IMPRESSIONS FROM A HOSPITAL LOBBY

Sitting in a hospital lobby for an hour or two is, to a people watcher, like watching an action-packed movie. The lobby is new, spacious, and almost a city block long. The front is all glass so that one can see if the valet parkers have brought a car out to the front. Opposite the front revolving door is a registration desk, one of the many in the hospital.

I sat near the end of the lobby, close to the door where all garage users have to stop to pay the ticket to park before picking up their car. Thus a constant parade of humanity walked by me. The first thought was, "Why do we have English and Spanish when there are so many other languages clearly in use?"

A couple, he using a cane, she a walker, sauntered slowly by. Others walked by swiftly, leather heels clicking loudly on the marble part of the floor. Next to that marble was a curvy area of rug on which sat clusters of comfortable chairs for people waiting. Some people carefully wove back and forth in the snake-like line the rug made on the floor so that they could silently walk only on the rug.

As with all confusing buildings housing many services, signage is really important. People entering from the garage often seemed to wander around trying to read signs that obviously weren't pointing to wherever they wished to go. In one area I had followed restroom signs only to end up in a dead end where what might have been restroom doors had signs, handwritten on 8.5" x 11" paper informing one that the doors were closed but sometime in the near future would be restrooms. I wondered why signage went up before service and then decided that it was probably a more usual sequence of things than I cared to admit. Others were clearly frequent callers who quickly pointed themselves in the right direction.

Once, I had a brief conversation with a gentleman, waiting for his son to retrieve their car. We started with the usual observation about how cold it is outside, moving then to noting that it is too early in the year for it to be so cold, that shouldn't happen until January. He lamented that by Wednesday it was supposed to be 60 degrees (under 20 degrees at the moment). The conversation went as predicted...onward to global warming after which his car was brought out of the garage. The gentleman thanked me for the chat, I wished him Happy Holidays, and off he went.

Later my amusement came watching and listening to some lady-in-charge on her wireless phone telling engineering that they should program the doors so they would not simultaneously open and let all the cold air in. She insisted that the programming could be done while the person on the other end, one would guess, didn't know how to do it. This conversation went on for rather a long time and I pictured some of the other things she might be called on to do, like phone in that someone tracked slippery mud onto the floor on the West end of the lobby, or any other interesting concern of the day.

To my surprise, I felt I had landed in a time warp when I saw, separately, two women in fur coats. One a long mink and the other a sheared beaver. In five years of frequent BSO Symphony attendance it is a sight rarely seen that a woman comes into the hall in fur. I confess, I wondered, even if they owned them, why they would wear them for all the daytime world to see in a hospital. I decided they must have been really cold.

The sound of shoes was a study unto itself. There were loud clinks and clunks made by clogs, stealth athletic shoes that made no sound (except when the walker 'slapped' feet onto the floor), boots with spiked heels which sounded like a two-legged horse cantering down the marble floor. If one tried to guess, rather than see, the walker with with a gym shoe on one foot and a cast on the other, would have been difficult. Lots of 'fragrant' women waddled by, termed by those unable to use the word pregnant because of the image of the act that caused the condition was unspeakable. I've always wondered what it is beyond the incest taboo which disallows children to imagine there parents having sex, as though sex began with their own young generation.

My last fascination was with gait. Some almost raced with purposeful steps and some walked slowly, lumbering along with shuffling feet and a wide stance reminding one of toddlers learning to walk with an uncomfortably full diaper. Throughout the time I waited, I realized I had read not more than a page or two of the book before me. I decided I was hopeless at reading in public because I could not keep myself from being distracted by the wave of humanity passing me by, leaving me wondering what brought them there.