The 23rd Palm

When I was 22, I got on the waiting list for nursing school.  I was told that if I got a job as a CNA in a nursing home, I  would to really well in nursing school.

So I got a job in a nursing home.  But I had to get on the waiting list to take the CNA class.  In the mean time, I had to serve meals and keep the Ice water pitchers filled in all the rooms. 

I guess everything would have gone great with this job but someone told me to beware of the little old man in room 319.  They told me that he liked to grope the women.  They told me to watch out and not stand too close to him.  I was terrified.  To make things worse, someone else told me not to drink from the red plastic cups in the dining hall.  They told me to only drink from the coffee cups.  I asked why, and they told me that that dirty old man liked to emotionally relieve himself into those red plastic cups. 

I didn’t know what to think of all that, but I only drank from the coffee cups.  I didn’t stay at that job long enough to find out if the rumor was true or not because something very odd happened to me
.

I was living in this college frat house. It wasn’t really a frat house.  I was never good enough to be included in one of those. This was just some run down trashy house that was lingering in that in-between place between crack house and abandoned. 

The kids that lived in this house all went to this posh expensive private college in Sherman called Austin College.

I woke up at 4:30 am, grabbed the last couple of brownies that sat on the stove top and drove myself to the nursing home to go fill ice pitchers.  When I got there, I started feeling strange.  To make things worse, the other ice pitcher filling girl called in sick, so I had to do double the work that morning in the same amount of time.  And I was feeling very odd.

It was a Sunday morning and all the old people were congregated in a room singing songs.  Their names weren’t on their doors and nobody was in the rooms to tell me who got what breakfast and I started to get really frustrated.  So this nurse tells me that I should go sit down and have a break.  She told me that she would finish passing out the meals. 

So I sat down for 15 minutes to rest while the nurse passed out the meals.  A few hours later, the head nurse pulled me into her office and yelled at me for putting my feet up all day while everyone else did my job. 

I had just left an abusive relationship and was feeling emotionally unstable.  I started shaking all over.  I felt like I had an antelope in my throat.  I wanted to explain my situation to her, but I knew that if I started talking, I would just burst into tears.  I couldn’t take the humiliation of such an outpouring of emotion.  So I just walked out and never went back.I blew my chances of getting to be a CNA and having experience before nursing school.

I’m great at running away from my problems.  It’s easier to run away from a problem, then to deal with it rationally. 

You can run, but you can’t hide. 

I have been told that it will be the same old thing everywhere you go.  Nothing changes, because it is I who must change before my circumstances will. 

I found out later on that day that those were “green” brownies.  I think my morning would have gone much smoother had they been filled with coffee beans.

Hindsight is 20/20.  So it goes.

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