Charlotte's Web

It took me hours to find her, and I'm not sure why I think she was a she, but humor me. For reasons that by the time it was over seemed to be, as one of the doctors explained, 'some people just have bad luck', I spent two nights in the hospital for pancreatitis and renal failure. I got to the hospital because my family took me there (this time of year there are no ice floes on either the Thames or Shetucket rivers) and have little recollection of that process at all.

Emergency rooms are where America's refusal to acknowledge we have a health coverage crisis is shown to be the lie that it is. After hours, or on weekends, those whose lives have been marginalized who, for reasons I don't know nor do I care about, do not have insurance and so instead of preventative care, they can only arrive at catastrophic moments and in the only place where they know they won't be turned away.

As America got richer in my lifetime, the gap between them that's got and them that ain't got became a chasm. "But I saw a kid with no smile on his face today. Where is my place in this bright future, I heard him say." Let's see how much longer we can avoid a Second Civil War.

None of that quite frankly was a concern for me--actually, in light of the shape I was in, I was nearly genial-and I've discovered, except that it's exhausting to try to keep doing, I'm very good at it. The thing that impressed about the hospital is how everyone I met liked her/his job. From the young woman in the ER who had always wanted to work in emergency care and whose parents, she told me, had actually met at an EMT class, through a young man (it turns out Michelle went to school with him) who was marking time for now before he could begin Coast Guard basic training to the technician who handled the CAT scan and had been a mortgage broker and decided years earlier he wanted something more for himself and his family. Each of them absolutely ordinary--and each of them extraordinary at what they do.

The following morning after admittance in the wee, small hours, I awakened much better than I'd gone to sleep and realizing I was tethered to a machine that delivered a saline drip, I was severely dehydrated, a machine I called Clyde the Side, that was battery-powered as well as A/C and on rollers so I could go to the little hospital patient's room when I needed to (not that I needed to a whole lot for quite some time).

I got up slowly, unplugged Clyde and headed over to the chair at the window. I took a long time but I was flushed with pride at my achievement, and from the exertion as it turns out. When the early dawn light crept over the horizon, I didn't see it at first: the very fine-spun lines of the spider web. I could see where the night's rains and still-heavy humidity had left pearls of water, but seeing the web was hard. And it took me many hours to actually see the spider, who wasn't all that much larger than a pinhead.

I was on the fourth floor. I used an elevator; I'm not sure how the spider got there. The windows are not designed to open as the hospital is climate-controlled. I have no idea why/how she chose the fourth floor. Perhaps her senses told her birds and other predators would be unwilling to attempt an attack on a surface even with the building, though that also means what did she catch to eat? How high does a mosquito or a gnat actually fly? I watched for two days and never saw another spider.

Such a solitary life, lived out in the middle of 21st Century civilization. I doubt that she was aware I was watching as she spent her days scurrying across her web making sure the lines were whatever it is spiders design them to do. I never saw her catch anything or stop to rest.
Her every waking moment, I believe, was devoted to her hearth and home. I was deeply impressed with how terrific she was. "But Charlotte," said Wilbur, "I'm not terrific." "That doesn't make a particle of difference," replied Charlotte. "Not a particle. People believe almost anything they see in print." And that certainly explains a lot.
-bill kenny