I was talking to a woman in a long hallway up above a musical show. She was american but told me she spent a lot of time in Germany. She had short black hair and blue eyes and seemed a little older than me. We were talking about environmentalism and she sounded hardcore. I told her that while I've done plenty of environmental stuff in the past, the one thing I couldn't deal with was recycling shit. She asked me what I meant. I told her that I couldn't deal with it, just couldn't deal with shit and vomit, and I tried to make a joke out of it. I could tell that I wasn't impressing her. When I walked away from her later, I remembered that Pat used to take all our old pizza boxes and refurbish them into cat scratchers, and wondered if that would impress her.
Later, I was talking to another woman and an Armenian woman and her mother came up to us. The young woman, maybe in her 30s, thanked us for the help, and said she had had the sponge removed--"all those hormones, ach!" She and her mother were showing us the daughter's pregnant belly. When they walked away I asked the woman with me, "There're hormones in the sponge? I had no idea."
I began looking at medical charts, written on long pieces of graph paper. Howie had written in some of them and I marveled at how her writing turned into that of a doctor's, the way it became illegible when written on medical charts.
