As their dinner was being cleared away, Doctor Lemuel Diggs watched his host. Across the table, Danny Thomas rolled a cigar between his fingers, lighting it with a wooden match.

“Now are you going to tell me about this secret of yours?” The doctor inquired.

“Back in Detroit, when things got tough, I told Saint Jude if he’d show me the way, I’d build him a shrine.” The smoke haloed Danny’s head as he spoke “Well, I’ve obviously found the way, so it’s time to make good on my end.”

“I’m not an architect, Danny. I can’t build you a church.”

Danny held up a hand, he hadn’t finished yet.

“I remember when my brother got sick. The sleepless nights my mother spent praying over him, her hope chipping away with each passing hour. No parent should have to go through that.”

He put his cigar down, and looked the doctor in the eyes.

“What I want from you is to help me build a place to give parents back their hope. I want them to know there is somewhere to call when they need help. I don’t want to build a church, Lem, I want to build a hospital.”

Memphis Note
Saint Jude Children’s Research Hospital is one of Memphis’s crown jewels. Opened in 1962, the hospital has been at the forefront of children’s medicine since its inception. Founded by entertainer Danny Thomas, Doctor Lemuel Diggs and Michael F. Tamer, the hospital was Thomas’s answer to an oath he made to Saint Jude years before. During a hard part of his life Thomas had promised that if Saint Jude, the patron saint of the hopeless, helped him to find his way, Thomas would build him a shrine in return. Saint Jude Hospital was that shrine.

She’d been out of the hospital three days, and her skin felt a thousand miles from her bones. Her head was empty, like a cave without echoes.

They told her she had to take the pills if she didn’t want to go back to the hospital. Take them to keep her quiet, keep her calm. She didn’t want another incident like last time at the pita place, did she?

But as she stared into the bathroom mirror, pills restless in her palm, she wondered if the doctors in white were right.

The beauty, the sensation, the light was gone from her life when the pills were within her. Sure, maybe she got angry every now and then without them, but anger’s what makes babies cry when they come out of a momma’s womb.

Don’t take them, the whispering voices pleaded. They’ll freeze your heart and poison your brain.

The fireflower birds and the prosthelytizing wind will disappear. If you take them, all the beauty will vanish, it whispered, seductively, like a lover whispering in her ear and blowing through her hair.

She dropped the pills into the sink, turned on the faucet, and pulled the stopper out, gasping for air.

Memphis Note
I spent a decent portion of tonight with a schizophrenic women yelling in my ear. She told me that I’d killed her father, and to stay away from her son, which she didn’t have. It made me think about the nature of mental illness, and how some refuse to take the pills because it cuts them off from some kind of beauty the rest of us will never know. I don’t know if I should envy them, or pity them.

“You think you’re the only GI that ever killed a Jerry, boy?” The withered man waved his cane at no one in particular, but his words were directed at the uniformed guard that had stopped him in the lobby of the hospital.

A white coated doctor approached the two of them, a concerned look on his face. “I’m sorry, is something the matter?”

The cane sliced through the air, stopping mere inches from the doctor’s nose. “Damn right there is!” said the ancient veteran, his words slurring through loose dentures. “Where do you get off changing the name of the street a man lives on!?”

“I…I’m sorry?” responded the doctor, bewildered.

“My street! I live on Shotwell! Lived here since the end of the Great War, through the Depression and even survived the racket of you folk building this hospital!”

He stopped for a moment to adjust his dentures with his tongue.

“But I wake up to find that I live on Getwell now! All cause some lady in Arkansas raised a stink in the Press-Scimitar”

“Sir, the post office is well aware of the change, you shouldn’t -”

“Ain’t the point!” he screeched “I was here first, goddammit!”

Memphis Note
The grounds of what is now the South Campus of the University of Memphis was originally used as a veteran’s hospital for World War 2 soldiers. Problem was, the street they were building it on was Shotwell, which was pointed out in a letter to the editor of the Press-Scimitar to not be a very appropriate name. So it was changed. To Getwell.