It's not an Emergency, just a Suggestion

Sitting in the waiting room on Saturday morning at almost six, with my son whose is seventeen, and is writhing with stomach pains,
we waited-
as a patient would.
While we waited,
I noticed a Suggestion Box.
It sat in an unlit corner implying,
this private lascivious anonymous exhibition was a private, confidential, secure, receptacle,
after all it had a sturdy lock.
I had to conjecture that it was, in fact, it stood for something, a representation of something else.

(Whose job would it be at the ER to check this?
Never mind, I don't need any suggestions.)

A suggestion by definition must be made public.
It must be told, conjectured, proposed, I suppose.
And this suggestion box implied that there is an appropriate time and a place for suggestions.
It could just be a trap that nobody ever opens to see if it caught something.
Just dead flies in a booby trap, likely full of nasty feedback,
and static, no good-nik, anti-constructive, ranting, lamenting, venting. Warning; hot steam can scald, if your sensitive to the heat.
Despite the Suggestion Box being an ill-placed allusion of helpfulness, subversively hidden in plain sight, like the chairs, it was indeed there for those in need.
A suggestion qualifies as anything-
to represent another thing indirectly, figuratively and sometimes obscurely by evoking a thought, image or conception of it.
Then there's poetry. A poetic license, that is often suggestive, rather than assertive.
Robert Frost was icy to the double meaning, a poetic metaphoric bridge that reader is expected to cross without knowing how secure the span, or hopes to
fall through the cracks, in wide open gaps, down a slit just wide enough
for a suggestion to fit through.
My son didn't know the ER was not a first come first serve type of establishment. We shyly watched an old man with white hair, sweats, a flannel shirt, wearing crocs and small spectacles arrive in the ER with his wife trailing a car length behind- who had taken time to "put her face on" first, as my grandmother would have observed.
The old man seemed okay initially, his color and manner rather calm and muted. Then I noticed he seemed a little confused after continuously rubbing his brow.
He was shortly taken by a doctor to get an EKG, his heart was about to attack him.
My son realized the priority system.

“Mom,”he asked me with his unusually tousled chestnut hair,

deep sunken drab eyes

and his salty olive complexion turned to the green kind of olive,

his baby lips that look the same to me are the pimentos, he ignored the customary fond look in my eyes, “Can I say something that I guess sounds totally racist?”

“Um, sure.  Go ahead,” I responded off guard and was not sure if he was going to be offensive or funny, neither are really his strong suit.

“I would trust a black doctor the most.”

“Really?” I asked as a knee-jerk response, not really needing confirmation of his preference. Of course this was so. And perhaps racist, it still made me proud.

Things can change.

Our offspring are our Silent Spring, whose waters run crystal clear despite the source.

He's a sensitive human.
And then a gesture, or adjustment in his seat, the collar of his t-shirt drooped,
tiny tufts of hair curled from the collar,
and in that brief moment the way I saw him forever changed,
he's becoming a man.
He used the restroom, which is traumatic enough for him at a public facility, the trauma team needed on standby.
And when he sat back down, he beelllccched.
We exchanged a wordless glance. Then we went home tired.
I suggested he pay more attention to his diet.
Garbage in, garbage out, as my grandma used to say,
kind  of like that suggestion box,
brimming with gassy garbage.
We are all full of hot air-
but sometimes it can become your enemy instead of your reassurance,
the mothers mirror check for her sleeping baby's fog,
the relief that you are still alive and made grateful all anew, humbled by the gift of life,
or it could be both.
Either way suggestions can be difficult to digest.
A little lesson learned from the hospital room suggestion box.


Image credit: By Unknown or not provided (U.S. National Archives and Records Administration) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.