Alliums

I booked my accommodations in my hometown, where I’m traveling to document and research Griffin Memorial Hospital, the psychiatric hospital where my mother worked for thirty-five years. Work from this trip will be part of the story I submit to Mad in America. I need to get back there before the entire plot of land the hospital sits on is sold, all seven hundred acres. (It recently went up for sale because the remaining portions of the hospital are moving to Oklahoma City.)

I also want to visit the community mental health clinic, which was the first to open in the country. My mother was the lead nurse who got that clinic up and running.

I’m making the trip in August on my birthday. It makes sense to go back to the place where I was born on the day I was born. I wonder if the alliums my mother planted in the backyard will be blooming. When she wasn’t calling them naked ladies, she referred to the alliums as my birthday flowers because they never failed to bloom on the day I was born. I won’t be able to see them, of course, because that’s not our family home anymore. Some strangers who let the trees and lawn die and who painted the front door clown-lip red live there now.

I guess the trees aren’t that dead, but the lawn is. And I stand by my assessment of the front door. It’s not even clown-lip red. It’s more like one of those colors from the Crayola Neon Crayon set, like the one I got stuck in my left nostril on the playground of McKinley Elementary one day after school when I was alone waiting for my father to come get me. It was a wee piece of the crayon, and I thought it was going to have to stay in my nose forever. I don’t know what’s worse: shoving a piece of a neon crayon up your nose as a child or painting your front door neon crayon red as an adult.

The latter, I think. I’m going with the latter.

I’ll probably drop by the cemetery and visit my mother’s grave, too, as well as the mass grave that contains the burnt bodies of forty boys and young men who died in a fire in 1918 at Norman Asylum, the hospital that once stood where Griffin Memorial was later built. That grave was only discovered eight or so years ago. There’s a whole story behind that as well. Of course there is.