My Jenn-eration

When I was 17 years old, I had to have an EEG. It’s a procedure designed to specifically measure electrical activity in the brain. As always, my mother was by my side. They glued eight million electrodes to my hair and head. When they were finished, I remember the technician going on the other side of the glass with my mother and a nurse, staring at me, and saying “Ok, now sleep.” Not surprisingly, I found it more than a little difficult to nod off. After awhile, the nurse reappeared with a small cup of what looked like juice but tasted much sweeter. It was orange. It was incredibly Alice in Wonderland-esque. I swear in my mind’s eye it was even served by a rabbit in a top hat with a label on it that said, “drink me.” And drink it I did. When I woke up, I remembered nothing. I looked particularly fun – like some sort of crazed medusa, the forgotten love child of Gene Shalit and Gene Wilder, if they’d mated, had a baby, stuck it’s finger in a light socket, and tried to give it a home...

Soon, it will be my friend Jonah’s birthday. He will be turning 5. It seems so hard to believe because it feels like just yesterday that he and I met. I doubt he remembers that day very much.   But I do. I remember everything and nothing about it all at the same time. It was a spring day. Not much unlike this one: warm but not hot. Bright, piercing sun. My mother had been in the hospital for what felt like a long time but probably wasn’t that long in reality. She had been moved to the ICU in just the past day or two. The ICU was dark: either literally or figuratively. I think it really was dark, not that it just felt that way. There were no sounds: no one talking. There was only the whirring and beeping of machines and this feeling of sickness that hung in the air. Hope might be found there, but it was stretched thin. It felt awfully hard to come by. At the same time that my mother was upstairs in the ICU, one of my oldest and dearest friends was just a few floors down in the s...