Stayed Up Late on a Friday Night

I was never much of a poetry lover, but this poem by Deborah Garrison in The New Yorker in 1995 always stayed with me. And I found myself thinking about it a lot in the past few days. Here is a link to her poem (https://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php%3Fdate=2001%252F11%252F30.html), which inspired me to write my own:

Stayed up late on a Friday Night

It’s July 4th weekend

the Upper East Side is humid and silent,

Drained of its wealthy Hamptons-going residents.

We get an ambulance to the ER at 9:00 p.m.

Screaming in the hallway among the jostling of beds

His eye bloody, “someone chased me with a metal pipe!

And I got HIV/AIDS!”

“My name is Joseph John Tyrone Washington Esquire, don’t forget the Esquire!”

The ambulance driver and I catch eyes—“I think he talked himself into that one,” he says.

I leave at 2:00 a.m., having been lying on a makeshift bed I made out of three chairs

While my father lay beside me in his hospital bed.

I get a taxi at the corner of York and 68^th at 2:00 a.m.

“How’s your evening?” the driver says cheerily.

“Well, I’m leaving the hospital at 2:00 a.m. so not great.” I reply

Then try to be friendly the rest of the way.

The daughter turns 60

I never imagined this situation

Lugging a plastic bag with my father’s clothes from hospital to rehab to home to hospital.

Chasing Ativan with some of my father’s scotch

Death does not happen the way I want it to

There is a netherworld before and we have to live in it.

I’m not half of what I meant to be

But he was. He was/is all of what he meant to be and more.

The note left on his dining room table: “Get bike fixed!” At 90.

Sometimes he couldn’t believe what he’d achieved, “just a boy from the Bronx.”