#1: Nursing a Stereotype

October 2007, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

By BOOMER SPITZER

While hospitals can be terrifying for patients, they tend to be boring for visitors. One game I play to pass the time is to observe everything about the nurses attending to the patient I am visiting.

My mom’s nurse was young, endlessly caring, with boundless energy and a certain fluidity to her movements. After two or three observations I had her pegged.

“Do you come from a very big family?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she said as she arranged my mother’s blankets. “Seven children.”

“Were you the oldest?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said as she worried over my mom’s IV becoming unstuck.

“Catholic?” I guessed correctly.

She did not ask why I was asking her questions, so after a minute or two, as she put a new bathrobe on my mother, I announced that I had found that many of the best nurses I had encountered were the first-born in a large, Catholic family.

She said she had never heard that theory but found it interesting. I said my theory was that the first-born in a large family quickly becomes “mother’s little helper.” “Mother’s big helper,” she said quickly, correcting me for the first time.

That evening I went to an Italian restaurant and was waited on by a waitress who was very similar in style to the nurse. After observing her throughout the meal I asked, “Do you come form a large family?” She did. She was the oldest, too.

I stopped the questioning at that point.

My mother told me the next morning that she had become quite close with the nurse. As my mom was being discharged she hugged the nurse, who said she wished she was coming home with my mother.

“I couldn’t take you away from your grandmother,” my mom said.

“Yes,” she said. “My grandmother says she would be lost without me. ”

My mother later explained that the nurse confided that she was raised by her grandmother, and had not seen her mother for years. My mother asked the nurse if she wanted to talk about it. No, she did not.

So much for my stereotyping. So much for my Norman Rockwell view of her home life.

Boomer Spitzer is using a pseudonym. He likes to ask other people questions but does not like to talk about himself.

#2: Not by the Book

1992, Swampscott, Massachusetts

By ALYCE DEVEAU

We all live our lives believing in stereotypes. For example, everyone knows that a librarian is a little old lady with glasses, a bun and sensible shoes.

Well, my friend Nora didn’t fit this stereotype at all. She was the consummate hippie who had flowing skirts; long, long hair; and a vocabulary that would make a truck driver blush.

She wasn’t married but she was involved in a tumultuous relationship that caused the rest of us who worked with her great concern. She and her “man” Doug lived in a cabin without heat, miles from civilization. At times they seemed totally in love. There were also days when I would pull into the library parking lot to find her asleep in her car. She and her “man” would have had an argument and she would live for weeks in her car.

To say that she resembled a gypsy is being kind. She would “borrow” rolls of toilet paper, take a sponge bath in the ladies room, and cook her dinner in a hot pot in the back of the library.

This unusual librarian worked of all places in the Children’s room. The kids loved her but the parents were suspect. They would arrive for story time and she would quickly hop up, snatch a few books off the shelf, and begin. Preparation didn’t fit into her daily routine.

Nora seemed to know no limits. After vacationing with her “man” in the islands, she returned to work with a tan and a ton of pictures. When she showed her pictures to one of the elderly volunteers, this tiny, gray-haired lady turned bright red as she perused. Nora hadn’t bothered to censor.

Nora managed to work at our library for about a year, but eventually both she and the library director agreed that working as a Children’s librarian was not a great career choice for her.

Our library will never be the same after experiencing the antics of Nora the librarian.

Alyce Deveau is a librarian in a small public library in the Northeast.

Posted by Common Ties on Monday, November 12th, 2007 | Email This Post

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