Previous segments of HOMETOWN are filed in the category BW Visitor Writings.
“Thanks for the compliment, honey!” It was the same nurse hovering over my face again and smiling. “What do you mean?” I asked through the mist of anesthesia. “Why, honey, you asked me if I was an angel!” “I did? I don’t remember asking that.” “Yes, you did,” she said, then turned and bounced away. * * * Fifteen days and over a hundred thousand dollars later, a nurse wheeled me out of Mercy Hospital into the cold, gray January day typical of Pittsburgh. “Good luck,” she said, and then turned and pushed the wheelchair back to the hospital. Good luck? I thought. I’ll need more than good luck.
I was the proud owner of an Automatic Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator, an AICD. A device the size of a large TV remote control was now tucked away in a pocket of fatty tissue just left of my belly button. I thought of myself as sort of a celebrity, a Million Dollar man. In a few weeks I would return to my position as a substitute teacher in my home school district, if I lived. I tried to hold onto the light. Tonight my heart’s rhythm is strong and regular. I pick up a little more speed as I cross from Washington to Church Street. I know this street well. It’s one of my favorites, with its maples lining the cracked flagstone sidewalks and its large late-Victorian houses. From the window of one of these–a tall buttery house trimmed in cornflower blue–light spills onto the sidewalk. Inside, the silhouette of a man fills the living room doorway, his eyeglasses lit by flickering blue images from a TV. A few blocks away, I slow down a little. In the neat white-sided house, a boy, maybe eleven, roams about the white-walled kitchen at the back of the house, just beyond the dark living room. Maybe he’s foraging for a snack before bed. I pass on and turn left into a shadowed alley. Click back on Wednesday evening for Part 5 of HOMETOWN. Parts are filed in the category BW VISITOR WRITINGS. | 
