My school friend Karen and I shared early November birthdays, so we had decided at least a year before to share our Sweet Sixteen with a party at her apartment. The party was on, but I was in the hospital and had been for close to three weeks with varying attacks of an auto-immune disease. I had most recently had a fever of 105.2 degrees which the doctors couldn’t seem to control. I saw angels. The doctors suggested an ice bath and I thought that would be interesting but what they came up with was massive doses of prednisone. I later learned that prednisone could either lower you to the depths of depression, or lift you up to the heights of euphoria. My nature was generally that of a Golden Retriever, so while the pills knocked the fever out, they also knocked me into another dimension. I sat up in my hospital bed and happily watched movies on the wall, movies of my own making. Movies produced by prednisone and directed by my imagination.  I understood the Secret of Life as I watched as a tree grew and flourished, and was decorated with the faces of my friends.  I waved to them every morning from my seventh -floor window, as they left the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, after daily full Anglican Morning Prayer. I missed my school friends. My friends! They were all at the party! I must certainly share with them what I had learned. There was a pay phone down the hall from my room. I was on a mission. I called Karen and received many good wishes, but somehow wound up talking to Paul. We had been in school together since First Grade, but I don’t think we had ever shared a conversation. We girls looked down on the boys in our class. It is true that we were all smarter, or more hardworking, and we loved school. The boys seemed downtrodden, unappreciated by the faculty, often in trouble with the very strict Reverend Mother, Head of the School. “Paul! I know the secret! It’s love! You have to love the Reverend Mother! Isn’t that wonderful?” I do not remember what Paul answered, if anything. We never mentioned this conversation in the years to come. In the years to come I felt ashamed and embarrassed by this outburst, as if I had actually gone to the party and danced in my underwear, ratty, torn underwear.

  Much later that night, after the phone call, I got out of bed, moved my chair out to the middle of the hospital hall, and began to sing Christmas Carols, as loud as I could. I knew all the second verses. In the hospital documentation of that day, it was noted that I had had hallucinations provoked by the disease, no mention of the overdosage of prednisone which had been immediately corrected.