Ruminations From a Cluttered Mind

I used to work in a jail. I spent two years at the county lock-up, the sole nurse for the place, 23 years old and crazy oblivious to the fact I was quite clearly in over my head.

I was game for anything that came my way, which probably proved helpful. I was a very nice nurse. I had the tendency to see inmates as ordinary souls wearing a lot of orange and carrying unfavorable back stories.

The jail was deceptively large. It looked like a squat, single-story, brown brick extension of the much older, much larger, much more elaborate courthouse next door. But as it turns out, about 2/3 of the jail is underground. And about half of the inmates are not local. The county recoups a little of its criminal justice expenses with some (mostly) federal cell rentals.

The locals were primarily people with addictions doing what addicts do to score their substance. The Feds were of a different ilk. Some of them were street hoods, gang-bangers. Some of them were in all likelihood involved in gun-running and crime syndicates. Allegedly. At the county jail, they weren't convicted. Not yet.

I had an office downstairs. The walls were grey, painted cinderblock. There was a closet where I stored my files and a few supplies. There was a med cart that held the inmates' prescriptions and all the OTC stuff they seemed to crave (Tylenol, Benedryl, etc). There was a desk, also gray, up against the wall in front of the room's only window. It overlooked the F block across the hall. I kept the blinds shut. Too much orange looking my way otherwise. There was a desk calendar on which I daily crossed off the days, counting down to my wedding day. It was eerily similar to doing time.

Except I could get out and go for lunch at the wonderful little sub sandwich place across the street. And when I rapped on the dispatch room window, someone released the latch and let me out of the place.

Every morning, I would greet everyone, get a report form the officers on duty about what was up, healthwise, with the inmates, and receive an updated roster sheet. From that, I would compose a list of inmates who were due for their obligatory health intake and TB test, and the TB test reading 2 or 3 days later.

I spent a lot of time just waiting in my office to see people. You see, in corrections, and probably even more so at the county level, the health needs of the inmates are of minimal concern to the corrections staff. These people, from the law enforcement perspective, are already getting free room and board on the taxpayers' dime, and now I want to appropriate even more toward optimizing their health. What were they doing about these pressing health concerns on the outside, anyway?

The argument did have some merit, I can't deny that. The one line that always galled me, though, was the officer who used to declare with some regularity, "Too far from the heart to kill 'im." That was the typical response I would get from that guy to my requests for the contracted doctor to come see someone for a genito-urinary concern, or for someone with an abscess to go out for a tooth extraction.

I carried a pager at all times. Whenever someone was booked who was carrying a prescription med, I was paged to verify it and give the officers the okay to let the guy take the med. Sometimes people with diabetes get arrested. Sometimes people with seizure disorders, or heart conditions, or asthma go to jail.

One time I was paged because the booking officer believed the inmate was having a heart attack. When I asked him why he was calling me instead of 911, he responded that protocol said I was the first to be notified in an emergency. I had absolutely no sway over protocol, which was both frustrating and a little scary.

I've been thinking a lot about that period of my life lately. It coincided with a passing interest in public health. I pursued a graduate degree in that area for a time, before I read between the lines and saw that the answer to programs and policies geared toward public health that sucked up tax dollars like sodium polyacrylate was to keep throwing more dollars at it. Maybe I didn't know where my talents were best applied, but it couldn't be in an endless parade of grant applications and politicking.

I've been mining my past a little more deeply lately, remembering things and landing on interests that haven't crossed my mind in decades. For pity's sake, I'm listening to 1970's easy listening these days...CCR, John Denver, Simon and Garfunkel, The Velvet Underground. I'm digging in deeper, poking around in the more shadowy places, hunting down perspective. So far, it's led me back to jail. Sounds ominous, doesn't it?

I've been making pie.

Over the summer, I tackled a pie project with the home-grown tart cherries from my parents' yard and rhubarb from my yard. I tried twice, and both times resulted in gorgeously photographic products with tasty filling with crust you could chip a tooth on. It also resulted in compromised sleep, because in my mind, it makes sense to begin pie projects after all the kids are down, which is nine o'clock or so.

Yesterday I began yet another pie project, this one involving Bartlett pears from my sister's bounty. I had a recipe for pear pie I saved from a magazine some 14 years ago and never actually made, so it seemed reasonable to embark on that project after the kids went down. I actually planned ahead enough that I had almost all the ingredients handy, even 4 tablespoons of brandy I lifted off my dad when I was visiting earlier that day. No vanilla bean, but extract suffices. Who keeps vanilla bean anyway? And no lemon zest, but a dab of lemon juice was good enough.

The project resulted in a fair amount of frustration when it came to rolling out the crust dough. Yes, it was imperative that I make crust from scratch. It was a combination of too wet and too crumbly. I was using some rather foul language for me, and my oldest son decided he'd stay up and lend moral support. I ended up having to roll, scrap, and roll once more for every one of the four crusts, which irked me because I was trying so hard not to over-handle the dough and make the crust tough.

The award-winning recipe said to cover the crusts with foil 30 minutes into baking, but somebody tell me how you wrap foil around hot-as-hell crusts in the door of a 400 degree oven. I gave up on that and told everyone on Facebook "I hate pie" several times over.

In the end, the pies turned out well. They were tasty, fruity goodness with flaky, crumbly crusts that did not become overly brown. I made my husband pose with a pie for Facebook, and I brought one pie to work to share with work people.

One such person, a fellow nurse, asked why I was so intent on making pie since it seemed a source of aggravation and stress. And ever since then, I've been thinking. Why? Why do I keep making pie?

I don't know. Maybe it's just a challenge, like playing Mahjong. I just wanted to see if I could do it, and do it well. I wanted to overcome the hassles, just to have bragging rights for a day. Or maybe I'm just looking for something I can sink my energy into, something manageable and tangible to accomplish, to make me feel like something out there is attainable and finite. The reward is so beautiful. You make a successful pie, and for a day your kids think you're a baking goddess. And you get to eat something you made yourself, which makes it taste just a little bit better.