Waking Up Is Hard To Do

Second posting by my friend Raymond Haygood.

Moses didn’t have a squirrel’s notion of anything when he woke up but that he was in a hospital bed with this Indian in the room.  I suppose that’s why he remembers our first meeting better than I do.  Yeah, I remember tossing some newspapers at him but not the conversation.  His eyes, that’s what I do remember.  They were clear now and blue.  His hair was wild and looked like a torn up Brillo pad.  Spoke perfect English but not one idea of who he was.  That’s why I gave him the newspapers.

 When I say, perfect English, I mean he spoke without an accent.  I joke him about that now because he talks all New Yorkified like he was born and bred there.  I guess without knowing who he was, he took on the affectations of his “new” home.  The hospital was no home for him and neither was Arizona.  I believe the only part he ever saw of this state was where he appeared and the airport.

During his committal, we talked a lot, played chess and watch bad TV.  A friendship was born in those white walls full of the not so fortunate.  He kept looking for clues, asking me all the time for books, papers, magazines anything that might help him piece together what happened.  I felt sorry for the guy.  I mean, how would you like waking up knowing squat about who you are?

When it became obvious he wasn’t going to get his memory back and that he wasn’t crazy (that happened later), I told him he needed to move on with his life.  So I hooked him up with my half-brother in New York.  They clicked like two parts of a seatbelt.

I would visit once in a while.  Don’t like the northeast much.  People up there are crazy.  But we did have fun.  Moses fits in up there.  He kind of re-molded himself into a New Yorker.  Makes sense because there wasn’t much personal for him to grab onto here so why not grab onto what was around him.

Ray