Los Angeles, California. The winter of 1955. A Saturday afternoon on the 23rd of December, two days before Christmas, in the waiting room of the pediatric ward at Los Angeles County General Hospital on North State Street, in the specific atmosphere of a hospital waiting room on the 23rd of December, which was different from the atmosphere of a hospital waiting room on any other day of the year, in the specific way that the proximity of Christmas changes the quality of waiting in a place that is already difficult to wait in.
The waiting room had 12 chairs along two walls. The chairs, the specific institutional chair of a 1955 hospital, metal frames with padded seats in a dark green vinyl that had been chosen because it was durable rather than because it was comfortable and was both. A window that looked onto the hospital’s interior courtyard, where a lemon tree grew in the center of a paved square, and had lemons on it that nobody picked because the courtyard was not used by anyone who would have had a use for lemons in December.
A window that looked onto the hospital’s interior courtyard, a low table with magazines that were several months old, and a Christmas tree in the corner that one of the pediatric nurses had brought in and decorated the previous week with construction paper ornaments that the children who were well enough to participate had helped make.
The ornaments uneven and bright, and the specific product of children’s hands rather than adult hands, which made the tree look like what it was, which was a tree decorated by sick children who had wanted to be part of making something cheerful and in a place that was not usually cheerful. The tree was 4 ft tall and stood in a green plastic stand and had a string of lights on it that someone had plugged into the wall outlet behind the magazine table and that blinked at an irregular interval that was the product of one bulb being
slightly loose in its socket rather than the product of any design intention. The waiting room was occupied on this Saturday afternoon at 2:45 by one person. He was a boy named Michael Reeves. He was 10 years old. He was sitting in the chair nearest the Christmas tree in the corner with his coat still on because he had been told to wait here and had not known whether he was allowed to take his coat off.
And he had been sitting there for an hour and 20 minutes. Alone. Which was how long it had been since his mother had been taken to a room and the nurse had said that someone would come and check on him and that he should wait here. Michael Reeves’ mother was 31 years old and had been raising Michael alone since Michael was six.
His father having left in circumstances that Michael understood in the simplified form that his mother had offered him at six and that he had not yet asked to have expanded into its full complexity. Understanding with the specific instinct of children for what information they are ready for and what information they are not, that the expanded version was available when he needed it and that he did not need it yet.
She was 31 years old and had been raising him in the apartment on Figueroa Street for four years and and been doing it with the specific focused competence of a woman who has one primary obligation and takes it seriously. She had been brought to the hospital by a neighbor at 1:15 that afternoon. After the neighbor had found her at home in a state that required the hospital rather than anything the neighbor could provide.
She had a condition that the doctors were working to assess and that had not yet been explained to Michael in any terms beyond the ones the admissions nurse had used when she had brought him to the waiting room. Which was that his mother was being looked after by very good doctors. And that he should wait here and someone would come and check on him.
Nobody had come to check on him in an hour and 20 minutes. He was not crying. He was 10 years old and had been told to wait here. And he was waiting here. In the chair nearest the Christmas tree. With his coat on. In the specific patient endurance of a 10-year-old boy who has been told to wait. And has decided that waiting is what he is going to do and has been doing it for an hour and 20 minutes.
Without knowing when the waiting is going to end. He had looked at the Christmas tree for a while when he first sat down. Which was what a person did in a waiting room with a Christmas tree in it. Looked at the tree with the specific ambient attention of someone who is waiting for something. And has given a portion of their attention to the nearest object.
While the larger portion waits for the thing being waited for. He had looked at the ornaments on it. The paper ones the children had made. He had looked at the ornaments on it. The paper ones the children had made and had thought about the fact that the children who had made them were patients in the ward beyond the door.
Children who were spending the Christmas before Christmas in a hospital because they were sick enough to be there. He had thought about this for a while, and then had looked away from the tree because thinking about it too directly produced a feeling that was adjacent to crying, and he had decided not to cry.
John Wayne was at the hospital because his friend’s daughter was in the pediatric ward, and he was at the hospital on the 23rd of December specifically because the 23rd of December was when his schedule had opened up enough to make the visit possible. His schedule in the week before Christmas being the schedule of a man whose professional and personal obligations both accelerated in December, and whose ability to manage them was a function of how carefully he had organized the week.
He had organized the week to include Saturday afternoon at County General. The friend was a man he had known since 1941, a prop master named Gerald Stein who had worked on more of his films than he could count from memory. And Gerald Stein’s daughter, who was 7 years old and was named Laura, had been in the pediatric ward for 4 days with a respiratory illness that had started as something manageable and had escalated into something that required the ward.
And John Wayne had learned about it on Thursday, and had been intending to visit since Thursday, and had arranged his schedule to make the Saturday afternoon work. He was 51 years old, 6 ft 4 in tall, and 250 lb. And he arrived at 2:50 in the afternoon in a plain coat over a white shirt and dark trousers. The same clothes he had been wearing since that morning when he had a production meeting at 9:00 and a lunch at 12:30.
And had been in those clothes since then rather than changing because changing had not seemed necessary for a hospital visit in the middle of the afternoon. And came through the hospital entrance and asked at the information desk for the pediatric ward. And was directed to the elevator and pressed the button for the third floor.
And came out of the elevator into the corridor and walked to the pediatric ward entrance and was told by the nurse at the desk that he would need to go to the waiting room while she arranged the visit. She directed him to the waiting room. He came through the door of the waiting room and saw the room and the Christmas tree in the corner and the boy in the chair nearest the tree.
With his coat still on sitting alone in a waiting room at 2:50 on the 23rd of December. He looked at the boy for a moment. He looked at the door he had come through. He walked to the chair beside the boy and sat down. He said, “Hello.” Michael looked at him. The recognition arrived in the way it always arrived in stages.
The face first and then the placing of the face and then the name behind the placing. Michael said his name. John Wayne said, “Yes.” He asked Michael who he was waiting for. Michael said his mother. He asked how long he had been waiting. Michael said an hour and 20 minutes. He said it with the specific precision of a child who has been tracking the time because tracking the time is the only form of control available when everything else is outside your control.
John Wayne looked at the Christmas tree. He said that the ornaments on it were good ornaments. Michael said that the children in the ward had made them. Wayne said that he thought that was probably why they were good. They sat for a moment. Wayne asked if anyone had been in to tell Michael anything about his mother since he started waiting.
Michael said no. Wayne said that was not right and that he would find out. He stood and went to the door of the waiting room and spoke to the nurse in the corridor for a few minutes. He came back and sat in the chair beside Michael and said that the doctors were still assessing his mother’s situation and that the nurse had confirmed that someone would come and give Michael an update within the next 30 minutes and that if they did not come in 30 minutes, he would go and find someone himself.
Michael looked at him. He said okay, which was the word that covered the full range of what he was feeling, which was more than okay but required only the one word. Wayne said that 30 minutes was not a very long time and that they should find something to do with it. He asked Michael what he liked, not what grade he was in or what school he went to or any of the other questions that adults ask children when they want to make conversation and are starting from the inventory of questions they know rather than from the actual child in
front of them. He asked what Michael liked. Michael said he liked baseball. He said it in the specific careful tone of a 10-year-old who has been in a waiting room for an hour and 20 minutes and is aware that what he says next is either going to produce more conversation or end it. And who wants more conversation? Wayne said that was a good thing to like and asked who his team was.
Wayne said that was a good thing to like and asked who his team was. Michael said the Dodgers. Wayne said that the Dodgers had moved from Brooklyn the previous year and asked whether Michael had opinions about that. Michael said he had strong opinions about that. For the next 28 minutes, sitting in the waiting room on the 23rd of December beside the Christmas tree with the paper ornaments and the blinking light in the chair with the metal frame and the dark green vinyl in the specific waiting room that smelled like hospital and looked like
every hospital waiting room and had a window overlooking a courtyard with a lemon tree that nobody picked, John Wayne and a 10-year-old boy named Michael Reeves discussed the Brooklyn Dodgers move to Los Angeles with the paper ornaments and the blinking light. John Wayne and a 10-year-old boy named Michael Reeves discussed the Brooklyn Dodgers move to Los Angeles, the history of the Dodgers franchise, the relative merits of various Dodger players from the previous decade, and the specific question of whether a
team belonged to a city or to the people who loved it when the team moved but the people stayed. Michael had thought about this question and had opinions about it. Wayne had also thought about it and had different opinions. The discussion was the kind of discussion that two people who both care about a subject have when one of them is 10 years old and the other is 51 and neither of them is performing the caring but actually has it.
The kind of discussion that is more equal than the age difference would suggest because the subject levels the participants in a way that most subjects do not. At 3:20, the nurse came to the waiting room door. She said that the doctor wanted to speak with Michael and that if the gentleman with him could wait a few minutes longer the doctor would come back to the waiting room afterward.
John Wayne said that the gentleman with Michael was happy to wait. He said it in the specific tone of a man for whom waiting was not a burden in this particular situation. Michael stood. He buttoned his coat which he had never unbuttoned because he had never known if he was allowed to and which he buttoned now out of the same uncertainty about whether he was allowed to do the thing or not.
Do the thing. The specific uncertainty of a child in an institutional setting who has not been told the rules and therefore treats everything as potentially requiring permission. He looked at Wayne. He said that he had appreciated the company. He said that the discussion about the Dodgers had been one of the better discussions he had had about the Dodgers which was not a thing he had expected to be able to say about a Saturday afternoon in a hospital waiting room.
He said it in the specific adult phrasing of a 10-year-old who has absorbed the vocabulary of adults without yet having the adult experience that makes the vocabulary feel natural rather than borrowed. Wayne said that he had appreciated it, too, and that he meant that specifically. He said that Michael was going to be all right, and that his mother was being looked after by very good people, and that the Dodgers were going to be fine in Los Angeles, even if the moving of them had been handled in a way that deserved the criticism it had received
from the people who had been left behind in Brooklyn. Michael went through the door with the nurse. John Wayne sat in the waiting room for another 40 minutes through the doctor’s visit with Michael and the return of the nurse who told him that Gerald Stein’s daughter, Laura, was ready to receive a visitor.
And he went in to see Laura and was with her for 20 minutes and said goodbye to Gerald Stein in the corridor and took the elevator back to the lobby and walked out of the hospital into the Los Angeles afternoon of the 23rd of December, 1955, which was the kind of afternoon that Los Angeles produces in late December, cool and clear and nothing like Christmas to anyone who expected Christmas to look like winter.
He drove back to his house on the specific December roads of Los Angeles, the roads that were decorated for Christmas in the way that Los Angeles decorates for Christmas, which is with the specific effort of a city that is making Christmas happen in a climate that is not cooperating with the seasonal expectations that most people brought to the holiday.
The palm trees with lights on them and the decorations in the shop windows and the inflatable Santas on the rooftops of the houses in the neighborhoods he drove through. He drove through it in the plain dark coat and the white shirt and thought about Michael Reeves in the chair beside the Christmas tree with his coat on waiting for an hour and 20 minutes without anyone coming to tell him anything.
Nobody had asked him to sit in the waiting room chair beside Michael Reeves for 28 minutes and discuss the Brooklyn Dodgers. Nobody had suggested it. Nobody had arranged it. It had not been planned in any conventional sense of planning which is the sense in which an intention is formed and a schedule is organized around it and the things executed according to the plan.
It had been something else. The specific kind of thing that happens when a person with a long habit of paying attention to what is in front of them walks into a room and sees a 10-year-old boy sitting alone with his coat on on the 23rd of December and decides without deliberation that the chair beside him is where they are going to sit and discuss the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Nobody had known he was going to do it. Nobody except Michael Reeves knew it had happened. And Michael Reeves was 10 years old and had spent the 23rd of December in a hospital waiting room alone for an hour and 20 minutes and had then spent the next 28 minutes not alone. And that was the whole of what had happened simple and complete requiring no addition.
John Wayne Found a Boy Sitting Alone at Christmas — Nobody Asked Him to Do What He Did Next
Los Angeles, California. The winter of 1955. A Saturday afternoon on the 23rd of December, two days before Christmas, in the waiting room of the pediatric ward at Los Angeles County General Hospital on North State Street, in the specific atmosphere of a hospital waiting room on the 23rd of December, which was different from the atmosphere of a hospital waiting room on any other day of the year, in the specific way that the proximity of Christmas changes the quality of waiting in a place that is already difficult to wait in.
The waiting room had 12 chairs along two walls. The chairs, the specific institutional chair of a 1955 hospital, metal frames with padded seats in a dark green vinyl that had been chosen because it was durable rather than because it was comfortable and was both. A window that looked onto the hospital’s interior courtyard, where a lemon tree grew in the center of a paved square, and had lemons on it that nobody picked because the courtyard was not used by anyone who would have had a use for lemons in December.
A window that looked onto the hospital’s interior courtyard, a low table with magazines that were several months old, and a Christmas tree in the corner that one of the pediatric nurses had brought in and decorated the previous week with construction paper ornaments that the children who were well enough to participate had helped make.
The ornaments uneven and bright, and the specific product of children’s hands rather than adult hands, which made the tree look like what it was, which was a tree decorated by sick children who had wanted to be part of making something cheerful and in a place that was not usually cheerful. The tree was 4 ft tall and stood in a green plastic stand and had a string of lights on it that someone had plugged into the wall outlet behind the magazine table and that blinked at an irregular interval that was the product of one bulb being
slightly loose in its socket rather than the product of any design intention. The waiting room was occupied on this Saturday afternoon at 2:45 by one person. He was a boy named Michael Reeves. He was 10 years old. He was sitting in the chair nearest the Christmas tree in the corner with his coat still on because he had been told to wait here and had not known whether he was allowed to take his coat off.
And he had been sitting there for an hour and 20 minutes. Alone. Which was how long it had been since his mother had been taken to a room and the nurse had said that someone would come and check on him and that he should wait here. Michael Reeves’ mother was 31 years old and had been raising Michael alone since Michael was six.
His father having left in circumstances that Michael understood in the simplified form that his mother had offered him at six and that he had not yet asked to have expanded into its full complexity. Understanding with the specific instinct of children for what information they are ready for and what information they are not, that the expanded version was available when he needed it and that he did not need it yet.
She was 31 years old and had been raising him in the apartment on Figueroa Street for four years and and been doing it with the specific focused competence of a woman who has one primary obligation and takes it seriously. She had been brought to the hospital by a neighbor at 1:15 that afternoon. After the neighbor had found her at home in a state that required the hospital rather than anything the neighbor could provide.
She had a condition that the doctors were working to assess and that had not yet been explained to Michael in any terms beyond the ones the admissions nurse had used when she had brought him to the waiting room. Which was that his mother was being looked after by very good doctors. And that he should wait here and someone would come and check on him.
Nobody had come to check on him in an hour and 20 minutes. He was not crying. He was 10 years old and had been told to wait here. And he was waiting here. In the chair nearest the Christmas tree. With his coat on. In the specific patient endurance of a 10-year-old boy who has been told to wait. And has decided that waiting is what he is going to do and has been doing it for an hour and 20 minutes.
Without knowing when the waiting is going to end. He had looked at the Christmas tree for a while when he first sat down. Which was what a person did in a waiting room with a Christmas tree in it. Looked at the tree with the specific ambient attention of someone who is waiting for something. And has given a portion of their attention to the nearest object.
While the larger portion waits for the thing being waited for. He had looked at the ornaments on it. The paper ones the children had made. He had looked at the ornaments on it. The paper ones the children had made and had thought about the fact that the children who had made them were patients in the ward beyond the door.
Children who were spending the Christmas before Christmas in a hospital because they were sick enough to be there. He had thought about this for a while, and then had looked away from the tree because thinking about it too directly produced a feeling that was adjacent to crying, and he had decided not to cry.
John Wayne was at the hospital because his friend’s daughter was in the pediatric ward, and he was at the hospital on the 23rd of December specifically because the 23rd of December was when his schedule had opened up enough to make the visit possible. His schedule in the week before Christmas being the schedule of a man whose professional and personal obligations both accelerated in December, and whose ability to manage them was a function of how carefully he had organized the week.
He had organized the week to include Saturday afternoon at County General. The friend was a man he had known since 1941, a prop master named Gerald Stein who had worked on more of his films than he could count from memory. And Gerald Stein’s daughter, who was 7 years old and was named Laura, had been in the pediatric ward for 4 days with a respiratory illness that had started as something manageable and had escalated into something that required the ward.
And John Wayne had learned about it on Thursday, and had been intending to visit since Thursday, and had arranged his schedule to make the Saturday afternoon work. He was 51 years old, 6 ft 4 in tall, and 250 lb. And he arrived at 2:50 in the afternoon in a plain coat over a white shirt and dark trousers. The same clothes he had been wearing since that morning when he had a production meeting at 9:00 and a lunch at 12:30.
And had been in those clothes since then rather than changing because changing had not seemed necessary for a hospital visit in the middle of the afternoon. And came through the hospital entrance and asked at the information desk for the pediatric ward. And was directed to the elevator and pressed the button for the third floor.
And came out of the elevator into the corridor and walked to the pediatric ward entrance and was told by the nurse at the desk that he would need to go to the waiting room while she arranged the visit. She directed him to the waiting room. He came through the door of the waiting room and saw the room and the Christmas tree in the corner and the boy in the chair nearest the tree.
With his coat still on sitting alone in a waiting room at 2:50 on the 23rd of December. He looked at the boy for a moment. He looked at the door he had come through. He walked to the chair beside the boy and sat down. He said, “Hello.” Michael looked at him. The recognition arrived in the way it always arrived in stages.
The face first and then the placing of the face and then the name behind the placing. Michael said his name. John Wayne said, “Yes.” He asked Michael who he was waiting for. Michael said his mother. He asked how long he had been waiting. Michael said an hour and 20 minutes. He said it with the specific precision of a child who has been tracking the time because tracking the time is the only form of control available when everything else is outside your control.
John Wayne looked at the Christmas tree. He said that the ornaments on it were good ornaments. Michael said that the children in the ward had made them. Wayne said that he thought that was probably why they were good. They sat for a moment. Wayne asked if anyone had been in to tell Michael anything about his mother since he started waiting.
Michael said no. Wayne said that was not right and that he would find out. He stood and went to the door of the waiting room and spoke to the nurse in the corridor for a few minutes. He came back and sat in the chair beside Michael and said that the doctors were still assessing his mother’s situation and that the nurse had confirmed that someone would come and give Michael an update within the next 30 minutes and that if they did not come in 30 minutes, he would go and find someone himself.
Michael looked at him. He said okay, which was the word that covered the full range of what he was feeling, which was more than okay but required only the one word. Wayne said that 30 minutes was not a very long time and that they should find something to do with it. He asked Michael what he liked, not what grade he was in or what school he went to or any of the other questions that adults ask children when they want to make conversation and are starting from the inventory of questions they know rather than from the actual child in
front of them. He asked what Michael liked. Michael said he liked baseball. He said it in the specific careful tone of a 10-year-old who has been in a waiting room for an hour and 20 minutes and is aware that what he says next is either going to produce more conversation or end it. And who wants more conversation? Wayne said that was a good thing to like and asked who his team was.
Wayne said that was a good thing to like and asked who his team was. Michael said the Dodgers. Wayne said that the Dodgers had moved from Brooklyn the previous year and asked whether Michael had opinions about that. Michael said he had strong opinions about that. For the next 28 minutes, sitting in the waiting room on the 23rd of December beside the Christmas tree with the paper ornaments and the blinking light in the chair with the metal frame and the dark green vinyl in the specific waiting room that smelled like hospital and looked like
every hospital waiting room and had a window overlooking a courtyard with a lemon tree that nobody picked, John Wayne and a 10-year-old boy named Michael Reeves discussed the Brooklyn Dodgers move to Los Angeles with the paper ornaments and the blinking light. John Wayne and a 10-year-old boy named Michael Reeves discussed the Brooklyn Dodgers move to Los Angeles, the history of the Dodgers franchise, the relative merits of various Dodger players from the previous decade, and the specific question of whether a
team belonged to a city or to the people who loved it when the team moved but the people stayed. Michael had thought about this question and had opinions about it. Wayne had also thought about it and had different opinions. The discussion was the kind of discussion that two people who both care about a subject have when one of them is 10 years old and the other is 51 and neither of them is performing the caring but actually has it.
The kind of discussion that is more equal than the age difference would suggest because the subject levels the participants in a way that most subjects do not. At 3:20, the nurse came to the waiting room door. She said that the doctor wanted to speak with Michael and that if the gentleman with him could wait a few minutes longer the doctor would come back to the waiting room afterward.
John Wayne said that the gentleman with Michael was happy to wait. He said it in the specific tone of a man for whom waiting was not a burden in this particular situation. Michael stood. He buttoned his coat which he had never unbuttoned because he had never known if he was allowed to and which he buttoned now out of the same uncertainty about whether he was allowed to do the thing or not.
Do the thing. The specific uncertainty of a child in an institutional setting who has not been told the rules and therefore treats everything as potentially requiring permission. He looked at Wayne. He said that he had appreciated the company. He said that the discussion about the Dodgers had been one of the better discussions he had had about the Dodgers which was not a thing he had expected to be able to say about a Saturday afternoon in a hospital waiting room.
He said it in the specific adult phrasing of a 10-year-old who has absorbed the vocabulary of adults without yet having the adult experience that makes the vocabulary feel natural rather than borrowed. Wayne said that he had appreciated it, too, and that he meant that specifically. He said that Michael was going to be all right, and that his mother was being looked after by very good people, and that the Dodgers were going to be fine in Los Angeles, even if the moving of them had been handled in a way that deserved the criticism it had received
from the people who had been left behind in Brooklyn. Michael went through the door with the nurse. John Wayne sat in the waiting room for another 40 minutes through the doctor’s visit with Michael and the return of the nurse who told him that Gerald Stein’s daughter, Laura, was ready to receive a visitor.
And he went in to see Laura and was with her for 20 minutes and said goodbye to Gerald Stein in the corridor and took the elevator back to the lobby and walked out of the hospital into the Los Angeles afternoon of the 23rd of December, 1955, which was the kind of afternoon that Los Angeles produces in late December, cool and clear and nothing like Christmas to anyone who expected Christmas to look like winter.
He drove back to his house on the specific December roads of Los Angeles, the roads that were decorated for Christmas in the way that Los Angeles decorates for Christmas, which is with the specific effort of a city that is making Christmas happen in a climate that is not cooperating with the seasonal expectations that most people brought to the holiday.
The palm trees with lights on them and the decorations in the shop windows and the inflatable Santas on the rooftops of the houses in the neighborhoods he drove through. He drove through it in the plain dark coat and the white shirt and thought about Michael Reeves in the chair beside the Christmas tree with his coat on waiting for an hour and 20 minutes without anyone coming to tell him anything.
Nobody had asked him to sit in the waiting room chair beside Michael Reeves for 28 minutes and discuss the Brooklyn Dodgers. Nobody had suggested it. Nobody had arranged it. It had not been planned in any conventional sense of planning which is the sense in which an intention is formed and a schedule is organized around it and the things executed according to the plan.
It had been something else. The specific kind of thing that happens when a person with a long habit of paying attention to what is in front of them walks into a room and sees a 10-year-old boy sitting alone with his coat on on the 23rd of December and decides without deliberation that the chair beside him is where they are going to sit and discuss the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Nobody had known he was going to do it. Nobody except Michael Reeves knew it had happened. And Michael Reeves was 10 years old and had spent the 23rd of December in a hospital waiting room alone for an hour and 20 minutes and had then spent the next 28 minutes not alone. And that was the whole of what had happened simple and complete requiring no addition.
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