Syreens

The streets of East Flatbush were corridors to Kings County Hospital, with ambulances wailing all day, and especially night.

One of the first words I learned, then unlearned, was "syreen," the noise-maker on ambulances and cop cars. I never heard it pronounced any other way until school, where our nuns, who were from Baltimore, told us the word was "siren."

They had to use their full authority to convince us of that. We gave it to them, but kept our pronunciation anyway. It sounded truer - or, as I learned much later, more onomatopoetic.

We were close enough to the hospital to drive there ourselves, when necessary, rather than by ambulance. Faster and cheaper both, I suppose.

I never knew an adult to go to the hospital. Kids did, with lifestyle mishaps: Deirdre Morgan, who once ate some shoelaces and drank bleach in the laundry; Jimmy Dolan, who liked to shove mothballs up his nose, but occasionally overdid it; and me, once, at age 4.

At Easter, I was entertaining some company at our house, running in circles and shouting "Heyyy, Abbott," to fine comic effect.

But you can't please everybody, and at one point Mary Sullivan, a full ten years my senior who should have known better, or at least been kinder, stuck her foot out in front of me in full throttle and sent me flying head-first into an iron radiator.

I remember the flight, and the passage from consciousness out of it. Apparently there was a good deal of blood, and some concern about loss of life. Thus, a trip to the hospital.

It turned out all right; my only hospital visit ever. Unlike Jimmy Dolan, I learned a little lesson, in deciding to never go back, if I could help it. Of course, maybe he simply couldn't.