Little Pea

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'Why do you hold her all the time?' Karen asked me one evening as I sat with the baby in our accustomed place, the scarred wooden rocker in front of the Isolette. Karen was smiling, teasing me. The little pea and I traced a section of institutional flooring over and over, slow and measured, back and forth. Karen was about 15 years older than I, and she had spent at least 10 of those years in that place, the neurology/neurosurgery unit of a large children's hospital. A few nurses there had desiccated into wasps, penetrating but venomous. Karen wasn't one of them. It was just that she was hundreds of brain-damaged babies, thousands of tragic stories, ahead of me.

'You've seen that baby's CT scan. You know she has about as much brain power as an earthworm,' she said, chuckling.

I could feel the little pea's fire against me, right over my heart, but at the same time, rising on my inner screen like a vision, was the earthworm I had dissected in 10th grade: one nerve running up the length of its body, bifurcating at its head into a simple Y. The Y is its 'brain.' Nothing is much more basic than the brain of an earthworm.

I snorted back a laugh. I'm still not sure if that laugh was salvation or damnation. But I do know that when you take a scalpel to the nervous system of an earthworm, the trick, then as now, is to expose that tender bifurcation without destroying it.

Reprinted from Georgia Review (Summer 2006). Subscriptions: $24/yr. (4 issues) from 12 Gilbert Hall, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602; www.uga.edu/garev.

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