A Cellarful of Nose - Future Shoes

He looked up at me and our eyes really met for the first time,
and I could see from the yellow sclera that he really had been
through something, some kind of conversion experience, and he
was not the same creep I knew in grade school. What I saw in his
face was grief.
But what he said blew me away:
“I hated you because you smiled at your sister's funeral.”
Everything seemed to freeze around us. The band playing
“Hang On Sloopy” faded into the background. The blinking
lights, the flashbulbs popping, the roar of chatter arising from the
folding tables all dwindled, as I remembered that day. May 8,
1961.
I had a sister named Kathy, five years older than me, born in
1945. She was born with a broken valve in her heart, that leaked
blood and kept her from getting the oxygen to her lungs and body
that she needed to be strong. Because of this defect her skin was a
pale bluish color, and her condition was known as “blue baby
syndrome.”
If you were a bluebaby in 1945, your prognosis was poor.
Five years later, relatively simple surgical procedure would be
developed that reversed the defect at birth. But we lived in a
quarry town, far from an academic hospital. We never knew of
such a thing.
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