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Tonight at the Morpheum: A Hospital Farce in Three Acts
Tonight at the Morpheum: A Hospital Farce in Three Acts
Tonight at the Morpheum: A Hospital Farce in Three Acts
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Tonight at the Morpheum: A Hospital Farce in Three Acts

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Markham Shaw Pyle, historian of the George Washington – Selina Huntingdon correspondence, the events of that portentous year 1937, Congress' decision, four months before Pearl Harbor, to keep the draft (by one vote), and the investigations into the loss of RMS Titanic, looks back on his 2014 heart attack and triple bypass, his recovery, and the missed diagnoses, misdiagnoses, and dangerous consequences of thirty years’ untreated illness.

A long essay at once harrowing, hopeful, and hilarious (never put a writer on a morphine drip: he'll hallucinate about typography and book design), Mr. Pyle looks candidly at the humiliations of colitis, the vagaries of having a vagus nerve that's trying to kill him, the dubious joys of having a heart attack on Halloween, the trials of recovery, the life-debt he owes to the physicians, nurses, and staff at Houston's Memorial Hermann Heart and Vascular Institute, and the surprising livability of life after illness.

From the time the other local hospital got shut down inadvertently by "Deputy Brangus and his Merry Men" to his first onset of illness in law school, to the stresses of losing both parents in a span of eighteen months and the surprising ways in which support is found in unexpected places, Mr. Pyle looks with wry candor and his accustomed wit and style on the ills flesh is heir to – or legatee of, if there's Will. And finds, as he hopes others suffering from the same ills may find, that there is, always, hope, after all.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherBapton Books
Release dateAug 28, 2015
ISBN9781310623318
Tonight at the Morpheum: A Hospital Farce in Three Acts
Author

Markham Pyle

Markham Shaw Pyle holds his undergraduate and law degrees from Washington & Lee. He is a past or current member of, inter alia, the Organization of American Historians; the Society for Military History; the Southern Historical Association; the Southwestern Social Science Association; the Southwestern Historical Association; the Southwestern Political Science Association; the Virginia Historical Society; and the Texas State Historical Association. He is the historian of Congress’ August 1941 vote to keep the draft four months before Pearl Harbor and, with GMW Wemyss, the historian of the Titanic enquiries and that portentous year 1937, and the annotator of Kipling and Kenneth Grahame.

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    Tonight at the Morpheum - Markham Pyle

    Tonight at the Morpheum

    A Hospital Farce in Three Acts

    Markham Shaw Pyle

    Bapton Books

    Copyright © 2011, 2015 by Bapton Literary Trust No 1 (for Markham Shaw Pyle)

    All rights reserved

    Bapton Books' Smashwords Edition

    Book design by Bapton Books

    A note to the reader: it is the aspiration of this imprint, small though Bapton Books be, to have as few errors and literals – 'typographical errors', misprints – as occur in any average Oxford University Press publication (which, alas, in these thin and piping times, gives us a margin of perhaps five or ten). Any obliging corrections shall be gratefully received.

    Passages of this work have appeared in substantially the same form in The Transatlantic Disputations, Bapton Books 2011.

    This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment, and yours alone. This ebook mayn't be re-sold or given away to others. Should you wish to share this book with others, do please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or should it not have been purchased for your use only, then do please return to Smashwords.com and purchase a copy of your own. We shall be greatly obliged to you for respecting the hard work of our authors and this publishing house.

    ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

    Markham Shaw Pyle, author of Fools, Drunks, and the United States: August 12 1941, and of Benevolent Designs: The Countess and the General: George Washington, Selina Countess of Huntingdon, their correspondence, & the evangelizing of America, holds his undergraduate and law degrees from Washington & Lee. He is a past or current member of, inter alia, the Organization of American Historians; the Society for Military History; the Southern Historical Association; the Southwestern Social Science Association; the Southwestern Historical Association; the Southwestern Political Science Association; the Virginia Historical Society; and the Texas State Historical Association. He is the co-author of The Transatlantic Disputations: Essays & Observations; The Bapton Books Sampler: a literary chrestomathy; '37: the year of portent; Freedom, Fascists, Fools, & Frauds: Bapton Books Position Papers and Other Critical Pieces, 2011 – 2014; and the acclaimed When That Great Ship Went Down: the legal and political repercussions of the loss of RMS Titanic; and co-editor and co-annotator of The Complete Mowgli Stories, Duly Annotated, and The Annotated Wind in the Willows, for Adults and Sensible Children (or, possibly, Children and Sensible Adults).

    He is one of the partners in Bapton Books.

    Other books by Markham Shaw Pyle from Bapton Books:

    Bapton Books Annotated Classics (with GMW Wemyss):

    The Complete Mowgli Stories, Duly Annotated

    The Annotated Wind in the Willows, for Adults and Sensible Children (or, possibly, Children and Sensible Adults)

    Bapton Books History Selections:

    Fools, Drunks, and the United States: August 12, 1941

    Benevolent Designs: The Countess and the General: George Washington, Selina Countess of Huntingdon, their correspondence, & the evangelizing of America

    When That Great Ship Went Down: the legal and political repercussions of the loss of RMS Titanic (with GMW Wemyss)

    '37: the year of portent (with GMW Wemyss)

    Essays:

    The Transatlantic Disputations: Essays & Observations (with GMW Wemyss)

    The Bapton Books Sampler: a literary chrestomathy (with GMW Wemyss)

    Freedom, Fascists, Fools, & Frauds: Bapton Books Position Papers and Other Critical Pieces, 2011 – 2014 (with GMW Wemyss)

    Other fiction:

    Crafts and Assaults: Two Uncanny Tales for the Season (with GMW Wemyss)

    Forthcoming:

    The Crisis: 1914 (with GMW Wemyss)

    The Annotated Kidnapped (Robert Louis Stevenson) (with GMW Wemyss)

    Contents:

    About the author

    Other books by Markham Shaw Pyle from Bapton Books

    Act I. A hospital room in the Regional Morpheum

    Act II. In flashback

    Act III. A hospital room in the Grand Metropolitan Morpheum

    Act I. A hospital room in the Regional Morpheum.

    Wolves. Three adolescent wolves. Three adolescent wolves dancing a jig, each with a shillelagh in its left, anthropomorphic, paw. They are bowler-hatted, in patched dungarees held up each by a single gallus. They owe something to A. B. Frost, something to Fred Moore, and something to Tex Avery.

    They are letterpress, these wolves, not gravure; clean and well-lined, bitten into the paper, on the verso page of a book – what book? I don't know. The paper is rag, and deckle-edged; it sparkles subtly, as if micaceous: I don't know how.

    I am in the hospital. It is my first experience with morphine. I am in the hospital, where everything, real and unreal (and surreal), is lived in the present continuous. I am in the hospital, and ill enough to justify it, and in more danger than I or they know (or will know), and, God help us all, I am hallucinating about page layout, typography, dingbats, and book design.

    Writers. Good God.

    This is an account – as true as I can make it – of illness. It is an account of chronic illness. It is also something of a roaring, bittersweet, three-act farce.

    It begins – well. I have no idea when it begins. Or how. Or when the curtain descends: not yet.

    My stay in the regional hospital is a good place to start; but it is not the start.

    We'll start there anyway.

    My parents have died, within eighteen months of one another. I'd been doing what I could – for what that was worth – to take what care of them I could.

    It wasn't worth much. By now, neither am I. My job is like Othello's occupation: gone. So is my health.

    So, when I end up in the hospital, this first time, I am living, until I can get back on my feet, with my aunt and uncle: my father's younger brother and his wife. I am in a small city, a county south of Houston and my old life: Houston, where I was born; where my parents were married; where my father died and is buried in the VA Cemetery with all the other old soldiers; where my mother now rests beside him.

    On Tuesdays, we do the delivery run, my aunt and uncle and I, taking hot meals to shut-ins and the nursing home residents and the very poor.

    It is a Tuesday.

    Halfway or so through

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