JULY 13, 2026 – With my mug of morning Java, I sat on the dock before the sun emerged from its lair behind the bend in the shoreline to the east. A warm breeze out of the south turned the lake into a sea of diamonds except in my immediate venue, where the trees and contour of the land still blocked the sun. Conditions were as pleasant as they could ever be—the world around me, calm and quiet; the air, not yet too hot or muggy; the hues of water and sky, gratifying to the eyes and imagination. Earlier, I’d dispensed with some legal work, and soon I would resume work on my model sailboats. For the next few minutes—to the bottom of my coffee mug, to be precise—I figured I’d give some thought to a topic for this evening’s blog post. I had ample material from which to choose, but I hadn’t yet settled on anything specific.
That’s when my phone rang. Little did I know it was “material” calling and material material, at that. “Hello, counselor,” the Big Man greeted me when I answered.
I asked how he was doing. It was in the casual way of putting the question, as many of us do upon entering a conversation with someone we know well. In his response, he divulged a recent incident that had I known of it before his call, I would’ve asked the same question but out of genuine concern, not conversational informality.
It hadn’t been his first trip to the E.R. for what turned out to be another quirky but non-life-threatening occasion of aphasia. Usually, my sister keeps me informed about these things, but she’s out of town attending to their daughter’s needs and hadn’t yet had a chance to communicate. According to my eminently reliable source—the caller—he’d alerted Jenny by text in the wee hours of the morning two days ago. She in turn, called 9-1-1.
“In no time at all,” he told me, “Three young EMT women, dressed all in black, were at our apartment and putting me on a gurney for the trip to E.R. They were the kindest people and took good care of me.”
He then described in detail his experience at St. Luke’s up at 120th Street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. “It’s a rougher part of the city,” he said, “and you see all kinds of people who’ve had a tough time in life, many simply having been left behind.” After giving me a writer’s view of the crowded hallways and waiting rooms, and some of the characters he heard and saw, he recounted a most amazing “small world” encounter.
“A woman with a badge identifying her as the doctor in charge came up to my bedside and introduced herself. ‘I’m from Anoka, Minnesota,’ she said. She grew up on Benton [one street up from Rice where we Nilssons lived]. ‘When I was in elementary school[1],’ she said, you visited our school and recited your poem, “Cat, You Better Come Home.”’ —‘So,’ I said, ‘would you like to hear me recite it again?’ And she said, —‘I’d love that.’ So I did. I also wrote her a limerick.
“If you want to express your appreciation for your E.R. doctor, you write them a limerick.”
My senior brother-in-law is unflappable when it comes to health issues—from the annoying to the uncomfortable to the painful to stuff that sends a person in E.R. (I wouldn’t disclose what I have in this post if he hadn’t already published even more on social media.) His pain threshold is directly proportional to his unusual height. Over the phone, his animated description of his trip to St. Luke’s covered little about himself or his condition. He focused exclusively on his caregivers; by how hard they worked; how dedicated they were; how concerned they were about the care and welfare of every single individual who was seeking or needing medical attention. “Until you spend a few hours in a big city E.R.,” he said, “you don’t understand how desperate many people are or that healthcare is a right, not a privilege.
“I’m going to write a column about this,” he said, “and I want to mention your father. But tell me this, can we say for sure that he was a Republican?”
“Of course he was,” I said. I didn’t ask how Dad would figure in the contemplated column or why it mattered whether he was a Republican. I knew how and why: The column would argue for Medicare for all; that the Party of Trump would oppose it, as that party opposes providing any assistance or succor to the less fortunate among us; that the Republicans of yesterday—people such as the columnist’s father-in-law, Ray Nilsson—were decent people; that they would be scandalized by what’s become of their party and most of all, by the naked emperor who leads it.
And that, my readers, is the “material material” for this post.
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© 2026 by Eric Nilsson
[1] Having lived on Benton, she would’ve gone to Franklin Elementary, which my sisters and I—and most of Garrison’s cousins—also attended.
