[AuthorRDK]

CONNIE-O


Once in a while a song comes on the radio which sends us back in time. That is what happened to me yesterday while I was driving to the doctor's office.

It's not so much that the song took me back to my younger days but more that it let me know what kind of a person I was becoming during my youth.

"O-Connie, O-Connie I miss you sooooo" went the song.

I could feel a tear come to my eye as the music played on. It took me back to when I was a young boy about seventeen. I was working at Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital in Albany Georgia.

While eating my lunch at the hospital I heard several people in the lunch room talking about a young sixteen year old girl on the maternity ward. They laughed and talked about her as if she was a worthless human being. That she was not married and that she was having a baby.

I got up from my seat and placed my tray in the kitchen window. Then I walked to the elevator and made my way up to the maternity ward. I walked behind the nurses station and I began to look through the medical charts.

"Can I help you?" Said the head nurse as she walked around the corner.

"I looking for some information for Doctor McCall." I told her.

"Well, if Doctor McCall wants any information on our maternity patients he will just have to come up here himself." She stated.

I looked down at the opened chart that I held in my hand. I saw that the patient was 16 years old and that her name was Miss. Cornwell. I placed the chart back into the chart rack and walked back to the elevator. Within several hours that was all that anyone was talking about in the hospital.

After the changing of shifts I went to the lab and borrowed, you might say, a white lab coat. Once again I took the elevator and made my way back to the maternity ward.

"What room is Miss Cornwell in" I asked the nurse.

"Right across the hall." she replied, as she pointed to a closed door.

I walked into the room and before my eyes sat a very beautiful young pregnant girl.

"Who are you?" She asked me.

"I have to make sure all the windows are closed" I told her, as I walked over to the curtains to check the widows.

"What is your name" She asked me.

"Roger. What's yours? I asked.

"Twila." She said.

I was very nervous and did not know what to say to her.

"You are really very pretty." I said to her.

She turned over and covered her head and I left the room.

The next day I sent two flowers to her room with an anonymous note telling her how pretty she was. I wanted to go back to see her but I was just to scared and nervous. Early the next day I heard that she had her baby. Now everyone was really talking about her. I made myself walk up to her room.

When I walked in she was holding her baby in her arms.

"Thank you for the beautiful flowers." She said.

"I didn't send no flowers." I said back to her.

"Well, nobody else around her has told me that I was beautiful." She said with a smile on her face.

I did not know what to say. I looked at her baby and told her that it was beautiful too, just like her. I asked her if she would do me a favor and listen to the radio between 7 and 8pm. She told me that she would.

After I got off work I walked to the radio station and asked the man if he would play a song titled "Connie-O" sung by the Four Seasons. It was a song that I had heard several days before. I was seventeen now and on my own. I was playing the song for Twila because I was going to ask her to marry me the next day. I did not want her to have to live with people talking about her having a baby and not being married.

I got the man at the radio station to play the song for me at exactly seven o'clock. The next day I went up to her room with two flowers and I opened the door. I could not believe my eyes when I saw that the room was vacant.

"Where is Twila?" I yelled out at the nurse.

"She was dismissed early this morning." She told me.

I never saw her again after that.

Some years later I married and I named my own daughter "Twila."

I guess we can all look back into our past and see many things that we might have done that were crazy or a little stupid.

But it is good to know when I look back at those days that I was a good boy, with a good heart. I think that makes being stupid ok, sometimes.

[VickyRN]

Very sweet story. Thanks so much for sharing, Roger