Point of View: A Captive Audience!

There is nothing new under the bun,” I said in my best Ecclesiastes manner as my sister, who’s rehabbing a back injury in Pittsburgh, and I peered down at the health care facility’s limp culinary offerings.

“Maybe they think that by serving up such awful stuff you’ll be all the more determined to make a speedy recovery,” I said, before I alit on a gambit of my own. “I know,” I said, “I’ll read you some of my columns.”

At last, a captive audience! I had brought several years’ worth in a manila envelope, and before she could say, “Don’t speak,” I began, of course, with the one about Gary Bowen’s and my recent men’s B doubles championship at the East Hampton Indoor-Outdoor Club.

And then I segued into the Memorial Day one, the one, you know, that begins with my saying to Jen Landes that “all of a sudden, our chances of being in an accident have just increased a thousandfold. . . . Honk if you love peace and quiet.”

I spared her the column about the fascinating lovemaking of slugs — no slam, bam, thank-you ma’ams there! — in favor of one about me telling the historical tourists that my time at The Star dated to the Late Paleolithic period, or perhaps to the Early Cretaceous.

Turnabout, of course, is fair play. So, the next day she read me three Psalms, the 131st, the 26th, and the 23rd, her favorite.

But this was no green pasture in which she was lying down — it was a hospital bed in a dreary place, the type of place from which, whenever I find myself in one, I instantly want to flee. Having suffered a compression fracture of a vertebra, she can’t do that yet. My mission, then, was to cheerlead — or to bore her so with my readings that, without any seeming agency on her part, she would leap from her bed and walk.

We talked of the old house, which I had driven by one morning on my way to see her, its bricks pink in the sun on the hill. It seemed a blessed place. Though parents and grandparents are no longer within, it lives on, stolid and upright, as they were.

Of God my sister is fond, but I said to her in taking my leave last Thursday, “I’m putting my faith in you.”