1 result for (book:sdpc AND heading:introduct AND stemmed:roof)
[... 27 paragraphs ...]
October 10, 1984. Both of us had jobs at the large hospital in my home town of Sayre, Pa., eighteen miles southeast of Elmira, N.Y. The setting and the buildings weren’t like those of the “real” hospital in Sayre, though. It was a gorgeous summer day. Jane was much younger than she’d been when she died at the age of fifty-five. She still had her long jet-black hair, slim active figure and exuberant personality. I could have been my own age, sixty-five. We relaxed upon a large, sloping, very green lawn beside a brick hospital building that was several stories high. Then with great surprise I saw that on top of the near end of the building there sat an old, flat-sided, two-story house with steep roofs, weathered a drab gray and with all of its windows shuttered. Caught in one shutter was a filmy pink garment like a negligee, fluttering in the breeze. Curiously, Jane and I stared up at the house perched so incongruously there, and we talked about trying to get up into it to see what it was like inside.
[... 1 paragraph ...]
Then I was in an elevator car inside the building, and rising toward the house on the roof. Jane wasn’t with me. Another, older lady was having trouble repairing a small mechanism that was fastened to the wall beside the car’s door. I offered to fix it for her; this involved my turning some large screws into place by hand. While I was doing so, the elevator stopped at a floor and the door opened. The lady left, and I hurriedly inserted the last few screws while the door stayed open. Just as I finished — or perhaps nearly so — the door began to close. I leaped toward it. I wedged my shoulder between the door and its frame and forced the door open enough so that I could squeeze out into a hallway of the hospital. The door shut behind me.
[... 5 paragraphs ...]
‘My bursting out of the elevator car, which was lifting me toward the house on the roof of the hospital building, and a new reality, is a close thing as I force my way free. I’m delayed by fixing the mechanism; repairing it means I still have things to do on the earth, as does the lady who was with me in the car. My almost waiting too long to get out of the car also stands for my grief for Jane, and for my intense questioning and speculating about ‘where she is’ now. I’m sure that she lives. I want to know more — yet I’m not ready to die now in order to find out. I feel sad, writing this and thinking of her.
[... 35 paragraphs ...]