Jim's prayer.

June 2, Santa Rosa, California.

Fuji is out of intensive care; he's now at a rehabilitation center in Santa Cruz. Jim came back to the circus last night.
"He is improving every day," he said. Fuji still has no use of nor feelings in half his body, with all the implications this has. "How do you tie your shoes with only one hand?" asked Jim. "His face is dropping on one side and when people see him at the circus he's going to look sad, but on his first day at the hospital we didn't know if he was going to live, so there's a lot of improvement," he added.
Jim found a card on the ground in the parking lot of the hospital on that first day. It was the Lord's Prayer in Spanish. There was no garbage on the lot, not even a piece of paper anywhere to be seen. "There was absolutely nothing around, but there was this card," Jim said. "On those first days I clung to that. It was a sign that he was going to be all right," Jim said, smiling, as he showed me the card.
Where it not for the merciful goodwill of the hospital there would be some one hundred thousand dollars worth of bills to pay. A day in rehab alone runs into the three thousand dollar range. "They were really good; they worked with us so that it would not be that much," said Jim. Yet one more reminder of the painfully obvious fact that this country is desperately in need of a health care system worthy of the name, one that includes everybody and is affordable for the common man, not to mention for society as a whole.

You can't afford health care but you're surrounded with cheap stuff. In unrelated news we the lucky few, the rich Westerners, live in a society where it actually costs more to buy something in a store than make it yourself.
We went to buy supplies to make a mattress for the custom-made crib Fridman has built for Dylan and found out it would cost about a third more to do so than to buy a mattress at the local chain store. Simple economic supply and demand logic, yet there is something unsettling about the idea.