Fun Times on the Psych Ward

Oddly enough, I had some of the best times I'd had in the past year while I was confined in the hospital.  Mainly this was because I was able to talk with people like me.  I didn't have to try to explain something that's unexplainable.  We "got" each other.  It was the first time I met someone else who'd fought depression for years and years without any let-up.  One night we were playing cards.  We'd been turned out of the dining area, then the overhead lights were turned off in the lounge so we couldn't see to play where the card table was.  The only other tables were little round decorative columns about 15" in diameter and maybe 2 1/2 feet tall.  We pushed three of these together like a 3-leaf clover and crowded around them.  The game we were playing required each player to have 6 cards laid down in front of him/her in a 2x3 pattern.  With four of us playing, you can imagine it was impossible to keep our cards straight on three small circular spaces.  Every depressed person I've met also seems to have at least a touch of obsessive/compulsive disorder.  Someone finally said, "Is it really bugging you that we can't line our cards up equi-distant from each other?"  We all cracked up because everyone of us had been worrying with that same thought.  One guy volunteered his first wife had divorced him because she couldn't stand that his red shirts had to be on red hangers, white on white.  "I see nothing wrong with that at all!" another patient told him.  His mother could never send him to his room as punishment when he was a boy because he'd spend hours organizing his closet and drawers.  When I was a camp counselor one summer, the girls could never understand why they could never short-sheet me--I had a plaid bedspread and those plaids had to be perfectly in line when I made that bed.  Just a glance at the bed and I could tell if anyone had messed with it.