When Crickets Cry

by Charles Martin

Emma once told me that some people spend their whole lives trying to outrun God, maybe get someplace He’s never been. She shook her head and smiled, wondering why. Trouble is, she said, they spend a lifetime searching and running, and when they arrive, they find He’s already been there.

Final words are hard to hear when you know for certain they are indeed final.

I spent a good part of my childhood reading. Still don’t own a television. A lot of dead writers feed my mind with their ever-present whisperings.

One thing I learned in school, somewhere in those long nights, was that if you ask enough of the right questions, the kind of questions that nibble at the issue but don’t directly confront it, people will usually offer what you’re looking for. Knowing what to ask, when to ask it, and most important, how are the beginnings of a pretty good bedside conversation.

I don’t like airports. Never have. When I find myself wondering what hell must be like, I’m reminded of the terminals in Atlanta. Thousands of people, most of whom don’t know one another, crammed into a limited space, all in a hurry and trying desperately to get out. No one really wants to be there because it’s simply a mandatory delay, a non-place—you’re not home and neither is anyone else. Everybody’s just passing through.

And, after all, what is a lie? ’Tis but the truth in masquerade.

“I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something. I will not refuse to do the something I can do.”

“That which we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence.”

You stir man to take pleasure in praising You, because You have made us for Yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in You.

The loneliest sound I have ever heard is that of a male cardinal calling out for a female who does not answer. And he will stand on that limb and sing at the top of his lungs for days.

Once organized, each tool was either within arm’s reach or just a few steps away. Meaning we wasted little effort once work began.

There’s a gold mine in salvageable wood draped in kudzu, pine needles, and acorns if someone is willing to peel back the vines and plane the wood. It’s a slow process, and you’re bound to uncover a few snakes, but maybe life is like that—you never know when something that’s been hidden is going to rise up and bite you, or glow with a golden hue.

The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.

That afternoon many of the pieces fell into place, and it struck me that doctors can help people get well, even prolong their lives, but they cannot heal them or make them whole. That’s something else.

“I shot an arrow into the air, it fell to earth, I knew not where; for so swiftly it flew, the sight could not follow in its flight. I breathed a song into the air, it fell to earth I knew not where; for who has sight so keen and strong, that it can follow the flight of a song? Long, long afterward, in an oak, I found the arrow still unbroke, and the song, from beginning to end, I found again in the heart of a friend.”

In all my reading and study, I have come to know one thing without any shadow of doubt: if anything in this universe reflects the fingerprint of God, it is the human heart.

The heart is not only the most unselfish of organs, it is also the most courageous and faithful.

“Never forget, the best is the enemy of the good.”

Then there are the doctors. The honest ones will tell you that few of us are immune to a bit of a God-complex. The system itself breeds the problem. Unlike CEOs, who receive feedback from their stockholders or boards of directors, doctors receive little to no correction. We feed off control. And in the operating room we are in total control; everyone is subservient to our smallest command. No argument. No negotiation. No question or protest. We prescribe, and people do. We extend a hand, and people jump. And with every saved life, we are affirmed.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . . it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us.

the best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched; they must be felt with the heart.

life is either a daring adventure, or it is nothing.

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

He tapped his chest with two fingers. “After more than sixty years of medicine, I’m still amazed at this little thing. Fist-sized, it sits in the center of us, never stopping to take a break or even pause. So simple, yet so complex and so utterly unknown.”

Hope is not the result of medicine or anything that science has to offer. It is a flower that sprouts and grows when others pour water upon it. I think sometimes that I spent so much time worrying about how to protect and strengthen the flower—even going so far as to graft in a new stem and root system—that I forgot to simply water it.

As bathing suits go, it was conservative, same halter top and bikini bottom, but it was still a bathing suit. And bathing suits and underwear are basically the same thing; we just wear them in different settings. When you boil it down, the deciding factor is geography.

“We are all shipwrecked. All castaways.” I took a few steps forward, toward the boat launch and the edge of the dock. I dug my hands in my pockets and then turned, my eyes meeting hers. “One day, we all wake on the beach, our heads caked with sand, sea foam stinging our eyes, fiddler crabs picking at our noses, and the taste of salt caked on our lips.”

“And, like it or not, it is there that we realize we are all in need of Friday to come rescue us off this island, because we don’t speak the language and we can’t read the messages in the bottle.”

During the day, a hospital is an intense place. It’s a cauldron of emotions, struggles, and people with short fuses facing few options. Peopled with nurses, doctors, patients, social workers, administrators, and family members, everybody is bouncing off one another like atoms in a centrifuge rapidly transiting between somewhere and somewhere else.

the hospital was alive, pulsing with the smell of disinfectant, the sound of hushed tones and unguarded laughter, and the feel of unending possibilities. I loved this, the feeling of absolute and eternal optimism, the feeling that no matter how bad or no matter how dire the circumstances or predictions, that until death has been declared and the sheet rolled up over the patient’s eyes, that even beyond the flatline, anything is possible. Beneath the undercurrent of even the direst predictions, hope lives here. It creeps along the corridors, hangs from every corner of every room, and speeds down every gurney in search of a soul in need.

Life is where the blood flows.

The heart doesn’t just pump blood, it is our source of emotion. Out of it and because of it, people laugh, cry, get angry, grow sad, know joy, empathize, live with a full range of emotions.

“The doctor who treats himself has a fool for a patient, and a fool for a doctor.”

All hearts stop, Annie. What matters is what you do with it while it’s still pumping.