I don't know what it is about hospitals. In my journeys I've spent many hours looking for instances of desolation. There have been trips to the airport, the maze-likes streets of Binghamton, NY and impromptu Sunday night adventures. Sunday night is the best night to go searching for desolation - nothing is open late and very few people are around.

And so that brings us to tonight. I am in an unkempt messy hospital waiting room at 10:15pm on a Saturday night. The door opens every few minutes and I gaze up unexpectedly as if my personal cure for Lupus was walking in.

This bathed-in-beige waiting room has two televisions, one blaring late-nite Lifetime movies, currently showing some hot and heavy action. Its volume is overpowering the other television broadcasting CNN. Call Ted Turner. The irony is not lost on me.

The focal point of the room is a mother and child sleeping on one of the seats. Though the security guard is sitting not 16 feet away, she is here, and I don't think she's getting up any time soon. It is the holiday season, after all.

It'd be too glib to make a birth of Jesus reference. Save that for the networks.

The story of this woman and her infant child is no doubt tragic - tragic enough to put her in a hospital waiting room late on a subzero Saturday night.

(But what about me?)

I've got 88 cents in my pocket - no doubt it could buy vending machine-sponsored feast. I'm rather leery about getting up and buying something, because I have no idea the last time this woman that has had a meal - let alone a treat like a Twix bar.

The way she is mothering her sleeping infant is staggering. Who knows what sad state of affairs they deal with when the sun is up. There's something soothing about the way habitually slurps on coughdrops.

I'd be scared to fall asleep here. And if I was to fall asleep and my pocket was picked - they can have the chapstick.

We've got company. Two more women just came in, one in a wheelchair. I wonder what they think of the mother and child.

This is a waiting room. What are these people waiting for?