Word: beaumonters
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...gift of life is never meant to be returned, especially not wrapped in plastic, packed in ice and enclosed in a small Igloo cooler. But that is precisely the transaction that occurred last week at William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Michigan, where doctors took the heart of a 22-year-old who died following a car crash and sewed it inside the body of her father...
...Sometimes the serious and hilarious are combined. Asked by an embarrassed sixth-grade girl to explain what condoms are for, an elderly volunteer answered delicately, "It's something a man wears to protect a lady." Replied the girl: "From what?" On another occasion a little girl asked volunteer Dorie Beaumont, "What if your mom meets your dad at a bar, has drinks and comes home and beats you up?" Beaumont recalls, "She seemed so calm. I was trying to stay calm. Suddenly she yelled, 'Here she comes!' I heard this awful scream, and the phone slammed down...
...Though Beaumont never had a chance to get that child's full name and number, cases of suspected abuse or neglect are usually reported to county child- protection services. In other instances where a child needs help, phone counselors may simply stay on the line until a problem is resolved. Bruce Nelson, the hospital's quietly intense community services director, who often works the phones himself, remembers an eight-year-old girl racked with chills and fever who said she had been vomiting all day: "She was crying all the time we talked to her." He called a nurse...
...dice. Stark, actually the ghost of Beaumont's fetal twin, who was incompletely absorbed in utero (the medical horror here is the book's only high-voltage shocker), comes to life as a cunning psychopath who, somewhat ludicrously, is determined to keep on writing. He slices up Beaumont's agent and editor and several other innocents with a straight razor, in scenes so lovingly detailed they would be called pornographic if the author had given the same attention...
...usual, King's prose is fast, simple and sloppy. He has young Beaumont in 1960 use the current slang "get off on," meaning enjoy, and lets an elderly English professor say he will "loan" the hero a car (old pedants say "lend"). The climax has the brutish Stark absurdly trying to write another novel to keep his ectoplasm from sloughing away in rivulets of goo. Characterization is perfunctory, with an odd exception: Beaumont's eight- month-old twin babies are vividly and charmingly described. For King fans this may be the sort of thing that sustains the myth that...