For The Record- 26. Apr. 2025

Some thoughts on Conclaves, Critical Thinking and The Cars

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In the spring of 2013, I wasn’t in the best hospital this city offers, but the closest one to my house. When you’re on your way back from urgent care, and the doctor calls your wife and says not to go home but to keep going to the nearest ER, that’s how it goes.

This was Day 2 or 3 of an excruciatingly slow recovery. Whatever the medical version of “hurry up and wait” was, this was it. I was full of Morphine, and it was making just enough of a dent for me to be bored. I had briefly been excited to finally (finally!) catch up on all the reading I’d wanted to do, but that was before the drugs kicked in. Following the plot is hard when you can't follow the words. In other words, no go. So I was basically sentenced to a few days of being in an altered state and watching daytime TV, which included a live feed on the last Conclave.

I was in a catholic hospital, and a nun was making the rounds, checking in on everyone. She started with the usual boilerplate small talk before noticing the TV and stopping midsentence. Wide-eyed, she asked if this was the Conclave. I was pretty sure it was (again, morphine), and she asked if she could sit down. The anecdote here is that I watched the last Conclave high as a kite with a nun sitting next to me in rapt attention.

The bigger picture is that A: I hope I’m nowhere near a medical facility for this one, and B) it was fascinating to see how much this meant to someone. TBH, I could’ve taken or left it, but to her? This was everything. It was a great lesson that I apparently needed to learn right then. Not everything is black and white, nothing is binary—no matter how much we’re conditioned to think that way.

I’ve been thinking about her (and the people in the original story below) a lot lately as the world seems to burn around us and we all keep our pitchforks sharp and our torches lit.