Kaylee pushed through the glass doors and stood on the sidewalk in the October wind, tilting her head back at the great brass letters above the entrance. I could see her lips move. When she came back through the doors, she was walking like a woman who has just stepped off a boat. She stopped in front of my chair and read it to the whole waiting room in a small voice. “The Hendricks Pavilion. In honor of Opal Hendricks and the eleven founding women of the Auxiliary, who built the first ward of this hospital with their own hands.” I am Opal Hendricks, seventy nine years old, and I sat with my grocery bag of forty little hats on my lap.
In 1969, I was twenty two years old and newly married, and I sat in a church basement in Nashville with eleven other women, each of us holding a casserole dish. We had read that the city had no hospital ward for sick children, only a hallway. We baked and sewed and sold quilts for two years until we had enough to rent a floor. I held a paintbrush, and so did the others. The small silver pin of two hands holding a heart was cast for the twelve of us that first winter. After the ward opened, I took a job at a bank on Broadway, for twenty eight years, and told no one.
The nurse with the gray braid, Marguerite, thirty five years on that floor, finally stepped forward and put both hands on my shoulders. “Miss Opal,” she said, “I wanted to say something. I swear I did.” The dad in the ball cap had risen to his feet with his coffee going cold. The grandmother with the diaper bag was crying openly, and a little boy on her lap, perhaps three, waved a stuffed rabbit at me and said, “Hat!” I took a blue one out of the bag, and he put it on his head, and the whole waiting room laughed through its tears.
A silver pin of two small hands gave one retired bank teller the length of a Thursday to bring a young receptionist back to the heart of her hospital in Nashville.
I gave my terms with a hand on the arm of Kaylee. “Honey, I am not going to report you. You are twenty five, you work the early shift, and you were trying to protect this floor from people who do not belong. That is a good instinct, and I want you to keep it. I would ask only that you learn the names on the wall in the lobby, all twelve, and that you tell every new employee who walked into that basement in 1969. And I would like to hold the first baby of the morning, if the family does not mind.” Kaylee nodded, and her chin trembled.
Kaylee dropped into the chair beside mine, and the words poured out. “Mrs. Hendricks, I came here three years ago from a town in Kentucky,” she said. “My little brother was sick in this hospital when I was twelve, and a woman in a gray cardigan brought him a hat. I became a receptionist because of her. I think it was you.” She covered her mouth. “I told you to take off the pin that started the whole place. I walk under your name every morning in the garage, and I have never once looked up.” I took her hand.
But embarrassment makes people reach for the nearest thing. Kaylee suddenly stood, plucked the little silver pin from my cardigan, and hurried toward the security desk down the hall, saying she would have to verify the engraving. She went four steps. Marguerite swung into the corridor and set her feet. The dad in the ball cap stepped across the other side, and the grandmother with the diaper bag rose from her chair with the toddler on her hip and said, in her softest voice, “Baby, you are about to make a mistake. Turn around.”
Kaylee stopped in the middle of the waiting room, with the pin held tight and a ring of tired parents around her. Nobody spoke, and the rabbit in the arms of the boy bobbed gently. She looked down at the two little silver hands. Then she walked back to me slowly, knelt in front of my chair on the waiting room carpet, and fastened the pin back on my cardigan with careful fingers, patting it flat. Behind her, the dad in the ball cap began to clap, and then the grandmother joined him, and then the entire floor.
The consequences were wonderful. The hospital reprinted the plaque in the lobby with all twelve names of the founders, and the director of the Auxiliary called me that afternoon to ask whether I would ride in the spring parade. Kaylee was promoted to the family liaison desk, and she brought me coffee every Thursday. The next week she arrived with her little brother, now twenty two and a nursing student at Vanderbilt, who asked to shake my hand. He still had the hat. It was yellow, and it had been darned three times.
In the name of my husband Calvin, who passed in 2020, I started the Calvin Hendricks Fund. It pays for lodging for the parents of sick children and for hand knit hats for every baby born on the fourth floor, in Davidson, Williamson and Rutherford counties. In the first year we housed one hundred and twelve families near the hospital and knit more than four thousand hats with the help of ninety volunteers. One was a great grandmother from Lebanon, ninety one years old, who knitted forty hats a week and asked for nothing but yarn.
On a Thursday in December, I came off the elevator with my grocery bag, and Kaylee was waiting at the desk with a new lanyard. Hanging from it was a small silver pin of two hands holding a heart, a copy, made by a jeweler on Broadway. “Mrs. Hendricks,” she said, “the Auxiliary voted to give one to every person who works on this floor, and I wanted to be the first to wear it.” I looked at her for a long moment. Then I reached into the bag and handed her a red hat. “Wear that one next,” I said.