(Updated- 7-17-2025)
On January 27th, 1997, Jasmine Regina Kingsley was born. Her birth was first registered at All Queen’s Hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio. The hospital was located near a bus stop. This bus stop, dressed in the recognizable colors of the Cincinnati Bearcats included a bench that was similarly adorned with the University label. This bench is where her mother rested while making her routine trips to the hospital for checkups.
Those checkups included weighing the body that she was now caring for with a new level of meticulous monitoring. This monitoring involved a review of her daily diet plan. This was a first ….
Jeanine Jameson Kingsley accessed the overwhelmingly large hospital through the front entrance. Electronic doors opened when the sensors were activated. These sensors picked up on any motion that indicated when someone was nearing the entrance.
The doors were opened wide & early on the day when Jasmine was born.
Her mother had visited with a notebook, diary and a number visits via this Bearcats’ labeled bus stop.
On This Day….
Jeanine ventured forth to visit the maternity ward late in the last trimester of her pregnancy through the welcoming electronic doors of the Northside entrance of All Queen’s Hospital. These visits & bus rides were a regular occurrence, with each trip causing greater anticipation, some finger twitching nerves and more involved conversations with her baby girl, still swimming, kicking, punching and rolling about in the womb.
This hospital was a prominent brick building, not far from the central bus depot in the downtown of Cincinnati. Cincinnati was alive and electric, lights shone forth, beaming across windows that reflected the cities’ grandeur.
Reflection
As Jasmine loves to reflect on her earlier years, she wonders if there is a way for her to reflect on her actual birthday. She wants to recall where it began, what happened and things of her birth as maybe -it- can explain the direction of her life, especially the last few years.
The Hospital
She remembers it….
-she recalls the rectangles;
doors, long, lean windows, even seeing rectangles that outlined the signage out on the street in front of the rectangular shaped building. Jasmine can find these memories floating forth when she is quietly sitting in thought on her bed.
Her uncle Joe took her & her mother past the hospital one day.
She rode quietly in the backseat of his well maintained, beet red, large bodied Cadillac. Jasmine sat up high, peeking out while kneeling atop a pillow her mother tucked and folded for her. She could grip the panel of the tan leather encasing just beneath the window. She edged up on the seat as they slowed past the front entrance of All Queen’s Hospital. While riding by the home of her initial arrival, the hospital where she was born into this world, her mother asked her uncle Joe to slow down.
Joe obliged, slowed down carefully, Jeanine pointed out the bus stop for young Jasmine to catch a momentary glimpse of the City’s largest care center, the hospital where baby Jas, Jasmine Regina Kingsley first saw rays of window-filtered natural light from the sun.
…. as they passed by this grey enamel structure in her uncle Joe’s “1979 Classic Cadillac”, as uncle Joe had proudly titled it, he slowed up even further, this time it was just by a tad bit but enough to show that he had eased up on the gas.
He was happy to slow further yet as he began noticing her enthusiastic intent to absorb this sight. The hospital was now physically visible and Jasmine knew forevermore that she’d remember exactly where she was born.
Memories
Although Jasmine could not quite recall her actual birth, she had a remarkable capacity to revisit moments from some of her earliest days. These resurfacing memories helped her make sense of feelings that emerged in large supply.
The memories that she embraced were those that included her mother.
She could recollect a moment of sitting. As it envelops her thought bank, she often recalls an upward stretching in order to sit beside her dear mother. This particular moment stood out on one quiet morning.
-… as she sat with her mother in their apartment staircase she settled into the quiet which began to resonate.
Now, in recalling the angular shapes of that staircase, she considers the shapes that first stood out when focusing on the hospital.
Then….
She memories continue to inch forth, drift about and move along in her flowing thought river.
She remembers being on her mother’s lap, stretching back and fully relying on the body, the strength and heart of the one woman she entrusted; her mom. Her mother was the sole person Jasmine felt comforted by.
“Where can she be?” …. Jasmine sang in a whisper. “Where is she?”…. This became a melody, “where can she be-e-e…. Where is she?” …. “ … I wonder where…”
“Where is she right now?”
“I wonder now…”. She finished the soft, lulling incantation, head tilted and she …. Gazed out.
Philip Dane 