Growing Pains

Not the sitcom that made Kirk Cameron and Alan Thicke big stars. But wasn’t Joanna Kerns beautiful?! Why yes! She was! I’m talking about the growing pains I get every time I drive by Lehigh Valley Hospital Cedar Crest. But first, a little background.

My favorite early childhood book is “The Little House, her story” by Virginia Lee Burton. It’s the story, told by a pretty little house on a hill in the country. It’s the sad story about how everything grew up around her and toward the later pages she is a frowning house in the middle of a big polluted city. She is rescued by a young family and moved to a little hill in the country. A fairy tale!

More background. As you all know, I grew up in Slatington and had to travel to Allentown for a lot of things. Back in my childhood, that drive was the occasional little village surrounded by woods and fields and more woods and fields, then Allentown. Now that same drive is almost housing development after housing development. Those woods and fields are almost as rare as the pheasants that used to live there.

Back to my ride past Lehigh Valley Hospital Cedar Crest. I remember when it was one building, called ASH, Allentown Sacred Heart Hospital. Sacred Heart bailed and has since gone out of business. Lehigh Valley Hospital has grown into a sprawling, massive, still growing complex. The same can be said for Lehigh Carbon Community College. I went there in 1970. It was one square building. Now the campus contains at least twenty buildings with locations elsewhere as well.

The Lehigh Valley Metropolitan area has grown to about a half million people, more than live in the city of Pittsburgh!

This also reminds me of my life. It started out so simple and all of my needs were taken care of by others. The came school, then a career, then marriage, then children, and all of the increasingly complicated responsibilities that come with all of that. Sometimes I feel like that little house that Virginia Lee Burton wrote about so long ago. How will my story continue? Will it be like author Burton’s fairy tale ending….for me, a cabin on a lake far from civilization? Or will my story be the story of Lehigh Valley Hospital…. increasingly complex and people filled? Time will tell. Either way, it’s all a wonderful adventure!