Post New Year

On this third morning of 2017, I awaken at 2 AM, as usual. Not that I always awaken at that specific time, but I always awaken at some point during the middle of the night – sometimes before midnight, sometimes after. Often, I’ll get up for a few hours then return to bed. But tonight I don’t feel like getting out of bed so early, so I lie in bed and listen to the rain hitting the roof. Occasionally, I glance at the clock beside my bed. When it says 5:00, I get up.

It’s dark and still raining. The forecast calls for rain all day and all night – just like yesterday. A gray day will soon be dawning. But I have a 9 AM appointment with my cardiologist, and I have prepping to do. I don’t want to be late for my appointment, so a four hour head start should insure that I’m not.

I shower. I shave. I even shave my chest and stomach. My torso is just a bit hairy, and when the cardiologist’s nurse yanks those EKG electrodes off me, they take hair with them. There are 12 leads on the EKG machine, so that’s 12 tufts of hair to be yanked out. Shaving my front allows the EKG pads to stick to my skin better, and bonus, also reduces the amount of hair that gets pulled out by the roots.

I dress. I sit in my living room, watching dismal world events unfold on the TV news, until 6:30. Then I get up and fix breakfast. I scramble two eggs and pour them into a hot skillet. I sprinkle the soon-to-be omelet with shredded cheese. I wait a few minutes and then carefully fold the egg mixture into an omelet. This is the point where half the time the omelet tears or breaks in half, but this time the magic works and I end up with an omelet-shaped omelet. I nuke two pre-cooked sausage links in the microwave oven. I go to the living room and sit in front of the TV, where I watch something completely forgettable while eating my breakfast. When I finish, the clock reads 7 AM.

I dress, pulling on freshly washed jeans and a heavy-knit shirt. I put on shoes and socks. The rain has let up and is now just a falling mist, so I take a bag of kitchen garbage out to the wheelie-bin behind my house. I go back into the house and this time I remember to turn off the backyard flood lights. I remember to do that about one in every twenty trips outside at night.

I look at some internet news and then decide to watch a one-hour video that I have on my computer. So I do that, and when I finish, the time is 8:30. It doesn’t take long to drive to the doctor’s office. I decide to leave at 8:45 so I’ll have 15 minutes to get there. Feeling the need to pee, and not knowing how long I’ll wait to see the doc, I go to the bathroom and try to pee. Although I feel like I have to go, not a drop comes out. “Sacrebleu!” I swear in 19th century French. “Is this the beginning of a urinary tract infection or did my prostate explode during the night?! Oy vey.” (I also swear in Yiddish. Yiddish is timeless.)

I pull on my coat, pop a baseball cap onto my head, and grab my umbrella. An umbrella may look dorky, but dressing fashionably cool is the last thing on my mind. I just want to stay dry.

I drive to the doctor’s office, getting there in plenty of time for my 9 AM appointment. I go to the appointment window to check in. The young lady on the other side of the window asks, “Who are you here to see?”

“Dr. Pathak,” I answer.

“He’s not here,” she says.

“Not here? I have a 9 AM appointment today.”

“Dr. Pathak isn’t here,” she repeats, adding, “He’s on vacation this week. Your appointment has been re-scheduled to the tenth. It’s at ten o’clock. Do you want an appointment card.”

“No – ten on the tenth. Got it.”

It would have been nice if someone had called me and told me that the appointment had been rescheduled. But there’s no point in getting upset about it. Shit happens, and always will.

I go to my car. To make the trip not a complete waste of time, I drive to the grocery store in the shopping center next door. I peruse the shelves, looking for something tasty but not overly unhealthy. “Oooh, fried chicken strips!” I pull the package out of the freezer and look at the nutrition label. “If this is three and a half servings, I’m a one-eyed sea monkey.” The label says the chicken strips contain four thousand milligrams of sodium – enough to elevate my blood pressure to what doctors call “the exploding-head threshold.” I put the package back in the freezer.

Next, I put a bag of potato chips into my cart, after first dropping the bag onto the floor, shattering half the chips inside. I could put the bag back on the shelf and get another bag, but I broke ‘em, so I’ll buy ‘em.

Next, I put a wheel of cooked shrimp into my cart. This is one of those round plastic platters: a circular serving of shrimp with a little well of shrimp sauce in the center. I’ve bought them before and they’re good. On the way to my car I, of course, drop the bag with a loud smack into a puddle of rainwater in the parking lot. But no worries. I know those shrimp are sealed up in that little round package tighter than the gold in Fort Knox. It will take twenty minutes with razor-sharp implements to break into that package.

Next, I go to the bread section. The shelf-stocker is there stocking shelves. “Do you have sourdough bread?” I ask.

He points. “Right there. Sourdough. Read it. Are you stupid?”

“Thank you for your help,” I reply and grab a loaf.

“Arrrrgh,” he snarls back. This could be my imagination, but I seem to recall he had an eye patch and a hook for one hand.

Eventually, I wheel my cart to the self-checkout line. My checkout machine turns out to be one of those that, on every third item I scan, tells me to remove the last item from the bag and scan it. Fortunately, at that time of morning the store isn’t busy, and there is a young woman overseeing the self-checkout machines, so every time there is a glitch, I turn around and look at her forlornly. She doesn’t have to ask me what’s wrong. She knows the quirks of every machine, so she can clear up the problem quickly. Or could, were she not distracted by the conversation she’s having with another young woman standing near her.

“Oh la vache!” I mutter in 21st century French. That is a real French curse. It translates as, “Oh the cow!”

Wait – the cow? Yes, the cow. Who can figure out the French?