I am writing from the lovely waiting room of Dr. I’m Not From Around Here, where I arrived a full forty-five minutes early. Totally an obsessive Sher thing to do. I don’t like to be late and I don’t like people who like to be late. I only forgave my twenty-year-old daughter last month for being two weeks past due.
The drive was great weather, pounding music and best of all, I managed to avoid breaking down across from the Bates Motel. Of course, I’ve not made the return trip home yet, so Norman may still have a shot at me.
I had hoped to use my handy dandy lap top to blog right here in front of God and everybody, but amazingly this hospital does not offer me a hotspot. For the kind of money Blue Cross is paying these people, I would expect some wireless internet access…and a cabana boy with a tray of cocktails with fruity skewers and umbrellas in them.
Totally blogless, I have resorted to writing this in Word and will post it later. Providing I am still not dead that is.
I’m sitting here passing the time being snoopy, looking around the gigantic room at the other sickies, while trying to be oh-so-stealthy. I am even peering over my glasses like a librarian because as everyone knows, they can’t see me staring if I do that. To most of the men and women here, I must look like a spring chicken as they are all roughly one-hundred years old.
Cheese–n-rice, that can’t be a good sign. Apparently my body is falling apart way ahead of schedule.
I wish I had a camera in my phone so you could see what I see. But as cell phones aren’t supposed to be turned on in here for fear of somebody’s chest spontaneously exploding, let me see if I can paint you a word picture of some of the other inhabitants here on the island of misfit internal organs.
There is the very dignified lady to my immediate right with short, gray hair that is sprayed stiff to stand up on end all over her head, except for the small bald spots here and there. She’s dressed in varying shades of beige from head to toe and her glasses are overly large circa 1978. Not only is she dressed in beige, she is the single beige-iest woman I’ve ever seen. I wonder what her life has been like, what secrets she has in her closet full of beige clothes. Was there a time when she wasn’t beige?
Does she have a husband? Is he handsome? Did he ever make her heart go pitter-patter? It’s been my experience that the beige women of the world aren’t necessarily beige on the inside and I’m betting old Stiff Hair is no different.
She’s reading a book…probably some Harlequin type where at least one winch is raped in the first chapter and the words “throbbing” and “welcoming’ are used more than they have any right to be. It must be that kind of book because every few minutes, she covers her mouth with her free hand as if she can’t bear to read another word. And yet, she does.
I see her look up at me from time to time as I click the keys of what I’m sure she thinks is an oversized calculator. She doesn’t approve of me. Me with my wild hair, my cropped pants and black t-shirt with BLONDIE scrawled across the front and the various and assorted pieces of jewelry on my arms, ears, fingers and toes.
“Hippee with her big calculator,” she thinks. “What has she got to add that takes so much clicking anyway?”
She probably blames Elvis and all that rock-n-roll, hip-shaking devil’s music.
Then there is the hard of hearing man directly in front of me. I know he’s hard of hearing because his escort, who I believe to be his son, keeps talking to him in a voice so loud I want to punch him in his gullet. (I have no idea what a gullet is, but I like that word.) The old guy must be way old because his son is at least twenty years older than I am and wearing sensible shoes that no self-respecting person would wear until they are at least sixty-five.
Or maybe he’s forty-one. As I myself am forty-one, is it possible I think I look way better than I really do? Maybe I should end the charade and stop at the sensible shoe outlet before I leave the city and leap into old age feet first.
Yeah. That’ll happen.
But my favorite person here has to be Delbert Townsend. How do I know his name?
Because for the last ten minutes, I have repeatedly heard the woman in kitty cat scrubs using her best outdoor voice call, “Delbert? Delbert Townsend?”
Delbert is so not here.
I don’t know where Delbert is, but I like him. He’s a renegade, that Delbert. Probably off hitting on a nurse somewhere, or God and Viagra willing, getting hinky in a broom closet with a blue-haired hottie he hooked up with before he got tired of waiting. You can’t contain Delbert Townsend in some waiting room with bad magazines. He’s a wild card. He’s unpredictable. He may be back, he may not. You just never know with the Delbert’s of this world.
It’s getting close now to the time I was actually supposed to be here so I should close before the kitty-cat woman bursts through the saloon doors that lead to the much smaller and far more intimate waiting room that will contain me until Dr. I’m Not From Around Here is good and ready to visit with my thyroid. While I wait there and in honor of my Delbert, I will lick all the popsicle sticks in his presumptuous glass jars and rearrange his brochures about the dangers of osteoporosis and how to take Fosamax.
Besides, I can no longer concentrate what with the old shades of beige lady politely picking her nose, her little finger sanitized for her protection in her crumpled up beige hankie.
Come back to the Five and Dime, Delbert Townsend, Delbert Townsend!
Copyright © 2004-2005, Sherri Bailey
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