Mental lists are made and reviewed in
waiting rooms, usually unrelated to the situation at hand. I concentrated on the step-by-step way I
would fix the gutter at home. I thought
about the nails I would use and the industrial strength construction adhesive
that I would line the seams with. I
thought about the ladder, its sturdiness and…
None of these things, of course, had
anything to do with why I was there. It
was simply a diversion. I didn’t want to
allow my thoughts to drift towards the immediate situation. If I had mentally headed down that path I
would have started to consider all the things that could possibly go awry, and
from there it would just get worse.
Eventually
I picked up a magazine. I paged through
it knowing full well that without my glasses every page was going to be just
one colorful blur after another. But it
didn’t matter. My thoughts quickly ran
back to me atop the extended ladder, leaning back so that I could swing the
hammer enough to hit the nail. I could
feel the rungs through the bottoms of my worn tennis shoes, an unavoidable
discomfort, not to mention my stretching leg muscles. Now, with my left arm looped through the
ladder while my fingers aligned the nail, my right hammer hand reached back
and…
Actually, when envisioning myself up
on the ladder, the real image I have is of a giant corn-dog on a stick, with
the entire Mosquito Nation closing in for the feast.
The television up in the corner of the
waiting room was playing some soap opera with a string of sub-titles running
along the bottom of the screen. As I
watched the words scroll by I began to wonder what committee determined the
speed at which the words would travel.
I’m sure that someone somewhere did a study, took a survey and
coordinated their findings with a Reader’s Digest comprehension formula that
told them that every word must remain on the screen for no less than 5 seconds,
and no more than 9, allowing for…
Just then a gentleman in a lab coat,
carrying a clipboard walked in. He
took the seat next to me, and in a low voice said, “Mr. Corwin, it took a
little longer than we thought. Once we
were in there we found quite a bit of sludge in the crankcase. We also had to replace two of the hoses
coming from the…”
But I had stopped listening. As he was talking – my eyes were scanning the
bottom of the clipboard. I was looking
for the total. How much in American
dollars was this going to cost me?
To my shock
and horror I saw… Page 1 of 4.
Wow!
There was no way I was going to be able to afford the industrial
strength construction adhesive.
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