June 17, 2016 (Friday)
On a clear, sunshine-filled day this week, I went to my doctor’s office for some lab work. O had to wait only a few minutes before being called to go back to a small room where a technician drew blood from my arm. Quickly she put a small bandage on the spot, and told me I was free to go. In about a minute I was back in my car, driving home.
Before I went into the room where they took some blood, I had to wait a few minutes. The waiting room is small, two rows of chairs facing each other. Room for no more than 12 or 15 at the most. Almost everyone waiting was elderly, like me. A couple came in and a man already seated moved to a seat by me to give them two seats together. As he made the move, he jokingly said “I’ll sit over here by this man (an old gentleman in the chair to his other side), and we’ll talk politics.”
Immediately the old man’s wife, seated opposite us, warned, “He’s had a stroke, and does not remember much, sometimes even his own name.” So I piped up and tried to prompt a laugh with, “he probably knows as much as any of us about politics.” The man who had moved to the seat beside me then said something about gun control in the wake of the Orlando shootings. The wife who had told us about her husband’s stroke then made clear that she was a strong advocate for Second Amendment rights. Another man added that guns should be registered, to which she replied that hers was fully registered and she carries a gun. I don’t know what was said after that because they called me in to take my blood sample.
We are at a place as a nation now in which anger is displacing humor. That’s sad. Laughter is the best medicine but it’s getting hard to find. On the bright side, when I was through giving blood and exited through the waiting room, everyone seemed to be OK.