You arrive late to the gateway knowing you could be there very early and still
be run late by the parade of people, mostly your own codger age, so pumped-up by the craving to have a blunt instrument tucked into the folds of the arm skin that they arrive ever-so-much-earlier to be first, that and they're hungry from fasting for
the blood work. So your being late hardly matters because no matter what your appointed time your blood will be drawn in the order of sign-in and you have
to wonder why you are given a prescribed time in the first place, but you know that already: it's for somebody else's convenience. Like the incredible forms you sign
each time you stand for a physical exam and have to stand up twice, once to sign
in and again when they call out your name to sign for the questions, for example,
Will you agree to pay the bill if your insurance company will not?
You can't help listening to your inner voice interrupt the mind's quiet,
Actually, I was really counting on Blue Cross and if they have a problem with
the bill, who am I to question the judgment of the experts on what a medical thing ought to cost, or whether it even counts as a real medical thing, in deed?
You must delight in the power of a mere signature.
So you don't mind being tardy for this routine procedure that you decide then and there at the gateway is no more routine than everything else your old self goes through at your age. You mind being late so very little that when you make your turn to hospital, you notice as if for the first time, in fact times numerous, the walking track installed by the establishment for the benefit of your heart and lungs and what not and you know it has to lead somehow up the hill to the point of your destination so you stop, look for parking, and see a place right in front of the trail's beginning, a boon since finding parking nearer hospital is like trying to find your already-parked-car at Disney World that time when no one in the family could recall if it was in Donald or in Goofy and it was then only nearing nine and you were blinded by the lights,
there were so many, and that meant there were sooo many spaces that the car
could be stowed there for a very long time, until everyone else went home.
So you step out of the van in its A1 parking spot only to notice the wipers have
finally stopped swishing, for though it wasn't raining (for the first time in seems-like 40 days and 40 nights) still the wiring's on the fritz, and the wipers have taken to choosing for themselves when to swish and when not to swish, which may just be force of recent habit but which you personally think is taking your freedom from choice a bit too far. Still, you avoid taking the event personally as you step
onto the path for the first time.
You self-talk of why you've not ever taken this route and decide it's so hassle-free you will take it more often now when you see it's positively grand, like a walk in the forest with trees and their moss, flowers and their buzzing critters, a path gorgeous and particular, with wooden breakers and banisters where they need to be, or leastwise right where you would put them. And you must write in, too, the dozen ducks and the pair of rabbits you see worshiping by the pond, honest-to-god.
You notice all this but along the way you notice mostly the people.
Blood Work continues here.
