Build Thee More Stately Mansions, O My Soul! And Tax The Crap Out Of Them.

              Out-of-towners, this is a Radio-Free Robin column I wrote about a highly local school-tax ish here in Dade County.  Dade Countians:  For reference, see my nooz piece on last Thursday’s county commission meeting in this week’s Sentinel.

   

 Build Thee More Stately Mansions, O My Soul!  And Tax The Crap Out Of Them.

By Robin Ford Wallace

My darlings!  If irony were acorns, and your narrator a chipmunk, after the November Dade County Commission meeting my little jaw sacs would be stuffed full enough to last the winter.  Even one of those long, blizzardy ones you read about in the Laura Ingalls Wilder novels, that happen after the old Indian hobbles into the trading post and warns, “Heap big snow coming” – heck, I’d still be spitting out hulls come March. 

The star of Thursday’s agenda was Dade’s duly and newly elected voice in Atlanta, whom we shall not name here except by the colorful descriptive phrase used more and more often about him locally:  Mr. He-Don’t-Come-‘Round-Here-No-More.

He-Don’t-Come was to speak and be spoken to about the Board of Education’s proposed modification of the so-called 65/5 school tax exemption, because this would require legislation at the state level.  But Reader, can you guess how Rep. He-Don’t-Come started the evening?

Bingo.  Pleading a last-minute prior engagement, or something, He-Don’t-Come didn’t come.  But the other players were lined up in the wings, shuffling their notes and rarin’ to go, so the show went by God on and the speakers spoke their pieces whether or not there was anyone there to listen but the commission and members of the ravenin’ press.

(Who were not unappreciative.  They say we small-town journalists are under-rewarded, but not only did I recently receive from a friendly interviewee a free T-shirt with a fart joke on front, Thursday night afforded harmless entertainment enough to keep a girl through Christmas.)

First, speaker No. 1, whom we’ll call here Mr. T. Bagger:  T. Bagger was Dade’s chief executive for four rollicking years in which the foolishness of electing people to government who don’t believe in it was made flesh.  During his term, Mr. B. almost managed to restore Dade County to primordial chaos, though not so much as a matter of policy as from the irritation factor.  I’m probably exaggerating when I say Mr. B’s in-your-face leadership style would have inspired b-slaps from Mother Teresa, but not when I say he couldn’t pass around doughnuts without starting a fistfight.  I was there.  The man conducted budget hearings like Caligula! 

Mr. B had come tonight to defend 65/5.  It was, after all, the issue he had ridden into office.  Though then, of course, he had gone off home to the compound and left the damn thing there, noisily huffing up oats and pooping in the schoolyard, while the remaining politicos tore out their hair fretting how to get rid of it without seeming pro-tax.  (It’s why most of them have bald spots.)

Now, ladies and gentlemen, let us move to the other corner, to speaker No. 2:  Mr. Education.  Yes!  That camo-wearin’, “yo”-callin’, ex-Army schools superintendent who campaigned for ESPLOST, then forgot to put it on the ballot, was now at the meeting calling for a new referendum, this one to amend 65/5.  The guy who OK’d $400,000 for sooper-dooper security in a town where the worst school invasions come from swarming ladybugs, but couldn’t find $38K for the library, marched right up to the podium and quoted Oliver Wendell Holmes:

“Taxes are what we pay for civilized society."

You want irony, my dears, I give you Mr. Education riding into town to proclaim himself the savior of civilization, fresh from gunning down the Dade County Library.  It don’t get no better than this, Earl!

As for Mr. E. quoting literature, interviewed earlier (during his maiden-voyage book-banning pogrom, BTW), he wasn’t able to name one of the Canterbury Tales, not even the Miller’s Tale, which is mostly a fart joke. 

So I expect somebody Googled the tax quote for him.  But here’s a further irony:  Me, when I think “Oliver Wendell Holmes,” I think “Chambered Nautilus,” as in:

“Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul!”

 And stately mansions are what 65/5 is all about.  It exempts people 65 and older from paying school taxes on five acres and their houses, no matter how stately. 

Mr. Education wants to reverse that.  He thinks people who come to Dade to build $500,000 mansions can afford to pay school tax.  But T. Bagger says making them pay would be against everything the Founding Fathers wanted for America. 

Mr. B. says he conducts Constitutional-law-slash-target-practice sessions at his shooting range (does that make anybody else go “EEE?”) and he and the boys have concluded between BLAMs that the whole purpose of the U.S. Constitution is to protect rich people’s right not to pay taxes.

What I take away from all this, besides the irony, is the utter uselessness of Big Ideas in government.  We need government for practical things we can’t achieve individually – for most of us, roads, law enforcement, schools; for some who need not be named here, clean water piped into their isolated armed compounds. 

With limited revenues, our sitting county commissioners supply us these things through a responsive, practical, push-pull democracy which you, too, would admire if you spent as much time staring deeply into their bald spots as I do.  Whereas when T. Bagger with his grand notions called the shots, county business pretty much shut down while everybody gritted teeth and tried not to slug him.

It’s the same with 65/5 and Mr. E.  Call me a commie but I’d rather hear Dade County described as having good schools than as a great place to dodge property taxes.  Saving civilization is a wonderful idea.

But maybe if the Board of Ed wants some help with that, it should redefine “civilization” to include books, learning and libraries.  Until then – well!

We’ll see how far through the heap-big snows we can all live on irony.

END

Reposted: All the 2009 Radio-Free Robins

          I never could stand scary movies.  I remember spending the last third of Alien in the lobby, pacing nervously and smoking cigarettes.  They don’t let you do that anymore, and anyway I quit smoking years ago.  But that’s how I feel about these last tense scenes of the Obamacare debate!  After all it’s been through, the bad guys are doing everything they can to kill it at the end.  I can’t look!  It makes me want to light up spasmodically amid the smell of buttered popcorn.

          Of course I’ll do no such thing – but what I have done instead is start writing “Radio-Free Robins” again.  Remember, I started in 2009 when the whole debate started, then tapered off as things calmed down a little. Maybe I should have kept going!   Well, I’m back now.  I’m busier now as a regular news writer, or maybe just stupider and slower, because I can’t do it as fast as I used to; but I’ll keep churning them out as long as the health care reform debate is still a debate.  (Might as well do something, since I’m stuck out here in the lobby nohow…)

          Meanwhile, I’m going to post all the RFRs from 2009 on this Bob’s Little Acre page.  I have another tab for them on this blog, but from the numbers I don’t think anybody much ever went there.         

Radio-Free Robin

     Bob’s Little Acre was meant to be apolitical.  Well, it tried.  Sometimes it found itself squatting in the dirt making snide little comments out of the side of its mouth, but in general it did try to live up to its endnotes and play quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one – which, by the way, if anybody cares, is a redneck regurgitation of Voltaire’s cultivating one’s own garden.

            Then, in the summer of 2009, all that changed.  Desperately-needed health care reform was pole-axed by a concerted propaganda campaign, and the Sentinel’s letters section became dominated by weird manifestos claiming the president was fixin’ to send death squads to assassinate our grandmas.

            So, with a noisy sigh, Bob brushed the dirt off her butt and girded her loins for battle.  The following columns were published with a different picture of your narrator from the Bob’s Little Acres, a more contemporary one with shorter hair and more wrinkles, and under the title “Radio-Free Robin.” 

Also, the endnotes changed to something like:  “In the past, Robin Ford Wallace has played quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.  Things change.”        

Turn Off The Shock Jocks!  Radio-Free Robin Hits the Airwaves!    

By Robin Ford Wallace

So.  There I was, minding my own business, investigatin’ journalistically as usual.  You know the drill, disseminating information, exposing corruption, fighting injustice, just basically keepin’ America safe for democracy.

All right.  So mostly it’s listing new hours for the county dump.  It’s a living.  Sort of. 

Anyway I was sitting in on some hearings and my attention had wandered a bit.  In fact, it had loped off down the road and was fixin’ to have lunch except it couldn’t make up its mind between the gyro sandwich and the Greek salad. 

Sometimes it runs off like that by itself; other times it gets carried away by my imagination, which is a little hyperactive and frankly a bad influence.  I’ll be listening to attorneys in blue suits arguing in front of a judge and suddenly I’ll see all three of them wearing red silk kimonos and those little hats like you see on the Village People. 

 Well.  Like I was saying.  Suddenly I got sucked back to alertness by the tone of indignation that had snuck into the conversation while my attention was off wallowin’ in zazeeki sauce.  “They’re takin’ your name!” the people in the room were saying.  “If you disagree with the president, they’re puttin’ you on their list!”

Who was taking whose name?  That’s when I realized I was the only person in the room with a pen and an open notebook, and, coincidentally, possibly the only one whose politics were anywhere further left than two degrees right of Hitler.  What I was hearing was the usual generalized Obama-bashin’ – “Why don’t he just show his birth certificate?” – but this time with this sinned-against I’m-bein’-persecuted thing going on.  What was that about?    

Later I found out:  One conservative talk show host had said speak up!  Call the administration and tell them you’re against the president’s policies!  But then another had said:  No!  Then they’ll have your name and know where you live!  You’ll be on their list!

I didn’t know that at the time, I found it out later that day out in a series of emails with my smarter older sister, Laura.  All I knew then was that people were looking at me expectantly – there must be some subtle something about my left nostril that tells them how I vote – and I was beginning to feel the way you do sometimes walking alone in the woods and thinking how good you would taste to a bear. 

Or maybe I was feeling like Hungary in 1956, because I signed those emails to my sister “Radio-Free Robin.”  (She was signing hers “Loony Leftie Laura.”  We are both outrageously funny.)

Anyway, whether from innate good taste or simple cowardice – I was seriously outnumbered – I refused to argue.  That kind of thing is always futile.  Nobody ever changes anybody’s mind, everybody just gets mad.  So I went on my way rejoicin’, and after flipping a nickel decided on the gyro sandwich, hold the fries.

It wasn’t until that weekend, reading the national op-eds – and Jewell Smalley’s insane, ravin’ incendiary letter-to-the-editor in our rag – that I realized the I’m-bein’-persecuted thing was a cynical, calculated attack on health care reform.  “They’re takin’ your name” had morphed into “They’re killin’ all the old people!”  Some evil demagogue had seized on a blameless mention of end-of-life care and used it to rouse rabble – and, incidentally, to shout down desperately needed reform.

And good old Jewell was in the thick of it.  Usually I think Dade is lucky to have such a dedicated activist, but at times like this you can’t help noticing how she approaches issues fearlessly, girds her loins for battle, and leaps in passionately on the wrong side every time.  Well, bless her heart, she was anyway right about the Bradford pears.   

Mostly I stay out of politics.  I am perfectly happy playing quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one. 

  But I’ve got a personal stake in health care reform.  A few years ago, when I did a different sort of work and had more money, I investigated and found that my husband and I could get health coverage for a hundred dollars more per month than our mortgage payment.  So we could be insured as long as we didn’t mind living under a bridge – though with huge deductibles that could wipe us out should we really ever get sick. 

About that time I read the headline, “Georgia prisons find health insurance for the incarcerated costly.”  So if I knocked over a liquor store, I could get health insurance for free?  Or if I was disabled, or raising children on welfare?  But if I keep on plugging away at keepin’ America safe for democracy, I can lie on the sidewalk and bleed? 

It’s crazy.  It’s broken.  It needs to be fixed.  And instead of fixing it, people are yelling silly lies about Obama knocking off their grandma?

So I was thinking, does anyone really, like, believe this drivel?  I remember when Jewell was a newshound for the Sentinel.  I was a stammering young stringer for the Times with the interviewing style of a large, friendly dog, and I  watched with admiration as she tore into some public official who’d been caught fibbin’.  She didn’t seem all that credulous back then. 

And the people in the hearing that day probably didn’t really believe anybody was taking their names and sending them to the White House.  It was more like one person said something crazy and everybody else kind of chimed in, cheering for the team.

So I’m going to have a stab at imparting useful information about health care.  In this occasional column, Radio-Free Robin, I will discuss some problems and I will tell some stories, and I will never, ever say anything that I don’t know to be true.

But then again, I have never seen any reason why the truth should not be entertainin’.  See you next time? 

END

Why I Moved Into the Erlanger Parking Lot

By Robin Ford Wallace

            One argument that I read over and over in the health care debate goes something like this:  “How can people say health care in this country is inaccessible?  All anyone need do to get care is walk into any emergency room!”

            That one always leaves me slack-jawed.  Go into an emergency room when you don’t have insurance?  Conscious, when no one is carrying you?  Are they serving beer for breakfast at those conservative think tanks or what? 

In case I’m burying my point as usual among the coloratura and the collard greens, what I’m spelling out here is:

It costs too much. 

When I got the notion of writing these columns I thought I would devote one to emergency room stories.  Then, as if whoever’s pulling the strings up there has a seriously sick sense of humor, I managed to accrue a new one between column 1 and column 2.

            Monday is crunch time for this rag, and at 7 p.m. that night I was still hunched heroically over the keyboard, assassinating characters, reducing empires to dust and preserving western-style democracy with the free and unfettered flow of information, when the first wave of nausea struck.             

At 5:30 Tuesday morning, I crawled back to my computer, summoned my stories back to the screen and tacked quick, random endings on them before I emailed them to the newspaper.  That’s why, in last week’s paper, you might have read stories about the PTA that ended:  “And then he pulled her up onto the horse and they rode into the west.”

            In between, I’d been to hell and back, and Erlanger twice.

            I’d been tetchy and unable to sleep all that weekend – an indisposition, by the way, to which a grateful world owes the existence of Radio-Free Robin – probably because I had unilaterally decided to discontinue a medication.  I won’t tell you much about it because frankly I hate the whole business.

One of the things that’s ironic about the health care debate is that somebody like me has to get involved at all.  I have no interest in medicine or sickness or internal organs of any kind.  Really I’d rather not have any.  Give me smoothly moving metal parts every time.  But like everybody else I’m stuck with one of these standard-issue flesh-and-blood bodies that seem like so much fun when we get them and then proceed to get uglier and harder to maintain every year.

            Anyway, that evening, sickness struck.  I vomited like I was practicing for the Olympics, then for the next five hours I writhed around in the kind of pounding, unending agony that you would gladly betray your country or shoot your mother to stop.  Or even go to the emergency room.

            So to the emergency room my husband drove me in the small hours, me flopping around like a salted slug, incoherent with pain, begging him to stop the car so I could get down and roll on the ground. 

Then, when we got off the highway, this really stupid thing happened:  It stopped.

So there I am in the Erlanger parking lot, face smeared with stomach acids but feeling, you know, absolutely OK.  I was afraid that whatever had happened might happen again, but to walk into the emergency room, I knew from past experience, would cost $500. 

So I didn’t go in.  We got back in the car and started home.

I was dehydrated and just dying for a Coke, so we stopped at a convenience store and I got a huge one with ice and a straw.  At the first sip, wham!   Bombs dropped, tanks rolled.  Back to Erlanger.

             And in the Erlanger parking lot this really stupid thing happened:  It stopped again.

            So it was this ridiculous problem.  A person who wasn’t worried about money might have gone inside, described the symptoms, and gotten a diagnosis or at least some advice.  A person with a higher threshold for pain might have gone home.  Me, I vacillated in the parking lot. 

Is this the “choice” the brownshirts are worried “Obamacare” will deprive us of?  The rock versus the hard place? 

On the way into town I’d had another of those important “choices”:  Erlanger or Memorial?  I’d taken my husband to the Erlanger emergency room a few years before when a blood vessel burst in his eye.  Turned out, scary as it looked, it was harmless and healed by itself.  The doctor diagnosed him from across the room, no drugs were prescribed, and he got to wear an eye patch, which, if anyone is interested, is to women what the black lace garter is to men.

 But we got a bill for $500.  When I wrote questioning that, Erlanger responded by sending the bill immediately to a collection agency. 

So the next time we had a crisis – my back – we went to Memorial. 

My Memorial experience was like one of those B movies where the people who are there to help you are really Nazis or space aliens.  A sadistic young orderly hurt me deliberately, then gave me a stern little lecture about taking the Lord’s name in vain when I, er, reacted.  You need Indiana Jones to rescue you from Memorial – but Memorial showed some mercy about the bill.

So that was another of my sacred American choices Monday night:  How much is it worth to me not to be roughed up by the help?

Let’s end there for now, with your narrator hovering fearfully in the hospital parking lot like a metaphor for a conflicted nation,  watching the third shift come out for their smoke breaks and wondering when the cops will arrive and make her move on.  If you need a happy ending, there aren’t any yet but you can use this one to tide you over until next time:

“And then he pulled her up onto the horse and they rode into the west.”

END

Hot Buttons, Red Flags and Let’s Leave My Mother Out of This!

By Robin Ford Wallace

            What you lookin’ at, mister?  You lookin’ at me?

            Yeah, that’s me, in tight jeans and a dirty white Tshirt with a pack of Marlboros rolled up in one sleeve, walking down the street tossing a tire iron from hand to hand with an air of barely repressed violence. 

            What you gonna do about it?

            Well, all right.  So that’s not me. 

So I’m more apt to wear Relaxed Fit than tight jeans these days.  So I quit smoking in April with spectacular if inverse effects on my physical and mental health and anyway Marlboros were never my thing, I was more the Virginia Slims type.. And so I’m not entirely sure what a tire iron is, I just thought it sounded threatening.

But it’s true about the chip on my shoulder.  It’s gotten to where if someone says, “I read your column,” I drop into a defensive crouch and hiss, “So.  You wanta piece a me?”

All this since I started writing about the health care debate!  When I wrote the silly gardening column, people would come up to me in the grocery store with goofy smiles.  “You Bob?” they’d say. 

Them was the days!

Because then I began writing the news and people started glaring at me and stopped returning my phone calls.  Which is fine, I guess.  They say you’re doing a good job if you make people mad.  Anyway, keeping the world safe for democracy is a lonely job, right?

Wrong.  You don’t know what lonely is until you start writing about health care!  Remember, once in Bob’s Little Acre I wrote that being burned at the stake would make me feel pretty and popular?

I was mistaken.     

Not that I’m getting death threats.  It’s more along the lines of, “I disagree with you categorically.”  Everywhere I go there’s someone disagreeing with me.  It gets unnerving.  I order lunch like:  “No pickles, no mayo, and if there’s any disagreement on it I’m sending it back this time.”   . 

My boss said he disagreed with me.  He said the government would make a mess of managing health care.    And while he was there in my column a-disagreein’ and a-thrashin’ around, he dislodged one of my apostrophes, which whacked me out of orbit and sent me spiraling into a snit the size of Saturn. 

I happen to be the apostrophe queen of America.  I make mistakes of fact and taste and judgment but never of apostrophes.  I would go on television naked before I’d leave out an apostrophe. 

It’s a curse being like that.  I can’t be in a room with a split infinitive, I get, like, hives, and when someone says “between you and I” I go into seizures.  I call it the princess and the participle syndrome and I’d lose it if I could.  But both my parents majored in English and they suckled me on semicolons.

            Anyway, the apostrophe was the proximate cause for my snit, but maybe it had something to do with all this disagreement, too.  I’m not really the hard-bitten journalist type, I’m a big old quiverin’ mass of pink feelings and exposed nerve endings, chronologically vulnerable to the AARP bounty hunters but emotionally still in roughly seventh grade.. 

So I stamped my foot and shook my fist and swore off column-writin’ forever.  It lasted about 12 hours.

What happened was, while I was going down to the garden to eat worms, I tripped over my lower lip, which was dragging the ground, and the ensuin’ impact must have caused blood to flow to my tiny brain because suddenly I had the thought:

What, precisely, have I said so far that utterly anybody could disagree with in any way, shape or fashion?   

In the (count ‘em) two columns I’ve written, I’ve made exactly two points:  (a) that health insurance is prohibitively expensive for working slobs like me to purchase, and (b) that emergency room care is prohibitively expensive for working slobs like me who can’t afford health insurance.

I don’t think either point is open to debate.  It must have been seven or eight years ago I priced health insurance for my husband and me, and it was a minimum of $700 a month then.  I expect it’s more now.  My sister and her husband had to pay their own premiums via a COBRA arrangement when he lost his job a few years ago, and it came to $1400 monthly for their family of four.

As for emergency room care, I think a base price of $500 to walk into a joint can reasonably be described as a mite pricey.  They don’t even provide beer.

I never said Uncle Sam should manage health care.  I never proposed a solution of any kind.  I merely pointed out there was a problem, and that was enough to set people disagreein’ with me six ways from Sunday.

Now, why is that?  Why is it if I say “health care” I might just as well have made some comment involving your sister, the bus station,  green eyeshadow and sailors?

I really don’t know why it’s so hot-button.  Is it because we disagree so violently about how to solve the problem we don’t want to admit one even exists?  Is all this raving about death squads and socialism a national attempt to stick our fingers in our ears and shout, “I – can’t – HEAR – you?”

I don’t know.  What I do know is that  the present system isn’t working, and I’ve got a dog in the fight because I’m one of the ones it isn’t working for.  But I’m not alone. Practically everybody I talk to has a horror story. 

So I’ve got to keep telling those stories as long as I can, and if you disagree all I can reasonably say is:

“C’mon.  Who wants a piece a me?”

END

The Adventures of Huckleberry Bob and Employee Jim

By Robin Ford Wallace

            We was floating down the river, me and Employee Jim, and it was pretty broad day so I made Jim lay down on the raft and cover up with the quilt, because if he set up people could tell he was a employee a good ways off.  But we hadn't no accidents and didn't see nobody, and when night come Jim come out too and we cooked our supper and after that lit up our pipes and had a smoke.  

"Jim, this is nice," I says. "I wouldn't want to be nowhere else but here.”

“Bless you, Huck,” says Jim.  “Where else we gwyne ter be since I run off from de factory, and you excaped from your pap?” 

But he allowed as how he was tolerable glad to be there too, and we set and smoked and had a general good time while the river run through the trees and the crickets sung just as lovely and peaceful as you could want it.

Then Jim he heaved a sigh and he says, “Tain’t no use, Huck.  No matter how fur we goes, I still ain’t gwyne ter be free.  I don’t reckon there is no help fer hit, hit’s this here health care system.  Suppose I got ter go ter de doctor?”

“Do like I do,” I says.  “Go to a clinic where they will treat you on a sliding scale.”

Jim he commented he wasn’t too sure about that, it did not sound stable to him and he’d ruther be treated on a plain old examining table that was not sliding nowhere. 

Then he heaved another sigh.  “Them clinics is fine fer you, Huck, because you is healthy and don’t want fer no one ter mess with you nohow, but looky here.” 

And Jim up and unbuttoned his shirt, so that I could see this big old snake just a-wrapped around his throat like it was set on choking Jim straight to death.  “That’s gashly, Jim,” I says.  “What is it?”

“That’s my COBRA, Huck,” he says.  “I pays $600 a month fer hit since I left de factory, and it’s like ter stranglin’ me.”

“Why don’t you pluck it off and flaing it in the river then?” I suggested.

But Jim he just shook his head.  “See, Huck, I got this little problem with my heart and I got to see a specialist now and then, maybe have a stress test or one of dem angioplasties.  You know how much that costs without medical insurance, chile?”

Jim did up his shirt again, very gentle and tender so as not to disturb the COBRA.  “If’n I don’t pay this ever’ month, honey,” he explained, “then they will preexist me and won’t nobody give me insurance then.  That means I’s gwyne to go bankrupt in just a year, Huck, if I don’t fine’ me no job with good insurance.”  He looked very melancholy.  “That or not go to no doctor, Huck, just lay down and die.”

So Jim he judged it was all up with him anyway it could be fixed; for if he didn't get a job before the COBRA was up he might as well get drownded here and now.  Well, he was right; he was most always right; he had an uncommon level head for a employee.

But that didn’t make it fair and I commenced to keen.  “It wasn’t meant to be so, Jim,” I  says.  “Nobody would have designed it no such fool way.  Health insurance got fastened to jobs in the 1940s as a draw for employees when labor was tight.  It was never meant to enslave nobody.”

 Jim allowed as I was right about that and no mistake, but then the for-profit insurers done took over the health market; and shortly after the hospitals all went for profit too and commenced to be run by CEOS with an eye to the bottom line; and costs spiraled out of control with everybody a-grabbing for his piece of it and if anybody said the least little thing about it the rest of them all hollered it was socialism.

So Jim he just hung his head and he says, “I’s gwyne back to de factory, Huck.  T’aint fair.  T’ain’t supposed to be no slavery in the United States, leastways of ever’ man and woman as has got to work for a living.  But what is folk like you and me gwyne ter do about it, chile?”

So we was standing there just as mournful and sad as if we was at a funeral when out of nowhere up rows my old friend Tom in a canoe and he says, “Well, you better do somethin’, because guess what?  Aunt Polly sent me to tell you the factory ain’t there no more.  They closed it down and outsourced the jobs to Mexico.  Looky yonder!”

   We looked and saw that the river had become just clogged with people, men and women and little children still in their night clothes, many with them COBRAs around their necks like Jim’s that they was attempting to pay with unemployment checks but most of them without nothing, nothing at all.

So you see, it ain’t just Jim, there’s millions and millions of us just a-drifting or a-flailing helplessly against the current, unemployed or outsourced or downsized, and if health care stays tied to jobs while jobs keep a-dying out and a-drying up, we are all going to be sold down the river.

That’s all and there ain't nothing more to say, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I'd a knowed what a trouble it was to write about health care I wouldn't a tackled it, and ain't a-going to no more.

The End, yours truly, Huckleberry Bob.

END

The End, Yours Truly, Only I Forgot To Tell You About the Purple Sock

By Robin Ford Wallace

One of the pleasures of living in a place this size is that it is such an elegant little microcosm of the larger world, everything in it a small and perfect metaphor simply bursting with significance. 

I sit in a Dade County Commission meeting and I see:  The Democratic Process.  Ted Rumley at the head of the table is Governmental Authority, Patrick Cannon, Law and Order, and the people hanging around the back eating doughnuts – well, you’ve got me there.  I guess sometimes people eating doughnuts are just people eating doughnuts.

Me, of course, with my camera and my officious little notebook, I am:  The Press.  I sit stern and dispassionate watching the elected officials with my eagle eye, occasionally breaking my flinty silence to ask a hard question like:  This the only kind of doughnut you got?

Well, see, even when you’re a metaphor bursting with significance it’s hard to take yourself too seriously when you are constantly reportin’ on what’s happening at the county dump.  Anyway, if you read this space with any regularity you will know that this particular metaphor is congenitally incapable of taking herself, or anything, seriously enough to break a real sweat. 

Until this health care thing came along and turned me into a different kind of metaphor – the Voice Crying in the Wilderness?  What happened is, I woke up one day and realized there were metaphorical elephants in the room and metaphorically nekkid emperors thick on the ground that everybody was pretending not to see, while I meanwhile sat in the cabbage patch babblin’ on about beer, Shakespeare and my brother Frank.

So I brushed the dirt off my butt, came in and said my piece, then last week made a dramatic exit from this whole crusadin’ racket and floated off with Huck and Jim down the Metaphor River.

But I’m bad at dramatic exits.  I tend to storm out, kicking over garbage cans, then come back and say, “Er, did I leave my car keys on the table?”  This time, what I forgot to tell you is about the purple sock.  So:

I used to be a court reporter.  I never much liked it and one thing I liked least was hospital parking garages.  Court reporters are always going to hospitals because attorneys are always deposing doctors, which is bad enough but another story.  We’d better stick with the parking garages. 

            I’m one of those people who get hopelessly lost in them.  If you were in a parking garage during those years and you saw an inbred-looking woman wandering from floor to floor, carrying a huge case and wearing high heels, odds are that was me and I wish you had stopped and given me a ride because those shoes were killing me.

Once I had a series of jobs that took me from hospital to hospital for over a week.  I had rented a car because my husband had gone out of town driving mine, and this complicated the parking garage thing to the point of cruel and unusual punishment.  I could actually stagger right past my car obliviously because it was a generic little rental car and I didn’t recognize it.

            So what I finally started doing, on maybe the third day, was tie a bright purple sock around the antenna.  Then I managed to find the car because, though it still looked like all the others, I was the only one with sufficiently low car pride to disfigure my vehicle like that.    

            Now, the reason I was at all those hospitals:  A group of doctors proposed to open a surgery center.  The three major hospitals in town all sued to stop them.  They sued not in the regular courts but before a public health commission, but the process was otherwise the same.  Their reason for objecting was: the surgical center would cut into their profits.

            So attorneys were deposing the CEOs of these hospitals, who sat there talking about cancer and heart disease as, I swear, “books of business.”  One of the attorneys asked one of the CEOs something along the lines of, “So your main concern in running this hospital is a profitable bottom line?”

            The CEO was mildly surprised, and said:  “Of course.  As in any other business.”

            Before that, when I drove past a hospital I’d see in my mind’s eye something very much like a TV medical drama – doctors and nurses rushing to the aid of someone being brought in on a stretcher, shouting:  “Has he got a pulse?”  These days, I’m more apt to think of them going through his pockets, shouting, “Has he got insurance?”

            Now, as for insurance:  The manager of the surgery center explained how she dickered with insurance companies to set a price for surgeries.  Because the companies could bargain collectively, she explained, they could get lower prices for a procedure than uninsured patients who had to pay their own way.  Which didn’t matter because nobody wanted uninsured patients anyway.

            Meanwhile, the doctors who were opening the center had no intention of offering their own employees health insurance.  They thought they could get enough nurses away from the hospitals by offering daytime hours to skip extras like that.

            After five or six days of this, I came to see health care the way these people did – a battle between hospitals, doctors and health insurance companies for the consumer dollar.  No one cared about patients.  And I didn’t care who won the suit because as far as I could see all parties involved laid their eggs in hot sand.

            But back to the purple sock.  I forgot to take it off the antenna and it flew off into 80-mph traffic on I-24.  It was probably some kind of metaphor, too, but I never figured out what for.  My innocence?  America?    

Still, it struck me as a terrible way for a sock to die.

END

It was somewhere during that summer and early fall of 2009 when I was writing these Radio-Free Robins about health care that I realized I had turned into my evil twin or somebody.  Well, not really evil but I wasn’t me anymore!  In the spring, I had quit a longtime and deeply-entrenched smoking habit with the help of a prescription drug called Chantix.  It worked!  I quit – but:

But the drug caused a variety of sinister personality changes and then when I tried to get off it, it damn near killed me.  Really, the drug is responsible for the Radio-Free Robins to begin with – I stopped being able to sleep when I discontinued it, so all one weekend I gave up trying and got out of bed to write instead.  Then the emergency room piece, no. 2 in the series, chronicles what happened when I gave up and took half a Chantix on an empty stomach. 

After I printed this piece I continued whaling away at Pfizer about the drug, and I wrote emails and like that to the AMA and pharmaceutical societies, but to this day I never got anyone to take me seriously. 

 It’s a shame because everybody I’ve known who’s taken the drug has ended up getting stranger than they already were.  In my case there are things I’m not going to put on the Internet, and that I will cheerfully deny under oath – but trust me, it’s a bad drug. 

Me, Sadie  and Pfizer:  Prescription Drugs and Pink Lipstick

By Robin Ford Wallace

I’d never have called my friend “Sadie” a girly-girl.  Yes, she loves to cook, she’s got a fine set of full frontals, and she can’t throw a Frisbee for her life.  But she’s also almost six feet tall and was a basketball star in high school.  She was just never the frilly type.

Note past tense.  These days, Sadie practically dots her i’s with little hearts.  When she stayed at my house this July, she came out of the shower wrapped in a bath sheet, squealing, “Ooh, I love this towel!  It’s soft and it’s purple and it goes over your whole body!”  Then she wiggled like Marilyn Monroe, and put curlers in her hair. 

Curlers. 

“Do you have any lip gloss?” she simpered.

I didn’t, but I handed over the one tube of lipstick I had in my purse.  “Your favorite color,” I said.  “Pink.” 

Lately, everything she owned was pink.  When we went camping, she used a pink flashlight.  Not that we camped much anymore; Sadie preferred to spend weekends shopping at outlet malls. 

Shopping.

What changed Sadie?  I blame a prescription drug called Chantix, manufactured by Pfizer, prescribed by her doctor last fall to help her stop smoking.  

Yes.  Today’s subject is:  the drug industry.  I know I keep promising to quit raving about health care and go back to the cabbage patch, but then something new riles me up and I come roaring out of the dirt like a plague of locusts. 

Anyway, Sadie:  Frankly, I never thought she could quit.  She was a career smoker who would light cheerfully up under No Smoking signs.  But quit she did, and without a speck of self-pity.  It was unbelievable.  It was as if she’d had the habit painlessly excised, as if by surgery.

Which is precisely what I’d always wanted. 

I was a different kind of smoker – you know, the tortured artist type, squinting bitterly through clouds of foul yellow smoke and saying things like, “Eet ees all so … pointless.”  Well, minus the French accent, but you can’t be a writer without occasionally saying something bitter through a cloud of smoke.

I wanted to quit and I knew it was going to be awful.  So since the Chantix had worked so well for my friend, I got my own prescription filled last March.  

It wasn’t as easy as Sadie had made it seem.  I was always just screaming with thwarted desire.  I wanted something and I wanted it like crazy – but somehow, the Chantix helped me realize it wasn’t a cigarette. How?  I formulated a theory:

Early on, I was at a party, outside under a full moon, and had made a new friend.  She and I drank glass after glass of red wine, exchanged life stories and complained about men – and as we talked, she lit cigarette after long white cigarette.  I think what had drawn me to her in the first place was that she smoked my brand.

Usually when temptation says come hither I go thither without much fuss.  I figure I’m going to screw up and there’s no point drawing it out.  But that night I never bummed the first puff!  I decided that Chantix must contain tiny transistors that had implanted themselves in my fillings and I was being remote-controlled from Washington, D.C., or possibly outer space.

            But that was just a joke, and it didn’t occur to me that Chantix really was controlling anybody until July, when Sadie was wiggling around in that bath sheet and borrowing my pink lipstick.  And then, of course, I was thinking in terms of Sadie.  It wasn’t until August that it finally struck me:

            What was I doing with pink lipstick?

            I remembered thinking, when I bought it:  “This pink will set off my tan.”  You’ll have to take my word for it but I’m not the kind of person who thinks things like that.  I’m the kind of person who thinks things like:  “If we get there early, we’ll have time for a beer.”

            It was chilling.  After I started noticing, though, I’d catch myself putting on full makeup to go places like the dump, or pausing in parking lots to check my face in other people’s car windows.  I’d paid to have the sun-bleached parts of my hair colored to match the other parts.  Eek! 

            I’ve never enjoyed being me.  My big joke was always:  If somebody steals my identity, can I get a new one?  But after I realized I was a pod person, all I wanted was to be me again, to reclaim my true, if you don’t mind, robinhood. 

So I quit taking the drug, and then everything really went to pieces. 

I started longing to smoke again.  Once I went into hysterics because I was out of breath mints.  I quit being able to sleep more than a few hours, then one hour, then at all.

Finally I was so hollow-eyed and twitchy I gave up and took half a Chantix.  But after so long without it, my body rejected it so spectacularly, I ended up at the hospital.

So you see, Chantix helped me quit smoking but messed with my head and ended up nearly killing me, and that’s what I told Pfizer.  I wrote a letter describing my symptoms and suggesting that the drug needed further R&D, particularly in relation to females of Sadie’s and my age. 

Pfizer cared so deeply about my side effects that it referred me to:

A call center in India.

So.  Turn me into Barbie, send me to the emergency room, then let me complain to someone who doesn’t understand a word I say?  And they call lawsuits against drug companies “frivolous?”  What do they call Uzis?

OK.  I’m really not going to sue.  I’m grateful to have quit smoking.

But I don’t know that I’m quite ready to quit writing about health care just yet.

END

Mostly About Underwear and Obamacare: Son of the Return of Radio-Free Robin

          Warning:  This is not particularly funny.  It ran in this week’s Sentinel not as a Bob’s Little Acre but as a Radio-Free Robin.  I try to stay away from politics but I’ve been holding my breath about the Obamacare ish, you know, putting my hands over my eyes and trying not to peep through, because lately I’ve noticed I’m kind of a jinx and Obamacare is the last best hope for people like me!  Anyway,in the end I had to mouth off.

Politicians, Untangle Your Underwear and Listen Up!  This is America Calling

By Robin Ford Wallace

Yes, it’s me again, Radio-Free Robin, back to carry on about health care – again!

Remember, I started in 2009, when the very idea of health care reform was enough to wad up panties in the business world. 

“What ?” said Big Biz.  “Change a corrupt system that’s raking in megabucks for fat cats at the top, just because it’s killing some Americans and enslaving the rest?  This is communism pure and simple!”  You could practically hear the skivvies balling up and wedging themselves into any available crevice beneath those three-piece suits.

Forthwith and therefore, Big Biz, clawing the Fruit-of-the-Looms out of its crack, also pulled the wallet out of its pocket.  PR firms were engaged, lobbyists were retained, and here in the South we heard bizarre stories of federal death panels, probably made up mostly of Muslims, or at the very least Yankees, who would murder our grandparents and take away our prized American freedoms.

Right, some of us snorted:  Our prized American freedom to bleed to death on the pavement because we can’t afford an ambulance ride?  Our freedom to die of tumors because we can’t afford MRIs?  To work at badly paid jobs for the insurance instead of in our family’s small business, because it’s the only way we can afford insulin?

I didn’t make up any of those examples.  They are all from right here in our neck o’.  I interviewed for this newspaper the woman who kept her job for the insurance, so that her husband could continue supporting the family with his business as opposed to dropping dead from diabetes.  Without insurance, she said, insulin would cost them $100 a bottle.

And I tried to interview the Trenton businessman who used to be an EMT and had told me that, during his ambulance-jockey days, he’d been instructed to find out if accident victims had health insurance, and if not to leave them on the sidewalk.  But when I went back, recorder in hand, to report the story for the newspaper, he skittered off like an insect. 

Or like an elephant, I should say!  Like a lot of Southerners, he was solidly Republican and agin’ anything a black Democratic president was fer, up to and including truth, justice and the American Way.

As for the MRI, that was for my own husband and I paid for it my own self – sort of – after haggling like a fishwife with the woman at the provider’s office.  It was almost $2000 but she said she’d knock off a couple hundred if she could get the dough up front.  So I put it on a credit card, then paid that one off with one of those zero-percent-interest offers, and a little later I combined that with another checkbook-smackin’ charge for an emergency root canal, and –

Well, that’s enough about my personal finances!  Believe me, you don’t want any longer a glimpse of those than you do of the BVD-blocked business butts I’ve been describing so lovingly, because they are just about as pretty.

But you know, pretty or not, my personal situation really is why I’m climbing back on the soapbox.  Obamacare is now the law of the land, but even as I write, the underwear-challenged House of Representatives has shut down the government, closing national parks and crippling the CDC, all in a last-ditch effort to deny affordable health care to little me!

That’s my message here:  This is personal.  An op-ed piece against Obamacare I read yesterday blamed people who have babies they can’t afford for costing the rest of the country major bucks for social programs.   Well, maybe they do, but what does that have to do with Obamacare?  Those people are already covered.  I’m not.

Medicaid already takes care of welfare mamas and their children.  It takes care of the disabled and maybe some people who just say they’re disabled.  Even if you’re in jail for crimes against society, society has programs that take care of your health, too.  

But not mine.

So what’s wrong with me?  I’m college-educated and so were my parents.  I’m from what used to be called “the American middle class,” for Pete’s sake.

I didn’t have children I couldn’t afford.  I’m not on welfare or in jail (yet).  I work for a living, have never seen a food stamp, and the only crime I commit regularly is robbing the savings (ha!) account each month to pay the mortgage.  I’m a responsible, law-abiding, self-supporting citizen who doesn’t cost society a dime – and I’m the one those anally occluded suits in the GOP are holding their breath until they turn blue to keep bleeding on the sidewalk.

I’m in the (growing) class of worker called (more and more) independent contractors because nobody will admit employing us – they don’t want to pay for our health insurance.  But when my husband and I approached insurers privately – 15 years younger then, and offensively healthy – they wanted $100 a month more than our mortgage for high-deductible basic. 

So while homeless people can seek routine medical care in hospitals, I get charged $500 to breathe the ER air so I don’t go even when hit by automobiles.  (This happened!)  And while indigent single mothers give birth free on Medicare, I read recently the average hospital charge for childbirth is $26,000.  (And they wonder why the middle class isn’t breeding!)

A doctor at the sliding-scale clinic where dregs like me seek medical attention told me she was against Obamacare because “we’re already taking care of all the wrong people.” 

So the question is:  who’s left?

The answer I give her – and any politician willing to take his panties out of whatever orifice they’re stuck in long enough to listen – is:

Me –

America!

END

Of Time and Turtles: Reflections Upon the Gardener’s (Never Mind Which) Birthday

              It’s been a long time since I completed one of these Bobs, but actually I had started this one, which is about TIME, in what I thought was TIME to be printed around my birthday in early August.  But TIME got away from me, being as I have to work all the damn TIME … Well, I’ll shut up and let you read it, we ain’t got TIME for this ….

Of Time and Turtles:  Reflections Upon the Gardener’s (Never Mind Which) Birthday 

By Robin Ford Wallace

            This is a story Stephen Hawking used to open his A Brief History of Time:

            A scientist was giving a lecture on the nature of the universe when an old lady in the audience objected to his theories, insisting that the earth rested on the back of a giant turtle. 

“Then what, dear lady,” he said indulgently, “is the turtle itself resting on?”

“You’re clever, young man,” she replied.  “But it’s no use:  It’s turtles all the way down.”

            I was thinking about time because in August I had to add another digit to my already unthinkable age.  It defies belief.  As far as I can tell I’m still the same old chocolate-stained kid playing quietly in the dirt; but AARP keeps sending me these stupid letters.

            And I was thinking about turtles because I used a turtle story myself to open a column in late 2011 about the apocalypse predicted for 2012 by the Mayans (which as far as I can tell didn’t happen) and the horrors my triskaidekaphobia warned me of for 2013 (which continue to unfold).

Remember the story?  A turtle gets mugged by a gang of snails, but he can’t remember details because it happened so fast?  Well, here we are almost through 2013 and I feel like the turtle.  It’s all a blur!

 Someone once told me that people like me, who don’t have children, perceive time differently from people like her, who do.  I conceded that that might be true, that I’d noticed that my childless friends and I seem, even in middle age, always to be going to parties or attending lectures or dancing in the streets, as if anxious to pack in the maximum amount of fun per second; whereas people like her, whose children are now young adults, seem more serene about the passage of time, as if their bodies sense their replicated DNA is now cruising around swilling beer so they don’t have to.
(I should add here that the description of my life as one mad moveable feast may have been a slight exaggeration, a defensive reaction to the phrase “people like you, who don’t have children.”  I’m fulfilled enough, I reckon, but between ourselves it’s not really all cafés and bullfights.  In fact I miss that deck they had at the old Jo Mama’s, where you could sit and watch the traffic go by on Highway 11.  Them was the days!)  

            Anyway, I took the idea seriously enough to check out the Hawking book, which does make a case for subjectivity.  It was all stuff like: if a man throws a ball in a train car and another man is on the platform watching through the window as the train zooms through the station, doesn’t the distance traveled by the ball and thus its speed, and thus time itself, depend on where you’re standing?

It all makes a girl faintly seasick but so does time.  Nothing seems to be happening at all, but look away for one minute and there you are growing hairs out of your chin and getting called “ma’am” by the bagboys at Ingle’s.  (God, I hate that.  On the whole I’d rather be called Fatso, or Stinky.)

But I don’t think it’s just me.  I think it’s the same for everybody.  In a radio retrospective I heard, the narrator said the year 1913 was considered the beginning of the modern era because that was when people began feeling that time was moving too fast.  Cars and airplanes were coming in, and Darwin’s theories; and in Paris the Eiffel Tower was considered so offensively new that the writer de Maupassant ate lunch there every day because it was the only place in town he couldn’t see it.
Change has certainly kept up breakneck since then, and we like to talk about “a simpler time.”  But when?  The Victorian Age?  In the Sherlock Holmes novels, the great detective starts out sending telegraphs and riding in hansoms but by the end there are telephones, automobiles and World War I.
I bet even in the Middle Ages, when they say nothing changed for a thousand years, things were still never the way they used to be.  I bet folks complained, “Dang!  Every time you look around they’ve changed these iron maidens again, so you don’t know how to kill people no more.”
Anyway, if you had a time machine that really could deliver you to what you consider “a simpler time,” say, May 1, 1532, at 4:30 p.m., you’d only be there a minute before it was 4:31, then May 2, and pretty soon you’d be growing hairs out of your chin and the peasants would start addressing you as “prithee, good dam” or whatever they called hags back then.
Our impulse is to try and outrun time, and the Hawking book did say time slows down as you approach the speed of light.  

But I think maybe there’s some kinky kind of truth in the fable of the turtle winning the race against the rabbit.  It’s the slow things that do seem to triumph in the end, like this volunteer gourd vine in my vegetable patch that may sooner or later swallow the sun.  I never see it move at all but it’s subsumed the entire garden. 

(I don’t mind, really.  It’s been an awful gardening year and the tomatoes had already stopped.  I’m just warning you to look out for that gourd vine, that’s all.  I think it’s moving north.)

And time doesn’t seem to go anywhere either but it’s got me feeling like that turtle, something slow and stodgy that’s been run down by something even slower, that travels on snot.

            I don’t really have an answer to this eternal problem but we’ve got to stop here anyway.

            We’re out of time.

END

True Love and Hot Dog Buns: Bob’s Little Acre June Wedding Wisdom Special

                I finally got through with this Bob’s Matrimonial Wisdom For Modern Youth piece!  I started it before Katie Kasch married her Keith in October, and then I wished I’d finished it when Dusty Rumley wed his Jacey in May.  (The solemnities for which, in case you missed it, were performed by none other than he with whose flesh I became one in September 1987.)  So this is my gift to brides and grooms.  Laugh at me if you will!  It’s embarrassing that the only wisdom I’ve gathered in 25 years of marriage is, “Don’t fight about hot dog buns,” but I do think it makes a nicer presentation than, “Stay away from automatic weapons,” and I can’t afford to give cash …

   

True Love and Hot Dog Buns:  Bob’s Little Acre June Wedding Wisdom Special

By Robin Ford Wallace

So, young people, you are to become, respectively, a bride and a groom, 25 years after I shambled down the aisle myself, and you come in your youth and innocence asking for wisdom? 

Let me just set aside my knitting.  I expected you to come, my dears, and I wrote down my thoughts.  Where are my spectacles?  Ahem.

RUN!  RUN LIKE BUNNIES AND DON’T STOP FOR COPS OR FARM ANIMALS!

Ha ha.   I must have my little joke.  It is true marriage is more difficult than it looks but I am sure you will be very happy.  My spouse and I have, after all, enjoyed virtually uninterrupted connubial harmony, except for the time I cooked all afternoon and then he broke the light above the table with his rocklike head and subsequently spent the entire dinner nervously examining my beautiful food for glass shards, mau-mauing the guests out of any vestige of appetite until I drop-kicked the casserole over the porch railings and we screamed at each other until the guests left and the police came –

Well, what did you expect?  The fact that I am older than you does not mean I am wiser, or knit.  It merely offers clues to the girth of our respective thighs and is a rather good indicator of the comparative noisiness of our digestions.  It is one of life’s ironies that older people suffer disproportionately from intestinal explosions when children are so much likelier to find them amusing.   

And the fact that I have been married a long time is no evidence I am good at it.  Is anybody?  Believe no one who says so!  People lie, and are lied to.  This has been the basis of my horticultural advice and I hereby extend it to matrimony.  A woman I knew was shocked to discover five years into her fairytale marriage that her Prince Charming had never stopped nor in fact slowed down feeling up other feet for glass slippers, telling everyone they had an open marriage and she was in any case gay. 

Which brings us to complacency.  She had always seemed so smug and self-satisfied as he frisked that people assumed it was true, and did not tell her.   It is a cautionary tale against overconfidence, though upon further reflection I suppose husbands of jealous wives abscond for Arizona on Harleys with Waffle House waitresses on the back in roughly the same numbers as those of the trusting, an occurrence so common as to explain the spotty service at these places, which are sadly understaffed.  Still, my dears, crowing about one’s perfect marriage is tantamount to tattooing a bullseye on one’s butt, and mooning the NRA. 

            And let us not leave this story without touching on same-sex marriage.  What could anyone possibly have against it?  Most of my own matrimonial problems have stemmed from marrying outside my gender.

Once we saw “crawfish balls” on a Cajun menu, which I translated as “croquettes,” but my husband said thoughtfully, “Don’t you know those have gotta be tiny.”  The male mind simply operates differently from the female!  I read this blurb on a box of men’s hair dye:  “Covers the gray.  Not all of it, just some of it.”  Why would men purchase a product that makes such humble claims?  The women’s kind proclaims (do not inquire how I know):  “100 percent coverage of stubborn gray.”  Then I realized:  It is how they wash dishes.  “Not all, just some,” is the male creed.
            The breezes that have riffled the petals of my own marital bower have been more dishwashing- than Waffle-House-waitress-related, not burning issues but minor irritations amplified by the constant and pitiless proximity of the conjugal state:

He eats the diet lunches I make to last me all week (“Those were delicious but there wasn’t much to them, so I had to eat five”); I assault him with my Alzheimer’s-proof memory (“Do you remember what you said when I cut my hair in 1985?)”; we have to drive to work together and he makes me late (“Put your shoes on, you son of a …”).

            Then there’s the lost-item phenomenon.  What begins, “Darling, have you seen my __?” ripens into, “Where’s my __?” and ultimately becomes:  “What did you do with my __, woman?”

We fight about laundry, illegal immigration, box fans and the pronunciation of the word “syrup.”  But I am happy to tell you we no longer fight about hot dog buns. 

            We did.  Why?  My dears, hot dog buns can destroy a marriage in more ways than I have room to tell you, but consider first they come in bags of eight; fat-girl-friendly turkey dogs also in eights; but manly 100-percent-beef dogs only in packs of 10.  So the situation is already a ticking time bomb, but suppose, miraculously, one ends the week with four dogs and four buns for Saturday lunch, only to find one’s spouse squandering a bun at breakfast on scrambled eggs? 

Anyway, however this particular fight started, one day we were locked in mortal combat when we simultaneously realized we were both shrieking passionately:  “Hot dog buns!  Hot dog buns!”  It was funny enough to stop us fighting.

It became a habit, and now when we catch ourselves fighting about something that doesn’t matter, one of us shouts HOT DOG BUNS and we stop.  Mostly.

And that is my advice to you, my darlings: not to avoid fighting, because you will.  Everybody does.  Romeo and Juliet would have, if they’d lived (“Mama always told me them Montagues was trash.”). 

But when you realize the argument is going nowhere, take a breath, rear back, and shout:

WAFFLE HOUSE WAITRESS!

Or, you know, HOT DOG BUNS; whichever the case may be.

END

ANCILLARY MERCHANDISE!

I'm posting this here in case anybody reads it who doesn't look at Facebook:  I recently published a novel on Amazon!  I'm not all that technological but today I think I pressed the right series of buttons to make it available on Kindle as well.  Eventually.  In the meantime, though, if anybody's interested in a paperback romance -- well, sort of a romance -- HERE'S A LINK:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Woman-Who-Loved-Sea/dp/1481862782

Robin and Mary's New Orleans Misadventure: The Denouement

     I can only fit so much into those newspaper columns, and I was determined to finish this chronicle without an endless slew of "To Be Continued"s.  Thus I rolled the universe into a ball for the newspaper, then worried it was choppy and incoherent.  So here I have expanded on this week's newspaper piece a great deal indeed.  If you think I've been TOO complete, feel free to read in increments.

Part III:  Robin and Mary’s Mardi Gras MisAdventure:  The Denouement

By Robin Ford Wallace

“I imagine alcohol was involved?” 

That’s the first thing the bearded young doctor said to us when Mary was wheeled into the curtained-off treatment cubicle in the ER.  

It struck us as an odd thing for a doctor to say; but later, after he had come back shaking his head grimly over Mary’s X-ray, we wondered if he wasn’t a doctor at all but someone who had escaped from a nearby asylum.  I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d whipped out a rifle and shot her.  Whatever happened to, “You’re going to be just fine”?

However he delivered it, though, the message was clear:  Mary had broken hell out of her leg.  It would require enough pins for a bowling alley.  Mary, who hadn’t been in a hospital since her tonsillectomy at 6, was here for a while.

So it began:  People began arriving in the cubicle to ask:  How old are you?  How tall?  How much do you weigh?  Do you smoke?  Apparently nobody wrote down the answers because the next person would ask the same questions. 

At perhaps the 10th repetition, though, there was a surprise:  The orthopedic surgeon noticed the age Mary gave didn’t match her year of birth.  Her birthday this year fell on Mardi Gras; she knew that.  But she’d been in denial about which one:  This one had a zero at the end!

This orthopedic surgeon was a tiny, beautiful Asian-American woman, young and modern, but what she did next could have come out of an old Western, or the song where Lorne Greene saves the life of Ringo (“But a spark still burned so I used my knife”).    “This is going to hurt,” she said.  “Now or later?” 

Mary said to get it over with.  The doctor put her little hands on Mary’s leg, reared back and –

Oh – my – God.  Such screaming. 

I slunk off to the waiting room.  Mary was pumped full of dope but still in terrible pain.  The doctor said she’d operate in the morning if it could be arranged. 

It could not.

I am flopping around here trying to find words to tell you the reality of Mardi Gras in New Orleans.  It’s huge, overshadowing.  Wherever you need to go, there’s a parade between you and it, sometimes two.  I think sooner or later they’ll have to outlaw it, it’s just too dangerous.  But people love it there and the nurses in the ward would call, “Happy Moddy Gras” as they went off shift, like we say, “Merry Christmas.”

Mary was prepped for surgery three times that first couple of days, Saturday night into Monday.  But they never could get the surgeon and the equipment in the same room at the same time, and on Monday afternoon they gave up until after the holiday.  So Mary just lay there until the surgery finally happened the ensuing Thursday, at $1200 a night.  She didn’t have it, or health insurance.

I didn’t, either.

I spent Saturday night wondering if Hell was a waiting room.  This one was full of Mardi Gras casualties, young revelers and old drunks and a middle-aged couple gorgeously dressed for a ball.  Their names would be called and off they would walk or hobble to their final destination.

Nobody called mine!  I hadn’t asked for medical attention, though as the night wore on it became clear I hadn’t emerged unscathed from being hit by a car after all.  My right knee began to swell and throb as I shifted miserably in the hard plastic chair, and when I got up to check on Mary I dragged the leg like Igor.  I just hadn’t wanted to be scathed!  At ER prices, I couldn’t afford to be scathed!  Anyway, all I wanted now was sleep.

Sunday afternoon, I got my wish, courtesy of two Chattanooga friends who had traveled to NOLA with us on the train-turned-bus, then gone their ways, planning to meet us later.  One of these, Jeannie, had since mysteriously gained access to a car; the other, Elizabeth, to a house on Dauphine where she was dog-sitting.  So they swooped in with the one to deliver me to the other.

I’d asked them to bring our luggage from the Frenchwoman’s place in the Ninth Ward.  They had, and they’d also brought the Frenchwoman!  So everyone paid respects to Mary, then off we four sped into the streets of New Orleans, Elizabeth Andretti-like behind the wheel.  The Frenchwoman turned whiter and whiter, and finally leapt out at a stoplight and vomited into a trashcan.

It is true the Frenchwoman was unused to car travel.  It is also true Elizabeth drives with a certain dash.  As she does everything!  I cannot mention her here without noting she is the source of the fashion angst that keeps cropping up in this narrative:  She never goes to the grocery store without a feather boa, minimum.

On our way we stopped at a wonderful downtown grocery store, Rouse, a New Orleans institution.  I mention this because of course all we foodies got separated as we gaped at the goodies, and when I checked out – after wandering bedazed for what seemed hours, so I was worried they’d left me – I took the wrong door and ended in a city street.  Then I found the parking lot and realized I didn’t know what the car looked like!  And then I realized I’d spent all the money I had on me, my wallet was in the car, and my cell phone had died!

I had almost given up, and commenced to keen, when Elizabeth mercifully emerged from the store and walked straight to the car – where the whole time the Frenchwoman had been sitting in the passenger seat!  She was hunched over biliously from the car ride but still visibly and inexorably the Frenchwoman, like a beacon.

Anyway, we got to Elizabeth’s dog-sitting house and there I slept until Monday, when our friends returned me to the hospital.  By then my every fifth word was AUGHHH as I stepped on the dog’s chew toys or tried to dress.  So I was resigned to scathehood, and from the hospital I hitched a ride on the institution’s shuttle bus to an urgent-care clinic Mary’s nurses told me about, for an X-ray. 

There I was examined by a peppery lady GP with the peculiar name “O’Bear.”  Or so I thought until, two days later, having at last found a drugstore and succeeded in locating the prescription she’d given me at the same time, I saw her name typed out:  Vicky Hebert, M.D.  It’s French and pronounced “A. Bear,” and apparently it’s the New Orleans equivalent of Smith or Jones.

Dr. Hebert gave me joyous tidings:  My knee wasn’t broken, just bruised.  But when I asked how to get back to the hospital, the news was not so good:  “You can’t.”  There were not one but two intersecting parades today, Dr. Hebert told me, so neither taxis nor trolleys were running.

Thus I set off on foot – note singular! – Igoring it along beside one of the parades, and paced by a float carrying the usual Greek god, plus a clump of men dressed as chefs – hell, maybe they were chefs – throwing beads.  It still hurt when I stepped wrong but I was so elated I wasn’t broken like poor Mary that I was walking on air, and I quoted Shakespeare cheerfully to myself about love’s light wings o’erperching walls 'n stuff.  

But mostly I was thinking about: food.  I hadn’t been able to interest Mary in takeout orders– she had to use a bedpan and said it all just turned into poop – but New Orleans is partly about eating out and I hadn’t had my crack at that part.  I was torn between poboys – authenticity – and Vietnamese – proximity; there was a restaurant right beside the hospital.

But when I went in to check first with Mary, the nurses were just packing her up to be transferred to the big bleak charity hospital across town.  They said I could ride in the ambulance with her, and since she would have a private room at the new place I would be allowed to sleep on a cot beside her.

This hospital, University, was in a bad section of town and when we got there the staff warned me not to venture outside at night.  So I dined that evening from the vending machines in the basement, and subsequently I would eat the food off Mary’s plate that she wouldn’t touch on the poop principle.  So much for the fabled cuisine of New Orleans!

At the first hospital, Touro, everything had been posh and carpeted and everyone was nice to us except one nurse with an ugly voice.  At the second everything was bare and tiled and everyone was mean to us except one little sweetheart nurse who had dimples and called Mary Twinkletoes.  She was the only one who could make Mary smile.

I slept on the cot until I had to leave town, not just because I had nowhere else to go – I mean, there was that – but also because I was worried that the big mean institution would kill Mary if I didn’t remain vigilant.  Mary said, “Don’t be ridiculous, Robin; I really believe in socialism.”

But if it was socialist in décor, that hospital later sent Mary a bill as running-dog as anything I’ve ever seen!  Mary said Touro was more reasonable about adjusting downward. 

Anyway, that next period was our really miserable time.  If I’d worried the nurses would neglect Mary, they did anyway come every four hours through the night to check her vitals; then the bright young residents rolled in with their stethoscopes and their new white coats at 6 a.m.  It didn’t bother Mary because she was too miserable during the day to do anything but sleep or watch television; but for weeks after I got home I couldn’t sit down in my reading chair without passing out.   

People kept putting paper bracelets on Mary every time she was transferred or prepped or sedated, until she had a collection on her wrist she had me photograph because she said it was as close as she would get to racking up Mardi Gras beads.

Mary was depressed.  Well, that’s inadequate.  It’s not wrong but it doesn’t cover the facts.  Mary, who is usually hopeful and friendly and New-York tough, your veritable little Yankee sunbeam, was a small shrunken figure under the sheets with a whispery toneless voice, who wouldn’t turn off the TV. 

And on Tuesday morning – Mardi Gras, and her 60^th birthday – she tossed me out of the room so I could witness the holiday, and she could suffer alone.

I limped down Canal Street, incidentally getting socked in the left eye by two strands of beads thrown from the usual parade – 

A word on parades:  All that nonsense you hear about procuring Mardi Gras beads via a roguish display of the full frontals?  My frontals aren’t that full and anyway I promise you they stayed primly within their sartorial confines, I was in no mood here, but I was dodging beads like shrapnel!  At Mardi Gras you have to run faster than I do to come home beadless.

– and thus arrived at the French Quarter where we began this chronicle, and where I saw a T-shirt with the New Orleans motto:  “Sin.  Repent.  Repeat."

Sin?  Mary and I had only wanted to drink a little beer and watch the fun in the Quarter.  Where’s the sin in that?  But the Big Easy smacked us to the mat on day one while others stayed drunk in the street all week and took no harm.  Really, we later speculated Mary might have landed more gracefully from that bicycle had she been a little more lubricated.  

Anyway, what sense does it make I should be hit by a car and Mary should be the one with $100,000 of medical bills?

I think the message here is there’s no logic in destiny:  No matter what those Baptist preachers say about sin and subsequent perdition, you can’t tell God what to do.  

And you sure as hell can’t tell New Orleans! 

END