I'm sitting in the hospital, waiting for my dad to be called in for his "procedure." They don't seem to use the word "operation" anymore, which is good because I find the word "procedure" much more calming and reassuring. (I assume Parker Brothers, or Milton Bradley, will be changing the name of the beloved child's game to Procedure.)
Fans of Gallows Road will be happy to know that we took Gallows Road to get here. Every appointment I take my dad to involves Gallows Road, either in the literal sense of us being physically on the damn thing, or in a less prosaic sense, as my dad points out that we should have taken Gallows Road instead of whatever "the GPS lady" said to take. I sometimes wonder what it would be like to live on Gallows Road. If you are inclined to spend decades ignoring doctor's advice, leading to a protracted situation where doctors and nurses are hovering around you 24 hours a day as if you're Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz (or later in life), and arguing like magpies over which specialist's concerns take precedence ("Now I KNOW you didn't just say you're planning to go near his spleen when you're monkeying around with his pancreas!"), I suggest you move into a house on Gallows Road and be done with it.
The drive here was uneventful, mostly broken up by my dad's trenchant observations about traffic patterns, and the wisdom of scheduling appointments at times other than the ones at which I chose to schedule them. A welcome variation from this routine was provided when my dad noticed in the Post an article about a three foot clam. I know this because he said, "Hmmm. A three foot clam." To use Tom Alderson's phrase, I allowed as how three feet was pretty big for a clam. My dad agreed, or would have, if he'd had his hearing aids in. He bought the kind of hearing aids that are small and compact, so they conveniently fit into a charger that you keep on your dresser and they never go in your ears. This particular brand has inspired many stimulating three-way conversations amongst me, my dad, and a nurse. These discussions are sort of like Agatha Christie novels, comforting and even oddly addictive, due to their familiarity and formulaic nature.
Nurse: Mr. Straub, did you not put your hearing aids in today?
Young Mr. Straub: He doesn't have them in today.
Old Mr. Straub: Do what?
Nurse: Mr. Straub, you're supposed to make sure he has his hearing aids in.
Young Mr. Straub: (not taking the bait) Sorry about that.
Old Mr. Straub: Do what?
Nurse: (loudly) Mr. Straub, you need to remember to put in your hearing aids so we can talk to you!
Old Mr. Straub: No, the clam was three feet long!
Young Mr. Straub: Do what?
(Sometimes, like a traveling acting company, we change the roles to keep it fresh, but the dialogue is always pretty much the same.)
They like you to arrive for these procedures two hours early, because it's customary for you to sit in a waiting room for 85 minutes before being told that you're in the wrong waiting room. Maybe I should have put MY hearing aids in, ha ha!
These waiting room intervals give me the time to go through the paper in a leisurely manner, catching up on all the recent examples of our president seeming "presidential" to the people handsomely paid to make this call. It's also helpful to get the in-depth reporting about POTUS's recent phone conversations with potentates. As far as I can determine, these little tete-a-tetes are the most cost-effective parts of our president's job, because they accomplish multiple things at once.
1. They give him a chance to tell the other potentates about what he's been up to, so they can validate him. Validation from your peers is important, and once you become president, you have very few of those. Your wife gets tired of hearing the usual talk about what people have been chanting at your rallies, what the lying media has been lying about, who you've been bombing, and so forth. (Sorry, I think it should have been "whom" you've been bombing.)
2. Photos can be taken, because a picture is worth a thousand words! Nothing looks more presidential than a photo of you talking on a phone. If a president is talking on a phone, we can assume it's a potentate on the other end, because anyone at the sub-potentate level is expected to walk over to his office or golf course to speak with him.
3. These phone calls are diligently recorded, and transcriptions are provided to the insiders who are in charge of leaking them to the lying media. (These days, lying media include lying broadcast and lying print, as well as lying bloggers, eventually moving downward to lying housewives in curlers chatting over backyard fences. As you can imagine, leaking to such a large and disparate group of liars is complicated, and requires coordinated effort from a crack team of leakers. The leakers are supposed to work a normal eight hour day, but as their spouses and main squeezes can attest, leakers are never really off the clock. It's certainly not always beer and skittles for the professional leaker.)
As I worked my way through all of this, I kept getting distracted by a provocative headline about some memoirist's thoughts about the ending of the controversial HBO program "Girls." I didn't realize that people who write memoirs now must be consulted so they can weigh in on the programs produced by Judd Apatow, nor was I aware that they are now to be referred to as memoirists. It seems bizarre to me that a person who writes a book about their life is more notable for that than for the life, unless it's Samuel Pepys (technically, he was a diarist, I suppose), but the glut of memoir writing we all enjoy today has elevated its status to a level once enjoyed by the writer of quality prose.
This is related to the phenomenon of "reality" television, where people struggling to put a basic sentence together on the subject of which behaviors they will accept from their fellow reality TV stars and which they will not are deemed more interesting than scripted actors, for reasons mysterious to me. I don't much care for truth presented as entertainment, as I am addicted to the kind of prose and dialogue that mostly occurs when written down by scriptwriters. I call it the fiction of good diction.
I'd like to state here for the record that I absolutely reject the honorific of "memoirist," despite the truthful facts I occasionally include in my work. I don't deny the truth of my writing, but I am always careful to include at least some item of exaggeration so that no one can get my dander up by accusing me of being a memoirist. Readers, please understand-- anything comical discovered herein was not made up by me. Anything untrue is most likely just lying by omission, a venial sin I sometimes commit to keep the thing rattling along without becoming dull.
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