Waiting for Dr. Flink or Someone Like Him

June 20, 2019

Grey dark unceasing rain.  In the midst of this unending precipitation I am sitting at a medical center.  In about an hour I will have a visit with my neurologist.  Dr. Flink will twist my wrists, he will have me follow a stimulus with my eyes and he will prick the bottom of my feet with sharp object.  He will ask me if I have had any migraines in the past year .  I will tell him I was blind for about 15 minutes yesterday.  He’ll shrug.  

Not driving, and because I don’t drive, I am here an hour early.  I am sitting in a little coffee shop drinking some decaffeinated coffee. Normally I could look out through the floor to glass windows at the green space outside; it is a little courtyard. But as I noted at the onset there is a grey dark unceasing rain ongoing.  This has rendered the windows more a mirror than not.  While I can see a hint of the way too lush green outside mostly all I see is a reflection of a portly old man in a peach shirt sitting at a table pounding away on a iPad and keyboard combination.  

As I sit here the staff members behind the counter are not very busy.  They are engaged in a lively conversation about “vampires”.  They are not talking about the blood sucking undead, they are talking about people who spend their lives working the night shift.  One guy is talking about a guy he knows who has worked the night shift for better than 20 years.  The other two are mentioning people they know who love night shift, it seems they all know one person and one person only, who has that predilection.  All of them are talking about not being cut out for such a lifestyle.  The woman says she has pulled two all nighters in her life. Exasperated shudders followed.

Maybe 30 years ago I would have worked nightshift.  Not now.  When I travel internationally and have to deal with the 24-30 hours I usually spend awake, I am a basket case for days.  While I never worked 12-8 shifts, when I was younger I loved working 4-midnight.  

4-midnight was a shift that let me do the stuff I had to in the daytime, bank, shop,etc.  It also let me party for less.  By the time I got to the party or the bar everybody else was trashed and I could simply have a beer or two before closing.   I remember the schedule well.  Midnight to 12:30 am I would close up the ice cream store.  1-3 I hit the bar.  Between 2-3 I would leave the bar and go to a party or a friend’s house and play cards or listen to music and/or smoke dope.  4 am I would usually be be home in bed. 1030 brought a cinnamon roll from Dot’s and a crawl to the beach to work on my tan.  Sleep on the beach, read Shakespeare and body surf until 3 pm.  At 3 pm head up to the house, shower and head back to work to do it again.  Yeah working on a boardwalk by the ocean between 4 pm and midnight was a kind of perfect schedule for a never do well like me.

Oh I know I have told the above part of my life story before.  But there are moments when I go back to it and wonder how it was I did not see those summers for the specialness they held.  If I towed the Buddhist line I should have been listening with an open mind. I should have looked around and realized the impermanence of all things and especially that situation.  Perhaps then I would have realized that I needed to live in and accept the experience as it was , when it was, joyfully accepting the wonder of that fleeting human experience.

This morning I read that the average age of retirement in America ranges between 62-65.  The high end is in the Northeast/New England.  The lowest end is the west coast.  I am 63-1/3rd.  It is time for me to go.  The article talked about the usual financial issues.  A special highlight was the issue of health care costs.  I think my wife and I have that handled.  The next big issue was boredom/loss of meaning.  Given how much I enjoy writing I think I will be able to handle that part of it.  As long as I have access to a source of reading materials and have access to a computer I think the meaning thing will not be a problem.   

Come on January 2020.