The Circus Comes to Town – Day 2
Author © Scott D. Zachary
I went for a long walk again on the second morning. Bemusedly, I watched a trash man drive from house to house. He jumped out of the driver’s seat at each stop, ran around to the rear of his truck, tossed the trash into the gaping jaws, and returned to his alternate job driving the garbage truck for another iteration. I needed a good workout, so I dashed to a pile of trash and dumped it into the back end of his truck before he could circumnavigate to the rear.
Running alongside his truck, I looked up at him, noting how his delighted expression intensified each time I sprinted to his next stop, tossed the trash in, and ran to another trash can before he could even get out of the truck. After three or four stops, he got the message. This scenario reminded me of some 35 years earlier when we boys raced between trash cans picking up the trash at the summer church camp behind the cemetery where I worked.
Several miles of twenty-yard dashes did me in, though, and I waved good-bye from the previous stop. I gasped to catch my breath. Nary a word spoken between us, he spryly returned my wave as though we’d been dear friends forever.
After breakfast, Rene picked me up at the hotel. During the hour-plus drive to the hospital, I shared a strange premonition with her that I’d envisioned while on my walk that morning. I told her it occurred to me that I would be trading my wedding ring for a rubber band today.
She glanced at the ring on my finger. “Is that the ring you bought in the Bahamas when you married Bobbie?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Rene scowled. “And you’re going to trade it for a rubber band?”
“We’ll see.” Pause. “We’ll see.”
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
“Top of the morning to you, DW!” I greeted.
Ed looked up from his breakfast and grunted, “Got rid of those buzzards. One bouquet smells nice—seven stink!” He sniffled agitatedly. Ed proceeded to describe how the stench, along with the unending parade of nurses coming to admire his floral array, inspired him to give them away. This gesture crowned him a hero for the day, or at least it did in the eyes of seven nurses.
My unorthodox psychological therapeutic ruffling had Ed recovering nicely—or should I say crassly—by that afternoon. His depression extracted, I spent much of the afternoon wandering around the expansive grounds and maze-like floors of the hospital. On one particular excursion, I decided to use the Oncology Center’s entrance. Ambling along on the broad sidewalk, a hundred feet or so from the automatic double doors, I zeroed in on a black gal in her early twenties whose stature defined the word “glum.” She sat slumped on a concrete bench a modest shadow-length away. Her profoundly sad countenance down-shifted my pace. She didn’t seem to care that her tears had blotched her pretty cheeks and chin with eyeliner.
I glanced down. You will never believe what I saw in the middle of this sea of concrete—a little rubber band. I halted, standing there looking at that improbable apparition. What are the probabilities? I hadn’t previously rehearsed my unfurling role, or even considered it. It just happened this way. The object of my premonition lured me to pick it up, which elicited the girl’s attention.
I walked over to my distressed damsel and held the rubber band up for her inspection. “This is going to seem strange, maybe even bizarre, but please bear with me for a moment. Did you see me pick up this rubber band?”
She nodded affirmatively.
“Lots and lots of people have walked by here today and ignored this rubber band. None of them have claimed it. I picked it up, and I’m claiming it as mine. Do you agree that this is now my rubber band?”
Naturally intrigued by my oddity, she again nodded her affirmation.
“Humor me a little longer, please. I’d like to give you my rubber band. Please accept it as yours. Please?”
The girl hesitantly presented her open palm. I placed my rubber band in it. “You own it—it’s your rubber band now, isn’t it?”
Nodding, the bewildered girl stared at her rubber band in the middle of her palm.
I removed my ring from the ring finger of my left hand. “This is my wedding ring,” holding it up for her to examine its channel-set diamonds and baguette sapphires. “It’s a beautiful ring, don’t you think?”
She nodded keenly.
“Okay, we’re almost there. I would like to exchange my wedding ring for your rubber band—it’s just a symbolic token. Would you please trade me?”
Dumbstruck, she handed me her rubber band, and I gave her my wedding ring. She incredulously examined her new ring and then tried it on her left ring finger. The young lady held up her hand and admired her ring. Its perfect fit spiraled the uncanniness of my fulfilled premonition, the oddity of that rubber band intersecting my path to such a troubled soul, and the ring’s unscripted loss of significance, into a preternatural phenomenon that might even cause a windmill-slaying knight to question his grasp on reality. But it didn’t.
She watched as I fiddled my new wedding band onto my finger, wrapping it thrice. I held up my hand and examined my ring, intrigued by the happenchance way that its twists seemed to form an elevated rubber gemstone. “Very nice.”
Bounding off toward the Oncology Center, I glinted a smile and enthused over my shoulder, “Thank you, pretty lady. You’ve done me an enormous favor. God bless you!”
My rescued maiden’s voice sang out, “God bless you!”
I walked through the Oncology Center, looked down, and saw a faint trail of streaks on the remarkably polished tile floor. I began to follow them for no particular reason. The capricious path led me hither and yon around seemingly random corners to an elevator. I looked around and pressed the button. It opened and I stepped inside. Besides the usual arrowed buttons indicating open and close, there was only one other button. I wasn’t labeled. I pushed it.
The trail of who-knows-what didn’t pick up again outside the elevator. I stood there and contemplated the three hallways that intersected in front of me. A déjà vu evoked a recollection of a particularly drunken night in Zimbabwe when I came to a traffic circle that intersected eight roads. At least this time, I only have three possible routes to reconnoiter.
I momentarily pondered which path to take when a nerdy, authoritative young man approached. He stared at me questioningly as he pressed the elevator button. He started to open his mouth, and my snappy Val Kilmer tone of annoyance interjected, “What?!” His challenge forestalled, he retreated through the open elevator doors, and I stepped straight ahead.
Thirty feet or so down my second choice, the trail reappeared, zigging and zagging this way and that way. I was lost long before I took that elevator. Is there a superlative for being most lost? Or do I have a ways to go yet?
I made one more turn to the left that brought me to a point in the bowels of the hospital where the virtual breadcrumbs stopped. So did I.
Something about the double doors before me lent the impression of a forbidden inner sanctum. Perhaps a surgery unit? The morgue? During the unaccountable minutes since I re-entered the hospital, I hadn’t consciously thought of anything except following this trail that brought me to this spot deep inside this hospital…on this planet, centrifugally traveling around our star at 67,000 miles an hour…in this Solar System, circuitously lapping its estranged black hole at the center of our Galaxy every 240 million years…leaving the source of the infinitesimal ultimate explosion at a mind-bending 900 thousand miles an hour…the stimulus that resulted in this universe. The Universe.
My heart filled with joyous accolades for God as I realized that He foresaw this moment—this particular instant in time—thirteen odd billion years ago when all material substance in the Universe instantly exploded into being from nothing. From nothing. From nothing? Sure.
A man dressed in purple medical scrubs pushed open the doors, walked directly toward me, and stopped. Searching my eyes, he probed, “Why? Why? Why?!” each interrogative laced with increasingly frantic emphasis.
A preposterously silly gut inclination nearly spoiled this atypical opportunity by spouting Harvey Titterson’s “We are what we are.” Fortunately, it occurred to me that Harvey’s justification for mankind’s existence would reek of total nonsense in this context. I nixed the Silly Rabbit, reached into my box of Trix, and confidently pulled out the prize. Pointing skyward, “It’s what He wants.”
“You think so?”
I nodded confidently.
The doctor—or whatever he was—expelled an enormous sigh of relief. He placed his hand paternally—or gratefully, or both—on my shoulder as he passed by me. I wondered if John D. MacDonald imagined his Harvey Titterson having the same indescribably amused feeling when the President left Harvey’s tenement abode as I did at that moment in time. Harvey toked a joint at this juncture, but I think I’ll find Ed and be kind to him for once, instead. That’ll shake up his gloom.
How in the world will I find my way out of here? Aha! It should be just a matter of following the streaks on the floor back to the Oncology Center. I did, but along the way, I lost the trail. A sweet, vivacious, buxom, black-haired nurse substituted nicely. I took a couple of smokes outside and found my way back to Ed and Rene.
“Hi, you guys! You like my new wedding band?”
“What happened to the other one? The real one?” asked Ed.
“I traded it to a damsel in distress for this one.”
“You truly are crazy!” proclaimed Rene.
Ed shook his head and smiled.
Bobbie had given me a gold pocket watch for my 50th birthday with a card that read: “The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything.” I figured that since the girl had dumped me, I might as well dump the gold watch, too. Handing it to Ed, I decreed, “Now you’ve got the girl, the gold watch, and everything. Happy birthday, buddy.” Ed seemed sincerely touched. I don’t think he remembered where the watch came from, but he will now.
A matronly nurse, her course gray hair piled into a bun, whisked into the room. “Excuse us, boys and girls, Mr. Ed has been clamoring on his little button for some attention, and I’m here to give it to him,” as she tossed a wink in our direction.
Ed and I enjoyed a pleasant truce for the rest of the day; hardly any sarcasm or barbs were launched between us. He even thanked me for coming to cheer him up. Before Rene and I left, Ed paid me the highest compliment. He said it would be a long time before he could take care of himself, much less his beloved Woofie. Ed asked me to take Woofie with me back to Kentucky. He qualified his request by saying that he did not want me to take Woofie on a plane.
Rene took me to get a rental car, and I followed her home. When I opened the door of my rental, Woofie bounded across the yard and attacked me with his affection. His whole body wagged his excitement as he lathered my face with his love.
While I scratched Woofie’s ears and waited for Rene to fetch his water bowl, leash, and such, I skimmed through random zany mental reverberations of the past two days. Who—in his right mind—could ever forget the horrified look on Rene’s face when she thought I’d stolen the painting from the nurses’ station? I had asked Ed if there was anything I could get him at the store and he said a picture of the beach. Rene off-handedly suggested that I should get the beautiful beach-scene painting from behind the nurses’ station. I then did my absolute best to buy that painting from the head nurse who adamantly refused—and refused even more adroitly when I offered a thousand dollars. It didn’t matter though. I rushed out to Walmart and bought one uncannily similar enough to convince Rene that I’d stolen the nurses’ painting, anyway. I held it up to see where to put the nail in Ed’s wall, and Rene tried to put my brakes on screech. “Take that thing back to the nurses’ station right now!” she rasped.
It didn’t calm Rene’s tempest in the least when I reminded her, “But you told me to take it. Besides, they won’t miss it.”
Warm fuzzies nestle in my iliac as I revisit the endearing memories of my newfound friends: the sweet, seemingly neglected, mentally disabled lady in the wheelchair whose dazzling smile signaled her unequivocal delight in response to my lavish attention; the initially standoffish Hispanic lady at the bus stop who I eventually won over with my sincere attempt to annihilate the Spanish language; and of course, my damsel in distress.
Rene delivered Woofie’s things and thanked me through her beautiful smile. “You sure are a lot of fun, Scott!”
“And you sure are a sweet lady, Rene.”
We hugged, closing another story.
