Endless Numbered Days

My doctor thinks I'm at the age when I should have my cholesterol checked. Given a family history of heart disease and high blood pressure this seems reasonable. So this morning I stopped by the hospital to have blood drawn. The laboratory room is small. A few nurses work quietly with their syringes and samples. But you have a sense that this is the entry point for many people into institutionalized care - a place where troubles that are caused by genetics or a lifetime of bad decisions are finally, and sometimes fatally exposed.

Across from me in the lounge area sat an older couple, perhaps in their seventies or eighties. He wore a baseball cap advertising farm equipment. She looked like she had been crying. They held hands - two gnarled roots tied together on the arm of the chair, waiting.

When they called my name it was quick and painless. I expect to know the results in a few days, and I expect the worst, but only because I have a deep, Irish fatalistic streak. I drive my wife crazy with dark comments about the airplane going down in flames and the handsome young husband she will acquire in her mid-forties. But truthfully I have plenty of work to do before my chips are cashed, notably in the raising of the our daughters that bounced merrily off to school this morning, preoccupied with math homework and the perils of friendship, and so perfectly oblivious to the exigencies of mortality.