Monday Attitude Adjustment Story

Trip to the Orthopedic Surgeon

I don’t think I have related the ordeal to you that I fondly refer to as “Our trek to the doctor’s office” or “Driving Mr. Crazy”…and by that I mean the missus was driving the mister nuts! Here are all the gory details, with the exception of the actual date of our journey. That’s because I will be using real names (no innocents to protect in this story) and I don’t want to tip off the property owners, who may have felt their “right to privacy” was violated, to our location on the fateful date…that may punch holes in our alibis. Anyway, I admit that this was the first time we were going to Dr. Bear’s office and neither of us had any idea where it was located…except of course that we had the actual address. So I availed myself of the use of Mapquest.com and it mapped the route in its usual, indomitable fashion clearly marking each directional twist and turn. One thing we forgot, having been away from Akron for so long, was that after Portage Path turned into Portage trail, the street numbers do not reset until you travel a few more blocks and cross State Road in the Falls, so we were looking for the number on Portage Trail in the wrong place. As we were cruising nicely along, with me announcing each turn at each street when I directed her to, “turn left here dear” and then, as we were approaching the end of a cul-de-sac, I corrected myself and told my chauffeur, “I’m sorry, darling I meant your other left…you know in the direction of the hand you write with.” At this point my wife did the sensible thing; pulled into a driveway and turned the car around. She explained that she only became confused because she was talking, so I planned to ease the burden she endured of providing me with transportation by looking for the turns as well as announcing them so she would not again become overwhelmed with an inordinate amount of tasks to perform, like unnecessarily conversing with me.

At this point I must pause to digress from my narration in order to explain, in advance, that the cul-de-sac we erroneously entered was entirely paved, driveways included. Why does this matter? Well let’s just say that the next two boo boos that occurred, through no fault of the driver nor the navigator, caused us to drive into two more dead ends…the last of which was not paved. When I reach that part of this epic you will understand the significance of this bit of data. I will now proceed with my story telling. After we transitioned from Portage Path to Portage Trail, I was looking for the address number of Doctor Bear’s Portage Trail office by viewing the address numbers on the left side of the road. We passed what was a hidden drive that had no address posted we could see and a place that looked like it was another hidden drive but was actually a dead-end street with its sign hidden from view. The next address we could see was higher than the address we were looking for so we agreed that one of the two areas we had passed must be the address we were seeking. Sylvia pulled the car into a playground parking lot so we could reverse our direction and turned right at the street with the hidden sign (which was also paved like the cul-de-sac had been). Again my wife very sensibly reversed our direction, by steering the car into a driveway, and then turned right again to explore the street address of the hidden drive. Now comes the fun part and the reason I will try real hard to obtain a drivers’ license again. This driveway was not paved and it branched two ways; one dead-ended into the homeowner’s barn (could have been a garage but I swear it looked more like a barn). The other branch circled in front of the house and then back to the driveway for exiting but there was a large truck parked right on the loop, close to the front door.

I have never seen Sylvia so shaken in all my life…not even when she laid in the hospital with a shattered femur…not even during Ryan’s childbirth when the staff forget to turn on the vacuum cleaner hose they use to suck the crap out of the kid’s lungs (they don’t slap the babies anymore…too many kids are extremely large and started slapping back…hard!) She was actually shaking so badly she could hardly put the car in reverse and with tears welling up in her eyes she stammered, “Oh no…I have to back up!” I was thinking that I was going to have to turn the car around for her and, reflecting back now, maybe I should have for both our stomach’s sake. You must understand, our car has a proximity sensor in the rear and Sylvia was terrified of backing into one of the three tees that stood about ¼ of a mile away from the driveway. She was trying to back up using just the mirrors and was freaking out about “…hitting one of the trees!” Me, well, I was concerned more about her running into the ditch that ran along the driveway because she was weaving all over the place...the reason I will not give the date or we might be sued for ruining the farmer’s lawn. Anyway, she didn’t get back onto the gravel until I told her that I was only worried about her hitting the mailbox. There wasn’t any but I thought that it would get her back on track…and it did. I was laughing so hard by the time we got back on the road that Sylvia was ready to kill me and if looks could do it I would not be telling you this story now. The rest of the trip was boring and uneventful with only the occasional glaring dagger shooting my way and the small ice age forming only in our car, so I’ll stop this story now while I have enough time to make a clean getaway.

Oh, by the way, Sylvia took me to the dentist Friday, September 24, and I mapped out the route (a lot of good it did me on the Orthopedic trek) but this time I told her to mark an “L” on her left hand and an “R” on her right. Maybe I should have supervised her in that but I did remind her that the “L” went on her writing hand as she is left-handed. I sure hope I didn’t make a mistake by letting her mark her hands unsupervised. Oh well, if it was a mistake I’ll just have more fodder for the MAAS mill.

Next week's 10-04-2010 (#161) title: TBD