Patient

Today we sat in the surgeon's waiting room 55 minutes after the scheduled appointment time, missing almost an hour of hula, the last hula session of 2013. Our conversation ran the gamut from Bill Cosby's greeting for a very late doctor: No. Sorry. You can't come in. You have to wait out there till I'm ready...to Seinfeld's, Let's see, 55 minutes, rounded up to an hour of my time, that'll be $125 (I'm cheap. Those are teacher substitute rates from 1999).

30 minutes past time, we were saying, Okay, another five minutes and that's it. Five minutes came and one of us went to the secretary, who said, Oh he just came in, he'll be right there. 45 minutes into the empty, soulless closet with the Thai batik of a man playing a flute to a small herd of goats, we decided to walk out and ask for the $30 copay back. Besides, a friend had recommended a surgeon on O'ahu who would most likely do the consult and the surgery on the same day. After all, this is a small thing, an inguinal hernia brought on by coughing, or was it chainsawing the Formosan koa a few weeks back? or hefting the first volume of the OED looking for Lopate's use of the word agon, referring to Emerson's striving for moderation... The image of me busting a gut cutting back the invasive species on our five acres sounds way good. The portrait of a word searching fool holds a weird sort of glamour. But serious, hard-core coughing points the way, truth be told. 65 is old(er) and I'm still figuring out how to act my age.

54 minutes and 59 seconds into this psychically draining, dehydrating, sensory-depriving experience, my mild-mannered persona actually slipped and I announced I was leaving, Let's go!

A split second later Doctor Harry Wong knocks on the door. I love it. We're stuck in his cubicle for almost an hour having a one couple encounter crisis and he knocks. Can I come in?

Why is it that 55 minutes after the meter's needle has moved from Nice, Easy-Going Pacifists through green, yellow and out the other side of the red zone into Unpredictable Anarchists, Doctor Wong comes in and we're all smiles, shaking hands? In no time at all, one of us drops his drawers with complete, utter trust in a perfect stranger. See how we suffer gladly the waiting, the inconvenience, a disdainful regard for our time, because...because one day in the near future he'll be holding the knife. And for this, he will be richly rewarded.

Trial by patience, I suppose, on the Hero's journey. How did we do? Hobbit-ish, I think, grumbling all the way, without giving up. But really, it's so easy to get caught in the cynical drift of the victim's undertow. That's the real cause of a hernia, isn't it? The whole world's a heavy thing when you try to move it.