The waiting room
Getting old means giving others control of our clocks
Baby boomers and their elders represent an age group whose destiny has boiled down to the art of waiting. Like it or not, we must resign ourselves to standing in line for prescription pick-up, sitting in doctors’ waiting rooms and anticipating phone calls with news of our latest tests or newest appointments.
Sometimes we wait on behalf of family members, friends or neighbors who have called on us for transportation or support.
Meanwhile, medical professionals take charge of our clocks, gauging the importance of our questions and needs, making sure that their precious minutes add up. As for those who wait, we must make do with stale office magazines and/or the blaring of much too-loud TV sets that cannot be turned down or turned off.
If our eyes grow tired, we can rest them on office art exhibits: tiny cottages covered with vines, surrounded by sheep and shepherds; glorious waterfalls that suggest the cool and the clean; bad copies of Van Gogh’s sunflowers or starry nights. These cliches can divert our attention for only so long.
Some precocious 70year-olds show off their modernity by tinkering with smart phones or i- Pads. Aging librarians fire up their Kindles. Old men read the local sports page, even though everything they read sounds pretty much the same as what they read yesterday, or the day before.
Every now and then, we glance at some smartly dressed older woman who still cares enough to care for her hair and nails. More often, patients come as they are, wearing soft shoes, soft pants and soft tops, all the easier to manage during the coming unveiling of bodily imperfections.
In our physical therapy suite, the minimum age seems to be 60 or so. This cohort is reporting for repair of muscles after knee or hip surgery, helped along by canes or walkers. The young, hip therapists can only imagine what it is like when legs and arms refuse to follow the lead of the brain.
With nowhere else to look and nothing to do but bear the discomfort of chairs covered in what seems like linoleum, waiting sends the mind wandering. We can try to remember the names of our mother’s 12 siblings, along with the dates of their births and deaths. Or we can call up memories of working at G.C. Murphy’s five-and-dime for 50 cents an hour, or buying our first pair of what we once called “dungarees.”
It is sometimes best to leave the mundane world of waiting by entering an imaginary world. A dental patient who brings along English poetry can survive the wait and the sound of drilling by picturing the “cherries hung with snow” in Housman’s “Loveliest of Trees” or by listening as “small gnats mourn” in Keats’ “To Autumn.”
Other waiters might find escape in a new mystery novel, an old Jane Austin story or even “War and Peace,” enduring the weight of the words to face down Napoleon with Prince Andrei or dance at the ball with Natasha.
That old possum, T.S. Eliot, at the very end of “The Wasteland,” speaks proudly of “these fragments I have shored against my ruin.” He shows and tells us that we must create riches in our minds to nourish our souls when the outer world offers nothing but despair, distraction and disarray.
Donna Lund, a writer living in Upper St. Clair, is the author of a collection of essays titled “WOE to WIT to WISDOM” (donnajlund@hotmail.com).