I figure speaking at an event with the words “World” and “Congress” in the title means I get to buy a new garment. So on Tuesday, I went to my local clothier for a really top-notch shirt. He looked at my coat and ties, picked one out, and told me the stripes are pronounced enough to tell everyone I’m the latest young hotshot, but restrained enough to put it respectfully. Here’s our post-purchase banter:
Ditch: “…and I think I’ll be back soon for pants. You warned me not to buy clothes in malls, and I did anyway, and the seam opened at the pocket after a week.”
Stitch: “Yeah, you know, I just can’t remember the last time I went to a discount superstore for thyroid surgery, either.”
On the top of Google’s listing for weird emails today:
Dear Father,
Bad news: When I set the tenth Sunday after Pentecost as the first day for the Kinkoriites to sing the Propers, I’d forgotten that my boss is expecting me to attend the World Congress on Thyroid Cancer in Toronto. So I probably can’t make it. I am raking south-western Ontario for a replacement cantor for you. Very sorry for the mess.
Certainly, the chief purpose of Friday abstinence is penance, but let’s not forget the collateral benefits of leisure and luxury. If you don’t know what I mean, then sit on your front porch next Friday at supper time with a loaf of bread, a piece of cheese, an apple and a mug of beer, and eat them slowly. Here is real leisure: there was no cooking, and there will be no dishes to wash. And here is luxury: at the end of a day without beef, you remember just how delicious an apple tastes. A good Friday meal is not a wallowing in culinary gloom, but a reminder of the extravagance of God’s smaller gifts, in the light of which you can see the bigger ones more clearly. No one enjoys the filet mignon so well as the one who revels in the potato next to it.
The best thing about working in a head and neck oncology clinic is meeting patients with missing eyes, throats, ears and even noses, whose voices sound like well-controlled burps, who cough thick mucus from holes in their chests, and who are more visibly cheerful to be alive than I am.
Then there was the aboriginal woman I picked up during paramedic preceptorship a few blocks from the notorious intersection of Hastings and Main in Vancouver. We found her lying in pain half on, half off her bed, surrounded by well used crack pipes, roaches, empty prescription bottles and a brand new box of needles she could only have stolen from a hospital. A stream of limp complaint poured slowly from her mouth. Her back hurt. Her head hurt. Her stomach hurt. She felt weak. She couldn’t walk upright. In the ambulance, I started a brief medical history, but ran out of paper before it was half done. She had diabetes, hypertension, depression and asthma. She was in an abusive relationship. “My kitney’s are no koot. My heart’s no koot either. My liver’s no koot.” (”Big surprise,” I thought.) “But my onions are OK.” My pen hovered over the paper as I pondered what organs she could possibly be calling onions, and I looked up just in time to catch her sharing a knowing grin with my preceptor. She nodded in my direction. “Blondy’s a little slow on the uptake.” The car errupted in laughter at my expense, and we traded jokes for the rest of the trip to St. Paul’s, most of them too off-colour to post on a Catholic blog. We left her to entertain the ER nurses, and for the rest of the shift, no one called me by my Christian name: ‘Blondy’ was more than sufficient.
In a feat of ipsiflagellant Narcissism that shouldn’t be possible in only four words, the seemingly innocent phrase “free gift with purchase” manages both to restate itself unnecessarily and to contradict itself. Which makes it a redundant oxymoron. The species remains on the endangered list, but shows signs of vitality that give preservationists reason to hope for an eventual recovery.