If Life’s Got ‘Ya Down, Pause For A Milkshake

 

 

By Dan Bodine

Milkshake? When’s the last time you stopped on the way home and bought a milkshake? Anyone?

Well, the idea just seemed right in a recent moment for me here in the Sun City!

We were coming from a doctor’s office visit on Saturday a week ago, about 1:00 p.m., when I told Noemi (she was driving), I felt like I needed a chocolate milkshake.

Just outta the blue! An ol’ defensive mechanism had reared its head.

That doctor’s visit had been the sixth that week — e.g., different doctors; every day! A freaking record for me!

All lined up (Or that’s what Noemi and I were thinking, anyway) after the VA found a small amount of blood in my urine once. So yeah, I might’ve been thinking I had some serious health problems, to go with all that concern, too.

All this culminated in a colonoscopy early yesterday morning at Del Sol Medical Center here — to determine, too, more about my chronic constipation, e.g.

And damn if’n I didn’t sail right through it with nothing but one small polyp found. It was cut out and routinely sent to a lab; Doc said not to worry about it!

“Come back in 10 years!”  was his message. (Hee, hee! Guess I got me some more time to work on this crazy notion of growing a garden under El Paso’s hot sun; and in its dry, caliche soil, too.)

But inside me in this moment — back on that Saturday, e.g. — Jethro, my child alter ego state (the little brat), had been screaming his hurt child feelings at me ’cause he wasn’t getting enough attention.

[My thinking, remember, goes back to Dallas, heavily influenced by years of transactional analysis group therapy centered on the popular book then, Games People Play. And Jethro has never liked being pigeon-holed since.

“Yeah, some damn Golden Age this is turning out to be for us!” his gripe was. You’re [along with your health insurance] puttin’ gold coins into half the doctors’ pockets in town! This ain’t what we retired for!“

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That’s when the chocolate milkshake popped into my head. Whiny Jethro (indeed, my inner child ego state) needed to be silenced. A milkshake did it.

Oh, our national health system is wonderful, best in the world, probably, let me quickly add here.

And as the son of the late Albert Ralph and Ruby Lee Bodine (both Dust Bowl survivors, too, to boot), I’d never decry the system — except, e.g., when reckoning these appointments!

It seems like each specialist wants either to be absolutely certain of his/her decision, or wants to share the insurance market spoils with colleages.

Or, simply get backup agreements on decisions already made. Colonoscopys are no easy walks-in-the-park, for sure. Thank God for Del Sol and all of America’s modernized health care systems.

Indeed, life in some of those infrequent moments — e.g., to pessimists like Jethro in the world (which by far are not unique through our sands of time) — tend to mimic, actually, the words of the great novelist Robert Penn Warren in his Pulitzer Prize 1946 novel, “All the King’s Men.”

In a reflection on that era’s human nature, he described arguably the worst of mankind. Or was it the most ostentatious? Whatever, the words were firebrick red!

“Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud,” Warren wrote. “There is always something.” [My emphasis on that last sentence.]

Indeed, something blatantly akin to today’s Trumpian politics, some may say. But not me.

Warren’s protagonist driving his script was none other than “Kingfish,” afterall, the famous nickname for an actual Huey P. Long — “the charismatic, populist governor and U.S. Senator from Louisiana during the Great Depression.

In Robert Penn Warren’s novel, “Huey Long serves as the primary real-life inspiration for the ruthless, bombastic protagonist.”

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But I’ve gone beyond a simple rant I felt at the time leading to that milkshake.

In fact, when everything’s been said and done, this seems just another “good chapter” on being “old” (and especially a military veteran) in the U.S. now. The government is still honoring its military promises.

So relax, Jethro. There could be a lot more chocolate milkshakes out there!

 

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