WHEN LIFE HANDS YOU A PETRI DISH

On the schedule today is a visit to my cardiologist. And I feel that I am ahead of the game, because there is every reason to believe that indeed I do have a heart.
Do not scoff, you cynics.

What's more, I have it in several languages.


心臟病學醫生
['sam jong beng hok yi sang']

Not entirely by coincidence, one of those languages is Cantonese. Seeing as my current general practitioner, the person formerly in that role, their office staff (including little nurse Mak), all the people in the pharmacy upstairs, the doctor I saw twice over a decade ago when I had strep throat, the kind ladies who jabbed me four out of five times with Covid vaccine stuff, everybody who has given me a vaccination in the last four years, AND my cardiologist are all Cantonese Americans, it is good that I am fairly conversant in their grandparents or great grandparents tongue. It is, in fact, the lingua franca of the neighborhood where I tend to hang out.

And that is where I shall be having dumplings after my appointment is over. Because he isn't at Chinese Hospital, I shall have to brave the wilds of further San Francisco where the rabid buffalo roam amid the headhunters and cannibals, and it will take me at least an hour to get back. So just in time for lunch.

Medical appointments are something to which I look forward. Trekking through the great urban outback where there are entitled yuppies and crazed drug addicts, bums, unique individuals, karens, and people with chips on their shoulders, isn't.

There is too much of the rest of America there.

You know, those people.



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