Point of View: The Bottom Line
I told Jen Landes, who’s conducting a survey as to whether males are more inclined than females to put flat lids on their coffee, and whether, conversely, females are more inclined than males to put on raised ones, that she could put me down as a raised-lidder.
I generally don’t participate in surveys, but I thought I should stand up and be counted when it came to this one on liddership.
“Of course,” I added, “that I go for the raised lids may be owing to the fact that I’m older now and have less testosterone.”
I’m not unhappy about this seepage; I think it has increasingly connected me to life, to its infinite variety, as well as to its often baffling vagaries.
Here today, gone tomorrow . . . flat lidders, raised lidders. . . . I hope there will come a time when we can get beyond what seems to divide us and celebrate our mutual affinities. (Bearing in mind, of course, that the raised-lidders were right!)
In the end, you’ve got to laugh, if only to keep from crying. And so I said to the nurse, while being elaborately prepared for a colonoscopy at the hospital the other day, that I thought they were piling it on a bit. “When these screenings were done at the doctor’s office,” I said, “it seemed like you just went in and they’d say, ‘Bend over.’ ”
“Bottom line, they’ll say the same thing here,” she said, hooking me up to an IV.
Soon it was over and I was told I was fine — at least until Health Republic’s “explanation of benefits” came in the mail.
“I’ll see you when I’m 80 then!” I said, on the way out the door with Mary, cheered by the thought that I’d not have to sip two bottles of magnesium citrate for another five years — on a par in my dread department with having to cover another U.S. Open at Shinnecock, where again, I presume, I’ll have to scope out the holes from beyond the ropes.
It’s all connected, you see!