Hot pink cane

June 12, 2011

Ventura today… finally! I’m sitting in bed eating my continental breakfast muffin from the hotel, drinking a cup of crappy coffee as I have nearly every morning for the past two and a half weeks. I know once I get into the grind at the hospital I will miss this, maybe even miss the desert… We shall see. Gheera gave up eating her food once I walked in with my plate of unhealthy pastries and has been staring at me for the past half hour in a creepy way from the floor. Now she’s moved to the bed and is staring across my lap at the plate on the night stand. I really don’t think she realizes she is not a human.

Speaking of humans, I have met some really, really sweet people on this trip. AND I stopped taking my surfboards off my car at night two days into the journey and no one has stolen them. (It was too much of a hassle.) My faith in humanity has been effectively restored. This morning was lovely when the stout Indian man at the front desk who had told me all about his daughter and her having just graduated high school and wanting to go to nursing school last night smiled at me excitedly when I walked into the breakfast area and asked how I slept. So precious! It is amazing how much a quick smile and genuine “good morning” can change your whole day. I wonder if that man knows how much that meant to me. I would definitely stay at this cheap Motel 8 again simply because of him.

This is a good time to transition to my story about Carol and her hot pink cane in Hurricane, Utah. This woman was an absolute trip and I’m pretty sure I may have been the only person to step in that visitor center in days. She spoke with a steady stream of consciousness and there were stretches of 5 to 10 minutes at a time where I wouldn’t have been able to get a word in if I’d wanted to, not that I wanted to; she was hilarious and did fine carrying the conversation on her own. There were three times that I had my fingers on the handle of the door to try to escape and she managed to lure me back into her lair with some new random story about the type of moccasins she felt that Jesus probably wore, based on a pair that was unearthed from 700 AD in that valley or something about where I should visit when I come back to Utah, and how the state has “more national parks than any other state in the union.”

This all started when my innocent self popped in to see if there was some place in the near vicinity I could check out for about an hour. When I asked her if there was anything cool to see, she asked how much time I had. I told her when I wanted to make it to Vegas by and she said, “No,” starred at me a second and just shook her head. For a moment it kind of weirded me out and I thought, oh man this women may be completely socially awkward; I need to get out of here fast, but that all quickly changed.

Short, fat and probably in her mid to late seventies, Carol’s very stubby grey and white peppered hair definitely gave the appearance that she gives herself haircuts. It was sticking up everywhere, one inch in some places, half an inch and everywhere in between in others. Her glasses hung from a beaded chain around her neck and her pink outfit matched her even more pink cane. She began to talk about her favorite places in Utah (she has two) but not before she asked me for what reason I was moving to California. “Are you gonna be an OB too?” she questioned after I explained residency. I told her I would like to have that as a part of my family medicine practice, yes. Well that opened a can of worms as she began to explain all about her OB and her c-section and how much she loved that man and about her epidural and how he didn’t understand how bad that headache hurt because he was a man but then years later, he called to apologize for not being more sympathetic because he had to get an epidural for some surgery and had the worst headache of his life and how she ran into him in the hospital when her son’s wife was giving birth but he was very old at that point and no longer practicing medicine and therefore couldn’t do her daughter-in-law’s delivery but in general, women OBs are better because women understand women’s bodies. It is amusing to me how people feel so comfortable divulging all of their medical history once they discover you are in the medical field. I heard more, trust me, but I will spare you the details.

So favorite place number one for Carol is a ghost town which is currently uninhabited but has gone through many cycles over the course of its history. Now it is owned by some company in the film industry and is used as a movie set for western scenes. Apparently part of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was filmed there. She said it’s just a really cool town and definitely worth the visit; I was convinced. Grafton is its name. It was much later in my time there, many conversation topics later, when I remembered she never told me what her second favorite spot is. I asked her and she simply said “Canyon lands.” I’m not exactly sure what she meant by that since I saw canyons all around in a bunch of different states but I will do some research. She then showed me a calendar of photos taken at Mesa Verde, something else she is particularly excited about.

After more random topics and calendars maps and books and artifacts, I finally (after my third attempt) made it out the door but she was still talking in the doorway as I walked down the ramp, asking me more questions. In response I told her I was traveling with my dog; she asked what kind and told me all about her shiatsu/Maltese mix, but instead of pronouncing it “shit-zu,” she said “sit-chu,” I think because she didn’t want to say the “shit” part. She also asked me what my faith is after I mentioned something about “my church.” I told her, “Um, protestant I guess, Christian… I don’t know, I just love the Lord.” She smiled and told me that that was wonderful and when she started job at the center they asked her if she was Mormon and she said, “Well why does that matter? Are you going to be teaching religion here?” She never told me if she is indeed LDS but eluded to it (this town was originally settled by those of Mormon faith so it wouldn’t surprise me; I imagine there is a huge LDS population there). She proceeded to explain that she believes God is inside all of us. She also showed me a painting in the museum, huge, that depicted Jesus with some sheep, holding a staff. She instructed me to walk past it, watching Jesus’ eyes, absolutely enthralled by the fact that the artist had painted it in such a way that if you keep your eyes, on His, they follow you as you walk. It was true! The same with his feet; they are pointed at you wherever you stand. She was absolutely delighted.

As I finally walked off she told me to tell my dog that she loves her; she explained that she loves all dogs and whether or not a person loves dogs tells a lot about that person. Her daughter-in-law does not and she is an “ornery” woman. Carol’s shiatsu/ maltese mix doesn’t like her daughter-in-law at all and dogs are a good judge of character. I smiled to myself, wondering if she told her daughter-in-law all this, waved goodbye and promised that if I return to Hurricane, Utah, I will come visit her.