Errands in a small town

The following post has no particular point.

The sky is hung with low, frothy clouds. The day is unnaturally dark and quite windy. The temperature outside was 27 degrees when I got out of bed; it is not yet above freezing.

At eight o'clock this morning, my mother took my brother and me into Bastrop. We had an appointment at the doctor's office. My brother and I were destined each to receive the final injection in a vaccination series we had begun this summer.

Our home is several miles outside of Bastrop. It sits along a farm road in countryside thick with juniper. A mile from our house, this farm road crosses Highway 71, which runs between Austin and Bastrop. Everybody uses 71; my family must use it to reach either city. Around rush hour, the intersection at which we turn from the farm road onto 71 is nearly impassable. The intersection sits on a hill and is controlled by only a stop sign.

This morning we saw the flashing lights of a fire truck as we approached this intersection. The fire truck looked like a relic of the 1960s; the local fire departments are still impoverished volunteer units. As we drew nearer to the intersection we realized that it was the scene of an accident. Assorted vehicles, including an ambulance and a wrecker, were parked on the grassy median of the highway. Two shivering sheriff's deputies stood in the crossover to direct traffic. Both of the officers wore brown uniform coats, and one wore a ski cap, but neither had gloves; one conspicuously blew into his cupped hands to warm them. Eventually he waved us on through the crossover, motioning us around the crippled gray minivan that still lay in the middle of the road. The van's front end was torn and crumpled, and its airbags had deployed, but the passenger compartment seemed quite intact. The engine compartment had absorbed most of the impact. I imagine the occupants were safe. It must have been an annoying morning for them, though.

A few minutes later we arrived in Bastrop. We found our way to the storefront that houses the medical clinic. A dozen doctors work in differnt offices in this clinc, which is located in a building that once housed the local Wal-Mart. The clinic has a large common waiting area into which several different offices open. We walked in through automatic doors, signed in at the relevant reception desk, and found seats in which to wait. I opened my Charles Williams Reader to the third chapter of Many Dimensions.

Across from us, I noticed, sat a rather strange couple. The woman was slim and dressed almost like a teenager in tan slacks and a denim jacket. The man was massive, hideous, and scruffy. He was in a pair of rather world-weary overalls. He was reading a copy of Good Housekeeping, balancing the magazine on what little remained of his lap after his three-tiered belly merged into it.

After a few minutes, a woman in late middle age also sat down nearby. Her long hair was a rather unlikely shade of red, and she wore heavy lipstick in an even brighter shade of the same color. I glanced at her as she arrived, then went back to my reading. Within a minute or two, however, I noticed a loud wheezing sound coming from her direction. Then a nurse passed by behind me. The woman cried out loudly, "It's my ribs! I need a sonogram on my ribs!" When she addressed the nurse by name and was addressed by name in turn, I gathered that she was a familiar figure at the clinic. Her strange manner led me to suspect that she might belong to a particular breed of mentally disordered individuals. The nurse tried to calm the lady down, assuring her that she would be treated soon. For a few minutes, the wheezing seemed to have stopped. Then the lady started to speak again but broke into a horrifying cough.

For a time, I reflected quietly on the unusual people one meets in small Texas towns. Then I realized that my mother had just become one of the unusual people. She was holding a rather noisy discussion with the receptionists. It seems some of our medical and insurance records had been misplaced again. Apparently an entire echocardiogram was unaccounted for. As my mother reiterated heatedly, this has happened quite a few times before. I sighed and slipped back into the world of Williams.

Finally a nurse stepped out of the office through a door behind me, calling for us. We followed her back into an examination room. She administered the shots quickly and painlessly, and promised to try to straighten out the confused paperwork.

While sitting in the examination room, I glanced through the open door toward the room across the hall. The door into that room was closed, but two young doctors or physician's assistants were consulting in hushed tones beside it. One of them put an ear to the door and listened for a moment. Both of them left, talking quietly. In a few minutes, both men returned. They opened the door and stepped inside. One asked cheerily, "So, who's been cussing out the radiology staff?" The nurse talking with us heard that and chuckled. It seems that they were attending the lady with the breathing problem.

On the way home, we stopped at the county courthouse briefly. The others waited in the van while I went inside. After a few minutes of trying to figure out why nobody in the courthouse seems to have any job title posted visibly, I learned that the new voter registration cards are not expected to be sent out by the secretary of state until the middle of the month. Inconvenient.