I thought I had a great plan for writing my blog post this month. I had scheduled several hours of sitting in a hospital waiting room. (No worries, everything went smoothly.) It seemed as though being trapped in a quiet room with nothing else to do would be the perfect place to knock out a few thoughts on writing.
Somewhere, someone who has spent time in a hospital waiting room is already laughing at my plan.
What was the problem? It was only mostly quiet. If the waiting room had been crowded, I could have easily tuned out the hum of overlapping voices. I only heard one voice at a time though. It wasn’t the same voice, only the same type of voice, the kind that doesn’t care if everyone around it hears every word.
I have the type of brain that starts spinning on whatever input it’s forced to receive, even when it’s supposed to be ignoring the intermittent loud voices to write about writing. I wasn’t listening when one woman told another about her visit to a shop run by Mennonites. I still heard her friend ask, “What’s a Mennonite?” My brain took the time to wonder how this second woman got to be 70 or so without ever hearing of Mennonites. My brain kept spinning as the first woman tried to explain that they are sort of like “those other people. It starts with an A.” The second woman immediately guessed, “Agricultural People?”
I was still trying to write about writing, but my brain completely stalled out at that point. It thought that guess was super strange. It also worried that if someone nearby could read my thoughts, would he be wondering how I got to be 70 or so without ever hearing of Agricultural People? I know I’m still more than two decades from turning 70. My brain knows I’ve been offered a senior discount in my 40s too often to count and couldn’t rule out the possibility I was way off on my guess of the other woman’s age. It was a little mean of my brain to remind me of that.
I tried to focus on something about writing.
Another female voice loudly proclaimed that she’d never forget the best pizza she’d ever had. She said it was covered in a pile of cheese, which she’d never cared for much. This confused my brain for a couple of obvious reasons. The woman’s friend, for some unfathomable reason, skipped the comment about liking something covered in something she didn’t like and only wanted to know about the crust. She asked if it was crispy or soft in the middle. Was it thick or thin? Could you fold it? The first woman couldn’t seem to remember anything about the crust. My brain was still spinning back to the start of the conversation I was trying not to hear when a phone rang.
It was a cell but with a very old-fashioned ring. This was fortunate. If it had sounded like anything else, I might have thought it was the fire alarm. I jumped so bad I momentarily levitated. When the old dude casually pulled it from his pocket on the third ring like it wasn’t the most jarring thing he’d heard in days, I suspected he was hard of hearing. I was therefore not surprised when he answered the phone by yelling into it. I was surprised when the first words out of his mouth were, “I’m doing pretty good. I went to a funeral yesterday.” My brain fought hard not to laugh at something that wasn’t remotely funny. Maybe I could have thought about writing if he had simply paused long enough to take a breath between those two sentences.
I didn’t get to write anything in all the hours I spent in
the waiting room. But I did leave with
assurance that real people will always be weirder than anyone I put in my
books. Especially that one who refers to
her brain as though it’s a separate entity.