Escape from Del Boca Vista

So were back in New Jersey from Del Boca Vista.  It’s Monday morning and I get up early “before the hacking” and make my escape back to Work...not that I didn’t have a great time with my family listening to grinding teeth and wondering when my turn at the clinic would come… but let’s not forget, it IS all about me.

I get in my jeep, drive down the street and notice the engine light is on.  I pull over and read the manual.  Says if the light is on, drive to a dealership for immediate inspection…can be a number of things from bad gas to a new transmission.  It says if the light is blinking, to stop immediately and call Triple A…or the engine could explode.  

I’m thinking to myself, “YOU GOTTA BE KIDDING ME!!!”  This is just not happening!  Time execute Plan B…I will NOT be deterred, “I am going to make it out!”  I drive back to my house dust off my 1978 Raleigh 10 speed, fill the tires with air, throw it in the back of the jeep.

This is the same bike I dusted off two summers ago when gas was about $4 a gallon and I decided…after a couple of adult beverages, that I was NOT going to, “Pay the Man” any longer.  Instead, I’d ride a bike to the train station and stand up for what was right.  I went out and bought myself a $75 knapsack that holds a laptop and I was ready for action.  There was only one problem: From my house, the dealership is about 4 miles almost completely down hill…like very downhill.  It was great in the morning…almost too chilly.  But coming home at 7PM in the dead of summer, it was a completely different story going up hill.  By the time I made it back to my house I came about as close to dialing 911 as I ever have.  I developed a bruised sternum which I earned as my heart was working overtime trying to blast itself out of my chest.

You’d be amazed how quickly you can forget these things.  My rationale for giving it another try was: It's cooler now and I don't have the laptop strapped to my back.  That and I have the sound of hacking ringing in my ears…my kids have the flu now too.  (I’m extremely sympathetic)  So I drop the car off and start pedaling back up the hill for home.  Funny thing was (actually not so funny) as much as it was cooler out…the incline was still at about 45 degrees, and not surprisingly, I’m still in terrible shape.  The only way I could distract myself from the pain was by cursing myself out.

It only gets better.

So now it’s about 7PM, I’m home, and I’m going to go pick up my car.  Turns out only a couple of hoses were cracked, so I figured I got off easy.  Sure... the mechanic informed me that it appears I’ve been driving for a couple of weeks without brakes, so now $700 later…I’m ready for the road.

I let my wife know that I’ll just drive the bike back down and drive the car back…no big deal.  She tells me I’m crazy and that she’ll drive me down.  Sir Valiant insists that she stay home and get well.  I explain that I’ve driven down in the early morning hours when it’s fairly dark and I’ll be just fine.  I should have updated my will.

I was wrong.  It’s much darker at night…much much darker.

I head out of my neighborhood and notice that it’s kind of difficult to pick up the wide speed bumps in the road.  And this is with all of the houses having their front porch lights on.  I head downhill into blackness.  No street lights, big trees everywhere…can’t see 5 feet in front of me...going Mach9.

Now I’m cursing TARP.  With all the infrastructure improvements going on I have to think that as much as these roads are narrow AND they don’t have streetlights, they must have been repaved recently.   Wrong again.

You’d be surprised how scary a pot hole is in the pitch black when you hit it going 70 miles an hour on a ten speed.  What’s even more fun is that when people see you coming in the opposite direction they all have the same reaction.  They put on their hi-beams.  This by itself is completely blinding, but then when they pass, your pupils are the size of a pinhead.  So if you think you couldn’t see anything before, now you might as well be opossum.

Got home, after I stopped shaking I informed my wife she was right and we won’t be trying that again.

So in the morning I almost had a heart attack from exhaustion and at night I managed to scare the crap out of myself. 

It’s sad when you look forward to a commute into the city.

What I did on my Vacation to Del Boca Vista

On the plane ride down to Florida, my wife sat next to two major germaphobes.   They had the industrial size jug of hand sanitizer, the masks…the works.  They were problematic in that they were also having issues with other passengers in the seats in front of them.  The people in front of them were trying to change seats so they could sit with family members.  Even though it wasn’t affecting the germaphobes, they didn’t like it.  One of their comments that became the catch phrase of our trip was, “So, what, are we all changing seats now!?!”  We got a kick out of them and naturally came up with a variety of jokes about them.

"Judge not lest ye be judged" says the Good Book - and my wife says she will never be judgmental about germaphobes again.  The Wednesday afternoon we got down to Florida, she came down with the Flu.  Good old “H1N1.” 8 days later, she still had a fever.

"Once Upon a Mattress" - What made it even more fun is that my Mom's condo is…non-large (Lovya Mom).  We slept on a 30+ year old pullout couch…mattress.  While it was on the pull out frame the bar that stuck in your lower back was way too painful, so we just put the mattress on the tile floor.   My Mom had gone out and bought a blow-up mattress for my kids, but didn't realize that you need to charge the little electric blower for 12 hours before the first use (It won’t run if you just plug it into the wall outlet…we tried).  So...at 9 p.m., I wound up going door to door hoping to borrow another pull-out couch mattress from one of my Mom’s neighbors.  (Absolutely great fun making new friends with strangers well into their 80's, all in their jammers.  It was also indescribable fun finding the treasures that had accumulated over the years under the cushions - unfortunately, no money!) Of course, back home our pullout couch mattress is pristine, I’ve often thought of eating off it.

Mission accomplished, I dragged another mattress back to my Mom's place and now we have two-pull out mattresses next to one another.  All four of us are together, with my wife coughing all night long, and the kids grinding teeth.  And for whatever reason, older folks in Florida do not believe in putting air conditioning on...it must be a religious thing!  I’m lying there sweltering, thinking to myself, “Maybe I’m dreaming, could this really be happening?  Or maybe I died, and I’m in purgatory.”

Also my Mom's not big on TV, so there wasn't one to watch…which my wife really appreciated since she was too sick and wiped out to read or do anything else.

At one point I come up with a great idea.  I’ll take the kids to the beach… and escape for a while.  The kids wind up arguing at each other constantly…until my head exploded.  I erupt like Vesuvius, and explain that if either one of them opens their mouths again for the rest of the afternoon, the other will become an only child.

At this point I’m getting very depressed because I know my Mom does not keep alcohol in the apartment, and I’m too embarrassed to tell her I need to go out buy an economy size jug of vodka.  I’m thinking maybe I’d now qualify for medical use marijuana. 

Think we’re having fun yet?  It gets better. The day before we leave my daughter stepped on a fire ant colony. Next time I'll send postcards from the clinic. 

The Juicer

Health Tip of the Week  - Never Buy a New “Juicer”, immediately go out and buy $93 of fruit and vegetables, test out most of it in one sitting, and take your dog for a long walk.

We're not talking about the old one-amp unit from commercials of years' past.  We're talking about today's technology, a Quad Core 6.7 GHz Engine that can produce enough power to light up half of Scotland.

So the unit arrives and we rush out and buy what I believe is the required $93 dollars worth of fruit and vegetables to power the unit.  People at the King's supermarket thought we were crazy.  We get home and now the problem is:  Where do you store $93 worth of fruit and vegetables?  This problem quickly liquefies. As we get caught up in the excitement of juice-amania, we decide to try it all.  We're mixing carrots and apples and pears; blueberries, strawberries and pineapples.  Then, why not all together.  Then papaya, mangos and celery.  Then again, why not all together.  We’re having a great time with our new toy.  Eventually we finish.  At this point my molars are swimming and my eyeballs are orange, we're on a Major Juice High.  My wife looks at me and says, "Ya know, I think the dog needs to go out, and I don't think he's had a walk all day."  I think to myself, “I’m so juiced up right now, I’m probably like two steps away from becoming the Incredible Hulk…and I don’t need the Gama rays.  I could probably walk half way around the globe with all this healthy stuff running through my veins.” 

I grab the leash, and naturally being the good neighbor that I am, I grab a small blue doggie cleanup bag, just in case.  Only because I have a digestive track that will someday be donated to the Smithsonian…you would think that at the very moment I touched the blue bag that something would have clicked in my head,…but unfortunately nothing did, and I walked out the door.

So I get about 3/4s of a mile from my house and start to feel some pressure, unmistakable pressure.  I take a couple more steps and it hits me.  I’m in real trouble.   

The feeling was kind of like the movie "Training Day," where towards the end, Denzel Washington leaves Ethan Hawke, the rookie, with the gang members whose job it is to kill him.  They manage trick him into giving them his gun and when he realizes he's done, it was one of those terrible hopeless sinking feelings.

There’s now an unholy war going on in my lower quadrant.  Even the dog’s senses are on overload, I’m sure I’m imagining it but I could swear he was giving me a look that said something like, “What were you thinking and what just happened to the atmosphere?”

But like Ethan, under a lot of pressure, I decide not to give up.  The downside is way too ugly.  And I don’t want to have to move out of the neighborhood.

I turn and head home.  I'm making decent time, but mentally beating myself up the whole way for being so sensible about drinking more than my fair share of $93 of juice.   You see the rest of my family had enough with just part of one cup of each brew.  I naturally didn’t want this life giving nectar to go to waste, so I'd finish theirs.  I did cut myself some slack because at one point during one of the juicing experiments I almost asked my wife, "What do you think would happen if we put an onion in it?"

I'm getting close to home and thinking, "Okay, I can do this.  Just hang tough... real tough."  Then disaster struck.  I look ahead and see a neighbor coming towards me and he’s walking his dog.  His dog is a dog that mine really likes... which happens to be just about every dog in the neighborhood.  Our dog is a Golden Retriever, and if he weren't a dog, he'd probably be mayor.  My neighbor is a nice enough guy but can be kind of chatty.  Trying not to be rude (in more ways than one), I engage in what I hope is a short conversation of un-pleasantries.  At one point he looks at me and can see that a trickle of sweat is streaming down both of my temples.  He asks me, "Steve, it's 37 degrees outside, and you're sweating - are you OK?"  I tell him I probably have something very contagious coming on, and better be on my way. 

Of course as we get back to our yard, my dog decides he needs to go.  I look at him as if he's stuck a knife in my back.   In desperation, I throw the blue bag at him and tell him to clean up after himself. It's every man or dog for himself at this point.  I race into the house….

I’ll only say this, I’ve brought new meaning to the technical term “Systems Purge.”

"6 inches is the new 9 inches" or "Catch & Release"

Growing up I was always a worm and bobber fisherman.  One Summer I was elevated into the ranks of the elite “Fly Fisherman.”  It happened after I sat in bumper-to-bumper traffic for over two hours as I tried to get from the GW Bridge to my studio apartment in Brooklyn Heights.  I was so frustrated that I had to call someone, and the only person I could think to call since it was after midnight was my oldest friend Mike who lived in California.  He said, Steve, do you know what you need?  I asked if it had to be legal.  He said a “Fly fishing trip to Idaho.”  Some place very far from traffic and where the Rainbow Trout outnumber people by about 10 to 1.  I’m sold and jump into action.  I race out to the store and buy the waders.   I go to my dad’s house where he’s got this Fly Fishing Pole that’s been sitting in a very nice wood veneer box since I can remember. As it turns out, one of the grandfather’s friends gave it to my Dad when he was a kid.  It’s a real bamboo fly-fishing pole, and it’s never been used.  Probably if I were to have taken it to the Antique’s Road Show, I could have set some valuation record for fishing polls.  That wasn’t meant to be though. 

I arrive in Idaho-Big Sky Country, Fresh Air, it’s Wonderful.  We head for the river (it’s a very tall state, you can drive for hours). I’m envisioning large trout fighting each other to jump onto my hook.  That wasn’t exactly the case. 

We’ll forget about the mind-bending tangles and knots I created that brought Mr. Patience to new heights of screaming frustration.  No, first there was the issue of learning how to cast with a fly-fishing pole.  You see unlike a regular fishing pole that has a heavy bobber on the end of the line to assist with casting, the fly pole and line is a completely different animal.  There are no weights on the end of the line. (What, no Bobber?)  As a matter of fact, it’s the exact opposite.  You want the end of the line to be as light as possible to allow the fake fly to lie on the water and fool the fish.  The way you get the line out there is by continually letting out line as you make forward and backward motions with your pole.  I’m getting the hang of it quickly, my technique seems to work well.  Then, unfortunately, I lost control.  I kept letting out line and couldn’t stop myself.  Now I have about two miles of line flying through the air and I have to keep going.  It’s kind of like a ponzi scheme.  You know its eventually going to collapse in your face, but you’re addicted and have to keep feeding it.  At one point as I’m in this crazed whirling of the line back and forth, I feel something hit my nose.  I’ve got a lot up in the air at this point and don’t think too much of it.  It wasn’t until after I had flung the pole forward that I thought to myself, (mind you this thought process is happening in micro-seconds) “What if that was the hook that hit my nose?  And what if it’s still there?” 

Too late…Inertia has caught up with my line and the hook on the end of it.  The same hook that is now lodged in one of the pores on the side of my nose.  As the tidal wave of line catches up with the hook in my nose, I have the unique opportunity to understand how a fish feels when he’s hooked and being reeled in.  As we leave for the day I suggest to my fishing buddies that we stop off and get me a complimentary tatoo to go with my nose piercing.

And a last bit of embarrassment:  It’s “catch and release” so if you want proof of your catch, you need to take a picture.  I caught one fish on our second day, but was too lazy to take my camera that day.  Now it’s the last day, so I have the camera and I’m ready.  The Great Fisherman that I am, I catch nothing.  At the end of the day, I see a shiny silver looking thing stuck in the thickets in the middle of the river.  I’m guessing it’s a can of some sort and I think to myself, well that stinks that someone would ruin this pristine environment by littering.  So I wade out to get it.  I look down in the thickets and see it’s actually a large rainbow trout, but he’s dead.  He’s in great shape, looks like he might have just had a heart attack or something.  So I scoop him up with my net, get out my camera, and snap a shot.  

With that my friend Mike comes walking by, looks at me and says, “Well Steve, I guess technically you did catch it.” 

How I Cracked My Ribs...Again

I wish I could say I did it while skiing down a challenging mogul

run....but that's not even close to what happened.

We’re going to the Pennsylvania mountains for a week of skiing…. on the Saturday morning we're getting ready to leave, my wife suggested that we bring the two cats with us...along with the large hairy Golden Retriever.  In a moment of insanity I said, "Yeah, why not."  

So I go out into the garage and dig out the one cat carrier we have.  Now I need to get another one (being that I’m now the proud owner of two cats) at the ridiculously overpriced store in town.  

I can feel my temperature beginning to boil because as usual, I’m in a major hurry and this set of activities is going to delay lift-off…and as is the usual case, it’s for absolutely no reason at all.  I’m just in a hurry and making a conscious decision to torture myself.

“Isn’t it Fascinating! “

I opt for another front loader similar to the one we already have. (Surprise, it’s the least expensive model they have.) I chose wrong. We were able to get Jack (who can be ornery) into the old carrier by putting a greenie in and closing the door behind him.  Jill who is generally sweet as pie became a she-demon.  (Three transfusions later, the doctors tell me that with time and some plastic surgery the scars won't be that noticeable.)

Now I’m in an absolutely perfect mood.  I have to go back to the boutique pet store, return my initial purchase and buy a top loader carrier.  Naturally the new unit I need costs over $80 dollars.  I did mention that one of the selling points my family used in acquiring these cats was that they were free!

Once we got up to the PA Mountains, I decided it would be a good idea to fold down the back seat of the minivan to make it easier to get at the ski equipment for the week.  Fortunately or Unfortunately I remembered that I packed two small snow shovels under the back seat...so they'd need to come out before collapsing the seat.

Instead of taking the extra 20 seconds to walk around the side of the

mini-van, and open a side door to remove them, I decided that I'd just reach over the back seat from the back of van and pull them out that way.  One of my many miscalculations of the week was that I forgot that I'm less than 6 feet tall and have relatively normal size arms.

I couldn't reach the shovels.  So again, I refuse to walk around the van; but now I'm imagining I have the flexible body of a twelve year old.  I position the lower portion of my rib cage on the top of the back seat, my body is now parallel to the ground and I reach over to pull the shovels out.  I get one shovel out (falsely reinforcing my notion that this was a good idea), but the other shovel is stuck.  At this point I'm totally committed to this plan, there is absolutely no way that I'm backing out.  (Let’s forget about the fact that at this point I'm totally frustrated and p*ssed out of my mind)  Then in a fit of rage I yank and yank on the handle of the shovel and felt what can best be described as one of my ribs buckling or crumbling.  Now I’m thinking to myself, “Oh Cr*p, I didn’t really just do that?  The Mrs. is going to be really pleased…again.”  But I got the shovel!

Hurt ribs can be a funny thing.  From past experience, they generally don't  hurt that bad right off the bat.  It doesn’t hit home until you try doing something difficult, like tying your shoes. 

I didn't start feeling any discomfort until that night.  I had some problems breathing after having a large meal.  Pain didn't show up until the next day… when it started snowing. I found that if I shovel in one direction no pain.  If I switch hands, it felt like Mohammed Ali connected with a left hook to my rib cage.  It snowed for 6 days straight.  When all was said and done we had over 3 feet of snow.  

Adding to my luck, I caught a family member's cold mid week.  So sneezing and nose blowing became unbelievably painful events. What's really fun is when you get into a sneezing fit and you rifle off 3 or 4 sneezes in a row.  The good news was that when I came to, I had no recollection of what happened.

Good Friends Golf Together (Famous 3 Stoogies Poster)

I don’t have any friends that are good enough to golf with me.  There are good reasons for this.  You know you’re golf-challenged when:

You’re out with your friends and after teeing off for the 3rd time, you hear, “God you suck.”  You turn around and one of your friends says to you, “Did I say that out loud?”

The first time I played golf I was about 16.  When the day was over the older brother of one of my friends picked us up.  He asked us what we had shot.  When I told him a 169, he looked at me unsympathetically and said, “Steve, you wasted your money.”

One time I was invited/forced to play in a charity golf outing where they paired a Golf Pro with everyone’s foursome.  Our pro was giving all kinds of helpful advice to everyone in our group…but me.  When I asked him what advice he had for me, he just looked at me in a confused and perplexed way and said, “With you, we’d have to start from scratch on every aspect of your game…just keep doing what you’re doing for today.”

When you’re in sales it’s kind of taken for granted that you play golf and you’re pretty good at it.  There are exceptions to every rule. When people ask me, “But don’t you like it?  I have a pat answer, “If I want aggravation, I’ll commute into the city on New Jersey Transit.”  Don’t get me wrong, I love the concept of golf: Fresh Air, Sunshine, Exercise, Camaraderie…but all of that goes down the toilet as soon as you have to swing at the little white ball and pray that it goes somewhere reasonable…which 9 times out of 10 it does not.  Maybe if a golf ball was the size of a melon that would be helpful.

I had a traumatic golf experience early on.  I was just starting out in sales and my company was a sponsor in the Ken Venturi Guiding Eyes Golf Classic.  I was able to get two high level VPs from my customer (neither of which I had ever ever met before) to agree to go.  I’m not sure what I was thinking because I was almost exclusively a miniature golf player.  It’s about a week before the tournament and I’m taking a subway downtown with a co-worker Don who was pairing our company’s executives with sales reps and customers.  Our head VP was guy named Bob Tway senior. His son was Bob Tway Jr. who at the time was the number 2 ranked golfer in the world.  Bob was from Atlanta and I didn’t know him at all.  Don is having problems finding a group to put Bob into.  He asks me who I have going.  When I tell him, he says, “Well that settles it, Bob’s golfing with you.” This was the first time I questioned my hearing.  (Next, picture Ralph Kramdon studdering in the Honeymooners’ “Chef of the Future” episode).  Don tries to calm me down and tells me that as long as I don’t do anything “Off the Wall”, I’ll be just fine.  (Now I’m thinking to myself, “Don, could you be a little more specific around your definition of “Off the Wall?” You’re talking to a guy that went to see the movie Animal House “in the theatre” no less than 8 times.)

So, for the next seven days I found a way to play golf each and every day.  The last day before the tournament, I decide to get a “lesson”, to tune myself up.  I’m feeling pretty good about myself, and figure with one of two pointers I could be a contender.  The golf pro is a jerk and has no patience (to be fair, even if he had an ocean of patience it wouldn’t have helped).  He decides he’s going to change EVERYTHING about my golf game (Huh?).  When I leave, I’m a complete mess.

It’s the day of the tournament.  I arrive at a very elite golf course (which I have no business being at), and look around.  There are a number of blind golfers who are putting on impressive clinics.  I think to myself that maybe I should have brought a cane and some dark sunglasses and I could fake my way through the day…but then I remember: I have to golf with customers and the VP of my Division whose son is the number 2 golfer in the world.  Could the crap I’m in be any deeper?  I start to rationalize: If I’m going to ruin my career better that I do it quickly and crash & burn in one day.

At the last minute, they decide to make the tournament a best ball scramble and my life has been saved.  So now after I hit, I no longer have to play my own ball.  What’s even better, they also had caddies chasing down everyone’s lost balls.  I leveraged them extensively and by the end of the day, I could hear the caddies cursing in the distance when I’d step up to tee off.

We finish our 18 holes, I’m completely worn out and just want to get back to the clubhouse for the after golf festivities.  We end our day on the 14^th hole about as far away from the clubhouse as you can get.  The three guys I’m playing with come up with a brilliant idea, “What do you say we play our own balls back to the club house.”  (At this point I’d rather be lit on fire than play any more golf.  I’m crushed; I had done a YoMan’s job for the last 5 or 6 hours in the extreme heat.  I had held it together, didn’t embarrass myself too much, and at this point my mind was fixated on just sitting someplace with my hand firmly grasped around a large, cold adult beverage.)  Naturally I chime in and say, “Yeah that sounds great.” 

We get to the first green and it’s surrounded by sand traps…lots of sand traps.  I get stuck in one and wedge out of it into another, and then back again.  This repetition goes on for a while.  There are no words that can adequately describe the frustration searing through my being at this point.  I’m waiting for a golf cart to pull up that has men in white uniforms and a straightjacket to take me away. 

With that, Bob Tway looks at me and says, “Steve, you can Surrender now if you like.”  I accept and become the designated driver for the rest of the day. 

50 is the New 22!

50 is the New 22! - One of the last things I remember from my Surprise 50^th Birthday Party was screaming this over and over again… until they asked me to leave.  I don’t say that any more.  These days I go by the old Mickey Mantle motto:  “If I’d known I was going to live this long, I would have taken a lot better care of myself.”

Listed below are a number of short experiences I’d like to share with you about being over 50 and a father of teenagers:

You know you’re in trouble when you have to seriously calculate the damage that you’ll do to yourself by having a fun night out.  Things like how many of your bodily functions will just cease to work, or which ones you’ll no longer be able to control for a day or so.

Fun on vacation: I’m chasing my kids around a fairly dangerous rock canyon under Yosemite Falls.  I really can’t keep up and it’s bugging the cr*p out of me.  At one point, to make it across a water way from one boulder to another, a complete stranger gives me a hand.  (I might have been able to make it on my own, but it was one of those situations that if I were wrong…not good at all.)  At dinner that night my son reminds me that if it weren’t for the stranger, I wouldn’t have been able to make it across the boulders.  Luckily for him, he was more than an arm’s length away.

I’m driving with my “Family” over Thanksgiving Weekend.  We go past an Assisted Living facility.  My wife nonchalantly says, “Oh, there’s a place we could put you.”  She and my kids burst into laughter.  I need to review my will…maybe hire a food taster, they still have those don’t they?

I had the opportunity to do a short training video for work.  They said the script I created was “EXCELLENT.”  The only problem was I couldn’t remember what I wrote.  When we were done, the girl mercifully said she could splice all of my “best” segments together.  I asked her if she was related to Houdini.  She asked me if I’d like to see the video.  I’m pretty self-centered, so I said sure.  She turns the camera around and hits the play button.  I could have sworn that my Grand Father was in the video talking to me.  I asked her if she knew that saying about how the camera put 10 pounds on you?  She replies, “Do you really think so?”  I said, “No, but it definitely adds 20 years.” 

And the "Piece of Resistance", I took the family to the movies to see Avatar.  My daughter was about 12, so I asked the woman behind the counter what the age cut off was for a child ticket vs. adult.  Her reply, "Well, what I can do for you is get "You" a senior ticket, that'll save you some."  Outside of, “Ah Sh*t!” I’m thinking to myself, I now know why they have these people sit behind thick glass with small openings.  It only gets better.  On the way in, my 14 year old son reminds me (I guess he thought I didn't hear the lady behind the counter – yeah right.)  He says with the biggest sh*t eating grin on his face, "Hey Dad, do you know that woman gave you a "Senior" ticket!” Being that I didn't want to spend the rest of my week in lock-up, I ignored him and walked into the theater.

The Friendly Proctologist:  This one I can’t claim as my own but it’s good.  It was a couple of days before New Year’s Eve.  A friend of mine (let’s say his name is “John”) had hit the 50 mark and it was time for a serious look-see in the hindquarters.  He’s bent over the examining table looking away from the doorway.  The doctor is “Deeply” involved in the exam, when my friend hears him ask, “So what are you doing for New Year’s Eve?”  Massive Panic sets in as scenes from “Deliverance” start flashing through his mind in rapid fire.  Then, like an angel from above, he hears the Nurse (who walked in quietly after the exam began) respond to the doctor.