Author Archives: oinsketta

Letter from Hell

Once in a while, at least in a life where you know a few people for a long time and have developed the trust to share confidences, a letter from hell arrives.   It usually begins with a prelude apologizing for the burden, explaining that it can’t be borne alone, that the writer didn’t know what else to do.   At wits’ end, the writer of the letter from hell writes because everything else is a far worse thought.  

Setting the story down at least gives a momentary impression that the unspeakable can be made intelligible, put at arm’s length, even if the arm is only as long as a Barbie doll’s arm.  The unbearable story then pours out, the details unimaginably hellish.  A novelist would be a brutal bastard indeed to invent these details.

“The Devil is in them details,” he winks, eyes glinting merrily, taking another slug of his honey colored drink.   The Devil is in the details and in, truly, not really giving that much of a damn.  Many people, we realize, have only a limited ability to fully consider another person’s pain, keep comparing it to their own and finding it so much less compelling.  

It’s kind of a tic in our celebrity culture, not being able to listen empathetically.  We are not a listening culture, we’re a bit of a narcissistic one [he opined, on his self-published weblog– ed.].   I suspect the harshness of that failure to be listened to comes into play each time a celebrity gets divorced, or commits suicide, or acts out badly enough to get sent to jail.  It goes as well for everyone who is not a celebrity, or very wealthy, or some kind of star.  We are not taught to listen very well, if you know what I’m saying.  We’d rather be entertained, even if our entertainers are often fairly tortured souls.

If you care for the writer of the letter from hell, you carefully read the terrible stories, interlocking like so many pythons, and, even if you care a lot, you may find yourself at a loss for what to say.   “I feel your pain,” once a perfectly decent thing to say at such times, has been ruined by everyone imitating Bill Clinton saying it, the phrase has become a joke, a politician’s parrot line that means the opposite, get it?   Your voice will become croaky, cartoony, Elmer Fuddish, Bubba-toned  as you say the words.  This will happen if you are me, anyway.    

In recent years I’ve learned to say “I’m sorry for your loss,” but that is for the children and mates of recently dead people, usually at funerals.  “Yikes,” is often the best I can do after I read such a letter, and assuring the person that I am around to listen.

The best we can give many times is some sign we have read the letter from hell, taken in all the details, were witnesses and sympathetic.  It is also about the least we can do.  It’s kind of good, if you think about it, that the least we can do is sometimes also the best.   

It is true that we often play a major role in bringing on some of our most hellish trials, though it does nothing to diminish the hellishness.  In fact, it probably enhances the torment.   We don’t check the reflex to get the last word when we know the other person will be infuriated by yet one more bon mot.  We are more witty, perhaps, a maddening bit quicker on the draw.  Or, since we can take a punch, we pretend the shot in the face was nothing.  “That was nice,” we say sarcastically, nose unbroken, “what shall we do now?  Movie?”  

“I’m in the details, asswipe,” says the Devil, finishing one honey colored drink and pouring himself another.  “You’ll have to do better, nobody knows what the hell you’re talking about.”  

“You’ve heard of the Repetition Compulsion, Debbil?” I ask.   The Devil, who is a master at not listening, just smirks a bit as he swallows his drink.  “It’s the neurotic need to play out some early life trauma over and over with people you meet over the course of your life.  These people stand in for the original abuser you never worked things out with.”  

“You’re a putz,” says the Devil, absently swirling rocks in his glass.   

“Yes.  So, anyway, I knew a guy whose repetition compulsion was a regular three act play.  In fact, it was so consistent, and I noted it so many times, that I could predict exactly where we were in the play at any given time.  The guy sent me a letter at one point saying he refused to be my lab rat anymore.  I wrote back thanking him for the excellent laugh– a letter of resignation from a lab rat!  Priceless.   Anyway, I watched the mangey white fucker in his cage year after year reliving the same story over and over like Bill Murray in Groundhog’s Day, but without the redeeming Hollywood plot line.”

“Here’s the particular drama he kept running over and over.  He’d meet somebody who was the coolest person he’d ever met, brilliant, hilarious and nonchalant.  He’d describe in highly idealized terms this cool, funny, talented, generous, non-egotistical genius who was his newest friend.  Act one would feature his spirited singing about this great person.”  

“Who gives a lab rat’s ass?” says the Devil, reaching for another dusty bottle.  

“Anyway, act two would be the beginning of the realization that the person maybe had a few faults.  This was always a troubling discovery, and led to complications.  Not all dramatic complications are good, and these act two complications were always ominous.  The unhappy ending they foreshadowed was inevitable each time.  After I’d heard these stories year after year I would know exactly when the curtain for Act three was about to go up and how the dramatic betrayal would unfold.”  

“‘The curtain for fucking act three’, do you even fucking listen to yourself?” asks the Devil without a hint of kindness.  

“Yeah, so I’d ask him, I’d say, wait, did he rip you off, curse you out, trash your place or physically assault you?  And this would make him furious each time.  ‘Can’t I finish telling you the goddamned story?  I just want to tell the goddamned story, Mr. Smart Guy, can you let me tell the goddamned story?’  I would relent, put my pipe back in my mouth, I’d cross my legs, prop my notebook on my lap, blow a puff of smoke, nod for him to continue.  He’d be furious as he sputtered about this interruption of his aggravating story.”   

“I can dig it,” says the Devil.   

“I’d let him continue and he’d say ‘he physically assaulted me’ and I would try not to smile or show any satisfaction at all.  ‘Fucking bastard…’ I would usually say, though it was hard to sound convincing after about the fiftieth identical tale.  The guy had no insight into his role in making people ‘betray’ him.”  

“Fascinating, truly,” says the Devil, scratching his hindquarters and rolling his terrible red-rimmed eyes.  

“Well, these stories may seem funny to you, Old Scratch, but I assure you, to the person going through them they are hellish indeed,” I say.  

“Hey, that guy with the Repetition Compulsion was your lab rat,” the Devil says. 

“Fucking bastard….” I think as I walk off into the stinking night.

 

Short Bark

Explaining the perplexing standstill my life and work have seemingly come to, I described in great detail the workings and potential of the student-run animation workshop.  My friend grasped it in unfolding steps as I laid it out to him and said “wow, the kids must love it.”  

“They do,” I said.  

“Well, then you need to take your strength and inspiration from them now, until you figure out the next move,” he said.  

“True, but I haven’t had a workshop with kids since May,” I said.  

“Oh…” he said, the syllable expressing perfectly the enormity of what I’m up against at the moment.

Dealing with Madness

“Can’t we just pretend that this is not insane?  Can’t we just go on into the future cherishing everything precious here as if none of this sordid, admittedly terrible, OK, unspeakable, history had ever happened between us?” he asked, a pleading look on his desperate face.  

For her part, she couldn’t keep from stealing glances at the bizarre looking twisted metal object his hand was clutching so tightly as the other hand gesticulated like maddened bird on a leash.

“It’s not as if people don’t get over all kinds of traumatic things,” he said, reasonably, under the circumstances.

She thought she’d managed to begin loosening the adapter cable that had been tied around her wrists.  The trick was to keep working it while maintaining pleasant eye contact with the maniac.  In the back of her mind, an odd thought nagged.    

“I know I wrote the entire story of this sick relationship, in great detail.  It might come in very handy at some point,” she thought “if only I could find the goddamned thing!”  The trouble was, the clutter in her computer mirrored the clutter on her desk, her kitchen table, the floor by the Lazy Boy.  She hadn’t used his name in the piece, which made it almost impossible to find.   Hard to search the hard drive, all the external drives, the email account, if you don’t have the right key word, she’d discovered.  It was maddening.

“Are you even listening to me?” he said, with great pain in his eyes, his right hand stiff on the weird and threatening looking metal tool.

 

 

Cause for Concern?

At dinner last night with old friends I told a story about a manipulative parrot at another friend’s house.  It was an amusing story, and I told it without frills or fanfare, in about a minute.

“They were there,” Sekhnet said when I’d concluded the short anecdote. My friends nodded.  

I wondered to myself how I could not have remembered that.  It was a little embarrassing.  That my friend, a moment before my story, had retold a parrot story he’d told us before didn’t occur to me until just now.  

I wonder now if I can avoid mentioning the worrisome incident to Sekhnet, who is prone to worry.   It could only serve as another reminder that I might be finally sliding off the deep end.  It certainly feels like the case today.

After FUNeral musings

The rabbi conducting yesterday’s funeral had actually met the recently deceased several times over the years, my friend’s father who passed away Sunday at 89 from a late diagnosed cancer.  The deceased had been a strong, vigorous man with a handshake like a vise, I was amazed to learn he’d been close to ninety.  His nephew ended his funeral remarks by calling him a mighty oak and there is nothing lacking in that description of him.

It occurred to me, listening to the moving stories of his youngest daughter and two of his grandsons, that stories told at funerals by people who love you present your best qualities while the rest, to reverse paraphrase the Bard, is oft interred with your bones, as Aaron’s were in the Jewish policeman’s funeral plot in some Queens cemetery.

I am muddling this, because in a hurry to pack up and get back to my cracked and depressing hovel which I have once again vowed to tidy and have patched up.  There is too much to tidy and too much work to patch and paint and re-tile all the things that need to be fixed once the clutter is removed.  A powerful metaphor for my life of action-stalling deliberation that went through my mind after the grandsons spoke lovingly of how their energetic grandfather never wasted a moment of his life.  After retiring from a long and vigorous work life as a police lieutenant and later insurance inspector, he was either strengthening his already strong body or keeping his mind sharp with a new book.  Or walking with or playing with his grandchildren.

The rabbi spoke of the dead man’s uprightness and nobility.  It would not occur to this man of integrity that there could ever be a good reason to depart from what is true, and right, and decent.   His name, Aaron, said the rabbi, was the name of the Jew who had created the priestly class and a fitting name, for the deceased was a true aristocrat.  I thought then of the analogous speech at my own funeral, the final rites of a man who has spent too much time brooding and too little time  pitting himself directly against life.

“He embraced his arbitrarily given name, The Prophet Elijah, with humility and an absurd sense of purpose.  He accepted without apparent complaint the difficult, essential, unpaid task of returning the hearts of children to their parents and the hearts of parents to their children.   Only this reconciliation could prepare humanity for the coming of the Messiah.  Undeterred by the impossibility of the assignment, knowing that the Messiah is not of this world, as subject to wishful imagining as any concept ever dreamed up by people facing the worst and an idea more objectively dubious than all other such human imaginings, even if more laudable than most, he persisted.   Our Elijah was not dissuaded by any of these things, even though he received no reassurance from God, as his biblical namesake had, and thus had no expectation of being taken alive up to heaven as a very, very old man because God loved him so much.”   A pause to look around at the assembled in their suits and nice dresses, letting the immensity of this sink in.  

It is a depressive move to think of your own funeral at, or immediately after, a funeral for somebody else, I think.  I wonder idly now how many others were measuring their own lives against the life of this mighty oak in his flag draped coffin to the rabbi’s right.

Many who give these funeral orations have never met the deceased.  This man did, and gave a few personal reminiscences that were meaningful and moving.  I thought the bit about the name was a little forced, perhaps, especially when he added that the last name, written in Hebrew, formed the root of the word sustainer, nourisher, giver of life, and that he was, indeed, an aristocratic nurturer who sustained us all by his example.   It set my thoughts back to my father’s story about the funeral of our neighbor, Sonny Friedman.

“The rabbi said that he was called ‘Sunny’ because of his cheerful disposition, that he lit up the room when he walked in,” my father told me in his sardonic manner after Sonny’s funeral.   I wish I was artist enough to convey my father’s wry, disgusted expression as he recounted that clinked attempt at a warm, personal touch.  Sonny was a nice neighbor, but withdrawn, a bit dour, perhaps, and I don’t remember that his understated, slightly forced smile lit up any rooms.

Our view of a person, from life to death, is clearly dictated by our perspective, and you know how dictators are.  My sense of this man I’d met a few times was much different from the portraits those who knew him well, and loved him best, painted.  These paintings were striking, majestic, highlighting what was best in him, colored with bold, poetic strokes.  

My sister had seen our father paint such masterpieces at funerals, I had too.  He could make the person live again for a moment among the gathered as he led them through laughs and tears.  “The D.U. could do that for someone he hated,” my sister contends to this day.  “It was just a gift,” she says.

In the audience, in a suit that bound me here and there, to remind me it was not my regular, comfortable clothes, I compared my own life, with its generous swathes of wasted time, to the deceased’s energetic striving, even in the weeks before his painful death, his unflagging strength and discipline, the full exploitation of his engine’s potential, run full-throttle, every day.  

In my seat on the wooden bench, squirming in my suit, I felt the opposite of that.  A trailblazer with tired eyes and quivering rubber legs, resting up apprehensively for the big day as winter prepared to bluster in.

 

 

Protagonism

Twenty-five or thirty years ago a friend of mine coined this term, as far as I know, to indicate the tendency, in our celebrity culture, to present oneself as a protagonist.  In the years since, everyone vaguely inclined to it has become a star.  Some of these stars shine over a city of two or three, some over an entirely empty yard, but while they write or perform they indulge in the dream that someone, somewhere, gives a rat’s ass about what they think or feel.

“Protagonism!” my old friend snorted, to indicate that the long-ago soundtrack I’d improvised and recorded on magnetic tape was mere showing off, did nothing to enhance the audience’s appreciation of the movie, instead merely pointed a constant finger at its author.  

“Nobody cares, nobody cares,” the world-weary dispatcher at Prometheus Courier Service used to say many times a day, especially when people tried to share their concerns with him.  He drank himself to death alone in a rented walk-up in Chelsea, and indeed, nobody cared.  Not to say he wasn’t a very nice guy and a lot of fun to shoot the shit with.  

People photograph their lunch and post it online.  OK.  Same with opinions, which, like cloacae [1], every one of us former reptiles and our bird cousins possess.  Unlike these primitives, we can post them as fast as we think them up.

I wonder about this desire to make oneself known to others, in the form of writings, photos, videos and music posted on the weird electronic spider web most of the world is connected to.    Zora Neale Hurston, a woman who knew a good deal about it, called this desire to make oneself known to others the oldest human longing.  

But thinking about it now, I wonder:  who can possibly care that a stranger’s father, when he was a baby, was whipped in the face, setting in motion a long chain of regrettable events that weighed on his children and his children’s children?  Or about his speculation on the terrible life of the insane mother that caused her to whip her infant in the face, before she left forever the town that would be wiped off the map twenty years later, the blood of everyone she knew in childhood plowed into the mud.  

I suppose one might as well wonder why people read poems, or enjoy psycho-biographies, or watch violent movies where terrible events are portrayed vividly, or smile at idiotically idealized comedies, or love head-banging music.  The things created by human souls as they hurtle between infancy and death.  Could be I’m just thinking too much, having nothing better to do.  You wanna see what I had for lunch?   I’m almost done digesting it.

 

[1]   In birds, the cloaca is the terminal chamber of the gastrointestinal and urogenital systems, opening at the vent. Excretory systems with analogous purpose in certain invertebrates are also sometimes referred to as “cloacae”.

Birds also reproduce with this organ; this is known as a cloacal kiss.  

 

 

Lovey Cries for all of Us

Another one of the things I used to write.  Lovey, a ten pound poodle, had a short, tragic life, fighting with my mother, often bullying my mother.  My nephew, a boy of few words, said as we were leaving the apartment “that dog’s a tyrant.”  

It was not, strictly speaking, the dog’s fault.  My mother in the last years of her slow death from cancer was in no condition to give a puppy the care and patient guidance it needed and they both suffered for it.  Lovey died at five, a month before my mother, and it was a tragic blow, like losing an affectionate, troubled teenager.

 

Lovey cries for all of us

Thursday, March 26, 2009, 4:31:57 AM

My father told me the last night of his life that he’d never seen love or affection exchanged in his home. He said “I have no idea how it’s even done.” I did not have my hand on his as he spoke to me that night, with all the tenderness he could muster. He was not the cuddly or even affectionate kind.

When he was feeling maudlin, after a particularly stupid and bloody battle with his children over the dinner of steak he provided every evening, he would look at me with hurt in his eyes and say “you should read ‘I Never Sang for My Father”. He’d tell me to read this play with all the bitterness he could manage and I’d snort.

I had the play on the bottom shelf in my room in my parents’ house, it rested halfway on the floor, covered in dust. I never so much as cracked the cover of the old paperback.  I have no idea what the play is about, except for the sense my father, someone who never sang for his father, gave me of it.

I saw my father cry twice in life.  Once was during a seder, when he was talking about God pouring out His wrath against every tyrant who persecuted His People, from the Egyptians to the Assyrians to the Inquisition to Chmelnitski to the Nazis.  His tears were bitter as the Dead Sea, pouring out of his surprisingly light hazel colored eyes, and I’m sure my sister recalls that moment as clearly as I do.

The other time was during a visit in Israel.  I’d gone there for a year after High School and my parents came to visit the new kibbutz where I was living and working.  It was a historic occasion, the kibbutz was about to celebrate its first Passover, and so my parents and my sister came to visit.

My father swept the dining hall and helped lay the table cloths and set the hundreds of places for the seder, my mother worked in the kitchen, my sister probably did too.  I was out in the field picking the crops.  I spent most of the long seder in a friend’s room, listening to Jimi’s beautiful Axis: Bold As Love for the first time, then the second, then the third.

I got a day off for my parents’ visit.  We drove in a rented car to a stretch of the beautiful Aravah desert, an oasis.  It may have been Ein Gedi, I can’t think of where else it could have been.  It could have been the walk down to the Dead Sea, now that I think of it, judging from a picture I have from that day.  It is a picture of us standing on the rocky shore of some dark water at low tide.  My father, with big, black sideburns, my sister, thin with a big new bust in a yellow tank top, and me, skinny as a whippet, with a scraggly beard and veins roping down my arms.

My mother and my sister were walking ahead on the dusty trail.  My father motioned for me to hang back by the car a minute, then we began walking slowly.  The color of the land was like wheat, but there was no wheat.  It was dry, parched, biblical terrain that did not look kindly on strangers.

My father was trying to talk to me but I was seventeen, lean, tanned, and impossible to engage.  I’d hardened my heart to him, as he’d required me to do, and appealing to me was like appealing to a thug, a stone-faced adversary who gives no quarter.  I had the demeanor of someone who’d rather smash your face than listen to your side of the story.

Taking this in, what he knew in that moment was largely his own handiwork, he suddenly began to cry.  It lasted only a moment, long enough for him to beg me not to become like him, to let my mother hug and kiss me, to be humane to my mother.

“I’d have to hold his head, but your father would let me kiss him,” my mother told me after my father died.

I was on the plane tonight, the cranky old woman next to me had gotten on standby.  She was in the middle seat, spilling over to my seat, she’d firmly taken the entire armrest and part of the area where my shoulder and arm should rightfully have been.  I didn’t muscle her.  I’d already let another old woman ahead of me on the walkway to the plane.

“It doesn’t matter,” she told me with a lovely smile and an accent from the old country that told me she’d seen much more terrible lines than this one.  She truly didn’t care if I went first or she did, but she took my small gift, to make me feel better.  She was very gracious about it.

I’m sitting on the plane and it occurs to me that my mother finally said the words “I’m dying.”  Words easy enough to say when you are depressed, or angry, or manipulating somebody.  But to say it when you are dying takes a lot of work, and when she said it the other day, angrily and to manipulate me, she meant it and understood it.  Said the awful thing aloud for the first time.

A few hours later I was sitting at the computer keyboard and she rested her face on the back of my forearm as I typed.  Gently, it didn’t disturb my typing. And with infinite tenderness.

Sitting next to the fat old lady who crowded me on the plane it came to me.  Her relentless touch and the heat of her meaty arm reminded me.  I hadn’t hugged my mother much, perhaps two or three times while I was there.  I’d probably hugged my nephew as much, or my niece, and these were hugs like hipsters give each other in greeting.  Stylized, barely touching, they take a few seconds to execute and are done for the look and the gesture rather than for the feel.

I leaned into the car and kissed her goodbye on her cheek as she kissed me on mine, the way I kiss Ida whenever I see her.  Her dog cried like a human being, beside herself to see me leaving.  My mother for her part did not cry, neither did I.

The dog sat up on her lap, staring at me, stretching toward me, inconsolable, crying, imploring me not to leave.  The dog wept without shame or restraint, like a creature acutely conscious of love, affection and companionship and crying because it was losing someone it loved.

I Used to Write Things like this

Looking for an account of a long unhappy friendship I’d written at some point, germane at the moment due to the passing of that former good friend’s mother, I’ve been picking through the haystack of unsorted needles with little hope of finding that story.  Going through the files for the now extinct blahg I once maintained, I stumbled on this one, poetic in its way, written four years ago when I was in the first stage of optimism about this new plan I had for my life.

Lost Souls

Sunday, September 19, 2010, 12:30:58 AM

Sat around a long table last night eating delicious food with a dozen people I love, each one full of great qualities, each one, in some part of themselves, a lost soul.   We bang around in this world lost a good deal of the time and there is no shame in it.  I am just thinking about it now, the dark night before Ralph’s unveiling, in the aftermath of the Days of Awe.

My sister took my mother to see “Up in the Air” a black comedy that touched a raw a nerve in this downed economy.  My mother, even though a George Clooney fan, didn’t enjoy it very much.  “Everybody in that movie was so damaged,” my mother told my sister as they left the cinema.  Abby was impressed by the insightful comment; indeed, every character in that movie is damaged in their hearts, in their minds, in their souls.  They dream the dreams of damaged people.

It was my mother’s follow-up comments that rendered my sister speechless on the drive home.  

“Do you think the filmmaker was trying to say that everyone is damaged?”  my mother asked.  Abby wondered if this was an ah-ha moment, the possible opening of an important discussion.  She ventured the opinion that everyone probably is damaged to some extent.

“I’m not damaged,” my mother said forcefully, a few months before cancer took her ravaged body and struggling soul from this life, and my sister was at a loss for anything to say to that.

Ralph’s tombstone will have a cheesecloth gauze removed from it tomorrow, after some prayers are chanted and a few words said about him.  Ralph was the father of my good friend Rob, who was my best friend in the world, and we spent many an evening over at his house, my family and I.  Ralph was quick with a droll remark, glass of booze in his hand, suave as Dean Martin but at the same time as downtrodden and dominated as the Jewish husband in any Jewish husband joke.  

The last time I saw him he looked wonderful, he was pushing 90 and could have passed for 75, dapper as always, smiling, his thick hair brushed back and shining.  He had no idea who I was, but could see by his wife’s friendliness toward me that I must be an old friend.  We went into a quiet room and sat and talked, his wife and I, then he turned to me with that old Ralph mischief in his eyes, and melancholy too, and crooned “the party’s over, it’s time to call it a day.”  A year or so later he was being eulogized, another mystery who had walked among us.

As all the ones we walk among must of necessity be.  There are reasons for every action, ridiculous as it may seem, given so many of the actions reasoned to.  If too unreasonable to be called reasons, there are at least rationales for every belief, behavior, hope and grudge.  We don’t act without them and we can’t do anything incredibly cruel or stupid without believing we have good reasons, or at least strong rationales, for doing what we do.  Sometimes we feel lost, wondering who is actually pulling these strings, this spider web I am hanging in life by, like a dangling participle?

Music that could and should be made, but silence.  Love that should be expressed freely, and shared, and used to give strength, used in a hundred bizarre undermining ways that advance nothing but puzzlement and hurt.  Beauty, sorrow, beautiful sorrow, sorrowful beauty, permutations of every moving thing often moving off in directions that sustain nobody.

It is no wonder that so many souls are lost, lost on the way to Death we do our best not to think of as coming for us, though it most certainly is.  We are a busy society, a competitive, commercial one, time is money and money runs faster than time, so we must be faster still.  And this chasing is hard work, leaving us tired, distracted, it is not always easy to concentrate.  

The research says we can only really focus on one thing at a time.  We generally have several things clamoring for our attention and feel obliged to multitask, which makes us less attentive to the things we attend to.  We have to take risks to advance, they are scary and so we are often tense when we jump.  A tense jump means trouble.

No connections, you want connections?  I could give you connections, but it would cost you.  I would require something of you to make these connections for you.  I am weary, and will be sleeping presently, to be up in seven hours to stand with Ralph’s widow, and his children, and a few friends still alive.  I will now be taking off my slippers, putting up my pipe, neatly hanging my velvety robe, laying myself between thick, creamy covers.  I’ll be snoring.  

I am tired, my dear, of speaking to the black, purring night.  The night is many things I love, but it is not big on conversation, which I do also love. And lost souls or no, I see the light of engagement on everyone’s face when they are correctly asked an intelligent question, or given feedback that leads them toward the light, or laughter, or a good, long cry.  I wonder about the short-circuit, why most people are too lost in worse things to be present more than momentarily when the moon is blue and a certain music reminds them– damn, I used to love music.

Courtesy Call

“Hi,” said the voice, mangling the pronunciation of my invented name.  “Did I pronounce that right?”

I reassured her that she’d been close and then, at her request, pronounced the invented pronunciation she’d  been so far from.  She then pronounced it perfectly and told me she was calling from the medical center where I’m having my colonoscopy tomorrow.

“This is a courtesy call,” she told me and then informed me I would have to make a $100 co-pay before the procedure.

“OK,” I said, “thank you for the courtesy.”  She peeped a little laugh-like peep.  As to my questions about the procedure itself, I would have to call the doctor directly.  “So you are calling from billing,” I said.  

“Yes,” she told me pleasantly and we wished each other a good day.