Road Apples
Jan. 26, 2009


Where deep thought gets you

By Tim Sanders

The other morning I was sitting at the breakfast table, staring intently at my spoonful of Cheerios.

"What’s wrong with you?" Marilyn asked.

"Huh?"

"Why are you sitting there, scowling? Is there a bug in your spoon?"

"I’m not scowling," I told her. "I’m only thinking."

She said that there was no reason for me to stop eating and scowl every time I had a thought. "Some of us can think and eat at the same time ... without scowling," she said.

I explained to her that yes, the shallow thinkers of the world could smile while thinking their meaningless, insignificant little thoughts. But we deep thinkers, weighing age-old questions of monumental importance, had to scowl because of the intensity of our cerebral activity. "Sometimes, when you’re thinking really hard, it hurts," I told her.

"So what deep, hurtful subject were you pondering?" she asked.

I could have told her the truth, that I’d noticed that the Cheerios floating in my spoon formed the word "OOOO," which brought "circular" to mind, which then brought up the serious question of just why the circulars we get in the mail are always rectangular, but I thought better of it. I told her I’d been contemplating the international monetary crisis.

I do a lot of my serious thinking at the breakfast table.

Last Wednesday morning Marilyn and I were sitting at a table in the UAB Hospital cafeteria, eating breakfast. I had an appointment in a few minutes with my nephrologist, Dr. Kumar. Dr. Kumar is the latest in a long line of fine nephrologists I’ve seen at UAB since my kidney transplant there twelve years ago. Like the other kidney specialists, Dr. Kumar is well-informed, helpful, courteous and professional. But unlike the others, she is an extremely attractive young lady of Indian descent. I mention this not because her appearance necessarily makes her a better doctor, but because it can make her patients want to be better patients.

I’d showered and shaved carefully that morning, and even trimmed my nose and ear hairs. Doctors notice things like that. I was wearing a neat, clean pair of trousers, a relatively new shirt, and a nice, tasteful new pair of tennis shoes. Sitting there in that cafeteria, I was thinking deep thoughts about how I could explain to the doctor why I hadn’t lost as much weight as she’d advised me to lose, or why I had yet to schedule that colonoscopy she’d suggested at my last visit. Doctors are all in favor of colonoscopies. Patients, by and large, are not. It’s hard to explain things like that to an attractive female doctor while maintaining an air of dignity and savoir faire. The colonoscopy thoughts had led to more deep thoughts about whether doctors who specialized in proctology and other colon-related work actually chose to do so, or whether they’d graduated at the bottom of their class in medical school and had simply remained at the bottom, so to speak. Those kinds of things were going through my mind when I reached for my orange juice.

[Here is a tip: If you are drinking orange juice from a Styrofoam cup, and tend to get lost in thought on occasion, do not, under any circumstances, put a straw in that cup!]

So when I absently reached for my orange juice while pondering those profound medical questions, I just barely touched that stupid straw, and you can imagine what happened. The orange juice covered the table, and since, naturally, the table legs on my side were shorter, each and every drop of that orange juice went directly from the table into my lap. I lost my savoir faire immediately, lurched backward and said a bad word. Marilyn told me later that the people at the table behind us seemed to enjoy the spectacle, bad word and all. We did what we could to dry me off, but all to no avail. Marilyn suggested that I go into the bathroom and hold my citrus-flavored pants under the hand dryer, but she was giggling when she said it, so I realized it was only a joke.

And here’s where all my deep thinking got me. I had to walk into that clinic waiting room with my pants all wet, while the other patients eyed me uneasily, hoping I didn’t sit in their vicinity. "ORANGE JUICE," I said to an elderly black gentleman sitting across from me. He nodded and smiled a smile that seemed to indicate skepticism. It was a kidney transplant clinic, after all.

By the time Dr. Kumar saw me in the examining room, I’d grown tired of saying "ORANGE JUICE" to people I didn’t even know. It didn’t seem to help much, dignity-wise. Apparently spilling orange juice all over your lap is only a small step above the weak bladder rung on the ladder of international sophistication. I did explain the incident to the doctor, but only because Marilyn felt it would be wiser than simply sitting there on the examining table with my file folder, the blood pressure cuff, the tissue box and my handkerchief arranged strategically on my lap. To her credit, Dr. Kumar didn’t laugh at me, only with me. I think.

So now, when Marilyn sees me sitting across the breakfast table, scowling, maybe she’ll realize that I’m not really angry, only thinking–probably about that lethal glass of orange juice lurking behind my cereal bowl.