Tools of the Trade
Saturday, March 3, 2007
Jashub Black’s 29th birthday. Collette figured the dude was probably starting to feel a little old, despite his youth.
The early morning had brought a sugar-dusting outside, and bitter chills.
The ride into the hospital actually saw a dozen or more cars spun out on the sides of the roads and several police cars and firetrucks scattered along the whole stretch of Highway 40. Once again, the flurries had been deceiving. Slick spots prevailed. And the sun shown parched through the gray clouds like a great orange eye, complete with an enormous band of cloud eyebrow.
At the hospital, class began almost right at eight o’clock after the nine couples had arrived and settled themselves. Their short blond instructor, who had five grandchildren of her own, definitely seemed to enjoy what she did. Then followed nine hours of instructions with breaks here and there, lunch in the cafeteria (which didn’t turn out that bad)…
“Let’s get something from the grill,” OLeif had said. “Do you want chicken tenders?”
“Sure.” Collette thought that sounded good.
“I’ll have ten chicken tenders,” OLeif told the foreign guy behind the counter.
“Ten?”
“Yes, ten.”
OLeif and Collette had both been thinking that he would fill up a box with ten average-sized chicken nuggets. But instead, he piled it high with large pieces of fried chicken, as though they were going on a picnic for four people.
“Uh…” OLeif turned around to Collette. “Should I stop him? How are we possibly going to eat all that?”
But they did, with honey mustard. And there were sodas, a bag of potato chips, and a box of Whoppers for later in the afternoon.
Meanwhile, the class continued under gray skies and swirling flakes. One woman in particular, who was having her second child after an eleven-year break, was particularly paranoid that her new baby would be stolen from the hospital. Their bubbly LaMaze instructor assured her that there were many security measures taken, including alarms, radio chips, elevator lock downs, camera surveillance, etc. And between all of the seven thousand babies they had every year over all the past years, there had never once been an incident.
Then she showed them various tools used to help the new baby out into the world, should there be complications, and other tools for monitoring vital signs, etc. Some of these tools liked like they might have been taken from the Roman inquisition, even the giant pair of barbecue tongs. Needles, pinchers, pullers, vacuums…
But soon the day had ended, and they left with a book and paperwork and hurried over to the Chipmunk’s for dinner. Athena was a good hostess, and for dinner they were served a fancy vegetable soup, a fancifully-arranged salad, French baguette bread, and each elegant setting included a glass of ice water and a glass of orange juice. This was followed with orange and vanilla sherbet and rolled wafer sticks filled with a sort of white cream.
During dinner and following, they learned about Buddy’s coin collection (including several coins which he had dug out of a field while serving in Vietnam) – Chinese coins, exactly like the kind Carrie-Bri had purchased for Collette in New York.
“Now, as far as I know,” he was saying, “there are just thousands of these coins around. And they’re from the Genghis Khan era.”
Collette almost choked. To think, she had a dozen of them at home. Not that they were necessarily worth anything, even if hers were real. But to think that they were that old and from that particular period of time, was fascinating.
And then they learned how the Chipmunk’s chimney had once caught their attic on fire when Bassanio-Ignace was just a baby, due to a birds’ nest built next to the chimney. If they had waited two minutes longer to call the fire department, they were told that the whole attic would have been engulfed in flames.
And Buddy told them about how he went on numerous parachute jumps back in the day; he and his buddies had been assigned to test-drive the efforts of new guys learning how to pack the chutes. And he drove jeeps in Vietnam during the war and lost several of the cloth tops due to bullet-holes while he was driving them around. He seemed more concerned that he had lost so many cloth tops than that he had been shot at numerous times.
Then they all asked about the LaMaze class.
“Does all that information want to make you reconsider?” Athena laughed.
“Yeah, sign me up for adoption,” Buddy added, who was having fun making Pele, their dog, run around the room after a laser pointer.
There was also brief conversation of how someone in Buddy’s family was tracing their history and had so far gone back about five hundred years, discovering that they were connected to some royalty somewhere down the line.
And Evangeline’s mother, who had exhausted research on their own family history, had now started on Judah’s.
“She found out that one of my great-great-something grandmother’s was named Zula Belcher,” Judah chuckled.
It was a good evening, albeit a long day.