In our church we believe we have a duty to look after each other. Once a month, we try to visit or call each other, by assignment, to make sure everyone is okay, find out if anyone is in need, or try to get free baby-sitting . . . oops . . . umm . . . I’m just kidding. I don’t have little kids. I don’t need free babysitting; I need someone to feed my horses and rub lotion in Charlie’s ears. But I digress.
Anyway, it’s called visiting teaching. I have two sisters (yes, we call each other brother and sister for deeply meaningful reasons having to do with being spiritually related in that big family in the sky sense—but I digress) that I “visit teach.”
One of my dear sisters has hit a rough patch that has put her in a rehabilitation center following some health issues.
Off I went to check on her.
She’s in room 600 plus. I stood at the first rehab center I cleverly thought of visiting, checking the room numbers. They went up to 200 plus. I stood puzzling and puzzling until my puzzler was sore. The lovely, gentle woman, who runs the joint, recognized a stumped puzzler when she saw one.
“Are you lost?” she said.
“You don’t have six hundred rooms here do you?”
With a knowing twinkle she gave me the number to the other rehabilitation center in town. I called. Ahhhh . . . they had a room with 600 plus on it and my friend.
Laughing, waving, and blowing kisses, I sped off to the next rehabilitation center.
And found . . . my friend.
We chatted. We read scriptures. We laughed over this and that. We caught up. We discussed her possible release date.
I met my friend’s lovely roommate.
We had visited for an hour when my friend’s roommate, a lovely woman recovering from a little of this and a little of that, pointed at my tie-dyed motorcycle vest.
“Sweetheart,” she began, gently. “You have your vest on inside out. Your buttons are on the inside and the tag is out.”
I looked down and realized that I had—for about two hours—been wearing my vest inside out to two different establishments where people are tutored in the fine art of dressing themselves properly and re-learning to walk.
“Right you are,” I said. “You know something.” I pulled my vest off so I could re-dress myself in the manner of a two-year old. “Every time I get to thinking I’m hot stuff my shoe falls in the toilet.” True story.
Everyone in the room nodded their head at my obvious grasp of my own dopiness and understanding of humiliation.
Laughing, waving, and blowing kisses, I made my exit.
On the way out, I’m pretty sure I heard an occupational therapist say, “She’ll be back.”
Linda (Buttoned Down) Zern
