Gone With The Ferry

I will miss both Dr Marshall’s, Kathleen and Christopher, I thought they were both terrific. I shared Dr. Kathleen’s passion for the movie Gone With The Wind. She’s the only person I’ve ever met who knew the script as well as I do. Plus, we’d quiz each other on GWTW trivia throughout my medical visit. It’s not just any doc who can prepare an injection and ask, “Okay, so what was Vivian Leigh’s biggest complaint about Clark Gable?” (Answer - bad breath from his dentures). We had an ongoing debate over the PDA’s vs. DayTimers datebooks. “PDA’s hold much more info and can perform many more functions.”
My response: “Unless you drop them or spill coffee on them, then they’re dead and there’s nothing to do but go berserk and have a panic attack because you just lost all your contact info and saved notes. At least with my old skool DayTimers, I can wipe off the coffee or sea spray and continue on.”

I saw Dr Christopher more than Dr Kathleen and he was very polite and effective. I always appreciated the way he looked directly into your eyes when he spoke to you and listened to your questions. Weight has always been a big problem for me and I didn’t even mind when he used chalk lines to mark off the parts he had examined and went on to the next section.

I’m sure the new docs will be wonderful. And they will have lots of interesting stories to tell very soon. We are coming into Deer Hunting Season and somewhere, on the Island right now, there is a conversation happening that goes like this...

“Try it on Sue, it looks good, don’t it? You like pink.”
“John, a pink camouflage deer hunting outfit does not count as a birthday gift. Why did you get this?”
“The kids are gone now. All I hear is how “we should spent more quality time together”, so I thought, since I’m spending my quality time in a deer blind this weekend, you could spend yours there too. You can be in charge of the coffee.”
“Oh, joy...”
“Give it a chance. It’s really more fun than it sounds.”
“You want me to sit in a deer blind in the early morning damp cold, freezing to death in a pink camo outfit, serving coffee.”
“Not just coffee. You can make sandwiches the night before and bring an extra thermos of tomato soup.”
“Thank you, John, that is the cherry on the cake of my day.”
“But you have to be quiet. We can’t talk. We have a few basic hand signals, I’ll teach you.”
“So I have to sit in silence with hot coffee, hot tomato soup, serve sandwiches, can’t read a book because it will be too dark, can’t shoot you because I don’t know how the gun works, besides which, it may scare off the deer which will annoy the other hunters. What part of this do you think I’ll enjoy, John?”
“We’ll be together.”
“That was enough when we were young and we could think of things to do alone together...”
“I know where this is going, Sue, I know you want more romance, but we can’t have sex in the deer blind. It will shake and scare off the deer.”
“I was thinking of when we enjoyed playing Trivia Pursuit. Having sex at four in the morning in the cold woods was not on my Bucket List.”

The next day, the new doctor on Shelter Island sees his new patient, John.
“John, I just don’t understand how a thermos could do this much damage to a human skull.”
“It was the heavy one, the one filled with tomato soup.”
“Who attacked you with this thermos?”
“I fell.”
“You fell on a thermos?”
“You’re new here, Doc, it will make sense as time goes by. Soon you’ll be able to distinguish a LLBean thermos imprint from a Rubbermaid one.”

Oysters with Herpes, What next - Clamydia?

Sep 2, 2010, AP “Scientists have identified a form of herpes as the culprit in a widespread viral outbreak that has killed as many as 8 billion French oysters in recent weeks. ... the discovery that 40% to 100% of oysters aged 12 and 18 months being raised in France's Atlantic cultivation beds had died. The reason, officials at the French Institute for Research Into Use of the Sea (Ifremer) say, is Oyster Herpes Virus type 1 (OsHV-1). “

Somewhere in a clam bed off the American Atlantic coast....

John: “Benny! Did you hear? The French Oysters have herpes. Didn’t we warn them? Didn’t we send that memo by the Pike Express - not to bed down in that damn Avian water? We told ‘em, you gotta be in salt water for the brine to wash out bacteria.....”
Benny: “C’mon John, the French have never listened to us. They hate clams, you know that. I told you we should have had the Scallops etch it into the Conch and then send it.”
John: “How come they like Scallops and not us anyway?”
Benny: “It’s the artsy thing the French have, they can’t help themselves. They love the artistry in the scallop shells, which you have to admit, John, is really impressive. That’s why our Clam de Soleil Circus failed. You just can’t get anywhere with the French shellfish unless you can produce a pearl or have a beautiful shell.”
John: “We produce pearls, Benny.”
Benny: “Yeah, but they look like little white pebbles and all they do is crack peoples teeth. Our pearls aren’t pretty, we don’t have any of that lacquer stuff they spit on the irritant.”
John: “Nacre, Benny, they have nacre.”
Benny: “Well I don’t care if they do it nacre or not, it’s still oyster spit.”
John: “You don’t suppose that virus could spread this far do you? It’s bad enough we have to deal with clamydia, I can’t imagine trying to explain how I got herpes to Jean.”
Benny: “We’ll have to avoid chewing on anything that crossed the Atlantic and then died.”
John: “How the hell will we know that?”
Benny: “We can start by avoiding anything wearing a beret or that smells like white wine, butter or garlic.”
John: “That’s a good start. When’s our next meeting with the scallops? We gotta tell them too, and the conchs.”
Benny: “The next meeting is the 15th, under the bridge by Jack’s Marina, second pole from the end. I figure if we start pumping our foot tomorrow we should make it there with time to spare.”
John: “Oh yeah, let’s get there ahead of the crowd this time before all the chum and gasoline are gone. Love that gasoline buzz....and the chum there is so good.”
Benny: “That’s where the humans got the expression, “Happy as a clam”, nothing happier than a clam nestled in fish guts with that trace of gasoline wafting through the water.”
John: “We only have one natural enemy here, those damn clammers. But the season is ending and soon the water will be too cold for those two legged monsters.”
Benny: “It would serve them right if we got herpes and gave it to them....I can just hear them now, “Honey, I swear, I wasn’t with nobody. I was at Bob’s eating clams on the half shell and barbecue. Call him, he’ll tell you”. “
John: “Ah, yes, in the words of Shellock Haddock, “Revenge is a dish that is best served iced on the half shell.....”