Twenty Minutes in a Clinic Waiting Room

Rage Against the Normal

I like to torment the political staff at the Ministry who talk, as if it were their idea, about a future with neighbourhoods where all distances are walkable and people can be born, grow up, grow old and die in one place. I tell them their vision is of the past, not the future. 

Before traffic engineers brought land use monoculture to post-war North America, everyone lived in a neighbourhood of the future. You went to the corner to buy groceries. Your kids walked two blocks to go to school. A few more blocks away there were offices and banks and dry cleaners. In these neighbourhoods, rich people and poor people and everyone in between all shared the same church pews, sidewalks and parks.

In North America wherever pre-war city settlements have not been pulverized by redevelopment, expressway construction or riots, these neighbourhoods still exist. But they have a bad reputation. They are thought to be congested, noisy, dirty, crime-ridden and dangerous. And they're expensive. 

Well, there's expensive and then there's expensive. A normal suburban household spends more than $32,000 a year sustaining the average 3.4 cars parked in every driveway. That's about the same cost as carrying a $600,000 mortgage (fixed rate 5 year at 3%). 

I live in a pre-war neighbourhood. I've never had a mortgage that big. 

All of which brings me to the twenty minutes I spent in the neighbourhood clinic (two blocks from home) this Friday, waiting for my doc to tell me that, if I wanted to get physiotherapy for my hip, I was going to have to pay for it myself.

My appointment was at 10:10 a.m. I didn't get there a minute before that, and expected I'd be there a long time. I found a seat in the crowded waiting room. The whole neighbourhood was represented there: a young pregnant woman who didn't have an appointment; a man in late middle-age with about four pounds of metal suspended from various parts of his head, tattoos covering every inch of visible skin; a still-in-operations transsexual, a wizened old woman folded like a rag over her walker, a whole bunch of ordinary-seeming people between the ages of twenty and fifty, and six little kids, ranging from barely over three to maybe five years old.

A playroom was set up in a sizeable alcove off of the waiting room. Colourful toys almost filled the space, but the kids were most interested in the toys' storage cupboard. Big enough to crawl in and out of, and generously ventilated to forestall tragedy, the kids vastly amused themselves by crawling in, closing the door, opening the door and crawling back out.

They were laughing loudly and making those crazy noises kids make with other kids. One of the three women watching over them would shush them and the volume would dip for four seconds or so. I'd brought paperwork to beguile the waiting. I didn't find the sound of well-behaved children having fun with one another to be too distracting.

I did notice, as each mother's name was called and she gathered her kids to go see the doctor, the small ceremonies of farewell among the children, until just one little guy was left all alone with his mom. He looked after the two girls - twins, I'm sure - who were disappearing around a corner, gave his circumstances some thought and with deliberation and care, crawled into the storage cupboard, closed the door and stayed there.

As for where I fit in the mosaic, I was the middle-aged white woman, dressed in crumpled business casual with three-week-old polish on her toenails, engrossed in her Blackberry and paperwork, oblivious to everything around her.

Good advice walking east on Wellesley Street

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen