I don’t know my own phone number
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- April 3, 2018
- 1793
You’re probably going to think I’m making this up, but I swear it’s true. I don’t know my own phone number.
It’s not — I hope — the onset of early senility, but who can know about these things.
Last week, for example, I was asked for my Social Security number as I waited to be seen in a dentist’s office and drew a complete blank.
“Well,” the young woman said, “that’s OK. How about your current address?”
And she had this mordant look in her eyes, the one that asked, “Why is this sad person even allowed to drive a car?”
To which I replied, resurrecting my famous Jack Nicholson dead-eye squint, “Honey, you don’t want to go there.”
Anytime you find yourself trapped in either of the two worst traps of modern American life — the medical or the legal — it’s time to pull the rip chord and just bail.
Ironic, isn’t it? I mean when I found myself entering my freshman year at Notre Dame, all I could think about was that my parents probably wanted me to choose medicine or the law because that was where the money was.
ND was a lot of things, but it wasn’t cheap. Fortunately I had misread their intentions.
My mother put it best. “Michael,” she said, “college isn’t a job factory. All we want is for you to enjoy every experience, learn all you can, and if possible, avoid making your first-ever girlfriend pregnant.”
My point is that she and my father had no interest in shoving me into pre-law or pre-med because they knew — as parents often know — their first-born child would ignore their words of wisdom and decide for himself what he would or wouldn’t do.
Which is doubtless why I find myself at the relatively mature age of 63 still seething whenever I find myself teetering on the edge of the abyss that could find me plummeting into either a doctor’s office or a lawyer’s waiting room.
These, faithful readers, are places you do not want to go.
You’re probably thinking to yourself, “Hey Mike, what’s so bad about those two professions? Aren’t there good folks in both, people who have dedicated their lives to helping others?”
And you’re right. But the odds of finding one of either species are roughly equivalent to discovering that college basketball isn’t run by greedy weasels or that your high school sweetheart is still carrying a torch for you. In short it’s next to impossible.
But what choice do we have? You get sick, you have to see a doctor. You get arrested, you need a lawyer.
It’s a zero-sum game, and as you doubtless know, in this modern me-first world, every contest is rigged.
Since college, where I learned these lessons well, I’ve tried mightily to avoid all contact with both the medical and legal sticky traps, believing I alone can negotiate life’s serpentine path just fine on my own, thank you very much.
It’s all an endless string of referrals and consultations anyway, for which you’re billed exorbitantly and enthusiastically, which is why my response is always easy enough. To wit: I’ll do fine on my own.
But what will happen when I can’t? This, my friends, is what would keep me up nights if I didn’t work vampire hours in a job with no benefits.
So those thoughts haunt my daytime hours, and believe me, my imagination is fertile enough to imagine a future devoid of any semblance of comfort, security or — dare I say it? — happiness.
No one wants to be a burden on society, least of all me. After all, I contribute to charities, believing not only that I’m helping others, but also that in some strange and appropriate spinning of the karma wheel, that by doing something good, some of my bad will be erased.
That was kind of the bedrock belief in the Catholic Church, which I found myself in way back when I had no idea there were other equally weird but just as valid faiths out there.
“Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.”
The Golden Rule. No one’s improved on those 11 words. But no one cares anymore, not really. At least that’s my belief.
We live in a very divided world. One half wants nothing to do with the other 50 percent. Each side believes in its own ideology and stands tall to defend it against any intruders. I get so tired of it, the tragic waste of mental energy. Which is probably why I couldn’t remember my phone number the other day when I was asked to provide it.
I don’t even know my wife’s.
With the advent and proliferation of cell phones, people have no use for recalling something that’s simply programmed and shared. You just touch a few buttons, save the data and go on. Nothing leaves an impression on your mind.
When I was a kid, the first things Mom and Dad taught me were my full name, my home address and my telephone number, probably because they could envision me wandering the streets of our town after dark, just enjoying every experience.
“I’m Stanley Michael Dewey,” I always repeated, envisioning a kindly cop with a spiral notebook. “I live at 1191 Bryson Road, and the phone number is AM7-2412.”
Now I have to check the back of my decade-old clamshell phone, where my wife has affixed a label with my number printed on it.
I doubt many doctors and lawyers have the same problem. Or maybe, just maybe, they’re just like all the rest of us.
Mike Dewey can be reached at CarolinamikeD@aol.com or 6211 Cardinal Drive, New Bern, NC 28560. He’d provide his telephone number, but he honestly can’t recall it, though he does invite you to join the fun on his Facebook page.