Tuesday, August 2, 2011.
Incident.
Mary Ann took a friend of ours to lunch. I thought I'd join them. I raced through my morning workpile and left late enough that they would have drinks and an appetizer before I got there. But that gave enough time for a funny accident to take place. Our friend is having back problems, and a pain medicine he's taking for it is one of those things with which you never drink an alcoholic beverage.
When I got there, he was finishing an old fashioned. He was at least one drink behind everyone else in this restaurant. He seemed a little out of it. Then a lot out of it. It was clear to me that he needed to lie down somewhere. I walked him to the hotel across the street, checked him in, made him drink a glass of water, and helped him into bed. Then I called his brother and asked whether I should call an ambulance. He told me about the medication, and that he didn't think there was danger. I checked back in the hotel room a couple of times. The third time, our friend had checked out of the hotel and was all right.
All I could think of throughout all this was that he was having the same experience I did on Lundi Gras. I too had been doing something I'd done before with no ill effects. I too had just passed a birthday with a zero in it. Those zeros seem to transform the effects of everything we do. I came out of it with a broken leg. I'm glad he's all right.
All this so disrupted the lunch that I don't even want to say where it was. When I got back, Mary Ann had eaten one of my soft-shell crabs and was talking to some visitors from Oregon. They warmed up my other crab, I ate it, and was off to the radio station.
