COUPON REDEMPTION [M, 6-25-24]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings of an Old Man--COUPON REDEMPTION [M, 6-25-24]

 

Our family zoomed together on Father’s Day. It’s about the only way we can all get together anymore, with grandkids all grown up. I really love those zoom times together, in part because we tell a lot of stories. Some we’ve heard before. Some are new.

Like the one his mother told, about when grandson Joe was in the local hospital being treated for liver cancer. He was diagnosed at 15 months. He was on the edge for a year, with so many surgeries and chemo treatments and terrifying days and nights. He and his mother were usually at the big university hospital for kids, 175 miles away, but in between treatments there, when he was home, if he spiked a fever, he had to go to the local hospital.

So we got to know the local pediatric doctors and nurses as well as those at the big hospital. I think pediatric nurses, as a group, impress me more than any other profession.

They have to do such awful things to little children who do not understand that those exams and treatments are for their own good. So they have to be psychologists as well as nurses.

One day a nurse in the local hospital snipped off a piece of used, flat plastic from one of those machines and gave it to Joe and said, “This is a coupon for Birdsall’s Ice Cream. It can be redeemed only by a grandpa.” Joe was not at all surprised that the coupon turned out to be doubly valid.

In a “Call the Midwife,” episode, Sister Mary Cynthia is talking to someone who is having a hard time, and she says, “There is a lot of healing in the world…” I was struck by that, because we usually think, and say, “There’s a lot of misery in the world,” implying that you almost have to go outside the world for healing.

Not so. There are a lot of coupons in the world. You just have to recognize them and know who needs one… and who is responsible for redeeming it.

John Robert McFarland

You’d think I would have remembered that story, but neither Joe nor his sister ever had to present a coupon, not even a request, so…