I was at the airport seeing my daughter and her friends off to Europe when I spoke to Pat from Fly by Night Insurance Company. As I tried to comprehend why the insured's name and policy number were somehow insufficient to enable Pat to access the information I sought (taxis have a lot of accidents, he explained), I gazed longingly at my daughter's suitcase, wondering how I could manage to slip into it. Usually, she travels with a bag that could easily fit a family of four, but this time she must have anticipated my fantasies and went with something compact. Ungrateful child.
Happily, she arrived safely, first in Paris, then in Prague. I didn't hear the middle-of-the-night texts, even though my phone was next to my bed. For Paris, at 2:30, the vibrations were drowned out by the sound of Manny downstairs tinkling a great lake onto the wood floor. For Prague, at 5:30, I was downstairs wrapping Manny's prednizone pills in peanut butter -- the very pills that cause him to turn my house into his urinal.
But really, things are lookin' up for June. Today, my mother will be sent home from the hospital with a full time health care aide. Apparently, she (my mother) is demanding that the poor unsuspecting aide not set foot in her kitchen. It's not that she wants her to starve (although my guess is the aide will, in my mother's opinion, be a fat disgusting pig); she's willing to arrange for take-out. My mother's kitchen, a shrine with its ice cream parlor chairs and miniature jars of food and one pot, one pan, and one semi-sharp knife, is a place not to be messed with. I don't have the heart to tell her I saw a roach in the sink when I visited.
But this was a post about insurance companies, wasn't it? By the time my mother gets through with what I am predicting will be a revolving door of health aides, I will be offering money to Medicare and Fly by Night and all the others just to keep them from suing us.
Maybe I should start setting my sights on July.
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