I love my uber-friendly dentist’s office. They are totally modern and pain-free in every way.
The doctor loads up his iPod with cool tunes and docks it in his sound system. He could have a show on a West Coast public radio station with his eclectic mix of rock, folk, blues and jazz. The receptionist/scheduler looks like a pleasant straight church lady, and probably is, but she gushes with pleasantries and stories when I arrive. It almost doesn’t hurt to give her my credit card.
This past visit, she told me about her summer vacation. She and her husband planned to visit family back in Ohio, but she had an intuition, a funny feeling that something would go wrong. She didn’t know if the car would break down, or an accident would happen. So she stayed home, caught up on house work and tackled overdo projects.
Midway through the staycation, the day before the Fourth of July, she got a call from her mother. The family had been without power for three days, the heat was killing them and the neighborhood was flooded by the line of storms we all read about in the news. She was bubbly with excitement about dodging that bullet and enjoying her safe stay-at-home vacation.
The hygienist had not cancelled her trip to the mountains of North Carolina and reported that the temperature reached 111 degrees, hotter than home in Florida. Gosh, I thought, it’s too bad there aren’t het vacation meccas for them to enjoy. Of course, hets have the whole world to choose from, but my gay superiority complex knows that we get the best vacations.
This article appears in Jul 19-25, 2012.