Laugh-starved? Need a fun gift for a friend? This (slightly edited) reprint of one of my columns from years ago, when I helped my daughter through the last stages of her medical residency at the University of Chicago, is included in my book, The View From Sunnybank, available at Horizon Books in Traverse City, and in other Grand Traverse area bookstores. Every cent goes toward the maintenance of my garden.
‘A delicious day is one that is not entirely predictable.’ D. Blair
Here’s a true tale, full of sound and slurry, signifying nothing.
February, 2007. I’d fed my exhausted, cold-sick oldest daughter a plump chicken dinner, and after a critical inspection, decided she needed a walk through Chicago’s charming neighborhood downtown area, a block from our door. Trapped in the bowels of the University of Chicago’s Emergency Department for weeks, she needed to breathe in clean lake air. (Her resident cold virus, losing interest, was already stalking the next susceptible nose and chest to deliver its payload of gasping coughs, fever and general nasal misery. This plan suited it, too.)
Jenny actually had the next 24 hours to herself; even her pager was peaceful, contenting itself with only the occasional burp. A quick cell-phone sort-out with the nurses, and Dr. Jen and I relaxed into the rhythm of a lovely evening stroll. Destination? Borders Books, an invigorating ten-minute trot down Broadway.
We passed imaginatively decorated store windows; the usual mercifully muted thump-thump ‘muzak’ leaked from their merchandise-stuffed interiors onto the sidewalk. Even now, at nearly 8:00 p.m., lots of cheerful ‘thirty-somethings’ were delighting in the relative warmth. A lovely half-moon glowed in a black sky. What a welcome change from the incredible cold of the last few weeks.
Yet…something was missing. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was.
What happened next defied credulity. There was a whoosh of air, then a definitive, sucking ‘Plop!’ With a confident, perfectly balanced landing, a delicately pink rubber toilet plunger touched down in the exact center of temporarily car-empty, snow-slushy Broadway Street. It teetered triumphantly, then took a firm grip and did what it was designed to do--create a vacuum.
Even for Chicagoans, this was outrageous. People paused in mid-stride, gaping in disbelief: the Broadway intersection went dead quiet.
Here began the toilet plunger’s fifteen minutes of fame; it basked in the glow of the street lamp. For a long moment, nobody moved; then, almost as a beautifully choreographed unit, people looked up. Huh. No cars had passed; no planes flew overhead; the big buildings lining the generously wide street displayed darkened, firmly shut higher-storied windows. So, where and how…? There was no rational answer for this dubious miracle.
Eyeing the pink, alien exclamation point, many onlookers realized They! could have been targeted…Nervously, some took a step back, eyes in constant motion, trying to make sense of this rubbery visitation. The toilet plunger hung on, stiffly erect, knowing its entrance was unprecedented.
Abruptly, an icy breeze made the tall wooden handle sway; the wide rubber mouth sighed, disconnected, and the hapless plunger toppled to the pavement, rudely exposing an unlovely, suspiciously dark underside.
Its collapse broke the spell; everyone laughed till tears came, and as Jenny and I held our sides and roared with the rest of them, I realized that this was what I’d missed. Sometimes life should be outrageous; the absurd ‘visitation’ fit the bill. Not one of the crowd really wanted to understand. It was enough that the impossible had happened, right here in Chicago.
Mopping our eyes, we moved on, and, when we made our way back an hour later we noticed the plunger’s thick pink business end lying forlornly by the curb, bottom-up, and slowly filling with brown slush from the muck-filled wheels of passing cars. Its wooden handle had disappeared.
Never mind the why of it; lucky pedestrians would never forget, that, for one brief, shining moment, we’d all been plunged into the Twilight Zone.