Healthchat

Friday, Sept. 27, 2002 - 3:09 p.m.

It was New Year's day, some 31 or 32 years ago. The Captain, affianced to Miss Throckmorton, was crunching about in the snow with her.

They were discussing the New Year's Eve Party his parents had given the night before.

"These people are so insane. All they talk about is their health. Don't they realize that there's a war going on?"

"It's like the pinnacle of Babbitism. They are so caught up in their own little solipsisms that they don't even care about anything relelvant."

"Man, when I heard someone starting to talk about Lenny I was hoping that someone had actually heard of Lenny Bruce but Lenny was just this old dude in the hospital with a heart attack."

"They compare hospitals and doctors the way that we compare poets and novelists. It's such a tiny little limited life they lead."

"Health, health, health! How can they care so much about their health when there's so much evil in the world."

"At least we know that OUR generation will never be so superficial."

"And they ALL have dying mothers; they all look at the small picture, nobody even mentioned Cambodia or Kent State once."

"If they would only get politicized they would not be so hung up on their health."

"Their little lives are so pointless. It's a perfect example of everything Karl Marx was saying."

"Well, at least we will never be that way."

Miss Throckmorton and her affianced Captain continue to crunch in the snow, eviscerating the older generation, a group of people who must all be between 40 and 60 years of age. We are about 20.

Fast forward. Do I owe these people a profound apology! Fortunately, we never told them how desperate, shallow, and superficial their lives; we groused behind their backs.

Typical dinner party I attend: We sit about the table and everyone discusses HEALTH! We anxiously compare doses of all of our statin drugs. We ask for and listen gravely and eager to reports on the aging Ps. Someone usually goes over the litany of hypertension medications. We swap cholesterol figures like little kids trading baseball cards. The most important numbers are not the dead in various terrorist attacks; they are the HDL/LDL ratio.

Why discuss Proust when you can compare triglycerides?

Why discuss Dubya when you know it will just elevate your blood pressure?

Why care about the demise of the world when you've been on the brink of it for so long that an exegeisis on that long-lasting throaty cough you have suffered seems more new and fascinating?

Some people tell the Sagas of their Colonoscopies. You would have been disgusted twenty years ago and you would have hated the person who held forth. Today you listen breathless with concern. Because you know that keeping the body going is becoming the main job.

Those people who would have told you all about their mescaline adventures twenty years ago now struggle with the choice of Tums, Mylanta, or Rolaids.

Those people who have recently published books and who would have waxed loquacious about their research 10 years ago want to talk about that strange vertigo.

Men exchange prostate numbers. Women agonize over HRT. And everyone listens, patiently, and with concern, and waits for his or her own turn to perform the body-logue.

Yes, I apologize to the Captain's Parents and all of their friends. Every day we speak, in hushed tones, of how arrogant we once were and how little sympathy we held for those who used the word "Health" in conversation.

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