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TALES OF THE QUARANTINE: Parts I and II
By Tom Anselm
I am sure that many people have stories to tell of their over two-month-sojourn in the Land of Lock-up. Some are no doubt inspirational, some very sad, some hopeful. And some may be downright stupid. I am no exception to this phenomenon. Let’s start with the “stupid.” Now, granddaughters Evelyn and Ruby tell me to never say stupid. And they are, alas, correct. Hard for me, since this is one of my favorite words. But there really is no way to better describe this tale.
It was a lovely Saturday afternoon. I went to a small county lake near our home, and was just starting to cast out with my newly-acquired fly reel. I have been doing a lot of fishing these past days, a welcome respite for The Lovely Jill, and a good way to pass a few hours in a time when I’ve got not much to do and all day to do it. So here goes the first cast, and it snags on a little stand of weeds.
I usually just snatch it out and shoot it forward. No big deal, right? Well, snatch it out it goes, but the fly hook finds its way into my face, just below my left jaw line. (Yeah, I know… Hey, Tom… that’s by the carotid, right?
Yep. Just typing this gives me the willies…!) So I reach up and there is the fly, in my neck. No bleeding. Yay! Try to wiggle it out. No luck. Fishing done for today. Get in the car, call Jill, tell her I got a hook in my cheek, drive home, grab my wire snippers in the garage, and walk in the door, Jill freaks out.
I say to her, “So here’s what we’re gonna do. You clip the fly on the hook, then I’ll push it through and it will slide right…”
“Are you #@$%^&* crazy? Here’s what we’re gonna do! I’m taking you right to the urgent care! That’s in your neck! You said ‘cheek!’ Your neck!! No way am I touching that!
Needless to say, we went to the urgent care. It wasn’t bleeding, not really even hurting. I was shook up, as was she, because it was, well, “my neck”!
But the ladies at the urgent care just calmly signed me in, and a few minutes later I was in a room. Everybody looks like their robbing the Quiki-Mart, masks and all. Two people check me in. Making some lame jokes about ‘any luck today?’ and ‘see you got a big one, ha ha.’ I wasn’t laughing. Feeling ‘sheeeepish.’
So the Nurse Practitioner walks in and she takes one look at me with this red-feathered, one-eyed fly lure in my neck and she starts laughing. She gets so embarrassed, like ‘Oh, I am so sorry… there’s nothing funny about this. I should not be laughing’… as she keeps giggling. I can imagine it did look pretty comical.
I began to relax, seeing this as an episode of “ER” or even “Scrubs.” She looked at it and said she didn’t think she had a wire clipper. Gonna cut the hook and work it out the front end, was her diagnosis. SEE, I said to myself, my treatment plan was CORRECT! Just now it was going to be done by a professional.
She comes back in with, not lying, a basket full of maintenance tools. Sanitizes the wire cutter, I lay down on the table, she shoots me with a teeny bit of lidocaine. Snip, wiggle and out.
So yeah, more “Scrubs” than “ER”, probably.
Moral of the story: If you’re fishing and the hook gets caught up in something, Be patient, for God’s sake! It’s only a hook. Cut it off and forget it. Lest it find its way into your face! Or something of the sort.
TALES OF THE QUARANTINE: Part II
Jill and I have been associated with a talent agency for a few years. Gotten several gigs, made a few bucks. You may have seen me watering the sidewalk on a hospital commercial during a Blues or Cards game in the past?
Anyway, we got a call from the agency director about a shoot for a musician named Allen Stone who wrote a song a few years ago that spoke to today’s pandemic stuff, with the isolation and taking time to appreciate what we have, entitled “Look Outside.” She asked us to send in some pics and we got booked.
We called the producer. In our conversation, it turns out his dad was a guy who daughter Mary Pat used to work for. Sadly, the father was a victim of a shooting with many terrible surgeries, but his recovery was very good. Then, a few years later, he died of cancer. Nate, the producer, was so thrilled to be working with us, as we had this connection to his dad, through our daughter. Talk about serendipity.
The very challenging part was that we had to self-shoot the whole thing in our house, quarantining being what it is. We borrowed granddaughter Elise’s iphone8 (all our grandkids have better phones than us!), set it up on a tripod, borrowed a Monopoly game from Jill’s sister Jenny, and did two takes of three scenes. Sent each to Nate as we did them, he’d critique them and we’d re-shot. We really had a ball, and The Lovely Jill once again proved that The Camera Loves Her!
Along with this story is a link to the music video on YouTube by Allen Stone called
“Look Outside.”This young man has an amazing voice, kind of like a combination Stevie Wonder-Smoky Robinson-James Taylor vibe. Nate and all the players did an amazing job, as the video tells a sweet story, honoring family and frontline workers everywhere.
So two stories: one stupid, one sweet. I’ll leave you with two thoughts:
Be safe out there… pulling hooks out of bushes, and taking those sometimes annoying but necessary health precautions.
And take time to Look Outside… at the sky and trees and grass, reach out to your loved ones, and look outside yourself, thanking God for all you have.
