It had seemed like a lark. The four dorm buddies had just learned on the Internet that TODAY, August 7^th – was National Sea Serpent Day. “That’s crazy,” said Jim Brewer, an astute but fun-loving 22-year-old, “Who ever heard of a sea serpent in southern California waters?” Sitting with Jim in his room were Mike, Dave, and Bill, surnamed Smith, Doe, and Jones respectively, all majors in marine sciences, and all had a good laugh. Something else they all had in common were health insurance policies provided by a California Health Insurance agent – which was to prove fortuitous.

One of the college students decided on an excursion as a way to celebrate the peculiar holiday – intended partly in jest but also because going out in Jim’s Aquasport was fun. A few hours later, Jim Brewer and his buddies were placidly perched in the 20-foot Aquasport when something, a sleek & sinuous serpentine shape, suddenly loomed over their boat in the fog, rising from the depths, and swiftly rammed them before any of them could blink.

“What the heck was that?” Dave Doe managed to say while bobbing in the ocean a mile off Catalina Island, as the Aquasport was capsized. Jim replied in emergency mode, “Everybody is okay, except for Mike, he’s swallowed a lot of water.”

Luckily Dave and Bill managed to right the boat, and they all headed back toward the city. Enroute, Jim put in a call via cell (amazingly it still functioned) to Mr. Tim Neptune, the kindly California Health Insurance agent who knew all their parents, and regarded these young men too as his clients.

“What can I do for you?”

“Our boat got swamped,” Jim blurted.

“What capsized you?”

“We don’t know. We think it was a sea serpent. But Mike Smith swallowed a lot of water and he’s barely conscious. What should we do?”

“Take him to the nearest ER,” advised Neptune, sounding like a sea god at that moment, “Don’t worry. You all have coverage and it’s current.”

Once their buddy Mike was taken in, he required hospitalization and an overnight stay. When he woke up in his hospital bed, Mike’s first words were peculiar. “It was a sea serpent,” he said, “I saw it.”

The Donegans, Bob, Mitzy, and their kids, Joey, Johnny, and Jimmy loved to light fireworks on their land near Eureka. They’d get it from Tijuana, and drive up past San Francisco with enough firepower every 4^th of July to start their own preemptive war. Their family health insurance plan typically served for mundane family catastrophes that might occur at other times of the year. Except for this single idiosyncrasy, a well-intentioned rite for celebrating our nation’s birthday, the Donegans were pretty ordinary. Bob was a self-employed entrepreneur with a computer repair business. Mitzy did the company’s books, and the kids, already quite computer literate, did the troubleshooting if the trouble wasn’t too complicated.

Around June 29^th the family drove off merrily humming. Their black hummer headed south for the border towards Tijuana’s fireworks stands, some with supermarket-like inventories,  to stock up on Roman candles and bottle rockets, salutes and M-80s, blockbusters and cherry bombs, even sparklers and snakes for little Jimmy, who was only twelve and a bit more timid than his brothers and parents.

Once back home, preparation for festive explosions and “the lighting” always was a big production. Neighbors came from miles around. Bob and Mitzy were relatively safety-conscious, but their boys could be downright careless – especially Johnny, a sullen 14-year-old who loved to see just about anything “blow up.” He was about to stuff a live M-80 into the unsuspecting maw of Spritzy, the family’s beloved Dalmatian, when the explosive power of that quarter-stick of dynamite exploded prematurely and blew up near a horrified Jimmy, trying to save the dog.  Mitzy dialed her family’s California Health Insurance agent in the nick of time. “Dial 911 – Stat!” he screamed over the phone. She did, and Jimmy was rushed to the nearest regional medical center via ambulance.

They all went to visit Jimmy after the surgery. He was bandaged up. “You look just like The Mummy from that movie,” remarked Johnny, displaying his usual contemptuous flair for the insensitive.   

“How’s Spritzy?” Jimmy managed to ask, barely audible through his wrappings.

John Smith and his wife Becca were preparing for their annual Father’s Day “cookout and fleshly barbeque” when the unthinkable happened. Usually the event drew the Smith’s three remaining children – Michael (named after the archangel), Mary (named after the mother of Jesus), and John Jr. (named after his Dad), ages 27, 29, and 31 respectively. Another Smith spawn was seldom spoken of. He’d left home at 18 for parts unknown, although rumors had surfaced that he’d become a Major League Baseball superstar for the Dodgers. Since the Smiths all hated baseball and none of them owned a television or radio, even if Daemon was playing shortstop with the Dodgers, his family wouldn’t have known. In fact, the family’s “black sheep” had become almost as famous as Manny Ramirez. Daemon was 32 now, and in fourteen years, there hadn’t been a single letter from the prodigal Smith son to any of his family members. Perhaps strangely, Daemon had become estranged.  

The accident involved the elder Smith. He was on the far side of Beverly Hills, his musket in hand, searching for a main course for the family’s upcoming “cookout and fleshly barbeque.”  If he’d been watching TV, he’d have known to avoid the far side of Beverly Hills. This nefarious region had become the lair of the infamous “Beverly Hills Wolverine.” It was on the news almost non-stop that day. The far side of Beverly Hills was like a ghost town.  “It’s awful quiet in these parts. Just me and my blunderbuss,” John Smith managed to say aloud, before the wolverine pounced. Wolverines are quite vicious. Just ask anyone from Michigan.

A California Health Insurance agent living in the neighborhood discovered Mr. Smith, who had purchased a policy on a prudent whim a few months back. The agent called ‘911.’ His second call was to the TV news stations.

On Father’s Day, the Smiths settled for turkey as their main course. Becca, Michael, Mary, and John Jr. were sitting down at the family picnic table with the bandaged John Sr., everyone in a melancholy mood when guess who showed up, bringing half the Dodgers?

Health Insurance

Everyone has a mother – even in California. A mother is often the first memory we have, and in most cases, except where the mother happens to be a “bad Mommy,” and often not even then, we tend to cherish our mothers and want to celebrate them on that Sunday in May set aside. Andrew S. Samaritan, a California Health Insurance agent based in Fresno, kept getting calls from his clients.

“Did you hear what they’re doing? I read it in the paper,” an elderly woman screamed, one who had a policy in good standing, “Andrew, are you listening to me?”

Andrew tried at first to accept the loss of Mother’s Day with quiet resignation. His mother and he had never gotten along. He began quietly humming. “Andrew!” the woman screamed again, “Mother’s Day is my day. It’s the only day that my son Mordred realizes I’m alive!”

Andrew knew Mordred, and didn’t particularly like him either, although he also purchased a policy and it was a family plan in good standing.  “I’ll see what I can do,” Andrew said, determined to do nothing, and hoping it would all blow over. It didn’t.

Mordred called next. “I can’t stand it!” he screamed, “My mother is going crazy over this thing about Mother’s Day being cancelled. You know the governor’s influential aide. Will you drive up to Sacramento and help?”

“It’s only cancelled for this year,” Andrew said, “until they get money back in the till.” He said this in the tone not fitting for an empathetic California Health Insurance agent, as if the crisis was no big deal.

“It IS a big deal!” screamed Mordred, as if HE were able to read Andrew’s mind, and hung up.

Seventy-eight calls from clients later, Andrew Samaritan decided to become a Good Samaritan. He got in his Honda Accord and headed up to the State Capitol.

The task at hand was speaking to the influential aide that he knew. The aide was actually Andrew’s sixth cousin, twice removed, once forcibly, in many ways a bad Samaritan.

But this story has a happy ending, and Mother’s Day was restored. Things would be fine for awhile, until everybody discovered that they’d cancelled Christmas.

May Day! May Day! It sounds a lot like Chicken Little saying that the sky is falling. Although the sky would fall if it could, as it happens to not be a big admirer of gravity, such a thing probably won’t happen in our lifetimes. So what’s all the commotion about?

Stephen P. Positive, a Polyannish California Health Insurance agent, had heard about May Day from several of his clients who had purchased policies. He was an honest guy, like virtually all California Health Insurance agents, just trying to make a living. Plus, his customers noted that he possessed a cheerful countenance within his “attitude of gratitude.”

One client who had a large family spoke of May Days past in the context of dancing around a Maypole, and celebrating the labor movement, but he was a liberal, and they were nearly extinct, weren’t they?

Mostly what Stephen got from his clients when they spoke about May Day were emergencies, most of them garden-variety in the larger scheme of things, certainly relative to a falling sky, which would indeed be a serious matter, Stephen mused, but most emergencies are just so important to someone when they are actually happening, even a kid falling off a swing, or grandpa forgetting to take his medication. So when he heard a litany of Maydays over the phone, every single day, they began to run together, which was human nature for Stephen, and you couldn’t really blame him.

It happened one day. Who would have thunk it? The client who was a liberal, his wife called Stephen, and she was frantic. “It’s my husband; he was dancing around the Maypole and …”

Stephen assured her that her husband was indeed covered, that their policy was in good standing, and he even calmly told her what to do next, about 911, and what to do with the Maypole, and not to shout “May Day! May Day!” over the phone when she called the emergency operator, acting Willy Nilly, as if she were Chicken Little.

He’d wanted to be normal since he’d been a boy. At 34, his bedroom was still littered with a menagerie of stuffed animals that provoked snide comments from his girlfriends – all the wrong kind of women anyway because they tended to be mother figures. He had to break these childhood patterns once and for all, and he’d settled on Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) as a cure.

His first mistake was going to bed, as usual in the shadow of Tony the Tiger and Gisele the Giraffe, each towering above his head on each side of his pillow, propped up in their verticality by the bed’s antique oaken headboard, without bothering to turn his alarm clock an hour ahead for the first day of Daylight Savings Time.  He had to arrive promptly at 8 a.m. at the Escondido NLP center to begin his life-changing all day seminar, centered upon combating the subjectivity that had so far made life without such imaginative creatures as Tony, Gisele, and their assorted brethren unthinkable.

The trouble began at 7:55 a.m. Daylight Savings Time when Maybelline, a matronly woman of 49 who loved to dote on “her Jonny,” called and roused him from a last minute half-asleep reverie. Jonathan was going to get up anyway in five minutes, as his alarm was set for 7:00 a.m. standard time.

“Hi May,” he said drowsily, “How come you’re calling so early?”

“Early,” she said, “It’s five minutes before eight. Don’t you have to be in Escondido at eight? It’s Daylight Savings, don’t you know?”

“Damn!” Jonathan exclaimed, “You’re right! I got to go!” Within ten minutes he’d completed his morning ablutions and was out the door without so much as a goodbye for Tony or Gisele.  

But he drove too fast. The accident happened just a mile from the center, a lamp post he didn’t see in time, a gouged radiator, a sprained ankle, an attempt to run, a collapse … he woke up in a hospital bed, a semi-private room.  A doctor was asking about whether he was covered, Jonathan answered in the affirmative, mumbled something about a California Health Insurance agent.

Suddenly, he saw them. Opening his eyes fully, he knew that he wasn’t alone. Somebody had brought Tony & Gisele and also a big stuffed dog, to keep him company.

[ How to cook your own Fish & Chips ]

It was St. Valentine’s Day eve before it occurred to Ed Nolan, a diesel mechanic and family man, that the ‘holiday’ needed to be celebrated or else his wife and eight kids would feel cheated. Brought up Catholic, Ed had met his wife Nancy when they were both in sixth grade at St. Valentine’s School back in Massachusetts, where they’d been childhood sweethearts. St. Valentine, as gorily depicted in the Catholic semi-sacred tome, “The Lives of the Saints,” had been a cupid-like young teenager shot to death by bow sent arrows, according to legend. As these grisly images surfaced in Nolan’s mind, he suddenly decided, without any planning whatsoever, that he’d have to take the entire family out to eat for “St. Valentine’s Day.” As it fell on a Sunday, but for some reason felt like a Friday, he figured it had to be a “fish place” — a restaurant specializing in seafood dishes. A born procrastinator, Ed and his family ended up driving around greater Los Angeles in search of a “fish place.” Finally, Ed pulled up to a seedy-looking diner called Cedrick’s Fish Place with Chips. “Perfect,” Ed exclaimed.

The food, planks of greenish-tinged cod with murky, dark red chowder tasted good enough going down. The younger Nolan children especially enjoyed the chowder and the process of discovering what “lurked beneath” in their bowls. “It tastes funny, but kind of nice,” remarked five-year-old Mary. 

A few hours later, the Nolan family en masse became very sick. A large quantity of vomit and diarrhea began to permeate their humble home. Much of it smelled like rotten fish. Ed procrastinated until his little girl began to resemble Typhoid Mary, a tragic character in history just as St. Valentine had been in his painful last ordeal. She began to develop her own greenish-tinge around the ears, nose, and mouth.      

Feeling nauseous and leaking out the derriere himself, Ed drove to the nearest urgent care facility post-haste. He remembered when they’d purchased a California Health Insurance policy from an agent named “Bill.” What was his last name? “Valentine,” Ed recalled. Next year, the Nolan family would plan well in advance for St. Valentine’s Day, the family’s patriarch ruefully mused.

Fishing Accident!!

Pete Wafsleger was an expert fisherman. Using bait and a fiberglass rod, he usually caught his limit. One day in May, Pete and five old friends, all experienced fishermen sans one, headed up to Pete’s favorite stream in Yosemite.  They drove up in an SUV, if not exactly fuel efficient, the vehicle was “fishing efficient,” according to Sam, the SUV’s owner and driver.

The vehicle’s onboard GPS worked swell, and within an hour, the group of friends arrived in the park. Within a few more minutes, they’d found Pete’s cherished stream. “Here we are!” he yelled. Sam stopped the car. The men felt like kids playing hooky when they got out their poles, and baited their hooks. Everybody was in a good mood. Five casts, expertly launched, went out into the stream.

Before Sam sent his own cast airborne, he spoke a red flag. “How do you even know for sure there’s even fish in this stream? It’s only about six inches deep!”

Pete and the rest turned to face Sam and flashed him looks. Every trout fisherman worth his tackle knows that a trout stream is seldom more than a foot deep. Besides, they’d all pulled stringers of writhing trout from this very stream. But at that very instant, Sam launched his cast. It sailed into the air like the others – for about seven feet – until Sam hooked Pete with considerable force – right in the forehead. “Geez Sam,” they all cried in unison, “now look what you’ve done.”

For his part, Pete just stood there bleeding profusely.  Sam drove in a quite a hurry back in the way they’d come, in fact, even further, all the way to Barstow. An emergency room gurney lay waiting for Pete. As he was wheeled off into the bowels of the hospital, his friends followed along like grown puppy dogs, and Sam seemed especially bedraggled. Pete lay there bleeding and repeating in the manner of a mantra, “Thank heavens I got health insurance coverage.”

Sure enough, Pete did have a plan in place. He’d purchased it a few months back from a California Health Insurance agent who was also a fisherman of sorts.

A few days later, the friends were all having a good laugh amid a few beers, even Pete, still wearing a bandage to protect the stitches.  “Still my friend?” Sam asked Pete.

“Sure,” Pete said, “Can’t help it. I’m hooked.” At least he wasn’t the friend that got away.

Everybody who is overweight, not grossly obese necessarily, but even those who find themselves pleasingly plump, get the urge to lose weight right after New Year’s. Diets are taken up like Bibles, and gymnasiums and sauna rooms are filled with perspiring people of every age and description. The offices of Turtlebaum & Turtlebaum, a Sacramento accounting firm of considerable renown, was no exception. Joe D’Angelo by his own estimation needed to shed twenty pounds worn around his middle like a girdle, Patty Provencal seemed to possess a double stomach along with her double chin; Betsy Boopora’s ankles had morphed into cankles, and Irving Iso, although quite conventional in most ways, possessed arms like an elephant’s trunk.

At the beginning of 2009, they’d all made New Year’s resolutions to lose the excess flab. Each was about to be weighed to learn just who might be winning the “Biggest Loser” prizes which had been offered by management as weight loss incentives. But the results were disappointing.

When Joe hopped up onto the precision scale, he’d lost only two pounds, and Betsy had lost just under a pound. Patty had actually gained forty pounds, and Irving had gained almost sixty. To describe any of these losers as “winners” seemed a stretch, but throughout the entire year, stress and anxiety about the “weigh-in” had been bubbling in their bloodstreams like lava from a volcano, and during the celebratory feast something was bound to give. People watched in abject horror as Irving turned red as a beet and actually “popped,” like in that Monty Python movie, and as he was whisked away in an ambulance, the same medical emergency to lesser degrees struck Betsy, Patty, and Joe.  While Irving had suffered some kind of massive stroke, his co-workers were merely hospitalized; thanks to a California health insurance agent who’d issued them all policies, they at least got to stay in separate semi-private rooms.

Joe grasped the prize he’d won in his left hand, the sinister one, while lying in bed and staring at the funny whorls in the hospital room’s ceiling. A nurse coming by with a bedpan happened to glance downwards and discover what it was: It was a ticket for the balcony as a member of the audience for the television show The Biggest Loser.

Because of his manipulative personality, his tendency to steal other children’s toys, and his predilection for tattling, other boys avoided eleven-year-old Stanley. When he was outside, he played solitary games like one-hand-clapping, and worse, he’d listen to that hand. Stanley’s mother, a single mom, could be accused of being overprotective, but she had contacted a widowed California Health Insurance agent named Ralph just to make sure her odd little cherub was covered by an individual child plan. This precaution seemed prudent, even prescient, once she started dating Ralph.

Let’s go camping up in the Sierras, Ralph announced one weekend. The three of them headed for a snow-covered campground in a rented SUV. After their tent was pitched, Stanley grew accustomed to the canvas structure’s fetid air and began his characteristic clapping game, which annoyed the heck out of Ralph. “Hey, let’s go out and throw some snowballs!” he announced. Pushed out into a winter wonderland as if re-emerging from the womb, Stanley, who had never really seen snow, began making a snowball with one hand. Ralph noticed. “You have to pack it – use your other hand,” he instructed. All too soon, Stanley had made his first-ever snowball.  But instinctively returning to his familiar game, the one-hand-clapping, the uncoordinated snowball became a projectile and smacked Ralph surprisingly hard on the side of the face.  Before he realized it, and because he assumed Stanley had meant to throw the snowball, Ralph retaliated with his adult strength. He may have thrown several. In any case, Stanley eventually screamed, “He broke my glasses! Ralph broke my glasses!”

Stanley’s mom drove at breakneck speed for forty miles out of that canyon until she made it to the nearest ER, hardly glancing at her newfound boyfriend.

Stanley had been cut below the left eye by a shard of glass, requiring three stitches. Afterwards, Ralph apologized. “I’m sorry kid,” he muttered.

Stanley was quick to forgive. “Want to play my game?” he asked. Ralph was initially repulsed, but decided, “Oh what the heck!” As the SUV sped along a narrow rural road somewhere north of Sacramento, two elusive hands chased each other while never touching.