California Health Insurance Quotes and Blog

While giving her son a home haircut, Marta Higgins realized in an awful instant that she was cutting more flesh than hair. Luckily they had purchased an insurance plan from California Health Insurance Agent Matt Lockard.

She’d wanted to save money. Haircuts were getting expensive. Why not? Marta Higgins mused. Her six-year-old would be getting a home haircut. The boy was anything but pleased. “Mommy; I want to go to the real barbershop.” Too old to have a tantrum, he had one anyway. It didn’t make any difference. Eventually, he was sitting up in a kitchen chair. She had promised to give him a cookie afterwards.      

Chip was well-behaved from then on, trying to sit absolutely still. Marta had never cut hair before. Once she’d dreamed of becoming a stylist in a unisex salon, but that’s when she’d been just eight.  Still, how hard could it be?  After draping a towel over Chip’s chest and shoulders, she grabbed a comb and scissors and just started cutting. Running the comb through her boy’s hair, she instinctively used it as a guide. “Mommy is doing a fine job,” she said to her son, as if to reassure him.

“I wish I could go to the barbershop,” the boy blurted.   

In fact, she was close to finishing, when the phone rang.  Distracted, suddenly she noticed when Chip started screaming that it wasn’t just hair she was cutting. Chip screamed again and was soon sobbing. Was that a piece of his earlobe that she now grasped in the pinching grip of her scissors? Blood came pouring out of the wound, and began running down his face and neck.

“Oops,” she said, “my bad.” She realized how remarkably calm she was.  It was a good thing she kept the phone number of her California Health Insurance Agent handy on the fridge. 

Matt Lockard came on the phone. “Yes?”

When Marta explained what had happened, Matt advised her to save the ear lobe, “Don’t lose it, whatever you do!” he said, rather loudly, to the voice on the phone, “Head right now to the nearest hospital ER, don’t waste a minute!”

“But my friend Sally called. I need to call her back. What if she has an emergency?” Marta said.

“YOU have your own emergency!” Matt screamed, in concert with Chip, who was still screaming.

“It will be expensive!” Marta howled.

“Don’t worry, you’re covered!” Matt explained. 

Thereafter, Chip always hid whenever his mom mentioned the word “hair,” but except for what the boy would forever refer to as his “Quasimodo” scar, he eventually recovered.

Prominent California Health Insurance agent Matt Lockard delivers testimonial for hero, who recognized the signs of a heart attack in the nick of time to save the life of an inebriated centenarian who happened to be the agent’s beloved great-great-grandmother.

Graeme Greeme was first and foremost a designated driver on that fateful New Year’s Eve. Flossie L. Taylor, age 106, had been imbibing single malt Scotch for the simple reason that she still could, and was “drunk as a skunk,” in her own slurred words, as she prepared to get behind the wheel of her silver Porsche for the drive home at 10:45 p.m. He’d been hired for the expressed purpose of “driving Miss Flossie,” as she was now called, but aside from the ancient lady’s typical alcohol-induced stupor, Mr. Greeme noticed something seriously amiss. Although her lightheadedness was less than obvious under the circumstances, all of the other signs, the cold sweats, vomiting, chest discomfort, neck pain, and shortness of breath – were linked inexorably to Poe’s Telltale Heart, as well as Flossie’s. “I’m having a heart attack,” the ancient Miss Taylor managed. Her words were the giveaway. Instead of “home,” their destination became the nearest hospital emergency room. The expensive car became a silver bullet. Graeme Greene’s prompt action saved Miss Flossie’s life. Her words, although uttered through spurting phlegm-coated bubbles of fine whisky, had proved prophetic.

At the Last Lutheran Church of Oxnard, her great-great-grandson, Matt Lockard, who happened to be a California Health Insurance agent with an office in Ventura, spoke a few words in recognition of Graeme Greeme’s selfless and timely act. Lockard’s voice, a slender baritone, was choked with emotion. “Tonight we are honoring a hero. Not only did this man save my great-great grandmother’s life by recognizing the signs of a heart attack and swiftly getting her to the nearest ER where she was thankfully covered due to a Medicare Advantage policy that she’d purchased from me many years ago, but he also did it safely while traveling at a high rate of speed through city traffic in that death trap meant for the racetrack that she owns.” He flashed his beloved ancient relative a withering look, but as usual she gazed back at her younger relative with a disconcerting centenarian’s smirk. Still, waves of applause reverberated through the church. As for Mr. Graeme Greeme, he smiled a hero’s grin, knowing that it was all part of “driving Miss Flossie.”

Getting a Christmas tree and decorating it was a family tradition for Oxnard’s Dickensonian family, the Crachits – despite all that Mr. Scrooge might do to stop them. By golly, they’d get one, but they would need the advice of California Health Insurance agent Matt Lockard to accomplish their festive task.

On the meager lucre Ebenezer C. Scrooge paid him, Bob Crachit was losing hope of getting a tree for Christmas. It was for Timothy’s sake. His youngest,  a diminutive buck-toothed lad in dire need of a charitable orthodontist, reduced to a limp and walking with an odd little cane, was afflicted with Goober’s Palsy, a degenerative illness said to be nearly always fatal since the economic collapse of ’07, when the cure for it had supposedly been lost. “Tim,” an intuitive child of eight years, seemed to know he might die someday, but was constantly embarrassing the Crachits by blurting “I got Goobers!” with the regularity of a metronome. 

“Why must I work on Christmas Day this year?” asked Bob Crachit.  

“Because it falls on a Friday, and that’s a weekday,” replied the irascible Scrooge.

But the next day, a neighbor, Mr. Alfred C. Nice to be precise, gave a tree to the Crachits after hearing of the family’s plight.

“It’s for you, Tiny Tim,” the generous benefactor told the usually mild-mannered youngest child in the privacy of the Crachit’s humble parlor.

“Don’t you ever call me that,” hissed the palsied boy.

Timothy was to rue those incongruously hostile words spoken on the eve of Christmas Eve. As the festive decorating of the tree advanced to its denouement, and Tim was hoisted up into the air above his father’s scrawny shoulders, the boy slipped while preparing to place the Star of David, and was painfully if not fatally impaled through his tender belly.  “Oh Christmas tree!” the buck-toothed boy screamed.  At this point, with a trip to the nearest urgent care center imminent, Bob Crachit needed reassurance and Christmas cheer in the worst way. So he called his California Health Insurance agent, Matt Lockard, to see if “Christmas tree impalings” were covered under his family plan.  As the family eagerly listened, he received his answer.

“Oh yes they are!” he exclaimed upon hanging up the phone.

Later, after being stitched up, Tim Cratchit brought them all back to reality. “God bless everyone,” the palsied boy said with a cookie cutter elfish grin, followed by the inevitable “I got Goobers.”