The Easter egg hunt over the spacious estate was great fun for the estimated five-hundred boys and girls loosed by the starter’s gun. Johnny and David Sprunt, a pair of brothers, aged 9 and 8, were intent on filling their baskets with treats. The chase after the hidden confections – became a frenzied kind of kid madness, within the first few seconds. But Johnny quickly spied a yellow marshmallow baby chick and placed it in his basket amid the green plastic grass and soon bent down to reach for a chocolate bunny behind an azalea bush that his brother David spotted at precisely the same instant. But when he too bent down and reached, the result was the accident of two boy heads bonking. The brothers were knocked cold.

“They both might have concussions,” their Dad figured. Their Mom was on her smart phone in seconds and dialing 911. Both parents were relieved when they realized that the trip to the ER would be covered, as they’d purchased a family plan from Matt Lockard, their California Health Insurance agent just a few months before.  First David, and then Johnny recovered consciousness in the ambulance enroute to the hospital, which was a good sign.

Both boys did sustain slight concussions, but even worse, they’d missed the rest of the Easter egg hunt. Later, when the brothers were recuperating at home, their parents offered them some pieces of Easter candy which the boys ironically refused – instead they asked for child’s strength aspirin. 

About a week later, the entire Sprunt family decided to pay a visit to Matt Lockard’s office. Within minutes the boys were relating the entire story, bonking and all. “That’s exactly what happened to me when I was about your age. I bonked my head on my friend Sammy’s head.”

The boys were impressed. “Really?” David asked.

A moment later, Matt surprised the family with an offer. “Hey, I knew you were coming over and hid some candy around my office. Whatever you can find in five minutes you can have.”

It was more informal, but big smiles suddenly appeared on Johnny’s angelic face, and then David’s. The hunt was on! Within ten seconds though, when both boys spied a big chocolate bunny at precisely the same instant, and reached for it a little too eagerly …

The Coakleys were refugees from Malibu Beach. When they moved to Ventura, it was difficult for them to fit in. Fred Coakley had been an actor, playing ghouls in zombie-filled horror flicks when he could get the parts; his wife Isabelle an ill-equipped socialite — lacked social skills. Their adorable children Tristan, age 6, and Annie, age 9, were chronically toy-deprived until a passive-aggressive Samaritan philanthropist donated a kaleidoscope for the children to play with. Prior to the children’s acquisition of the sinister toy, the philanthropist had also paid for three policies, a family plan and two individual plans for the kiddies – all purchased from California Health Insurance agent Matt Lockard.

The Coakley children weren’t greedy like some children are. This turned out to be a liability, as they quietly shared the kaleidoscope, being utterly mesmerized by its ceaseless morphing colorful patterns – and in staring at the kaleidoscope in their obsessive-compulsive manner which was hereditary for any Coakley; their sweet little eyes became fixated in a cruel way. Strabismus, sometimes known as “cross-eyes” or in Isabelle Coakley’s crazed mind, “the double evil-eye times two,” set in. 

Fred and Isabelle noticed their children’s wandering eyes one night during a family séance. Isabelle became hysterical. “Why are you doing that kiddies?” she screamed, “Why are you giving your Ma the double evil-eye times two?” The children replied in eerie unison, voicing a chilling, sing-song cadenced mannerism reminiscent of some of their Da’s better films, “It’s the kaleidoscope me thinks!”

While Isabelle simply grabbed the nearest axe, Fred had the presence of mind to seek out emergency eye care, something to flush out strabismus when it was kaleidoscope-induced, preferably. A month later, the reunited family came by Matt Lockard’s office after taking the bus there. The children were wearing patches on their left eyes, the sinister ones. Matt was expecting the foursome, being a fan of Fred’s better undead impersonations and of course, being their trusted California Health Insurance agent, albeit by proxy.

“Nice patches,” Matt Lockard opined once the kiddies had ambled in, “Are they pirates today?”

When the children began sobbing, their feelings hurt; well-meaning Matt pulled a toy from a convenient drawer. It was, unfortunately, a kaleidoscope.

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.

Gifford loved his turkey. No, literally. Gifford loved his turkey. A Sullivan family tradition was to have the eldest child raise a wild turkey that would, at the appointed time, a few days prior to Thanksgiving, be sacrificed as the family’s dinner. “Don’t get too attached to that turkey, Giff,” his mom tried to tell him, but such an admonition was useless. The animal-loving twelve-year-old had come to consider Isabelle (yes, the boy had already secretly named the hen turkey purchased to be slaughtered) a member of their family and a cherished pet. Every morning before school he’d gone into the turkey’s pen in the backyard of the Sullivan’s Oxnard home to feed and clean up after and otherwise nurture the growing fowl; he was conniving for a way to somehow save “Isabelle’s” life. 

Gifford’s siblings Wayne and Toby were relatively indifferent to Gifford’s conflict.  “That turkey is going to be the best Thanksgiving meal ever,” teased ten-year-old Wayne, “it’s better than any store-bought butterball.” Nine-year-old Toby was even worse in his way, tormenting his older brother while acting innocent as a sacrificial lamb. “Which part do you like best? I go for drumsticks,” he taunted. Gifford would run off sobbing to the sanctuary of Isabelle’s backyard pen, to hug the bewildered turkey.

Finally, the execution day came. Godfrey Sullivan raised the axe beside the chopping block which was also in the Sullivan’s backyard, and just as the horrific scene with the turkey caught in the vise …

Gifford ran headlong toward his father, his only thought to rescue Isabelle as the axe was raised at the proper angle and began descending …

The axe fell and the boy screamed. Blood gushed everywhere. The family headed toward the nearest hospital’s ER, protected only cost-wise by a convenient family health plan sold to them the previous year by California Health Insurance agent Matt Lockard.

Gifford developed amnesia after the accident. “Did you get enough to eat?” his mom asked.

 “Yeah, mom, but I got a question. How come I had to have veggie burgers instead of turkey like everybody else?”

 


Sleep Well:
How To Get A Good Night’s Sleep

Autumn is not only holiday season, with year-end delights beckoning, it’s also “cold and flu” season, which fewer people choose to celebrate. Instead of Thanksgiving turkey and yams, and Halloween treats, think vitamin C and Echinacea. But what about sleep – not getting enough can suppress the immune system and create a likelihood of sickness.

As any California Health Insurance agent can tell you, poor sleep habits and susceptibility to colds and influenza go hand in hand – much like a germ-spreading handshake. Sleep, its quantity and especially its quality, can play a role in maintaining the body’s defenses.

In a recent study conducted by the Archives of Internal Medicine, scientists tracked 153 men and women for a fortnight (two weeks), monitoring the quality and duration of sleep that these experimental subjects experienced. Next, during a five-day follow-up, the subjects were quarantined and exposed to cold viruses. Those who slept an average of less than seven hours a night, it transpired, were three times more likely to become ill as those who slept for at least eight hours.

Sleep and immunity are apparently interrelated. Studies have found that mammals that require the most sleep also produce increased levels of disease-fighting white blood cells, but not red blood cells — even though both kinds of cells are produced in bone marrow and are derived from identical precursors. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany have demonstrated that “good-sleeping” species resist pathogens (germs) with a special resilience.    

California Health Insurance agents specialize in selling customized plans that allow their customers more sleep, as well as a better quality of REM sleep that facilitates dreams. If it’s known that you’re not sleeping enough, run; don’t walk, to the nearest office of a California Health Insurance agent before you catch a cold or flu bug. Celebrating the holidays is a lot more fun if you’re not sick – but if you do become ill, you have the right coverage.

 The cartoon boy with an “every boy’s” persona would ask the Great Pumpkin arcane questions about life, and in a manner of being, the inanimate orange harvest veggie assumed the stature of an odd deity – or at least a sage in the tradition of certain gods transported from Greek Mythology. As a religion, such a pumpkin cult has its merits, and in these days of strident calls for health care reform, certain California Health Insurance agents have taken to visiting pumpkin patches in search of their own personal Great Pumpkin that may exist in the nether regions between Visalia and Fresno. For days the search for this orange quasi-deity has continued unabated, but although some giant spheroids, many with black features painted on them  like human faces, have been located, none as of yet can be considered sacred, or wiser than others culled from among their brethren. Where this Great Pumpkin resides, proclaimed an excitable agent from the environs around San Bernardino, speaking aloud but in very muted tones, ‘He is liable to be an oracle able to speak in tongues, or to offer wisdom, perhaps possessing a fluency understandable only to those who sell policies for every conceivable need, including but necessarily limited to the occasional health-related whim.’ This agent soon attracted a considerable following with such talk, and the second Cult of the Great Pumpkin was born. Finally as All Hallows Eve approached, a sacrifice was needed, and bands of gathering California Health Insurance agents began roaming the entire state like insurance-minded dervishes. Choosing a suitable Great Pumpkin, even for pie, proved to be a dangerous undertaking once the attention of the real Great Pumpkin was attracted, and soon chunks of familiar  faces began turning up everywhere, during the night and especially once the sun was up. In fact, the most introspective California Health Insurance agents, imitating Charlie Brown in a wondrous reincarnation of animated perpetual boyhood, began sitting Buddha-like in sundry patches all over California. Finally, an unfortunate California Health Insurance agent was indeed mistaken for that very orange veggie he’d been searching for. It was bound to happen.

 ”Asleep” The Smiths

Alexander and Penelope were identical twins except for their gender. Blonde and blue-eyed, with perfect skin and on the cusp of being adults, the twins thrived during a marvelous summer.  Tennis camp, sleepovers, surfing and swimming, camping, parachuting from 15,000 feet in their Dad’s twin-engine aircraft, the Smith kids played hard and slept hard, uninterrupted, for the months trailing the June solstice in the land of Ventura night. But when school began just before Labor Day, the teens began to change before their parent’s eyes.

Alexander developed a cyst under his left eye. Penelope began stumbling as if she were nearsighted although her vision had been tested in July at 20-10 left and right. Adolescence suddenly bred entire tribes of pus-filled pimples.   Alexander became injury prone: When he tried to run he tripped most times, his perfectly proportioned legs no longer coordinated.  “Something’s wrong,” Ashley their mom told Gary, their father, who was sure that there wasn’t. “It’s just the awkward stage,” he asserted.

“Are they both just being awkward?” Ashley Smith countered.

“They’re both teenagers,” Gary shrugged.

But the twins kept getting worse.  Finally, because they did have a family plan purchased from California Health Insurance agent Matt Lockard, Gary relented and took both 15-year-olds over to Dr. Nicole Tesla, the family’s trusted primary care physician. When she examined them, she knew the answer almost immediately. “How much are they sleeping?” she asked.

“They go up to their bedrooms,” Gary said. “The lights are out. Of course they’re sleeping.”

“How do you know?” asserted Dr. Tesla. When she spoke, electric sparks seemed to give a bluish tint to her waiting room’s tepid air. She suggested they find out for sure.  Both twins were wired to biofeedback equipment on school nights to satisfy Dr. Tesla’s medically-based hunch.  

Was this equipment covered? Gary called Matt Lockard to find out. It was.  

The results were amazing. The kids weren’t getting their REM, the productive kind of rest signaled by rapid eye movements. “Teenagers need their beauty rest,” Dr. Tesla concluded.

“Alexander needs his too?” Ashley wondered.  

“He sure does,” Dr. Tesla pronounced.

“But they have to go to school!” Gary said. The solution seemed simple: a modified school day built around later mornings and longer afternoons, a 9-5 adjustment. It was as if a solstice had returned to the land of Ventura night.

Billy Blalock was eager to earn extra money. He needed a new skateboard and Playstation 3, but his parents were scrimping just to get by. His “job,” raking leaves at the Jones next door in their modest Rancho Bernardo ‘hood’, seemed like a no-brainer. When Sally Jones, a pert brunette thirty-something whom Billy considered “a second mom,” agreed to Billy’s raking after school, the teenager was elated.

“I can rake!” he exclaimed to Betty, his first mom, “I can rake!”

“Yes you can,” she replied deadpan, sort of like a 34-year-old feminine version of a Caucasian Barack Obama.   

But a strange thing happened on the way to Billy’s raking. Underneath the Jones’s imported maple tree, an exotic from New England, Billy sneezed. He returned to raking. He sneezed again.  He started raking again, a bit more tentatively this time. Suddenly he sneezed in a burst, once, twice, three times, perhaps a hundred times as he couldn’t stop sneezing. Billy was sneezing so hard he was crying. He ran away in tears from the poisonous tree straight to Sally’s ample bosom. “Second mom! Second mom!”  Billy cried, “I can’t.”  

“You can’t what?” Sally asked, noticing the tears in the eyes of her neighbor’s son.

“Rake,” Billy blurted, sobbing.

Billy’s real mom Betty decided to seek a medical solution since they’d purchased an individual child’s plan from a California Health Insurance agent.  Dr. Quag was friendly to Billy at his office and patted his belly several times, which seemed a bit weird to the boy. The prescription, however, gave Billy hope. The doctor prescribed sixty milligrams twice a day of a drug called fexofenadine, also referred to as Allegra, and the funny thing was, Billy had even heard of it, having seen it recently on a TV commercial. 

“Allegra,” Billy said, “I’ll be taking Allegra so I can rake by the maple tree!”

“Yes, you can,” said Dr. Quag, “if you remember to take your peach-colored pills!”

Betty was there too. “It’s peachy that Billy’s Allegra isn’t costing me out of pocket,” she said.

“Are they peach flavored?” Billy asked.

He was the biggest-boned kid in the 16-member Pedroia clan. At age 14, Rudy was downright husky as Pedroias went, graced with good looks and a sturdy physical stature freshly bestowed upon him by puberty. But in the harsh glare of the stadium klieg lights, he weighed only 87 pounds fully dressed in pads and gear, and a California health insurance agent triumphantly emerged as the family’s hero.Bakersfield’s Rudy Pedroia was a born athlete. At age ten, his father Randy first spied his son’s potential. When the kid pranced barefoot in the summer heat, “My boy has an athlete’s foot,” he casually remarked.  

Get a quote and apply online now!
Get Prices for Medicare Supplement Plans

Rudy practiced. He knew every play. Fleet of athlete’s foot, the day came when he made the varsity squad. A freshman, the Pedroia’s little star sat on the bench on that fateful night. His wise parents had purchased a child’s individual health insurance plan for their son, just in case. Rudy was third-string; at four feet five and 87 pounds, no one beyond the Pedroia clan figured that Rudy would actually play. Still, the entire family watched as they always did. Randy was proud.  “He has athlete’s feet!” he would brag to anyone within earshot while attracting looks of mild disdain. Finally Rudy’s big moment came. The home team’s first-string tackle broke an ankle and was carried off the field on a stretcher. The second-string tackle got clotheslined in the groin and nearly lost his tackle. When that unconscious 200-pounder was carted off, the coach looked at the bench and saw … “You!” he barked, “Get in there!” The crowd uttered a collective gasp.  “He’s so shrimpy!” somebody’s grandmother screeched. But Rudy knew the plays.

Get a quote and apply online now!
Get Prices for Medicare Supplement Plans

It didn’t really matter. While attempting to trip up the touchdown sprint of a monstrous fullback, Rudy’s outstretched toes served as a launching pad for the opposing team’s end zone. The sound of a Pedroia metatarsal crunching could be heard at the fifty-yard line.   Gathered around Rudy’s bed in his semi-private room where all three of Bakersfield High’s wounded players were hospitalized, only Rudy’s family was smiling. “What?” Randy Pedroia said, “My son has athlete’s feet!” Since they had purchased a teenager’s plan from a California Health Insurance agent, they could afford to smile.

Get a quote and apply online now!
Get Prices for Medicare Supplement Plans

Jimmy Malcolm, age 12, epitomized the word “brat.” He blithely ignored the lifeguard at the county pool. But when Jimmy’s mother and the repentant boy went in to thank California Health Insurance agent Matt Lockard, he was as pleased as the Malcolm family that they’d purchased a suitable group policy.

Get a quote and apply online now!
Get Prices for Medicare Supplement Plans

The lifeguard, Freddy Feldspar, was getting really annoyed. This kid epitomized the word “brat,” a 12-year-old man-child in the promised land of the Oxnard Community Pool making the lifeguard screech and bark incessantly. “No running!” yelled Feldspar at the careless boy who kept dashing to and fro, along the sides of the pool, skidding on the wet surface in his bare feet, jumping in and quickly out again in some frenetic rabid dance of pubescent energy, “Can’t you see the signs?” But Jimmy Malcolm wasn’t paying attention to the signs or to the clearly annoyed lifeguard, a college age red-haired man who made little impression on the energized boy. Jimmy looked at him once or twice, but his expression was one of indifference, perhaps even a mild disdain. Unfortunately, the signs were there for a reason, as such behavior on the part of errant boys is an accident waiting to happen. Jimmy kept it up at breakneck speed, his soles wet and slippery, running and dashing, diving into the crowded public pool, and then climbing out and beginning his mad dashes all over again. The 12-year-old escaped a mishap for perhaps longer than he should have, his feet barely in control along the wet tiles, but then the inevitable happened.

Get a quote and apply online now!
Get Prices for Medicare Supplement Plans

“No running!” Freddy Feldspar cried out one last time. The words had barely emerged from his lips when the inevitable transpired. Everyone at the pool saw Jimmy slip and fall, and scrape the skin off his right ankle when he did. Five stitches and an urgent care facility visit later, a more contrite Jimmy Malcolm and his mother Madge went to see California Health Insurance agent Matt Lockard in his office a few days later, “My son and I just wanted to thank you for selling us that small business policy last year,” she said, “It came in very handy a few days ago.” “Oh?” queried Matt spying a rather obvious protective bandage around young Jimmy’s sandal-cloaked right ankle. “So what happened?” Jimmy spoke shyly, almost as if a tabby cat had gotten his tongue. “There was this lifeguard …”

Get a quote and apply online now!
Get Prices for Medicare Supplement Plans