The Big Scooter Race
Friday, August 28th, 2009Scooter races can be dangerous, especially in a motor home park for seniors when the seniors are the ones doing the racing. A California health insurance agent prevented the worst carnage: the financial kind.
74-year-old Padraig O’Brien loved to watch those scooter commercials on TV. “You can have your scooter, with no out-of-pocket expense,” the announcer crooned. Like several of his friends at the Elysium Trailer Park in Oxnard, Padraig was otherwise confined to a wheelchair. One day Padraig and several peers purchased dandy electric-powered scooters using their Medicare Supplement insurance policies to help defray their cost. Visiting the Grand Canyon while maneuvering among crowds of tourists on their scooters didn’t appeal to anyone at Elysium, but once everyone had their scooters, something else became evident: the thrill of scooter speed.
“I think we should set up a race track,” suggested Tony Pilano, at 79, a near-octogenarian assumed to be Elysium’s resident sage. Mary Falafel, who spoke Arabic but wasn’t a 73-year-old terrorist, preferring to decorate or draw, agreed. “I can make banners,” she said. She loved to draw nude men.
The race track was set up along the trailer park’s wide walking paths. In preparation for the big scooter race, the “main drag” was clearly marked by Mary’s banners, a few of them rather lewd. Fourteen scooters set to race lined up. Someone had brought a starter’s pistol. The electric hum of racing scooters was vaguely reassuring to many in the crowd of geezer gawkers.
Tony and Padraig jousted for the lead, each rubbing the other like NASCAR drivers. Mary was running a strong third. As her scooter tipped, she reached for what she thought was a convenient handle …
Exactly what occurred in those next crucial two seconds will never be precisely known.
The aftermath featured the friendly California Health Insurance agent dutifully tying up loose ends after the participants had returned to Elysium. Mary brought up what was on everybody’s mind. “Let’s have another race,” she exclaimed. A silence ensued leaving her words hanging in the California air.
A tear formed in Padraig’s eye. “Tony would have liked that,” he concluded.
He lived with his extended family instead of in a rest home. It was a big family living in a big house. Grandpa-pa-pa as he was known to all was loved and revered. Although he hated celebrating his own birthday once he’d attained his late nineties, his annual party had become a family tradition, and Grandpa-pa-pa Morse reluctantly went along. The worst part was blowing out his candles with a single exhaled breath, a perfectly timed gust expelled from his increasingly frail frame that could put out all the candles at once so that he might “get his wish.” Last year at age 102 he’d wished for an end to this ordeal, but secretly of course, so as not to disappoint his younger kin. This year, the massive cake, with papaya-flavored frosting, was decorated with 103 candles, each like a tiny universe flickering. “Blow Grandpa-pa-pa,” shrieked eight-year-old Adam, already a little windbag who’d easily blown out his own candles, all eight of them, just two weeks before. The family’s beloved centenarian was gathering his remaining breath in a mighty storm at that very moment, but the task before him seemed immense. Could he still do it? Grand-pa-pa Morse huffed …. And blew with all the might he had. The result was strange. Instead of going out, the 103 candles suddenly blazed as one! Everyone in the room, a gaggle of Morses, gasped. Grandpa-pa-pa not only gasped, but began wheezing. “That’s never happened before!” exclaimed Mossy Morse, his family-values smitten granddaughter, age fifty-six, who already had grandchildren of her own, of which Adam was one. By the time Mossy’s husband Alexander realized there was an emergency, he’d begun putting the cake out with a nearby extinguisher. Adam screamed, “Grandpa-pa-pa!” when the boy saw their patriarch keel over. Moments later, they were all in the emergency room of a nearby facility, as Grandpa-pa-pa Morse was receiving urgent care.
Sixty-seven-year-old Evelyn Saguaro had the same problem her late mother had once been afflicted with. Besides her real gall bladder, she’d been born with a vestigial secondary one in which three cactus-like gallstones, each about the size of a quarter, had formed. Late in life, the vestigial gall bladder’s gallstones were starting to act up. Sharp pains would erupt beneath her breastbone immediately after she ate even a tiny serving of anything, and the acute pain made her sick to her stomach. When her doctor ordered tests to identify where the symptoms were originating from, he told Evelyn that her Medicare Plan only covered her original gall bladder, and since the stones had formed in the vestigial one, any procedure to remove them in “her unique case” would not be reimbursed. Her primary care physician kidded with her. “I suggest you refrain from eating,” he said. “Are you serious?” she asked. “No, a better idea might be to seek out a California Health Insurance agent.”
