If all goes according to plan. It’s one of the sub-sets of ‘It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time,’ along with others like ‘The best laid plans o’ mice an’ men gang aft a-gley,’ Mick Jagger’s ‘You can’t always get what you want,’ and, of course, the Jewish version, ‘Man proposes and God disposes.’ What these disparate sayings have in common is the understanding that life is often out our control, that things will NOT go the way we have in mind. Barbara and I were sitting in the office of our primary care physician, Adam Albert, showing him the list of tests I need to have completed prior to my laser surgery on March 1, asking him what does this all mean and where do we go to do so-and-so. In the course of the conversation, we mentioned that I would need to have my catheter replaced by the end of December, three months after it was last done. Our doctor, who is always on top of things, told us that we didn’t have to go to the emergency room, that the procedure could be done by a specially trained nurse in the relative comfort of the nurses station down the hall. At which point, the good doctor picked up the phone and called Rachel, the head nurse, for confirmation. Someone would call us in the middle of December to schedule an appointment. OK, we said; works for us. Of course, working for us doesn’t always translate into working at all, which, if it did, I’d have nothing to write about.

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