AUSTIN, Texas, Mar. 7, 2005 — When you don't work you accept odd things as duty. When you don't have the excuse ("I have to get to work") you will sit with your dad through a boring wait in a waiting room and in an exam room for an hour only to have the doc listen to his heart and lungs and poke on his neck for maybe three minutes and then refer him to another doctor.

When you don't work, you accept workout as duty or playing games with your dad and sister. Things that are not all that heinous but do pass the time differently than you might, left to your own devices.

I wasn't really left to my own devices most of the day. Oh, I got up and poked around on my computer and had coffee and then went to the gym. Gym is duty to me. Just a little workout (thirty minutes on the bike, a couple of sets of weights) is the least I'm required to do. Rush home, get showered and groomed while watching a bit of an episode of Northern Exposure.

I picked my dad and sister up and suggested a very early lunch to accommodate getting Dad to his doctor's appointment and getting a table at Houston's. We had a very tasty and filling trout dish all around with my sister getting fries, Dad a curried cauliflower and me some tasty salsify. I suggested we could spend a minute or two in the nearby toy store but my sister demurred to my relief. Took her back and a few minutes later drove Dad in my car to the Doctor at St. David's Plaza on IH35. We were early. We had to do paperwork because they are 'changing systems.' I joke about the doc's losing patients filling out paperwork later with my dad. "Imagine those old folks with no help and a bit of peripheral neuropathy so they are shaking and it's hard to write and they are half blind and it's hard to read the forms and they have trouble remembering their drugs and diseases. So, they are out their hunched over clipboards and the help looks and says, 'We lost another one doing paperwork.'" We get in an exam room at the exact time of the appointment. The exam room is warm where the waiting room was cold. I read my book, almost dozing. Finally, thirty minutes later the doctor comes in. I like him. He doesn't want to operate on the 'goiter the size of a small animinal' (as my Dad and I refer to it) since it is 'like a rock, not changing.' He has, however, ferreted something out of the CAT scan to worry about and spend Medicare and Blue Cross money on: a 'thickening' in the area of the uvula. He makes a drawing of the tongue and talks about the uvula and the epiglottis. He says an ENT can put a scope in and have a look or something. So he wants us to go to one and we agree. Otherwise, he says the goiter can be CAT scanned in a year. Dad prompts him when he hesitates, "You said a year." Outside we get the referral and the assistant can't make appointments for next year and I say, "Don't worry. I'll put it on my calendar to call you next year." I turn to Dad and say, "If you live another year, we will get a CAT scan." She looks shocked, he laughs. One of these days I'll get accused of elder abuse I guess.

Finally we get away. The assistant for the ENT catches me in the parking garage and sets up an appointment for tomorrow. Dang. Well, we will get it over with.

At my dad's we discuss some stuff my sister is going through. (Yeah, over two years after my mother died we are still going through stuff.) We play a game. (Dad kills us, winning handily. But it's luck I tell you.) I work on my family address books. Then it's time for me to head home.

I check my e-mail, discuss things with Forrest, throw on a sweater and we go to Fonda to eat with some young folks. We meet a friend who has a friend in tow who wants to know which one of the young couple is our child. Hrrmph. We meet other friends. We get a table and enjoy some good food, nice wine, a free-wheeling discussion.

Then it's home, reading a bit, parking myself in front of the TV with a cup of coffee and a pile of papers and flipping through the DVR for something worth my eyeballs. Then, too late probably, sleep.