Waiting Rooms

I've spent a lot of my life in waiting rooms.

Waiting rooms are afforded the same design aesthetic of college residences, for what I imagine are the same general reason: to inspire no particular emotional reaction in any way. A waiting room won't keep you calm, it just won't make you upset.

I have become a frequenter of waiting rooms. A regular at the white washed walls of emotional absence. I've come to recognize some of the regulars; not specific people, but archetypes. I've noticed my own place in the pantheon.  There's the friendly middle-aged man who knows all of the receptionists and hands out bad jokes about his middle-aged wife and twenty-something children. "She put me in here, didn't she?" one man laughed, his mirth interrupted by a cigarette-smoke fueled cough. He fishes in his pockets for his wallet and pulls out a ten for the copay, unfolds it on the reception desk and sinks his hands back into his pockets in a ritual as practiced as tying his shoes. Not that this man ties his shoes anymore, he's moved onto the single motion loafers in an early bid for the retirement lifestyle, even though he's still twenty more years of laboring away for his last kid's college education. He turns around and returns to his seat, grabbing a magazine that looks as old as his youngest daughter. He buries his face into the magazine as he sits one seat past the comfort zone between myself and anyone else. 

There's the elderly woman who shuffles along in her slippers and looks like she should be using a walker but is too stubborn to admit it. Her snow-white hair has streaks of gray that seem to, remarkably, represent a sign of youth. She, too, knows the receptionists and chats with them. Too old now for the banter, she goes through the motions of the sign-in process with mechanized efficiency, but all the while still as polite and warm as your grandmother. She walks to a seat near the middle aged man, and all the while I want to sit up and take her by the hand to make sure she doesn't fall, but I'm too busy trying not to be noticed. The middle aged man politely strikes up conversation, his bald head iridescent in the fluorescent light. They chat about their now-adult children.

Then there's the ten year old girl who is even more out of place in this room than I am, but she is trailed by her mother, younger than the middle aged man, colder than the old woman, but on her way to being as versed in the art of waiting room expediency.  The daughter is bitter she has to come here, taken away from the much more productive act of watching the Disney Channel show reruns of the same five shows all afternoon. The mother whispers just loud enough for everyone else in the waiting room to know that she spoke, but just below the ability for any meaning to be taken from this noise. She walks to the reception desk with a hurried dispassion, pulling the strap of her purse over her shoulder where it had begun to slip from bending over to speak with her daughter. Her hair is taught in a ponytail, but fraying at the front and a few stray single strands bounce before her forehead. She is as brutally efficient as the old woman, but in a hurry. No doubt she just came from work to pick her daughter up from school to get her into the office on time. "Traffic was unbelievable," she says, and the receptionist smiles and pretends to take in this woman's complaints. The mother has no qualms with burdening others with her first world woes of minor inconvenience, and as she scribbles the copay into her checkbook, her whole body seems tense enough to snap like a rubber band stretched too far when a child tried to shoot it across the room.

A waiting room has no life of its own and inspires no emotion, but it takes on the attributes of those within. Maybe the receptionists can tell, with their too-polite-to-ignore-your-complaints continence  acting as a counterbalance to the strange, hollow, mechanized ritual and stilted conversation brought on by waiting room regulars.

Because the middle-aged man, despite the fulfilled life of family and career, is still sick and needs to wait for a doctor. The old woman knows that she has spent more time in a waiting room than she has seen her grandchildren in the last two months. The mother fears that her daughter is going to be the twenty-something sitting awkwardly aloof and out of place, staring at a phone that doesn't actually have anything on the screen, trying to pretend that he does not exist.  When my name is called to sign in and present all of my information I do it with a fumbled practice that is purposefully ignorant. Because admitting that I am as practiced at this as the middle-aged man is a disheartening realization. To think that I was once the ten year old child who just wanted to watch TV is heart-breaking. And then there's the old woman who is the only one that truly belongs in this waiting room, and it  fills me with a sweeping joy for her that maybe, just maybe, she was never any of us.