Hospice Nurse Turns to Life of Crime

Nobody ever claimed that Siri is the sharpest tool in the shed. I was dictating to her in the car the other day. I told her to text George. She asked me whether I meant a woman I worked with thirty years ago, a former boyfriend, or George. I told her I meant George. What would you like to know about George? I wondered briefly what Siri might know about my partner that I didn’t, but I repeated that I just wanted to text him. What would you like to say to George? I dictated my text. In the middle of it, Maps Siri told me to turn left in a quarter mile, so the text came out hey babe, in a quarter mile turn left. It would have been easier to mail him a letter.

This is not to say that I could live without Maps Siri. Without her, I would spend my days driving around trying to find my patients in a perpetual state of lostness. Plus I changed her voice to Australian Siri, which is cool. Now when I miss a turn, she says Fair go, mate, fair suck of the sauce bottle, next right is better than a ham sandwich!

This morning, Australian Siri helped me find a farm out in the middle of nowhere. The farmer was selling a Wurlitzer piano for a hundred bucks. It looked decent in the pictures, but you have to sit at a piano and play to know. As I sat at his piano, the farmer told me apologetically that it hadn’t been played for about thirty years and could probably do with a tuning. I played a couple of bars. Politely refraining from telling him it could do with being hacked up for firewood, I suggested he offer it free to a good home. Then I backed my Subaru out his long, half-ploughed driveway and drove the hour home. You gotta love farmers.

People keep asking me how I’m doing in the snowy New York Winter. I’m really doing fine. Our house is warm, except for our bedroom, which is actually an enclosed summer porch. It’s colder in our bedroom than outside, because our bedroom takes the cold and traps it until it condenses into ice. I call our bedroom Siberia. This is quite a funny joke if you examine it closely, because I just checked Siberia on my weather app and it’s -18 degrees. On Friday night, it will be -14 degrees in Clinton Hollow where I live. I should have picked somewhere colder. Where is colder than Siberia? Please do not have it be our bedroom.

There are advantages to having a bedroom in Siberia though. If you accidentally do too much shopping and the groceries don’t fit in your fridge, you can store them in your bedroom. And that is the only advantage I can think of.

Despite the fact that parts of our house are colder than our fridge, I recently enticed my daughter to come visit. I rented us an airbnb on Cape Cod for her quarantine. Neither of us had ever been, and after five months I was yearning to see the ocean. Plus I figured Cape Cod would be deserted in the Winter, and I was right. We were the only people on any of the beaches. Minus four degrees could have had something to do with this. One day was so cold we ran along Race Point Beach in our masks and five layers of clothing laughing hysterically and shouting We’ve come on holiday by mistake! 

This is a quote from Withnail & I that has come in handy more than once in my life. But in fact, Cape Cod was quite magical with no humans about. There was an abundance of lobster shacks (if only we could have sampled), an array of empty wild Atlantic beaches, and we even drove to the northernmost tip and through the ridiculously quaint Provincetown, which is a hamlet of under 3,000 that reportedly swells to 60,000 in the Summer. No wonder they looked daggers at our California plates.

It is true, after six months in New York, I still have California plates on my car. This is not just laziness. I drive a grey Subaru Forester. So does everyone else in the Hudson Valley, unless they drive a Jeep. When I come out of the grocery store, I would never find my car were it not for the white plates. Thus, my laziness has saved me hours of my life wandering aimlessly in parking lots. I am past the deadline to register my car in the Empire State. It’s exciting being a criminal.