in the red

It is raining yet again on the farm, keeping us on course for one of the wettest Marchs since I started keeping records in 2008. All water, excluding a monster tsunami, is welcome here, but it’s keeping me from starting my outdoor spring projects. I’m well up-to-date on the carnage below the 49th Parallel, so I’m making some tea and will soon be near the woodstove rereading Tom Robbins’ Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates. Robbins died recently.

As I wait for the tea water to boil, I’m counting my blessings, as I’m wont to do on dreary days. Today I’m remembering a particularly tough patch when my 7-year-old son and I were living with my parents in Kansas City because I could find no work. There wasn’t much in the KC area, either, and my prospects just kept dimming.

Reading the want ads one day, I saw an ad for plasma donors. It wasn’t something I could make a career of, but it paid $10 for the first visit and $15 for the second in a week. There were several clinics in town, so after each session, donors would have a thumbnail painted with some liquid that would show up under a UV light. It apparently faded after three days.

You can imagine the clientele. One fellow donor wore a T-shirt that read “Sick Mother Fucker!”. Another always had a pigeon on his shoulder. Yet another told me that if you scrubbed your painted thumbnail with toothpaste, you could donate six days a week. In that he was rail-thin, toothless and jittery, I chose not to pursue that as a career.

Since the procedure took about 90 minutes, the clinics had TV monitors showing the same movie non-stop all day. If it was a slow day, the staff would even let us stay to finish a flick, but we had to skip the credits.