Days of Wine and Roses, and Vasectomies

Favorite book? Nah, boring question. I’ve already said I will be a King James man until my last hour.

But I did intend to go into the book industry at one time, and I’ve written in this volume about my work in Falls Church. That job was a source of amusing anecdotes, so herewith:

You all, of course, see me as the very model of sophistication and affable ennui. It was not always so. But on one terrible day in 1978, I suffered the worst mortification of my life, before or since.

Our employer was changing insurance carriers, and a rep came out to Falls Church to tell us about it. Maybe 20 of us were gathered to hear her, and I, 26, sober and diligent, stood in a corner. The rep was in her 50s, and I remember her smoking heavily as she talked, with a whiskey laugh. She went over the details of the coverage, and she had an easy rapport with us.

She surveyed the room, found us all to be women, somehow missing me, standing kind of behind her but facing all of my co-workers, and so diverted into details of coverage no man needs to know. But all my colleagues noticed me, in my extreme discomfiture, and the air grew tense.

“And then, ladies, when the days of wine and roses are over, as a matter of interest to everyone in this room,” she summed up, “we’ll cover a tubal ligation.” The rep finally noticed the undercurrent of angst, followed the nervous glances at me, turned to me and said, “Or a vasectomy for you, sir.”

If that happened to me now, I would laugh. Not then. There was no corner in the room remote or dark enough for me to hide in.

Good times!