I don't know about you, or at least I'm not willing to divulge how much I know, but when I was a lad, before written language had been invented, when people talked about menopause they euphemized it as "The Change," and yes, you could tell it was s'posed to be Capitalized. "Your mother's going through The Change," they'd tell me in whispers when the hot flashes or shortened temper hit. I didn't have a clue what that meant, but fortunately I was able to find out on the street, whence springs all knowledge and truth.
I opened the paper of record, The New York Times, this morning and was greeted by a photo of Caitlyn nee Bruce in a lacy dress, in profile enough that what stand out most (yes, I did) are a breast and a butt cheek. They're not Kim Kwality or Kwantity, but clearly C/B learned something in all those years as a Kardashian. And granted, the photo was in the "Arts and Leisure" (not sure which of those the pic depicted) section, but still: don't we get enough of this crap from the rest of the media? Does "The Gray Lady" really need to join the cockoffany? Or perhaps She, too, desires "The Change" and wants to become a man--or a Shih Tzu. I'm thinking she'd have to be The Daily News or maybe The Daily Racing Form in order to be macho enough.
So now when we say "The Change" we don't necessarily mean menopause, we may mean "men oh stop; let me be my true self." And, like me, you must have given some thought to the logistics of this Brave New Change; probably, like me, more thought than you want to, which may be "any." But the whole process, as I imagine it, has a certain grisly fascination, particularly the disposal of artifacts. I've also thought of that in terms of breast reduction surgery: What do they do with what's left? I don't know, but here's a proposal:
People of a certain age will remember the movie version of Joseph Heller's wonderful novel Catch-22. In it there's one scene where two nurses, gabbing all the while, attend to a patient wrapped head-to-toe in bandages, only holes for the eyes, and all four limbs in traction. This poor guy has an IV running to his arm, a catheter to another bag hanging on a stand. The IV solution bag is empty, the catheter bag full. You see where this goes, right? Yep: again, without any interruption in their chatter, the nurses swap the bags, pull the curtain to, and continue on to serve the next patient.
Here's what I'm thinkin', then, and I'm sure by now that you can see where this is going, too. Line 'em up side-by-side for the operations, and do a direct exchange, one to the other: out--or off--with the old and in--or on--with the new. The doctors would stand between the two tables and simply pivot, left to right, right to left. Efficiency greatly increased, no muss, no fuss, no waste. If we're trying to cut healthcare costs, here's one small step for a (wo)man, or whichever.
Oh, lighten up. Jonathan Swift once suggested, in apparent seriousness, that the English eat Irish babies. He still wins.
I just hope that Cait is prepared to earn seventy seven cents for every dollar Bruce used to make....
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