A step in the right direction. Hopefully.

When I arrived, there was only one person in line to see Dr. Jeffrey Goss, an old guy dressed in a blue suit. I put my name on the waiting sheet and took a seat by the magazine table. There must have been some dozen and a half different magazines scattered on the table, each and every one with Dr Goss' in the "mail to:" field. On the very top of the pile, Modern Bride. That's when you know your doctor cares for you. Anyway, I shuffle through the stack, looking for a magazine to commit to.

I decide in the end on the LA magazine and start to leaf through it. I come to a page that headlines: Top ten pick up tips for bars in LA. Before getting through reading #1, Gerald, the other patient in the office, breaks the silence with a prison ice breaker, "So what are you in here for?"

Before I move on, I should explain that I got acquainted with Gerald's name a little earlier, when through the pigeon hole window standard with most doctors' offices, Dr. Goss noticed Gerald in the waiting room and greeted him with friendly delight by his first name. I knew then that it wasn't Gerald's first time at this office. Or his second, third or fourth as I would later discover.

Some people dress up when meeting a new doctor for the first time, and as time goes by let their dress slip, sometimes to the point where they show up at the doctor's in their cow-and-moon-print pajama pants. But that was not the case with Gerald. The trip to the doctor was a big event in this 72 year old's life, gib enough to warrant him wearing his Sunday best baby blue suit. Gerald's pants leg hung 2 inches above his ankles, exposing his striped blue and muddy yellow socks. It's funny, because if you think about it, as you grow older, your body shrinks, and as a result, your clothes should actually grow longer. But I think it may be human nature to develop a tendency to pull our pants higher and higher above our waist as we grow older. If that's the case, 'May you live till your pants reach your chest' should be our new greeting to old people. I think I've strayed enough. Back to Gerald's question.

i start to tell Gerald about my big swollen toe and my long sob story about how being off the tennis court far exceeded the pain in my toe. I in return enquire about the reason for Gerald's visit. When you ask a 71 year old about his health, you've just supplied him with conversation firewood for many, many ticks of the clock.

Stranded with a dysfunctional heart, thyroid glands 4 times the normal size and a hip ripe for replacement, Gerald walked around with a pacemaker buried in his chest, a wooden cane, and a pocket full of drugs. This time around, Gerald was at Dr Goss' to get prescription insoles for his $250 pair of shoes which cost what they cost because they had to be height adjusted on the right to make up for lack of length in his left leg. To make my toe problem sound more trivial, Gerald tells me about the colonoscopy he had two months ago, and the cataract surgery he was going to undergo in two days. To drive it home, he tells me about how he injured his hip; in a car accident where he lost his wife and kid. That sure bummed me out for the rest of the day.

It takes me about an hour to get to see the good doctor. You could tell that Goss was a well decorated doctor from the number of plaques and certificates hanging on his wall. He also had several framed pictures of celebrities on his wall, each marker-penned with niceties like, "Dear Dr Goss, Keep up the good work!' Among the celebrity pictures were Cuba Gooding Jr., Paula Abdul and Ronald Reagan. Can you believe it? The same guy who touched Ronald Reagan's feet was now going to touch mine.

Dr Goss looks at the X-ray, does some tests on my toe and can't determine what's wrong with it. He then takes out a tuning fork, hits it on his hand until it vibrates and then puts it on different points of my toe. I don't really feel anything until he puts it on this one spot where the vibrations of the fork get driven right up a possible crack in my bone. He writes my swollen, aching toe off as having a stress fracture and prescribed plenty of rest.