They say every cloud...

On June 10, 2009, Beloved had the knobs of bone that used to be her left knee joint scraped, sanded, drilled, and totally replaced with a mechanical marvel of human design. And every day since then, she has been in pain.

It's getting better, but it has taken a lot longer than we were led to believe by all the glowing reports of instant relief from others who had been through the procedure.

We were so assured of a speedy recovery that we figured a mid-September trip to New York City, the Pedestrian Capital of the World, would be no problem at all. So the flight was booked, the credit card charged, and vacation time arranged.

Contrary to expectations, the week before the trip, we were researching how much it would cost to rent a wheelchair.

Not happy with the rental rate we found, Beloved insisted she would be fine just using her cane. And aside from always feeling like she's catching up with the able-bodied walkers, she is doing both okey and dokey.

"Excuse me, Dewey?" interrupts an attentive reader, "Doesn't the title of this piece imply that you've got some kind of impressive good news in store; instead of all this whining?"

Ah...yes...thanks for reminding me. The silver lining of this slow-recovery cloud happened this past Monday, September 14, 2009. Beloved said she would like to visit the Empire State Building, and so, being the dutiful, obedient, wise man that I am (who knows which side of the bread his butter is on), we boarded the N train and headed out.

Ignoring the carnies who insisted that a second floor virtual tour of New York's highest point would be far more satisfying than actually being there, we followed the signs to get our Observatory Tickets. The second we caught up with the back of the line, a maroon-jacketed building employee moved aside one of the velvet ropes and directed us to "go right on ahead." Being the dutiful, obedient, clueless people we are, we went right on ahead.

This happened two or three more times, each time being asked, "Do you have tickets?" and each time answering, "No we don't." We finally came to the point where the actual tickets were actually getting scanned into The Actual System and our hands were empty. We expressed this to A Guy Who Looked Like He Was More In Charge Than The Other Jacketeers, who said, "Okay, here's what we're gonna do. You're going to follow me to the ticket window, then we'll come back and pick up your wife."

And I did. And we did. And then we were ushered past the line of people waiting to get into an elevator going up and go up we most assuredly went.

All this special treatment...all this bypassing of lines...all because Beloved was using a cane.

And all God's children said, "Cool!"