The Lady On The Sign

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Aug. 31, 2008

Not many people ride in my car.

It’s not that I‘m a bad driver. I am a good driver, despite the complaints of some of my fellow motorists who simply haven’t gotten used to the fact that single lane roads can at times handle the presence of two cars going in the same direction at the same time in approximately the same location, the laws of physics notwithstanding.

It’s mostly my personal situation, being a single father of none, that keeps my car in the passenger free zone. The soccer moms out there who probably keep an extra kid or two hanging around in the stockroom just in case they have to get in the minivan and their actual children are not anywhere to be found may not understand this, but some of us are just naturaly unaccompanied when we jump behind the wheel.

It is not that I don’t want to have someone else in the car. I wouldn’t mind having someone else in the car, keeping me company, so long as they kept their paws off the iPod and their comments to themselves when I start singing along to Tom Waits and drumming the steering wheel like John Bonham of Led Zepplin. Because, after all, there are times when we want a human connection alongside us as we motor from place to place.

And that, I should explain, is how I became enchanted with the Lady on the Hospital Signs.

You, of course, know the one I’m talking about if you’ve been driving anywhere in the Chester County area in the past two years. She’s the smiling doctor/nurse/medical technician who looks out from behind the message, “Ahead of the curve. And just around the corner.” She has been smiling at us from advertising billboards and road signs, enticing us with her seemingly refreshed, breezy bedside manner and just exuding this air of professional healthiness.

The first time I spotted her over there on East Marshall Street in West Chester, I knew exactly where I wanted to go when, or if, I got sick. By the third or fourth time I saw her, I had started making plans on how to get just ill enough to be admitted into her presence, but not so out-of-sorts that I couldn’t throw off some charming witticisms that would impress her oh-so-healthy heart.

There I was, hoping to make come human connection as I drove along alone in my Subaru Outback, and there she was, waiting to welcome me to the emergency room or the surgery room or the ambulatory care unit or wherever it is that she worked. We were made for one another.

What captivated me was the whole casualness of her. In the photo, she just stands there, arms crossed and stethoscope slung jauntily around her neck, telling us with her big dark eyes that she doesn’t make judgments about how badly we might have been taking care of our bodies, that she’s just there to be a friend, a healer, a caregiver. And to make sure we don’t feel too intimidated by the fact that she’s a dozen times smarter and healthier and better paid than we are, her hair is sort of mussed up, as if she’s too down to earth to constantly check her coif in the mirror.

Hey, you have to have something to occupy your imagination while you’re driving alone. Some people dream of winning the Daytona 500; I’ve got the Lady on the Hospital Signs.

So recently I figured I would call over the hospital and find out what floor she worked on so I could arrange to be admitted there with some non-life threatening ailment and begin the process of chatting her up.

And didn’t I learn the cruel truth? That the object of my adoration is not a doctor at the hospital, not a nurse at the hospital, not a med tech or a rehab specialist or an EMT or an occupational therapist, but a standard issue model who was paid to pose for that photo.

My dreams were dashed, my hopes quashed, my plans for the future disposed of like a used latex glove. The passenger seat in my heart was, once again, empty.