It was time for an oil change for the truck today, so I stopped at the Al Serra dealership in Grand Blanc on my way home from the doctor (I've got some crud that's going around).
With no place to go and an hour or so wait, I headed to the nice waiting lounge. The popcorn machine was popping out some new corn, but I'm not allowed to drink caffeinated coffee or sugar sweetened drinks so I had to pass on the lemonade, fruit punch and coffee that was offered.
Even though I have been out of the reporting business for 15 months, I still make a quick mental note about my surroundings whenever I come into a room. Old habits die hard. What I noticed were five men sitting well-spaced apart in the room.
Each of us picked up something to read, but in the background and showing on a big flat screened television was the ABC afternoon soap opera called "One Life to Live."
Every so often I would glance up from the magazine I was reading and catch one or two other men watching the soap. As soon as they realized one or more of us were also watching them watch, they would return to their reading materials.
As I recall my brief glimpses of the show there was some kind of wedding going on, possibly in a hospital room or it could have been tea party in a mansion, I really wasn't paying that close attention.
What I do know is none of us was really watching the show, but for some reason too nervous or polite to see if we could change the channel to something, say where there is a countdown for the top ten sports plays of the day.
The episode reminded me of my police days when I worked the night shift. I often spent part of my afternoon watching "All My Children." Actually, I got hooked on it.
There was a character (Susan Lucci, still on the show, I believe) called Erica Cain who was dating a doctor - Jeff somebody - but the relationship ended, as all soap opera relationships do in heartbreak and dissolution. I remember that Erica's mother was very nice, but Erica was, well, not nice at all.
Each day when I would get to the police station to begin my shift, there were my fellow officers, a bunch of macho cops, swapping stories about that day's episode of "All My Children." It sometimes left the day shift captain shaking his head when he would hear a shift full of police employees talking about how Erica had messed over Jeff, or how we suspected that so-and-so was having an affair that was going to interfere with another relationship on the show.
We always had this idea that if anyone outside the police department had any thought that we were all obsessed with an afternoon soap, they would have a lot less fear of us.
All this came up because of my stupid oil change this afternoon.
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