#2 Just Another Dead White Male

She buzzed around the patient, dressed in a tiny pink pant suit, armed with a line of floss.

“Open wide,” she sang.

He opened wide. 

She accidentally rubbed up against him.

He flinched.

“Relax, Rabbi Scheinblum,” she said gaily. “I’m not going to hurt you. That’s Dr. Digby’s job.”

He flinched again.

“Just kidding,” she reassured him. “My job is to take your mind off the coming pain.”

A major flinch.

She ignored this response and launched into her assignment. One of the questions she’d been asking people as she flossed them up for Dr. Digby was, what did they like best about Kirkland? If they were to name her the one thing they liked best about living in Kirkland, Kansas, one thing and one thing only, what would that one thing be?

​They’d been saying it’s a nice conservative town. Still too much crime in the streets, maybe, and it was getting a little too big, in terms of population, but basically it was still a nice conservative town, knock on wood. They’d been mentioning the friendliness of the people. They’d been saying Kirkland was the kind of a place where family values were allowed to shine through, which accounted for the friendliness. They’d also been saying it was one big happy church-going community where everybody was free to go to the religion of his own choice and there were no long-haired Socialists—she guessed that maybe now they were called Liberals (this brought an indisputable flinch)—and very, very few atheists, just a few long-haired philosophers out at the University, and nobody paid any attention to them anyway, except for maybe a few sophomores, who’d grow out of it just about the time they started applying for jobs in the appliance department at Sears.