Coffee or Tea

Yesterday Jeffrey and I went out to eat with some friends from ACU who were in town for a couple of days. We decided on The Alamo Cafe for a some homemade tortillas and chips and salsa. Jeffrey and I arrived first, and Jeffrey got a call from Will while we were at the table because Will was lost. While Jeffrey was busy giving directions, an elderly gentleman began walking toward our table.

Since we were seated near the bathrooms, I assumed that the man was just headed there, but I was wrong. As he came closer I realized that he was holding a blind man's cane, tapping it right toward our table. He got up to the table, directly across from me, leaned over (drooled a little on our table) and said...

..."Would it be possible to get a cup of coffee to go?"

Uncertain of how to respond, I said, "I'm not sure, sir. We'll have to ask your waitress. Do you know what she looks like?"

Immediately after asking the latter question, I realized that I had just requested that a blind man recall the facial features of his waitress. Quickly I stammered, "I mean, do you know your waitress's name?"

He didn't.

I told him to stay there and got another member of the waitstaff and told her his coffee order. She went to fetch the coffee and I went back to the man. He was a little unsteady, so I held his hand until he could turn toward me and then I told him that they would bring his coffee to his table. He said, "I think I'll wait right here."

I'm fairly certain that it only took the waitress 3 minutes to get the coffee, but it felt like several years since the man stood directly in front of me, looking across my table into my eyes, but without saying anything. Finally, she returned with his coffee and led him back to his table.

10 minutes later, I heard a familiar tapping sound and found that our friend was returning to our table to make some other request. The waitress intercepted him and asked if she could help him. He said, "Are you the one who got my coffee?" She said yes and he handed her one dollar.

Shouldn't I at least get 50 cents of that tip?

In other news--Update on things that have happened in the oral surgery clinic:
We had a patient scream so loudly (not in pain, just nervous when we pulled her lip back to see which tooth was bothering her) that people from other departments at the hospital came to see what was wrong.

One of my patients exclaimed, "Ay, ay, ay!" each time I touched her (with a shot, with an instrument, or just on the shoulder).

Another patient came in for extraction of the broken roots he had in his mouth. They were broken because he had tried to pull his own teeth with the old string-and-door trick, and was unsuccessful. When we asked him why he didn't just come see us in the first place, he said, "Because they were hurting too bad and I knew I could do it myself."