You're Bleeding

A few hours ago I stopped at a nearby copy shop to get an estimate and as I lounged against the counter waiting for a clerk I heard a voice saying softly:  "You're bleeding."  It was a young man nearby using the copying machine.  I knew right away what he meant, and looked down over my exposed body parts, and sure enough there was blood trickling out of a small gash on my right arm below the elbow.  In my general unsteadiness I often bump against the frame of doors as I walk into places; it must have happened here.  The rich flow of red blood was moving down my arm in a dramatic way.  "The bathroom's over there," said a clerk who had just arrived at the  counter to help me.  "It's either blood thinners or a stroke," I said as I went in to get some tissue, but realized that that kind of gallows humor does not work so well with the young who firm of mind, body, and soul cannot imagine the disintegration the lies ahead of them.  I have eighty five year old tissue thin skin which rips at the slightest provocation and the blood conduits beneath are only too happy to release their liquids.  A year ago whilst boarding a subway at Columbus Circle enroute to Grand Central Station, I was severely jostled by a wheelchair and knocked against a metal pillar while waiting to board.  Only when I was seated on the train did feel the unaccustomed warmth on my arm, looked down and perceived the blood flowing, indeed more copiously than usual--it must have been a large tear--, and I had no tissue.  My respectability drained from me along with the blood.  What could he be, I could imagine my fellow passengers asking themselves, some old wino, homeless, derelict, pathetic!  Desperate to staunch the flow, plus eliminate the evidence, I, like any dog or cat, began to lick my arm, grotesque I know, but a normal human reaction, no?  As I discovered later some of the blood adhered to the skin around my mouth, ugh!  After a ride to 42nd street, a transfer to the Shuttle Train, I arrived at Grand Central, by now, with bits of evidence of blood here there and everywhere, still licking away, and shunned by one and all.  I raced downstairs to where I knew the mens room was located, pushed the waiting occupants aside, barged into a stall, grabbed at the toilet paper, oblivious to the seated astonished figure trying to take a crap in peace.  Outside at the mirrors over the sink I applied copious amounts of tissue, wadded up more to put into my pockets, regained my composure, met my friend at Track #46, and went off with her to a delightful meal with her family in the burbs.  Another day in the life of an old timer.