When I was 18, I sold my blue VW stickshift (complete with groovy sticker as seen above) so I could go on a literary tour of the British Isles sponsored by the local community college. We would travel by coach (read: tour bus) from Dickens’ London up to the Isle of Skye off the northwest coast of Scotland (can’t honestly remember who the writer represented there was, although there are fairy pools, so that’s an imagination sparker). Somewhere in between Tess of the d’Urbervilles and The Tempest (Dorset to Stratford), I caught a cold. Getting off the bus at our hotel that evening, our driver, a family man of middle age (I know that because he told us his backstory over the mic in between narration of the literary countryside we were driving through. Our literary lady would say, “And that’s Saffron Hill, where Dickens’ Fagan plied his trade,” then we’d pull onto the M40 and our bus (er, lorry) driver would suddenly pipe up with “I met my wife at a pub just along here” (or something like that). So by the time we got off in Shakespeare’s town, he was pretty familiar to us and I was pretty sniffly. As I was heading for the hotel, he pulled me aside and suggested I go to the bar, order a hot toddy, take it to the room, get in a hot bath and sip it. Then tomorrow all would be right with the world.

So I did that. The bartender batted not an eye when I ordered it, then I took it up to the room inhaling all the lemony smells and feeling imminent health was around the corner. While my roommate, a lovely lady with two daughters at home (somehow I was the youngest on this tour), went out with the others to explore Stratford-Upon-Avon’s gustatory offerings, I got in a very hot bath with my libation. I’m not sure I fully understood about the alcohol bit in a hot toddy. It’s not as if I hadn’t had the stuff. I was a college student after all. Beer and a bad experience with rum was pretty much it though. I sipped. I finished. I passed out in the bath. I didn’t drown, but I did wake up to my roommate pounding on the door having come home some hours later and found it locked, naturally becoming alarmed. I dragged myself out, freezing, and of course, the next day found my cold had become a raging bronchial event. I got my own row on the bus in the back because no one wanted to be near me. Every once in a while I’d catch our driver looking at me in his rearview. I think he felt bad, yet I wasn’t really mad at him. He might instead have been thinking “what an eedjit. Lass can’t hold her drink” or something equally as critical.

By the time we’d reached Edinburgh, Scotland (Sir Walter Scott, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle…a lot of sirs and an arts festival), I was fine. the cold all worked out and I was once again sitting with the others on the bus, er, coach. That night we were being served a traditional Scottish meal and as I got off the bus, the driver said to me “Be sure to try the haggis” I nodded enthusiastically Yes, I will do that. And I did. And let me just say, haggis is a vile thing. I know, yes, the poet Robert Burns wrote a poem about the stuff, which was why it was on our menu. I did not fully admit to the vileness of sheep guts, offal, and like that until I had eaten the whole thing. Because the bus driver said to(?!?). By the time I’d noticed that everyone around me had either taken a polite bite or ignored it altogether, I’d tucked in and chawed through the whole thing. What a sport, I thought. Why was I even listening to that guy? Trust? Idiocy? Both?

A thread that runs through is that I want to think people know things and are offering me a chance to share in their knowledge. Or maybe I want to prove I’m up for the challenge? (I once ate a live cricket on some sort of teenage survival hike because I thought the guide was cute and he was proving the point that they’re a good source of energy if you’ve run out of food. It was crunchy.) But I’ve also come to realize discernment and a gut-check needs to come along with this trust thing. I’m still working it out: just because someone holds some expertise on a topic (or maybe just a driver’s license) that they don’t know everything and/or their advice isn’t the thing for me. But sometimes I just want a solution to the thing at hand. Want to skip all the figuring-out parts. Recently, just this past week in fact, when the cold I’ve been nursing turned into bronchitis (because of course it did), I went to the doc (actually urgent care, and boy could I riff on how broken our health care system is; that’s for another rant) and got me some meds, and, yes, they are helping calm the cough but yet time would do that too. And I’m apparently impatient and who knows if these meds are really doing anything.

So I’ve stepped up from taking advice from the bus driver to someone wearing scrubs, yet the trust thing still tempts. Who knows, I might have gotten just as good advice from the M19 driver (the bus I take from Redlands to my dad’s) on some family cold remedy. Stay tuned, there may be a next time.