Thousand+ Words for Nov 24, 2025

An Old Man Lay in a Hospital Bed, Weak, Agitated, and Confused. "The Milk Truck Comes...."

An old man lay in a hospital bed, weak, agitated, and confused. "The milk truck comes on Wednesdays and Saturdays," he said to no one in particular, although there were several people in the room with him. No one acknowledged his revelation or responded. "Wednesday!" he repeated, surprising strongly. A pause, then "Saturdays," he said weakly, as if he had not yet recovered from the effort that saying the first day had taken.

"How long has he been this way?" one of the men standing in the room said to one of the others. They were of similar build, dressed similarly in slacks and white shirts, jackets but no ties. Each had a clear plastic plug in his left ear, and a tightly coiled wire made its way behind each man's ear, down each man's neck, and disappeared under each man's collar. Each sported a short, military-style haircut, and each had the same thin trace of a pattern around his eyes, as if each spent a lot of time outside in the sun wearing sunglasses. They were similar enough to have been stamped out of cookie dough.

"All day. He woke up going on about the milk truck," responded the second man. He was a member of the regular detail, while the first man was an additional team member brought in to help secure the hospital during the time the former president would be convalescing. Or dying.

The door to the small private room opened and a woman entered. She wore a white smock over a green dress and flat shoes that would be comfortable during a day spent on her feet walking around a hospital. On the front of her smock was embroidered Rebecca C. Frayley, MD, PhD, and below that, in smaller letters, Chief of Psychiatry. She approached the two cookie-cutter men, and nodded at one of them. "Good afternoon," she said softly.

"Hello, Doctor," he responded. Then, to his partner, who wasn't a member of the regular detail and therefore would not have known, he said: "Dr. Frayley has been working with him."

The partner nodded. "Doctor," the partner nodded.

Frayley stepped around the two men and up to the side of the old man's bed. "Hello there," she said brightly, turning on her big smile. The man had been holding his head at an odd angle, an uncomfortable-looking angle, but on hearing her, he turned to her and looked directly at her. For a moment, Frayley wondered if he was having a moment of lucidity. He focused on her face as if it were the first face he'd seen in a while. He was old, but his distinctive features were immediately recognizable from the media, if you were over forty, or from the history books if you weren't. It was easy to see that he had been good-looking once, even if his looks had faded almost completely with the years. "The milk truck?" he asked. Frayley ignored the question.

"Mr. President, I'm Rebecca Frayley. Do you know where you are?"

"The milk truck comes on Wednesdays," the former president confided in a low voice. "And Saturdays."

"Yes, sir," Frayley responded. "Mr. President, do you know me."

"Perhaps," the old man said, and, looking away, returning to the awkward posture, he smiled a smile that was at once both charming and horrible. Charming in that it was clearly the smile that forty-eight years ago had charmed 56 percent of the nation's voters and four years after that had charmed 61 percent of them, and horrible in that it was ravaged by a particularly unkind old age. The unshaven face, the spotty skin, the diseased teeth. "The milk truck comes on Wednesdays," he repeated, and the smile collapsed. Out of office forty years, the old man's stature as an elder statesman had replaced the many failings and weaknesses of policy and person he'd had during his terms as president.

"All right, sir, we'll talk later, okay?" Frayley patted his forearm, and he turned to face her once again. "Rebecca," he said. Frayley was surprised, and for an instant, her face revealed it.

"Yes, sir?"

"That's a nice name," he said, staring directly at her. His cool blue eyes hadn't changed at all since his heyday, and Rebecca understood how he would have been attractive."

"Why, thank you, Mr. President," she responded. Then, without thinking, she said, "I've always liked the name Stephen."

He smiled. "The milk truck comes on Saturdays, Rebecca," he said, and then he took a big sigh. "Wednesdays and Saturdays every week."

"Thank you, Mr. President." She got up and walked around to a small table along the wall. The laptop computer there was connected to the hospital's record system. She sat down and deftly typed her password into the keyboard, clicked a few keys, and then turned to the Secret Service agent she had spoken to before. "His records aren't in our computer," she said.

"No. I think I have what you need here," he said. She hadn't noticed before, but the agent had an out-sized roll-around briefcase at his side, and he stooped to flip open the top of it and fish out a thick folder. On the front, it said "Classified Medical Record -- TS" in red letters.

He offered it to her, and she took it. "Thank you," she said, opening the folder. On top of the papers was the most recent assessment of the former president's mental status, and under that the results of blood work and a full physical. Under that was Frayley's own assessment of the president, conducted three months prior when she visited him at his ranch in southern Ohio. On that day, he had been lucid, ambulatory, and plainly attracted by her young femininity--it had been the first time she'd met the man, and she had been surprisingly nervous, but this soon faded as he made her feel comfortable and welcome in the well-appointed front room where she conducted her assessment. "I'm pleased to meet you, Mr. President," she had said.

"And I you," he had responded with a surprising degree of charm. "Are you sure you're really a doctor, Doctor? You seem so young." The way he said it, smiling and gripping her hand, it was somehow disarming.

"Oh, yes, sir," she said. "I trained at Boston Hospital, and did a residency at Johns Hopkins."

"Of course," he said, releasing her hand. "My friends there--" he nodded to the silent figure standing in the room, with a plug in his ear and a tightly coiled wire snaking down his shirt--"they say you're okay, and that's good enough for me."

"Very kind of you to have me in your home," she said.

"It's my pleasure. Since my Suzy died, the place, well, it's not the same for me, but it is nice. All this is her idea," he said, his arm sweeping up to indicate the room and its decorations and furniture. "I never had much of an eye for design."

"It's beautiful, sir, and I'm so sorry about your wife."

The president's wife, the former first lady, had died nearly two years ago of natural causes. "Thank you," he said. "Shall we sit?"

He motioned for her to sit in a blue-upholstered chair and once she had done so, he took his place in a rocking chair nearby, cushions on the arms but only hard wood on the seat and back. "This is the best thing for my back," he said. "I understand Kennedy used to do the same thing."

"Yes, I believe I've seen pictures of that," Frayley responded. She retrieved a half-size clipboard from her purse and unsnapped the pen from the clip that fastened it there. "May I take a couple of notes, please?" she asked.

"You're the doctor," he said, smiling.

“Alright, sir, let me establish orientation first, if I may. Where are we right now, can you tell me?”

“I believe I can,” he returned. We are in my sitting room, in my house, just outside of the city of Salyerville, Ohio.”

“And the date?”

“Today is Thursday, March 21.” “And the year?” She felt silly asking this, so she kept her eyes on her notes.

“Twenty eighty.”

“Alright, very good, sir.” She looked up. “Okay, how are you feeling today?”

He shrugged. “I feel fine. I wish I was still president,” he said with a half- smile.

“Let’s see, you’ve been out of office how long now?” she said.

“Forty years this year. Hard to believe it’s been that long, but forty years. My second term was ‘36 to ‘40.”

“I was born during your second term,” she said, and she immediately regretting saying it, thinking that it might emphasize the old man’s age.

“Ha! Yes, that’s entirely possible,” he said. “Just how old are you, young doctor, if I may ask.”

“I’m 38,” she responded.

“Had your birthday this year yet?”

“No, sir, that’s not until June.”

“I see. Born in ’37 then. Yeah, that was a great time,” he said. “That summer, my Suzy and I went to Europe and brokered a deal with Yanilov to resolve those disputed islands in the North Pacific.” He seemed thoughtful for a moment. “Yanilov, now there’s a leader for you. Man was an idiot, but he was the most effective player in Russian politics I’d ever seen, or have ever seen, for that matter.”

“I know the name, but that’s about all,” Rebecca said with a smile.

“Yeah, Yanilov. He was younger than me, but he died young, you know. He had a beautiful young wife, she lives in Sweden now, I believe.”

“And Miyakawa?” Freylay asked.

“I’m surprised you know that name. Yeah, Miyakawa. Terrible about what happened to him.” The president was referring to the assassination attempt, which took place in 2041 and left the Japanese Prime Minister in a wheelchair and breathing with just one lung.

“Yes.” She paused for a moment, studying the 49th President of the United States carefully. He sat still, arms on the cushioned covers of the rocking chair’s arms, staring off into the middle distance. Perhaps he was thinking about his own near-brush with death at the hands of an assassin. The president had taken a bullet to the leg in that episode, and a Secret Service agent had been killed. The would-be assassin made his attempt on the president’s life, failed, and then took a vial of cyanide; he died in about two minutes, but a quick-thinking Secret Service agent had managed to record the man’s last words using his sleeve microphone. Although he was not a Turk--the man turned out to be Syrian--he had spoken in Turkish, and what he said turned out to be the lyrics to a song that was popular in the Middle East about the time that Iraq was dissolved as a nation and split into four self-governing provinces. Despite a good deal of effort, the Secret Service had never been able to connect that song to anything related to the president or to the man’s desire to have him removed from the political scene.