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The Donegans, Bob, Mitzy, and their kids, Joey, Johnny, and Jimmy loved to light fireworks on their land near Eureka. They’d get it from Tijuana, and drive up past San Francisco with enough firepower every 4th of July to start their own preemptive war. Their family health insurance plan typically served for mundane family catastrophes that might occur at other times of the year. Except for this single idiosyncrasy, a well-intentioned rite for celebrating our nation’s birthday, the Donegans were pretty ordinary. Bob was a self-employed entrepreneur with a computer repair business. Mitzy did the company’s books, and the kids, already quite computer literate, did the troubleshooting if the trouble wasn’t too complicated.

Around June 29th the family drove off merrily humming. Their black hummer headed south for the border towards Tijuana’s fireworks stands, some with supermarket-like inventories,  to stock up on Roman candles and bottle rockets, salutes and M-80s, blockbusters and cherry bombs, even sparklers and snakes for little Jimmy, who was only twelve and a bit more timid than his brothers and parents.

Once back home, preparation for festive explosions and “the lighting” always was a big production. Neighbors came from miles around. Bob and Mitzy were relatively safety-conscious, but their boys could be downright careless – especially Johnny, a sullen 14-year-old who loved to see just about anything “blow up.” He was about to stuff a live M-80 into the unsuspecting maw of Spritzy, the family’s beloved Dalmatian, when the explosive power of that quarter-stick of dynamite exploded prematurely and blew up near a horrified Jimmy, trying to save the dog.  Mitzy dialed her family’s California Health Insurance agent in the nick of time. “Dial 911 – Stat!” he screamed over the phone. She did, and Jimmy was rushed to the nearest regional medical center via ambulance.

They all went to visit Jimmy after the surgery. He was bandaged up. “You look just like The Mummy from that movie,” remarked Johnny, displaying his usual contemptuous flair for the insensitive.   

“How’s Spritzy?” Jimmy managed to ask, barely audible through his wrappings.

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//

In lieu of a day off on that fateful August 15th, Matt Lockard wanted to at least have a relatively easy day. Most of his fondest memories in some way were involved with National Relaxation Day, or at least a degree of relaxation.

By 11 a.m., he’d seen seven clients, customers and prior policyholders march through his office door, families with their family plans, the elderly and the newlyweds, and even a llama that ambled in off the street and actually wasn’t a customer.

A woman from somewhere in the Middle East came by in a burka, and a pirate wanted one of those special policies to protect his interests on the high seas – as he was wary of other pirates with all that’d been going on lately in the Indian Ocean. They came in to make the day ultra-hectic and it wasn’t even lunchtime yet.

Cripes Matt Lockard whined (fortunately only in his mind’s eye), it’s National Relaxation Day and I can’t have a leisurely day just because my gig is California Health Insurance policies. It seems that everyone in California has some kind of health care concern that a policy can address.

Just then some college students came in, and they wanted a group policy that would protect them from potential injuries incurred at keg parties. Five of the six were young men, all enrolled in California schools getting in-state tuition and the straggler was an attractive young woman, unmarried but majoring in animal husbandry she soon revealed. Ten minutes later, Matt was at it again, part of a flurry of frenetic, attending to needs of people that had to be met.

More pirates in the afternoon, but these happened to be transplants to the Los Angeles environs from Pittsburgh. A bald-headed centenarian walked in preceded by his cane, and he wanted a policy that would somehow last to provide a legacy perhaps. Soon it was five of the clock and the sun was beginning to approach the horizon and Matt Lockard, a man who had missed his chance to relax, was about to set. The phone rang just then …

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Richie Montrose was an all American boy. The previous summer he’d been 12 and broken his foot while skateboarding down a steep hill. Mending the hairline fracture had been out of pocket, no insurance. This summer, his parents were better prepared, and went to see a California Health Insurance agent with Richie in tow.

“We’re covered,” his dad triumphantly said afterwards, “What would you like to do this summer?”

To Richie, that was a no brainer. “August 16 is National Roller Coaster Day,” the boy said, a bit wistfully, “Why don’t we all go to Six Flags Magic Mountain?”

His Dad considered it, his mom was right there, and it was the family’s vacation week. The theme park was nearby in Valencia, only about twenty miles north of West Hollywood where the family lived. “There are neat roller coasters at Magic Mountain,” his mom offered, “and we can go there, on one condition: All three of us have to go on whatever ride you choose.”

Richie considered the embarrassment factor, he was actually a teenager, and whirred through his mind’s eye the park’s 100+ thrilling rides, including roller coasters like Tatsu, Goliath, the Riddler’s Revenge, and  his all-time favorite, the revamped X2. Somehow he had to convince both of his parents to ride that. But he would do it. “It’s a deal,” Richie agreed.

That family fun day began within minutes of the park’s opening. By late afternoon, they’d ridden as a family five of Magic Mountain’s six looping coasters – but not the X2. Worse, with dusk approaching, both parents were balking. “Pretty please …” the boy finally said, with strategic tears starting in both eyes. His parents weren’t dummies when it came to coasters. They knew about the X2’s raven turns, its terrifying flips, how the individual coasters spin independently 360 degrees forwards and backwards on a separate axis. “No way,” Richie’s dad drew the line, or thought he did.

But a few moments later they were all strapped in and set for an unrelenting thrill, and after the ride, when Richie’s dad felt pain in his ribs, lots of it, Richie was philosophical on their way to the ER. “At least we’re covered dad,” he said, and his mom laughed, while his dad only tried to.

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It had seemed like a lark. The four dorm buddies had just learned on the Internet that TODAY, August 7th – was National Sea Serpent Day. “That’s crazy,” said Jim Brewer, an astute but fun-loving 22-year-old, “Who ever heard of a sea serpent in southern California waters?” Sitting with Jim in his room were Mike, Dave, and Bill, surnamed Smith, Doe, and Jones respectively, all majors in marine sciences, and all had a good laugh. Something else they all had in common were health insurance policies provided by a California Health Insurance agent – which was to prove fortuitous.

One of the college students decided on an excursion as a way to celebrate the peculiar holiday – intended partly in jest but also because going out in Jim’s Aquasport was fun. A few hours later, Jim Brewer and his buddies were placidly perched in the 20-foot Aquasport when something, a sleek & sinuous serpentine shape, suddenly loomed over their boat in the fog, rising from the depths, and swiftly rammed them before any of them could blink.

“What the heck was that?” Dave Doe managed to say while bobbing in the ocean a mile off Catalina Island, as the Aquasport was capsized. Jim replied in emergency mode, “Everybody is okay, except for Mike, he’s swallowed a lot of water.”

Luckily Dave and Bill managed to right the boat, and they all headed back toward the city. Enroute, Jim put in a call via cell (amazingly it still functioned) to Mr. Tim Neptune, the kindly California Health Insurance agent who knew all their parents, and regarded these young men too as his clients.

“What can I do for you?”

“Our boat got swamped,” Jim blurted.

“What capsized you?”

“We don’t know. We think it was a sea serpent. But Mike Smith swallowed a lot of water and he’s barely conscious. What should we do?”

“Take him to the nearest ER,” advised Neptune, sounding like a sea god at that moment, “Don’t worry. You all have coverage and it’s current.”

Once their buddy Mike was taken in, he required hospitalization and an overnight stay. When he woke up in his hospital bed, Mike’s first words were peculiar. “It was a sea serpent,” he said, “I saw it.”

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Bastille Day falls on July 14th every year. Lately, septuagenarian Pritella Pratt felt like storming a few Bastilles herself, and she wasn’t even French. She did enjoy French salad dressing on her Romaine lettuce, and had eaten French fries, but that doesn’t count. But on Bastille Day, 2010, the French Independence Day, Pritella was in a hurry and tripped coming down some cement steps. She kept her balance, but it was Pritella’s pratfall nonetheless, as by evening of that day, several hours later, she felt a sharp nagging ache in her lower back. What was Pritella to do? She called Mabel, her beloved California Health Insurance agent (Mabel had also been her pinochle partner when her husband had been alive), to learn if her Medigap supplemental coverage was still in effect. “Yes indeedy,” Mabel said in her strange Irish brogue, “it is.” Medicare was great, but after Plan D of the Bush years, she didn’t know what to expect. She rushed out of her house, headed for her car, a Studebaker, and tripped, more seriously this time, a second pratfall. “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” she whispered as loudly as she could. Several more such vocalizations left Pritella feeling very old indeedy, and now her back was much worse. It was still Bastille Day, but almost dusk. A crow was cawing. Finally a good Samaritan named Sam came by, and helped Pritella to her Studebaker. Deep down the seventy-six-year-old felt a sprig of hope, like a probing tendril, because of Mabel’s affirmative words “Yes indeedy.” Those precious words were all that mattered now. Three blocks later, the urgent care center came into view. She could have walked there if it weren’t for her pratfalls. It was now dusk and a second crow cawed. Her back was killing her, perhaps literally as she didn’t know what was wrong.  Feeling a surge of “old lady” adrenalin, she managed to open the glass doors, and walked into the health care facility. “I’ve got Medicare, and Medigap supplemental,” she proudly said when asked by the receptionist, and promptly fainted.

It turned out that she’d “ruptured something,” and she needed to go the hospital for observation. Waking up in her hospital bed, her first thoughts were of Mabel – and not the bill.

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//

The Olsens were headed from their village of Orange Hollow straight to Los Angeles to go camping in the nearby foothills for 4th of July weekend. But a wrong turn led Biff, the family’s patriarch, into East LA. A camping trailer couldn’t help but attract attention. It was inevitable when Biff and his lovely wife Beatrice, their sons Brian, Bill, and Bobby, only eleven – heard the first knock. “Who could that be?” whispered Beatrice. “It’s not Matt Lockard,” Biff said, “He doesn’t know we’re here.” The Olsens had recently purchased a family health insurance plan from Matt, a California Health Insurance agent if ever there was one. Once he’d invited the Olsens to the Los Angeles area, in a casual aside, but where their trailer was parked now was no place for tourists.

“Can I go outside?” said Bobby, being only eleven.

The knock came again. Fifteen-year-old Brian opened the door, and a youth gang poured into the family’s trailer en masse all wearing hockey shirts embossed with the logo of the Los Angeles Kings.  The Olsen kids, after a childhood spent cooped up in Orange Hollow, were keen on adventure. When one of the Kings offered to “show them around,” it sounded like adventure.

When the Olsen boys went with the others, Beatrice became momentarily worried. “Where are they going?” she said.  

“Boys will be boys, let them explore,” replied Biff.  

A few hours later, another knock came. This time it was a SWAT team, armed with a search warrant. The police officers discovered a Bible with certain passages from the Book of Revelations clearly marked, and also brought news of their boys – Brian, Bill, and Bobby, who was only eleven. “They were involved in an altercation with a rival gang,” one officer said, “Your youngest was shot in the leg.”

“That’d be Bobby,” replied Beatrice, “he’s only eleven.”

“We’d better call Matt Lockard and go to that hospital,” Biff said to Beatrice, after the SWAT team left, “Sounds like their exploring got out of hand.”

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//

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Matt Lockard, California Health Insurance agent extraordinaire, didn’t know. He was really clueless about National Hug-A-Cat Day being celebrated

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Article Content:
Everyone in California enjoyed celebrating June 4 as Hug-A-Cat Day, except for California Health Insurance Agent Matt Lockard.

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Matt Lockard, California Health Insurance agent extraordinaire, didn’t know. He was really clueless about National Hug-A-Cat Day being celebrated on the 4th of June.

When the calls from cat-loving clients kept ringing him up on the 3rd, a whole slew of them, Matt was puzzled and even wary. “I assumed it was some sort of practical joke,” Matt explained.

Matt was less than enthused, especially when clients such as Mrs. Bessie Morgenthau began texting him on his Smartphone. “After she texted me about a dozen times, I’d had enough,” Matt said, “When I texted her back, I told her that I didn’t even like cats.”

This did not go over well. During the remainder of Hug-a-Cat Day eve, the calls kept coming in, overwhelmingly pro-cat, increasingly irate.

“Why aren’t you out with your cat preparing for the hug-a-cat-a-thon?” a client who refused to be identified finally asked the exasperated Matt, hearing a distinct purring in the background.  “I don’t have a cat,” Matt replied, but at that moment, he almost wished he did.

The next day, National Hug-A-Cat Day, dawned smoggy and putrid, a little like if a disgusting cat box had been left in Matt’s office. Matt opened the door to like any dutiful and hardworking California Health Insurance agent might, and entered. “What’s that smell?” Matt immediately said. A few seconds later, he saw it, a real cat box, and several little cat houses made of hard plastic not far from where the litter would go if he had any. “Oh no!” Matt cried, and then, perhaps instinctively, “Here kitty?

Suddenly, out from the cat houses came one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight of them, Matt counted. Matt sat down and began sobbing, and then a strange thing happened. The cats started coming up to him, nestling against his trouser shins which were soon covered in cat hairs. Matt reached out and started petting. “These animals just want to be fed,” Matt said aloud. Still, despite his best instincts, he picked one up, little more than a kitten, and hugged it.

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//

He’d wanted to be normal since he’d been a boy. At 34, his bedroom was still littered with a menagerie of stuffed animals that provoked snide comments from his girlfriends – all the wrong kind of women anyway because they tended to be mother figures. He had to break these childhood patterns once and for all, and he’d settled on Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) as a cure.

His first mistake was going to bed, as usual in the shadow of Tony the Tiger and Gisele the Giraffe, each towering above his head on each side of his pillow, propped up in their verticality by the bed’s antique oaken headboard, without bothering to turn his alarm clock an hour ahead for the first day of Daylight Savings Time.  He had to arrive promptly at 8 a.m. at the Escondido NLP center to begin his life-changing all day seminar, centered upon combating the subjectivity that had so far made life without such imaginative creatures as Tony, Gisele, and their assorted brethren unthinkable.

The trouble began at 7:55 a.m. Daylight Savings Time when Maybelline, a matronly woman of 49 who loved to dote on “her Jonny,” called and roused him from a last minute half-asleep reverie. Jonathan was going to get up anyway in five minutes, as his alarm was set for 7:00 a.m. standard time.

“Hi May,” he said drowsily, “How come you’re calling so early?”

“Early,” she said, “It’s five minutes before eight. Don’t you have to be in Escondido at eight? It’s Daylight Savings, don’t you know?”

“Damn!” Jonathan exclaimed, “You’re right! I got to go!” Within ten minutes he’d completed his morning ablutions and was out the door without so much as a goodbye for Tony or Gisele.  

But he drove too fast. The accident happened just a mile from the center, a lamp post he didn’t see in time, a gouged radiator, a sprained ankle, an attempt to run, a collapse … he woke up in a hospital bed, a semi-private room.  A doctor was asking about whether he was covered, Jonathan answered in the affirmative, mumbled something about a California Health Insurance agent.

Suddenly, he saw them. Opening his eyes fully, he knew that he wasn’t alone. Somebody had brought Tony & Gisele and also a big stuffed dog, to keep him company.

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//

When California Health

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Article Content:
When California Health Insurance agent Matt Lockard was growing up, a few cartoon characters were fat, and Matt laughed along with his peers. But now fat kids are far from rare, and nobody’s laughing. Childhood obesity is a national epidemic.

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When California Health Insurance agent Matt Lockard was growing up, cartoon characters like Bill Cosby’s Fat Albert and Porky Pig made kids laugh. But in those days, most “fat” kids were merely chubby, few were obese, and even fewer were morbidly obese. “I watched Fat Albert and Porky Pig and Miss Piggy and the Muppets, and they made me laugh,” explains California Health Insurance agent Matt Lockard with a hint of nostalgia in his voice, “I’m not sure I even knew any really fat kids when I was a boy, and in any case, we all exercised and played sports along with watching TV. I might have played a little Pac Man as a teenager, but not for hours and hours like a lot of the kids today. There was a balance generally speaking.”  The operative word is “was.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 19 percent of American children (over 10 million) 6-19 years old are overweight or obese – a number that has more than tripled since 1980 when Matt was growing up. In addition, over the past three decades the childhood obesity rate for preschool children aged 2-5 years and adolescents aged 12-19 years has more than doubled, and studies have shown that overweight adolescents have a 70 percent chance of becoming overweight or obese adults.

“The repercussions of childhood obesity certainly impact the health insurance industry,” Lockard asserts, “along with a lack of preventative care and emphasis, obesity in general and childhood obesity in particular are major factors bringing up the cost of U.S. health care.”

Experts and Lockard are in agreement that inactivity and poor eating habits contribute greatly to obesity’s prevalence and recent rise to epidemic status, and the trends are getting worse, not better. “They eat fast food and junk food primarily, and are way too sedentary,” Lockard argues, “it’s a national tragedy that’s just beginning to be scrutinized.”

Obesity-related diseases such as Type 2 diabetes are already assuming epidemic proportions along with the obesity itself, with pediatric diabetes increasing as much as 60% since 1995. As adults, these health issues experienced in childhood account for “more than half of all hospitalizations,” according to Lockard. Yet despite these grim statistics, “That’s not where politicians place their emphasis,” Lockard concludes.

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The Easter egg hunt over the spacious estate

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Article Content:
What happened to Johnny and David was exactly what had happened to California Health Insurance agent Matt Lockard when he was about their age. It was like déjà vu, but it was fortunate that the boys were properly insured.

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The Easter egg hunt over the spacious estate was great fun for the estimated five-hundred boys and girls loosed by the starter’s gun. Johnny and David Sprunt, a pair of brothers, aged 9 and 8, were intent on filling their baskets with treats. The chase after the hidden confections – became a frenzied kind of kid madness, within the first few seconds. But Johnny quickly spied a yellow marshmallow baby chick and placed it in his basket amid the green plastic grass and soon bent down to reach for a chocolate bunny behind an azalea bush that his brother David spotted at precisely the same instant. But when he too bent down and reached, the result was the accident of two boy heads bonking. The brothers were knocked cold.

“They both might have concussions,” their Dad figured. Their Mom was on her smart phone in seconds and dialing 911. Both parents were relieved when they realized that the trip to the ER would be covered, as they’d purchased a family plan from Matt Lockard, their California Health Insurance agent just a few months before.  First David, and then Johnny recovered consciousness in the ambulance enroute to the hospital, which was a good sign.

Both boys did sustain slight concussions, but even worse, they’d missed the rest of the Easter egg hunt. Later, when the brothers were recuperating at home, their parents offered them some pieces of Easter candy which the boys ironically refused – instead they asked for child’s strength aspirin. 

About a week later, the entire Sprunt family decided to pay a visit to Matt Lockard’s office. Within minutes the boys were relating the entire story, bonking and all. “That’s exactly what happened to me when I was about your age. I bonked my head on my friend Sammy’s head.”

The boys were impressed. “Really?” David asked.

A moment later, Matt surprised the family with an offer. “Hey, I knew you were coming over and hid some candy around my office. Whatever you can find in five minutes you can have.”

It was more informal, but big smiles suddenly appeared on Johnny’s angelic face, and then David’s. The hunt was on! Within ten seconds though, when both boys spied a big chocolate bunny at precisely the same instant, and reached for it a little too eagerly …

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