What is normal?

I was writing to a friend who is in the US for a couple of months and told her things seem normal here. But what’s normal?

Normal here means that you expect to have your bag checked every time you go to the grocery store, the hospital, malls or any biggish store. When things are “tense” you might even get a pat down at the malls. You can expect as many as four searches (two x-ray and sometimes up to two hand searches of bags) at the airport not including the security check of the car you arrive in.

Normal also means that if you should bother to look up the weather forcast on the internet it would invariably say 60% chance of rain and thunderstorms. I am not actually sure what that means. It certainly doesn’t rain 60% (14.4 hours) of the day. But it does rain on far more than 219 days (60%) in the year. In fact it typically rains for at least a short while almost every day. So, I am not quite sure what exactly it means to say that there is a 60% chance of rain.

Normal means you can spend a fair amount of time standing in lines at ATM machines because most things are still paid for in cash. Some big stores take credit cards but since the system is off-line so often, it is usually much faster to pay cash. You also spend a fair amount of time standing in lines to pay utilities. They do not have a system for mailing checks or automatic deductions, but the telephone company does have a cool touch screen machine you can use if you pay by check.

Normal means that the rich have body guards – even when they go to the dentist.

Normal means that aside from the school year, you keep track of the passage of time by what fruits are in season.

Normal means that your doctor keeps your medical record on index cards. Normal means that you can get lab work and most tests done today, or tomorrow at the latest, and you can pick up the results the same day or the next.

Normal means that traffic flows better without traffic cops.

Normal means that at least one of your neighbors raises roosters for cock fighting. (So you never need an alarm clock.)

Normal means that somebody in the general neigborhood is having a party with BIG speakers on any given evening, though a recent city ordinence has limited most of it to before 10pm on school nights.

And normal means that it is not smart to use illegal drugs in this town. Killings of drug users and pushers still occur weekly by mysterious perpetrators.