But on this occasion, everyone in the waiting room, including me, was looking at their phone. There were a few magazines, all of them outdated but still crisp and new looking because no one ever opened magazines anymore.

I was taken aback by an online advertisement: Seniors 65 and up, it stated, are losing up to $60 billion a year due to fraud. According to Yahoo, while total fraud losses reported by older adults to the Federal Trade Commission were more than $1.9 billion, the actual losses could be as high as $61.5 billion, since only a fraction are reported. So how did they arrive at that number? I wondered.

A couple of hours later, standing in the pouring down rain in the parking lot at Quality Drive and Route 22, just off the Plattsburgh Airport exit ramp, I looked, aghast, at my dramatically blown-apart right front tire. Glancing across the lot at a display modular home, I thought, maybe I’ll sleep there tonight.

Feeling, as they say, unequal to the situation, I called my friend Sarah, who always knows what to do. Do you have Triple A? She asked. No, I said. Hmm, she said.

I called Triple A and asked, hesitantly, hopefully, if I could sign up on the spot — and the answer was yes! I was flooded with relief. Help was on the way.

Not that the modular home wasn’t nice and all, but I could tell just by looking it wasn’t hooked up and I reckoned it was probably locked anyways. (Did you know that anyways is a very old word that comes from anywise?)

At that moment I could imagine nothing finer than to be in the comfort of my own home with Jupiter the cat, even if he was yowling at me.

So wait, who has a billion dollars to lose in the first place, it occurred to me to wonder. It was reassuring to know, as I sat there looking out at the rain and waiting for the tow truck, that, whatever ambsace I was dealing with at the moment, I was not losing a billion dollars myself, let alone $61.5 billion.

It wasn’t long before the tow truck arrived.

You’re not going anywhere with THAT anytime soon. Looks like you hit a pot hole, the kindly tow guy said, eyeing the ruins of the burst tire. He replaced the flat with the spare they call a donut and cautioned me not to drive it very far.

It’s not as if I’d never had Triple A insurance. Years ago, in Boulder, Colorado, I had a Camaro that I loved. Its one flaw, as I saw it, was its predilection for fishtailing and sliding off the road into a ditch at the slightest sign of precipitation. The Camaro was just very sensitive that way.

Luckily, we didn’t get much rain in Boulder, so there was no problem until the winter snows arrived. My Triple A insurance policy promised me unlimited tows, and I made regular use of this policy until Triple A sent me a letter. Yes, they knew what they’d agreed to, but they politely asked me not to abuse my towing privileges.

If you are aghast, you look as if you’ve just seen a ghost, or something similarly shocking. In Middle English gasten meant to frighten. The word comes from gast, meaning ghost. Gast was also used as a verb meaning to scare, as when Edmund, in Shakespeare’s King Lear, says:“Gasted by the noise I made, full suddenly he fled.”

Now people use the word ghost as a verb meaning to avoid someone.

I learned recently that the word ambsace refers to the lowest throw in dice, two ones, or snake eyes; something unlucky or worthless. Ambsace is pronounced kind of the way you’d say embrace.

Ambs, from Latin, means both. Ambs ace means both aces. Think of ambidextrous and ambivalent. It can also mean the smallest amount, within an ace of something.

Well, anyways, have a good week.

(Martha Allen, of Keene Valley, has been writing for the News since 1996.)