still as he presented a thought, a feeling, a dilemma, she was not genuinely interested in him. In truth, they seemed closest when she was ill and he was more doctor than husband. How all of this didn’t sap something essential from him, I don’t know. Perhaps it did. Perhaps, with his wife’s love, he would have been even more than he was.
When he said good night to me, he always sat on the edge of my bed. He stroked my face, and his fingers smelled of the peppermint antacids he chewed after meals. He said he loved me. He said the oak tree would stand guard all night, and that a new day was scheduled to arrive first thing in the morning. Sometimes, to delay his departure, I asked about his day, what patients he’d seen, how sick they were; I would want to know if any of them had barfed onhim, and he would say no, but come to think of it there had been a Charles on the ceiling (an upchuck). He never talked about the actual children he treated. This was long before HIPAA; he simply didn’t think it was right. And I think he knew it would make me jealous. His close friend and colleague Marvin Miller sometimes used phrases like “my boys and girls.” My father said “my patients.”
His family had not owned a car until he was ten years old. This was fantastic to me—he might as well have said they lived in a cave. The strangest thing about it was that they hadn’t needed one. They lived in a small town. They walked everywhere. And yet the first time I went there—on a visit we all took in the summer of 1969—it wasn’t the size of the place, the four short blocks that encompassed the downtown, that amazed me. It was the humidity. I didn’t see how he could have told us about his early life without mentioning it. Every moment coated your skin; to go from air-conditioned car to air-conditioned restaurant was to traverse a tiny hell. On our first afternoon in town, when it was 95 degrees out with 88 percent humidity, we knocked on the door of his childhood home, and the current owners invited us to come in and look around. The relief from the heat was minor, and there was an unpleasant cooked-meat smell. I wondered how you went about visiting people you didn’t know, but our father was very good at this kind of interaction, and after a compliment and an anecdote he beckoned us to the dark, narrow passageway that ran from the entry hall to the kitchen. “Come stand here, children,” he said. “Do you feel that little breeze? This is where I played on days like this.” And we stood in the passageway, the six of us making quite a crowd, and I thought that my father’s ability to make the best of a situation was something I would acquire one day, like underarm hair or a deeper voice.
California enchanted him. He loved the dry air and the gold hills, the particular dust-and-tree-bark scent of our land. Long aftereveryone was gone—we kids and our mother—he stayed in the house, expanding his territory into the empty rooms so that, at the time of his death, he was using my bedroom for the TV, Rebecca’s for a guest room, and the one shared by Ryan and James for a snug library lined with bookcases, in the center of which sat a leather armchair and a lamp. When he had us all to dinner, he set the table with linens and the silver candlesticks our mother had rejected as too conservative and, with an unnecessary apology, served us undercooked broccoli and bland meat loaf procured at the prepared-foods department of the local supermarket.
A few months after his seventy-fourth birthday, he had a bout of pneumonia that put him in the hospital for several days, and not long after that he suffered a stroke that was mild enough to leave him with deficits in no area other than confidence, though there it affected him deeply. He seemed to age overnight, to begin refusing invitations, pleading fatigue when we urged him to accompany us on weekend trips, even visits to the city. Then, on December 27, 2003, after two days of
When he said good night to me, he always sat on the edge of my bed. He stroked my face, and his fingers smelled of the peppermint antacids he chewed after meals. He said he loved me. He said the oak tree would stand guard all night, and that a new day was scheduled to arrive first thing in the morning. Sometimes, to delay his departure, I asked about his day, what patients he’d seen, how sick they were; I would want to know if any of them had barfed onhim, and he would say no, but come to think of it there had been a Charles on the ceiling (an upchuck). He never talked about the actual children he treated. This was long before HIPAA; he simply didn’t think it was right. And I think he knew it would make me jealous. His close friend and colleague Marvin Miller sometimes used phrases like “my boys and girls.” My father said “my patients.”
His family had not owned a car until he was ten years old. This was fantastic to me—he might as well have said they lived in a cave. The strangest thing about it was that they hadn’t needed one. They lived in a small town. They walked everywhere. And yet the first time I went there—on a visit we all took in the summer of 1969—it wasn’t the size of the place, the four short blocks that encompassed the downtown, that amazed me. It was the humidity. I didn’t see how he could have told us about his early life without mentioning it. Every moment coated your skin; to go from air-conditioned car to air-conditioned restaurant was to traverse a tiny hell. On our first afternoon in town, when it was 95 degrees out with 88 percent humidity, we knocked on the door of his childhood home, and the current owners invited us to come in and look around. The relief from the heat was minor, and there was an unpleasant cooked-meat smell. I wondered how you went about visiting people you didn’t know, but our father was very good at this kind of interaction, and after a compliment and an anecdote he beckoned us to the dark, narrow passageway that ran from the entry hall to the kitchen. “Come stand here, children,” he said. “Do you feel that little breeze? This is where I played on days like this.” And we stood in the passageway, the six of us making quite a crowd, and I thought that my father’s ability to make the best of a situation was something I would acquire one day, like underarm hair or a deeper voice.
California enchanted him. He loved the dry air and the gold hills, the particular dust-and-tree-bark scent of our land. Long aftereveryone was gone—we kids and our mother—he stayed in the house, expanding his territory into the empty rooms so that, at the time of his death, he was using my bedroom for the TV, Rebecca’s for a guest room, and the one shared by Ryan and James for a snug library lined with bookcases, in the center of which sat a leather armchair and a lamp. When he had us all to dinner, he set the table with linens and the silver candlesticks our mother had rejected as too conservative and, with an unnecessary apology, served us undercooked broccoli and bland meat loaf procured at the prepared-foods department of the local supermarket.
A few months after his seventy-fourth birthday, he had a bout of pneumonia that put him in the hospital for several days, and not long after that he suffered a stroke that was mild enough to leave him with deficits in no area other than confidence, though there it affected him deeply. He seemed to age overnight, to begin refusing invitations, pleading fatigue when we urged him to accompany us on weekend trips, even visits to the city. Then, on December 27, 2003, after two days of
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