In the Simmer Dim

Pietà

2011-10-12T20:53:00.000-07:00

It took only hours for me.

Just a couple of hours in the World War I Museum in Kansas City.

Its entrance, fittingly, a long, sloping slide to heavy, brass doors. The doors themselves fronting what seems at once a casement, at once a tomb.

But for those of that generation who once manned such casements, too many of whom too soon came to man such tombs, my own couple of hours seemed sacrilege.

Me eyeing those munitions, the likes of which stilled some by the shell, slaughtered thousands by shot, by shock, by gas, by grenade, by the butcher’s cut of machine-gun fire, by bullets sawing life from limb; lives then pooling in seconds, those ponds of blood all at once rimmed by mud, by wire; anything that might ever have been itself puddling a landscape pocked from then to tomorrow.

And me, now, shrinking from these, these encased bayonets, these saved shells, themselves rescued from rust, the ignominy they once, always, deserved.

Me, here, now, almost a century later, eyeing dice, mere dice, mere playing cards, all, face value, even if in miniature. Dice, cards, that all those decades ago made life for moments some semblance of life for those for whom life was then otherwise mud, otherwise stench, otherwise the whistle of shells, the rip of machine guns, the nearness, the irrepressible imminence of death.

And me, this moment, in this museum, staring, in photographs, into the eyes, the eyes of the dead.

Some stunned dead by war.

The rest, all the rest, silenced since by life itself.

By this, the slow cadence of life. Too many of those in those photographs never outliving all they had lived before.

My own grandfather among them.

He, in 1917, then 21 or almost so, a boy made quickly a man by war, packaged in khaki, then shipped to the front.

To him, to everyone then, packed off to that Great War. That war then presumed to end all wars. The one commemorated by this same monument, itself today stabbing a clouded sky.

And far away, in time, in place...

Far from my dead grandfather’s New York City. Far removed from those words inscribed on this monument in Kansas City. The words commemorating this war “the world war,” the emphasis on “the” lost today, as if, naïvely, no one then could ever imagine that one world war might ever engender another.

Only to have my own father fight that next world war, the one never imagined. Only himself to escape by marriage, maybe by newborn me, fighting another, the war after that, the one in Korea.

And my brother, my own brother, a couple of decades later, enlisting during Vietnam.

And I, older than that brother, living, in effect, under the gun, spared by the only lottery I have ever to win. Me, my own five children, since then living life in the shadow of too many wars since that one of my own youth.

And all of us knowing today what my grandfather, almost a century ago, could never have known.

That those in command then, in that Great War, a war now so soon nearly a century dead to history, were convinced to blindness to stand their ground, even if standing ground meant digging deep into that ground.

Meant trenches.

Meant what we now know as trench warfare.

Meant snarls of barbed wire. Senseless forays over the top, the top of the trenches, the top of the wire. Meant traversing no man’s land, itself a cemetery of the willing; of those prodded by whim, by conscience, by any sense whatsoever, misplaced or otherwise, whether of God, of country; every last man now a name on a stone or dust known only to some god, every last soul utterly, ineluctably luckless.

And all that museumed here.

Here, mid-prairie. Here, in what is, to many, the middle of nowhere.

An ocean, and half a continent more, from there, from anyone’s anywhere. Decades, nearly a century, from then.

And me here, now, in 2011, two wars at a time currently engaging us, them, and two of my four sons with me today, both, so far, blessedly removed from either, both wars.

Me grateful today, every day.

Me, having, let’s face it, escaped death myself by the luck of the draw during Vietnam. My four sons so far, to this day, their lives, their whole lives, still ahead.

And then, this morning, these eyes.

Eyes that had seen so much, now saying so little. Eyes like searchlights sweeping a hospital room, lighting, in their passing, only shadows.

His mother, so young herself, what, three, four, feet from his, her boy’s, hospital bed. Her own eyes, any mother’s eyes, this morning lidding sorrow.

His eyes, again, not once on mine, never on mine, never on Tara’s, the social worker with me, me this morning doing palliative care.

His neck, arms, whatever else, inked with tattoos.

His face a mask.

All he lived before, before. All since, since. All, everything, all of it, every last minute in Iraq, a cipher.

“Thank you,” I tell him right away. “Thank you for what you did for all of us,” his own eyes even then darting to anywhere but meeting mine.

I don’t tell him that I myself dodged bullets by the numbers. That he did what I, my own sons, others his age, might otherwise, under other circumstances, have done. Might, if blessed, have survived.

But I did, this morning, think those thoughts.

All those thoughts.

My last, this son, hers—hers beloved as any, beloved as my own—he, in her mind, draped in his mother’s arms; she, in his, still cradling the boy he’d been. Their eyes saying what eyes alone can say…

© 2011, Dónal Kevin Gordon

“How do you do this?”

2011-09-21T21:07:00.000-07:00

We had just spent the better of two hours with a newly diagnosed cancer patient.

A patient young, certainly by the standard of my own 60 years.

She herself still absorbing the news that she, no one, ever hopes to hear. Her husband, at more remove, fathoming, all at once, the unfathomable. The visit itself emotional, more so than any of us in that room might ever have expected.

With me, this visit, one of the Family Medicine residents with whom I work as faculty. She, the entire time, quiet, but attentive, paged once from the room—and long then in returning.

It was one of those patient visits when I do what I usually do; when Melanie, the palliative medicine nurse accompanying me this day, most days, does what she usually does on any day; when neither Melanie nor I thought we were anywhere outside the territory we usually inhabit, despite the patient’s relative youth, despite the poignancy of the moment.

But for the resident—new to this and young herself, perhaps new to death, and certainly to this, to death’s insistent rap at the door—heartrending.

“How do you do this?” she asks me, seconds after leaving the room, her voice rising on that last word, the two of us praying foam into our hands, the better to deaden exposures more benign than those to the heart, even as we put backs to the room, even as we turned to the corridor.

“I twice wanted to get up and leave, was glad for that page,” she says.

And again, seconds later, “How do you do this?”

“I don’t know,” I replied, that much the truth, pausing a few seconds. “Someone has to,” I say feebly. “Maybe me.”

The thing is, until that resident asked me that question, I had not ever asked myself how I do this.

I just do it.

Sure, there are nights when I come home from a day on palliative all but empty emotionally.

The whole day death, dying.

And me, in the evening, just home from work, in a chair, in the living room, quiet, my wife Karen respecting that silence, maybe an hour, maybe a little more, me the whole time awaiting the tide: for life to flow again, for death to ebb again, at least for today, for now, for the moment, this moment.

So, how do I do this?

Nothing in med school, not one hour of pathology, not an entire semester of pharmacology, no amount of biochemistry, no one or any combination of rotations, could ever have schooled me to do what I now do.

Even I, now faculty at a Family Medicine residency, adjunct faculty at the nearby medical school, am unsure how to teach what I’m not sure can be taught, except by me letting that resident, any resident, just experience this: life, life itself; death, the awful imminence of death.

But how to instill in those residents, those med students who follow me, my own long life before I began med school at age 49. My own losses along the way. The things that make me who I am, that taught me.

My mother’s death, herself, her beautiful self, then just 49, to breast cancer. My father’s to pancreatic cancer at 66—and him, a good man, a good father, looking to life ahead, but dead almost before he knew he was dying, before he could make amends for things no one of his five children thought needed amending.

And before that…

An uncle, my father’s kid brother, dead to fire at 28, only two weeks after the death of my own mother’s mother. Just two years later, my father’s only, other brother, dead himself, at 26, in a car accident. And, in the year between, a miscarriage, it just shy of taking my own mother’s life, she a breath from death that day at arrival at the hospital.

And me coming home from school that afternoon, blood spotting, no murdering, the path our family doctor had walked from mattress to front door; he, seeing what he had seen, scooping my mother in his arms, carrying her to his car; the oar of the steering wheel then in his hands; and he, suddenly Charon, ferrying my mother to the hospital. And my father, later that night, his eyes hollow, the near loss of his loved bride beyond any attempt to be anything less than just that, lost.

And me, all this time, only a boy, oldest then of four, but, oldest or not, a boy.

And later still, a friend, my age then, my age then young, dead by his own hand at 29. An uncle, himself later a suicide. All aunts but one, all uncles but one, now lost to all but memory.

How do I do this?

I learned only from life.

My hand, only days ago, on a patient’s hand. She, only weeks ago turned 50, new to the news that she had incurable lung cancer. Her eyes, lids pooling tears, on mine.

“I’m scared,” she says, her voice failing.

“I know,” my hand tightens on hers, hers tightening on mine.

And, just behind me, her three daughters, all of them young, all three thinking, as all of us always do, that they would have their mother, their loved mother, forever.

And just minutes before, my own arm around the shoulders of one daughter, and me telling her, “I’ve been here. I do understand.”

But, God, how I myself so often hurt, still often cry.

© 2011, Dónal Kevin Gordon

Once in September…

2011-09-11T07:53:00.000-07:00

Until that day, that day was our son Brendan’s birthday.Always, always a happy day. A day, in our home, to celebrate life. Our own Brendan’slife.

But that was before September 11^th became 9.11.Before Brendan’s birthday became a remembrance of things past, that past all atonce lit against sudden darkness. Before Afghanistan. Before Iraq. Before HomelandSecurity and pre-flight pat-downs. Before any of us thought any of us hadanything to fear.

And now…

The pages of history dog-eared by columns burning. Bypictures of the lost, taped and thumbtacked, sunlit by day in that last summer,by night by candle. By hope, tears, anger, memory, grief, revenge and, forsome, an uncentered joy.

And Brendan himself, today 27, a decade after a teenager’sbirthday was hijacked and made his generation’s Pearl Harbor?

Four years in New Orleans, helping to rebuild after Katrina.

Two stints in Haiti after the earthquake.

And just yesterday home from Japan, after months doing hispart to undo a tsunami.

A life, so far, well lived.

But all those other lives lost.

Those many thousands of lives, these many thousands of dayslater.

The good those lives, left to live, might have done. Thelove they would have shared. Those other hearts, those hearts the lostthemselves once loved, not ever broken.

And today?

Today we remember things past, even as we imagine thatfuture all those lost would have all of us imagine.

And here at home, here in this small town in Iowa, here atthis old yellow house that has already seen its share of history, watched somany lives quietly come, quietly go. A house that has heard laughter dampened bytime. The laughter of children who lived their lives, only in time tothemselves become ghosts. An old yellow house that remembers, in its way, allthose who passed this way.

Here at this old house, we today celebrate life. Celebrate Brendan.The good he’s done. The joy he’s given. The hope he, at 27, represents for us.For all of us.

Oh, to prey in Pray…

2011-09-10T18:18:00.000-07:00

“Come on in! Have some fun!”

That invitation—coming from one of four guys pumped on something stronger than sun, all four doing their own kind of homeland security, all of them posted outside a bar in this, the middle of a weekday afternoon, here in the middle of sky-big, sun-amped Montana—was, not surprisingly, not at all a pass, lateral or otherwise, in my direction.

Not when the first of us to cross any one of those eight, paired guy-eyes was my attractive, my looking-decidedly-younger-than-her-years wife, and our own equally attractive, calendar-younger daughter. With me lagging enough behind. Just enough so to make both lasses look like they’d not ever be with a guy so grey above the ears as me. Not by choice, certainly. Not by any stretch of any guy’s imagination. Let alone the beer-and-a-bump imaginations of these particular guys.

“Come on in!” one bleats, beating his buddies to their own blurts. “Have some fun!”

Those guys, those four, all four steadied by the four legs of their chairs, those chairs outside a bar, mid-afternoon, all of us, this very mid-afternoon, somewhere south of Pray, in southern Montana. All four guys, at the least, the bar’s own welcome committee; at best, the town’s chamber of commerce; at worst, just four guys hoping, hoping for their own, anyone’s, version of the best.

Me, remembering a younger me, can’t blame them, though, for trying.

“Come on in! Have some fun!”

A come-hither, at once consummate, consummation itself still anyone’s guess.

Meanwhile, this hither worth the hither, brew-breathed or otherwise.

Y’miss most, y’get lucky once, y’go to bed counting the day good, they gotta be thinking.

And, always, always, the prospect of another come-hither, lucky, if luck revisits, and another, at the end of the day, good day.

So, yeah, why not. “Come on in! Have some fun!”

Love in the Afternoon

2011-08-26T20:20:00.000-07:00

Start any day on Palliative Medicine, and you already know that your day is anything but that which you might otherwise predict.

Family meeting, half past nine, but no family there.

Move on to the ten o’clock family meeting, son there, not the daughter. Try to squeeze in a follow-up, only to find that that patient is down in radiology. Back to the half-past-nine, hoping against hope, in this, this our own mission of hope…

Our days, our agendas, we all know, are fluid.

We start with lists of patients. We plan to see most in some timely manner. And then…

Lovely woman, 58 years old. Her husband at the bedside.

She had come in with pain, pain in her fingertips, with, studies confirm, micro-embolisms in those fingertips.

Only ten days earlier, however, she had learned of her Stage IV lung cancer, she still absorbing that.

Radiation not an option. Chemo still out there, waiting, waiting for the oncologist to call the score.

“They give me a year,” she tells me and tells the nurse with me. “And that, that, they say, is generous,” tears starting.

Her husband, now and all this time, stoic, even as we continue to talk, talk about those things no one wants to talk about. His chin, once or twice in all that time trembling, the weight of her future, theirs, all at once nothing but that, a weight.

And then from nowhere…

“I do love you,” she tells him, her eyes, her eyes brimming with tears. “I just never told you.”

All at once, his eyes turning to hers.

Hers to his.

His surprised.

Decades married. Two adult children.

And love.

Love this very afternoon, a surprise.

Letting go…

2011-08-11T18:03:00.000-07:00

She is eating her lunch, as I interrupt that lunch.

Yet, she, she already knows.

Already knows that some kind of cancer, maybe lung from above, maybe pancreatic from below, has already charted a path from here to tomorrow. A path other than the one she and her husband of some fifty years might otherwise have wished, have ever imagined.

Still, here I am, the palliative care physician, the one echoing the oncologist’s bad news.

The patient herself, frail, gray hair cropped short, quietly forking food to mouth, mostly ignoring me, anything I have to say.

And her husband—her husband now of decades, his love so very obvious, so obviously obvious. Even as he, like so many men of any age, tries to make that love, any love, seem somehow less noticeable. At least to eyes, any eyes, especially eyes, eyes as inquisitive as mine.

And he, to my eyes, losing already what he never envisioned losing.

Looking to me, then quickly to her.

And his eyes—oh, my God, his eyes—his eyes right now damming tears, even as those eyes redden, their lids swell. And he struggling to keep me, the nurse with me, from ever, ever noticing.

How to give up what we love…

I myself love poetry.

Love the interplay of word with word within any given line.

Love line tumbling after line, those lines forming a stanza, stanzas a poem, the poem itself music. The music that of my life, your life, all lives.

To lose it, that poetry, is, in a sense, to lose life.

But to lose those we love…oh, to lose those we love…

My own loved mother, dead at 49 of breast cancer. My father, loved at least as much, gone at 66 of pancreatic cancer.

Their ghosts, their ghosts in the room, this room, this morning, with me.

Their own son, these decades later, still freighted himself with those memories.
And me now, talking to this woman, her husband.

Me, thinking at the same time, of all I myself have ever lost. And, at the same time, all I still have.

My wife Karen, our children; my siblings, Karen’s; that next generation, the one extending ours.

All of us, hope against hope, tumbling day after day, no less than those lines of poetry I love. Lines rippling iambically or otherwise one after another. The music, that music. That of lives, mine, yours, ours, everyone’s, now and forever.

And still, she, this patient, fork to mouth, no eye contact whatsoever.

And her husband, straddling some moto-chair, cowboying his own emotions: ignore this, his body seems to say; ignore this, like all those rashes ignored this life long, like any and all colds.

And maybe, just maybe, everything, all this, will, will just go away.

But those eyes, his eyes…

Those eyes…

Those eyes pooling tears even as they say what ineluctably is:

“This will kill you, my love, you I have loved so long, these fifty years.

Kill you no less than any knife, the gun in any murderer’s hand.

You, my lover, you I held so often, so long. Mother of our children. The woman, the woman I remember young, so very young.

The murderer here, the murderer it has always been, the murderer life itself.

And all you love, all I love, all who ever loved you, ending in some instant.
Some instant so soon to come.

A moment you, I, those you love, are now cruelly left to imagine…"

© 2011, Dónal Kevin Gordon

Dying by degrees…

2011-07-31T16:41:00.000-07:00

After a week and the better part of another out west, out where, on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, temperatures flirted with a decidedly coquettish 70, where, in Montana, temps hit the upper 80s, albeit with the humidity in the temperate 30s, we bird-dogged this summer’s heat wave home to Iowa.

Driving east from Rapid City, South Dakota, we saw temperatures climb from the mid-90s to 100, eventually to 106, the road crews on I-90 somehow undeterred. Me, at the same time, cursing my whereabouts, blessing the car’s air conditioning, wishing somehow that sometime soon all this, this intimation of hell, would break.

We’re home now ten days, and I’m still breaking sweat.

Oh, sure, it has rained, often and to notable effect, that much water on so much hot rock creating nothing more than a regional sauna. And the temp here has dipped, maybe, to the upper 80s, only to rebound to, what, to some, a tepid, 95; to others, a balmy 97.

“I’m Irish,” I tell Karen, as I, suffering, surrender, heart, soul, arms- akimbo in abject submission, to the nearest air conditioner. “I’m built for cold, bleak islands.”

Indeed, Iowa itself, neither particularly cold, nor in any way bleak, let alone an island, unless imagined as some landlocked island of corn, is hardly hospitable to the likes of me, even as it makes itself home on so many other levels.

Heart of the heartland, the state certainly wears that heart on its sleeve, welcoming one, all, even as it welcomed my own family almost a dozen years ago, the only test that, and a test somewhat less than a test at that, of winter.

“Been through an Iowa winter?” we were asked, asked often, as newcomers to Iowa, those winters from the first scarcely requiring attention compared to the winters we had known in northern Vermont.

“When does winter start?” our own Vermont-born kids asked, halfway through our first Iowa winter, their disappointment measured as much by inflection as by the dismay on their faces.

And every summer here since, even as the corn, year after year, revels in heat, in humidity, I crank the air conditioners, only, only to make life here, at least summer here, otherwise tolerable, somehow still tolerable.

Outside, though, I die, die by degrees, wishing fewer of them in summer, fewer even in winter; wishing this summer, every summer, to feel what I so rarely feel: alive.

© 2011 by Dónal Kevin Gordon

All that matters…

2011-07-27T21:05:00.000-07:00

I have written here in recent weeks of place, of time.

But so much of our recent trip west had to do with people, with family—with a sister, brothers, their spouses, children—family I’ve long not seen, never less than loved, too long neglected, so often missed; and yet another sister, beyond those other siblings, herself absent.

I am myself the oldest of five, and I confess that while I often see my youngest brother, who himself lives conveniently in the same state, I have not seen my next younger brother in 12 years; his wife in 17; our youngest sister, since she married, moved to London, in 26 years. For her, for me, half her life ago; she then only then just beyond a girl; now a woman; a mother, mother of a daughter; a daughter to the very great credit of mother and father; those years between, those many years, my profound loss.

What had brought us all together, on the west coast of Washington’s Puget Sound, was the wedding of my niece, Courtney, older child of my younger brother Michael—he whom I’d not seen in 12 years—to fiancé Joe.

The wedding itself simple, but eminently elegant.

The reception a chance for me, my wife Karen, our daughter Siohbán; that sister Meghan, her husband Kevin; brother Michael and wife Carol; another brother, Patrick, and his wife, Dawnelle; nieces Courtney and Ellie, nephew Sean, and yet another, much younger nephew, Gavin, to tie time’s loose ends, as much as anyone could tie any number of years into so many hours.

But, ah, those hours, those, those glorious hours!

A father’s toast, heart-spoken and forever.

The mother of the bride plotting, beforehand, to sabotage a Polish tradition—one foreign to anyone but the bride herself, who had once worked in Poland—but a tradition sabotaged much to everyone’s amusement, especially, with more than a nod from that mom, to those of us at mom’s table.

A wedding preluded by deluge, consummated by rainbow.

The laughter. All that laughter. The love. All that love. All that evening. That night long.

And me, wishing I’d not lost these years, any lost memories.

But time is, of course, relative.

Einstein wrote as much, even as he saw time in terms of physics, of relativity itself.

And for me, time, too, is relative, decidedly relative.

My brother Mike, my sister Meghan, our youngest brother Patrick. Another sister, Moira, whom I much miss, much love, whom I only wish had joined us in Washington.

All five of us separated by time, by space, even as time itself continues to collapse, not respecting any one of us, not respecting time itself.

And, now, Courtney joining Joe.

A generation beyond ours joining hands.

Ensuring that all that matters, beyond us, beyond them, beyond anyone who ever calls any one of us mom, dad, grandma, grandpa, aunt, uncle…is that this love, the one that binds, that which made us all of us, this one Saturday, one…that this love, in the end, still matters.

© 2011 by Dónal Kevin Gordon

Watching snow melt…

2011-07-23T20:08:00.000-07:00

July 10th, and on our way west from Iowa, Wyoming’s Big Horns are the first of the big mountains to scratch the horizon, the highest, Cloud Peak among them, syruped with snow.

And the next day, along the Beartooth Highway bridging Montana and Wyoming, at, what, 10,000 feet, snow banked at the road’s edge to 10 or 12 feet, names carved, graffiti-like, in the walls, those walls of snow, the names of wife Karen and daughter Siobhán now among those many names, and likely there for weeks, if not months, a year, memoriam.

By the time we had rear-viewed Yellowstone, snow was, however, passé: we had seen it, walked it, even, in July, formed and thrown snowballs.

And then came Montana’s Paradise Valley, snow still drizzled across ranges east and west, every last river and stream all but riotous with run-off.

And me outside a cabin, this cabin, in that valley, there in the sunlight, watching snow melt.

Someone, the old line goes, has to do it, so why not me?

And, given, I’m told, that the snow on one nearby ridge has not melted in three years, this could well be a full-time job, one, even if I’m not yet qualified for, I might grow into.

Doing little more this.

Little more than watching.

Watching what has year after year unfolded, decade by decade, century after century.

Winter at last relaxing, unpacking kit and case, drop becoming dribble, dribble a trickle, trickle a rivulet, rivulet to run to creek to river. And, by August in Montana, kids from bridges leaping, those rivers at last tamed by summer, summer already languid, languid with the imminence of fall.

But back to watching snow melt.

Think of that now, this moment, whatever else you might this minute be doing.

Because there is, even now, snow melting, not all of it seen, let alone under anyone’s careful scrutiny. If not in the Rockies, then the Pyrenees, the Andes, the Alps, the Urals.

And someone—you, even—should be watching, watching snow melt, watching life happen, watching time, time itself, those seconds become droplets and on to rivers, to bays, to the ocean of life itself.

And your hand, your one hand, the rest of you maybe now, maybe making love, that one hand, though, liquid in the sunshine, catching what cannot, not now, not ever, be entirely caught…

© 2011 by Dónal Kevin Gordon

Home

2011-07-21T19:12:00.000-07:00

…is, I know, where the heart is.

And my heart, for all that Iowa has done for me and for my family over this last decade, has never entirely been here, never entirely been at home.

Always, I have hankered after the Vermont I knew, always wishing I might have again what I had once known.

And, if not Vermont, then Montana, maybe Michigan, maybe Wisconsin.

This, my wayward heart…

This heart wanting more than any one life might willingly give me.

This heart, this past week, out west, and finding itself…at home

And how to explain?

Those mountains speaking to some deeper sense of myself. A certain wildness, certainly absent in Iowa. A rough edge here in Montana, a reminder of a place not yet entirely tamed. And, yeah, the heat, this heat, usually intolerable to me, but tempered, tempered just enough, by low humidity.

And something more…

That thing intangible, all but indescribable. That sense, that if I were strung now, strung here, here in Pray, strung between two trees in a hammock, I’d be at peace.

© 2011 by Dónal Kevin Gordon

A farewell to paradise…

2011-07-21T18:45:00.000-07:00

Behind me some 2,000 miles, Iowa to Poulsbo, Washington.

And since then another day’s drive, this one east, another 700 miles.

East now as far as Livingston, in Montana, to the gates, to the gap, to Paradise Valley. The three of us—Karen, daughter Siobhan, me—holed up in the Murray, as Peckinpah once did, albeit without bullet holes in the walls to commemorate our stay.

And out there in Paradise…

This morning, this last morning, I’m alone in Paradise Valley, Karen and Siobhan in the car, me scuffing dirt car-side, the sun chinning up over the Absorakas.

Not far away the Yellowstone rippling, loudly rippling, river meeting rock. The smell of hay from nearer fields, hay as redolent as July itself, the bales themselves rounded, tumbled into some semblance of a stack. Cows from across the road lowing, reminding me, if reminding were necessary, of life.

And rimming the horizon, the Absorakas themselves, the highest still skirted with snow, those skirts tattered by sunlight. Clouds this morning skirling peaks. The air crisp, but waiting to warm again to 90°, the heat’s saving grace its low humidity.

A last look, this last look, and eastward to home…

© 2011 by Dónal Kevin Gordon

Along Mill Creek Road…

2011-07-13T16:08:00.000-07:00

Today, along Mill Creek Road, Montana’s Mill Creek itself did what it has done for millennia, times like these, times when winter’s snowpack has meant an extended spring, creeks like Mill Creek, roiling as it has so often roiled before, meeting the Yellowstone River, the river itself belly-high, spreading itself hip to hip, water, so much water, rippling between.

Out here in Montana’s Paradise Valley, life literally flows on.

The valley itself at the whim, the wile, of that Yellowstone.

The river, yet again, declaring ownership of its banks, reminding those living nearby that those banks are fluid, that life itself is ever subject to change.

This one river announcing itself one year, surprising another. Those mountains now and forever rimming the horizon.

All that is different is that I am this year witness.

Witness to this life.

To this creek, this river.

To life itself.

Life rippling rock to rock. Bank to bank.

Those banks widening, this year to accommodate life’s flow, as it has always before accommodated life’s flow. And, another year, barely breaching rock.

And me, looking, listening to that water meeting that rock. The creek itself today exultant.

Me, at the same time, so small.

This speck, my life, against this landscape, against all of time.

And me today sixty…

All we have is what we bring into the room

2011-07-02T20:25:00.000-07:00

Practice medicine, and getting a CBC, checking a potassium level, ordering a TSH is as easy as asking. Want a chest x-ray? Need a head CT? What about that ultrasound to rule out that DVT?

Write it. Sign it. Done.

Less easily ordered, less easily done, is that CT of the soul. The ultrasound that tells those of us in Palliative Medicine that there’s a herniated depression, a pocket of anxiety, some fulminant pain. The x-ray that reveals that this patient never got along with her daughter, but loves her, loves her to no end, would never hurt her, even if it means not making her power-of-attorney, not having her make those, those terrible decisions. That another patient’s son, faced with saying goodbye to his father, had yet to learn to say hello.

All we have is what we bring into the room.

Any experience. Whatever medical knowledge. Some amount of insight, of intuition. None of it measured in milligrams, colonies, rads.

Oh, to see what cannot be seen…

To enter that patient’s room and to know, not just a creatinine level, not only a sodium value, but to already have depression’s number, to have seen the spirituality films, to understand, by some algorithm of the EMR, that this patient’s pain is not in her back, has nothing to do with her diagnosis, will never respond to narcotics.

To see what can’t be seen…

Like the fifty-two-year-old woman I saw yesterday, only recently diagnosed with rapidly advancing pancreatic cancer.

How to measure the fact that her husband loved the light in her once, loves that light still, will love it forever, even when that light is out.

That, as he said to me, pleasantly, with no anger toward the world shuttering his world, and me believing him from his first word, “You can’t tell me anything worse than what I have already heard.”

That their youngest child, a daughter, will be married in September.

That her mother once never questioned seeing her younger daughter’s wedding day.

And that patient herself?

Beautiful.

Head without a hair. Earrings defiantly in place. Cheeks summered, red. And now and then a smile. A smile transcending any and all pain. Her face itself transcendent. A face all at once reflecting all she is, all she loves, all she is so likely to so soon lose.

My hand reaches for hers, and hers, tellingly, reaches for mine.

“My father had pancreatic cancer,” I say to her, almost whispering, lest her husband, talking to the nurse, hear me acknowledge the obvious. “I understand.”

But, of course, I don’t.

Sure, I lost my father to pancreatic cancer.

But this woman is losing her one loved life to the same thing.

And her husband, his tears dammed by his smile, his laughter, is himself losing the girl he married. The girl, who at 18, bore their first child. The woman who has shared his life since, and who for more than 30 years returned a love that appears more than love.

How can I understand?

Maybe one day with that CT of the soul. That ultrasound of anxiety. That x-ray of family dynamics.

But today all I know is what I somehow know.

Labs more or less normal.

Imaging unremarkable, except, of course, for that mass.

Nothing, really, by the numbers physicians so often care about.

But my own father dead of pancreatic cancer.

This woman, her husband, losing the life they loved, the one they, like all of us, took for granted on too many a day.

And she herself beautiful.

Her face, her eyes, those cheeks, transcendent.

© 2011 by Dónal Kevin Gordon

And at light's end...

2011-06-12T18:43:00.000-07:00

He’s only 25 years old. My daughter’s age.

But he’s dying, and there’s nothing I, just one of his doctors, can do to stop the dying.

We’re talking a good kid, a kid until March just living his life.

A kid not unlike most 25-year-olds.

Not unlike my daughter, my own 25-year-old daughter.

Hanging with friends. Living. Loving Iowa’s Hawkeyes. Never thinking the inevitable. Until three months ago, when a foot drop signaled, not just a problem, but the inevitable.

His tumor, his glioblastoma, is right now doing what glios do.

Making his brain its brain.

Short-circuiting everything that makes any 25-year-old a 25-year-old, let alone anyone, anyone.

But his smile.

His smile makes you think that tomorrow could truly still be tomorrow.

With all the promise of another day.

Another day to go to classes.

To text friends. To catch a round of ultimate Frisbee. Complain about cafeteria food. Wonder who that girl is. Whether she might be his.

But the boy, this boy, is dying.

And this morning, this boy—and, Lord knows, he’s still but a boy—curled to half his height in the bed, so soundly asleep after radiation that I cannot wake him, his shaved head the only glimmer in the darkness of this, his room, too likely his last room.

“I don’t get to make the rules of the world,” I tell him, one hand on his, the other on his shoulder. “If I did, you wouldn’t be here…you’d be doing what my own kids are doing. You’d be just twenty-five…doing what 25-year-olds do…”

Again, that smile.

That smile, in that darkened room, even if then just half a smile, a night-light from the door to his bed.

And, at light’s end, this boy, curled in that dark around this, his unwelcome death…

© 2011 Dónal Kevin Gordon

I Don’t Want to Die…

2011-06-04T21:16:00.001-07:00

Who does.

Not you. Not me.

At least not yet.

Most patients I see in the course of most weeks, even if dying, only want to go home. Whether to some home you and I might think of as home; whether to a care facility; whether to the care of some caring son, daughter, sister, or, even more poignantly still, a mother, a father.

One and all, those patients all want to go home.

And you, who, wouldn’t?

Your home. Your room. Your bed. Your death. Your way.

For those of us in the business of shepherding the dying, ours is too often about the shepherding.

The dying itself is, after all, for the dying themselves.

Far be it from us to intrude.

And yet we do.

Want this?

We’ll crush your chest; we’ll crack your ribs. Not like TV, I tell patients.

Want that?

That tube down your throat. That tube to a machine. And you no longer you afterwards, even if you are, somewhere, still somehow you.

I don’t want that, most say.

“I’m 87,” one tells me, just the other day. “I’ve lived a long life. I’m done.”

And who am I, the palliative care doc, to say otherwise?

I’m not 87.

I’m not willing to say that my life, at almost sixty, is a long life. I don’t yet know when done is done.

Her choice, then, is not my choice.

“And if you die now. If you stop breathing now. If your heart all at once falls silent…”

Then, by your choice, I, standing nearby, stand nearby.

Watching death do what death does…

Me, cradling the rope to your small boat…

The pond beyond. That larger pond. And my hand opening…

The rope slipping from hand, my hand, slipping from my hand for good…

For good.

Surely, for good…

© 2011 Dónal Kevin Gordon

Over the Rainbow

2011-05-25T17:20:00.001-07:00

I am, I know, as I slip up on sixty, entering the age of imminent death.

Indeed, on any given day when I see palliative care patients, some, sometimes most, bracket my own age. Ordinary people living ordinary lives, no different than me living mine, than many I know or love, until life tosses a stick into the spokes and sends them over the handlebars.

Such a spill, in younger days, only meant scrapes that soon scabbed and healed.

But in my world now, over the handlebars too often means over the rainbow.

And bluebirds?

Not sure.

As for dreams that you dare to dream, all that’s important is all that ever was important, that they really do come true.

Which, of course, makes dreams still worth their dreaming.

And time, time all the more to cherish.

As in this, this very moment…

© 2011 Dónal Kevin Gordon

“Don’t put me out with the trash…”

2011-05-15T15:30:00.000-07:00

His smile meets mine from the corridor, as I gown and glove to see him.

“I’m not contagious,” he tells me, weakly, his face still a smile, one nevertheless showing concern, even if his only contagion is he himself, his life, what he learned along the way, what he, my new friend, may now teach me.

“You’re not contagious,” I say immediately from the doorway, knowing that he is thinking only of the cancer, that wolf, the one as real at his throat as the central line taped to his jugular, and me, myself, thinking mere MRSA, mere VRE, bugs as ubiquitous in hospitals these days as charts or IVs, so common as to be irrelevant, certainly now, now in the face, the very face, of this man, this one man, and this cancer leaching his one life.

“The hospital has rules,” I say, arms into gown; “I have to abide by them,” hands into gloves; “I’m not worried, nor should you be worried,” me, stepping into the room, finally and quickly closing any space between us.

“How are you, my friend?” I ask, my gloved hand reaching for his, his own as bare, as warm, as human as his God first made it, that hand his mother once held, and this — both of us so well aware, both the sons of mothers killed young, so very young — the day before Mother’s Day, “How are you feeling?”

Go ahead.

Go ahead and dismiss him as yet another disheveled 57-year-old, any better days long behind him, one of those prior-to-his-hospitalization, living-in-his-own-care, living-in-his-own-car guys, and this, in a Wal-Mart lot, at that, a dog his only companion, a dog loved and loving to this, a bitter end.

Go ahead.

57, just turned, looking 77, and that generous.

Found by whomever in the car he called home.

Brought to the hospital. Noted to have a blood pressure of 60/30, something you wouldn’t want. Hemoglobin 5, and ditto on the you-wouldn’t-want-that list. Badness, in a familiar term familiar to physicians, lurking, with more tests pending. An interesting patient. And, from any patient’s perspective, you never, ever, want to be interesting to a physician.

But whatever you’re now thinking, none of that matters.

Not the necrotic, metastatic cancer in his belly, as in tissue dead and tumor spreading from somewhere. Not the fact that he is the very vision of cachectic, as in skin over bone. Not his anemia, that ebb of a blood pressure, his critically low potassium level, not anything anyone but a physician might care about, at least by the numbers physicians so care about.

“Don’t put me out with the trash,” my new friend suddenly tells me. “Please, don’t put me out with the trash.”

His face is all eyes, eyes the color of sky.

Eyes as blue as the bluest June meeting mine, my one hand covering his, my other embracing his face, the two of us a kiss, my yellow gown papering my bent form, white sheets shrouding the little left of the man who’d been, the two of us carving pietà from the room around us, from time itself, from all of time.

And his face shrunken by cancer to bone. His teeth rotted by time, by disease, maybe, it might be thought, by meth — and who cares, who cares now.

But those eyes, those blue eyes.

Listen to him, and you only guess at what those eyes have seen…

“I’ve made a lot of mistakes…”

“A marriage gone wrong,” he goes on, me letting him talk, my own plan to get home early after rounding, now nobody’s undone plan but mine, a plan all at once abandoned, as I let him talk — and talk.

A girl he loved. A girl at 17. A girl he, of course, had to love.

And children.

Later, a farm in Ohio, a farm lost, lost to another woman who took him for what he was worth.

A job in Iowa. Lost, too, with lost benefits. The flood in Cedar Rapids in 2008, it taking anything left.

And then a car.

A car suddenly a home.

And those kids, also lost now, so sadly lost. And his eyes saying that, just that. One son local, who can hardly bear to see him, even now, especially now. Two other sons in Afghanistan, both wishing dad dead.

And now this. Those sons all but getting their wish.

Cancer that would make Christmas of a PET scan, and no joyeux Noel in that.

“We all make mistakes,” I tell him, after he tells me that he had done that and more.

“I’m no angel," I go on to confide. "Just ask my kids.”

His face tilts to mine, skin stretched over bone, lips taut over teeth only remotely teeth. And those eyes, those eyes, my one gloved hand on his, my other on his shoulder.

And my own eyes, I confess, all at once a lover’s…

“Don’t put me out with the trash…” he pleads. “Please, don’t put me out with the trash.”

“I won’t,” I promise, meaning it.

“I trust you,” he says in a whisper, his hand tighter on mine. “I trust you,” the voice ever so stronger, those eyes again on mine, those blue eyes.

Twenty minutes later, note dictated, orders written, I leave the hospital, into Saturday, into sunshine, into May and all its warmth, toward the car that will take me away from this, from all of this, and me, me weeping as I walk.

© 2011 Dónal Kevin Gordon

Now, Karen, now...

2011-05-01T18:18:00.000-07:00

Sunlight this night splayed by blinds and splashing, splintered, across the living room’s wooden floor. And again, and from more of a distance, some neighbor’s mower grinding air, to no effect but sound, to no effect but sound, that clamorously insistent sound, and, in its wake, plumes only of ground grass.

And me here tonight, one day nearer sixty, still contemplating now what…now, for goodness sake, what…and all the more so with yet another job offer now in the offing.

No need now to trouble readers with details; those are mine, as they have before been mine.

The question, rather, is older, as those who have long considered such questions were themselves so often older: who am I, what have I done, what more might I yet do?

To my son, Brendan, the answer is likely quicker: I’m 26, have so distant an end conceivably ahead, have already worked for years for others in New Orleans after Katrina, have twice been to Haiti and am now poised for post-tsunami Japan.

And my son is, truly, my son.

A younger me had similar inclinations, if fewer opportunities, with, alas, the shadow of the Vietnam War graying my teens, my early twenties. And time, as it is wont to do, then made itself the thief of later opportunities, with responsibility freighting daily, weekly, inevitably by the decade, any hope of, well, any hope.

Until now. And still now.

And still tonight the chance to do good, to do what I once set out to do, to not do what I’ve since done, what, arguably, is merely offered again. And now, my love, mindful that similar offers earlier have only gotten us here, now.

Here.

Now, Karen.

Now…

Just April…

2011-04-24T21:56:00.000-07:00

My neighbor is this evening mowing his lawn, and not just mowing, but giving it a burr-cut, the air around and between us just noise, just noise.

Still, we’re talking April 24th, as in April…again, just April. The same April that saw 85 degrees on the 10th, and me that day cursing every degree over freezing; me that Sunday in my drawers and only my drawers, in the living room, the windows open, fans fanning, the air otherwise dead and me, again, loudly cursing every degree over freezing.

Back in the Vermont I knew (and, yes, I already hear my children moaning, “There goes Dad again about Vermont, those perfect summers, winters walking through head-high snow—and that’s only after shoveling—and, any god knows, you were the better for the shoveling!”), April was April.

If lucky, April was a muddy month, and muddy only by inches, given how feet-deep the ground had frozen by winter’s nadir and how slow any thaw in any year.

And snow, in Aprils then, was still the not-unexpected stranger at the door. In fact, our youngest son was born on an April 17th, during a night softened by eight inches of snow, a snowfall that slowed the midwives and made their one-hour trip north, two, but still in time. And Mother’s Day, one year, yes, Mother’s Day in the middle of a month wanting to be May, itself dawned to eight inches of snow, although by then, by anyone’s reckoning, winter’s back was surely broken, and that particular snowfall, doomed at the outset, little more than fertilizer.

In April, in Vermont, no one would ever mow a lawn, not unless there were some question of sanity.

April was a month to be enjoyed for the temptation it was, and undoubtedly still is there—the odd day warming to 50 degrees; the night again reminding you of winter; the road ruts, warmed in the day’s sunlight, freezing again overnight and, in the chill of morning, claiming the odd water pump (our car’s, one year) or exhaust system, only for the wrong choice of a rut. And any snow then was short-lived, blanketing, only momentarily beautifying, with the writing already on the sky: the days longer, the nights less, any chance of any snow lingering for hours, let alone days, increasingly just that, a chance.

Spring when it came, when it truly came, was a gift and, almost always, languorous; no all-at-once pushing-90, no instant lawns, no mowers robbing this, or any, April evening of the peace April has earned and deserves.

What I remember, instead, was one day only gently warmer than the day before, spring greening the landscape by leaf and branch, a green barely green, its shimmer pilfered from an impressionist’s palette, a green which, as it deepened, melted the winter that had been.

And sometime, maybe May, more likely June, the need to mow.

Second Son, Second Stint

2011-02-19T20:10:00.000-08:00

I left you last with Brendan talking Haiti.

Here’s what I’ve not told you: That Brendan went to Haiti. Started a blog. First link all about almost being kidnapped. Accosted by a car, guns bristling from windows.

Almost, happily enough, was the operative word.

Still, this, in an e-mail, was his first mention of his blog, as in, Brendan, this couldn’t wait until the ride home to Iowa from O’Hare?

O’Hare came. Went.

And a few months more. And back again to Haiti. This time only for weeks, not months.

Still…

As the father who loves him, I can only admire, even as I worry. This, my beloved son, in whom I, echoing an even more paternal father, am well pleased.

Brendan is now home again, home for him, back in New Orleans, and safely so, back where he has been almost since completing college, only a year or so after Katrina, ever since doing what he could do to undo what Katrina did.

And Brendan has done what I’ve not done.

I am a doctor, but…

Brendan, newly graduated from Beloit College, went to New Orleans, built homes, dozens of them, his mother, at one time, for a week helping to hammer nails.

I am a doctor, but…

Brendan left New Orleans for Haiti. And I, doctor that I am, hoped to join him there, but didn’t.

And Brendan went back to Haiti, and I am still doing what I do in Cedar Rapids.

And what I do, in light of what Brendan has done…

So alone...

2010-07-31T20:15:00.000-07:00

It is July’s swan song today — or, more to the point, here in Iowa, July’s cicada song — the bugs, those buggers, take your pick, in their way, their accustomed way, claxoning mid-summer and providing point to this summer’s counterpoint of unexampled heat.

Two days earlier, on the 29th, and sixteen years before, my father was his own cicada, his own last summer, his life, that day, that very dawn, at an end, his song — his song, all but ignored, as it rep-ratcheted, trilled, rep-rubbed to an end…an early end.

A date, sure, on a calendar, of course, on my calendar.

And, in my case, my mind, the morning I could never again say, “Hi, Dad!”

“And did I tell you, Dad? I love you.”

"That I loved you then. "

"That I loved you always. "

"Always, Dad. "

And, sixteen years later, who could have imagined this.

That, this, that dead man’s oldest son, then a writer, would now be a physician, a physician teaching, each day, other physicians. That that same man’s youngest son would also now himself be a physician. The two of us carrying forward all we learned before.

The hurt then.

The love mostly now.

And, sixteen years now to the day, I am in Kansas City.

At this, the annual medical student conference.

Me, a physician.

Thinking of my father, my father, my dead father these sixteen years later.

And me laughing.

Me laughing with students.

“Yes, this is a great program,” I say, my eyes hiding my life, my pain, this day. “Yes, the residents are terrific. Yes, the faculty are all you could ever hope for. And, yes, you, you, belong here.”

And, yes, me laughing.

Even as I try to hide what I cannot hide.

Me, again, laughing.

“Yes,” I’d tell then, if they’d asked, reading my eyes.

“My father died sixteen years ago, this day, this very day, this very morning. A phone call. A phone call at four-thirty. Yeah, Eastern Time. Me in Vermont. A phone call from two brothers at a phone in Seattle. ‘He’s gone,’ one brother tells me. 'Dad’s gone. Few minutes ago. Gone. Maybe it’s for the best.’”

For the best, maybe.

But my father, my father, is dead and lost to me and anyone near me.

And, yes, yes, I still hurt, yes…I still hurt.

And you don’t know that. It’s not your fault, I know.

But still, I hurt, I hurt…

And no one in Kansas City knows to care. And I’m now in Kansas City.

And, yes, in this sea of med students, residents, most young, most so very young, all with lives to live, with lives so much to live, I’m alone.

So alone.

My son, our son…

2010-07-24T19:41:00.000-07:00

My son, our son, Brendan, who for almost three years had been in New Orleans, doing what he, by himself, could do to help those he can to recover from Katrina, is now in Haiti.

Keep in mind that when he went to New Orleans, this parent’s advice was pretty much limited to, “Watch your ass.”

“Yeah, Pops,” I think he, hardly convincingly, told me then.

And then there was that bullet.

That bullet.

Shattering the drywall, only inches above my son’s head in the shower, while my son, my loved son, himself showered.

And, then, more bullets.

In rooms below.

In the very same apartment. From somewhere in the street. From somewhere in the street that might have, could have, killed my son.

My good, my loved, my second son.

And now Haiti.

“Watch your ass,” I tell him again on the phone.

“Ten days, Pops. Ten days, I’m off to Haiti,” he tells me.

This, the reckless son.

He, as a boy, given to barreling full-speed down a Vermont dirt-road hill on a bike, his mother holding her breath behind him, his father never knowing until years later.

He, who, as a kid, saw an electrified fence and saw an opportunity for a charge, even if it meant putting his stream of pee in the line of fire.

He, who showed up for his college graduation road-rashed—chin, legs, arms—after doing a handlebar-sault racing, pre-grad, post-alcohol, to a bar.

And now Haiti…

17 April, These Years Later

2010-04-17T21:01:00.000-07:00

Again, and, for me, the 59th time, the calendar has turned to April 17th, and this time a Saturday.

Eighteen years ago, on a Friday, a very good and Good Friday, Karen and I welcomed Dónal, as in Dónal Óg (Dónal the younger, in Irish), the lad who to this day remains the youngest of our brood.

We lived then in northern Vermont, and it snowed the night before what would be this particular lad’s birthday.

By itself, that would not have been a problem, given that his birth, like that of the other four before his, was planned. As much as anyone can plan, anyway, a home birth. With a midwife doing, well, the midwifing.

But again, it snowed. And it snowed. And still it snowed. All through the night.

By the time the midwife and her assistant arrived, it had taken them an hour or more longer than the usual hour to get to our home from theirs, and by then there were eight inches of new snow on the ground.

But, happily, they arrived—arrived, as it turned out, much sooner than would this latest son, who, let’s face it, saw fit to yo-yo on his umbilical cord for many of the delayed hours of his eventual 14-hour entrance to the world.

Now, do keep in mind that Karen and I back then were no strangers to long labors.

After all, our first child, our very first child, Declan, said hello only after 43 hours—yes, 43 hours, as in, yes, 43 hours—of labor.

To this day, I tell anyone who will listen of the walks that Karen and I took during those ineluctably memorable 43 hours, walks along the mostly wooded Potomac bike trail in Alexandria, Virginia, where we then lived.

In the course of those walks (again, we’re talking 43 hours of labor—yes, 43 unforgettable hours—and lots of walks), any number of folks, whether jogging, walking or cycling, passed us. And many of those folks had to be witness to Karen—the breadth of her belly signaling her obvious condition and her just-as-obvious distress—doubling over with contractions, me at her side, both of us in the woods, either and both of us far, far from the hospital at which any of those witnesses would have assumed we belonged.

So, go ahead.

Imagine yourself as one of those joggers, your earbuds plugged then into your pre-iPod Walkman, and you, skipping footfall by footfall, along that path, only to see this all-too-evidently gravid woman hunkered over in pain on your jogging path, your jogging path, deep into the woods, nowhere near a hospital. And all at once you’re thinking, “What the hell is that woman doing here, and what’s with that guy holding her hand and now and then cradling her shoulders and telling her to breathe, just breathe!”

I joked later—and have done so many times since—that our first son, sensing his parents’ liberal proclivities (remember, this was 1982), was braced, arms and legs akimbo in utero, vowing, “Reagan’s president. I’m not coming out. I’m not coming out until the odds are in my favor!”

But we’re talking April 17th now, in 2010 now, and we're talking the fifth of those five kids.

That kid, that son, that youngest and good son, Dónal, did, indeed, enter the world on a cushion of eight inches of snow—and, yes, in mid-April and in northern Vermont—did have those hands that touched him first be those midwives’ hands, did do without a first name (another story in itself, especially then, especially in wee Peacham, Vermont) for a week, maybe more, did become the occasion for evening meals for at least a week, maybe more, from the same neighbors who wondered after the kid’s name, and to whom, to this day, Karen and I are still grateful.

And now that same Dónal is eighteen—that son, our youngest son, is eighteen.

And Karen (forgive me, Karen, for reminding you of the painfully obvious) and I are eighteen years older than we were then.

And, God, we were so young then: you, Karen; me, Karen; the other and older kids, Karen.

But this piece is meant for that son Dónal, born this April 17th, those 18 years ago.

Born into a family that already included, besides Karen and me, four other children, all born at home, all, to some or greater extent, schooled at home. And that Dónal, from the start, a child gentler on his parents than those before, whether because of his own nature or that of his parents, already denatured by his older siblings.

In the end, what needs to be said is this and only this: that this child, while fifth in line—and without in any way taking anything away from any of his other siblings—has, mostly, on every and any day, brought joy to his mother and his father.

And for that, Dónal Óg, your mother and I are grateful. So very grateful, even as we wish you joy and love on this, your one and only 18th birthday.

© 2010 Dónal Kevin Gordon

Go figure…

2010-03-16T18:44:00.000-07:00

Ah, health care. And, as a physician, a family physician, I should care.

And I do. I truly do.

In fact, more than ten years ago, back in rural Vermont, I was even then mindful of those who hadn’t what I had.

And, yet, I was then a freelance writer, not a physician, buying health insurance at the going rate, even if the going rate then didn’t compensate for the fact that I was relatively young and healthy, as was my wife, Karen, and our five children.

Truth is, we cost good ol’ Blue Cross nothing, not one cent, over some 15 years, and all the more so given that all five of those children were born at home, with midwives in attendance, midwives whom Blue Cross would not acknowledge as professionals, let alone cover.

Consider this: Karen and I paid cash for each of those five births, some $1,200 or so each, covering both prenatal care and delivery, this despite making the monthly Blue Cross premium, month after month, year after year after year.

But, had Karen had the usual prenatal care, with an OB doing the deal for thirty-something weeks, and then the delivery and then the post-partum visit, at, let’s say two or three times what a midwife would have charged for the full Monty, Blue Cross would have obliged, or mostly obliged, at least insofar as its “prearranged” contract with that OB, a dollar figure always lower than the billed figure (yet another inequity in a health care system rife with inequities) for those with insurance.

And, get this, had Karen had the C-section that her first 43-hour labor would likely have bought her, we’re talking beaucoup bucks, to the tune of maybe $10,000 or more that Blue Cross would merrily have paid the OB, the hospital and anyone else with a hand stretched in our direction.

Yet, none of that takes into account the $50,000 that health care cost my family over a three-year period in the late 1990s.

I’m talking premiums, deductibles, co-pays, in a span that encompassed an ectopic pregnancy, our daughter’s hospitalization for an asthma exacerbation, my own then and still inexplicable health problems, another child’s visit to the local ER, and so on.

We had that money then, only because, as a freelance scribbler, I worked hard to keep a cushion against what I, preternaturally Irish, saw as the inevitable rainy day. Even so, those health care bills those three years wiped us out, to the penny. And afterwards I worked, day, night, weekends, for another three years, to build that cushion back.

A decade and more later, no one is better off.

Not me.

Not you.

Not any of us.

Even I, now a physician, am no better off, health insurance-wise, than I was as a freelance writer ten years ago.

I still have the same kind of health savings account, then called a medical savings account, with the same $5,000 family deductible. The only thing, if anything, that is different, is the premium, which, I think, and if I remember correctly, is, believe it or not, lower today.

Still, a decade later and not much difference.

And the fact that the last ten years transformed me from a freelance writer, fortunate enough to afford health insurance, to a physician, arguably even more fortunate, matters little.

I am, as much as any employee anywhere, at risk of that single silver bullet, in terms of uncompensated health care, let alone the bullet to the heart that some catastrophic event might occasion.

Ah, America!

Home of the free…land of the brave…

A country, at least in terms of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, of equals.

But, of course...not.

I have health insurance. Someone else has more. Somebody else has less. And all of us who have, pay the price for those who have not.

That is what it is.

In the end, given any amount of health care costs, the patient with no health insurance will pay nothing, even after any number of attempts on the part of any collection agency. And you and I and anyone else with any semblance of health insurance will pay more, our premiums, in part, going to cover the pseudo-inflated cost of our own health problems — and, by extension, the uncompensated cost of any and all uninsured patients seen in that hospital or the nearest, this clinic or the one down the street.

So, yeah, what a country.

The richest in the world, able to fund one war, or multiple wars, even on spurious reasons, on the spur of any moment, even at the cost of debt passed to our grandchildren, and likely to our great-grandchildren.

But wave even a dollar in the direction of universal health care — a right, a human right, let's face it, in any country, let alone this, the most prosperous on the planet — and you can expect a tea bag up ‘side the head, a tea bag tagged with the words, “socialist medicine.”

And yet we, those tea partiers and we teed-off partiers alike, spend the most on health care and, for our money, come up short, in terms of quality care, at thirty-something worldwide for the dollar spent.

Hmm-m…

Go figure…

And among those figures are the nearly 50 million fellow Americans — one of every six of us — who tonight sleep without health insurance; who tomorrow may use the emergency room for routine primary care, and who the next may find their homes, their families, their futures hostage to a hospital bill they can never pay; 50 million fellow Americans who are, there but for the grace of a job and for job-related health insurance, you or me or anyone you or me may now or ever love.

© 2010 Dónal Kevin Gordon

Last lion…

2009-08-30T19:34:00.000-07:00

And, so, Ted Kennedy has at last caught up to his loved brothers.

For those of us for whom the saga of the Kennedy family has signposted our lives, the passing of this, the youngest of the four brothers, is a kind of dead end. For even if another Kennedy picks up the torch, it will be the torch of a new generation and not the same as that torch passed so long ago to a new generation.

For me, my life, my young life, is backlit by the memory of my parents sinking a Kennedy sign into our front yard in Bayside, New York, in the fall of 1960, announcing to our neighbors my family’s allegiance to a Kennedy, another Irish Catholic like ourselves, even as my mother’s parents, as Irish as us, continued to toe the Republican party line.

By 1972, by the time I could first vote, there was no Kennedy on the ballot, two brothers by then dead by bullet, the next and youngest, the now-dead Teddy, not yet ready for prime time. Nixon, despite his peace-candidate pretensions, was never an option, and I cast my first presidential ballot for George McGovern, the McGovern button on my shirt prompting a Nixon exit poller to remark as I walked by, “How does it feel to vote for a loser?”

Come 1980, and Teddy runs, and falters and falls. And those of us who knew, who remembered, picked up the torch, only, let’s face it, to falter ourselves.

We get Reagan for our troubles, then Bush the elder, the younger still wet with inexperience in the wings, his own eyes, alas, even then bug-eyed on the stage.

The Clinton interregnum would do little to advance the Kennedy agenda.

After all, there was too much to buy in the ‘90s, let alone on into the Bush redux years of the early 2000’s. And to buy was to help the economy. Forget what was needed, whether for yourself or for society, when you could all too easily get what you wanted. Gas back then was cheap, so tank the family in a high-above-ground SUV. Why care about mileage or any pre-9/11 notion of dependence on foreign oil? Hey, we’re Americans, aren’t we, and who’s going to tell us how to live? Certainly not some Arabian sheik, let alone a granola-cruncher back home. Want a house beyond your means? No problem; some bank somewhere will give you a loan. Can’t afford whatever it was you wanted that particular moment? Hey, so what was plastic for, anyway?

As for health care, the self-proclaimed cause of Ted Kennedy’s life, either you had it or you didn’t. And if you didn’t, too bad; it’s the American way, isn’t it? I’ve got mine, and if you don’t have yours, well, that’s not my problem.

Then Bush-the-encore rolls into town.

And suddenly it’s a snap to find and fund a multi-billion-dollar-a-year war, necessary or not, for year after year, thanks to a little Cheney sleight-of-hand, even as the Bush minions preach a decidedly unEmersonian self-reliance to the home front.

Health care for all? Hell, it’ll break the budget. Shore up social security? Oh, we’re good for another decade or so, if not more. The banks, the stock market, the insurance industry? And, man, all at once we’re talking a big Texas whoa. As in whoa, whoa! As in hands off, back away, who needs government regulation? The banks, the market, the insurance companies will take care of themselves.

And they did.

And here we are.

And there, there, the torch lies…

Putting on the Ritz, I mean, the Marriott…

2009-08-09T18:54:00.000-07:00

At the risk of sounding Andy-Rooney-ish, it is, I think, perplexing that Marriott, where I stayed a week and more back, while on business in Kansas City, should have found some reason to have outfitted my room with a catalog pitching its “collection.”

Certainly, that catalog begs questions on many levels: Is it, for example, worth the proverbial paper it was printed on and the consequent damage to the environment, both on the front end and the back? Who at Marriott ever dreamed that those visiting its hotels would have a sudden and overwhelming compulsion to rush home to redecorate their homes á la Marriott? And if any Marriott visitor ever did succumb to such urge or desire, why?

Nonetheless, if, by some quirk, or, more correctly, some outright and utter suspension of all reason, I ever wanted to sleep at home on the same bed I had once slept on in Kansas City, that very bed — I’m not kidding — is only a catalog-click away. I could even order the “complete bed package,” replete with one of four “signature bed dressings,” one of them dubbed, after Marriott’s leader, the JW (we are, after all, talking “signature” bed dressings). But why stop there, when I could easily add a duvet, pillow and bed linens, each reproducing, down to the very last stitch, the furnishings that made my Marriott room my so-very-home away from home.

But there’s more, as they say in the ad trade…

My telephone or online order could also include a shower curtain to match the one in my Kansas City Marriott bathroom, not to mention towels, oh, excuse me, “towel therapy,” the better to enhance the aromatherapy products and the shampoo and conditioner, which, in the catalog’s words (who could make this up?), have “developed a cult following.” (Me? I’m holding out for the chocolates-on-pillows cult, or maybe the cult of free cable-TV previews, or even the cult of ice-down-the-corridor.)

But if, like me, you’re still not convinced, still thinking that maybe this Marriott thing is not the thing for you, then go ahead…go ahead and imagine yourself lounging in your Marriott robe, sipping tea from your Marriott tea cup, the room’s ambience enhanced by a home diffuser wafting notes of lemon verbena, thyme and lavender. And whatever you’re now thinking, if it’s not enough to make you want to plunge right now into your Marriott-inspired bed décor for what the good folks at Marriott promise will be “a transcendent sleep experience,” well, then, maybe, just maybe, you’re not Marriott material.

As a former advertising copywriter, I know what it is like to have to write such drivel and to feign accountability, if not outright pride, when submitting copy to the client. And, yet, here I am a career later, confronting in that catalog a vision of my former self and realizing, again, the Newtonian/Pavlovian knee-jerk action and reaction that animates our economy: some of us sell; most of us buy. And that is, still is, all these years after I abandoned that career for another, what makes this world of ours go ‘round, maybe even more so, given Marriott’s assumption that I, or anyone, for that matter, could ever want what Marriott passes for wares.

“To be Irish…”

2009-08-02T18:41:00.000-07:00

Once upon a distant midnight, Karen and I and our eldest, then-toddler son, Declan, then one-and-a-half, shared a bed — no apologies, we were then (not surprisingly — five home births, 50 kid-years of homeschooling) of the family-bed persuasion, a persuasion, which, given that we eventually had those five children, most of whom are now in their 20s, we eventually and successfully got over.

But at the time, back in 1983, that family bed occupied one corner of an upper bedroom in the hillside farmhouse in which we lived, some eight miles west of then-undiscovered Dingle, far out on the tattered western edge of Ireland, within sight, on any rare clear day, of the ever-roiling Atlantic. In fact, we lived close enough to the ocean, that any gale commanded notice, that night as on any night in coastal Ireland.

But the gales that night really did mean business. So much so that on this particular night — the night after the day our landlady’s son-in-law had replaced several of the window panes in our bedroom, the putty still not yet set — we three cocooned in the bed in the room, Karen and I listening to the wind test the newly repaired windows, Declan, a good baby, snug and snoozing between us.

But I’m talking gales, as in winds shrieking and unstopped by any speed bump of an island anywhere between Nova Scotia and Ireland. Gales that could, and did, strip leaves overnight from otherwise verdant trees, that soaked to the fibers rooftops long wetted by storms long spewed by that very same ocean. Gales that pummeled windows, like those that aired that Irish bedroom of ours. Gales which, that same night, would memorably blow out those newly replaced window panes.

Now, almost 26 years later, all this still makes for a good story.

But to Karen and me, to recall this story is to again hear wind screaming through that old farmhouse’s unsealed cracks and uninsulated walls, to hear rain lashing against the windows and against the wet putty of those window panes, to hear those panes shattering on the bedroom floor and then to hear rain stitching the very floor, the wind all at once funneling through the emptied mullions and firing rain like bullets. And all the while, all three of us — mother, father, son — huddled against the wind, against the cold, against all that anyone ever born Irish always knew an ocean could do.

And, the next morning, calm, a beautiful, beautiful calm.

And I would again have lit the cooker, that morning, as on many morning in Ireland, a cooker stoked with coal, the better to warm the kitchen, not to mention heat any needed water. And Karen might again have done a wash, that day, as she did on so many days, with that same heated water, in that kitchen’s sink, the laundry scrubbed against an old-fashioned washboard, then rinsed and dried afterwards on a line outside, in a wind by then soothed to a breeze and hardly a wind at all.

And all of us, Karen, me, Declan, youngest brother Patrick, would have then made our way through another day in Ireland, me scribbling for clients back in the States; Karen doing the more important work of mom-ing baby Declan; Patrick, then a ninth-grader, off at the local Christian Brothers school in Dingle, his own day made more difficult by the fact that his classes were all taught in Irish Gaelic, with no accommodation whatsoever for the English-speaking Yank, and his own Irish limited to that taught him, of romantic necessity, by his Irish girlfriend.

Had any one of us needed to go somewhere near, we would have walked, since we’d no car, and we’d have used the stroller to haul whatever needed lugging (you’d be surprised how many bags you can sling on one of the umbrella models of those days). And if we’d had to go farther? We’d have joined the regulars, of course, on the twice-a-week bus to Dingle, among those regulars the nonagenarian, his thumb thumbing the near end of his walking-stick, who, that summer, lamented that wet summer, and who later made his way into a poem I wrote (see below).

There, in Dingle, we’d buy whatever we couldn’t buy — including Wellies at a pub along Green Street, a pub that doubled as a hardware store, and socks at a clothing store that doubled as a pub — at the one-room, one-counter grocery in Murreagh nearer our home. And, memorably, on one of those days, as we walked from home in Kilcooley to the bus-stop at Murreagh, maybe half a mile away, the gales again nail-gunning a horizontal rain, we passed a couple of soaked-to-the-skin road workers digging a ditch at the edge of the church at Ardamór, their work overseen, for lack of anything else to do, by a long-retired mailman known locally, and famously, as Paddy the Post.

Glancing up at us as we approached, Paddy pinched the brim of his cap, the better to hold it against the wind and rain, smiled into the weather and bellowed over the howl of the gale, “It’s a wild one, isn’t it?”

That night Patrick would have struggled through his homework in his own bedroom, no doubt spending much of his time trying to decipher the gibberish of the Irish he heard against the little Irish he knew. Karen and me would likely have sat in the sitting room, with no television to entertain us, only a radio, the room itself warmed only by a turf-and-coal fire, the air alit by the various voices of Radió Telefís Éireann, or RTE, the government-run radio station, some of those voices in Ireland’s assimilated English, the rest in the native Irish.

But back to where I began…

“To be Irish…”

Is something I have known since I was a child.

My name alone a kind of tribal tattoo. Dónal. The name, when said by anyone Irish, mellifluent, the first syllable drum-struck by its long “o” and spilling into the musical second, lesser note. Dó-nal, “world-mighty,” in its Anglicized translation, even if the name pre-dates anything any later tribe, whether Scots or English, ever better embellished. It is, therefore, what it is and always was, before the Scots ever tacked a “d” to the end or the English determined some Anglicized translation: Dónal, plain and simple, Dónal.

And, were there any doubt of my lineage, my father was another Dónal and his two brothers were Kevin and Seán; my great-grandparents, on both sides of my family, had called Mayo, Sligo, Tipperary, Longford and Cavan home; my own children bear the names of Declan, Brendan, Siobhán, Tiernán and Dónal, the last one Dónal Óg, or “young Dónal,” the better to distinguish him from me, Dónal Mór, or “Dónal the greater (or, more to the point, older).” And I, after those intervening generations, had been the one, the only one, albeit briefly, to again bring my name to ground, to very green ground, by moving back to Ireland.

“To be Irish…”

If you know history, is to know suppression, if not outright oppression. Is to understand the loss of language, culture, faith, history. Is to till the earth, but not own it. Is to raise crops and livestock, but to die, horribly and by the hundreds of thousands, for the lack of those very things. Is to suffer the insufferable, until finally some voices became a chorus, became a crowd, became an insurrection, became history.

“To be Irish…”

Is also to know that there is nothing in life that is to be taken for granted. That what you have today, you may not have tomorrow. That anything lived or loved can also be lost — and eventually will.

“To be Irish…”

Is, in the words of the late Irish-American politician Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “to know that in the end the world will break your heart.” And, the part Moynihan left out, to know that the very same world will, in the end, also make make your heart.

*Once again, the vagaries of Blogspot, at least insofar as I can fathom them, do not allow me to preserve the architecture of a poem. Suffice it to say, that there are some missing indents in the following lines, but you, proverbially, will get my drift:

Language Lessons
(Ceachtanna Teanga)

“Never, he breathed,
his smoker’s thumb burninshing
a blackthorn pinched between the knobs
of ancient knees.
“Never a summer like this. Not
in my ninety-five years.

Rain curtained the windows
as he spoke, purling
in the bus’s slipstream, as one white hand,
flushed from its perch, fluttered briefly
with regret, then settled again
on its blackthorn roost, and blue eyes,
swimming in a century of memories,
slid slowly from mine to the floor.

In air electric with Irish, his English
seemed all squawk and sputter, though
his wool coat, peaty with rain, held
its own in the lingua franca of the nose.
What little I knew of the old words
I understood. That a bus
was not simply a bus.
That the stopped burr of Donald
was not the liquid lilt of Dónal.
That no round-voweled potahto plucked
from Kentish loam would weigh so heavy
on the page as any tongue-tripped práta.
That there was, in fact,
a lunacy in Lúnasa that mere August,
in all its English augustness,
would never quite convey.

Could-a, would-a, should-a… (or, A Love Letter to Karen, on this, my 58th Birthday)

2009-07-13T17:26:00.000-07:00

Karen and I married on what some, with questionable kindness, once thought a whim.

Since then, we have racked up almost 29 years of marriage — and 19 moves in those same 29 years.

We have lived in six states, three of those states more than once, and two countries.

We raised my youngest brother, Patrick, after my mother’s premature death of breast cancer in 1981, at which time Karen and I had only been months married, and Karen, God bless her, had made room in the blush of her own life for my brother, himself only ten years younger than she.

Karen and I later had five children of our own, all of them born at home. We home-schooled most of them most of the time. And Karen later brave-faced the years of my graduate school at Notre Dame, then was, if anything, even more stalwart during those pre-med science years back in Vermont, and, later still, during med school in Iowa and during residency, all of which, in the end, cost each and both and all of us some 13 years of what might otherwise have been some semblance of a normal life.

Under such circumstances, who could blame Karen for not at times wondering what could-a, would-a, should-a been?

Certainly, not me. Not the guy responsible for much, if not quite all, of the above.

Still, when it comes to the unexperienced and the unrequited, Karen is, and she herself would readily admit, the queen of what-might-have-beens:

“If only we’d not moved from Cornwall (Vermont) and had never left that little grey cape I loved…”

“Surely, we should have saved more than we did and much earlier, especially now that we’re older…”

“What if you’d never gone to med school…what if you’d just gotten a teaching job at the Academy (St. Johnsbury, in Vermont)…”

“We could have just stayed in Ireland…we could have bought that acre of land on the ocean west of Dingle, back when no one knew where Dingle was…could have had a life unequal to any we’ve lived since…”

“We should never have sold that house and those ten acres in Jericho (Vermont)… remember the snowstorm that greeted us on our arrival…it snowed for a week…two feet of snow all around, trees hung with snow, the very air a mystery, the lineman linking our phone line a mirage trudging from the house to the distant pole through the falling snow…”

“What if we’d never left Peacham (Vermont, again), what if we’d never left the brick house or the Gagliardi house or the brown house…what, what might have been…”

“And, yes, Karen,” I patiently tell her, not for the first time, never for the last, “We could-a, would-a, should-a…”

Yes, Karen…

We’d now be somewhere, undoubtedly under other, better or less circumstances, but still wondering what might have happened, if only we’d not done this or done that.

If only we’d not been so quick to sell this house or sold that one later or for more money; if, perhaps, the sun had not shined on August 22nd of any particular year, or if, instead of going to the grocery store in the morning of some now-dead day, I’d gone in the afternoon; or, maybe, just maybe, we should never have left Virginia twenty-something years ago. Maybe I should have stayed with Time-Life Books until, as eventually happened, there was no more Time-Life Books; maybe I would have gotten some kind of buy-out, some gilded, silvered or bronzed parachute; and maybe, maybe, as you’ve often suggested, we should have had one child instead of five, or five homes instead of 19, 19 dogs instead of one, one career instead of two, eight cars instead of five…

We’ll never know, though, Karen. Because we never lived those days.

And because here, here we are…

You, Karen.

And me.

Here.

Now.

Together for 28 years and counting, a few down, most up, with five kids to love and to still watch grow, not to mention that youngest brother of mine, who, despite the fact that we used our parental training wheels on him — and he did his spin on us (right, Patrick?) — has done more than okay.

And so, Karen, so have we.

And, yes, Karen, we could-a, we would-a, we should-a …

But we’d not be here, now, in this moment, this place, still moving forward, for better or for worse, as once we promised one another that day, that lunch hour — that whim —those 28-and-something years ago, in front of that justice of the peace, all to the alarm of my then-boss and our still-friend, Glenn, who vowed never again to leave me unattended in any lunch hour ever…

Nor, if we’d stayed put, would we ever have known the likes of Vreni and Peter, of Frank and lost Joan, of Glenn and Maria, and, back in Vermont, of Jean Clark, of John and Wendy and Bob and Sharon, of Tim and Betsy, whom time eventually made the in-laws you wish you would have; and, still in Vermont, of Kathleen Kolb, of Jean and long-missed Howard, of Dick Birdsall and Edith and Gordon; on to South Bend, and Kevin and Indie, Diana and John, dear, dear Mary and her family; and here in Iowa, Helen and Bob, Jane and Geery, Marti and John, and so many, many more, unnamed here, and all, all, all of whom have graced our lives…

Would never remember a certain swing at a certain Vermont motel at a certain vanished time in our lives, way back in 1986, as we watched our two toddler children on that same swing and committed ourselves then, that dulcet evening, that very moment, to a life in Vermont…

Could not now think of the stereotypically silent Calvin Coolidge without recalling our own not-to-be-forgotten picnic, what, maybe 20 years ago, a stone’s throw from Coolidge’s modest house in Plymouth, Vermont, and a photograph, taken by a friendly passer-by, on that passer-by’s own urging, that very same day, one that, to this day, preserves one moment of one very memorable day…

Should never still hear, on a footpath near the Notre Dame Basilica, the skip and scamper of our children’s ghosted younger feet as all of us walked, on any given Sunday, from graduate housing to Mass and back again…

Would not have found, in Iowa, a place to call here, if not quite home…

We could-a, Karen…

would-a, Karen…

should-a, Karen…

Still, life’s been good, really good.

And, at the same time, it has also at times been hard.

And, Karen, I do admit to having made it harder.

Freelancing was never quite free. Med school — sorry, Joseph, “follow-your-bliss,” Campbell — was never anybody’s idea of middle-age bliss. And residency was hardly an improvement on med school.

And let’s not even discuss our decisions since then.

But if we’d not done what we’ve done, you and I, Karen, would not be who we are.

And just look at you, Karen.

The librarian you, at twenty, could never have imagined you’d be, your work, your good work, your very good work, loved by kids and parents alike, from Iowa City to Vermont. Not to mention mother of five — six, if you count Patrick — and a good, no, truly gifted, mother at that. Survivor of all those moves, and, let’s face it, medical school and residency and too much more. And still, still, the girl you were, the woman you are, the woman you so deeply are.

Me?

All I got out of all of this was an MD, which, in the longer view, is not much.

Yes, Karen, we could-a, would-a, should-a..,

But, again, here we are, with all that we’ve lived behind us and whatever we’ve left to live ahead. And, mindful of that, mindful that the path ahead is at once climbing and narrowing, what’s next?

His pleasure…

2009-07-05T21:54:00.000-07:00

The corn here in east-central Iowa, in this, the near-edge of summer of 2009, is knee-high and growing inches by the day. And many an adjacent field, now, as for so many seasons before, is carpeted, if only ankle-high, in soybeans, leaves pale-green, the color so reminiscent of Vermont in so many a wistful and now-remembered spring.

And even if that is news to you, I suspect that you are more interested in where I have been, all these many months, ever since my blog whispered to a seeming close in November.

Short version of a long story: Six of ten physician faculty at my residency resigned, each one of them for very good reason, leaving the four survivors with so much more to do, not the least of it saving the residency itself. And yet, in good time, and for equally good reason, I, too, resigned, and so did yet another friend and faculty member. Only, in the end, I chose to stay on. Only because I could not give up teaching. Only because, maybe, just maybe, there is such a thing, feathered or not, as hope.

Nonetheless, all that I and my many colleagues endured these many months certainly deserved my resignation. And even though I have decided to remain on the faculty, it has cost me dearly, whether in terms of friends lost or in a path ahead made less certain, with my own desire to again be the writer I was wobbling in winds beyond my control, even as I continue to be the physician I am.

And yet here I am.

Still heading to work each day as physician and teacher. Still hoping again to be the writer I was. Still wishing that life might somehow become less complicated, somewhat less convoluted.

And yet, and yet, I so miss writing…

For those of you who knew me back when, I truly loved what I did.

For years, first on the staff of Doubleday and later at Time-Life Books, I went to work eager to prove every day that I could do what no other copywriter could do, not ever for ego, but only because I was aware of a certain gift, a gift that was mine to give in return.

Later still, as a freelancer, I had little choice but to excel as a writer, the better to keep my family roofed, clothed, in good health and in food. And, at some point, back in the mid-1980s, I started writing chapters for books, and, happily, editors liked what I wrote.

And always, always, as my bride Karen knows, whether I was writing those books or writing advertising, I wrote for that burn of a moment when I knew that I had done all that I ever could do, when there was nothing I myself could not do better, that moment analogous to that of the Scots runner in Chariots of Fire, who, against a verdant and scalloped backdrop, not unlike that of my own loved and lamented Vermont, confided to his sister, “I believe that God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. And when I run, I feel His pleasure.”

God, how I felt His pleasure. God, how I miss that today…

But, you ask, you’re now a physician, and isn’t there pleasure to be had in that?

There is.

But not like the pleasure I felt before as a scribbler.

Sure, patients appreciate to whatever extent whatever I do, and the residents, I want to think, are grateful for the teaching I do. And on most days I leave work having accomplished something greater than the effort invested.

But to again feel God’s pleasure…to feel His pleasure as once I did…to know that I had done the best on any day with the gifts given me…ah, to again do that, and so often…such is pleasure, His pleasure…and why I run..and fast.

© 2009 Dónal Kevin Gordon

The celebrity in all of us...

2008-11-01T21:12:00.000-07:00

People die.

They die all the time.

And, yet, every now and then, one of those people reminds us all of our mutual mortality.

My mother died when I was 29, my father when I was 43. I woke up to life all at once at 29, I never forgot again at 43. And I am still, at 57, mindful every day of those losses and of so many more, so many friends, so many family members, before and since.

And then…and then Paul Newman dies.

And, ah, come on, I should care?

Me, distant by so many years, by so many degrees of acquaintance.

And yet I care, I really do care.

Maybe because the milestones of Paul’s career meshed here and there with the admittedly lesser milestones of my own then-young life.

Cool Hand Luke, back in 1967 the talk of many a high-school classmate, even though I, cultural nerd that I was, did not then see the movie.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and I’m still a kid myself, a college kid, packed in a car in 1968 at an Atlanta drive-in with half a dozen other college kids, not one girl between us, all of us dreaming that night of getting lucky, and all of us, every single one of us, destined to go home lonely.

A breath of years later and The Sting. If you saw it, as I did then, in the theater, that last scene caught you by surprise, by happy, happy surprise: our Paul getting away with movie murder, our Bob living to love again. Who could ask for more?

Try seeing The Sting now, now that Newman is dead, now that all he was in that movie — the contained confidence, the mustache, that small stick of a cigar in his mouth, the fedora slanted on his head, those blue eyes, those scintillatingly blue eyes, saying whatever you wanted them to say — now that all that is gone, so, so irrefutably gone. Try, just try, go ahead, just try, as I did tonight, not to watch Newman and to feel so human, so fragilely human and so utterly doomed.

Admit it.

As Newman aged, so did you. And me. Except, of course, that Newman never seemingly seemed to age.

Even when he played some old codger, as in Nobody’s Fool or Empire Falls, he was still Paul, still somehow the Butch he’d been, let alone the Hud he’d been earlier, not to mention the coolest of Cool Hand Lukes. A guy who lived life the way I would wish to live life, the way many of us would wish to live life, at once embracing it, but still almost entirely suspicious of it, those blue eyes summarily icing whatever they viewed. Newman could no more die than Gable, or Valentino, than Tracy or Hepburn, than you, than me.

Except, of course, that he did.

The message, let’s face it, is that life is short. Chalk up 83 years, as Newman did, and count yourself lucky. Clock 49, as my mother did, and oh, well. We live the lives we live, as long as we live them. Nothing more, nothing less. And Newman’s life, at once so long and so short, reminds us, if reminding was necessary, that nothing is forever. Newman’s death sucks life from all of us, if only because he was one of us.

On settling down, in, for...

2008-09-29T20:14:00.001-07:00

I should long ago have lost count of the number of moves Karen and I have made in our 28 years of marriage, but that number, 19, is as sticky in memory as gum in July to sneakers, easily making up in magnitude whatever it may lack in any evenness or roundness.

Sure, not all of those moves were of the long-distance kind, although enough of them covered enough ground, so that if movers in those days had given out frequent-packer points, we could long ago have cashed in. Even so, even the short moves, with the shortest of all only across a driveway in Vermont, were never easy. There was still the pitching of stuff accumulated since the last move and the packing of stuff that would seed the next move, still the lifting down stairs and the lugging up, still the last-minute cleaning; and then, once on the far end of the move, came the unpacking, the trial-and-error of the couch here or there or maybe there, the frantic, frustrating search for the bed hardware or the clock or your favorite cookbook, which, you knew, you absolutely knew, you put in a box somewhere; and then, slowly, imperceptibly, over some measure of months, the ineluctable settling in.

Karen and I have now settled in 19 times.

We have, however, settled down maybe once, that in the trim and heartbreakingly beautiful village of Peacham, Vermont.

There, over the span of a decade, interrupted only by a stint at Notre Dame, we raised our then-young children. There, in fact, in a robin’s-egg blue bedroom on the second floor of a quintessential white-clapboarded, green-shuttered, 150-year-old house on the main street — “the prettiest house,” I once told Karen, “we may ever live in” — our youngest son was born, deep in a knee-deep, mid-April snowstorm in 1992, his home birth at once the occasion for two weeks of meals provided by friends and neighbors and, briefly, a cause for village concern, as Karen and I dithered for a week over a name for the lad, teetering between eventual winner, Dónal, and also-ran Fintan (“That boy got a name yet?” came the inevitable, but good-natured question I fielded from all quarters, as I picked up the mail at the post office across the street and across the farther green). And there, too, in the steeply-gabled back room on the third floor, with VPR blaring from the radio on the windowsill and sheep bleating from the fields beyond our back fence, I wrote in architecturally lofty solitude for what was then my family’s living.

It was also in Peacham that our lives became inextricably stitched into the community quilt, that quilt blanketing at its center the old cemetery on the hill below the Bond house, where the graves speak of lives lived and lost in the 1700s; one edge then drifting up and over the Civil War monument steepling Church Hill; the whole thing a patchwork of field and forest, of farms in families for generations, its fabric stretching south from Harvey’s Hollow and the covered Greenbank Hollow bridge, up and over the brow of Cow Hill, its flanks forested and pocked with the cellar holes of homes that once were and are no more, your imagination free there to conjure up the long-ago scraping of plows, the lowing of cows, laughter in fallen kitchens, love in vanished bedrooms and lofts; down and up again to the village itself, over the mast of the Congregational Church, rumpling west to Macks Mountain and dipping eastward toward Harvey’s Lake, then spreading south to where the snow drifts perennially in winter across the road fronting Elizabeth’s Farm.

So, you ask, if so lovely, how could we ever leave?

Medical school, in short, the longer answer a topic for another day.

But for all our practice in settling in, and our single successful attempt at settling down, what Karen and I have never done, and what is so often misunderstood about us, is that we have steadfastly refused to settle for less.

It was desire that led us 25 years ago to cross the Atlantic to Ireland, and it was family that brought us back. Friendship pulled us to Massachusetts, and longing took us again to Virginia. Vermont happened, as I’ve often told the tale, because Virginia’s unrelenting heat and humidity at last drove me far enough north until, finally, only an hour from the Canadian border, I cooled off. Notre Dame took us west to Indiana, home took us back to Vermont, and medical school to Iowa. And always, always, to this day always, there remains the tug of adventure: e-mails that trumpet opportunities for doctors in New Zealand, Australia, British Columbia; others that tout jobs in Montana, Idaho or, dare I write the words, back home in Vermont; or that inner call, the one that says, life’s short, there’s so much yet to do, so little time in which to do it, sell the house, chuck the stuff, get up, get going, c’mon, man, you’re 57 and time, time, time…

Yet here we still are, still in Iowa, four years after medical school, one year after residency.

So, have we settled?

In, yes. Down, no. For less, absolutely not.

Karen and I are, I admit, and in keeping with the title of this blog, in the simmer dim, neither here nor there, but somewhere in between. Where we’ll be a year from now, I cannot now predict, but home, for me, remains the one place in which we once settled. Can you go home again? No, no, wrote Thomas Wolfe, so emphatically he put it in the book’s title. As for me, we’ll see.

© 2008 by Dónal Kevin Gordon

So you think you can govern...

2008-09-27T16:51:00.000-07:00

“I — I answered him yes because I have the confidence in that readiness and knowing that you can’t blink, you have to be wired in a way of being so committed to the mission, the mission that we’re on, reform of this country and victory in the war, you can’t blink….So I didn’t blink then even when asked to run as his running mate.”

Okay, if you’ve been reading or watching, you have to know who said that in response to a question from ABC’s Charlie Gibson, and you can probably already guess on what side of the readiness fence I’m on.

What’s that? Not entirely sure?

So, we’re talking a one-time mayor of a town of maybe 6,000, generously 9,000, and less-than-one-term governor of a state that is at once the largest and smallest, or almost smallest, in the nation. We’re talking she of the “Bridge to Nowhere,” who supported it, only to abandon that support after the Congress had already said flatly no, and who, even then, greedily took the same amount of money, to be spent at the Alaska’s discretion, in welcome compensation. And we’re talking the same former mayor and same current governor whose 20-20 vision remains so exquisitely acute that she can. in the blink of a designer-spec’d eye, readily winnow obvious supporters from hateful “haters”. The same former mayor, the same current governor who, in keeping with some-or-another faith, does unto others the way she would do unto others of some-or-some-other persuasion.

Okay, so now we’re on the same page.

And while we’re flipping pages, let’s skim the resume (and, risking insult to the injury of McCain’s choice, this won’t take long): small-town mayor, governor for less than two years, like 21 months and counting, a stint on city council paving the way, with a reputation for vindictiveness and cronyism to fill the potholes.

Now, let’s quick-reverse through recent history: small-potatoes governor of a big state becomes president; values loyalty above else to honesty and openness; has, on any level you want to choose — oedipal, political, ethical, religious — something to prove; shoots enemies from the hip of utter and unforgiving righteousness…hmmm…

And, over the last eight years, under the guidance of he-who-must-be-obeyed in the White House, that has gotten us where, as a nation, a people, a civilization?

Can history repeat itself?

Alas, a country that blinked, as Sarah is wont to say, and got Bush, only then to outright elect the same son-of-a-Bush, can certainly choose a Bush by another name the next time around. I mean, just because we pledge allegiance to one nation under God, invoke, again and again, that God bless America, and call down the One and Only from every near mountain on high, doesn’t mean that we, as a country, in the form of our prophet-in-chief, can’t align ourselves, knowingly or not, with the devil. Let’s face it, the moral balance sheet is anything but on our side.

Witness Iraq and the now-they’re-here, now-they’re not WMD. Or that nebulous and, I’m really being kind, link between Sadam and al-Qaeda. Or, dare we mention his name in anything more than a whisper, the not-only-not-dead-but-still-alive Osama bin Laden, on whom, if you believe him, our current president, he of the swaggering, dead-or-alive dictum, has drawn a bead for, oh, the last seven years. And do we even have to talk about Katrina, let alone the current mess on Wall Street, let alone that pesky definition of that troublesome word “torture” and its locus, the foreshortened Gitmo.

Oh, c’mon, what in the same Lord’s name possessed us, or at least possessed those tens of millions of voters who made themselves the W’s enablers!

And, then, along comes Sarah.

Let’s see, at the risk of repeating myself: worst financial crisis since the Great Depression; ongoing war in Iraq, to the tune of $10 billion per month; the ground gained in Afghanistan all but lost; Osama still on the loose, dreaming of who-knows-what in his own response to the now-and-forever war on terror; and, closer to home, New Orleans still not New Orleans, now three heck-of-a-good-job-Brownie years after Katrina; tens of millions — I mean, tens of millions, as in almost 50 million men, women and children, as in one out of every six Americans — without health insurance in this, a nation of ostensible equals; a tax structure that benefits the haves and leaves the have-nots to fend for themselves.

And we, as a nation, are going to put Sarah Palin — to whom that oldie-but-goodie “I Can See Clearly Now” conjures images of the icy Bering Strait and nearby Russia and, by convoluted extension, unexampled prowess in foreign policy — the proverbial heartbeat away from the presidency, when the president himself would be the actuarially-challenged John McCain?

Time out.

There’s reality TV — and then there’s reality. And, right now, it is time for a reality check, if you, forgive me, catch my blink.

© 2008 by Dónal Kevin Gordon

Dancing in the dark...

2008-09-20T17:18:00.000-07:00

Sometime around 1972 or 1973, back when I would have been 21 or so, my sister Moira and I, and maybe even our very much younger brother Patrick, went to see then-hot Chicago at a concert in Richmond, Virginia, where we lived at the time. I dimly recall that we had pretty good seats at the Coliseum, for a show that I was very much up to see, having been a Chicago fan ever since the group’s debut double-album under the banner of Chicago Transit Authority some four or five years earlier.

I’ll admit that, prior to the concert, I hadn’t paid any attention whatsoever to the opening act and, in fact, didn’t even know who it was, figuring, not unreasonably, that, not unlike most opening acts, this one was preordained to be forgettable. I mean, c’mon, we’re talking Chicago, and any opening act could, even under the best of circumstances, be little more than a speed bump en route to the night’s ultimate destination — forty minutes, maybe more, of somebody else’s one-riff-beyond-the-garage music, then on to the real deal. And, whaddya know, as if to confirm that dim expectation, out on the stage steps this decidedly scruffy fellow from Jersey, a young guy, a guy with the seriously un-billboard-like name of Springsteen, backed by an imposingly large sax player named Clarence, linchpin, if only by stature, in a crew that inexplicably cast itself as the E Street Band.

Since then, my life, maybe like yours, has been signposted by Springsteen: 1984 and Born in the USA, me a mere 33, new dad, this time second time around, in relatively good shape myself, albeit nothing like the newly, sexily buff Springsteen; a year or two later and I remember, as if it were yesterday, the day I bought that boxed, three-CD live set at the Book Annex in Alexandria, Virginia, with that album, if memory serves, the incentive for buying our first CD player; come the 1990’s, and I’m pretty much cruising at 40 and steering beyond, my compass not then set on the Boss, with family, life and a writing career tugging my needle from the due-north of E Street; by 2001, and the unhappy inspiration for The Rising, I’m in med school, all ears when it comes to the Boss’s message, but all broke when it came to ever hitting a concert.

But just four years later, in the fall of 2005, at a solo concert in Madison, Wisconsin, a concert that was for Karen and me a celebration of our 25th wedding anniversary, Bruce and I had at last and again hooked up. And if Bruce didn’t know it, I certainly did. Entire decades had come full circle, I was for a moment that comparative kid again in Richmond, Virginia, and the world, apart from the devils and dust of our collective nightmare, was for that same moment, not the complicated place which Karen and Bruce and I otherwise inhabited, but for she and he and me a renewal of sorts, and, for Karen, in particular, a first chance to put flesh to the other love of her life.

But, for Karen, alas, that love was unrequited.

Sure, this was Bruce, but only Bruce, just Bruce, no E Street Band, and so Karen felt somewhat short-changed by what was a comparatively low-octane Springsteen gig. Fast-forward two years, though, and the Boss is again hitting the boards, this time to push a new album, this time backed by the E Street Band, and, with anniversary 27 in the offing, I, as a surprise to Karen, snagged tickets for two to Bruce and the Band at the United Center in Chicago.

If Springsteen was great that night, and he was, the concert was all the better for giving me the chance to watch Karen shed her middle years and dance that night in the dark, each lick of the Boss’s guitar cranking chords of memory as much as music: “Born to Run,” and, Karen, our own meanderings — 19 moves in 28 years of marriage — leapt that night immediately to mind, even as the Boss belted words I’d so often said in other words, “Someday, girl, I don’t know when, we’re gonna get to that place where we really want to go…but till then…tramps like us, baby, we were born to run”; “Thunder Road,” and, who’s kiddin’ who, we’re as scared as we’ve ever been, “that maybe we ain’t that young anymore,” with the ghosts of our own twined lives haunting all those decades lost to parenting and med school and residency, no less, beautiful Karen, than the ghosts of “all the boys you sent away,” like those of Springsteen’s storied Mary, haunt the “dusty beach road” of your own young life; and, don’t you know, dear Karen, that when I hear “Out in the Street,” that you, you, my own and much loved Karen, are that girl again, the girl I knew back when we first met, walking the way you wanted to walk, talking the way you wanted to talk, wha-oh, wha-oh-oh-oh-oh.

But if there is Bruce solo and Bruce with the Band, there is also Bruce as he can only be experienced from the pit, surrounded by fans of fellow deep persuasion, an experience that was then still unticked on Karen’s life list.

So, come this last March, there Karen and I were again at a Springsteen concert, this time in Omaha, this time right there on the floor, close enough to imagine what it was like, all those years ago, when a younger Karen, a younger me, might have rocked to a younger Bruce, right there on the floor, with everyone around us, then as now, writhing in unison, thousands of arms pistoning air, thousands of hips pivoting as one, thousands of mouths mouthing words long ago tucked into memory.

Am I going somewhere?

“You bet,” in the vernacular of this, the Midwest of my long-ago youth.

Because a couple of weekends back, back in those dying days of August, Karen and I motored to Milwaukee, where Bruce was the closing act for Harley-Davidson’s 105th Anniversary. It was, in addition, the last stop on the Boss’s latest tour, a tour begun about a year ago, a year that had also marked the loss of one of the members of the E Street Band, dead these many months ago to melanoma. Time, it seems, had caught up to the Band, as much as it had caught up to me, who in E-Street years, had already counted the loss of both parents and all too many friends and relatives, and to Karen, whose own father was among those more recently fallen behind, his hand slipped suddenly free of his daughter’s, his life lost, as Bruce, singing alone to Karen, might have sung, “in the shadow of the evening trees.”

But on that night, time, and loss, and memory, were one.

Because there Bruce was, his arrival announced, loudly and in total darkness, by the vroom-vroom-vroomvroom-vroom-vroom- vroom of a Harley, even as the audience, 50,000 or more shadows on the lawn of Milwaukee’s lakeside Veterans Park, Karen and me among the shadows, scanned a darkened stage, all of us fully expecting the Boss to power-drive the stage, only to have the lights light to reveal Bruce, not astride, but striding toward the stage, band members already at their stations, the opening lyrics of “Gypsy Biker” even then filling the black and starlit air. Minutes later, that song done, and with no breath between, the Boss declared his intention to have fun with “Out in the Street,” leaping, almost immediately from the main stage to the catwalk beyond, sprinting up and down the ramp, his free hand grabbing strangers’ hands, his back suffering unnumbered, anonymous pats, and, once and then again, flinging himself to the mosh pit of the audience, fans’ hands offering him to the gods of the black Milwaukee night.

Now, I’ll admit, that I was hardly enamored of the crowd around me, most of whom subscribed more to the Harley fetish than they did to Springsteen: leather, both thin and thick, fringed or not; denim shirts snipped short at the sleeves; cigars, sported as much by women as men, and, if not cigars, cigarettes seemingly touched one to another; weak-ass Miller slapped back at $5.75 a slap, and we’re talking beaucoup slaps, with the expected wobbly results in a standing-room-only crowd; and, dare I tell, those baring the most skin, men oddly more than women, were those who should most have covered up.

Still, fists pumped humid air, feet sprang, hands clapped, hips swayed, and I’m only talking Karen. And, song after song after song, the Boss played on, until more than three and a half non-stop hours later, after two concert-tested, half-hearted entreaties to band member Stevie Van Zandt, “ What time is it, Steve?” and the equally concert-tested, half-hearted response, “It’s quitting time,” even the Boss himself, now on the far side of midnight, finally had to call it quits, this after 31 songs, a record for the tour; after repeatedly throwing himself to the mercy of the chosen, wrist-banded 3,000 nearest the stage; after knee-sliding the catwalk; after glad-handing God-only-knows how many fans, suffering Lord-only-knows how many touches here, there and everywhere; and after making the night memorable, not just for Karen, but also for one very much younger face in the nearer crowd, who, echoes of Courtney Cox all those decades ago, suddenly found herself on stage sa-shaying hand in hand with the Boss to “Dancing in the Dark.”

Admittedly that night, some lines rang all the more true, if only for me.

In fact, all those decades ago, back in my once loved and still lamented Vermont, back in the days when I made my living as a full-time scribbler of words, I was known to play Springsteen, loudly, and I mean loudly (just ask the kids), to sparkplug the day’s writing.

To this day, I still joke that those lines in “Dancing in the Dark” — “I’m sick of sitting ‘round here trying to write this book…I need a love reaction…come on, baby, gimme just one look” — led, for this freelance writer and his all-too-available lover, in all-too-bucolic Vermont, to five children. And you can’t know how often in how many places since I have thought, like Springsteen, that, “this town is full of losers, and I’m pulling out of here to win.” And, I’ll confess, even now, even as recently as Milwaukee, wanna-be-adventurous me bellowed along with the Boss (just ask Karen), “I ain’t nothing but tired, man, I’m just tired and bored with myself,” even as I looked beyond the here and now of the here and now, “I ain’t getting nowhere, I’m just living in a dump like this.”

Whatever, as I’m too often wont to say, too often to the irritation of those around me.

But with Milwaukee behind us, both Bruce and I now get to motor on, he to home and New Jersey and whatever lies beyond, me to whatever waits beyond this specific moment, this particular place. I look forward, as does Karen, to whatever moves the Boss to make music, and hope, on behalf of Karen and me, that time and health, things all of us, Bruce included, had to take for granted when younger, conspire to allow future tours. As for Karen and much older me, we’ll keep feeling our way forward, too often blindly, so rarely with anything resembling sure-footedness, knowing nonetheless and all the way, “the night’s busted open, these two lanes will take us anywhere,” and, more important, that even at this late hour of life, “we’ve got one last chance to make it real,” (even as Karen reads this and thinks, oh, God, hold on and hold on really tight, ‘cause here we go again!).

And, yet, I confess yet again, the life I’ve lost ‘til now.

Spent, too late at mid-life, were those two years in grad school at beloved Notre Dame. Spent, too, even later, were four more years in med school and three years in residency, not to mention two more years along the way doing all those pre-med science courses. And all along, all the time I lost with Karen, with our children, years I can never have back, years that can never fully be justified on the profit-and-loss statement of life, no matter how many meaningless letters of however many worthless degrees get tacked after my name. Bruce, too, I’m sure, has paid the price for all his years on the road, but you can’t help but think that his lost years bought joy, while mine bought only security and, even on the best of days, mere contentment.

But, oh God, what I would give for joy.

Bruce, in parting in Milwaukee, vowed he’d be back. “We’re only getting started,” he promised the hungry of heart still begging for more deep into that August night. And, Bruce, buddy, I’m gonna have to hold you to it. After all, “There’s something happening somewhere,” both us spinning to sixty know, “even if we’re just dancing in the dark.”

© 2008 by Dónal Kevin Gordon

Slippery slope...

2008-08-25T19:15:00.001-07:00

A few weeks ago, our youngest son Dónal traveled with friends to Wisconsin, in large part to slip and slide the various water parks that make Wisconsin’s Dells “the Dells.”

I long ago, back around the time I last climbed aboard a roller coaster at Hershey Park in Pennsylvania — and we’re talking some 25 years ago, when Karen and my youngest brother Patrick last convinced me to ignore common sense — started resisting any spur-of-the-moment impulse that might give gravity even more leverage to sooner end my life. Since then, I have reasonably reasoned that the older I get, the more opportunities there are to die without, on my own volition, having to add to the list of possibilities. So, for all my youngest son’s entreaties to the contrary — “oh, c’mon, Dad, it’s fun…can’t wait to do it…it’s only a 50- (or was it 80-) foot vertical drop” — I proverbially begged to differ. After all, he’s sixteen, what does he know about what life can do to him, to me, to his mother, to all those who love him, in that, that one instant of unknowing.

The thing is, that at this, my age of 57, there are not only more — and more frequent — opportunities to die (yes, Karen, I’m showing my Irishness again), but it is truly all too easy to gain admittance into that somewhat less than amusing amusement park that beckons at middle age and broadens beyond. Ignore your high blood pressure, and you’re screwed. Step into the minefield of diabetes, and, guess what, you’re screwed. Crank up on the burgers and fries, and, you know what, you’re screwed. Wait a few more years, and, for whatever good luck you might have had before, the time bomb of genetics goes off, leaving you at the mercy of glaucoma, cancer, stroke, you name it.

It’s a crap shoot…life, that is.

In my former position as a family physician in a small and rural town in Iowa, I would, every Tuesday, every other week, visit a local nursing home. Most of those Tuesdays, I’d see six or eight or ten nursing home residents in the course of a couple of hours. Most were routine visits, mandated, mostly, by Medicare. But some were the kind of encounters, which, I knew, could all too easily lead to that slippery slope, that water slide, which is, young or old, the realm of the possible for all of us, and hardly fun.

If you’re young, let’s face it, time is decidedly on your side.

But get yourself into a nursing home, and all it takes is one infection, one new onset, as those of us of the medical persuasion shorthand it, of A. fib, of an otherwise ordinary UTI, of ARF, and you are, in the vernacular, a get-out-of-my-emergency-room “gomer,” if not an outright goner. And if that shorthand gives you the short end of the stick, consider this: giving you the benefit of a doubt, stretching your diagnosis to atrial fibrillation, to a urinary tract infection, to acute renal failure, changes nothing. It all depends on those immediately around you and how quickly they respond to your more or less pressing problem.

Dare I share a secret?

Every time I entered that nursing home, I smelled death.

I would slip, in an instant, from the car into Iowa sunshine, walk toward the shade of the building, pull open the front door, step into the vestibule beyond, reach for the next door, the shadows beyond, give that last door a yank, and then…

Sometimes it was the smell of the newly dead.

Mostly, however, it was the smell of those about to die.

The infection festered; the heart failure neglected beyond the usual swelling those of us in the know chalk up to everyday lower extremity edema; the pneumonia, treated, too often half-heartedly, and now gone amuck; the emphysema, COPD to those of us in the trade, that makes comfortable company until it decides that today, today, this day is the day you die.

All of us die.

But none of us, not one of us, need be sped off life’s stage.

It is, this doctor is going to say, too easy to die in a nursing home.

You — or your mother, father, sister, brother, does it really matter — are, let’s face it, a bed. Nothing more, not much less. A bed that ups the occupancy rate, ensures reimbursement from this insurance or that, or, if age allows, from Medicare, and, in the end, keeps the nursing home in the black. If you — or your mom or dad or those luckless siblings — die, oh, well. The tail end of the greatest generation and the front end of the baby boom bunch pretty much ensure plenty of replacements. Why get hung up on good-hearted Bob, after all he’d already had 101 good years, or ill-fated Ruth, who, until she started paying rent at the home and then started packing on pounds of water weight, had been in pretty good shape; or luckless Helen, bride, all those decades ago, of Bob and now his widow, whose heel wound, somehow, without anyone noticing, became the feeding ground of maggots; or, for good measure, poor, poor Thelma — ah, c’mon, she’s already 97, who cares if she makes it to 98, and so what if she has a son who himself cares. I mean, she’s 97, what, what at this point is left to enjoy of anything that resembles life?

Let’s say, though, it was me. Or, maybe, you.

Are you ready to be admitted to the home, welcomed, more or less patronizingly, encouraged to mix with those who, knowingly or not, signed on before you, survived so far, and who are, like it or not, your new neighbors and roommates? Are you willing to give up those extra years, whether in your 80s, 90s or beyond, to the unintentioned ignorance or ill-intentioned malfeasance of those hired to care for you? Are you, at 97, ready to hear, in action even more than words, why bother imagining a future when your life, your precious life, is all about the past?

If you’re lucky, you’ll fit in, stay healthy, avoid the ever-swirling infections, the stumble in the hallway, the all-at-once illness that means a trip to the emergency room and, perhaps, a longer stay in the hospital, and the risk, simply by the company you’re keeping, that you’ll buy the infection that will buy you the farm. If you’re even luckier, you’ll look forward to bingo, enough so that, even when called out for your every-other-month checkup, you won’t, as did my patient Jean, who threatened me with a “kick in the pants,” mind the intrusion. Luckier still, and lunch — which, like breakfast and dinner in a nursing home, is but a stepping-stone in the slow, ineluctable journey that marks life’s end, and which, on any day, guarantees a traffic jam of wheelchairs and walkers at the chalk line of the cafeteria — will be nothing more than a speed bump in your day, and you’ll soon be in and beyond to the momentary nirvana of gelled this and gravied that. Another meal, another day, in lives all too achingly short of days.

And if you’re not as lucky, if death sniffs around and decides you are the one, that today is your day, that no number of prayers, no amount of hope can stiff-arm its approach?

Oh, well.

Life, if not for you, goes on. Your bed is serendipitously open. There is, like it or not, insurance money to be had. Those left behind — spouse, siblings, children — will get over it, won’t they?

© 2008 by Dónal Kevin Gordon

Her beautiful life...

2008-08-10T20:38:00.000-07:00

Karen and I first met Joan in 1988, twenty years ago now, at a farmers’ market in Middlebury, Vermont. She was selling apples from her orchard in nearby New Haven, and Karen and I were among the day’s browsers and buyers.

It is distant enough now in memory that I cannot recall exactly where in Middlebury the market was located. Nevertheless, at some point in that morning’s wanderings, Karen and I had chanced upon Joan’s booth. Again, time has smudged the details, but without question we exchanged the appropriate niceties of the moment, in the course of which Joan at some point spotted the Claddagh rings that both Karen and I wore, and we, for our part, took note of Joan’s accent.

“Where in Ireland are you from?” I asked, my eyes drunk in an instant on Joan’s own eyes, her blonde hair, her cheeks at once appled and summer-blushed, a smile dialing up the glow.

“Dublin,” came the answer, the geography confirmed in a breath by the brogue.

Joan, as we soon learned, had left Ireland for the States as a lass of twenty-something and had, at some point not long after, met an American lad from Massachusetts named Frank. That meeting had led to marriage, which, in turn, had led to children, three begotten, one adopted, and to the usual vagaries to which time and circumstances make us all victim.

For Frank and Joan, that road forward had led eventually to New Hampshire, to a farm in rural Francestown, the house and land heartbreaking in their beauty, and, years later, to that apple orchard in New Haven, culmination of Frank’s dream to live in Vermont.

Résumés, if you had them, would tell you that Frank had done time as a high school guidance counselor, while Joan had earned her stripes as a small-town librarian. Along the way, too, there had been a detour to some sun-soaked island in the Caribbean, Frank and Joan’s would-be ticket to a better and different life, that had led, as unhappy circumstances would have it, only to a ticket home to New Hampshire.

For our part, Karen and I had only five years before lived in Ireland. We had sold almost everything back in 1983, cast fortune to the proverbial wind and crossed the pond with the intention of never returning to the States, only to return to the States, partly because Karen missed her family and partly because my youngest brother, Patrick, whom we were then raising, missed mine. We had lasted six months, more or less, and we have ever since, especially in these the years of Bush redux, regretted leaving.

The Claddagh rings were a testament to those Irish leanings, both genetic and otherwise, even as the lilt of Joan’s accent had, in an instant, again brought us home. I don’t have to tell you, but will, that the fact that she and Frank and Karen and I were spirits both kindred and free ensured nothing less than camaraderie right from the start. Indeed, not long after we had met Joan, on a fall day lit less by sunlight than by leaves crimsoned and gilded, Karen and I and three kids shoveled five pairs of feet through windrows of leaves to the roadside shed from which Frank and Joan sold apples. There we found, as I remember, apples by the bag and apples by the bushel, and, somewhere on a table, a basket for collection by the honor system, but no Frank.

Later, I’d come to understand that that same honor system, by happy design, put the buffer of the basket between Frank and his market, something, which, in Joan’s Ireland, would have been beyond all reason, but, which, to consummate New Englander Frank, was reasonable enough. But on that day, the day on which we first met Frank and the first of many get-togethers over the decades and all the many miles since, I also learned that Frank’s New England veneer was easily scratched, exposing the heartwood that was so obviously the common ground between Frank and his Irish bride.

Not much deeper into that first fall of our acquaintance, six-year-old Declan, his four-year-old brother, Brendan, and I killed any idle hour, rare as they were, in those, the years of my freelance writing, picking up drops — apples fallen by wind or whim — the better to help our new friend, Frank, who would otherwise have had to cull all 200-plus acres himself. We’d later feed these drops to the neighbor’s cows, whose involuntary swish and sway, laughable to see at the time, spoke to their fermentation-induced happiness.

God, I loved those days. Lord, how I remember them.

They were so different from what I did for a living every day. No writing. No solitary me in an otherwise empty room. No pleasing this or that client — only apples, bruised and ripe for the rotting, awaiting the salvation of our hands and a last chance to become fodder for heifers. And, in those, my own wistful and halcyon days, there I was, along with my sons and my good friend Frank, raking apples by the fistful, in an orchard which in that time, for me, of relative youth, and, for Frank, of middle age, stretched forever, even if our shared sun was then, without us even noticing, dipping ever lower that fall and every fall since.

That autumn, and those memories, give glow today to the mind’s hearth, and are all the dearer now that lovely Joan did herself slip away this past year and a summer ago. Indeed, Frank’s visit today is the first since Joan’s death, and her absence was beyond heartfelt.

To be sure, there had been times in the past, when Frank had visited us alone in Vermont, mostly because Joan, her feelings toward Vermont tempered by what she came to see as an unhappy experience in New Haven and a foreordained return to Francestown, would do anything to avoid crossing the border from New Hampshire. And always, always, we knew that Frank’s Vermont was not Joan’s, no less than my Ireland and my own Vermont was like the Ireland or Vermont of those I love. Moreover, like my own meanderings, Frank’s had come at cost to those he loved, something he knew and felt, as do I about the price of my own wanderings.

Yet here we all were, on this, the second day of August, Frank, Karen, me — all of us, of course, except our missed Joan. Around us, too, were three of our five grown and almost-grown children, all of whom Joan had known, and who, in the years since, had grown from tots and toddlers to four young men and a woman.

For two hours, Frank and Karen and me and the gathered children talked and laughed, even as we stopped short of speaking of Joan, the better, I knew, then and later, to stop short of sobbing. There were memories, memories of bread pudding, absolutely perfect bread pudding, baked once, only to have Joan change the recipe forever; of other dishes when Joan, not finding a needed ingredient, substituted whatever was handy, regardless of its relationship to the required ingredient; of the Scottish Highland cattle Frank once raised, which, on one afternoon, were driven to dancing — no exaggeration, as we’ve the photos to prove it — by our son Brendan’s bagpiping.

Those things never mentioned last Saturday count for more: Frank’s “Go Away” welcome mat at the farmhouse in New Haven; Tiernán’s christening all those years ago, with Frank and Joan enlivening the celebration; so many weekend dinners together at our home in Cornwall, Vermont, or theirs in nearby New Haven; the visits, time and again, after we had moved to Peacham, to Francestown, to Frank and Joan in their book-lined family room, in the kitchen of changed recipes, and, just beyond, in the field of the Highland cattle. Or the time Frank helped me haul a washing machine up the outside stairs of our Vermont home in Peacham, in the course of which the washer, easily given to tumbling in its day’s work, tumbled less willfully from the handtruck and down the steps, although, to Sears’s credit, it took a dinging and kept on wringing. Or, in the year or two after returning to Francestown from New Haven, when Joan, by her own admission never more than an Irish cook of her time, welcomed the good excuse that the oven of her rented house lacked a door, rendering any temperature, and any result, beyond her control.

Life, in those days of our shared Vermont and, later, shared border, seemed, in the naiveté of those years, without limit. None of us could imagine at the outset of our friendship that my family would twice leave Vermont, once for graduate school at Notre Dame and later for med school in Iowa, stretching but never breaking our ties to Frank and Joan. That visits since would be so few, so far between. That that last visit, four years ago, when we were returning from Maine to Iowa, would be the last for all of us.

And, yet, Joan is now dead, and Frank is stiffer of limb since we last saw him four years ago. He is, nevertheless, still Frank, his references to the “fahm” a testament to those New England roots, with enough granite, and only just enough, in his constitution to firm the foundation. Everything above ground, however, reflects Joan: that easy laughter, the easy laughter of an Irishman by marriage; that shared memory; his own unbearable lightness of being, which, without Joan, might otherwise, given that New England upbringing, have become rock.

But it is Joan, now, who is missing, missing for Frank, missing for their children, missing for Karen, for me, for our children, for all of us lucky enough to have ever touched — and been touched — by her beautiful life.

Frank, true to the spirit that first led him to Joan and to all he and Joan later lived together, is moving on. He is San Francisco-bound this time, the promise of a new, if later, life luring him west. If it doesn’t work out, he says, he’ll go back to New Hampshire. And that, with nothing more than a shrug, was spoken like Frank.

I have written here of friendship. I have implied, and surely do intend, love.

Karen and I loved Joan. Karen and I love Frank. And neither time nor loss has dimmed our love for either, nor could it ever.

Shortly after we all met, Frank and Joan joined us for the christening of our fourth child, Tiernán, baptized maybe six months after our meeting. Since then, that child has grown to a man of almost twenty. And yet, can I again write the words, Joan is now gone. Since then, Karen and I and the kids have wandered elsewhere in Vermont, then to Indiana for graduate school, and later still back to Vermont, only to leave again for Iowa and medical school and for all that has happened since. Still, still, Joan is gone. Tiernán has turned another decade, Siobhán has become a woman of almost 22, Dónal a lad of 16, and two more, Declan and Brendan, have grown and gone from the fold. All of them knew Joan, and, if I’m allowed to speak for them, all of them, every one, every last one, loved her.

We are told that hundreds from Francestown and thereabouts attended Joan’s funeral. Should it surprise me that so many found in Joan what I did and what friends from Scotland took note of in an online memorial: a heart, both wonderful and big. A fund, established since Joan’s death, has bankrolled an ongoing lecture series in Francestown, ensuring that a sliver of what Joan was will live on in the New Hampshire town, which despite those sojourns in Vermont and the Indies, she called home and which, from somewhere beyond, she still loves.

I can, if I want, walk right now into our kitchen and pause for a moment before a simple hutch against the back wall. Two of four shelves are lined with Nicholas Mosse pottery, crafted in Ireland, but sold in New Hampshire, and showcased in her barn, by local rep Joan. I bought some pieces as gifts for Karen, and Joan gave us others as gifts from her and Frank. Each cup, saucer, pitcher is made of Irish clay, shaped by Irish hands, embellished with Irish designs. Each piece is of and from Ireland. But each cup, saucer, pitcher, speaks only to me of Joan. So, too, does our recipe file, however softly, of that changed bread pudding, as does the apple pancake, which Joan, on one occasion, memorable to our daughter Siobhán, hurried to check on lest it explode. Nor can any mention of Joan fail to include the coziness of her home and, again, to daughter Siobhán, the embrace of that favorite armchair in the family room.

Truth is, our lives are our lives because Joan, then and now, brushed against ours, once, then and forever. We have lost Joan. We still have Frank. And onward, for all that loss, we go, Frank and his children, Karen and me and our children, all of us the better for having loved Joan.

© 2008 by Dónal Kevin Gordon

Dog days...

2008-07-28T19:48:00.001-07:00

In Iowa, this time of year, heat hangs heavily.

You can see it in the trees, slack-shouldered, knees to the ground, sweat all but dripping from the drooping leaves. The grass, too, so recently eager to roll out its green carpet in that remembered blush of spring, now staunches its once-and-future youthful enthusiasm in favor of a more seasoned approach to summer. And everywhere, flowers, the sun-worshippers among them anyway, bare all, petals akimbo, stamens and pistils all but whistling at bees that might be up for a buzz. Those blossoms more demure, sidelined by choice to shade or chance to shadow, Mona-Lisa from the background, their modesty draped in a well-placed sepal or three.

In any other year, you could also drive down any back road of your choosing, your wheels churning a dust-devil of gravel and powder to chart your passage against a sky-blue sky, with the road itself rimmed on either side with corn high as the nearest elephant’s eye. This year, however, floods have stemmed the corn’s tide, so much so that Iowa’s seasonal sea of corn, rising and falling on a groundswell of hill and hollow, is, in most places, a foot or two shallower. Not so, though, the layer of haze above, as all those acres of corn pump up the already amped humidity, thickening all the more the gumboed summer air.

Across a more charted, more Atlantic ocean, the rain in Spain may still fall mainly on the plain, but, l’air en France, or at least in that part of the country known as Cognac, is the better for the “angels’ share,” that surprisingly large percentage of alcohol lost in its aging by the local eaux-de-vie to evaporation. Not to be out-proofed, however, those who care about such things have also shown that Iowa’s humidity owes much to the transpiration of mega-acres of corn, conjuring images of the entire state heaving on inspiration and blurring the horizon with the first morning breath. Still, it beggars the same imagination that any angels of any persuasion, perched wing-to-wing on a fence rail in some Iowa that is truly heaven and not merely a field in someone’s dreams, are huffing corn when there’s headier cognac to be had, but, hey, whatever rings an angel’s bell.

Me?

I’m no angel, especially when it comes to taking the heat, since my inner thermostat tops out at 80 degrees — anything above might as well be a hundred, just ask the woman who shares my life and who suffers the consequences on these, the most howling of my dog days. Toss in humidity to fire up the heat index, and I’m the unhappiest bowser you can imagine. Indeed, I have been known to enter the locally famous beer vault at John’s Grocery in Iowa City and pipe to any who would listen, usually and only that same long-suffering bride, that you could haul in a desk and maybe punch out a window, and I’d be in hop heaven. Back at home, though, under less air- or, for that matter, cask-conditioned circumstances, I am the one long-suffering, known to lament often and aloud, much to the chagrin of the purgatoried souls around me, “I’m Irish, built for cold, bleak islands,” an observation bolstered by the fact that while I’m stripped to shorts, and still complaining, everyone else is shivering under blankets.

Back in those fresh-from-Vermont, new-to-Iowa days when we lived in West Branch on the outskirts of Iowa City, back when I was still in med school, our own backyard butted against a cornfield at the town’s eastern edge. On those dog days of those first summers, made junkyard-dog days by the added heat of med school itself, when there was no beer vault anywhere around stocked well enough to slake my discontent or cool enough to temper my distemper, I was known to ramble to the fence line separating the crew-cut grass from the rank-and-order corn beyond. I’d stand there, still as the stalks themselves, face to the field, feet rooted, haloed myself by the academic haze du jour, whether it was anatomy or path, micro or pharm, and would watch, literally, the corn grow.

It was an intentionally mindless activity, demanding little more than observation on any voluntary level and as little obligatory perspiration as I had to muster. No fathoming the function of kidneys at a cellular level, no cramming the kinetics of this or that analgesic, no mapping the neural comings and goings of the brachial plexus. Only the horizon inching higher, seemingly by the hour, the corn in a cloudless sky breathing in and breathing out, leaves splayed in the sun, tassels tossed to the breeze, and, as the weeks wore on, the field itself all ears, attuned to some distant and timeless melody, its rhythm the rhythm of that summer and every summer before and since.

© 2008 by Dónal Kevin Gordon

Slouching towards Bethlehem...

2008-07-19T21:43:00.000-07:00

You could spend a lifetime straddling stools in bars from the bay side of Isle au Haut to the far side of Tillamook, and every once in a bottle of Blue Moon you might find yourself squinting through rivers of neon and smoke, tucking your beer a bit tighter to hand and leaning into the voice beside you, all at once aware that what you’re hearing might well pass for wisdom, even, and this, a true test of wisdom, the morning after.

More often, of course, all that beer breeds only so much blather, all of it as frothy and evanescent as the foam trimming the top, none of it relevant, if even remembered, in the fog of a morning after.

But try as you might, in that same lifetime of jockeying bar stools, you’d be hard-pressed to hitch that voice of lagered palaver to a face, and to have that face belong to a wise man of dubious wisdom with the unlikely, but, oh, so mellifluent name of Melchior.

So imagine, for a moment, my own good fortune, when, a week or so ago, after a couple of hours fielding riffs from the grassy bleachers at the Iowa City Jazz Festival, Karen and I popped into a local watering-hole, angled for the empty corner of the bar and, while Karen headed to the ladies’, I swung into the saddle and took the lay of the land.

To my left the jukebox, the empty stool saved for Karen to the right and, just beyond, another empty, with a pack of smokes and a proverbially half-empty/half-full glass laying claim to what was obviously temporarily abandoned territory. The owner — a gallon of a man in a pint container, a tree or two on the shady side of 60, the brim of a ball cap topping a head given to a comical bobbling — returned before Karen did, slipping easily into the saddle of his own seat and immediately crossing the divide with a good-natured dig at the recently implemented ban on public smoking in Iowa.

“It’ll never last,” expounded the man who would soon enough introduce himself as Melchior, in story the name of one of the wise men, in legend the one who bore the gold, giving me, suddenly all ears, the gift of writer’s gold. “They’ll repeal it before the summer ends. You just watch,” he sputtered, the words whistling between missing teeth.

I nodded, far less in agreement, given the welcome improvement in oxygen content since the new law had gone into effect on July 1st, than in politeness, then watched as Karen cantered toward, then slipped between us, Melchior brightening visibly at the suddenly lovelier horizon, and almost immediately registering his improved prospects with the downing of the dregs of what might, under less fortuitous circumstances, have been his last call.

After that, all I had to do was listen.

He had grown up in the Poconos, spent a decade and then another, not one day of which he could ever live to regret, in the Navy, some of that stint, if I close-hauled his wake, in a dreamily remembered Hawaii. Along the way, he had met, married and later ex-ed the woman who had been his wife. At some point, too, and somewhat incongruously, he had studied art in the company of Andrew Wyeth. And somewhere two more roads had diverged in a wood, and Melchior had emerged by the one more traveled by, piloting the business end of a semi while another pair of decades slipstreamed by.

I’m not sure when he picked up the pilot’s license, although he was quick, and we’re talking in the next breath, to invite me up for a spin.

Now, I left out the part where Melchior related how he’d not so long ago given up riding a bike to the bar after he’d taken a tumble on the way home. Better, I suppose, to walk, wobble and make whatever headway against a beer-and-bourbon tide than to ever again do a header over those handlebars.

It would also help you to know that the only times I had ever enjoyed travel by air was when Ireland had been the destination. I can’t explain that, other than by some dead-reckoning of the soul that had, on those many ocean crossings, led me reassuringly home. Except for that, every other flight, almost always of a business persuasion, owed much to wing but more to prayer. Not only that, but a life detoured by all this recent education, had meant a life without much in the way of vacation, the upshot of which is that I’ve not been on a plane in 14 years. Yet here Melchior was, having walked away from a boozy bike wreck, teetering as precariously now on a bar stool as he had that accidental night on a bicycle seat, and going Frank Sinatra on me with his own version of “Come Fly with Me.”

So I did what you’d do and ignored the invitation.

As luck would have it, nature, in the form of a nicotine break, called, and Melchior, more deftly than I would have predicted, fingered a smoke from the pack, snagged his lighter with his other hand and followed temptation and the brim of his cap to the great outdoors.

A bit more luck, and any memory of that invitation would have been just that, memory. Instead, no sooner had Melchior remounted his bar stool when he tried again.

“Anytime you want to go up, you just let me know.”

I looked at him, took in the bobbling cap on the bobbling head, the merriment in his eyes, remembered in that instant all he had already told me, and, even as I reveled in the wonder, the utter and unexpected wonder, of the moment, dropped any pretense and bared my manhood.

“I’m not one for planes,” I confessed, choosing not to add, “unless Ireland’s on the far end of the flight path,” lest he trump my petty ante and offer to ferry me by air to Shannon.

With the grace born of long years of marriage, Karen, right on cue, vouched for my midair derring-don’t, grounding for good any further flight of fancy on the part of our newfound companion. The three of us moved on to talk idly of other things, then, at some point, Karen and I huddled a moment to share a thought, only to look back to see that Melchior, this time cigarettes and all, had himself become night and memory.

Wisdom is, often as not, a wistful thing.

You can, if you listen, hear it in Springsteen and, if “Thunder Road” is what you’re listening to, catch it in passing in the rear-view window of your own life. You can read it in the likes of a Whitman or Agee, sense it on prayer mat or pew, encounter it in proverb or, even better, the script for “Bull Durham.” And sometimes, just sometimes, when you’re entirely unaware, when you’re slouched on a stool, with the namesake of a wise man at your elbow, each of you bound for your own private Bethlehem under some distant and brighter star, wisdom, in its wisdom, bellies up to the bar and buys you a round on the house.

© 2008 by Dónal Kevin Gordon

Friday's child...

2008-07-13T11:28:00.001-07:00

For a guy who started out on a Friday the 13th 57 years ago today, I really can’t complain. After all, I’ve mostly sidestepped a more or less equal share of adversity, created opportunity where often there was none, been luckier overall than most, and if I’ve not quite lived the life I planned, I’ve certainly lived the life I wanted, at least in retrospect.

Oh, sure, I do seem to have a disproportionate number of what I call “Charlie Brown” moments, where, whether by whim or wile, the football of life is yanked away just as I’m about to send it toward the goalpost. But those moments, while seemingly frequent, are minor in impact and importance, and always more inconvenient than ever incapacitating.

Nor, perhaps in deference to my Friday the 13th start in life, am I a betting man, although, truth is, my caution has more to do with a long-ago San Gennaro Feast in New York’s Little Italy than it does to any ill-omened birth. Back then, at a time when I earned scarcely $13,000 a year writing copy for Doubleday and was supporting not just myself, but my mother, father and youngest brother, I allowed myself to be swindled by an unscrupulous street vendor running one of those ubiquitous games of chance, mistaking early luck for good fortune and not for the set-up it was. In the end, I lost about $100, maybe half a week’s pay, surely a week’s groceries, probably a big bite from the month’s rent, at a time when even the cost of a subway token to take me to Karen, whom I was then dating, was a luxury.

Since then, I’ve not wagered money, unless you count the thousands lost on houses that only rarely and only briefly let us capitalize on investment. I have, however, been somewhat profligate with time, betting months on a stint in Ireland intended to be a lifetime; months more on this or that writing project in the days when I was a hired pen; and entire years on graduate school, med school and residency, all in the name of affirming the writer I’d always been and becoming the physician I always dreamed to be.

Has it been worth it? Again, I’ve lived the life I wanted. But certainly those gambles on time have come at a cost, especially this last decade devoted to tacking that MD after my name.

I’ve already lamented to some that those ten years are ten ghosted years during which I seldom wrote a word, let alone the poetry, articles or books that might better have bricked a life’s work and mortared a legacy, that might, in the end, have built a happier life. The greater cost, however, has been exacted on my family, each and all of whom have dearly paid for my career change in laughter never shared and memories never made. Several of our children have, in this same lost decade, grown into adulthood, and no doubt too often recall their father as the worried med student prepping for the next exam or the wasted resident sleeping off a long night’s call. For Karen and me, too, full too many of our middle years have been years of unneeded stress and struggle. Nor can I argue that I am, as a physician, the better for my family’s sacrifice, since the practice of medicine, for all its inherent idealism and altruism, is today less practice than it is process, done at the behest of hospital employers, insurance and pharmaceutical companies to whom productivity, as measured in patients seen and prescriptions written, and efficiency, as charted in procedures avoided and dollars saved, is what makes the stethoscope go around.

The nursery rhyme would have me, as Friday’s child, loving and giving, and over the course of this lengthening life I have tried, I have really tried. That much I know. But I also know that I have too often failed. And to those who have paid the price for that failure, those I love most and to whom I have given much but not enough, my gift to you, on this my own 57th birthday, is, even if papered in heartfelt regret, the equally sincere hope for brighter days to come.

© 2008 by Dónal Kevin Gordon

After the deluge...

2008-07-12T17:24:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday, Karen and I went into Iowa City for the Jazz Festival, a three-day annual affair made more celebratory this year after the June floods that devastated eastern Iowa, including Iowa City.

Strolling toward the Pentacrest lawn, venue for the Jazz Festival, across the higher ground of the city’s east side, you’d be hard-pressed, as we were, to find evidence of the Iowa River’s mad slosh through Iowa City: the odd poster trumpeting a flood-relief benefit; here and there tiers of sandbags buttressing walls which, in the end, never saw water; and, only if you had paused in the library lobby on the way, a display of FEMA clean-up booklets.

Not unless you were to amble across the Pentracrest and around the Old Capitol to the portico fronting the building’s west façade and overlooking the river would you get a glimmer, and even there just a glimmer, of the deluge that was: ductwork funneling fouled air from the bowels of the university’s new journalism building; strands of yellow police tape, even from this distance spiraling in the evening breeze and warning the curious from the recently swamped Iowa Memorial Union, where, photographs attest, the river had had its way with the lower-level food courts and university bookstore, ransacking the place to the envy of the most frenzied burglar and swirling the ensuing mess into a sodden mass; the Iowa Avenue bridge, normally four lanes and doing a kind of limbo beneath the bar of a railroad bridge, now bottlenecked to two lanes, courtesy of a sinkhole the river had gouged from the eastbound lanes; and all around and everywhere the brickwork of buildings sporting the high-water scars of the Iowa River’s grimy embrace.

Although not within view from the Capitol portico, things were worse still on the river’s west bank, where the university’s arts campus, including the nationally renowned Hancher Auditorium, scene of concerts, graduations and regular visits from the likes of the Joffrey Ballet, was all but drowned a few weeks ago when the river leaped, all but laughing, the half-mile-long sandbag dike intended to elbow the flood away. A short drive away, Dubuque Street, one of Iowa City’s main approaches from points north, remained closed as of the weekend. At high tide, Dubuque had bottomed the lake the river had become, and the street’s usual course could then be traced only in the outline of streetlights, the poles stilting the river like a flock of outsized flamingos.

But that was then, and the Jazz Festival was now, with the Iowa River itself, like some sated ogre returned to its cave, in most places again back in its banks.

Coincidentally, the evening we were there one of the headlining groups hailed from New Orleans, its members undoubtedly more intimate with the effects of water than they’d ever dreamed to be. Regardless, the music was memorable, the weather, at this point in an Iowa summer for an Irish guy whose inner thermostat tops out at 80 degrees, deliciously pleasant, the audience of several thousand rife for people-watching. Here were kids for whom every tree was an invitation to climb; there, lovers, still courting high school as much as each other, their eyes, smiles and occasional, socially-acceptable caress a reminder, to any not too hoary to have forgotten, of youthful summers past; and everywhere families, friends and couples, like Karen and me, forgetting, flood and all else, for this shared moment on a summer’s eve.

Many of these same people would also have been among the army of sandbaggers, who, a month ago, sought to keep a river at bay. On that mid-June Saturday, Madison Street had been lined with anthills of sand, each crawling with volunteer workers scooping, bagging, tying and stacking. A fleet of trucks, Bob-Cats and front-end loaders scurried from hill to hill, back-up beepers announcing their unscheduled comings and goings, their business ends hefting and hauling bags by heaps and hundreds to the waiting receiving lines of sandbag slingers, Karen and me and two of our children among them, who would then pass the bags hand to hand to the river’s edge. I read later that 100,000 sandbags were laid in the course of that single Saturday, a testament to the hundreds of people who rallied that day to the cause. Indeed, even in the face of imminent heartbreak, it was heartwarming to see so many do so much in so short a time, all in the name of saving the city they love.

In the end, the river pulled its punch, but not before a historically telling blow, cresting on June 15th at 31.53 feet, a foot and a half lower than expected, but three feet higher than the previous record set in 1993. Nor was the Iowa River in any hurry to leave, unlike the Cedar River farther north, which crested on June 13th and slinked back below flood stage eight days later. Instead, not until July 7th, some three weeks after cresting, did the Iowa slip again below its own flood stage. And, as impressive as that might be, upstream along the Iowa River at the Coralville Lake Reservoir, the flood called it quits only after topping off at a bit more than 717 feet, water as deep as a 70-story building is high, the top five of those feet tumbling for days over the spillway at the rate of tens of thousands of cubic feet per second. The word biblical comes quickly to mind.

© 2008 by Dónal Kevin Gordon

By way of explaining...

2008-07-09T16:54:00.000-07:00

In Shetland, that scattershot of islands at Scotland’s far northern edge, there is in the midst of a midsummer’s night a half-hour span when the day in its dying leaps the horizon, only, in an instant, to change its mind and to shinny again up the cliff face, renewed and ready as ever to gild a dawn. It is a twilit time, neither light nor dark, neither day nor night, a time somewhere between and known to locals as the Simmer Dim.

Back in 1989, back when I was a comparative lad of 38, I was myself in a kind of Simmer Dim, a somewhere-between time that was, admittedly, as much frame of mind, one occasioned by my family’s desire to move back to Ireland, a move stymied then and forever by a house in Vermont that we couldn’t sell, owing to a well contaminated by road salt. Eventually, the problem was remedied; eventually, the house sold, albeit at such a loss that the seed money that would have bankrolled the move and allowed us to sink new roots in the Old Sod had gone, all too literally, down the drain.

It was in that summer of the salted well, with a planned solo jaunt to Ireland providing the excuse to hopscotch Scotland to Shetland, that I visited this Ultima Thule of the ancients, lured largely by a longstanding, but otherwise inexplicable, tug in that direction, and partly by a writer’s more understandable desire to stand entirely alone and at the edge of the world.

In fact, in the course of that visit, I would do exactly that, abandoning a hired car in the car park at the Hermaness Nature Preserve at the northernmost tip of Shetland’s northernmost isle of Unst, striding two miles and more to cliff’s edge, then, with not a soul to be seen or heard, stood staring north, beyond the rocky scarp of Muckle Flugga, to a far and imagined polar cap; east, more or less, to Norway; west, by some compass of the mind, to Greenland. And still, all these years and miles later, how easily I recall myself there again, how comforting once more the solace of all but unbroken sea and all but endless sky.

Think of it…

There I was. Absolutely and utterly alone. My feet having traversed a long length of moor and bracken, my entire being at long last at land’s end. Before me now a ragged edge of earth, grey sky overhead, grey ocean beyond, and, as I drew nearer the brink, gulls and guillemots skimming near rock and farther foam.

Some twenty years later, the mind’s eye all too tauntingly allows me to see my younger self at that particular precipice, not knowing then what I all so well know now. That life would lead me again, back from that latest cliff, back to the relative safety of Vermont, and, later still, after Notre Dame and graduate school, to Iowa and to the edge again, this time, at age 49 and with five kids in tow, in the form of medical school. Graduation meant only another cliff, with the roiling sea of residency beyond, and, still farther and yet finally, to harbor again, not so much as a physician, but as an adult. Indeed, throughout medical school, I had dreamed often of days to come beyond its puerile, boot-camp-like atmosphere, while throughout residency, I had teased myself forward by the unabandoned notion that at its end I would again be the adult I’d been a decade earlier, free once more to chart my days as I wanted to chart them, with nary the shoal of a rotation nor the shelf of some requirement to put to lee, even as I sped then, as I speed now, full sail forward into this, our shared Simmer Dim of unknowing.

(If the spirit proverbially moves, I will tell you more of my decades-long transition from salaried penman to freelancer to physician, but, for now, do permit me passage.)

For those so inclined, here’s a poem from the past, regrettably without its original line breaks (the vagaries of Blogger remain frustratingly vague to me):

In the Simmer Dim

I.

Night falls and catches itself
before hitting bottom,
leaving light enough to still be light,
light enough that
midnight here is only midnight
on the clock, but not out there,
not there where Shetland’s barrowed
isles speedbump the Atlantic
and once-drowned Jarlshof
slumbers again at Sumburgh,
its spectral sentries listening still
to the lapping of ocean, the licking of sea.

II.

Water
ran everywhere that first morning,
running in rivulets on the green sponge
of Stanydale, running tea-brown
across my shoetops and wanting now
only to be boiled into whisky.

Beyond that rise rose a gate,
and beyond the gate gaped a hole
where once a temple stood
and true believers, wetted much
as any field or stone, had cowered
then in the fear of faith.

There is wind here,
there is always wind, the scent of salt,
the spittle of sea and little else. Neither
farm nor farmer. Sheep nor shepherd.
Boat nor boatman. Time circles,
hovers, wings away.

III.

I had come because I had
always wanted to come.
Because a finger traced once
across a map had led me
to this fringe of island fringe.

To Thule, the ancients called it,
to the edge of the world.
And now I’m here. Straddling
past and present. Scanning
the sea of the coming time
and seeing only sea. Lost.
Lost in the simmer dim.

The view from the porch...

2008-07-04T16:32:00.000-07:00

From where I sit, the flag on our porch droops in the late afternoon of this Fourth of July.

One can’t look at it for more than a moment without reflecting, as have many before me, on its meaning and its cost. Wars, causes, lives, the hopes that sugar forward both the life of a nation and the lives of its citizens, the declaration, that singular Declaration of Independence, that all those years ago set it all in motion, commemorated today, as it has been for two centuries and more, in the words of the prescient John Adams, “with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other” — all measured in what is right now, on my porch, on this July 4, 2008, a languid field of red, white and blue.

Some in Washington some years ago saw in that same starred banner a call to arms, counting more on ruse than right that those easily led would sheepishly follow, and, more cynically still, that those easily swayed would saunter behind. All too unhappily, they were at once right and so wrong, and as a people we all bear the consequences, in the form of diminished respect among our friends, increased hatred among our enemies, a loss everywhere of the uniquely human hopes and dreams woven into every inch of the fabric that is our shared history.

The current resident of the White House can, in language both verbal and physical, bloviate, as he so often does and did so again today from the portico of Monticello, about the virtues of liberty. But he himself, who in his youth so famously signed in liberty's name only to infamously sidestep its defense, lacks virtue. Easy it is to wrap one's cause, however ill-imagined and self-serving, in a flag reddened by lives lost in its name; easy it is to snatch from the world its shroud of sympathy in the wake of 9/11 and to use it, callously, to shroud one's own oedipal quest for glory. Harder still to lift from its ashes a nation wronged, to rise above the hatred that so obviously fed that wrong, to twin grief to what Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature," to truly make might equal to right.

Instead, here we all are, deep in the afternoon of this Fourth, long in the coming night of this most disappointing presidency, many, if not most, of us contemplating a different dawn.

And perhaps, just perhaps, the way forward lies in, of all things, following the flag.

Now by that I do not mean the blind adherence to the jingoism that has led us into this, our current, epochal dead end. Rather, I mean a new beginning, not just a blind eye to our historical inheritance, but a re-dedication to the sacrifice inherent in stars, the values intrinsic in stripes — to nothing less than a rebirth of liberty bought at such a cost by those before us, of whom so much was so often asked, by whom so much was so often given.

All of us, you, me, our families, friends, neighbors, can, if we wish, be the people those vaunted forefathers wanted us to be; can, if we want, subscribe again to what Jefferson termed the "unalienable rights" of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; can, if we we choose, remind ourselves, as the author of the Declaration did, "that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it."

I exhort you, my friends, to wish, want and choose, and to do so wisely.

© 2008 by Dónal Kevin Gordon

A river ran through it...

2008-07-02T21:54:00.000-07:00

I have twice had occasion this week to visit Cedar Rapids, the first time on Monday to welcome the new residents at a picnic, the second on Saturday to send off the graduating residents.

On Monday, for example, the path to the picnic led us across over the Cedar River by way of the Eighth Avenue bridge. Perhaps 50 feet south lies what was once a railroad bridge across the same river, but is now a twisted span that has become an oversized trap, one all too effective at catching every manner of trash flowing downriver, from the plastic bric-a-brac of lives that once were and are now forever changed, to tree limbs of every size, to entire parts of houses. Also imprisoned within the bridge’s contorted fretwork are fully laden railroad cars, parked intentionally on the span in the hope of stabilizing steel against what was two weeks ago the imminent onslaught of water. All too obviously, that ploy failed, and now those same cars are either, like some giant’s jewelry, spun within the same steel, or, discarded, like so much dross, bottoming the river.

The same path also had us veering here and there around road debris, usually unidentifiable in passing, although when we got to the picnic and learned that one of the residency staff had earlier slit a tire on a domestic roadside bomb of a boxcutter, I was glad to have given way to the river’s scattered last laughs.

Other sights: everywhere, in every direction, what were once sidewalks heaped with the detritus of the wants and necessities of modern life — refrigerators, furnaces, water heaters, lumber of every shape and size, boxes containing whatever once was worth saving and now was, like it or not, lost. Those people, who must also count themselves among that loss, were gone. The luckier of the lot, doctors’ offices, city hall, Mercy Hospital, other businesses, sported their relative good fortune in the form of vans, trucks and, in the case of Mercy, nothing less than a necklace of semis, courtesy of disaster clean-up companies that have, in the wake of the deluge, become their own kind of flood.

Most memorable of all on that Monday: the smell, so redolent, so inescapable that, to me, it gave new meaning to the word “stench.” Think sewage. Now factor in the olfactory herbage of garbage. Now layer in god-knows-whatever the river only knows. Imagine yourself, for this, this whiff of a moment, in a landfill heretofore unimaginable. Now, breathe, breathe deeply of what was weeks ago a city alive. You cannot, will not, forget.

Can I add more?

Only this: last night, after leaving the residency graduation, we drove south on I-380 through Cedar Rapids, midnight, more or less, and, more more than less, its own garden of evil. To my left the downtown Crowne Plaza hotel, on any other night ablaze with tumescent swooners or more-so honeymooners, the odd corporate-card layover or a weekending family or three, now dark, a single room on a penultimate floor inexplicably alit. Around it block after block of apartment buildings and office towers, and even the enisled city hall itself, all, all, in ink. Further south still, whole neighborhoods, power still out, the lanes between homes shadowed in streetlights, the homes themselves no longer homes, just houses, each one fronted by its own pile of debris (a ton per house, I read, some 300,000 tons overall), each with its red, yellow or green placard on the door whispering, respectively, to drive-by passers-by of doom, hope and the eventual return of owners. (To give you some sense of how widespread that doom and how spartan that hope, some 45,000 people in Cedar Rapids — fully one-fifth of the city’s population — have been displaced by the flood, and hundreds of houses are expected to have their own close encounter with the bulldozer. And that’s only Cedar Rapids; elsewhere in Iowa, the story is much the same, or worse.)

And, oh, oh, oh god, the smell, oh,no, the stench.

We here, Karen, me, the kids, are among the spared — and surely blessed — yet all too mindful of the many friends and co-workers who have lost some or everything. Whatever prayers you might want to loft, do so for them. We’re okay — and, again, surely blessed.

© 2008 by Dónal Kevin Gordon