Friday's child...

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