Solstice 2003

Solstice, 2003

Dear Ones,
Alright already! I haven’t forgotten, I am just a little behind. I’m getting to it, just hold on, there. OK, here goes the 12th annual Not-Really-a-Holiday-Letter Holiday Letter. The motivation for me, I will tell you up front, is to inspire guilt in old friends, that I wrote and they didn’t, so you owe us one…call, write, or something. There is also a certain inertia after 11 years—can’t stop now. That said, I will now launch into the usual discussion of our year, the world in general, throw in a few warm-and-fuzzies at the end, and call it a wrap.
We are carrying on carrying on in Delaware, living in pleasant squalor in our ranch house by the Nanticoke. Nevermind that we can’t have guests over anymore, since all the bathrooms have crumbled into broken-tiled ruins, now covered (temporarily) with Plexiglas and caulk, just to tide us over til we win the lottery. Nevermind that the spare bedroom is taken over with sewing machines, and the dining room with computers, and both are metastasizing to all the surrounding rooms. Nevermind the junk in the front yard overgrown with “native flora”. It’s home. You just can’t be allowed to see it, lest you realize we have “gone native”, and are more red of neck than the reddest redneck who ever necked. The kids are good. We got a new one this year, on our usual whim. Everett already has his Ph.D. in Ebonics, but has been studying Chinese at our local Chinese restaurant, spurred on by a love of Chinese movies, as best we can figure. He also spent a month in an immersion Chinese language camp in northern Minnesota this summer. (he minored in Minnesowta Accent) His principal knew this, so when a Chinese exchange student arrived to her host family, and it immediately became apparent that it wasn’t going to work out, Everett was asked if we couldn’t pinch hit. Well the conversation here at home went something like:

Catherine (from the next room, while watching the news): “Honey, what would you think about having an exchange student here for the school year?”
Me (in the kitchen, reading): “I dunno, it would be OK I guess.”
Catherine: “I was just wondering.”
Me: “Oh. OK.”

Next day, the meaning of this innocent-sounding interchange became clear. When I arrived home from work, I found that Shu-Ting Cheung, a Hong-Kong teenager here for her senior year, was already ensconsed in Hannah’s bedroom, and Hannah had moved into the basement, now known as “her lair”. Shu-Ting is a funny, sweet kid, and a great role model of hard studying for our kids, and doesn’t eat much, so I can’t complain. She has broadened our horizons considerably, as I hope we have hers, also. Everett’s Chinese is coming along most amazingly, and he is off to Beijing next year for his junior year in a public high school. He wants to be Ambassador to China. Nice work, if he can get it. I advised him that the path to that career goal usually involves becoming filthy rich first, but he seems undaunted. Hannah, meanwhile has had a great year of softball, going as starting shortstop and second baseman to both to the Eastern Regional Tournament in Little league, and to the State Tournament on her High School team. She has college all figured out, having been accepted to NAPS, the Naval Academy Prep School, which will get her math and such up to speed for starting the Naval Academy in 2005. Success at NAPS guarantees her a spot at the Academy. She is pumped up! She wants to be a Marine, and kill bad guys. Go figure. But I’m hoping more for an Aegis Destroyer Captain. It will save us a cool hundred-K in college tuition, true enough. But we are proud of her and her determination to get accepted and go. This was her gig from the get-go.
Nat, meanwhile, is in an Army M.P. in Germany, after a year in Kosovo. They are being posted to Baghdad in April or May for a year or more. He seems resigned to soldiering through and getting out of the Army when his time is up. He is doing OK, doing a lot of growing up a long way from home.
Michele is finishing her degree in Philosophy as we speak, and graduates summa cum laude this week. Part of her practicum was to teach ethics and philo to prisoners at the local state prison. She got an eyeful of reality (not) TV there. We are so proud of her. She did marry her pilot boyfriend this summer, and is settled briefly in Salisbury. Eric, my new son-in-law, is training up on the regional jet CRJ 200 for Air Wisconsin/United Express. They are off to Chicago to live in February. We will miss having them close. He’s a real sweetheart.
Catherine has been (mostly) retired, sewing quilts for wounded soldiers, and generally doing what she wants. She is immersed and in love with the Patrick O’Brian series of sea novels, forging through the audio books, while sewing. (Addictive stuff, but worth it. Catch Master and Commander, for that fatal first taste) Being retired agrees with her, as I suspect it would me, too. She dotes on (spoils) the dogs, Tory and Rudy, keeps the kids in line, and saves a little energy for me, since I am home more. She is going to Montana in February (yikes!) to be a locum tenens midwife on an Indian reservation. We here on the home front will be living on canned stew the whole time, but we can hack it. Catherine and I are both trying to get our minds around being empty nesters this year, as we will very soon be. We actually have some diversions planned. Cath began to have a hankering for a boat again, and over my strenuous objections, we found ourselves boat shopping. A few sailboat tours later, she declared her desire for a motor boat, and the shopping became more serious. We wound up buying an Eagle 40 trawler, a slow, sturdy, workboaty kind of boat. We named her Chance, after our favorite force of nature. They had just finished a cute little marina in by our river not 3 miles from here, so it is the height of convenience to get down there, and we have spent many a night down there, reveling in the lapping of waves and the slapping of halyards. Our trip across the Chesapeake to put her up for the winter was a daymare of 30-knot winds, steep 8-10 foot waves and green water over the rails, but we were proud to have made it, and quite sure after all, that the boat is tougher than the people inside. I do like being a skipper again.
As for me, I am working away, more during the day, and more administratively, less clinically, so life is better, apart from the odd SARS scare. We are building a new department, and have a new clinical computer system, so all is chaos, which is after all our specialty. I have been riding my recumbent bike a good bit, to the amazement of the local rednecks, who have a hard time with adults who still ride bicycles, let alone racing lawn chairs. I just finished my second year of online law school, with exam grades pending and 3rd year starting mid January. I also passed the big hurdle in June, the 1st year California Bar Exam. But I got way behind after studying for that test, and then with Michele and Eric’s wedding, Hannah’s softball, Elizabeth Roberts’ wedding to Craig Gordon all competing for time in August, I got put on academic probation, ‘til I caught up. I was sweating it out at double speed these last three months, but I guess I squeaked by with the most superficial of readings in my subjects. My new mantra is Ellen DeGeneres’s voice from Finding Nemo—Just keep swimming, just keep swimming.
My patients continue to amaze. The pathos I see played out daily removes any desire to watch Judge Judy or Jerry Springer. I live that stuff every day at work. I had a 5-person motor vehicle accident come in, all the victims on long boards and neck collars, complaining mightily of pain, and of course all non-English speakers. The ambulance crews report 5 “Hispanic” patients, but they all turn out to be Creole-speaking Haitians. (The crews just knew they were some kind of furriner.) We get them undone, examined and x-rayed, and the cop comes in later with eyewitnesses telling us that three of the ‘victims’ were not even in the car. They had been waiting on the side of the road for the wreck to happen, and jumped in afterwards. I was furious to find out after all that. I would have cheerfully cut their clothes off them into useless ribbons, (standard Trauma procedure) and given them foley catheters, had I known, but silly me. I thought when you came in on a long board, you were hurt. It is a bitch when you can’t believe anybody. Another guy called up in a snowstorm from a local crack hotel. Apparently his “fiancée” was pregnant, and they were out of food. He wondered if we could deliver some bread and milk to his hotel room, and was outraged that we wouldn’t get right on that problem. We all speak French, of course. “Fiancée” is defined as “the bitch/motherfucker I been sleepin’ wit lately”. That becomes “my baby-momma/ baby-daddy” with the passage of time. (and a 10 centimeter head through the birth canal.) Ouch, that’s gonna leave stretch marks. I have entire conversations with baby-mommas about their feverin’ babies, during which the mom never takes her thumb out of her own mouth, not even to talk to me. And, I have experts galore directing care from afar. I had a baby brought in with nothing apparently wrong, except he had been fussy, and had been banging his head against the bars of his crib. The opening complaint was “He been bangin his head on the crib and won’t sleep. Mom-mom say he need a CAT scan.” I couldn’t even speak. I did inquire as to whether mom-mom was a retired neuroradiologist, just to be sure I wasn’t missing something vital, but no, mom-mom was just an average Ja-náe. So I grabbed a stuffed cat that was in the nursing station by purest coincidence, brought it back to the bedside, waved it solemnly over the child while making a low, wavering whistle, and pronounced the CAT scan normal. That really put me over the edge, I am afraid.
And so, fellow travelers, as we wind our way through another year’s cycle of senseless violence, and mark the passage of our brief lives with our own minor triumphs over stupidity, let us ponder our good fortune at having crossed paths at all, and draw together to push back the darkness and fear. The darkness has loomed large this year, with another war, nuclear threats from the ever more petulant Kim Jong Il, another election year of lies and damned lies, and SARS lurking in every cough in my waiting room. But in the darkness are a few shining examples, a few points of light. Who can but thrill at our brave Commander in Chief flying to Baghdad for the most expensive turkey dinner ever served? And who could contemplate without shuddering, the prospect of a stunt like that giving us President Dick Cheney? Even with a personal look around, Dubya still can’t find those pesky weapons of mass destruction. Peace is Hell! Who will ever forget the chutzpah of “Baghdad Bob”, reporting live from the battle front? At least we caught that rat-bastard Saddam in the mother of all rat-holes. Let the Iranians have him. And who could imagine that Oxycontin would turn out to be addictive? (Oxy? What a Rush!) I know I worry daily about whether or not Michael will be exonerated, and get back to his transition from black boy to white woman. So brave! So twisted! And what of Ahhnold? Large, in charge…forget his tag line, “I’ll be back.” Now it is “You have a great ass!” I pause to note the passing of some notables from our midst. Fond farewell to Steven Ambrose, who gave us accessible, readable stories of our fathers’ and grandfathers’ war, and filled me with love and admiration for what a noble and spectacular thing they did. (See Band of Brothers!!) Bon voyage to Johnny Cash, Senators Paul Simon and Paul Wellstone, David Brinkley, Buddy Ebsen, Katherine Hepburn, Art Carney, Dr. Robert Atkins, and Dolly the Cloned Sheep. And a special farewell to Fred Rogers, who helped raise our kids and lots of others. And so, dear friends, as this year draws to a whimpering end, be of good cheer. Be faithful to what is right, foursquare against the forces of evil. And don’ be hatin’, yo. If you are charged with raising young’uns, find the strength to resist the easy path, and to hold them to standards your grandparents would have been proud of. My generation might have got off easy, but we have to draw the line in the sand here and now. May your enterprises be fruitful, and your circle of acquaintances ever larger and warmer. And may you keep a warm spot in the corner of your heart for us, as we do you. Cheers!