THE BEGINNING

September, 2019

Pa

Pop

lollipop

red lollipop

little red lollipop

The little red lollipop

The little red round globe of a rounded red lollipop his father gave him still in its crinkly-fresh, crinkly-clear wrapper was tucky-tucked inside his navy blue velvety corduroy, pleated overalls.

He liked the feel of the raised lines of material on his pants leg. He had such glee, such joy caressing those lines. More, more. He didn’t know the words “Infinite pleasure.”  Those lines shifted ever so slightly with his touch.

His big dark brown eyes wide with pride, awe, immense admiration for his father, the doctor as the tall, quiet man gently picked up his young son for a hug and a kiss on top of the head just before leaving for work. He glowed.

Staring at the door, seeing, imagining, believing with every fiber of his young being - his somehow already old soul- that his father, the good, benevolent giant, the god of his young life was on the other side of that door off to incredible adventure.

His mother was off in the kitchen already at this early hour starting the kidney bean soup for dinner. One of the boy’s favorites, he would eat it hungrily over a delicious mound of white rice.

 The father, just now on the outside of the door, felt a pull at his heartstring.  Sadness, with tenderness brought a single tear. He saw how his little son admired, idolized him. He felt unworthy. He was after all the youngest intern, just out of medical school, bills, monstrous student loans, he was off to yet another grueling shift. Yes they lived in a beautiful building but money was tight. 1950 He was already drinking more. More than in med school, more than in college. More than in high school. Each year it was just a little more. One more drink at a party. One more nightcap. He heard there was a group for doctors. Like AA.

***

The little boy was used to being alone. His mother was always busy, shopping, cooking, endlessly making the house spotless, organized. Would we today say she had some OCD?

She did read to him three times a day. They took little walks to the greengrocer. Less often they saw a friend of hers who had a little child, another sad woman, sadder even than his mother. She was divorced, living in a studio in a nearby hotel. Her husband was the local butcher.  Not the gentlest of men, though not overtly abusive. He divorced her because he was so bored with her silence, told the judge they were sexually incompatible. He felt trapped in an airless dark blue darkness. He felt heavy velvet drapes, dark heavy velvet blue drapes smothering him. Such was the dream, the nightmare he had nightly.

Neither woman spoke much. They held hands once. That was it. That was all. There might have been more had they lived in more modern times.

The little child had imaginary playmates, imaginary worlds like those he saw in cartoons.  He could speak and walk at a very young age. Like his mother, though, he said little.

He imagined the god of his young life.

He had a recurring dream.

The god turned into a monster.

Years later, in middle school when he learned about Venn Diagrams, it seemed his family were circles barely intersecting, barely touching, barely interacting or overlapping. He desperately remembered his father’s hugs and lollipops from his earliest childhood.

He pushed away a barely noticeable thought about a monster. He nearly got hit by a bus. That fear, that momentary panic, not his first brush with accidental death, stayed with him for decades.

In high school his friend from another divorced family once told him how his mother escaped with him when he was a toddler. Escaped from a physically abusive husband. They had lived with her parents who weren’t the calmest, always fighting. The mother eventually saved enough to get their own place. Living paycheck to paycheck until her son was old enough to contribute.

The doctor’s boy by now lived in relative affluence. Still, he was mostly still. Still

and hidden, silent. Not quite mute- he did answer questions correctly in school. Mostly his head was in a book. His voice, his god was now on the violin.

1964 His father offered him a choice: Canada, Europe, Mexico. He chose West Point.

Then medical school. In Vietnam there were daily brushes with death- his, his patients, his colleagues, the Vietnamese. Death was all around him. Death somehow gave his life more urgent meaning. 

He was a good soldier, a better doctor, a psychiatrist who didn’t rush his patients. His compassion grew from the self-care he had had to learn being alone so much of his life. True his parents were models of self-sufficiency. True too they did relate better the longer they were married, especially after they got remarried after their brief but emotionally brutal divorce.

He even remembered them hugging, sometimes a rare standing three way hug as one or more of them were off to another adventure. Also on the anniversaries of the births and deaths of loved ones, in memoriam also on anniversaries of national and international tragedies, after wakes, shivas, when one of them came home from a trip abroad.

He tried living at home with his parents for a few weeks about a year after he returned from Nam. His nightmares scared his parents. He understood them. So did his psychiatrist. A small studio was a better venue for his growing sense of calm return to at least an approximation of normalcy. He understood nothing would even be the same.

***

By the time he was established in his own medical practice, his family began to have a few friends. He was inspired to reach out to cousins he hasn’t seen since childhood.  He toyed with the idea of going to his fifteen year high school reunion. The thought of not measuring up prevented him. He understood his envy of the best parts of other people was a distortion, a perverse filter. He couldn’t shake it most of the time - except when he was deep in the process of work, study or exercise.

Still, he did socialize more. His parents had more and more friends. That surprised him- made him smile. So people could change. He always held fast to that belief with his patients. It was more difficult to believe with those he loved. Difficult to believe of himself. 

His parents continued to l became more social, throwing parties if you could believe it!His father grew a beard, retired young, took up Ti chi.

His mom went back to school when he was in middle school. She had started as a secretary as so many women did in 1958. Her competence, her quiet brilliance soon had her bosses giving her their work- without extra pay.

It did have one benefit. It proved to her she could do more. She started one of the first all-female ad agencies- clients -at first were only small women-owned businesses- until Loria Vandengelt gave her the account. Then it was the upward part of an exponential curve.

***

The young psychiatrist was discharged honorably from his wartime service. He married a Vietnamese woman he had rescued from a burning village. He taught her English. He taught her psychology. He taught her everything he knew...

She left him.

She left him saying “Enough of your Pygmalion Complex.”

He had to laugh. There was enough truth in it. It still hurt. He thought he had loved her. At least they had no kids. Though he wanted them. 

That was when he stayed with his folks briefly.

 ***

The little Red Light district in Bangkok reminded him of Saigon. Smelled worse. He couldn’t stand the smell. He hightailed it to a greener pasture. A greener pasture in Scotland where a good old golf course stood in decay. An air of infinite ruin permeated the local airport. There was an air of dread, of worse things to come.

The lines at airports used to bother him. They would infuriate him, remind him of an endless stream of frustrations, pulling him toward an abyss of self-hatred. A monstrous self-loathing he attributed to being endlessly lonely- trained to be self-sufficient, but lonely as - well there really was no sufficiently dire word- lonely since he could remember, on the other side of the door after his beloved father went off to work.

A recurring nightmare of a scene reminiscent of Harry Potter: catacombs, monsters, the seemingly infinite deaths during Europe’s Medieval Black Plague. He imagined a circle of Hell, or not quite that intense- perhaps in an up-dated version of Dante’s Purgatory- intense and initially frightening enough- where those infinite dead reached up hungrily to grab his legs. Pull his shins down to the nether-waters to add to their nefarious infinite ranks.

Would he meet his recently departed father, his grandfathers, his great-great ancestors -Lucy?!

Pulling himself back from the reverie, a seemingly pointless view into the abyss of human misery, he thought of Siddhartha after many months of the Buddha’s first mediation meeting no longer demons of the external world but versions -as if in a fun-house infinite set of mirrors- his own demons. Realizing those could never be forgotten or changed, he learned to live above them. Perhaps he could even draw from, be energized by their dark, monstrously frightening force. It was, after all, unreasonable to think the world, the universe, all of reality could only be light. If it were monochromatic it would be infinitely dull.

***

The Red Lights of the airplane handlers’ landing flares caught his eye. The flight’s landing, its night landing shifted its path ever so slightly with guidance from those lights.

In a way, he envied those people who smoked on the periphery, at open doorways blowing smoke into the infinite air. He hated smoke. But still. The idea of being both in and out was always appealing. He desperately wanted to be an insider but never had learned to be calm- sufficiently calm in peer to peer relationships. It wasn’t usually too bad one on one but even three people- despite all his psychiatric and psychological training, his endless reading and writing, his meditation- even three people made him feel like that third wheel, a squeaky one at that, compelled to talk, revealing more than he wanted, giving away power.

Full stop...

The plane had come to a full stop. The landing-gear in place, the stairs awaiting their transient human cargo.

He arrived two days before going back to work. His return, he wanted to be fresh, clear-minded, fresh-minted. He planned out his usual post-flight routine: sleep, lots of water, vegetable juices, warm baths, vigorous exercise, chores, naps.

In a random night walk from the hospital to his high rise, he saw a sign he had never before seen. Lowery Yoga-all night classes.

He passed by every night for the next week.

Finally he walked up the seemingly infinitely old stairs.

********* THE BEGINNING *********