January 28, 2022
Dear Interested Readers,
Note to readers: A friend and interested reader once told me that I was a better memoirist than an essayist. This week I am taking that observation to heart. As you read the first section of this week’s offering, you may wonder where I am going. You may even wonder just what the story from my childhood has to do with healthcare or anything that is tangentially related to healthcare. Getting into a subject is often a challenge for me, and that was certainly the case this week. I finally resorted to the hope that reviewing a memory with you might get me going. I think I have told bits and pieces of this story before. It is even possible that I have told the whole story. Having written about a thousand pieces over the last fourteen years it is hard for me to remember just what I wrote and separate what I wrote from what I thought about writing. If you find the first part tedious or of no interest just skip it and move onto the second section, “Our Obsession With Apocalyptic Events.”
My Uncle Herbert, A Hero Who Never Told Me His Story
During the summer of 1954, I had one of the greatest adventures of my life. I was not nine years old until July, but for some reason, when school was out in late May my parents decided that I could fly alone from our new home in Waco, Texas to South Carolina to visit with my grandparents. My father thought I might stay a week or two before I got homesick. After about six weeks I was told to come home because my father missed me. I think the truth was that he was going on a fishing trip with a few of his buddies and wanted me to be at home to help my mother with my three younger siblings.
In retrospect, my parents may have felt guilty because they were not going to take their usual month-long trip back to the Carolinas that summer to visit their parents. Perhaps I was taking the trip as their replacement. My maternal grandfather had died of coronary disease and post-myocardial infarction CHF the previous summer. He was buried during the week of my eighth birthday.
I remember the trip as if I took it last week. After supper on the evening of my departure, we drove the one hundred miles from Waco to Love Field in Dallas where at about midnight I boarded a Delta Douglas DC3 carrying my briefcase full of comic books. I was treated like royalty. The stewardess pinned a pilot’s wings to my shirt and took me up to the cockpit to meet the captain and his copilot. The DC3 was the quintessential “puddle hopper.” Who knows? Maybe we were delivering the mail because we stopped in Shreveport, Louisiana, Jackson, Mississippi, and Birmingham, Alabama before finally reaching Atlanta in time for breakfast.
In Atlanta, one of my father’s friends from his seminary days helped me get a good breakfast and transfer to an Eastern Airlines Martin 404 for the final leg of my trip to Greenville, South Carolina. The Martin 404 was a distinctive twin-engined plane that you could enter through a stairway in the tail as well as by the usual stairway near the front of the plane. ( You can see the rear stairway in the pictures on the link.) I climbed on board from the rear and buckled up for the short flight of about one hundred forty miles to Greenville, South Carolina, my father’s hometown. I was revved from the moment I left Dallas until I finally landed in Greenville where I knew my father’s older brother, my Uncle Herbert, would meet me. I don’t think I slept at all on that trip. I was too excited. But, I also don’t remember feeling tired. Adrenaline is amazing.
I was excited that Uncle Herbert was meeting me. I had really only seen him once before, but my grandmother’s picture of him in his uniform with the insignia of a paratrooper had always fascinated me before I finally met him a couple of years earlier when he spent a few months with us in Oklahoma after a near-fatal accident. Uncle Herbert had been estranged from my grandfather even before the war. That was the reason he joined the Army in 1936. He reenlisted after Pearl Harbor. I had never met him before his accident because after World War II he had gone to the University of Arizona on the GI bill. After college, he moved further west to Southern California where he married a woman who had a daughter about my age. He seemed to have decided to leave the South behind.
He had seen none of us for years. My dad had invited him to come with his wife and stepdaughter to Oklahoma for a visit with us. Before cars were airconditioned many people would make the drive east from California across the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico at night when it was cooler. I remember seeing dusty cars with tags from western states that sported a waterbag hanging from the hood ornament.
The trip was a disaster. Uncle Herbert suffered a “broken back” and many other injuries and his wife had been killed when their car was hit by a trucker who had gone to sleep at the wheel of his eighteen-wheeler. My uncle lived because he was outside of the car changing a flat tire when the truck hit them. The car was thrown into a deep ravine. His wife died in the ambulance during the seventy-mile trip to the nearest hospital in New Mexico. Miraculously, his stepdaughter who was asleep in the back seat was not injured. Prior to that accident, my only contact with my uncle had been looking for hours at his picture in his army uniform that was hanging almost like a memorial on the wall above my grandmother’s console radio. On hot summer days, I would lie on the floor in front of the radio and study his picture while I listened to Sky King, The Lone Ranger, or the Green Hornet on that radio which now sits in my basement awaiting restoration that is at least forty years overdue.
Dad traveled to New Mexico and brought Herbert to our home in Shawnee when he was stable for travel. He was a mess. He was encased in plaster from just below his chin down to his hips. I spent hours with him in his room over the next few months. My father hated cigarette smoking and Uncle Herbert smoked Pall Malls by the carton. After I got to know him, I had the courage to ask him about his tattoo. I had not seen many tattoos, and I was fascinated by the black cat standing on the number thirteen that was tattooed on his left shoulder.
He told me that the tattoo was a regrettable event following an evening of drinking in Baltimore with army buddies before they were shipped to England during World War II. The other regrettable event of his youth was that he married a woman whom he did not know well just before being shipped out to England. She cashed his army paychecks while he was overseas and then divorced him before he returned from the war. That black cat must have meant something.
After he was better, Herbert went home to South Carolina. Past issues with my grandfather must have been resolved because he moved in with my grandparents and began graduate work in psychology at nearby Furman University. The stepdaughter had gone to live with her maternal grandparents. I met her only once some years later.
When the plane landed in Greenville and my uncle met me, the best was yet to come. We put the top down on his 1953 Mercury convertible and drove from the airport to my grandparent’s home which was located on a country road near Greenville. It was my first ride in a convertible. The fact that for the last forty-five years I have owned at least one convertible is probably related to the thrill of that first ride with the top down.
Uncle Herbert was engaged to a widow who would soon become my Aunt Sue. That summer Uncle Herbert and I took Sue to a lot of drive-in movies in that convertible. To my surprise, she called him Bill. His full name was William Herbert Lindsey and in the Army and for the rest of his life everybody except our family called him “Bill.”
After that summer, Bill and Sue were married and he began teaching psychology at Georgia Military Academy. A year or so later he escaped the South for good and took dual positions teaching psychology at the state college in Oneonta, New York, and serving as the psychologist for the local school district. My family visited him and Sue around 1960 in mid-winter. I had never seen so much snow. It was as if there was a tunnel from their driveway to their front door.
Uncle Herbert died of metastatic colon cancer in the summer of 1969 at the age of 52 while I was doing a research project at the University College Hospital in London. I sometimes wondered if his tattoo with the black cat standing on the number thirteen was emblematic of much of his life until I learned that over the last years of his life in Oneonta he was very active in his community and was much loved and respected for his contributions at the college, in the school system, and at his church.
During my uncle’s life, I did not know much about his military experience other than that he was a paratrooper and had been given a purple heart because he was wounded by a hand grenade during the Battle of the Bulge. I had seen the scars on his back. It was not until many years after his death that I learned from papers that my father saved that he won three bronze stars for bravery in action to go along with his purple heart.
He was one of the members of the “saving private Ryan” regiment of the 82nd airborne that parachuted in behind Omaha Beach the night before the sun came up on D-day. He was a sergeant and was decorated for exposing himself to enemy fire while recovering critical communications gear that fell at a distance from where they landed near the bridge over the Merderet River at La Fiere, Normandy. Capturing and holding the bridge was their objective. It is a famous military action. After being wounded at the Battle of the Bulge, he recovered in England and then returned to his unit for the final “Battle for Berlin.” Along the way, he was awarded two more Bronze Stars for his bravery and meritorious service. Like many of those who served, he never talked about his own small contribution to the effort to save the world from authoritarian maniacs and perpetrators of genocide who thought that they were superior to everyone else.
Our Obsession With Apocalyptic Events
The only movie I remember of the many that Uncle Herbert, Aunt Sue, and I saw that summer of 1954 was called “Five.” The movie scared me to death. It was about the last five people on earth after a nuclear catastrophe. There have been many other movies about the “end of the world.” I was in my midteens when Nevel Shute’s “On the Beach” starring Gregory Peck came out in 1959. We love “end of the world” movies. I found a list of the twenty-five best “end of the world movies” that was published last June. Neither “Five” nor “On the Beach” made the list. I wonder if it is because in those movies things were pretty much over for good. Like in “On the Road” by Cormac McCarthy which was made into a 2009 movie, there was no timely rescue from near disaster in “Five” or “On the Beach” and the best one could hope as the movie ended was for a long slow process of humanity and the rest of the living world starting a “do-over.”
Fiction isn’t true, but it works best when it reveals a truth. “Five” was remarkable because it went into production about five years after we dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and suddenly we possessed a source with apocalyptic potential. “On the Beach” was the same song, second verse. These days our apocalyptic potential may lie in climate change, or perhaps in contagion.
One of my most interesting experiences in medical school occurred during my first-year microbiology lab. We would touch a swab to some source of bacteria like mucous from our own mouth and then tap it on the agar of a Petri dish. The next day we would return and see blobs of bacteria on the agar. Our professor had us do some math and we discovered that the same rate of growth if sustained would in a short time fill the entire space of the lab, and then in not a very long time after that be a blob the size of the planet. His question to us was why doesn’t it happen? He answered his own question, “The bacteria drown in their own metabolic wastes!” (He used a cruder word than “metabolic wastes” for emphasis.) I think that he was advocating for the advantages of multisystem organisms that decided to join forces and devote some of their energy to waste removal.
Many times over the last few decades I have wondered if the apocalyptic end of the world in these movies was too sudden and overly dramatic. It is becoming more likely that if humankind engineers its own end it will be through the summation of wicked problems that one might consider “small stuff” which could be impolitely labeled with the same word my professor used when explaining why we aren’t smothered under the weight of a mass of bacteria. Solving the problems that have the potential to be the origin of a major shift in our collective future requires collective action. I fear that our increasingly polarized society, the widening economic gap between those with too many resources and those with not enough coupled with a pandemic of narcissism might collectively be our undoing because together they preclude the sort of collective action that is required to solve the problems that threaten our collective future for which personal wealth and power can’t protect anyone.
I was surprised to read in a column entitled “America Is Falling Apart at the Seams” that David Brooks is concerned that there is something seriously wrong in America that could send us into a terminal slide. Brooks uses the first two-thirds of his verbiage to deliver statistics that reveal an epidemic of bad behavior and deteriorating metrics. Then, in summary, he says:
But something darker and deeper seems to be happening as well — a long-term loss of solidarity, a long-term rise in estrangement and hostility. This is what it feels like to live in a society that is dissolving from the bottom up as much as from the top down.
He asks a key question and then like my microbiology professor tries to answer his own query:
What the hell is going on? The short answer: I don’t know. I also don’t know what’s causing the high rates of depression, suicide and loneliness that dogged Americans even before the pandemic and that are the sad flip side of all the hostility and recklessness I’ve just described.
After considering runaway social media, politics, and the permission that Donald Trump seemed to give many to make it difficult for marginalized populations, Brooks considers issues in sociology, the rise of single-parent households, the decline of religion, and culture in general, but he still can’t find an answer more specific than culture:
And some of the poisons must be cultural. In 2018, The Washington Post had a story headlined, “America Is a Nation of Narcissists, According to Two New Studies.”
But there must also be some spiritual or moral problem at the core of this. Over the past several years, and over a wide range of different behaviors, Americans have been acting in fewer pro-social and relational ways and in more antisocial and self-destructive ways. But why?
As a columnist, I’m supposed to have some answers. But I just don’t right now. I just know the situation is dire.
I read Brooks’ column before my wife and I decided to watch “Don’t Look Up” on Netflix last weekend. I knew nothing about the movie before we watched it but my wife keeps a list of movies that her friends recommend, and I was tired of watching football. Before watching the movie the only thing I knew was that it was another “end of the world” movie. Before watching the show what I thought was most remarkable was its cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Steep, Rob Morgan, Jonah Hill, Cate Blanchette, Tyler Perry, and many, many more.
After watching the movie, I have learned a little more about it. It was filmed pre-COVID. The project was apparently conceived as a statement by its writer, producer, director, Adam McKay that lampooned our apathy about the threat to the planet from global warmer and climate change. As Manohla Dargis wrote in her New York Times review in mid-December:
The director Adam McKay is not in the mood for nihilistic flights of fancy. Our planet is too dear and its future too terrifying, as the accelerated pace of species extinction and global deforestation underscore. But humanity isn’t interested in saving Earth, never mind itself, as the recent Glasgow climate summit reminded us. We’re too numb, dumb, powerless and indifferent, too busy fighting trivial battles. So McKay has made “Don’t Look Up,” a very angry, deeply anguished comedy freak out about how we are blowing it, hurtling toward oblivion. He’s sweetened the bummer setup with plenty of yuks — good, bad, indifferent — but if you weep, it may not be from laughing.
Perhaps it was brilliance, more likely it was luck, but for some reason, McKay presents a “surrogate” disaster to climate change in the form of a comet the size of Mount Everest that will hit the planet with the force of thousands of nuclear weapons and cause enough destruction to wipe life as we enjoy it from the planet. I think that as COVID has continued we see that we have even more to worry about that might cause our demise than just a sudden nuclear holocaust, a comet, or creeping global warming.
At the root of all of our vulnerabilities are the choices we make and the choices that we just don’t have the will to make together. Something deep within us seems to prevent us from doing the work together that so desperately needs to be done. Collective action is a concept that seems incompatible with the deep partisan divide which is the rate-limiting factor to the solution of many problems that could add together to be worse than a comet headed our way. I am reminded that God promises Noah that he will not destroy the earth again with water. That’s the promise of the rainbow. Speculation is that the next extinction event created either by God or a comet will be by fire. When, and if, an end comes, it may not even be more than by the summation of many small problems that are not dramatic at all. As T.S. Eliot suggests, the end may come, “Not with a bang but a whimper.” But that is just my speculation. What McKay does present in a chillingly effective way is that there will likely be a moment in time after which there will be no way out. After the inevitable is no longer preventable, we will have time for finger-pointing and plenty of shoulda, woulda, coulda grief, but not enough time for a reversal of a terrible reality. That is the message of the movie. A message that many don’t want to consider may explain the diversity of opinion about the movie. I doubt there is an Oscar waiting for McKay.
That is the message in McKay’s cinematic sermon. McKay is suggesting in his Hollywood way, that a whimpering end fits with climate change and global warming. McKay adds more. The end is avoidable if we could only turn from our vapid ways and take something seriously, but to do that we would need to be interested in something larger than ourselves. That was the message that McKay was delivering pre-COVID, and it feels even more appropriate as we struggle with COIVD and anticipate its next mutation. Spoiler alert! Skip down to the last two paragraphs if you haven’t seen the movie, and plan to do so.
Viewing the movie now–in the midst of the ups, downs, and persistence of COVID which we are beginning to realize is not going to go away, in part because so many of us can’t participate in a collective strategy because of our fears or arrogance–is a chilling and depressing experience. The movie suggests that all of our problems may arise from a common origin, our inability to make the “sacrifices” of personal preference that are necessary to avoid a fate that is very similar to those bacteria who have a limited growth possibility on a Petrie dish. The bacteria hit their limit because they can’t manage the removal of the by-products of their metabolism. We may hit the wall because we can’t manage the complexity of our world because universal self-interest is incompatible with a society that has a chance for continuous improvement and survival.
You would be disappointed if I did not bring this discussion back to the inequities in our system of healthcare and the social failure that make consideration of the social determinants of health an exercise in considering problems that have no simple solutions. If you have seen the movie you know that the only positive thing, in the end, is a “kumbaya” moment of community feeling when it is too late to do anything but pray for forgiveness and hope that there is an afterlife. McKay offers us an opportunity to avoid something similar in the real world by holding a mirror up for us to see how foolish we can be as a collective of individuals who prefer a strategy that always looks advantageous in the rare moments when luck is with us, but never works when the tables inevitably turn. He also suggests that there is always some charlatan who is looking to make a buck while convincing us that there is an easy self-serving way to avoid actions that require personal sacrifice. We evolved in community. Our future is dismal and social barriers to individual health are way down the list of our concerns pressing concerns. The good news is that the social determinants of health will improve and won’t be the problem they are today if we can learn to care about our shared home and shared future.
The critics gave the movie mixed reviews. See it anyway. It’s worth your time and thought. It’s a made-up story, but someday we might discover that it reveals a lot of truth.
There Is Beauty In The Cold
It has been cold. Minus eleven cold. Pipe freezing cold. Battery killing cold. Long johns cold. Four layers of gloves cold. And, a nor’easter is coming tomorrow! Ironically, we are behind in our average annual snowfall sweepstakes, but as today’s header reveals, we have plenty. The scene is one that often calls me to pause, take a deep breath, and be thankful for the privilege of enjoying its beauty. Many years ago, without making the connection to the scene in the header, we bought a painting that hangs over our fireplace when not replaced by a holiday wreath, which is almost the same scene.
I am getting acclimatized to this year’s cold. The call of outdoor beauty makes it a necessity. I would hate to miss the beauty I see on my walks. Most days if I wait until mid-afternoon the temp gets up near twenty and sometimes gets up to the mid-twenties. My coldest walk has been at eight degrees in the mid-afternoon. I am on a pace to log more than a hundred miles for January if the nor’easter doesn’t prevent me from losing more than one day on the road. On the days I can’t walk I manage my addiction with the Peloton while pretending that I am riding in Patagonia or some other exotic place that I see on the screen before me.
I wish that I could tell you the name of the little brook in the picture that is in today’s header. It is the principal outflow of Little Lake Sunapee, and no one I know can tell me its name. The major inflow is Kidder Brook. I cross the brook with no name about three-quarters of a mile into my usual walk just as it exits the lake. In less than a half-mile, it runs into Goose Pond which some people call Goose Hole. The road that rims Goose Pond is called Goose Hole Road. Almost two hundred years ago a massive dam was built across the brook and the associated millrun and waterfall is still present. There was a community at the mill that was also called Goose Hole. I have seen one map which names the brook that flows away from the millworks, Otter Brook. There must be a reason it is not called Goose Brook. Perhaps, it was Otter Brook long before the dam was built. In about a quarter-mile, after a steep downhill run, Otter Brook runs into Otter Pond which empties into Lake Sunapee which is just a few hundred yards further downstream.
I have tried hard to determine whether the brook coming out of Little Lake Sunapee that is in the header was also called Otter Brook back in the early days before the mill works were constructed downstream that created Goose Pond. If the millworks weren’t there, would Goose Pond be there? I have many questions to ponder, and I am planning a trip to our library to see if I can answer my questions. One of my friends, who is also in his seventies, has lived here all of his life, and once was the town engineer, and he could not answer my question. It is good to discover something beautiful that also has a little mystery in its history. There is much to enjoy before the spring redecorates the neighborhood. I hope that there is some little mystery for you to solve in your world.
Be well,
Gene
