• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

One of my favorite stories about Bernie and Kurt involved a trip they took to see their father, Kurt senior, when he was dying. On the way to Indianapolis, the car they were driving ran out of gas, so they were going to hitchhike to a gas station. Kurt propped the hood up to let people know there was mechanical trouble and asked Bernie if there was anything else they should do.

“We could let the air out of the tires,” suggested Bernie.

——

On the 1985 fishing trip, Bernie brought twenty glass-and-gel plates he had used to record the path electricity took through gel under different conditions. The branching patterns were intricate and beautiful. Bernie’s provocative question to Kurt was whether or not they were art. Kurt thought they weren’t art, because the objects weren’t made by an artist who could have a conversation with himself or anyone else about what he had done. For it to be art there had to be an artist who could learn from it and do something different or the same the next time.

Maybe Bernie, by noticing these things and dragging them to Long Island for us to see, was the artist? You can’t create or destroy matter or energy, but you can take blank paper and write a novel or canvas and make a painting or wood and make furniture. An artist is someone who isn’t put off by how terrible his first tries are, who finds himself talking back and notices that he changes and grows when he makes art.

That trip was the beginning of the end of what I had assumed was a lifetime no-cut contract with alcohol. I can’t remember why, but I drank much more than I usually did, and nothing happened. I drank beer steadily through the morning and then had two glasses of bourbon. No click, no feeling a little looser, nothing.

We caught a bunch of bluefish. The mate filleted them and I grilled them over charcoal with garlic salt and everyone said they tasted great just like always, but I couldn’t get away from the feeling that another shoe was going to drop.

What if you pick up the early signs too late?

Back home, I was playing the piano better than ever. I’d be playing the piano and singing and start crying after a beer or two. Unless we had a business lunch on Friday, I never drank at work or before getting home, somewhere around 6 P.M. I sometimes kept beer in the office refrigerator on Fridays if I was going to be going to the Cape, but that was okay because of the traffic. If I had had a drinking problem, I would have hidden it, but I didn’t so I didn’t.

The thing that keeps the gambler gambling is the illusion that he has control, special knowledge that will make him come out on top. If the gambler comes to believe that he is up against a random number generator and that what he once thought of as special knowledge is worthless, he stops gambling. What keeps the drinker drinking is the certainty that she can stop whenever she wants. It never would have occurred to me that stopping the pathetic little bit of drinking I did would have mattered.

I kept in touch with MGH by serving as the ward attending once a year and teaching in the ER one night a week along with admitting my patients there. It was a way of giving back. They paid me about sixteen dollars an hour.

Four years after I’d finished my residency at MGH, right after Thanksgiving, a twelve-year-old girl came in having had a seizure that had stopped by the time she arrived. We examined her, drew labs, reassured her parents, called her pediatrician, and had the resident doing pediatric neurology come down to see her. He started her on medication, decided she didn’t have to be admitted, and set up a time to see her in the pedi-neuro clinic two days later.

Off the top of my head I gave the medical students a ten-minute lecture on the differential diagnosis, work-up, and treatment of pediatric seizures. I was a hardworking, integral part of a wonderful hospital and a wonderful medical school and a wonderful city, full of people all doing the best they could.