I interviewed my professors. I rejected only one after the interview. I was paying a lot of money for a year learning from them so I wanted to know they were worth it. I had a list of a half dozen questions. I made an appointment. I met with them and told them my purpose. All but one welcomed it. All said they’d never experienced this before but all but one passed with flying colours. The one who failed was arrogant and didn’t comprehend the idea of ‘hard earned’ money and the buyers desire to ensure his investment. Today I’d just think of him as a privileged socialist who thought others should pay for him. Marx was like that a royal kafetch who was supported by his Jewish friends and bit the hands that fed him.
I was still teaching dancing at Ken Matthews Dance Studio. I was meditating and praying and would begin meditating 2 hours a day minimum for the next decade or so.
I was grieving my marriage, feeling such an utter failure. I missed Baiba but I’d moved out of her parents basement into the walk up bachelor apartment beside the university. I really liked the Murphy bed that came out of the wall. I had a crock pot and an electric frying pan. I began my love affair with cooking.
Paul Simon’s song, « I am a rock I am an I am an island. I have my books...I have my poetry to protect me....I touch no one and no one touches me ‘ was my theme song of the period.
I lived in the library.
I met these great guys, other guys who lived in the library. Glen Benoit would become my friend and inspiration. He was younger. The son of a famous Winnipeg opthalmologist. He wanted to be a doctor from childhood. He was dedicated. We both lived in the study carrel. We’d met because of our matching routines. I’d sit in the confines of the study carrel, no distraction, the little white desk sensory deprivation chamber. Every hour for 10 minutes I’d get up and have a cup of coffee. Usually the horrid machine fare. I’d meet Glen and we’d chat. He liked Cat Stevens and introduced me to the album Tea for the Tillerman. I thought he was young and loved his focus.
I wore a black suit and tie to school. I was going from classes to teach dancing. People thought me unusual. I was a »Manon Black » before this was cool.
I was supposed to get a white lab coat. I was doing my own laundry. I concluded that white was going to get dirty much faster and instead bought a blue mechanics long lab coat. I was the only one dressed dark. The reason for the white is that you can see spills. I couldn’t see the spills but after I washed my lab coat, not something I made a habit of, one could see the holes where the unseen acid and other solutions spills ate through the fabric.
Glen was my partner in Chemistry lab. I was an ‘arts’ student when I did my second year of sciences. I’m confused about the time line and the separation and divorce. The university years flow one after another but their connection with my other life seems less clear.
I remember blowing up the lab that summer. I think the lab instructors name was Mrs. Tascona. I had several fires and explosions and was told that if I had one more explosion she would have to ask me to leave. I had difficulty with the precision that the ‘science’ students took for granted. I would forever affer know what too many lawyers, politicians, bureaucrats and other potential bullies in the arts crowds lacked because I had this same trait when I began my science studies. Arts doesn’t have a ‘lab’. I thought of myself as an ‘ideas’ man. I took pride in being called an ‘intellectual’. I loved my ‘big mind’. What I didn’t appreciate was the connection between the inner world and outer world. I lived in my head. I put less value on application. I missed that part where the rubber meets the road.
In the lab that’s where that all occurs. My mechanic friends and engineering friends would have ideas and then have to ‘operationalize’ them. For people who haven’t got their hands ‘dirty’ this is all anathema to them. We are living in a world where most people want to give orders and want to be thinkers. The women seem the worst. They simply don’t want to learn from getting their hands ‘dirty’ but they do think they can be administrators.
It’s in the detail. I’d learn more about reality and life in the lab and later in surgery than I’d learn from countless books full of ideas and schemes by people who hadn’t done anything.
I didn’t appreciate the importance of a ‘point’. That little indicator on the measure. So I filled a spoon with 1 ml when it was supposed to be .1 ml. It exploded, fortunately in the gas chamber which I’d not completely closed since closing it enough was okay. The instructions were precise. I’d done it imprecisely my way. The lab had filled with smoke to the level of 4 feet below the ceiling. It had to be evacuated until the fans could get rid of the smoke. The lab was off from the main school. Good planning.
I’d approached my my other lab partner and asked if he’d be my lab partner. He would turn out to be the very best lab partner because he was amazing at doing technical things but couldn’t comprehend the process of presentation and recording. We were a straight A team. But as a joke he’d sometimes leave out a « . » in our combined lab work with the result I had another explosion having used 10 times the chemical indicated. He was a joker. No one died. His skill in chemistry and labs in general resulted in his becoming a technician. I would go onto be the doctor but seeing his comfort with the translation of ideas into reality was a life lesson. I happened to be good at translating what had occurred and recording. Glen my other lab partner was good at everything.
Glen was beside me on the day of another explosion. The other classmates considered him heroic. There had no takers for the space beside me. By now my lab coat was holed with chemical spills and half burnt. I looked more like a homeless person than a chemistry student.
There’s this unusual experiment where we made nitro glycerin in the lab. We had this nifty buzon burners and all that evil scientist paraphernalia .I’d mixed up the ingredients in my usual less than precise way. But I had this concoction going without realizing the amount of heat was another variable that needed careful monitoring. It said in the lab notes that under no condition was the liquid to boil away and become dry as then it would explode.
I saw that the liquid had magically disappeared. I pointed that out to Glen who was standing beside me. He turned off his bunson burner and backed carefully away as if I’d just pointed out an STD. I called to the courageous lab instructor and said, « Pardon me. I seem to have boiled off my liquid. ».
I don’t know why I just didn’t turn off the flame. The decision to do that took a second or two or more because I was distracted by the mass exodus of students with Mrs. Tascona encouraging this at the doorway.
I watched as she herded everyone including Glen out of the lab. There I was alone in front of this major beaker of what obvious was nitro glycerin and nitroglycerin alone.
I had a brilliant idea. I carefully lifted the still hot beaker and put it under my desk and moved away. The explosion lifted the desk and charred the insides of the wood but otherwise caused no damage.
« Quick under the desk, » Glen would say another time when I got the experiment a bit off and he being much more scientifically astute recognized what was about to happen. Again a loud noise. The desk lifting. Class and teacher staring at me.
« If you have had another explosion. I can’t let you complete the lab. I can’t put the rest of the students lives at any more risk. ».
The pressure was exordinate but I did complete that lab and learned the terrible importance of detail. What I thought and what I did needed a congruence and care that simply was methodical and not that orgasmic intuitive inspirational bit that is so addictive and appealing in the arts.
A marine colonel would say it was the polishing of boots that made the soldier. My Queen’s counsel friend would say the best lawyer learned to dot every ‘i’. My surgical mentor Dr. Ross would one day say, « it’s how you handle the tissue’.
I learned attention to detail in Mrs. Tascona Chemistry lab. In future contract I’m sure she insisted on danger pay and was sure to keep up her life insurance. I learned that little things really counted.
I will forever remember our great long suffering lab teacher on the back of Glen’s motorcycle screaming as he drove her to the bar where we gathered at the end of course. We all raised our glasses to chemistry with a whole new appreciation. For most of us this skill would be turned to making of better wine and beer or bathtub hallucinogens. . Chemistry became everything for me. I loved considering the ingredients of everything.
All the while I was making stews and soups and studying recipes and trying to discern the ingredients and herbs and spices in everything I ate. The two went hand and hand together. I could even smell some of the chemicals and would later smell disease long before some of my colleagues rationally concluded what was wrong with the patient. It was like I had this whole other sense open up for me and it had all begun with the periodic table.
Now I was thinking in three dimensional spaces. In biochemistry we’d consider the combinations of carbons and other elements in three d and I’d see these shapes dancing in the air visualizing them. I’d speak to a composer and he’d tell me he saw the music that way. I ‘d seen music when I’d dropped acid but he said it was the clefts and lines of script like ticker tape and each of the instruments in these great sheets he’d read in the hall as he directed and his ears listened. I was like that then for chemistry. It was a marvellous love affair.
At night I’d dance. I had these regular students and I’d get to know their lives and we’d translate the idea of dance into their bodies and their forms and choreograph these routines that flowed about the rooms and got them awards. I’d choreograph show dances for tv and local shows, great and beautiful presentations of groups of young bodies laughing in form. It was a wonderful time. I felt my senses were alive in a way I’d not known.
I was loving learning in classes. I had these friends at school and the friends in the dance. I actually read text books as I walked at fast pace from the university to the dance studio. Between classes I’d been memorizing mathematic equations.
I’d buy my first Texas instrument computer calculator. Life would become so easy. I’d never been adept with the slide rule. That loss of a ‘point’ could occur so easily with those mechanical devices that needed an intuitive understanding of the desired end to really make them work. I didn’t have this in math. I was always surprised and fascinated by the conclusions I got to these equations that had taken hundreds of years of genius to find. The Texas instrument calculator was a god send. I wore it with pride dangling from my belt buckle. I had a white plastic pocket protector and my pencil and my pen. My hair was cut short and I wore the black slacks, white shirt and often took the tie off so it didin’t get in the solutions. Then in the afternoon like Superman I’d switch back to Clark Kent and go off to teach dancing secure in the knowledge I could make explosives. Each technique and process gave me a skill that would be the basis of mastery of all that we took for granted in the 20th century. Once you can make the basics its not a whole lot different to use these ingredients to move forward.
I talked not that long ago with a fellow doing gene splitting and we reflected on the simplicity of it and how the new machines were making it so much easier.
The computer moved us completely into a ‘multi factorial’ analysis that revolutionized our understanding of disease all the while too many people left to ideological teachers remained trapped in cause and effect and binary reductionism. The awe and wonder comes with science.
My love and appreciation of God grew daily in my study just as I’d been in wonder looking at the drop of pond water in that little microscope I’d been given by my parents so many years before.
University of Winnipeg was this wonderful playground for me. Every night I’d be three or 4 hours in the study carrels. On the weekend I’d study 8 to 10 hours each on Saturday and Sunday. Glen would want a ‘change’ and I’d get on the back of his motorcycle and we’d ride to a different library where we’d sit in a different study carrel and study for hours expriencing the different coffee from a different terrible from different coffee machine. He’d call that a ‘vacation’. He was a funny guy. His brother Archie was older and would go on to be an anesthetist. I’d get to know him and like him him too through the years of medical school. The Benoits were a great family and I appreciated seeing them alone and together and seeing how family transmitted the really important intimate details. I’d meet his mother a beautiful deeply loving woman and his father who had that surgical intellect with the confidence of experience and constant reliability. It was a great honor to be a friend. I’d be forever thankful.
In medical school I’d come up against these weird blocks. One was kidney. I couldn’t wrap my brain around the idea of ion exchange. It was a puzzle. Once you got it you couldn’t understand how you ever missed it but it was a reall impediment to my school and understanding. A couple of critical times Glen sat with me and went over it again and again until I had that ‘aha moment’. We had formed a study group by then. A half dozen of us who’d mainly met in that University of Winnipeg library who’d go onto University of Manitoba medical school and stay together and work together whenever we could. It was great comraderie and truly amazing people.
I’d enter medical school with straight A grades in Arts and Science. Even in medical school I ‘d continue to take courses with Dr .Ridd, studying Kierkegaard and Kafka. Dr. Ridd was a Christian existentialist. He’d have a group us us sitting around a coffee shop after class considering the meaning and purpose of life and reflecting on Ecclesiastes and the Trial. Then I’d be dissecting the dead in the daytime and dancing to Van Morison the next evening.
But that’s getting ahead of myself. When I entered medical school I had straight A’s in Arts and Sciences. I joined with a hundred other people whose lowest mark had been one B in one year. We were considered a very smart class. There were 15 other Straight A’s several master students and some PhD’s. For the first time since I’d been in the gifted class in school I felt among my own. I had the same comraderie as the dance world but here the pace was incredible. There was no time for parties. No time for a ‘break’. We were always on. It was exhilarating. I loved the overload and the wonder. I loved the learning. I was ecstatic and having one ‘aha’ moment after another.
Long after I left University of Winnipeg I’d return and study in the stacks and carrels. I’d love the smell and feel of the library. The teachers were so inspirational. My classics professor just for one was a wizard. They were all gods and goddesses to me. These amazing people who shared their arcane knowledge. Gnostics who opened their minds and hearts to us. Of course Dr. Ridd was my favourite self effacing hero, a basketball player who loved his family and loved students, loved God and loved learning. I am truly blessed in this life.
I’d still have dinners with my family. My brother and Adell had begun on their amazing love affair. I’d look with wonder at their lives as we all were moving forward crossing these great expanses of wilderness and park lands taking the various bits of pavement. I’d left the unbeaten paths and the roads less travelled and was really enjoying the speed that came with the well trodden path. I was loving and appreciating the selection of learning my professors deemed critical.
This was especially true in philosophy where my professsor had contributed to the insaniety defence decisions and I’d years before my time study the originals of the laws that I’d one day work intimately with. The university I’d once thought had nothing to offer now gave me so much and condensed so much learning. I was simply in love. I wasn’t standing but I was crawling up the backs of millions who had gone before me to find out the very fabric of modern society. It was incredible.
I’d leave University of Winnipeg which would always remain a true university to me, like Oxford, to go to the University of Manitoba which would only be part university but mostly technical school. I’d love the latter in time too. I simply loved learning. That humility and stupidity then the learning and mastery , repeated over and over again.
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