I’d also go through a phase of macrame. All these little hand things. I enjoyed working with my hands. I enjoyed the tiny machinery of the fountain pain. I enjoyed all the paraphernalia of my pipe. I had a collection of pipes and once a real tobacco store opened, enjoyed creating my own blend of tobacco with just the right flavours and a touch of Latikea for taste and smell. I liked sitting in the cloud and the pipe as manly portable incense. I always had restless hands and loved having something to fiddle with. In the woods I liked to whittle. I really should have stuck with knitting. I may take it up again. My mother was always busy with her hands Knitting, crocheting, darning. She never watched tv without a basket of work beside her.
IKEA targettes me and my generation because our apartments were always made up of assembled furniture. I just saw a fellow carrying a large brick and asked him if he was building a book case or making a stand for his stereo. Younger, he’d no clue what I was talking about. He’d not ‘selected’ boards and bricks with loving care to get the right industrial rough classic ‘look’. As students these little touches, Saturday afternoon with varnish or shellack were memorable events.
Once Biology had ‘caught’ me I wanted to ‘try’ the pre med classes. I redid my high school math, chemistry and physics in a few week summer accelerated course that University of Winnipeg offered mostly ‘bad boys and girls. ‘ and some ‘adults’ like me who were upgrading for some reason. One of my class mates wanted to be an electrician, most had failed gr 12 or not completed it. I was just there mostly for curiosity and wondering if I had the capacity to succeed.
I didn’t doubt myself in arts. But sciences concerned me. Until I had this spiritual experience in the chapel and aced the MCAT I’d really think that I might get a research lab job working with electron microscopes which I loved or become a play wright. I was muddling along as my life was always doing. I’d read ‘slouching towards bethelehem’ about the ‘beast’ and thought of myself as maudlin and mozying in the right direction but not doing a particularly good job of it. I always admired those around me who were on the ‘straight and narrow’.
My brother was a natural in sciences, a genius really, and my father was an engineer. I’d been their second assistant on countless car and motor repairs but never number one. In surgery I was the favoured assistant but not particularly interested in being number one. In hockey’s I’d loved playing defence but wasn’t interested in centre. It seemed to be a theme in my life, that I wanted to be on the right team but didn’t need to step on anyone to be there and really would rather walk away from a fight if I could.
I’d actually take an IQ test worried because I thought I was too stupid and score in the 140 plus, the screening test simply indicating if I was capable. It was reassuring. I’ve never thought of myself as particular that good in anything as I always knew people who were so much superior. I never considered how so many others were not but focused on those who I knew were great. Hence I’d laugh one day out loud when I’d hear the term for my kind as ‘egomaniac with an inferiority complex ».
In deed in arts I had this sense that I was perhaps the best with often only one other in the class I thought was ‘interesting’. In the sciences it would be a teacher or someone telling me I was the best when I thought there was some mistake. In the philosophy class there’d be 50 who started but only 6 of us who completed the course and this one fellow, long haired dog, with a woe begone beard, we’d play chess and debate together, and I remember thinking perhaps for the first time, this fellow has a ‘first rate mind’. We’d study Logic together and I liked it because it was mathematical.
I’d been taking music lessons and singing on my own once a week with this beautiful blind man who would say ‘you once had a fine voice but you’ve probably already ruined it » .... »you could have been a singer but if you practice you might still be able to do the singing an actor needs. ». When I’d taken theatre I’d decided I needed training in ‘voice’. Actors and actresses do this. It’s their thing. Most people don’t know all that’s going on in the background but the successful ones are doing as I did, all these classes, often paid for on their own, usually with some gifted teacher who takes on a few students and commonly works out of their home. I wanted to sing like Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan but he wanted me to learn like Pavarotti.
I sang this old English song « In spring time’. Over and over and over again.
I also joined the University of Winnipeg Madrigal Choir. I wasn’t in the league of some but didn’t embarrass myself or others. Except once. Like dance, song was always looking for men. Low bar. The women had a lot more competition and took the matter much more seriously as a group. I enjoyed hanging out with the guys trying to read music and stay in the same key. I wasn’t good alone. Once when the tenors and baritones didn’t show up and there was me and over there the bass and in front of me the soprano and the alto I just sung along. The very haughty soprano diva stopped in the middle and turned to me and said rather loudly, « I can sing the soprano alone thank you. ». Without support I’d wandered off with the loudest voice. I tended to do that so the director especially after that put me in with a better sort of character. That day he moved me in to the bass section till we had more tenors and baritones to protect me from possible disfigurement by the long painted nailed clawed Sopranos.
We actually performed to great applause on many occasions. I learned to love madrigal and harmony.
I continued to meditate a couple of hours a day and weekly when I could gather with my fellow meditators at the Self Realization Fellowship meditation evenings. We’d meet before dawn on the most memorable occasional Sundays and méditate as the sun came up and depart when the sun went down. I must have peed but I don’t remember any breaks. Someone had a house with lots of glass and windows in St. Vital I believe, out near the beginning of the country. It was beautiful in Winnipeg then with the snow all around and the silence of the near rural countryside.
I didn’t drive. I did bicycle. I was bicycling everywhere. It was extraordinarily unusual to be using the bicycle as a ‘commuter’. Winnipeg and Canada in general hadn’t embraced the bicycle except as a children’s toy, a summer fun thing and for adults as racists. Having bicycled across Europe and seen how Europeans used the bicycle as their principle means of transport I just did the same. I’d bicycle to the University of Manitoba from down town and literally never think of distance as I might today when I considered bicycling somewhere. I did think of the time but enjoyed it as a time for prayer. I’ve always prayed in motion or made up poems or sung songs. I’d hate the down time of transport and years later always have the latest medical audiotapes playing in my car for decades when I commuted. I remember too when I was in medical school that there was a Swiss doctor and myself who were the only ones who chained our bikes in the largest bicycle lot. Today that rack has expanded ten fold and never has enough room for bicycles. I was certainly way out ahead of the trend on the bicycle front in Canada which not unusually was behind Europe in this way.
Dancers, actors, don’t generally have to considèr ‘exercise’. There simply was very little obesity around me in those days. Hughie, my gay actor friend was obese but he really was the exception. Later obesity became very apparent especially as people got older, more sedate, the desk job because supreme and excuses abounded.
We played intramural sports during our medical school. I remember being on the indoor hockey team and the touch football team. The trick for pre med and medical students was to get enough out, especially depending on rotations, to have a team to compete with other faculties. We were collectively abysmal as a team though individually we had some outstanding athletes. In football we had the former quarterback of the University of Manitoba Bison. I think his name was Richard. He called me ‘butter fingers’ because I couldn’t hold onto a ball he passed perfectly. That’s how I became a defensive end and applied all my psychological skills to verbal abuse of my easily terrified counterpart.
I was called ‘Wild Bill’ most of my life and especially in these years. Nicknames were an important badge of honor among men. I rather liked mine over the years. Wild Bill and Crazy Bill were sometime used interchangeably. I was known for my daring and had no doubt that if I’d been a student in Heidelberg I’d be early to wear a scar. Being a gymnast and a dancer and mostly having acted I was the one who’d suddenly do a handspring, break out in a tap dance or sing Amen with gusto. I was also doing Dacor before it got it’s fancy name. We’d go out as groups for pints and after a few race for the last bus, a bunch of college guys swinging around bus poles vaulting parking meters and running over the tops of sheds.
With meditating I didn’t need to sleep as much. I’d get 6 hours generally and later in medical school that was a lot. But I’d meditate 2 hours and meditation was a superior form of mental relaxation. In later years I would have these ‘down times’, ‘unplanned’ , ‘rest periods’ . I’d have whole afternoons and sometimes days ‘without anything to do’. I’d spent decades before this with every moment of my life planned and applied. Evening going to a movie was considered because it was rationed in a way. Our time was so precious that we’d only see one movie while others might see 20. For years the tv would reside in the closet. It was a glorious life of learning and relationships.
I’d fall in love again. I really was at the time I met her like a ‘top gun’ pilot. The courtship had that kind of flavour too.
I’d sat alone in the divorce. The judge was kindly and compassionate. I was very lonely getting the papers completed. That would take time. The official separation and then the divorce.
But 6 month later I’d see these three beautiful girls in the common area. There was something about the sun. These two identical twin Scandinavia long blond haired sisters with their best friend. She was so beautiful. A model. A Blondie to Baiba’s Veronica. Tall and slim, The Nicole Kidman to my former Anglina Jolie. These are terrible cliche Hollywood comparisons but they’re true in an Andy Warhol world. I loved the girls in sciences. I loved their dedication and sharp minds. I’d been surrounded by dancers and actresses , models and perfect bodies, and now really enjoyed these girls I could discuss chemistry with. She was a year behind me. She’d spent a year in Europe as an au pair. It was a traumatic time.
I thought « I’m going to date her’ and then slowly and with certainty and confidence I began my campaign. She was the most beautiful girl in the school. Her sister and their friend Debbie were the brightest. Yet she was a party girl. They all were. They stood out at the ‘mixers’, laughing and drinking and just being the centre of attention. I was this guy in a suit doing all the weird stuff. They called me the ‘geek’ which I thought amusing because I aspired to that but didn’t think of myself yet as academic.
I loved the movies of the day. I really identified with Peter O’Toole’ especially in Laurence of Arabia but my mind was so often talking like Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry. Then I’d switch to Bruce Willis and always have a touch of Jack Nicholson but I mostly wanted to be Sean Connery and often ended up feeling I came across like Robbin Williams. I’d loved Mork.
Now here was this girl who was the queen of the secular world. Not spiritual. Not church going. I’d still be going to church when I could with my family and spending evenings meditating when I became closer to her. I was so different and she was so truly mainstream. I guess that was it’s own attraction. In the world of sciences there was a tremendous conformity and fear that simply wasn’t apart of the theatre world. It would be even more with those who went onto law and bureaucracy. This conformity and imitation of adulthood was so overwhelming after the world of dance, the world of English eccentricity and the appreciation for genius. Increasingly I felt everyone was trying to ‘fit in’. There wasn’t much time for socialization. But it was stifled in a way new to me with a whole lot of group dynamic and social games.
I remember a guy angry with me because I was talking with a girl he ‘wanted’. I’d not seen this since junior high school but a lot of the science types had delayed maturity in odd ways. Years later men and women would still be living at home with a single mother or having a sister take care of them. There was all this animal behaviour among these undersocialized guys who were really into power, money and getting scores. I knew a Chinese guy who really was an idiot savant aspergér type that without his mother would likely have died. I’d not encountered this set before.
We out and out competed for leads in theatre and dance and somehow knew our place but here there was all this back room competition, sly and sneaky. I’d be studying for the A and almost always get the top mark. I had this one girl in physics who was furious and actually threw a temper tantrum in class when she saw I had the only A+ and she had the second in the class A. She bashed about desks and made a scene. This would become more common as these weird competitions occurred between people. It wasn’t that I was completely outside of it. I liked ‘winning’ but I was competing against myself mostly, loved the learning, and the score didn’t matter.
I’d once ask a professor out of curiosity why he gave me a B when he told me I was the smartest student and he’d ever doctor he’d ever known. It was the only time I ever questioned a grade and only did because of the incongruity. He broke down and told me that his colleague had approached him and insisted he fail me.
I’d corrected his colleague who had the greatest ego and least skill but bureaucratic superiority and refused to stay in the department if I had have any contact with him. He was this perculiar bureaucratic sort who lacking intelligence and skill got himself into a position and used his position to work out his inadequacies. He probably killed people but took great exception when I stopped his stupidity. He was that weird sort who would rather be right and let a student fail or a patient die rather than admit to being wrong.
I’d find these sorts could achieve high success in toxic bureaurcracies. At the time I didn’t want anything to do with the loser and told the department head I was checking out rather than have to associate with him. I went to another hospital and got the highest score in the department straight A’s except this one B. When he told me that he’d been threatened by this political doctor to fail me and only could bring himself to give me a B, I thanked him for his honesty. He begged me to take an A+ after that but I said ‘whatever’ and walked away. He’d give me the A + and become an enemy of the loser. It was all about character and I was learning mountains in psychiatry but long had a blind spot for sociopaths and psychopaths that thrived in static bureaurocracies moving upward with the group, the stagnant waters being pushed forward and cleaning up a bit but still taking the dregs with them.
I’d left classes where I was the A+ to go to better teachers where I began as a B. I’d seen that I was the top dancer in a Winnipeg competition only to lose in Montreal and then in London not even feel adequate to dance that first night we were only with other champions and teachers. My friend Keith Carter was the greatest gymnast in Canada but became 20th or so in the world Olympic competitions. I’d spend the rest of my life with Big fish in little pond people and all their meaness and ego issues. I just knew from an early age that I might be the best in this room but all I needed to do was go to the next town to find someone better. I thought the University was supposed to be the Un-I place because I saw that the top doctor couldn’t be the top chemist as well. It was only in the reductionism of the bureaucracy that the ‘who’s up, who’s down’ of King Lear could prevail. People at the top general admired each other whereas envy dominated those at the bottom.
Training with Doreen Key, the world champion Latin teacher, I’d had a revelation. I was good. I was 19 and I was thoroughly enjoying the learning. But the couple that followed me were her students for years and they were 16. I’d had to ‘unlearn’ a whole lot of bad teaching and here were these kids who had 4 years on me and had no ‘bad habits’. Watching them dance was a dream. I simply knew then that I’d not win the Olympics. Dance was set to become an Olympic sport and I vaguely had been headed in that direction.
But I met this older fellow I played chess with in a little village in Germany. We’d been served by a very pleasnt waiter who was his friend. I had said something about what a nice waiter he was and this man had told me
‘He’s not the waiter. He’s the chess master’.
‘Huy?’ I’d grunted wondering whether to move my queen or knight.
‘In Europe we look at people as having a vocation and an avocation and then as having jobs. In Europe the vocation was the best work. If a person felt born to be a baker he’d hope to be the village baker. For centuries guilds and families passed on their learning to their children. Each village needed a baker. The best baker would have that vocation. But there was often another whose ‘heart’s blood’ was to be a baker. Only he wasn’t as good as the first baker. He’d bake as an ‘avocation’. It was his passion but to feed his family he’d take a job as a street cleaner or a construction worker. There was always pride in work. Any work that served the community was good work. Men lived to care for their families and if they had a vocation they pursued this for excellence. If the first baker died then this baker would take his place. A bit like a ships captain and first mate. »
‘Like hobbies?’ I’d said moving the knight.
‘No a hobby is a word from the company town. When the aetheist communists and the heartless corporations came with the Industrial Age and post Industrial Age the village and guilds and family all were assaulted. Marx was an idiot but the union movement was necessary because these owners weren’t part of the community like the old Lords and Ladies. They ‘d been like family with all the different natures of family. Tolstoy was a good example of a good father and there were always those kinds. They made that era last for hundred of years. There’s so much abuse and rewriting of history today by enemies of the truth. But our waiter there, he’s not seen as a waiter here. He’s the grand chess master. He was the top chess player in all of Germany and competed beyond. He still plays chess. I’ve learned all my best moves from him. Checkmate. »
I’d go on to learn years later that the company town reduced everything but the work of the mine or whatever else was to child’s play. Hences the word ‘hobby’. The destruction of the family by the communists. The State and Individual was paralleled by the « Job’ and « Hobbies’. All that was important was the job and the job made money and to these people, the new sociopaths, the one who died with the most money one. Silly really. Like the communist leader with all his ribbons on his chest like the Boy Scout badges. Not earned like the best of soldiers but given by friends in power.
Now I’d be among these people who were seeing the ‘a’ as the ‘dollar’ or ‘status’ and frankly I wasn’t immune. It amused me and I did the work and got the ‘A’s’ but it wasn’t ‘real’ in a way. My friend Glen was the real doctor. His family was that medical guild family. He was the scientist. He was much smarter than me but more often than not I’d get the higher grade.
I’d so enjoy the movie Paper Chase about the gamesmanship of law school.
I’d do things others wouldn’t think of and simply knew what the teachers wanted or what was necessary for an exam. I was also efficient because I was trying to keep up this whole other life and making money was a serious demand since I had to pay the rent. Our Jewish friend’s parents would give him a sports car when he got into medical school. A number of the girls were given trips to Hawaii by their parents for getting into medical school. I just spent another summer teaching drama and dance and more and more doing executive typing jobs. I’d learned dictaphone typing in England and there was a demand for this in Winnipeg. I worked for business start ups that would go onto be international concerns . I liked that I met Nygaard back in those days because I was typing his advertising. It was always fun to live long enough to see the outcomes. The Mercantile Bank of England executive I typed for would always be in the news in years to come and there was Nygaard who went on to great success. They were different back then, driven and true workaholics and their devotion to their work and dreams paid off. They both grasped the idea of excellence and it showed in all they did. At least to me the lowly office help, that’s what stood out.
I was even doing fencing back then taking classes with the view still to be an actor and wanting to be ready for a pirate scene. Also I really did enjoy fencing.
I was doing tv commercials dancing for easy money at this time and going down to the US on weekends to do dance shows, all for the easy money. With the demands on time getting a $100 for an hour of a commercial whereas I’d have to work a day teaching dancing to get that. I moved over into sales at Ken Matthews because selling dance lessons paid the most with commissions. I’d go in for an evening and that week I’d convince some woman or a couple to spend thousands on joining the studio and doing a year of dancing. The main competitor it always seemed was that they were considering taking a trip. Well for all I knew the dance studio and a year of lessons and parties and social involvement paid more than a week cruise but the price was the same and needing the money mostly for text books I won them over. I loved commissions. But then I needed books. I loved books.
Once I set my eyes on Maureen I’d have to work even harder so I had more money to take her out. Women were then and have always have been expensive for men and we didn’t care if we put out half our income and men gave all their income to their families until the lies flourished around feminism, that social construct of ‘cultural communism’ the ‘divide and conquer’ that pitted people against another, and reduced everything to binary, first the rich and the poor, then the man and the woman. It was an industry. It was intrinsically evil but back then that was just the way and long after the wealth of Canada moved to women collectively as the wives of the workaholic men died ten years earlier the feminists still cherry picked their data.
And men continued to pay for dates. And women continued to ‘marry up’. But that was a future concern. At this time I was just struggling to find time for study and time for work. I’d learned from my father and brother to pay the rent first so usually went without food. I managed. I loved the university events so often because of the free food. Food for guys back then was really like filling a car with gas. We were in constant motion and kept needing to fill the tank. Yet we had money for coffee and tobacco.
I enjoyed that year being single and solely focussed on study but would not mind at all being waylaid by Cupid yet again. Maureen would become the love of my life. We’d come together as much for the traumas of our pasts as the successes of our present. I always thought that her sister’s friend Debbie a dedicated student like me kept the sister on track while I was the one who motivated Maureen. She would always want to knock off study, go to a movie, take the evening off and I was always the bad guy who was ‘no fun’ and took us to the library where I’d do my 50 minutes on and 10 minutes off. She’d been the last to get into medical school whereas I’d been the first. She was a year behind her sister and together we’d stick with Glen and a few of my friends and together we excelled. In retrospect that was my usefulness , I helped her get her exams and her speciality .I’d do that again. I helped two women become specialist doctors eventually. As likely they’d have succeeded without me as I would have without them.
I almost failed first year medical school because I was distracted by all of Maureen’s family problems. I missed one exam and there was no margin for error in medical school. It didn’t matter I was A in everything, in pathology I failed. I was distracted by her drama and had this psychopathic teacher who insisted we all buy this huge book for this one course. Each of the teachers put inordinate demands on the students for their course but this guy was the worst and was repeatedly cited by the school with many complaints against him about his piling on masses of reading no one could do .
Because I was distracted and in love and not hanging with my study friends I missed the memo that his ‘book’ was ‘bullshit’ there was a little study book that could be read in a night. I’d been reading this 3000 page book and it turned out that was because he had a chapter in this old book which increased his sales. I simply couldn’t read the 3000 pages and didn’t know the test subject based on the last 100 pages. The other book was so far superior and the class learned this from their families and knew about this idiot.
Maureen’s father was a dying alcoholic and the older brother would die also of alcoholism. Hard drinking men in the car business. Functional alcoholics heavy nightly hard liguer drinkers. The other older brother was an aloof intellectual who’d go on to succeed as a journalist and always be the apple of the mother’s eye. The mother was a hyperchondriac nurse with asthma and whenever the attention at a dinner party wavered from her she’d have some attack and suddenly she was centre of attention again.. She’d hate me when years later as a physician she fall on the ground one too many times with ‘I’m having a heart attack. I can’t move. I’m paralyzed. ‘ I’d grown incredibly tired of this mad woman sucking the life blood from my wife who would be sick for days after some visits because this untreated Al Anon, the alcoholic wife was constantly in drama while Maureen was constatnly pulled from her studies to attend to the latest emergency. Her sister would marry into a strong and good Christian family and her husband and she would move away. The time when Maureen was left alone with the mother I remember as the « nightmare years. » I would forever identify with any ‘mother in law’ joke a comedian came up with and generally feel I could trump him. Not surprisingly though seemingly impossible my next mother in law was worse.
On that occasion I stood up and walked into the kitchen leaving the mother flailing about on the floor. ‘Are you calling an ambulance the girls following me into the kitchen, asked me’
‘No’ I said.
‘But my mother’s dying . ‘ Maureen said.
And I would utter the line I’d repeat years to come.
‘Your mother has been dying and in crisis as long as I have known her.’
‘But she’s on the floor dying right now.’ Maureen cried.
The first rule of medicine was observation and I’d observed as I would a hundred times again how she’d fallen. She had wafted to the ground like every heroine in a black and white move. I’d oberserved the breathing and the strength of the her demands’.
« Just wait.’ I said.
‘We have to do something, » Maureen cried increasingly anxious. .’ Susan was more separated, not suffering the ‘folie a dieux’ I’d come to know so well.
‘If she is having a heart attack or dying who is best to save her? » The mother was getting angry and her complaints were increasing and taking on a particular edge so I was in no fear that she was going to pass away quietly while we conferenced in the kitchen. She was never known as a quiet woman.
‘You’ the sisters agreed. I’d done a year of surgery at this point and months of intensive care. No one doubted my skills. I’d been asked to join all the faculties not just because I was a good academic but I’d shined as a clinician. I had that thing that academics and bureaucrats didn’t. I was what was called a ‘real doctor’ and it was already well noted. There were a lot of us in any class. The girls were too . They’d become the greatest of clinicians themselves and I’d say this lesson that night contributed a lot to their achievement. It meant however that I achieved a life long enemy which would lead to the end of my marriage. Not that I would ever need any help screwing up a relationship.
« You’ the girls said in unison to me as I heard the mother beginning to stumble about in the other room, no doubt straightening her skirt.
« Well then wait. She’ll be coming through that door in 10. 9. 8. 7. 6 ....and she appeared. On cue and very angry’.
« I was dying on the floor and you weren’t going to save me. » She screamed at her daughters and shouted at me . « You call yourself doctors. . You’ll never be doctors. I could have died and you did nothing. » Then staring with the hate in her eyes aflame she looked straight at me and « Mr. Doctor. I’m a nurse and you’re never be a doctor. ». The fact I was a doctor already. « . Leaving a mother to die on the floor. » she said disgusted.
Susan said, « you were never dying , mother’.
She was the one who spoke. The flaming eyes turned on her
Her mother’s eyes shot bullets, bazookas, grenade launchers, missile portals, nuclear weapon source. She’d would throw on her court and stalk out the door demanding that some one ‘take me home. ».
She’d live many years to come but I’d never have to face another episode of drama at my dinner table. I’d go onto be a psychiatrist and this lady would smile to my face but I’d always watch where the knives were and never turn my back on her again. She truly loved her loved ones but like all untreated al anon’s her resentments were never forgotten. She was unforgiving. A great mother and a great nurse but a most impressive enemy of the sort that Vikings were. You’d always want her on your side in a fight but she was truly the ‘mother in law from hell’
Of course to everyone else she was a saint. I ‘d go onto psychiatry and be fascinated by family therapy and the ‘identified’ patient and study the alcoholic family system probably because of my own experience with her and seeing my marriage dissolve which I’d argue ‘would drive anyone to drink’. Family therapists en mass went onto divorce. It was a true occupational hazard. We need our secrets and training and working as a psychiatrist would be like the mental and emotional equivalent of the experience of surgeons. One plastic surgeon confided in me. I can’t see anyone without thinking of asymmetry and wanting to fix something. I’m always wanting to take off an unsightly mole and wondering why some beautiful woman with an ugly nose wouldn’t do something about it.’
Personally I’d become bombarded constinuously with all this social and psychological material. These layers and deceits and character flaws and the defences and coping strategies. We’d laugh and say that nurses entered psychiatry because they knew they were crazy and wanted free therapy whereas psychiatrists were only allowed in psychiatry after extensive vetting and showing proof we were relatively sane. Then the job would drive us all nuts, if only by association. After working intimately with the dangerously insane, schizophrenics, drug addicts, prostitutes, bipolars, and pedophiles I’d be changed. Our society walls off the deviants and yet everyone has it’s own insaneity to a lesser degree in their families. I loved that Einstein didn’t wear socks. I’d loved the book Drama of the Gifted Child. I’d love seeing how individuals, families and societies learned to cope. I loved adaptation and evolution. The alcoholic and the insane person was never alone but always part of a system. I loved system theory. I was also enjoying drinking more in medical school where drinking was de rigor. We used to joke and say you didn’t have an alcohol problem if you didn’t drink more than your doctor. The lawyers, accountants and engineers were the greatest drinkers and frankly while a group of fraternities wanted me to join I didn’t like any of them because there was so much drunkenness.
I had such a serious streak then. I was meditating and praying and reading spiritual texts while consumed with chemistry and medicine.
But there I’ve got myself way a head of my story. Maureen was the most beautiful girl in the world, gentle, kind, caring, dedicated, brilliant and just a joy to be with. Everyone loved her. We became the ‘beautiful couple’ the true success story and then I didn’t know, the ‘envy of the trolls’. But being part of this world of the Yuppie was truly fun for me at the time. We were young successful adults on their way upward to being suburbanites with great friends, and a great future and great years ahead of us.
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