Prologue 1
On the 24th of
this month I will reach my 84th year. I've always
been a fearful person and afraid of getting beaten up by older kids. So, to
compensate I have done things which are more dangerous such as getting married,
medical school, father of seven children, and prison psychiatry. I knew
my mother wanted me to be a doctor but I was afraid of that too. But one day my
dad and I were going down a road we happened upon a serious traffic accident. A
crowd quickly gathered but stood transfixed in horror. Blood was everywhere in
a mangled car where a partially scalped child, a father and mother lay gravely
injured in helpless agony.
Though just 16 at
the time I was able be of assistance to people who were hurt. I then used that
as an excuse or rationale that I could go to medical school. Now that I no
longer feared the sight of blood this somehow that gave me the notion that
medical school would be an easy task. Little did I know what was in store for
me.
About halfway through my undergraduate studies I began to
lose faith in the whole process; I couldn't stop thinking about girls but was
too fearful to approach them. So, Bill Richardson, a friend of mine arranged a
blind date. Her name was Frieda and I thought she cried on this date but
she always claimed that she didn't. I was so dumb-struck by her that
I thought I could jump over tall buildings and certainly get into medical
school. We had a beautifully troubled marriage of 58 years of invincible
incompatibility.
I never really understood her but she claimed that she not only understood
herself but she nailed me like a frog to a board with confident understanding.
I never believed that I had a knack of self-comprehension so I marveled that my
wife could manage this and thus it became a blessing. Whenever I had a moment
of self-doubt I would turn to Frieda and she would say with only a
glance of love and I would be reassured. And so, it goes.
During my youth, I
discovered that my dad had a first wife who abandoned him leaving their
6-week-old daughter. Diana was ultimately raised by my dad’s folks since my own
mother would not take the child in as “her own”. Occasionally I thought I saw
pain in my dad’s eyes although he never spoke to anyone about the first
marriage.
I will try to explain how the word "balance” fits
into my story and calls forth a rich soup. I was told by adults in
my family that my dad first noticed mom from behind a hole in a newspaper that
he was supposed to be reading while sitting in the Biloxi library where she was
the librarian. I suppose he was dumbstruck by the sight of her and a small hole
in the newspaper allowed him to see her right-sized.
To digress for a moment, I always had
trouble with self-examination or even an examination of another person. I was,
and still am, terrible at it. In two attempts, I have failed the
psychiatry oral part of the Board exams. What could've possibly caused me to
continue in psychiatry. Being my parents first born there was plenty of
opportunity to watch them in action. It didn't take me too long to see that
they had captured the spirit of invincible incompatibility. I did not see
her and I did not see him but somehow managed to see in their
midst...............the love relationship. My mother was a Biloxi Catholic and
my dad was a Butler University dropout agnostic nerd from Indianapolis. He came
to Biloxi to fish for sharks. Neither made sense in the context of the other,
but they somehow made sense within themselves.
From that
point on Life has become a balancing act. But please allow an
explanation.................. for this is crucial to understanding how one
might better fathom and balance differences in the life of our politics, Life
of our religions, Life of our families, and the Life within ourselves.
My dad had a quiet composure that he thought was due
in part to the study of Aesop's Fables. Around age 12 he was bed-bound by
doctors’ orders with the sequelae of rheumatic fever. It was a year of intense
reading for him but it became, for me, an experience of my father that I
balanced with the experience of my mother's Catholicism. He told me the one
about "The Boys and The Frogs"
SOME BOYS,
playing near a pond, saw several frogs in the
water and began
to pelt them with stones. They killed several of
them, when
one of the Frogs, lifting his head out of the water,
cried
out: "Pray stop, my boys: what is sport to you, is
death to
us."
Somehow this balanced with the Catholicism of
mom after the boys killed the frog they went
to confession
and the
priest gave them 10 Our Fathers and 10 Hail Mary’s to say as penitence.
