| The Stranger of the Two |
|
You stop for a moment in your daily routine. You think about a conversation with a stranger, a short, fifteen minute conversation, that you had a long time ago. I lived in Maine after college. I spent three years looking at the pine trees and walking on the cliffs and doing the sort of odd jobs that keep you alive so that you can continue looking at the landscape. I was not unhappy. During my last year in Maine I worked as a short order cook in a restaurant/club located on a bay. One evening, on break, I sat down in the lounge area, still wearing  my apron and bandana. It was very crowded and there weren’t many seats available while people waited for a table. The man sitting next to me commented on my cook’s outfit—I remember that it was a humorous remark and was obviously meant to pass the time. We exchanged a few pleasantries and after a few minutes, he said that I didn’t talk like a short order cook. This amused me. I was in that part of my life when every job seemed like a summer job and held no relevance to what I considered my “real” self. Eventually, I asked him what he did for a living. He was middle-aged, or thereabouts, and so I imagined that his job, unlike mine, must be “grown up” and therefore spoke to him in a deeper way. He told me he was a surgeon. I don’t remember how we got there, but the conversation wound back to his experience in Vietnam. I remember saying something to him like, “It must have been pretty terrible.” He shook his head. Then he smiled at me. “Actually,” he said, “it was fantastic—for a surgeon, that is.” I listened to him. “I learned more in one year than I could have in twenty years of regular practice,” he said. I didn’t understand him. “You see these horrific wounds during a war,” he explained. “And in many cases, the damage is so extensive that the patient is almost certainly going to die. So you try things…” “What kind of things?” I asked. “Anything,” he replied. “You take risks that you would never be allowed to take in civilian practice. In a war, there’s often no time, and so there’s nothing to be lost by trying whatever you can. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But you get very good in the process. Your skills increase enormously. War is the greatest learning experience for a young surgeon.” His table was called. He stood up. “Nice talking to you,” he said. I had that conversation almost thirty years ago. Why do I remember it so distinctly? Of course, I know the answer. I wasn’t talking with a total stranger. And that makes me uncomfortable. What conversations have you had that you can still recall so clearly? Why do you think you’ve never forgotten them? Donald Gallinger is the author of The Master Planets Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites               
Powered by !JoomlaComment 3.26
3.26 Copyright (C) 2008 Compojoom.com / Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved." |
||||||||