The show is called Seinfeld, Mark said, still counting the coconut hairs of my doormat. As in Jerry Seinfeld, and it’s set in the Upper West Side.
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I WAS SUPPOSED TO work only two weeks in November, but when an attending called out sick last minute, I volunteered to step in. Then Reese asked if I could take his Thanksgiving shift in exchange for one of my December ones. The day of turkey basting and feasting was his mother’s favorite—because it was just one day, as he explained, centered around family and not like Christmas, which for the entire month of December became a part-time job.
He said he’s never missed a Thanksgiving.
Not even one? I asked.
Thirty-three years and counting, he had no plans to start now.
I’d forgotten that Reese was a year younger than Madeline, though his reproductive window was much longer. Did it make sense to call it a window, if after puberty it was flung open for the rest of his life? Reese was our youngest ICU attending but by his first year had already made it onto the brochures, from his good relations with HR. For whatever reason, our HR department employed only late-middle-aged women, the same age as probably Reese’s mother. He would open doors for them, wave to them in the halls, or swing by their offices for a quick chat. The HR reception counter always had a filled M&M dispenser, and I’d seen Reese stand there, chatting and pulling the handle as if it were a slot machine, cha-ching, cha-ching.
But a doctor who has never missed Thanksgiving was an anomaly and I asked Reese how he had managed to do that.
He shrugged. Always able to find coverage, he guessed, someone was usually willing.
I almost rescinded my offer but wanted his hours more. I wanted everybody’s hours, so didn’t offer him any of my shifts.
A rite of passage almost, to miss all the important holidays, to be on weekend call and never there for your family or friends. A badge of honor to have missed your sister’s wedding or the major crisis of a close friend, to slowly become the person whom no one reached out to first and then the person who heard about personal news last. My brother’s engagement to Tami I didn’t know about until a week after it had occurred. But I texted and called you, he said, and indeed he had. He had even left a voice message that I’d meant to listen to, forgot, and while I was angry at myself for forgetting, I was also slightly proud. Because how else could you be providing great service to strangers if you didn’t take that time away from people who were not?
* * *
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ON THE SECOND FRIDAY of the month, I was summoned by the director’s secretary to his corner office on the twentieth floor. The office faced northwest and had an uninterrupted view of the Hudson from bank to bank. Opposite this wall with the window was the wall of his degrees, five and counting, hung up in different types of brown frames. The latest degree was an MBA that he had finished online. The last time I was here, the degree was printed but unframed. Now it was in a frame more ornate than the one for his MD and MPH. He had a DPhil too. Prior to med school, he had studied linguistics at Oxford, a story he liked to tell new recruits during meet and greets, over drinks.
Medicine was a calling, he’d say, and sometimes you had to wait for this call while pursuing something else. Don’t rush into medicine, else you’ll be miserable; find new interests, challenge yourself with the unknown, etc.
Impressed by his journey, his degrees, I’d once asked the director how many languages he could speak, and he said that’s not what linguistics was about. The field was about the study of languages, not any in particular. Discovering that he knew no other language, I was both disappointed and confused. Even someone like me, along with most people in the world, knew English and a second.
I worried that I was being summoned for having worked four continuous weeks. While the director cared about productivity, the hospital’s HR department set limits and exceeding them was heavily discouraged. But my insane November schedule wasn’t mentioned and he jumped right into praising how unflappable I’d been these last three years and essential to their program in intensive care.
He asked about my Thanksgiving plans and I said I wasn’t going anywhere, since I was on service.
Good to hear, he said, and wished he could say the same. He was heading up to Westchester to see his in-laws. The wife is big on tradition, he explained. The kids like getting out of the city. That he had a wife （and kids） surprised me, and since imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I used the same Etch A Sketch motion he used before on me when he asked if I had a father.