Good questions. As for the answers…hell, I didn’t know. Maybe I’d never be able to help anyone. What I did know was that my options were somewhat limited. Anything surgical was out—what with the partial blindness and missing fingers and all—and I wasn’t interested in either family practice or internal medicine.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss surgery, though. I missed the raw way my hands felt after scrubbing, and the sound of the gloves snapping in place; I loved repairing bones and ligaments and tendons and feeling like I always knew exactly what I was doing. There was a kid in Kandahar about twelve years old who’d shattered his kneecap falling off a roof a couple of years earlier, and the local physicians had botched the operation so badly that he could barely walk. I had to rebuild the knee from scratch and six months later, when he returned for a checkup, he jogged toward me. I liked the way it made me feel—that I’d fixed him, allowing him to lead a normal life—and wondered whether psychiatry would ever give me that same satisfaction.
Because who is ever really fixed when it comes to mental or emotional health? Life takes radical twists and turns, and hopes and dreams shift as people enter different phases of their lives. Yesterday, via Skype—we speak every Monday—Dr. Bowen reminded me that we’re all continual works in progress.
I was musing about all of this as I stood over my grill later in the evening with the radio playing in the background. The sun was going down, illuminating a kaleidoscope sky as I flipped the NY strip I’d picked up from the Village Butcher on the far side of town. In the kitchen, I had a salad and baked potato ready to go, but if you’re thinking I’m some kind of chef, I’m not. I have a simple palate and I’m decent with the grill, but that’s about it. Since moving to New Bern, I’d been shoving charcoal into my grandfather’s old Weber three or four times a week and setting the coals ablaze. It made me nostalgic for all those summers of my childhood, when my grandfather and I grilled our suppers almost every night.
When the steak was ready, I added it to my plate and sat at the table on the back porch. It was dark by then, the house lights glowing from within, and moonlight reflected off the still waters of Brices Creek. The steak was perfect, but my baked potato was a bit cold. I would have popped it in the microwave, except for the fact that the kitchen didn’t have a microwave. Though I’d made the house livable, I hadn’t yet decided on whether to renovate the kitchen, or put on a new roof, or seal the windows, or even fix the slant in the kitchen floor. If I decided to sell the place, I suspected that whoever bought it would tear down the old house, so they could put a custom home on the property. You didn’t need to be a real estate whiz to figure out that any value to the property was in the land, not the structure.
After finishing my dinner, I brought the plate inside and set it in the sink. Opening a beer, I returned to the porch to do some reading. I had a stack of psychiatric books and textbooks I wanted to finish perusing before I moved to Baltimore, on subjects ranging from psychopharmaceuticals to the value and drawbacks associated with hypnosis. The more I’d been reading, the more I felt I had to learn. I had to admit my study skills were rusty; I sometimes felt like I was an old dog and these were new tricks. When I’d said as much to Dr. Bowen, he’d essentially told me to quit whining. Or that’s how I took it, anyway.
I’d settled into the rocking chair, turned on the lamp, and had just started reading when I thought I heard a voice calling out from around the corner of the house. I turned down the radio, waited a beat, and heard the sound again.
“Hello?”
Rising from my seat, I grabbed my beer and moved to the porch railing. Peeking into the darkness, I called back. “Is someone there?”
A moment later, a woman in uniform stepped into the light. Specifically, the uniform of a deputy sheriff. The sight caught me off guard. My experience with law enforcement to that point in my life was limited to highway patrolmen, two of whom had pulled me over for speeding in my younger years. Though I’d been apologetic and polite, each of them nonetheless gave me a ticket, and dealing with law enforcement ever since made me nervous. Even if I hadn’t done anything wrong.
I didn’t say anything; I was too busy trying to figure out why a deputy sheriff was paying me a visit, while the other part of my brain was processing the fact that the uniformed officer was female. Call me a sexist, but I hadn’t interacted with many women in law enforcement, especially down here.