a day in the life
I am honored to report blessed details of an un-famous local, a PA entrusted with the bodies and minds of mostly young lives—from the newly married with uhm…intimate issues to the tall valley transplant who just wants to play his sport. Such vulnerability in the search for wellness.
To say to someone, this is how you must behave—or eat—or play or not play. Knowing full well it is the manner of telling that really counts, not who I am or what I know. Learning to be more authoritative but staying humble. I mean, medicine is a tricky business. Science isn’t always what it’s cut out to be. But communicating mutual trust and balancing what we do know with what we don’t know, well, I often wonder why medical providers are trained in science. Medicine is so much more; it’s soulful, it is.
Then driving to the post office to mail a package, insert $20 to the newly independent girl, girl justice, girl new job. Girl finding furniture, with expenditures equaling income, learning a new world. The museums are free, and the transportation, too. Ahh, the perks of a government job.
Then lunch with a friend excited with her wedding plans so I listen, listen a lot, one-way talk ‘til I mention edgewise that there’s been a slight change, uh, I won’t be joining the church after all. After all, it’s the time of our lives that we need to be together, my man and I, not apart. And I prayed. Well, I sat in silence mostly which is the closest thing to prayer for me. Getting guidance from a spiritual leader who seems from another world, a Methodist perfectionist world, or, in my mind, from the same world as my perp, so many similarities, if only he knew how triggering perfectionist talk can be.
So leaving the restaurant, I leap over large puddles, the rain coming down on me, and I strip off the wet socks, lay them on the car seat and after an afternoon of more details of peoples’ lives that make me feel honored as usual, I find dry socks to put on my bare feet in my Birkenstocks (no, I am not gay.) I take the back way home, listening to Michael Murphy’s Carolina in the Pines and Wildfire so I can feel sad, so I can go back to college time --to a time that was simpler, easier, more biblical, more outdoorsy. I close my eyes (at the stoplight) and I smell the autumn crispness of east texas, hear the leaves scrape the sidewalk outside my antique dorm window, see the pines towering into the sky on my way to class. A simpler time, it was.
So many complex encounters today; tension and joy mount. Sexual dysfunction so early in marriage; and two cases in one week. “I am not a sex counselor,” I hear myself say—twice today. And I reinforce good communication and the great benefits of counseling, but I really want to scream out, “Grab the moments now! While your ovaries are working so well!” Because I recall such wasted greed for release, alone or in closets .(don’t ask) Too impatient, I was.
If only people could wait, could stay married long enough for a day like today when the joy and the tension of the mundane, the rain, the music, the memories, the honorable purpose of work, blends together and comes to a head with majestic life thoughts. When the day culminates with dreams realized, and there is a peace about completion, of a job well done and still doing.
Fulfillment in touch or longings finally met, not wasted.
Investment in others’ lives and deferred gratification come to pass.
At last. This was a day in my life, this day, august 21, 2008.
1:11:19 AM 
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