I was greeted by a medical student the other evening off campus, and I inquired about how it was going for him. He noted it was exam week, but he said he was glad to see me, as it “helps him know he can make it”, and that our occasional brief conversations are a “break from the insanity from his studies”.   Twenty-Five years ago about this time of year when the Fargo winter was just beginning to soften, I was having a crisis of confidence in my post-MD residency training which would prove to be life-changing. I smiled as we parted, thinking that nobody would’ve considered me a “break from insanity” back then       (I WAS the insanity!).

A couple of days later, an elderly retired physician from north central Minnesota stopped at the front of the hall to visit following a lecture I had given for community education.   I had never met him before-his eyes sparkled as he talked about medicine and his practice, noting that he too had suffered a stroke which changed many things for him. The doctor had not grown up in the area, he was from a medium sized city like myself, and like many of his generation, had also been in the service. He was a marvelous story teller, and I could tell he really enjoyed sharing his old stories of medical practice in the rural upper Midwest, where he really did everything- taking care of sick kids, delivering babies, even many surgical procedures. In his early 80’s, walking with a cane, I saw a little of myself in 30 years.

Later that afternoon, I needed to go up to the medical school to do some paper work and pick up some mail. On my way out of the building in the early evening, I walked by the glass-walled library, and the same student looked up from his studies and gave me a friendly nod- sealing some chain of mentorship, reflecting on all I’d learned from my professors all those years ago, some of whose portraits I pass every day in these halls.

And so it goes.

Spirit broken

Words not spoken

Paths otherwise left unchosen

Then

I

see

you

The rain was exploding around me, almost overpowering me, it seemed a struggle just to stay sitting up.  I’d felt the presence of every molecule of water, as I imagined the trip the vapor had made from somewhere in the Rockies.  Soon collected into the gathering thunderstorm across the plains and now totally immersing me, wet, warm, symphonic in its energy.  I could see the lightning, but the thunder was inaudible, yet viscerally impacting my body.  I suddenly became aware that I was wearing sunglasses as I looked across my small yard sloping downward toward the Missouri river.  The old, chipped, weathered cement staircase to nowhere, now my focus as it gathered water and herded it on its never ending cycle, predating, and in all likelihood, postdating my time on the planet, awesome in its force, especially in my exhausted reverie.

I wasn’t sure how long I’d been sitting here, in a lawn chair chaise, shirtless, wearing cutoffs and Birkenstocks.  Each raindrop seemed cataclysmic in its demise, yet time suspended as my mind seemed to hold and contemplate their individual, and finally, collective fate.  It had to have been over 30 hours, but a watch would’ve been useless by now.   From the dead zone that was where the night before was a recent memory, before the new day was really realized, the extension of this madness now launching me into the classic late afternoon thunderstorm in eastern Nebraska.  I had the faint, distant realization of a tape I had of the Grateful Dead at Red Rocks in ’84 playing somewhere in my apartment.  “Wake up to find that you are the eyes of the world..” Freak On.