Why do we have hair? It grows after we die. It defines our face and the lack of hair can be a source of sorrow in our middle years. A bald head is actually a sign of virility as excessive testosterone creates male pattern baldness. The whiteness of our fair locks signals stress and wisdom. More stress than wisdom to our fairer sex.
Jeff is a hairy guy. He has been growing his locks every since a family trip to the Grand Canyon in the summer. Jeff is an iconoclast, a Democratic Republican, a Brooks Brothers man on the outside to a John Gardner’s October Light on the inside. Growing up in Long Island, he went to medical school, although I never asked him why. He cared about studies but was not afraid to party. He did well in college and was a summa cum laude in Chemistry. This fact, he kept sort of to himself.
I met Jeff my first year in med school. Coming to medical school is more of a medieval throw back. From a vantage point of small group of college students talking about the relevance of population genetics to current government funding of different social programs in the A D White Humanities seminars, medical school was didactic and Prussian. This is the metatarsal bone. If you don't know it as such, you flunk. The iliac artery becomes the femoral artery below the inguinal ligament. There is no discussion. We learned a new language, a different way of thinking about the body, putting aside a lot of cultural beliefs to tease the mysteries of the flesh. The first two years are a blur of large classes and feeling sort of lost in the shuffle. It is not romantic. There is palpable competition in the classrooms as most of the students have only been students and haven’t really lived in the real world. They were great at taking tests, but difficult to know as human beings. A liberal education has taught me that everything is up for question. A medical student is expected to digest, incorporate, and then regurgitate the information back in the best style of the attending doctor of the day.
It is a stark contrast to the problem at hand, taking care of ill who are in need of strong medicine but also in need of assuage and compassion.
On the wards, the medical student is actually the lowest of the low as he is not essential. Albert Memmi writes in the “Colonizers and the Colonized, “ that the middle man is the most cruel of all oppressors, as he deals a harsher sentence to the people below him than that he receives. We are at the whims of the interns and residents, and the floor nurses who used us for messengers and phlebotomists. It was a time of humility and also a time when we figured out how not be certain doctors as we tried to not to transform ourselves into people we would not recognize.
Jeff’s attitude was brazen meek. He and I met through a common bond of bicycling. I had been out in the Bikecentennial trail before school, and Jeff had wanted to start road biking. We road out to Niagara Falls on the beautiful Canadian side of the river, and ended up at Horseshoe falls. We did not need to talk. The shared experience was enough. It was a break from the learning oppression.
Over the next four years of indentureship, Jeff and I would escape each summer on our bicycles. We had a four dollar budget for food and lodging. We traveled from Boulder to Albuquerque crossing the Continental Divide four times. We had a snowball fight on top of Loveland Pass in July. We toured Europe from Southern England, to France, Switzerland, Italy, Amsterdam, and Belgium. We had another snowball fight on top of the Great St. Bernard Pass in the Alps. We ventured to North Bay in Canada and got eaten alive by blackflies. We slept in our tent, and ate peanut butter and jelly bought from the Wall of Value in various grocery stores. We were happy poor but experience rich.
A perfect day was climbing up the Alps to descend on the Italian side to a bottle of Asti and several day old bread given up by the local farmer because we looked so hapless. Coming back home one trip, the great Peoples Express from Heathrow, the stewardess asked for any medical personal on board. We helped an elderly man who was having chest pain. I don’t recall what we did, I think we just held his hand gave him oxygen, but we had great drinks and food for the rest of the ride home. We looked like ruffian, having bathed in rivers most of the summer, and smelt like salt, as we used salt to quell our greasy hair. We learned that knowledge, how little we possessed at the time, republicanized our appearances on some days. We learned not to feel like imposters.
I don’t know why friendships form and dissipate. Jeff and I can parallel our lives, and we can meet at some intersections. He is in Vermont, busy in the Emergency Room and also busy in learning the saxophone. His wife and children need him, as he needs them. We can go on for months and then years without contact, and then a chance meeting ignites our friendship to a status that we never left. It is almost an effortless friendship which is the most difficult kind to maintain.
We have tried to go sailing every other year recently. After the kids are in school, and after the Fall falls away, we have met in Deltaville for a brief turn around the Southern Bay. We meet after the Richmond Marathon, and I hobble out the following day to find that we can jump on board and crank the winches. Joan gives her blessing and we sort of go back in time for a bit. We do not go far. We bring a four dollar mug, and travel Cape Charles to Kelly’s restaurant.
It is comforting and comfortable that we do not have to talk. At the same time, we can validate our strange observations. Boy I thought that metatarsal bone looked like a duck....Holy cow, those teenagers are a strange lot. After a few days, we return back to our families, haircuts done, back to the world of adults with short hair.
Hair grows a little after we die. I am privileged to have friendships that grow like hair when we are living.
