
My dad wasn’t a trained surgeon but he did the best he could. There were times at the jungle hospital in
Mom was a universal blood donor and became accustomed to these nocturnal sanguineous visitations. It got to the point where she would just roll over in bed, extend her left arm, and barely wake up. Dad would suck out a bright purple pint with a big syringe and trot back to work.
I shared this story with a young Red Cross phlebotomist at the New Hope Fire Station blood drive last Saturday. She looked at me with an expression of bemused horror--the sort of look a phlebotomist might give a wise guy who cracks, “Confidentially, I should tell you my parents were vampires. Do you find me attractive?”
In the early 1970s a special visitor descended on our house and my parents treated him like he was the Archangel Michael. Our guest was a blond mustachioed young surgeon from
One afternoon during Dr. Doerfer’s sojourn with us, a teenaged accident victim was brought into the hospital, splayed out in the back of a pickup taxi. He’d been hit by a bus and had quite a number of broken bones. Dad and Dr. Doerfer sprung into action. I happened to be hanging around and chose this moment to tell Dad that I’d been thinking of becoming a doctor myself someday. In a flash of well-meaning but misplaced pedagogical enthusiasm, Dad invited me into the operating room to watch him and Dr. Doerfer perform surgery on this multiple trauma victim. “Maybe you’ll learn something!” he said.
Dad was the picture of jovial serenity as he assisted Dr. Doerfer in the operation--humming gospel choruses, making small talk with his friends Beth the anesthetist and Eleanor the instrument-handing nurse, and complimenting young John’s surgical chops.
For his part, Dr. Doerfer appeared to be slightly freaked out. As the hours passed, he became more and more anxious. “Wally, we’re never going to finish this in time. We’ve got to wake him up--he’s been down too long. There are a lot of things we need...”
Dad acted like he and John might have been assembling a slightly complicated model airplane on a Sunday afternoon. “It’s looking great, John! Let’s keep going! You want something to eat? We’ve got bananas. Could somebody get John a banana?”
Dad loved surgery almost as much as trout fishing. He was a little better at surgery.
Night fell and eventually I de-gowned and left the hospital and walked back to the house. On the far horizon to the west, I saw what looked like a red ember glowing on the cone of
The next morning dawned clear and Sangay remained visible along with its jagged-topped neighbor, El Altar. At the breakfast table, Mom explained to Dr. Doerfer that he had been granted a rare vision: seeing Sangay erupt at night and then the snowcaps rising out of the mist in the morning. Mom opined that this was a sure sign the Lord was calling John Doerfer to move to the jungle for good. “What do you think, John? Huh?”
Dr. Doerfer wasn’t saying. He looked like a man who had spent the night in one of those secret CIA prisons in
* * *
During our family’s first decade in
In 1973, we came back to
The day we got the van from Uncle Sheldon, Dad motored over to Grandpa Arvid’s house to display his splendid new chariot. Grandpa was bothered by the National Car Rental logos painted on the sides. (He had the same impulse that I’d had upon receiving Melvin Christiansen’s used baseball glove for Christmas with Melvin’s name block-lettered on it: Let’s paint over that.)
Arvid found some white enamel paint in his basement and proceeded to brush over the National logos forthwith. The effect was not quite what Dad was hoping for. The repainted ovals were flat-finished and off shade from the rest of the car. It now gave the impression that we’d stolen a utility van from a plumber.
A couple of days later, our family packed into the van and left
Eventually we reached
We all slept in the van by the side of the road, oblivious to wild animals, bandidos, right-wing death squads, and narcotraficantes. We ate freeze dried camping food. Sometimes we made a fire. I was reading The Grapes of Wrath and it felt like we were the Joads. Actually there wasn’t enough sleeping room for everybody inside the van, so most nights, weather permitting, I stretched out on the roof. I would lie up there gazing at the stars and ponder deep philosophical questions, the top three being: (1) If a person could travel to the edge of the universe, what would he find on the other side (and if the answer is “nothing,” then what was the difference between nothing and a separate empty universe?) (2) If God was willing to kill Bathsheba’s baby who hadn’t done anything wrong, then why didn’t he just kill Hitler? (3) Would I ever have a girlfriend?
When we arrived in
In
* * *
At the end of my junior year at the
Somewhere in the Ecuadorian Oriente, Jay acquired an eight-foot boa constrictor. He was determined to take this rather large serpent back to
Incredibly, this mad scheme worked. Jay breezed through customs in
Back in
The boa stayed at large all winter--that’s about nine months in
* * *
It was 1994 and I was trying again to reach Stan George, my editor at Oxford University Press. I’d sent him the final edits to my manuscript but I hadn’t heard from him in two months. Now he wasn’t returning my phone calls. I dialed one more time and got his voicemail: “This is Stan George. I’m sorry I can’t come to the phone right now. Leave me a message and I will call you back at my earliest opportunity.”
“Mr. George is ignoring me!” I fairly shouted. “I’ve left numerous messages but he won’t return my calls. This is unprofessional. What’s happening with my book? I’ve been left in limbo for two months.”
What followed next was a long and awkward pause, then this: “Professor Swanson, I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but Stan is dead. He passed away some time ago. I guess we should have changed his voicemail message.”
Changed his message, I thought? Changed it to what? How about: “Hello, you’ve reached the desk of Stan George. I REALLY can’t come to the phone right now... because I’m dead. But thanks for calling, and have a lovely day.”
“Thanks for sending me that book announcement,” Allen said. “What’s it about again? Missionaries in
Suddenly I felt anxious and cold--like the Aunties in the middle of an endless winter and possibly in bed with a snake.
* * *
It’s November 2007 and I’m at an elegant wine-and-cheese reception at the University Club, surrounded by my colleagues, close friends, and family. The special occasion is to celebrate my promotion to the rank of Professor in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences with tenure at
The co-sponsor and host of this affair is my personal investment advisor and portfolio manager, who is also an old and dear friend. His name is John Doerfer, Jr. John now lives in Chapel Hill, is a divorced father of four, and just returned from a journey to
Jay and Wendy Anderson walk in, fresh from the airport and just having stepped off a plane from
Johnny Doerfer approaches the mic and reads a kind letter from my Yale mentor, Kai Erikson. Then my Duke colleague Marvin Swartz reads a funny fake letter from Allen Francis, our former chairman. (Allen left Duke long ago, and contrary to his dire predictions I’m still here.) Marvin presents me with a few charming gifts, effluvia of liberal academic culture: a nationwide map of NPR stations, a Chia pet that will grow a tangled mat of green hair on the head of Professor Einstein, and a beer top opener that spouts memorable Bushisms like, “You’re working hard to put food on your family.”
I listen to Jay and I wish my mom were alive to hear this. I wish Dad were here, too. Despite my intention that day, long ago, when Dad let me watch him and John’s dad perform surgery on a guy who got hit by a bus, I never followed through and became a doctor. Ironically, though--and improbably--I had come to this: I was now a full professor in a medical school. My mother would have loved it.
Finally, I deliver a few prepared remarks:
Now, Limbo is the place where the unbaptized souls go to just sort of look busy and wait and see what’s going to happen to them. So I was really sorry to see this abolished, because it always seemed to me such a perfect metaphor for the academic career without tenure.
I end my shtick and pause for a moment. My mind wanders to the time I took my Matt and his friend whitewater rafting in the mountains, and the guides turned out to be two girls younger than my son. I was the only person in the raft with the slightest appreciation of the fact that we will all surely die--perhaps today. Suspended between the raging rapids and a giant rock, I said a prayer and tried to recall how much life insurance Pam was going to collect. Then I heard the kids laughing at me and we were in the still waters.
At the University Club I proceed to thank people in earnest--one by one--for what they’ve all done and who they are. I say it’s going to be brief but this is a happy lie. I end with these words:
Finally, at a time like this, and coming from my background, really the only appropriate thing to do is to quote Scripture. So I’d like to repeat those old words, “Love bears all things, hopes all things, believes all things, endures all things.”
With a little of that, I could survive the end of limbo. I might even be immortalized for quite some time.