`Their Rectitude is Chastening'

My doctor graduated with his B.S. in 1949, three years before I was born, from the university where I work. In June he will celebrate his 80th birthday and retire after practicing medicine for 50 years. I’ve known him for less than three years but he’s the first doctor whose company I don’t dread and who makes me feel like an adult. When he enters the examination room, I stand, we shake hands, he pulls up a chair and we talk and laugh for five or 10 minutes – family, the weather, what we’ve been reading. He enjoys listening to a good story as much as he does telling one. He enjoys words the way some people savor a lemon candy. Two years ago, when a harmless spike showed up on my EKG, causing me to consult a cardiologist, I called it an “anomaly,” and he laughed and claimed the word as his own and repeats each time I see him. Eventually, we get around to the state of my health, which is so tiresomely uneventful I’m tempted to invent ailments so I don’t lose his interest.

I saw Dr. B. again Wednesday, probably for the last time. I asked about his plans and he said, “Tomatoes. I grow them. And roses.” His children live in Virginia, Oklahoma and the Bay Area of California, and he and his wife plan to take leisurely road trips to visit them all. “We’ll take two weeks to drive to San Francisco. I love to drive and we enjoy seeing the country.” His father was a doctor, and so was his late brother, and so is his late brother’s son, who’s in practice with Dr. B. and who will inherit me as a patient. My doctor plans to keep his license because he wants occasionally to volunteer at a nearby clinic.

In the waiting room, before my exam, I was rereading Assorted Prose (1965), probably the first book I read by John Updike. The pieces he wrote in the fifties and early sixties for “The Talk of the Town” inevitably betray his influences – especially E.B. White – but all are amusing and justify my return to them periodically. One brief piece from May 1958, “Upright Carpentry,” seems pertinent to the retirement of one physician and the end of an era it signals for me and the rest of his patients:

“The bookcase and kitchen counter and cabinet he left behind stand perfectly up-and-down in a cockeyed house. Their rectitude is chastening. For minutes at a stretch, we study them, wondering if perhaps it isn’t, after all, the wall that is true and the bookcase that leans. Eventually, we suppose, everything will settle into the comfortably crooked, but it will take years, barring earthquakes, and in the meantime we are annoyed at being made to live with impossible standards.”