'Someone Else Now Is the Tyro'

“Waiting in a Dr.’s office is always a strange experience. When you come in, you feel that you are strangers, the eyes of all those who have arrived before you are centered on you with a frank scrutiny, accompanied by a stony silence; you feel awkward & self-conscious, and grab the first seats that are handy. But if even only a few moments elapse, and someone else comes in, at once you suddenly belong to the old group, and you feel almost a smug satisfaction that someone else now is the tyro, and must feel mortified and an alien.” 

Little has changed since the painter Charles Burchfield made those observations in his journal on this date, April 12, in 1937. We are still territorial. Later arrivals are threats to the pecking order until absorbed into the entrenched mass. We are forever individuals defying demographics – inimitable, irreplaceable – and yet we are like the others.

 

 Judging by appearances, on Monday I was the youngest in my doctor’s waiting room – an increasingly rare phenomenon. Everyone was masked. The waiting rooms of doctors and dentists, like barber shops, used to be stocked with good magazines, titles you didn’t subscribe to (Field & Stream!), like little branch libraries. No longer. The television mounted on the wall was tuned to a real-estate channel, and most of my fellow waiters looked rapt.

 

The nurse who escorted me to the examination room and took my blood pressure was named Trinidad. I told him he was the first person I had ever met named after a country, except for (sort of) Chick Corea, whom I once interviewed by telephone. The nurse said his aunt named him after “St. Trinidad. You know, in the Bible.” I knew it was a long shot but I asked if he had ever read anything by V.S. Naipaul. He hadn’t.

 

I suppose the Ur-text when it comes to doctors’ or dentists’ waiting rooms is Elizabeth Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room” (Geography III, 1976):

 

“Why should I be my aunt,

or me, or anyone?

What similarities--

boots, hands, the family voice

I felt in my throat, or even

the National Geographic

and those awful hanging breasts--

held us all together

or made us all just one?”

 

All of us are reduced by boredom and anxiety to children when waiting for the doctor to see us. At least Bishop had that disturbing National Geographic. All we had was the real-estate channel.

 

[In 1993, the State University of New York Press published a 737-page selection edited by J. Benjamin Townsend, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place. With it, Guy Davenport wrote, Burchfield “takes his place among American writers.”]