Dr. Feight

to listen to this post and the next, click here

 Dr. Feight  

I am looking at the calendar over the phone in the kitchen. Today is Tuesday, January 17th. Yesterday, then, was almost certainly Monday the 16th, the day before Sunday the 15th, and so forth. Tomorrow, pace David Hume, will be Wednesday, January 18th.

On Sunday, Uncle Albert and I went to church. Roz went to coffee with her friend Charlie. In the afternoon, the four of us, Roz, Charlie, Uncle Albert, and I went to Seeville to take back a coat Charlie had bought for her husband Ray and to buy shoes for me. We returned the coat, and Uncle Albert bought a book, something about Nettles by Junichiro Tanizaki; but I couldn’t find shoes that I wanted. We ate a very late lunch or very early supper at a deli. Then we came home.

     Uncle Albert wasn’t feeling well, he said, so he “retired” to his room.

When I checked on him on my way to bed, because Roz said, “Don’t you think you should check on Albert?” – meaning, “At least knock on Albert’s door and see if he’s still alive” – he was sitting at the desk, writing in his notebook. He had the book by Tanizaki open beside the notebook.

     “What are you writing?” I said, then quickly: “Are you all right?”

     “I’m fine,” he said. “I’m trying to write a sentence, but I can’t get it short enough . . . ” He hesitated. “Sharp enough.”

     “Can I see?” I asked.

     “Yes, come in.”

Here is what he had written:

We can fall out of life without dying. Instead, we become abstemious: we stop drinking and smoking and even thinking about women. We begin collecting antique tea sets. We wrap the past in cotton gauze and the present in the past.

“I like it,” I said. “I don’t think it’s too long.”

     “Maybe not,” he said.

     I said, “Are you feeling better?”

     He said, “Some. I’d feel even better if I thought I could get this right.”

    “Well,” I said, “good night.”

     Good night,” he said.

Down the stairs

That was Sunday, and yesterday was Monday, which was a holiday, Martin Luther King Day, so I didn’t go to work; but Roz did, because someone had to be in her office, and it was her turn. Besides she was going to take off part of Tuesday – today – to take me to the doctor.

     So, today we went to the doctor.

His name is Feight. He went to Johns Hopkins, then did a psychiatric residency at the University – that’s what I gathered from his diplomas; I gathered also that he was at least ten years older than I am, which made me wonder. I will be sixty this spring if I live that long.

Dr. Feight’s office is in his house. There’s a separate entrance down some stairs to the basement. You come into a little hallway, and there are two doors, one straight ahead and one to the left marked “Waiting Room.” In the waiting room are two chairs and a couch and a table with magazines: The New York Review of Books and Scientific American and Poetry and Dissent. We had hardly sat down when he opened the door and stepped in, a small, round man in suit and tie, a spray of white hair. Nothing quite fit. The suit-coat was too small, and the trousers too long; the white hair seemed to hover a few centimeters above his head.

     He and I went into the other room in which there was a chair and a desk and a couch and books. “So,” he said. “Tell me what’s going on.”

     I said I wasn’t sure.

to be continued

01.17.17