Late lunch at Bread and Salt in Frisco. Paula and I walked down 5th to Main, the windy snow at our backs, the atmosphere January grey. Curbside seating was not offered. The patio chairs and bistro tables were mounded with a cubit of snow, the yellow umbrellas furled and resentful of the chill and desertion.
A week ago we were driving north from San Antonio, battling 70 mph wind laced with Panhandle tumbleweeds and this weird combination of flurries and dust, sprinkled with the occasional jackknifed 18-wheeler. Here in Summit County we have a quiet apartment and 25 inches of light snow. The Subaru has done quite well, both on the highways and in the mire of the Walmart parking lot. Our only engineering glitch has been frozen windshield-washer fluid.
This last week we’ve met strangers, fellow travelers and vacationers, and I amuse myself for rarely failing to mention that I have just retired. The past 7 days certainly feels more like vacation than retirement. I see myself at a bit of a distance when I make the announcement/confession that I am retired, and not infrequently I’m asked “What did you do?” What did I do? Only on occasion will I fill in the big blanks: 26 years in the Army, 37 years in medicine: pediatrics and clinical genetics. Is it fading from memory that quickly? And whatever I did, or will do, is that who I am?
Wasn’t self-discovery a task for an earlier stage of life?
Who are we if not our jobs, our training and credentials, the post-nominal initials some of us presume to trail after our names, illuminating a superior pedigree, another feather in your cap? Are we our families, our tribes, our voting records, real or acclaimed? Art thou thy hair? Are you your beliefs, if lucky enough to have more than one? Are you your behaviors, phobias, and rap sheet?
Identity is as concrete and elusive as any other facet of personhood. Being a physician lets you sidestep this a bit, because you can focus almost exclusively on what you do, what you have specialized in. It answers most questions that could be posed to you at a cocktail party, and sometimes gets you a nod of approbation. But none of the labels approaches the truth.
Who are you? Who am I?
Labels most always lie, even as they glance at truth. But take that with a grain of salt (and a slice of bread), as it is coming from someone who has warmly coveted certain labels. The prevarication is only in the inability of any label to represent the core of one’s identity.
Some fibs I seem to like, like the notion that I’m not really retired: I’m going to write! To validate the idea (for myself and my interlocutors), I have declared an intention: to get an MFA in writing. A rescue from the inchoate prospects of the recently retired. Purpose. Agenda. Three letters to festoon my surname.
I like that turn of logic. But it’s a little white lie, too. I just want to write. I’d prefer to write well, which will require practice and reading and reading and writing and talking to lots of people who want to read what I have written and help me get better while I do my best to reciprocate. Yet the question of why I want to write, or why anyone would want to write, is not well answered by ratiocination. First, there is the paradox of the process and the product. Is one worth more than the other? If one wrote well, and yet no one read it, would there be some value? Is the destination worth more than the journey? These questions are very much part of the gap year journey and I think will require some long walks in the mountains, clearing the mind and soul of the detritus of the world, centering of values and belief. How can that not be exciting?
A pilgrimage to find the light. Maybe. An inflection point, just as every day is potentially an inflection point, but here and now I have declared it publicly and so must find the path to the waterfall. My new path to the waterfall. Possibly perilous, a challenge to self-understanding, self-identity, and like all good challenges simultaneously a threat and an opportunity that, at its center, is visceral and emotive. Curiously, for me at least, there is ego, but ego interfused: a spirit and a motion that rolls through all things. No ideas but in things. Logic of the heart.
This week I have been reading weather forecasts and snow reports for Breckinridge, Keystone, and Arapahoe Basin. And James Joyce: Dubliners, a book he unsuccessfully tried to self-publish in 1912. Here are a few lines from The Dead:
“He longed to be alone with her. When the others had gone away, when he and she were in their room in the hotel, then they would be alone together. He would call to her softly”
—Gretta!
Perhaps she would not hear at once: she would be undressing. Then something in his voice would strike her. She would turn and look at him. . . .”
Bundle up and stay warm, my friends.
Scott D. McLean, MD 