Truth is stranger than fiction.
You can see here a beard (me) in a hooded sweatshirt. What is probably true is that it is my Hamilton College lacrosse sweatshirt, last worn in 1979, then saved in several generations of cardboard boxes and moved from Clinton to Baltimore to Boston to Bethesda, Tacoma, Seoul, Vienna (VA), Silver Spring, El Paso, and to San Antonio. All for the opportunity to slip it on. Once. 45 years later.
It fit! Ha!
Then I threw it away. Because the other truth is that it has fallen apart and smells like the 1970s. That was not the best vintage for sweat.
Why did I save this snug blue garment? For yea 4 decades I had no chance of a fit. How well does the detritus of the glory days preserve the faint but intoxicating scent of glory? Enough, if worn just once more.
The theme for the next segment of my “gap year” – the interlude between full time practice as a clinical geneticist and low-residency MFA in writing – will be nonfiction. Five or 6 weeks focused on essays, commentary, book reviews, and prescriptive nonfiction, highly flavored with the tribulations of medical practice in the specialty of clinical genetics. On some topics I have notes going back years – the criteria by which we add conditions to the panels of newborn screens, the death rattle of dysmorphology, the separation and impending divorce between pediatrics and genetics, the history of direct-to-consumer genetic testing, the genetics workforce, the geneticist’s book of spells and incantations, eugenics for enlightened influencer.
The job will be to unpack and read what I have previously written, air them out, see if they have fallen to tatters or reek of ages past, and if worthy set them up and see what we can make of them. It will be fun. But I’m sure about half will have to join my sweatshirt in the landfill. Someday, that will be good organic material from which we can expect new growth. Either that or swamp gas.
Scott D. McLean, MD 