Scott D. McLean, MD

Of course I have not forgotten that a year encompasses just 52 weeks. But a gap year is more flexible than what we admire as the legal, orthodox, and obdurate movement of the earth around the sun.

I retired in January 2024. For the umpteenth time, from the practice of clinical genetics (yes, that’s a thing) with Baylor College of Medicine, who have granted me the academic trappings of Emeritus Professor. Try as I will, the moniker does not entitle me to a free cuppa joe at Local Coffee. Sheesh!

Now I’m nearing the end of my retirement, about to go back to school and, in fact, smothered by assignments to prepare for the first day of class – the 18^th of July, Enders Island, Connecticut, where the Fairfield University (low-residency) Master of Fine Arts in Writing (fiction for me) will begin an 8-day residency. This will be the first of five semi-annual residencies for the two-year program. Preparation has included writing – a short story, about a dozen pages, terrible, to be read by lots of good writers, to be judged. Yikes. And I have read five short stories written by my workshop peers: whoa! I’m the rookie, just called up to the bigs, a bit worried about taking batting practice. Can’t really trust that I can swing the bat.

I’ll have a couple of workshops, each with a reading list, plus two novels by our visiting authors; this brings the page count to 14995. No, not really. That’s an exaggeration. It’s only 971 pages.

Dang.

That means I have to place my regular reading list in abeyance, two stacks of purchases and retrievals from my previously read and previously purchased but unread library. The photo you see here shows 95 percent of them. I have excluded about 38 semi-assaulted copies of the New Yorker.

Time to get back to reading.

To leave you with something interesting to think about, here is an excerpt from “The Left Hand of Darkness,” by Ursula Leguin, the best science fiction novel published in 1969.

Let me ask you this, Mr. Ai: do you know, by your own experience, what patriotism is?”

“No,” I said, shaken by the force of that intense personality suddenly turning itself wholly upon me. “I don’t think I do. If by patriotism you don’t mean the love of one’s homeland, for that I do know.”

“No, I don’t mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression. It grows in us, that fear. It grows in us year by year.”