I give a black man a ride. He tells of how he first arrived here from overseas. How he wasn’t given of the funding promised him when he arrived, so he had to make do.
We arrive at the doctors office. We sit down in the waiting room. Just then he gets to the part about ten-thousand Chinese with a thousand dollars between them. He becomes distraught; I get choked up. I think to myself, how am I going to be a good doctor if this gets me unsettled?
I’m called to the back. It’s a pleasant back hallway, reminiscent of a hospital hallway. I’m nervous and incredulous these folks are accepting of my taking a doctor’s role without any training or knowledge. I peak into an office room. In a small part of the room, I see a quaint sign with a medical serpent emblem saying something like psychic studies. This reassures me. I’m called to see a patient. This will be interesting.
As I walk down the hallway, a woman walks beside me and hands me a book. It’s white with metallic blue letters and a simple golden snowflake (a hexagon with lines continuing out). She thanks me for the book. I don’t understand what she means. “You and Chelsea and Elsie (the two doctors here) wrote it.”
Hmm. I look at the writing a couple page back from the bookmark and the conversation we are having is in the book. This gives me a good, wholesome feeling — a special, cared-for feeling.
Somehow we are turned around. Elsie comes into to see the patient just as I was about to begin with him or her.
I go to the lunchroom with the woman who gave me the book. It’s more significant than a lunchroom: there is a feeling of home and that this is the center of many cultural activities; still, it’s normal-sized.
There is a nice, wide table of unpolished, comfortable wood. The woman and I have a seat. Doctor Chelsea sits across from us. There is a feeling that a presentation is going to begin, but the atmosphere is that which precedes a family member presenting to a family without any feeling of business obligation.
Elsie sits down besides me to my right. Again, there is a family feel here, one of immediate acceptance, as if we’ve been doing this together for a while, or, it’s the comfort of being happy with what one does and being involved with a thoroughly solid and good and wholesome practice. Elsie settles in as though she’s about to tuck into a good sandwich. “Oh, mom’s here too,” she says with a grateful nonchalance.