musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

Oh, speak again of the day you’ve had


I’ve always been a dog person I think; I love all animals, but dogs are special to me: they are curious about the world outside their yards -their territories. I mean for them, everything seems to leave a scent, or at least a mark as they travel through the park or neighbourhood where they are walked. Invisible to us, of course, whatever is there seems obvious to the dog. It got me wondering whether we, too, inadvertently mark our passage through the world.

I don’t think I’m a particularly interactive person; I mean, I talk to people and apologize if I inadvertently bump into them, but I’m more of a listener; an outsider who is more comfortable on the periphery: aware, although not necessarily involved. But even as I sit on the boundary, life still brushes into me; and there are times when I am an instigator, an agent as well as a recipient -perhaps more than I have awarded credit. I suspect that only a very few of us can limit ourselves to spectation; we are usually drawn in, if only by being noticed as a member of the edge of the crowd who is trying not to watch. Not to engage…

But even being noticed is a mark of sorts: a weak engagement is still a mark. I remember a poem I wrote years ago. I think it was the first time I actually thought about the influence, the marks, that other people left on me although the effect surprised me enough to call it ‘the One and Only):

We had not met

And never will.

She travelled through the crowd

An island,

With people

Breaking over her

Like waves.

Submerged in thought,

She sometimes cleared

Her head

Enough

To rise above the sea-

Sadness painted in her cheeks,

And loneliness

A smudge

Upon her face.

But once,

She surfaced in the stream

Her eyes

Like beacons.

And there,

Floodlit in her gaze,

We joined

Along a line so bright

The people melted

Into ripples:

Stubbled shadows

In the glare

And we danced

Along the glowing bridge

Between,

Till she was swept away

To join

The churning waves.

Crowds

Are such empty places

Now.

I’m not sure how I missed the marks before; they were there I’m sure, but likely hidden outside the bubble most of us wear to get us through the day. Only by paying attention to our interactions can we gauge the enormity of our inadvertent effects on others: holding the door open for someone whose arms are full of groceries; commenting how wet an umbrella-less stranger appears on a street corner while waiting for the little man sign to appear ,and then holding your own umbrella over their head; or letting someone go ahead of you in a grocery line when they only have one item in their basket. These, surely, do not go unnoticed, unappreciated… We are social animals and I’d like to think our marks help guide others through their day.

Perhaps one of the ways that marks become important and actually stand out from the constantly changing background is when they are not only unexpected, but seem counterintuitive, capricious. Like on the busy bus I entered the other day. I was tired from carrying one load of heavy groceries in a cloth bag, as well as several even heavier cans and bottles in my back pack. Yes, I am old -I suppose octogenarianism is an automatic ticket to that club- but although I often play the ‘old card’ with my grizzled beard, there are times when the recalcitrance of Age determines my actions. Or should I more embarrassingly call it stubbornness? I may be Old, but I’m still in the game, even while being jostled in the rapidly-filling aisle of a bus with no empty seats visible, or reachable wearing a clunky, irregularly-weighted back pack and a carrying a bag so heavy I had to keep switching hands to keep the contents from spilling onto a morass of largely insouciant feet.

There seemed no desert island refuge nearby with the unlikely exception of the aisle seat beside me being absolutely jammed, not with flesh, but with bags, and in what space there might have been in front of the seat on the floor, was wedged a rickety old-person’s grocery rolley: a carry-on airplane suitcase that doubled as a carry-all cart. The occupant of the window seat beside this confusing array was an elderly lady calmly looking out of the side window. She looked frail, but determined after what was probably a day of shopping for the week’s groceries. Still, she was trapped in her window seat like a little bird in a cage.

Nobody in the aisle had asked her to move her things off the seat beside her because… well, there was no space left to put them even if she agreed. Suddenly, as if aware of how the bus was filling up, she glanced at me over the jagged pile beside her and smiled: Old acknowledging Old, I guess.
“Do you need to sit down, sir?” she asked with a worried look at what I was carrying.

I smiled back. “I’m okay,” I lied.

She surveyed her items on the seat beside her. “Taking a bus when you’re on a day of grocerying is always fraught isn’t it,” she said eyeing my own acquaintance with the trouble. “Here, I can shift some of these around a bit so you can at least put your heavy bag on the seat…” She studied the problem like she might have a game of 3 dimensional chess. “Well, you can actually sit, if I take some of my bags, and put them on my lap…”

I could see by her face she was positioning her items into manageable aliquots.

I nodded my gratitude as she riffled through the more manageable packages on the seat and then glanced at me with a worried look on her face. “I forgot about my Granny Cart; You’ll never be able to get your feet around it…”

She looked deflated at her magnanimous offer being defeated by circumstances beyond her control. We stared at each other for a moment, perplexed, but unwilling to countenance defeat.

I studied the problem with the certainty of a lifelong experience of a male, and suddenly the problem unravelled. “If it’s all right with you,” I said a bit hesitantly, I can put your rolley on my lap, and my bag between my legs…”

“But then what about your back-pack?”

A young voice then piped up from the crowd listening in the aisle. “You can put your pack on the floor and I can straddle it between my legs, if that’s okay with you, sir.”

And, between the three of us -no, it was also with the willing shuffling of close by people in the aisle- we made it work! I managed to escape the bus at my stop several kilometers along the road, and poured praise upon the lady and the aislies (bus jargon for the standers) who jammed even closer together to allow me to reach the door. But it was really the lady who had made it all possible; as I looked back at her between the heads when I was about to leave the bus I saw she had a wide satisfied smile on her face knowing she had made a difference. Actually, there were smiles all along the aisle… They realized that they, too, had played a part…

We all leave marks.

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gozzter

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