The common understanding of the word ‘bookmark’ is that slip of paper we interpose into a book to demark a finished page and the one next to be read.
But, in my own thinking, it has another meaning: An event in our lives which we will never forget; think marriage, birth, graduation or your favorite movie.
Or occasionally, it’s something you read, like that sentence which flashed before my eyes many years ago.
I never forgot it…
It was written by a wise, elderly woman whose life had been bone-gravel hard. Now in a safe, warm place where she was loved, she determined to look back over her life to see if she could untangle that murky calculus which takes us from where we began to where we now find ourselves.
Now, she had no wish to re-visit her past; looking back is a thing far apart from going back. When she had finished her thoughts, she came out with this sentence: Looking back, I wouldn’t take nothin’ for where I’ve been.
There’s a sermon in that sentence, I fancy.
This because she understood that her past, those happenings which had occurred were forever entwined with what she did about those events – the decisions she made had bought her to her present place.
Her summary became a bookmark for me.
Medical school was, for me, trying to climb a rope using only your hands for four years. At the end of my Senior year, I took my final exams.
Something happened; something unthinkable, unexpected, and unpredictable.
I passed…
Throughout the medical school, word of my graduation passed like fire through dry grass. In fact, a number of my classmates, hearing this counter-intuitive turn of scholastic events, promptly fell to the floor and began speaking in tongues.
Internship, with its innumerable shifts and long, grinding hours was quite demanding. At its end, I felt like an exhausted marine, elbowing his way out of the sea onto the sands of Omaha Beach under heavy fire.
Then, in early 1971, I examined my first patient as a fully endorsed practitioner of medicine. He was perhaps the most courageous man I have ever met before or since. Why? First: because he was my first patient. Second: he survived my therapeutic exertions. It gives a body pause that the Commonwealth of Virginia would loose upon an ailing public one as green as I.
My entry into the medical profession soon taught me that all my patient encounters would not be pleasant, nor all my days fulfilling. After some spectacularly bad shifts, driving home, I wondered what had possessed me to choose medicine as a profession what with just a bit more work I could have happily lived out my days hanging dry wall.
But, along the way I also encountered wonderful, helpful hearts: those professors who patiently endured my immaturity and obstinacy to teach me medicine, my Heaven-sent physician partners for these forty-plus years, the nurses, techs, and fire/rescue individuals who were such a blessing to me. Then there were the patients I met who inspired and taught me, not to mention the magical people I worked with on civic endeavors outside the hospital.
Realizing this, I opted to stay with medicine and by-pass the joys of daily drywall installation.
I am about the work I am now supposed to do, in the place I was meant to be, with the person I am supposed to do it with: the co-author of my life, my Sabrina.
So, I can echo the words of that wise, old woman: Looking back, I wouldn’t take nothin’ for were I’ve been . . .”
Look for Lucky’s three latest books on Amazon: Reflections, Cemone’s Trilogy, and Perish The Thought!
SEE SABRINA’S WILDLIFE WEBSITE: FACEBOOK.COM/SWVA WILDLIFE
