On the day when the small community hospital where Kernie worked caught fire, she received a call from a patient of mine. “Hey, Mrs. Moeller, I have a question. Do you mind if we take Amber to a cock fight this afternoon?”
Amber, our first child, was six months old and in the company of my patients with whom we had solicited baby sitting duties for Kernie’s return to work. The hospital fire proved good fortune. She had learned that the hospital would be closed for a few weeks and given that, her answer was unambiguous, “You know, I don’t think that’s a good idea. They are sending me away from work. Let me come pick her up right now.”
Cock fights! In Prunedale, California……
The road to Prunedale can only be explained by our confronting many of life’s changes before having much judgement with which to plan our way. Kernie and I saved money and within a year of marriage jumped into home ownership —with our eyes wide open— when interest rates on a mortgage were in the double digits. To pay the mortgage would require both our two incomes. That we were trying to have a baby did not stop us. The week our loan was close to being secured, Kernie was working on an oncology floor and staffing shortages had her assigned to a patient with active tuberculosis— when Kernie was twelve weeks pregnant and afraid to tell her manager for fear of it stopping the loan process. Amber was born with the home secured. The planned six weeks off work turned into six months as the notion of leaving Amber with a stranger had a very different feel to it than it had had when we planned our finances and work on paper.
As a resident, I was developing a family practice and as many of my patients were my age, I had trolled some with Amber’s first day care in mind. I found one couple who were available and seemed nice enough. With time I would learn that people in general, show their best sides in a doctor’s office. They were from Salinas and lived rurally. After just two days of babysitting we had our doubts about this choice. Amber’s little bald head smelled of cigarettes when we picked her up. She vomited when we tilted her more than thirty degrees in any direction and Kernie’s belief was this was from her having the bottle propped while she lay down. The Cock fight question came on day number three—- and three strikes it was. Suburbanites from Southern California vs Rural Salinans, the score was now 0:1. Kernie and I had two weeks to sort out a different arrangement while Kernie’s hospital effected repairs after the fire.
Our alternative babysitter was a perfect match. This was a young woman whom I had delivered of her first child, a daughter. I had gotten to know her and her husband a bit with the prenatal visits and then the bonding that occurs with a delivery. She did not want to return to work and for a modest fee was willing to take Amber in during the afternoon two to three days a week when Kernie would work an evening shift, leaving for work around 2:30 and me picking her up around 6:00 when I got off my shift at the hospital. This young woman and her husband would within a few months choose to move (to Kansas!) and they offered up an alternative for us that proved to be a confused blessing: Her mother and father had helped her with both children and they had come to love Amber. Losing a grandchild to the move offered up the opportunity to become surrogate grandparents to Amber. Our family grew with the addition of not only Amber, but Will and Phoebe who would watch her free of charge. With cock fights as a reference point, it was reassuring to know that this couple were quietly but seriously religious. Our child would be safe, not smell of cigarettes, and would not have her bottle propped when starting a nap.
Will and Phoebe were just a bit younger than our parents and we related to them as such. They were nice enough, polite, and clearly enjoyed Amber’s presence in their home. Amber came to love them very much and like most young parents, we began to have some concerns around “raising the child.” They were, “informal.” For example, in our house, when we had dinner, Amber was put in a high chair and she joined us, eating when we did. As she developed into a toddler, the pattern at Will and Phoebe’s was what Kernie characterized as allowing her to be “Helen Keller beggar child.” By this, Kernie was describing Amber in her diaper and nothing else, wandering the dining room as Phoebe and Will ate, occasionally raising her hands and having a morsel of food put in her mouth at which point, she would wander off again. Unlike our house though, they would say a prayer prior to eating.
I loved to read to Amber as did Phoebe. I read, “Busy Day, Busy People,” and Phoebe read her Bible stories. My grandson Tres, Amber’s son, years later would tell me when I read him Bible stories, “Grandaddy, I don’t want to hear these; they are too sad! The people are always dying!” Amber was way too polite to have said any such thing to her grandmother Phoebe.
So Caine and Abel are one thing. Saying prayers before dinner another. Then there was the Papal plot to assassinate Lincoln……..
To the credit of Amber’s Salinas grandparents, they did not ask me much or solicit my interest in their faith. I had no problem with the nods to religion they manifested when I was around in that their norms were not that far off from those I experienced as a child. One day though, as I was leaving with Amber, a comic book was thrust into my hands. “I know you like history, Randy, and I think you will find this very interesting.”
For me, comic books were not unlike smart phones for your adults now. I had coveted them greatly growing up, not being allowed to have them in the house. Their emotional value was far out of proportion to any objective value. I looked this comic book over and found that it described a plot by Jesuits to have Abraham Lincoln assassinated. The pope in Europe spoke of the assassination before it actually happened and all the conspirators of the assassination (Mary Surrat and John Wilkes Booth) as it turned out, were Catholics.
I do like history and this was that stuff of tabloids. Historically, this fit a narrative in Protestant America that was wary of Catholics and the dilemma this “old world” religion brought to a young Republic. This concern would echo again with JFK among others.
I was a busy doctor at the time and the comic wound up in the trash. I did not comment on it to Phoebe and Will. A few years later, they gifted me the hardbound version of this theory and it was 500 pages. I was polite but expressed clearly, this did not seem like a likely explanation for Lincoln’s assassination.
By the early 1980’s, I was coming to appreciate that life in Salinas and life with Bill and Phoebe were not necessarily one and the same. For example, next to the doorbell was a sign—you have seen it I am sure—“This house guarded by Smith and Wesson.” A snub nose pistol is painted directly at the doorbell ringer. As it turned out, Will had been raised rurally. He let us know that Amber was quite safe when at their house in that on the nights when I was on call and Kernie came to pick her up around 11:30, she would be asleep between Phoebe and himself. And, he had the Smith and Wesson under the pillow, just in case.
Then as now, we wonder how that process of picking Amber up near midnight went without a hitch and without a word being said. Kernie would enter the unlocked home, go to the bedroom, and quietly scoop up Amber from between Will and Phoebe knowing he had a gun under the pillow to shoot intruders —-like that was the most normal thing in the world. We knew it was not. And just like with real grandparents, it was not exactly a subject we weighed into heavily. Our relationship to them put blinders on our judgement and concerns. We made it a joke of sorts.
We had a crisis; Amber at age three anticipated twins (“Buster and Clark”) who did not survive the pregnancy. When pregnant, Phoebe made clear she could not take care of three kids. Her days with Amber were numbered. Around this time, Phoebe became more engaged with the church. After the twins were delivered, and as we were closing on a decision to move, Kernie’s decision to stop work was facilitated by Phoebe’s effort to rehabilitate a pedophile from the church—as in having him in her home with Amber. She would defend Amber’s life with her own, but clearly Phoebe’s connection to reality was very very different than our’s.
My connection to Phoebe and Will, as did Kernie’s became distant and one last conversation is recalled from my last six months in Salinas. Will and his son talked me into deep sea fishing off of Big Sur. This was a lot of fun and out of my usual experience. At four o’clock in the morning, as we headed for the pier in Monterey, Will went on a rant about the sexual practices of what he called, “really bad people.” I thought he was talking about the man his wife was trying to rehabilitate. He was talking about people who had oral sex……
We might as well have been speaking about abortion, a subject that I studiously had avoided in their presence for years. I thought that we would part on friendly terms with little remaining contact. I thought it likely that once we moved, we would share Christmas cards, and that would be that.
I was wrong. Within months of arriving to Washington State, Phoebe asked if she could visit to see Amber —-and get a face lift. Kernie and I were tasked with researching who was available to offer that service. Phoebe never went out in the sun and had beautiful skin. She was married to a man who would stand by her even if they were the models for Wood’s American Gothic. We found a surgeon. Kernie private-dutied her through this surgery which was a novelty to me: you did not see this surgery done at the Monterey County Hospital in the 1980’s; we took care of injuries from the Salinas Rodeo and field workers with tuberculosis. As surgeries go, it was more invasive than I had imagined as I watched her bruising and swelling reduce day by day on the fold-out couch in the living room. She kept to herself, Amber excepted, and healed up sufficiently within the week, leaving with assurances that, “no one will suspect, will they?”
I am pretty sure it would have been a scandal at her church to be confronted with this vanity, but with time I came to realize that it is very private and ultimately, no matter what a woman says, the choice to do it is based on how she feels about herself, and not what other people think or judge. Not going to church with visible bruising made sense.
The Christmas cards petered out within a year or so. With the perspective of today, it is clear to me the culture wars were front-and-center in 1979, before the term was coined. I have a dulled sense of concern, much less outrage as I consider these irritations and differences between strangers whom had become family. Part of this is a live-and-let-live attitude I was born with and part reflects my work in medicine. To have a therapeutic relationship with people from all walks of life occurs in the setting of disclosed physical symptoms, persistent thoughts or concerns, and religious and political points of view. People in a doctor’s office share very odd beliefs and always have. My work required me to work around these and do my best to serve the patient’s problem as perceived by them as well as myself.
You can’t help people heal and ignore their core beliefs. You can try to influence them if you see a plan that supports healing and that can take time and patience and a thick skin. Humor is helpful but some people are humorless. Logic is helpful to a point but as is all too evident these days, logic only goes so far—and can be used to come to contradictory conclusions no matter what your point of view proves to be. Relationships are often based with no logic involved and they evolve accordingly. If they are important enough, they work out.
Phoebe and Will moved on as we did, family no more. We retain gratitude for the service and love they provided our daughter when we were vulnerable, young, and unsure of ourselves. This gratitude, and to a point, love, outweighs the negative impressions I have related. Truly, a shared object of love is very powerful antidote to contradictory beliefs. That has been a good life lesson.
Comments