Writing for the Senate

My parents let me play hooky for two reasons: to write or to go to the racetrack.

One of those pastimes makes you a bit more employable than the other although it’s a toss-up as to which one will make you more money.

I’ve written over the years for school, for promotion and for hire. I’m happiest when I’m just writing for the fun of it.

I participated in a career development seminar in medical school. The verdict after six weeks was that I should be a writer. Oh well, I thought, I will write in patients’ charts.

There are two places that I currently write--the Chapel Hill Public Library and my home office.

I have to write near a window with birds in plain sight. I have a wall of framed Audubon prints in my office. My novel manuscript is about looking for a songbird, the rufous-sided towhee. Course I don’t have to look for them today; there’s almost always one singing somewhere around the house or the library. People sometimes look for what they already have, anyway.

Many of my writer friends keep a talisman near them while they write. My friend Garrison Somers kept a plane on his desk while he wrote his novel manuscript about a WWII pilot.

I have an office angel with butterfly wings; a friend sent it one holiday. A James Michener quote adorns the skirt: “I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotion.”

Turns out Michener is buried in Austin, Texas, my home away from home, and there is a Michener Center for Writers at UT.

When it comes to writing, I remember the advice of one voice. Surprisingly, it was not an English professor. It was the typing teacher at Sacred Heart Academy. She wore a beehive and way too much Tabu. Her name was Mrs. Pike, and she taught us how to type on our Pica typewriters. This is what she said in a deep southern accent about pounding the keyboard: “Girl if you don’t get it right, you’ve got to do it again.”

Now that plays right into my Catholic, repressed psychodrama. No wonder I worked on the novel manuscript for seven years.

I was fortunate to have many teachers and professors who gave me directive advice about writing on the days that I wasn’t at the track or in my basement typing poetry. They are the ones that I want to thank today in celebration of the National Day on Writing.

Off the Beaten Path

Have you ever been offered the perfect job in a new location that is slightly off the beaten path?

In 1995 during my surgical pathology fellowship at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, I considered taking a job in Appalachia. I was going to be paid a salary that nearly competed with the one the UT med school was offering, plus the Kentucky practice was tempting me with every other week off.

With that much time on my hands, I figured I’d finally learn how to play banjo. I’d been playing acoustic guitar and wanted some variety.

Certainly the job would’ve gotten me a little closer to my hometown of Louisville, where my dad and two grandmothers lived. Something worried me though: I figured in Appalachia folks would be knocking on my door to deliver babies night and day, cause, well, in the hollers, a doctor’s a doctor, right? Yeah, but this doctor doesn’t know nothing about no birthing and babies, and so I got scared away from the prospect of moving to the hills of eastern Kentucky.

Subsequently and sadly, I never learned to play the banjo. I stayed in Houston and picked up windsurfing. But happily, at night, when it was too dark to windsurf, I hung out in a place where fiddles, mandolins, and banjos made their rotation. That’s where I met a young musician from Appalachia named Troy Campbell.

His band, Loose Diamonds, covered a song “Stonewalls and Steel Bars.” The song is on their Freedom Records release Fresco Fiasco. “Stonewalls” is my second favorite song on the disc that Neil Strauss of the New York Times called one of “ten records from 1996 that haven't received much attention but are worth the extra time it takes to hunt for them, either through mail order or a local independent record store.” I’d never bothered looking at the liner notes to find out who wrote the song. Then this summer at Antone’s, Troy introduced the song as a Stanley Brothers tune.

I read yesterday in the Times that the only remaining Stanley of the Stanley Brothers, Ralph, has written his autobiography, which was due out today. Now even if he’s embellished history a tad, Appalachia's the kind of place where the truth is always going to be stranger than fiction, so this book is likely to be a hoot.

“Stonewalls and steel bars, a love on my mind/
I'm a three-time loser; I'm long gone this time."

C. Stanley, “Stonewalls and Steel Bars”

Like the Times reviewer said: Go find the Loose Diamonds CD. Better yet, catch Loose Diamonds live for the electric version that Ralph Stanley would consider sacrilege.

My Uncle Sam and McCartney's Uncle Albert

"Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey" ("UA/AH") takes its place among those songs with lyrics that confound. I didn't know what the song meant when I was seven, and I probably won't know when I'm sixty-four.

In 1971 while my dad drove us along the Rock Creek Parkway in DC, "UA/AH" was on the radio. I sat in the backseat with my sister and my Mrs. Beasley doll. I was in a dress, on my way back to the hotel from the Smithsonian.

Last Sunday a cabdriver speaking Arabic drove me along the same segment of Rock Creek Parkway, and "UA/AH" was playing in my acoustic memory. I sat in the backseat with a doll, my 17-year-old daughter. She was in a dress, and we were on our way to the hotel from the National Gallery.

In '71 "UA/AH" was one of my favorite songs, but "Bridge Over Troubled Water" won the Grammy. That sad song always makes me think of the deaths of President John F. and Senator Bobby Kennedy. In '71 our troops were in Vietnam; now they're in Afghanistan.

This week the only word my cabdriver said that I understood, as he held a cell phone to his head while he held our lives in his hands, was Afghanistan, and I recall he said that word just as we passed the Watergate. In a Neil Young song "even Richard Nixon has got soul." Nixon certainly had an ego. It kept him from doing the right thing.

I was invited to the Capitol by a college classmate on Monday, and as I toured the building, I felt the same awe to be viewing one of our nation's jewels that I felt as a child at the Smithsonian.

We've suffered as a nation since the 70's. There's the misery of those who returned from war and the misery of those whose kin did not. We're scarred by September 11th and the hurricane.

The misery of "those who have not" hangs in the balance as we makes fools of ourselves over who is entitled to health care. Will the sick have to rely on charity or will access to care be deemed an individual right (not to be confused with an individual mandate)? If our country fails here, the disgrace is all our own. There has been no provocation from foreign soil. We cannot blame the elements.

People who reproduce are said to be genetically fit. Maybe the term should be changed to mean those who can afford the best health care policy their DNA will allow. The insurance companies are becoming genetic watchdogs: "Your body repairs DNA damage, you can have insurance; your body does not repair DNA damage, no insurance for you."

Genetic bullying wasn't okay for Hitler, and it's not okay for us.

Sometimes songs we don't understand still resonate. Even in those songs that lose us, there's usually one line hits the mark. In McCartney's song, "the kettles on the boil, and we're so easily called away." I hope we don't get called away from this topic of national urgency.

I had to turn off The Ed Schultz Show today when the cancer-stricken caller began crying. I didn't want to get that upset while driving, but it was too late because I'd heard enough of the story. The caller's status as a provider had been decimated by his illness. Not only did he lose the business that provided health insurance for his employees, but he also lost his ability to support his family.

Maybe our legislators will get it right. On Monday at the Capitol, my friend pointed out one of Senator Kennedy's sanctuaries. Although the senator's at rest now, we needed him a little bit longer.


"We're so sorry, Uncle Albert/But we haven't done a bloody thing all day."
-Linda and Paul McCartney, "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey"