Dr. Masser
It's not as though Aaron never had reason to distrust people
in medicine. Although, in the late 1970s
when Aaron was growing up, people picked up
hitchhikers. They weren't worried
about strangers, let alone doctors and nurses. It was generally believed that
all people basically were good. They believed that when children were born their
minds were blank pieces of paper. Suggesting that some might be born with
psychopathic personalities result in ostracism to the point of a rant. The idea
that some could have good intentions subverted to evil ends by cultures or
institutions achieving their own ends was not considered except in extreme
historical cases like Nazism. Flower power and "all you need is love" and
cooperation were on peoples' tongues.
So Aaron wasn't worried about people. Not even truckers.
When he was five years old, one of Aaron’s friends had shown him how to make a hand signal that mimicked a
trucker’s reaching up to grab the handle of an air horn. He said that was how to
signal a trucker to blow the horn. Walking on the sidewalk as a semi-truck approached Aaron gave the signal. The trucker blasted the horn
half a dozen times. The man controlling that huge rig had responded to the boy’s
tiny hand signal. He was amazed, in part at the size of the community that
responded positively to him.
A couple of years later, he and his friend tried doing
something they saw older kids doing. They put their thumbs out and hitched
rides. The drivers asked them where they were from and where they lived. There
was nothing in his experience to suggest he shouldn't trust these people.
Especially doctors and nurses. There were only three doctors
he knew growing up. Two of them were neighbors. Dr. Smith was retired and lived next door.
Dr. Masser, who was older but still working, lived across the street.
Dr. Smith appeared outside only to mow his lawn or retrieve his newspaper. He
was reclusive and barely hid his dislike of people. Aaron was familiar with adults who didn’t like children,
but this wasn’t that. Dr. Smith didn’t like anyone.
Dr. Masser was the opposite. He loved children, liked everyone, was loved by
everyone, and couldn’t have been more generous and loving to everyone he
encountered. He was attached to Aaron and the rest of Aaron's
family like the ideal grandfather even though they were not related. Dr.
Masser's own children were grown and not living in the neighborhood, so he more or less
adopted Aaron’s family, the Roarks, as surrogate children and grandchildren.
Although one time Dr. Masser did create a question with which Aaron wrestled for a long
time. He broke
the needle off of a syringe and handed it to Aaron telling him it would make a
good squirt gun, but saying not to tell anyone where he got it.
“Why not?”
Because it was against the law to give it to him.
“Why is it against the law?”
“Oh, they’re worried about people using them to inject their own drugs.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Some people do it for fun. They’re not people you’ll ever be around. No one is
worried about you. It’s okay for you to play with this.”
This created a quandary for Aaron. It was a really great squirt gun for the time. He wanted to play with it. But it was illegal. Dr. Masser had said not
to worry about it, but it was against the law. How could a doctor break a
law? He wanted to ask his mother, but Dr. Masser had said not to tell anyone. He
was afraid to let anyone know about the syringe, let alone squirt anyone with it. So he
hid it under a rock in the field next to his house where no one would find it.
This did not tarnish his near reverence for Dr. Masser. The man was so infused
in Aaron’s consciousness that it was unlikely that anything could tarnish it. There even was a sandwich named for him. In keeping with the
nutritional ideas of the time, Dr. Masser had invented a sandwich that he
himself ate everyday at lunch and that Aaron’s family adopted as one of their
favorites. It contained an egg with a runny yoke, two slices of bacon, lettuce,
tomato and mayonnaise. It was best when the yoke ran through it like a sauce.
In order to have a ready supply of the best tomatoes for these sandwiches, Dr.
Masser made a deal with Aaron’s family. He would use a machine to till a few
rows of soil in the field next to their house if they would plant tomatoes that
they would share. Two rows of tomato plants produced more tomatoes than the
two households could eat. When Aaron wanted a snack in the summertime, one of
his favorite things was to take a salt shaker out to the field, pick a ripe tomato,
and alternately take bites and salt it as he stood in the sunshine facing Dr.
Masser’ house.
Growing things and planting things was a passion for the doctor. The trees
between the street and the sidewalk were oak trees that had
planted as acorns when Dr. Masser first moved there decades before Aaron was born. He had
a passion for plants and planting things. When he was 18 years old, on
a train on the way to college, trying to decide whether to study agronomy or study medicine,
a stranger persuaded him that he would be able to do more good for humanity by
becoming a doctor.
Now there were summer days when he knocked on Aaron’s door and asked if he
wanted to go for a drive. They would drive to the countryside to visit some
piece of property
or other he had purchased. Walking on it he could tell from the plants if there was a spring underneath it and how fertile the soil was. He bought
forested land, had bulldozers clear it and put ponds where he knew there were
underground springs. He turned the properties into working farms, then sold
them and scouted for more land. On the way to visit his pieces of property he
taught Aaron how to recognize Guernsey and Jersey cows from each other and how
to recognize trees that indicated different things about the land.
Back home he pointed to two trees in Aaron’s front yard to show him the
difference between an oak and a maple. The oak trees planted by Dr. Masser were bigger around than Aaron could reach. Dr. Masser was bigger than life. He
created life. He took care of life. He was the archetypal doctor. How could a
syringe buried under a rock fifty feet from the tomatoes tarnish that?
Persons, places, events, and situations in this story are purely
fictional.
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Rough Draft / Under Construction
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