A Random Memory or Two, or More

For those of you who don't really care what I think about filibuster reform etc.

It is almost impossible to believe now, but there was a time when the little town of Genoa, Nebraska had three doctors, Drs. Williams, Davis and Dalton.

By the time I was growing up, only Dalton, who was of my parents' generation, was still practicing, although the other two were still living. Come to think of it, probably during my high school years Dalton took on a younger partner, so Genoa had two practicing doctors even in the days when I was still there, and four overall.

Nowadays there is a nurse practitioner who comes around to the nursing home on some sort of regular schedule. What the people who live in that little town but aren't in the nursing home do for medical care, I don't know. Perhaps he/she has scheduled office hours somewhere in town. Perhaps everybody just drives 22 miles to a town with doctors.

But this is about the good ol' days in Genoa. Drs. Davis and Williams were probably in their eighties when I was in my teens. Davis may even have been in his nineties.

I recall that Davis in his last years had regular home care. He lived alone, but with a housekeeper/cook in one of the largest houses in town. I remember one hag of a housekeeper who wasn't local, but showed up out of nowhere and then was gone just as quickly.

At the time I worked in the IGA store, run by one of the most unscrupulous cheap skates I've ever known. He ground unsold pork into the stinky beef he made hamburger out of, and who knows what adjustments he might have made to the scale? The town shoe repair man used to come in and buy hamburger and bread. For his lunch he would make a sandwich of raw hamburger (which was almost always, unknown to him, partly raw pork). I am of the generation today that can't quite adjust to the idea of ordering a pork chop in a restaurant and being asked how I want it cooked. I want to yell, WELL DONE! What are you trying to do, kill me? Trichinosis might have been one of the few medical terms I knew in the 7th grade, but I was too chicken to alert the shoe guy of what he was eating.

When Dr. Davis's housekeeper/hag would come in to buy the groceries, she always bought some Copenhagen snuff as well. She said "it's good for the houseplants." I remember the day I delivered her groceries to the back door and watched through the lace curtain as she scooped  the wad out of her lower lip...and then let me have it for coming to the wrong door.

At some point in his last years, Davis was bedridden and women in town were hired to stay overnight at his place. My mother supplemented the family income by being one of them for a short while. I don't believe any of them stayed on the job very long, probably because of Davis's reputation for randiness and, let's say, inappropriate actions, in his senility. I do remember that, when my youngest brother was born, someone said to my mother "Why, Isabelle, he doesn't look at all like Dr. Davis."

Dr. Williams was a widower who lived alone. My mother would tell stories about the tremendous fights he and his wife used to have. They were the kind of fights apparently that the whole town knew about. She was a nurse, and she would argue with him in front of patients about his diagnoses and his prescriptions, I guess about almost everything.  According to my mother, she was charged at one time with practicing medicine without a license, but unfortunately I don't know any of the details.

About the time I was a Junior or Senior in high school, I worked after school at the one and only local beanery, owned by another character Teeny Little Burroughs, but I'll save her for another time. Dr. Williams came in every night for dinner. By then he was a mess, but he tried to maintain an appearance. He would have on a white shirt and tie, unaware I guess that large parts of his last meals were distributed all over both. He dribbled food when he ate, his language was slurred and guttural but, hey, he still lived alone and he still drove his car. There is another story about him and his car that I'll save for another time also.

One night in the restaurant a stranger came in who had apparently lived in the area many years earlier. He saw the old man and went up to his table. "Hey, aren't you Dr. Williams? How's your wife?"

"Ahhh, that ol' bitch'es been dead for years."

It occurred to me much later that the immediacy of the man's question about "your wife" must have been mildly malicious in its intent, just to see what kind of response it would get. If so, he had to be pleased, as were all the rest of us.