WAITING TO BE SERVED

The man with the beard, wearing tennis shoes, a ski hat, and a sleeveless red vest, escorts his friend to the car.

The friend is stiff. He waddles and ooches in a way that I, having had various appendages of my own temporarily disabled, can understand.

The man opens the door for his friend. His friend falls in. The car on cue bows in response. A cup of coffee in a Styrofoam container sits on the roof. In the moment that passes between equilibrium in the passenger seat and the instant the man reaches for the cup and hands it to his friend, there is, for the man, a little breath, in and out, and for his friend, anticipation, waiting to be served.

I know about this. My mother, though she lived to be ninety, was always sick or on the verge of something or other. She created within this inhospitable geography of illness a realm of comfort by always recruiting little moments of service like these: my father, in the kitchen scrambling eggs, her boys bringing wildflowers to the bedside, everyone tiptoeing through the rooms in what came to be a ghostlike passage of childhood. We didn’t like giving service, but we got to be very good at it.

I’ve even wondered if that’s part of the reason I became a doctor, and why, though committed to service, I resist behaviors that service generates. Be strong. Recover. Resist the idea of pain . . . the disease and the disease it makes.

And it doesn’t make me tough on my patients. On the contrary, it gives me a basis for understanding where they are, and, out of that, more tolerance.

Mavis calls, complaining of constipation. It’s seven thirty in the morning. The urgency is that she’s deathly afraid to fly and she’s booked on tomorrow’s plane to Hawaii with her husband. She wants me to tell her she can’t go. Well, I have layers of response to that, all the way from “It’s all right if you don’t go” to “Just do what you have to do and stop whining about it.” Well, I guess I wouldn’t say that. I’m too well trained.

I know, I know, there’s a fuzzy sense of well-being that rises from attention received. It lights up faces. It’s an expression of affection, after all. And it does wonders. And I love doing it, but it’s tricky. The circumstance is born out of need, and need . . . well, need can always be questioned. So the server either has to commit to the legitimacy of the request or wonder if he’s being manipulated. It’s natural to doubt, to try to protect yourself a little. Yet when either the disease or the diseased is convincing, doubt, and all the self-protection it provides, is crushed.

So the friend receives his coffee, but he is made to wait just a little. Mavis will be funneled into a pathway that takes her to the airport, but the ceremony will contain a few grumbles.

The man is walking around his car. He is unlocking the door.

I don’t know him.

I know him very well.