It was August or so of 1973 when I traveled first to Amiens.
I had known I would never go to medical school in Paris. It seemed to me tradesmen striking was a sort of French National Pastime.
I decided to visit as many as needed of the official government medical schools and register. The cost was minimal and I had to pick the best, because my school’s heritage would be associated with me for the rest of my life. Read more on My Introduction To France And Locating My Medical School…
Filed under medicine, News by on Jan 4th, 2019. Comment. 
Medical school in France was very cheap and open to anyone who wanted to enroll — at least for the first year. Only those who scored highest on year-end exams were allowed to continue to 2nd year.
Over 600 hopeful students enrolled that first year — but I worked extra hard and placed 38th. Only about a hundred were admitted. I was in!
Soon after I passed the “elimination contest” that was meant to let those of us who had scored best (and were allegedly the smartest) continue with the business of medical school. We had to get down to the business of learning things that we would need to function as doctors. Read more on My Training As A French Country Doctor…
It was not political correctness, but rather a deep and visceral thirst that has driven me to reach out to people who are different — very different from myself. Being brought up Jewish (traditional eastern-European Jewish Ashkenaze) is not all of who I am, not even close to that, but it is the raw clay out of which I have been sculpted in America. Canada is different. A pharmacist I worked with in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada was well-traveled and told me how it was different from America. “America is a melting-pot — Canada is a salad.”
Americans really seem (or at least seemed) to want to be Americans. I remember the emigrants to America joking about learning about baseball, the bat being likened to a chicken drumstick, a “pulkeh.” To understand and love baseball was a very important part of being American. Part of the lore of the time was that it was possible to unmask a foreign spy who spoke perfect English if you asked him who had won the last world series and he did not know. Very different from Canadians who kept their own traditions and their own languages in tiny equivalents of their native lands around Edmonton where ethnic traditions were publicly exalted, in places called “little Germany” or “little Italy.”
Filed under News, politics by on Jul 7th, 2017. Comment.
I remember my French apartment, next to the market-place in Amiens, a small town a hundred miles north of Paris. A woman and her husband ran one of the larger produce booths, just a few steps from my window. She was one of those diminutive nut-brown Frenchwomen — not as pale as most of us were in the frozen north. She told me that near the Mediterranean, where she came from, I would be called “white as an aspirin tablet.” And when I visited there briefly, that is exactly what they called me. Read more on The Pleasure Of The Table…
Filed under News by on Mar 19th, 2017. Comment.
The Emperor’s New Clothes — A great story that seems to have survived the ages. Like most Americans, I heard the Hans Christian Andersen (19th century) version in childhood. In case you missed it, the subject was two fellows employed as weavers, who offered the emperor a suit that would be invisible to those who were not smart or appropriate for their jobs. The Emperor wears his new suit for a big public parade in front of the subjects, to great acclaim by all. Nobody mentions the emperor is wearing nothing but underwear until a kid yells it out at the top of his lungs. Read more on The emperor has no clothes!…
Filed under News, weight by on Oct 19th, 2016. Comment.
“How in the world do you know how to say that in French?” I asked my hostess, in French. The reason for that was simple — we were in France and she was French. In fact, she was my closest friend at that time and in that place. As I look back, she was one of the best friends I have ever had, in a basically friendless world where I have received few favors. She told me — as we stood in front of a cranberry display on the Market of the Rue Mouffetard, in Paris — that she had learned the word when she had been on the team that discovered that DNA (and not protein) was the hereditary material. Afterward she had a year of sabbatical in Cleveland, Ohio at the Case Western University, and they grew cranberries somewhere around there. Her friends had known that this strange little fruit did not exist in France, so they showed it to her, and somehow they had tested and exchanged vocabulary, just as I had with her.
Although I had been born in suburban Boston, I had not seen cranberries growing in a bog until a high school road trip. My class had traveled to see Plymouth Rock, and the reproduction of the Mayflower (so tiny — they must have been really cramped) and other such things I had been told existed no other place on God’s green Earth except for Cape Cod. I was glad I had my French friend to help me break such myths of chauvinistic rubbish. How strong the myth had felt, how deeply I had believed it, and for so long. Read more on Canneberges?…
Filed under Family, Holidays, News by on Nov 22nd, 2012. Comment.
Poverty, illness and desperation are a tragic trio and destroy unknown numbers of lives.
One story that broke my heart was that of a sweet young thing, age 23, who had inherited nothing from her father but a disease.
She needed a “specialty medicine” for it — one of those medicines that is so expensive that nobody seems to want to pay for it. But she lost her job due to “downsizing” so she had no insurance and no money. Read more on US Healthcare Is A Tragedy, Not A Success…
Filed under Healthcare reform by on Nov 3rd, 2011. Comment.