Tuesday night, I was to attend a meeting at the local professional society in Philadelphia. As I was going in, I was talking to someone I've known for not quite 40 years. He was to teach a course and I was going to meet with a reading group that has been meeting since the 1960's and to which I was invited some years ago. He was wearing a men's tweed hat that might have looked fine on a driver of a 1959 MGA and still looked good, today. As we were going in, one of the members of my reading group arrived. He, too, was wearing a tweed cap and he, too, was involved in this professional community for 40 years or more ... a community with not much more than a hundred professionals. I'm not a voting member of this society due to history and politics, but, rather, something of an honorary member. Still, it struck me as profoundly sad that these two both foreign born physicians, members of the same group for many years, had never met nor did they know each other's name and needed to be introduced by an outsider of sorts. How alienated a world we live in has often struck me but maybe never more profoundly than at that moment.
After the meeting, I left feeling blue and glad -- only later -- when I arrived home to M and Gunther Dog. It's loaded with a sort of pathos that all these years have passed in my life and the 65 and 75 years of my colleagues and, still, people don't quite get on with each other in communities of mutual interest, concern and fraternity with each other.
No comments:
Post a Comment