I'm fine, thank you, and how goes it with you?

The Column: 06.14.24

I spent most of last week at the Mayo Clinic back home in Minnesota, one of the friendliest places I know of, where I peed in a cup, turned my head to the side and coughed, had my eyes dilated and looked at the ophthalmologist’s right ear as she shone brilliant lights into my eyes, stripped to my shorts to be examined by a dermatologist, took a deep breath and held it while a doctor listened to my heart, was X-rayed, had electric shocks transmitted to various leg and arm muscles, and had my arm pierced and several vials of blood drawn by a man from Baghdad who came to this country at age 22 with no English whatsoever and I admired his perfect diction as he told me his story. I am not a hypochondriac so I know very little about medicine; what I love about Mayo is the humanity of it, the cheerfulness of the men and women in blue who call you from the waiting room to the warren of examining rooms. Their gentleness with the halt and the lame. The good humor. I sit in the examining chair and the ophthalmic nurse says, “I want you to follow my finger with your eyes,” and I say, That’s not your finger, it’s your thumb.” And she laughs.

I am a lucky man. Mayo has kept me alive. When I set out to be a writer, I felt obligated to smoke several packs a day and become a serious drinker, both of which I gave up long ago, but I still love cheeseburgers, so it’s a wonder to find that my cholesterol is low. My idea of exercise is walking fast in airline terminals and not using the moving sidewalks. So I’m touched to look at the echocardiogram screen and see my heart working, including the valve from a pig that a Mayo surgeon installed to replace one of mine. Its little petals flutter in stupendous synchronicity.

The clientele here includes a lot of Minnesotans my age and as I walk down the hall I see someone stop and stare at me and try to remember my name and sometimes they walk up and say, “Are you ––?” and I say, “I’m trying to be” and we talk. They know me because I was a friend of Chet Atkins and I knew Leo Kottke. I once sang “Hard Times Come Again No More” with Renée Fleming. I have hung around with famous people.

So a woman walks up and says, “Don’t I know you?” and she remembers me reciting the 87 counties of Minnesota in alphabetical order so I do it for her. I meet a man from St. Paul who fell off a 25-foot ladder but is still trying to play guitar like Leo Kottke: his ambition for thirty years has been to play “Vaseline Machine Gun” and he’s still working on “Crow River Waltz.” I meet a woman in a wheelchair who’s had some neurological adventures but is on the mend and planning to go back southwest and resume teaching Navajo children, which clearly, from the expression on her face, is her life and her joy. I sit in the waiting room and turn to the man next to me and ask, “Where you come in from?” He’s from Bozeman so we talk about the precarious business of ranching. Mortality draws us together. Nobody asks me, “What you in here for?” but we’re all vulnerable, sickness and trouble are a great equalizer of people, which makes the everyday more beautiful. A former CEO of a huge corporation sits in a wheelchair and what brightens his face is the fact that his daughter is flying in from L.A. to have lunch with him in an hour.

People come to Mayo from all over because there are great minds here, but what touches me is the steady cheerfulness of the place. The man who stands at the front door whose job it is to say, “Good morning.” The kindness. You sit in an examining room and the doctor always knocks before entering. Your eyes meet. A handshake. Before your file opens on the computer and the test results are studied, here is your chance to recite your troubles to the sympathetic ear of silence. Each one is worthy. God loves each one. Life is good and that’s why we want more of it.

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