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Therapy by text message?

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sea storm:
Thanks for your sincere and thoughtful reply. Intelligence doesn't seem to mean better parenting and more loving parents, just more complicated and ultimately confusing.
Your description of life in the higher spheres of medicine in a big bureaucracy are very familiar to me. Although i worked with highly intelligent specialists in their fields,it was the same knuckles dragging on the floor scramble for power. Primitive really and very sad state of affairs. I hope you weren't mauled too badly. i was. I had little idea about this kind of nimble tennis for big brains. Subtle and mean. Sooooooo counterproductiive.

The fact that you wrote a play is like a lovely trumpet singing through the dark night playing the high notes like light. Who cares if your dad approves. It is a good thing and good for you.

It is such a good thing that you are creating after being in the brain factory for so long.

I don't know how you managed to become an artist with the parents you had.  Says something good about the human spirit. Not to slag your parents but sound like they are a bit stiff and starchy.

I watched a great lecture on Japanese art live from Harvard.  I was so surprised when the brilliant, funny, caring professor asked the kids a question, they had nothing to say. Oh yes, they wanted to know about marks and inane stuff. Same as my university. They wanted to get an A. and were so preoccupied with that above all else.

Glad you got out of the major rat race. God knows, life is not about winning and there is no prize.

Kind Regards
SEa

Hopalong:
Doc G.
I am personally verrrrrrrrrrrrry pissed at both your parents for never attending any of your graduations.

I will work on forgiving them.

Pfffft.

And now gonna go read this play.

Hops

Meh:
A side note. While I was browsing the internet yesterday an advert kept on coming up on my computer for a local health organization that is offering doctor appointments via skype.

Not sure how they do this, they can't really inspect the person, can't look in their throat or ears etc. I guess there must have been a lot of testing out the concept before they decided to actually do it. I just don't know how a doc can diagnose a person remotely I mean what if there is some underlying more complicated problem that doesn't get diagnosed quickly just because the patient was never really in a clinic.

Anywho. I guess it must work on some level.

Dr. Richard Grossman:
Hi Hops,

Thanks.  Certainly, by the time I reached high school, I had long ago accommodated my parents’ inattention.  As I have written here before, there were characteristics I had from birth that garnered a lot of adult attention growing up. That attention made up for much of what I did not get from my parents.   From the sixth grade on, some of my teachers were friends outside of the classroom.  It is no wonder to me that I married one of my graduate school professors, some 10 years my senior.  The age difference seemed perfectly normal to me.

My parents both led difficult lives each in their own way, and my mother did what she felt was right and useful in bringing us up—while at the same time feeling secretly angry from being deprived of a life in the arts.   They certainly didn’t abandon us, and they did the best they could.

So…when I reached the end of senior year, I skipped graduation altogether—much to the shock of my guidance counselor and others (they took it as an insult—I was going to be presented an award for being editor of the newspaper) and went backpacking in Italy (Florence and Venice), Greece (the Peloponnese), and Israel (working on a kibbutz for a month) with my brother and one of his friends.   We toured many of the ancient Greek ruins which I loved (hence the 10-minute play everyone except philosophy majors hated, “The Last Resort”), and on the kibbutz, going out to the fields on the Jordan River every morning to move water pipes and pick up spent rocket parts (at 3AM to avoid the heat)--I learned one Hebrew word:  shilshu (or something like that).  English translation:  diarrhea.

My mother hated staged ceremonies and holidays—the only time I called home on Mother’s Day was freshman year.  My dorm mates insisted, so we gathered around, and I picked up the phone and dialed.  My mother answered, I said “Happy Mother’s Day!”, and my mother replied “I think I’m going to vomit.”  Everyone burst out laughing—of course, no one understood or could believe what they heard—and I loved it!  What a great life story!

So, that’s the long, long way of saying I hope you’ll forgive my parents—and also the ways I am like especially, my mother.  Perhaps you should ask Micaela, my daughter, about those...

Richard

 

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