No Beginning and No Ending

I am going to try to relate this to you in a way that does not sound con­trived. It’s impos­si­ble. It is con­trived. Con­trived means that it was obvi­ously planned. This, what I am telling you about, was, and yet some­thing entered in to the space between the plan and the unknown, the won­der­ful, if you will allow me that.
I showed up to Cincin­nati for my res­i­dency in gen­eral surgery with every expec­ta­tion to be work­ing 100 hours + weekly. I was not dis­ap­pointed. At the same time as that extremely and unyield­ing sched­ule, I met Robbo. We met on almost day one at the VA Hos­pi­tal. The ele­va­tor made a sound of two notes that said it was prob­a­bly meant to be. Those two notes were the first two notes of St. Stephen’s, a song we both knew.
Ok, so this is where it turns in to a story about two guys who know the same Grate­ful Dead song and they get con­nected. Etc. But I have to make this mean more, because there are a mil­lion sto­ries like that out there. Never mind that Rob and I, like beau­ti­ful, inno­cent chil­dren, at age 26, fol­lowed mail deliv­ery peo­ple around to get our Spring or Sum­mer Grate­ful Dead tick­ets, like chil­dren, you get that right? Never mind that we aban­doned our­selves and found our­selves by find­ing each other at Grate­ful Dead shows through­out our 100+ hour/week sched­ules, more like 120 hours per week – do that math for your cur­rent job and then mul­ti­ply by min­i­mum wage, which was less than $5/ hour. What­ever.. We were given the oppor­tu­nity to oper­ate on live humans and learn. For all those peo­ple who gave me that chance I say: Thank you Ma’a,m, Sir. I have done the best I can each and every day, even when I have made mis­takes, with what you taught me, and, thank you.
So we needed the time off, Rob and me. It was hard, I won’t lie. It was the dis­tance between the moon and the earth, the dis­tance between the expec­ta­tion to be there in the morn­ing at 5am and our desire to be together, Rob and me, and , surgery on humans, and our own human lim­i­ta­tions. The strug­gle was inex­plic­a­ble. I can’t really explain it here. Take a minute and imag­ine you go from not cut­ting peo­ple open, to cut­ting peo­ple open and what that means in terms of respon­si­bil­ity and priv­i­lege and then the absolute need to decom­press from that to be sep­a­rate from that, to be kids again for a minute, really that is it at the heart of it, to be kids.
In the midst of that, insert the Grate­ful Dead Spring tour of 1991 and two boy­men who know they need to not just work but also to play. You will feel maybe then amaz­ing gulf between the moon and the earth if you under­stand that. It is dif­fer­ent and nec­es­sar­ily dif­fer­ent worlds. They con­nect the way that a gas ped­dle and the road con­nect: not exactly directly but not indi­rectly either.
Any­way, Robbo, it feels like sum­mer and the moon is long in the sky tonight and Jerry is now gone and dead, but every year at this time, I miss you so hard and I love you for shar­ing surgery train­ing with me. And I love you any­way and always, brother, silly as it sounds.