Cross Country #4     Weather or Not

Barry: Des Moines, Iowa. Driving here from Chicago is quite an experience...threatening skies, wind buffeting "Vinnie", a road sign blows off its pole in front of us, flying across the high way....the swirling soil of recently plowed fields created an eerie haze...

Goldie: golden-gray skies yielded a sense of danger, impending tornados perhaps...switch on the radio to learn of the devastation in Oklahoma, only a few hundred miles away.

Barry: just read that Illinois has 60,000 square miles of prairie, now reduced to 3 square miles. At the Fermi National Laboratory, they have a prairie sanctuary surrounded by the linear accelerator.

Goldie: In a film at Fermi scientists reflect on their creative process. I was elated to hear one talk about long, long showers as his favorite spot for integrative thinking.....he once worked out an equation in the condensation on the shower door that led to the discover of the "top quark".

Barry: now reading about the adverse environmental effects of parking lots and thinking about evolution. Forests, yielding to glaciers, yielding to prairie, yielding to plowed farm land, yielding to suburban sprawl and parking lots....Civilization improving on nature.

Other lessons learned today......

Victoria’s Secret is that no one over thirty can fit in her lingerie...

In Chicago we met a woman who said that for three years she used to fly back to NYC to have her hair done by her favorite hair dresser.

Goldie: In Chicago I called all over, couldn’t get an appointment for a haircut. In Des Moines, my usual method prevailed. Wandering a local street, enter a local salon, and there stands someone waiting just. We share the Torah of our lives......his wife died when their daughter was 13...etc., etc. I left looking and feeling well cared for and rich in details about farm and city life in the mid-west.

Barry: Had the best steak of my life at the 801 Steak House and Saloon. The cow died and I went to heaven. Goldie wonders if you call it "dead-stock" instead of livestock at this stage in its process.

Barry: My son Jonathan calls, saying he enjoys reading my email postings of the journey, but wonders how I’m feeling about traveling like this. It occurs to me that this is a profound question and makes me feel proud of his sensitivity.

Answer - On the one hand I feel some loss in my identity as a physician without important work in the world, on the other there is a certain satisfaction that I am pushing the limits of creating time for myself and experiencing the world.