What Happened to the Art Sonja Henie Donated to the Norwegians
The Dean of my med school was a adult female, I'm pretty sure. But the details were clouded by all the flash appearances and disappearances, overlapping fade-ins and fade-outs of faceless characters, fleeting flashbacks, and loops, stroboscopic, special-effected like a cable Telly new-historic period documentary or a Tv commercial for some geriatric medicine with seniors waltzing in deadening motility. And it happened terminal dark, towards dawn. Looking back, my encephalon is a piffling less muddled but the story is even fuzzier. Information technology wasn't clear whether I, when made King, was a medical student – that was 70 years ago – or center aged, – that would have been several decades agone – but that I wasn't my nowadays advanced age seemed more than certain in a hazy way. Merely I'k pretty sure that it was a she, a faceless she, who somehow bundled for me to be Rex of Kingdom of norway.
That I would be, and already was, Male monarch of Kingdom of norway emerged equally the ane stable thing. It seemed to be a done deal, the leitmotif of the story. My kingship was not the question. But by the same token I was too somehow distantly aware of questions, they seemed to be my ain, in the background similar muted muzak or a ghostly voice in the wings. Shouldn't in that location have been some sort of official notification from Oslo, a delegation of officials, probably all faceless and nameless men in tuxedos at least shaking my manus?
My kingship was not in question, only that'due south absurd. I accept no business being a king. Sure, I was top in my med school class, just that would authorize me for honors and membership in an bookish honor society, a sort of royal gild even in royalty-free America, perhaps the Blastoff Omega Alpha, but not the Norwegian crown.
Likewise, I'm non Norwegian. Not a Norwegian gene in my genome. About 5'8", I'k not tall like a Norwegian. I don't even ski. Never have, not once. I was born and raised in Northward Hollywood in the days when we could see beyond the Hollywood hills the searchlights raking the night skies celebrating the premier of some other movie starring Clark Gable, undisputed King of Hollywood. Hollywood is never without a King and multiple pretenders. The Queen was Sonja Henie, as Norwegian as they come up.
Simply my wife is Norwegian – one-half Norwegian and one-half Danish. But she was built-in and raised in Kingdom of denmark. Danish is her native natural language. But at present, afterwards having came to California to learn better English, work for a twelvemonth or ii, and and so return to Denmark, she married me and stayed hither, with me. After over l years she speaks American-English flawlessly merely with a residual faint but unmistakable Danish, or generic European, Accent. She notwithstanding speaks Danish when she can discover fellow Danes to converse with, simply English is what she speaks in dreams and checkout lines. Fifty-fifty with her Norwegian connections she wouldn't take engineered my elevation. She keeps a pretty low contour on just about everything, mean solar day and night. Danes, if not Norwegians, are famously phlegmatic.
Afterwards that morning, later on wrestling myself awake, I confirmed from Google that Kingdom of norway does still have a King and Queen. The Queen'southward name is Sonja. Now that'due south exactly – I'thousand not making this up -- my wife's name, fifty-fifty to the spelling.
My Sonja didn't seem to know about Queen Sonja. Being culturally Danish, she follows Danish royalty similar millennials follow Miley Cyrus, and knows what the current Danish Queen's proper name is –Margrethe. In Norwegian royalty she has only passing interest.
Last night equally we were in bed, I descending into murkiness, my Sonja was awake with her iPad in paw making her nightly rounds of online Danish newspapers, Greek to me. In these she had learned, equally she this morning reported, that the Danish Prince Consort, a Frenchman named Henrix, age 83, who had been for a yr certified as demented, a condition that ramped up his famous lifelong pique of not having been elevated to King Consort, died yesterday. "His job is open," she informed me this morning. "Just," I replied, I'm not a Consort, I'm The King, and furthermore the King of Norway, not Denmark. And you're my Queen, Queen Sonja!" A skillful 6'3" tall am I, clad in a uniform, probably naval, duly but not unseemly sashed, epauleted, beribboned and bemedaled. A crown would be anticlimactic.
I assumed that she hadn't heard a give-and-take of the Norwegian King business. As I was telling the adept role while fixed upon myself in the mirror shaving, she was heading towards the kitchen and her regal ritual of squeezing my morn navel orange juice, a royal treat indeed. Over the roaring juicer she shouted, "How was you night? Any more strange dreams?"
"No. Well, yep." I acknowledged, "I did have a strange experience, I'g not ready to dismiss it as a mere dream, in which I was a young med student age 19 or 20." Yet, when nosotros went to bed terminal night I was legally, undeniably, certifiably 89. My med educatee days were so long agone, near 70 years agone when I was an honest 5'10," that the Dean, they were all men in those days and had faces, hadn't heard of the Alpha Omega Alpha Society. Information technology probably hadn't been built-in nonetheless. An AOA certificate to hang backside my part desk never crowned my part, my lifelong pique. Merely on my regal compatible one of the medals, a special ane on a ribbon and hanging around my cervix like the iron cross, is emblazoned with the AOA logo.
A pretty surrealistic story that somehow prompted me to recall that this evening will be my med schoolhouse class's reunion – the 65th. Actually, it should exist our 66th. The class of 1953 should be the class of 1952. And our graduation happened in 1952. Merely information technology was a mock graduation. We marched with due pomp and circumstance to receive from the dean empty envelopes. The iv years of medicine had been completed in 1952 simply in those days diplomas were non awarded until after internship. And so information technology was in 1953 that we received our diplomas unceremoniously in the mail. Ours was the final class to be dated a year after we had marched. Adding that bit of history would be irrelevant to the story but seems relevant to its surrealism.
My married woman will be ceremoniously laying out my wearing apparel and then that she's sure I'm presentable, a practice she instinctively started long ago. "I would have put out your fanciest Rex-of-Norway dress uniform simply I thought it too pretentious for a class reunion," she announced playfully. "Yous're actually wearing Dockers dark pants that I just got back from the cleaners and a Norwegian patterned pullover sweater."
Our sixty fifth medical school class reunion is happening at the usual time, 6:00 p.one thousand., the merely similarity to previous ones. In fact it turned out to be weird, as witnessed only in a tremulous huddle of nearly concluding man beings. So strange that my dream and my being King of Norway seems the reality.
All sixteen surviving class members are in their 90s, except me. Close enough. I'one thousand a year shy of nonagenariancy. If the whole form of 100 were living the average age would be 100. The oldest would exist 110. That's considering our class, the form of '53, was the get-go to exist demographically so strikingly skewed by the horde of returning veterans of WWII, creating a singled-out generation gap. They had been non-coms, sergeants and the similar. Having been used to commanding and being commanded, this battle-hardened mature generation was promoted in med school to the higher ranks and took over all form offices. I used to draw cartoons of our sergeants as goose-stepping field marshals. But time has passed and almost to a human being, and woman (1 crusty old ground forces nurse who may have been the only bodily officer), the erstwhile soldiers have fallen. Taps has sounded for most of them. Will any materialize this night?
Information technology is more probable that the 4-5 of us who as freshmen were 25 or younger (at 19 I was the youngest) will be in that location. Young and then, not now. And none of united states, me included, have been immune to historic period-related issues, as young doctors delicately put it nowadays. We said "complaints."
Our medical schoolhouse has inverse even more than nosotros accept, if possible. 60 five years ago we graduated from the College of Medical Evangelists (CME), a proper noun that to me, all out academically oriented, was a flake embarrassing. Simply the name, and so much else, has changed. A small campus hard against oceans of orange groves in our twenty-four hours, it has get a burgeoning academy composed of schools of medicine, public health, tropical medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, and nursing, even faith, plus affiliated technologies, with nearly 5000 students. It's not nevertheless a liberal arts institution, except for organized religion, which is liberal with a bang. Being thoroughly academically and humanistically oriented, the school of religion seems embarrassed that in that location ever was a College of Medical Evangelists. An erstwhile grad, I've come around to being biased towards the quondam CME, increasingly unembarrassed by its name, even proud of it, and proud of the several of my classmates who spent much or all of their careers of medical-evangelism in small mission stations in jungles.
After ii years of digging of a 4-story deep pigsty in the globe in which huge springs and rocking devices against earthquakes were installed, the double thickness steel skeleton of the new flagship all-glass new 1.viii billion-dollar hospital is beginning to emerge, to loom over half the land in 2020 if the schedule tin can be followed. That monumental structure will join the nowadays 3-belfry 5-story hospital which will remain as an part building to arrange the army of development officers and VPs and more than, the children'southward hospital, the enquiry building, and a sixty-meg-dollar basic sciences building, and many more scattered similar strip malls all over boondocks. Not an orange tree in sight and hardly a parking spot.
Our 50th reunion was a banner result. I estimated that at to the lowest degree 50 of the class of '53 came, distinguished at present past gray hair and Olympic-style minted medals around our necks, presented by the Alumni Association. All together about 150 people were in that location, including our spouses and offspring and a few local news reporters and several photographers. The Association, keenly aware that a gray-haired 50th ceremony class is peculiarly susceptible to calls to donate living wills and trusts, sent a nice lady "development officer" to make the plea, and, while we ate a catered meal, to provide entertainment, groundwork piano music. The first class president – an crumbling army medic who had splashed off an LCT at Normandy Beach – officiated.
The big outcome was held at a spacious home perched on the crest of the hill that shelters the university endemic by a jolly roly-poly classmate, a freckled redhead, one of us form youngsters. Well known for her mansion and girth, she is famous for her humor that never fails to fissure up her table or to lay an audition in the isles with helpless belly laughs. The class Whoopi Goldberg in white-face, she was the life of the lively, laughing, even raucous 50th party.
All subsequent reunions until this night have been held at the hilarious lady's clangorous home on the colina, but they take been increasingly sparsely attended and anticlimactic if cozier. The love old sergeant who had served equally class president died, as had virtually all the onetime noncom class officers. Into this void marched my old roommate, giving a drawing salute and taking over at all reunions since the 50th as organizer, host, MC, and chairman and one-man government. At last our generation had come up of age and taken over.
Ii or iii of us who hadn't served our country before med school were after drafted every bit officers, outranking our class officers only hardly equaling them for armed services esprit or harrowing experiences. Inducted while interning, I was a helm in the army medical corps at the Military Found of Pathology, now defunct. The commanding general came to work in uniform and huaraches. My roommate was a lieutenant in the navy. Stationed in San Diego he spent a lot of time at the famous zoo. The ex-naval lieutenant has officiated by a sort of pidgin Robert's Rules as evolved by non-military doctors who notice themselves committee chairmen, in his casual famous wry and droll fashion, expert for scattered grins, non guffaws or smart salutes.
Well, in the last couple of years our MC's manner has been more than droning than droll and more than dry out than wry, and the jovial lady'due south anecdotes accept been increasingly rare and abbreviated and defective the old pizzazz. Three months ago she moved into the local Assisted Intendance and Memory Direction Unit. Her mansion is upward for sale at a steal of a price. No takers yet. Who should be her next door neighbor at Assisted Care just my erstwhile roommate and his married woman, diabetic and disabled. I was best man at their wedding. For them time has looped dorsum to dorm days, when all of us singles, young and frisky then, lived together. For me and my married woman, time had repossessed our 5 acres of wood in Ohio and sent united states to California and a smallish HOA-assisted retirement house.
When I learned that the large house on the hill was for sale and its possessor and my organizer roommate had both moved into Assisted Care, I fatuously predicted that our 65th reunion would be at the Assisted Intendance unit. In the Dining Room. It turned out that I was unwittingly prophetic rather than whimsical. For that's exactly where it was actually held, at Assisted Intendance! Just not in the Dining Room. Information technology was in the Executive Conference Room, as the guests of the Assisted Intendance Villa yet. Equally is usual at reunions our course had footed the bill for our 50th. Each of the states had forked over $50 to the gruff former army nurse for a bounteous catered vegetarian smörgåsbord. But Assisted Care sponsored our 65th festivity and picked up the tab, research having shown that nonagenarians are likely clients to relieve the rapid turnover of such undertakings. The firm gourmet geriatrics chef concocted uncharacteristically quasi-edible nutrient characteristically skimpy and common salt- and carbohydrate-free. Plus each of us was given a souvenir-sack of goodies of our era such as Uno Bars and Crackerjacks. What, no Camel cigarettes for WWII vets?
My roommate, soldiering on as host, calls our 65th to gild. "Practice I hear a move?" "So move." I believe I said that. "Second?" None is heard. If our 50th was as noisy equally New Year's Eve, our 65th is as silent equally Silent Night. Nobody from the Alumni Association is hither. No groundwork music. No photographers. Nosotros are left to rest in peace. Not much is heard from anybody all evening.
For i affair, we're all deaf, deafer, and deafest. Though the youngest in the class, I came tonight certain that I would likewise hold the distinction of existence the deafest. Without my Miracle Ears I would be King of The Deaf. But my dear classmates turn out to be even deafer. Or perchance they are just besides vain to stuff their ears or too forgetful. Not me, I tout my bionic ears. Magic Ear merely not miraculous. It's disappointing that hearing aids amplify sound but can't decode speech, thus opening a cornucopia of humor that only we deafies tin catch. I recite my prize example, "I bought true cat nutrient" coming out "…got tattooed." Just my dear classmates merely sit there looking vacant, oblivious of the humor.
Some unassisted ears endeavour to fly it. That seldom succeeds. "How are you?" "V. Three boys and two girls," and out come the dog-eared photographs. To that humor I'm not oblivious.
That non a single classmate noted the five conspicuous Band-Aids on my confront where a dermatologist had plied his specialty tin't exist blamed on deafness. Nonagenarians are famous for existence deaf and for being dull or disoriented, or all three, rendering them no longer in possession of the famous wisdom of age. MDs, that's us, seldom can brand a definitive diagnosis and instead offer, with a flourish, a list of differential diagnoses, take your pick. Using the Victorian-era method of simply observation (inspection, palpitation, auscultation, percussion), still enthusiastically taught to united states of america by Vienna-trained virtuosos, the toughest differential is betwixt deafness and Alzheimer'southward. Both kinds of patients, that'south us, testify the same dumb wait. To define the exact diagnosis, merely ignore all that yesteryear stuff about inspection and auscultation whether by hearing aids or stethoscope, and go straight for a True cat scan. And then information technology is demonstrated that mostly the DD (differential diagnosis) isn't tough after all; the same person has both. That's us?
If a 50th form reunion is noisy conviviality without letup and y'all can't get a word in edgewise, a 65th is equally full of gaps as development is, and information technology's difficult even to get a conversation going. That'south the fashion we were; that's non the style nosotros are.
In the gaps I found myself meditating. Amidst the several thoughts that managed to work themselves into consciousness, the immediate one was that senile deafness complicated past creeping amnesia, and maybe malfitting dentures or a touch of aphasia makes it hard to bear on a conversation. So you sort of look away and fold your arms and turn mute, which is considerate to the old young man sitting side by side to you on the other side slumped in refractory sleep. You check to see if he has simply died and 911 should exist called, simply subsequently quick inspection you diagnose him as just the usual example of senile narcolepsy mutual in committee meetings and during sermons. But there'southward ever some onetime geezer to mar the silence with nonstop senile solo repetitive rambling aimed at no one in particular, the bane of conversations with seniors. I know of several such ramblers in our class. I've been guilty. I could ramble on most the medals encrusting my Kingly uniform. Mercifully for the occasion and for this study, no such mumbled maundering marred the evening.
The jocund lady, blood-red-headed when I sat adjacent to her in class, at present coiffured in burgeoning curly distinctly pink hair or wig (she has survived lymphoma and chemotherapy, every bit she once heartily informed united states of america), is ensconced in a Tesla wheelchair. She won't utter a syllable all evening, or express joy, or smile. Her mouth is frozen half open, frozen. The dear girl! Walking out with my marginally needed pikestaff after the event was over, I paused and put my hand on her shoulder. She reached upwards and put hers on mine. I thought I saw a hint of a tear. Nothing was said.
Somebody ought to take over as chuckle-master. Shall I footstep up to bat? Since schoolhouse days I've considered myself a gentle curmudgeon and sardonic in a subliminal or crushing sort of way, evoking non even grins but confused or disapproving frowns. Nobody can tell whether I'm serious or not. I considered playing the stand up-up comedian and telling the screamer about the 65th ceremony that was held in an Assisted Care Unit. Only such a preposterous ane is better left to the class comedian. She would get a express joy. So I'll attempt this: "I've been regularly receiving ads in the postal service for smart cremation. Accept you folks?" Plain non.
Assisted Intendance hadn't included proper name tags with its goodies, so when I meet one of the oldest classmates I hadn't seen for 65 years, -- the last fourth dimension he saw me was at graduation when we received empty envelopes and I was 23 -- I figure he couldn't possibly recognize me now all wrinkled and albino-disguised. With a shout (every bit I had shouted "HEY Popular!" at erstwhile codgers when I was a kid intern at a huge county infirmary 65 years agone), I innovate myself. Without turning his head to look at me, he replies quite audibly, "I recognize you. Don't shout!" So at least ane of us, peradventure the oldest in the room, still has good ears and good perceptive powers, but is croaky of vocalism, like all the rest of u.s.a..
Sitting right next to my beloved unvarying-voiced roommate MC, I figured I was hearing him as well as possible. "The first order of business concern," he said, "is to give our annual written report on who couldn't make it to the reunion this yr because they died. I've heard of three. All in favor?" I remember back when reports and gossip were well-nigh who went into psychiatry, and the girl nosotros liked to call the class bimbo is professor of neurosurgery at a big eastern university; hard patients, being deposed for malpractice deportment, a daughter merely starting medicine or was it the ministry or a auto rental; divorces and baldness and substance abuse. Later it was of strokes, insomnia and obstipation and horrendous uninsured dental bills, second wives, grandchildren and swell grandchildren. Now, falls and broken hips, and deaths.
Small talk about big things. About 9 years agone upon moving to California and condign a patient myself and on the victim side of the health-care maw, I, forth with the edgier classmates and the profession at large, began to fume and grumble near how dissimilar the practise of medicine had become – doctors won't fifty-fifty talk to us their colleagues on the phone much less make firm calls. Just the biggest new villain regulating the states like cancer overwhelming patients, distracting us from the patients themselves and their diseases, was Big Insurance and now Humongous Politics. In one case outraged at this pes-in-the-door bit of socialized medicine, we now, however, are rather glad for Medicare, even if it ceased paying more a pittance decades ago, and we've had to mountain the departure ourselves or confront appallingly huge "gap insurance." "Professional courtesy" expired quietly earlier our 50th anniversary, and was a hot topic at the thing. And aren't we glad that for the better part of our careers we needed to hire only a nurse or 2, not an assortment of class filler-outers, CPAs, and lawyers. There's lots of buzz about the overabundance of consultants a physician gets into a example nowadays, but there are at least as many that he himself needs just to stay out of trouble with the government and insurance companies and tabloids. No wonder immature doctors, er, wellness car providers, seem intimidated, frustrated, aloof, altogether different. But a patient – sigh, me as well every bit everybody else – can't simply take it personally. The endearing generation gap in our class between u.s.a. post adolescents and the returning veterans was nothing compared to the string of generation gaps between us antiques and the new barricaded clock-watching providers. Put that manner our generation of MDs were the admired and dearest physicians that Norman Rockwell painted, while the presently active docs are painted as greedy and distant apparatchiks and opioid merchants.
And thus I would constitutional on a few years ago. But somehow I've gotten acclimated to information technology. Now I and my virtually adversarial main physician smiling while furtively glancing at the clock on the wall, and when we both silently annotation that the allowed 15 minutes are upward, I depart in peace. At present as I sit here, pawing for the toy among the Crackerjacks, the mess medicine has become is simply a fleeting idea. Why verbalize it and cast a pall over the fog?
Really the upshot was ameliorate attended than I expected. Vii of the 16 survivors (make that 13), materialized. This is about the same percentage as attended the 50th, for what's that is worth. Not much. Likewise for united states of america. All of us class youngsters are here plus a token residuum of the ancient oldsters. All together, nearly 25 people, the majority being widows.
As for entertainment, a copy of the prissy screw-bound book of memories prepared by our grade for our 50th anniversary, is passed around. I'd studied my copy for 15 years and had just reviewed it to refresh my retention of names, but to appear loyal I kickoff a perfunctory scanning of the book, and and so, but then did I find the little detail nearly the famous offset anatomy test and how nosotros'd all flunked. The highest grade was fourteen%, the item said. Hey, that's way wrong! The highest was 32%. I know because I got it. The grades had been made known by individual study cards in our personal postal service boxes rather than by posted listing. So when I saw mine I figured 32% had to be the lowest in the class, and was on my way back to the dorm to call my dad to come and go me – I'd just flunked medicine. On the way I encountered the rest of my classmates bemoaning their grades, half-dozen, 12%, xiv%. I sighed with relief, but for some reason didn't proclaim that my score was more than 100% higher than the side by side. Oh well, I'g keeping my being King of Norway a secret too.
"The next lodge of business concern," murmured the chairman, "is to congratulate Wes on existence the Male monarch of Norway and he finally got his AOA medal." I learned later from my wife he had really said "….spring nosegay….his may-day settled." She hadn't defenseless the rest.
Feeling that I should respond to the Host's gracious congratulation and an urge to put in words an overriding sentiment that had been gaining force equally I have looked at this roomful of my dear classmates, all of us needing assistance, hearing aids, and a minute or ii to remember what we were trying to retrieve, I manage to hoist myself out of my chair and speak. Whether the post-obit is the fashion information technology really came out of my rima oris, or is the way anybody head it, it'due south what I wanted to say: "Mr. chairman, I had come up this evening prepared to make a motility that this exist our last reunion and that no plans for any hereafter events exist made now or e'er until nosotros, all 100 of usa, meet over again in heaven where Christ Himself volition be our host, and at that place volition be no deafness and nosotros volition hear Him perfectly, and the memory of our griefs, just those memories, will surely fade, and nosotros doctors volition be out of concern. Merely now I feel moved to motion that we express appreciation to our chairman for his remarkably sustained interest in and concern for us, and for his originality and inventiveness fifty-fifty to the point of arranging this 65th reunion at an Assisted Intendance facility -- who ever heard of the like? It's never been washed before, fifty-fifty by classes older than ours. I must acknowledge that as the youngest in the class, though past a measly twelvemonth, I was a mite embarrassed when I heard our leader had arranged for the reunion to be at an assisted care unit. Actually I thought information technology was ridiculous. Is he trying to flaunt our antiquity? Doesn't he know you're only as quondam every bit you lot feel, that old proverb? But, sigh, we are old, cannot hide it, we feel it, so why non alive with it? Mr. chairman, I'm beginning to catch your genius and honesty and reality in having the reunion hither. No, information technology's never been done before, but at present it has, and the class of '53 is a model across the world for the classes of '50 and '54 and 55. We all may well be here pretty soon. I move that ... "
The chairman is however standing. Impatiently he cuts me off . "That Wes! Rambling like he did when he was 19 and we were roommates," he mumbles. Before his affect went flat I could tell when he was just being wry. Oh well, he's plowing on in his no-nonsense manner: "I would like to entertain a motion that next year, our 66th reunion be held right here at Assisted Care. Do I hear a motility?" Having settled back upon my chair, I ratchet myself upward and croak, "then move, and so to say, just here. Forget the Dining Room."
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