Mighty Women, A series

As summer dwindles, momentum gathers for the coming storm: school.

Here is installation 1 and 2 on some of the Women in my Life.

(1)
A. is a Professor of Medicine and the Assistant Director of a small research focused program within A Prestigious University. She is Illustriously Trained, patrician and dignified. Perhaps in her forties or fifties, she has a husband and grown children. She is beautiful and charming. Perfect manners and neatly coifed hair, a Midwestern accent dotted with exclamations, soft sweaters and impeccable posture. Sometimes you are not sure how big she really is, because she is somewhat cute, somewhat petite, but she is somewhat of a Giant. Her gaze is exacting, her knowledge is sweeping, and her disapproval of poor thinking, gentle and piercing. She is a Physician, and carries the dignity of her profession as elegantly as a single, glinting, imperceptible gold chain. If you are held in rapture just enough, you may eventually see, just beneath the rectitude, the cultivated discipline, the neatly drawn lines, that furious drive, you can see A. at 23, a fierce young thing, a little bit neurotic, a little bit humorless, in that florescent hospital gaze, meticulously carving tracheotomies into the throats of the comatose, Bates and CMDT piled and dog eared by her side. Every Monday morning I can feel her Not Looking At Me, because my write-ups are 2 months overdue.

(2)
K. is a family doctor for souls lost amid Violent and Forgotten Urban Decay, and has been for decades. She is in her late fifties perhaps early sixties, stout, dykish, hoarse, asthmatic and commanding. She looks perpetually either startled, disgruntled, or outraged. As most of her patients have a line up of bullet wounds, insurance companies that hold out on their insulin, and the complicated pharmacology of titrating blood pressure medication with a cocaine addiction, such reactions are often unsurprising. She has the manner of an old general, who has seen the trenches of human misery For a Very Long Time. She eyes the idiotic green recruit (i.e. second year medical student) with a mixture of exhausted, patient irritation; stunned disbelief at the magnanimous extent of true and utter ignorance; and then that faintest, slyest wink, a genuine excitement for this the Next Generation, who eagerly, if clumsily, take up arms in her wake.