Kelli, Cha-Cha, and Fred visited us in our new home last weekend ... We had a blast strolling through Amana, playing board games, making and eating elaborate meals, and generally having a lot of laughs.

When I accepted my present job back in Spring of this year, I knew that I’d be working a combination of day shifts and night shifts ... And last week, I got more than a taste of overnights. I worked forty-eight hours of overnights. In celebration of my achievement, I’ll offer a brief list of insights, should you ever find yourself working overnight on a Mother-Baby unit.

1) You can deliver safe, effective patient care without caffeine. Yes, Friends, it’s possible! I drank my last carbonated, caffeinated beverage one week ago today! I was concerned about the amount of caffeine I’d been taking in since starting work back in July - my daily average was at least three cups of coffee and two cans of Diet Coke with Lime. So, what better way to nip a bad habit in the bud than on the night shift when everything is weird to your body anyway? (For the record, I have been enjoying one modest cup of coffee on my days off ...)

2) You can sleep successfully during the daytime ... If the lights are off. And if Adelaide’s voice isn’t ringing through the house. And if the fan is on. And if Nine is in the basement. And if the air conditioning is on. And if our next-door neighbor isn’t working on his lawn, his motorcycle, or his roof.

3) You can subsist on two meals per day. I found that eating a big supper with Joel and Adelaide and then having a big breakfast in the morning (before trudging off to bed) was the best for me ... Eating a giant “lunch” at 2:30 in the morning is bizarre. Perhaps I’m in denial about my job or working the night shift, I refuse to have “lunch” in the middle of the night. I do think “midnight snack” is a more appropriate moniker and way-of-life for me - I will not forget the fact that I am not a nocturnal creature, and so lunch is a daytime thing.

4) You will not find time to sleep on your shift. Before I’d attempted a night shift, I foolishly believed that I might be able catch a cat-nap working overnight. I was wrong. In fact, it’s a bustling, busy place with babies coming into the world at any time of day or night. And, what’s more, new Moms and Families will send their babies to be cared for in the nursery more overnight than during the daytime. Moms seem to need that precious shut-eye to handle the barrage of doctors, residents, paperwork, and visitors that show up during the daytime, so nighttime is the best time to be that nurse who coos, cuddles, feeds, and rocks new babies. But, that’s typically not me so far ... Nope, there’s been too much charting, too many antibiotics, too many fundal checks, and too many admissions for that sort of soothing work.

5) You will not be able to do this kind of work without a Joel. If you ever find yourself in my position, will not be able to work your scheduled hours and then sleep your sleep without help from a Joel. He will help you by getting your kid dressed and to daycare in the morning, working hard for his own paycheck (and personal sense of accomplishment, of course), getting supper on the table at night, taking care of your kid’s cries through the night, getting up the next morning to do it all over again and giving you a bouquet of flowers to keep you going ... Yes, you must have a Joel.

So, we’ve got three more night shifts this week before I’ll be back on days for more than a month ... Being a night owl isn’t so bad, but I am a little sleepy ...

Some Saturday afternoons, when the sunlight is just so, you realize that there will be plenty of time for updates about the things you've done and seen the first month in your new home.

Sometimes you realize that the most important thing on the day's agenda is just to enjoy fresh spray of water, the angle of the light, the song of the birds, and the laughter of your family.

I'll leave it to her to report on the actual goings-on of her job, because this entry is actually a self-centered lament. Aimee has moved out of the clinic and into the Mother-Baby Unit, which means that she has moved out of the public sphere of medical care and into the highest-security branch of the whole apparatus. There are vials of potential bio-warfare agents across the hall from me that are less well-guarded than Aimee's workspace. Which is appropriate, and good, but it also means that, as a pathology resident and husband, I'll never see Aimee work.

As the bus rumbled around the corner, Kinnick Stadium came into view. Emblazoned on the gargantuan scoreboard is an image of the University of Iowa mascot, the tiger hawk.

Adelaide caught sight of the hawk and said, at the top of her little 2 year-old voice, "Go Hawkeyes!"

All of the riders within range (i.e., 1/3rd of the bus, including the bus driver) laughed.

Despite the fact that I've only been gone for four days, and despite the fact that it is nice to take a break from parenting, it's hard to be absent from my family. Adelaide is just starting to really converse on the phone, and during my frequent calls she'll tell me about her life and we'll sing songs together, and I'll have difficulty deciding between laughing and crying.

But this time is a nice reminder of how lucky we are not to be separated regularly or for long periods of time. And in celebration of our long period of togetherness, here are some previously unseen pictures of our adventures.

Here's one from our Bemidji trip that I really like. The statue of Paul Bunyan is about three times my height, and Adelaide is a little more than 1/3 my height.

And here we are at Animal Land, the largest private family zoo in the nation (using, I'm pretty sure, a very specific and narrow definition of "private family zoo").

Sartell had its summer festival a few weeks ago, complete with parade. Adelaide quickly caught on to the idea of scurrying out into traffic in chase of thrown candy, and collected quite a bag of barely edible sugary delights. We're now trying to divert her frequent requests for her bag of candy into discussions of potty training and the kinds of sugary delights that are given to girls who use the potty. It's slow going.

My solitude ends tomorrow, as Aimee tells me the moving truck has been expertly packed up, the poopship has been loaded onto a tow dolly, and they are all set to haul our earthly possessions down I-35 and across I-80 for six-to-seven hours and then unload 'em all again. On my end, all the papers are signed, I'm in possession of a key, and no one seems to have thought better about lending us hundreds of thousands of dollars, so very soon we'll all be together again in our new home.

Since our departure from Vermillion, we've been kickin' it in Minnesota with our families.

Early on, after the U-Haul was returned and our possessions safely stowed in a 10x15 square foot storage cube, we ventured north and visited Molly and Doug in Bemidji. We introduced Adelaide to the Mighty Mississip at Itasca's headwaters; we took a glorious 12-mile bike ride up hill and down at Itasca; we shook hands with Paul and Babe on Lake Bemidji; we met the tigers, lemurs, camels, and deer of Animal Land; we took a strolling tour of the farm, picked countless woodticks off of one another, happened upon an Indigo Bunting and a Grosbeek at Molly's feeders, and patted Numa and Breezy (the horses) often. We enjoyed a relaxing, memorable time at Molly and Doug's, and left the camera at home ... Growl.

Scorched Earth allows its players to re-enact the eastern front of World War II, the great land battle between Nazi Germany and Stalinist Soviet Union. With a rule book stretching to 87 pages, and each two-week game turn taking Nate and me a little longer than two weeks, Scorched Earth is for serious war game geeks only. Shown here are the German 61st infantry division and the 108th engineer regiment (with an Australian dollar for scale), both of which came to grief at the gates of Leningrad.

Nate moved to Brookings in the eighth grade and, because my friend Chris was his peer natural helper (whatever that was), and we had the same home room, and we quickly recognized each other as members of the same social class (Geeks, But Not Totally Irredeemable*), we agreed to hang out. During our very first afternoon of hanging out, Nate introduced me to wargaming. I’d played the odd game of Risk before then, but The Battle of Krynn was far more complex, confusing, and wonderful.

In my memory, we graduated from wargames that could be played in an afternoon to Scorched Earth in a matter of months. I remember Nate selling me on it (it cost something like $150), by emphasizing its hugeness (3000 game pieces and an eight-food wide playing space), and then for the rest of our school days we spent a lot of our time searching for a place to put it, setting it up, putting it away, and then looking for another place to put it. At one time or another it resided on a ping-pong table in Nate’s basement, on the floor in my basement, and on the floor of Nate’s bedroom, necessitating a tricky double jump to get from his bed to the door.

We play it via email now, so there’s no need to bargain for playing space and, I suppose, no need to treasure a few cardboard counters. But one look at the 61st and I’m carried away by a sense-memory of basement murk and dust, my fingers cramp into the uncomfortable claw necessary to organize and move with precision a stack of eight little cardboard squares, and my mind slips into thoughts of diversion and counterthrust, the search for a weakness in the defense, and the decisive maneuver that will, for the smallest and most personal stakes imaginable, bring triumph.

*The male social strata of Brookings Middle School, from least to greatest:
Total Geeks
Geeks, But Not Totally Irredeemable
Violent Criminal Lunatics
Jocular Suckerfish
Wrestlers
Rich Kids
Those Who, Because of Their Aptitude For Football and Basketball, Are As Gods

Last summer, Joel's grandmother Mar gave us a set of lichen-encrusted adirondack lawn chairs. Mar's chairs had happily weathered Nebraska prairie summers beneath a fruit-bearing tree for the last decade. The chairs were uprooted from their cozy spot on Mar's little farm to our front lawn in Vermillion after she decided to move. When we moved last week, the adirondacks made the long trip from South Dakota to Minnesota. They've found a temporary home ringing my parents' backyard fire pit and a revived look under my dad's power washer and Joel's steady hand.

During our courtship, Joel refurbished an ancient picnic table for me one summer when we lived in Minneapolis. The picnic table had been salvaged from the dump by Molly during Brookings annual Clean-Up Days in the early 1980s and sat for years in the Mirons' backyard enjoying many outdoor feasts, its peeling paint and warped boards often hidden by a tablecloth. Joel and I saved the table from another curbside sale and hauled it to my apartment in Minneapolis. After Joel refurbished the table, using tools loaned from a traveling theatre company (Joel performed the part of Sebastian in Shakespeare's The Tempest that summer), the Mirons' old picnic table was transformed into my dining room table. And until recently, it was our primary table, seeing scores of meals, birthdays, dinner parties, batches of cookies, craft projects, and homework in its 10-year lifespan. I have many memories in which that table serves as a centerpiece to all the action of my young life.

It seems to be our thing - recycling old, worn furniture, stabilizing it for another 10 or 20 years use. It's kind of fun to take a scabbed-over, wobbly thing, add a little elbow grease, and make a little heirloom out of it.

I wonder what fun times the new-used adirondacks will afford us?

The sun was warming the green lawns and new flowers as kids zoomed by on bicycles and swung high at the Austin School playground a block from our (old) house. In the rearview mirror, I watched as Joel carefully maneuvered the U-Haul onto the street and, from the corner of my eye, I saw our dear neighbor mowing his lawn in the perfect straight lines he always mows while his daughter ran around the yard, playing.

And then, it hit me.

We’re never coming back. Never coming back to live in Vermillion.

After this realization, I felt a deep loss. After all, in four short years, we’d come to love the little town on the prairie for revitalizing our love of theatre, encouraging our professional aspirations, for giving us a community to belong to, and for endowing us with wonderful friends.

But perhaps, the one thing that made me the most sad was thinking of Adelaide. Vermillion is the town of her birth. When Adelaide was born, this little community gave her such a welcome and nurtured Joel and I in our parental infancy. Vermillion is the place where Adelaide first went down a slide, where Adelaide made her first friends, and where Adelaide turned one month, six months, one year, and two. My memories of our time in Vermillion are almost entirely wrapped up in memories of Adelaide’s milestones, challenges, and stories.

It’s difficult to leave all of that behind. Yes, we take the memories with us to our new home, but we leave behind all of the tangible reminders.

The Austin School Tunnel of Mystery.

The Vermillion High School Stage.

The Backyard Clothesline.

The Hill.

The Hospital.

Highway 50 between Vermillion and Yankton.

How do you say good-bye?

embrace,

celebrate.

Graduating from medical school feels both ridiculous and inevitable. Ridiculous because, of course, I’m still me. After this evening’s ceremony I’ll still be me (perhaps with the addition of a light hangover), but I’ll be Dr. Me (not my real name). There’s a theatrical feeling to this, or, in less confident moments, a feeling of imposture. I’m me, but I’m about to acquire a different role with new and unfamiliar lines to say and convince people that I mean.

On the other hand, graduating feels inevitable. In a way, I’ve graduated from medical school several times. The first graduation was attended by the pediatrician I trained with and a little girl who may or may not have been sexually abused by her father. The graduation happened in my head, and “Nope, I was considering going into pediatrics, but this can’t be my career,” was my silent valedictorian speech on the day that I decided to become a pathologist.

After deciding to become a pathologist, a lot of medical school took on a perfunctory air. I still assisted in surgeries, births, and both fast and slow deaths, but I was fulfilling prerequisite requirements, waiting for my real training to begin. I don’t mean to be crass, I played my part well, knew all my lines, and really cared about the surgeries, births, and deaths, but I kept a mental barrier up, something like invisible latex gloves, that maintained a pristine sense of, “This is just for now. Later will be better.”

The day of my second graduation was in a crowded hallway, but really it was just Aimee watching me open an envelope (Adelaide was there but overwhelmed by all the strangers.). Inside it was the phrase “University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics”, and then Aimee gave me an Iowa baseball cap to go with my exultation and relief.

After Match Day, things became even more perfunctory. It helped that the rest of my training involved watching very specialized doctors do very specialized procedures. These sinus operations, Mohs biopsies, and brain surgeries had a lot to do with pathology (that which is cut out winds up on the pathologist’s desk), and were interesting, but the doctors in charge of my training let me be a future pathologist who was observing for the week rather than a medical student.

And now today, with the robe, hood, and hat. I’m not sure what the ceremony will be like. Maybe someone will talk about history and how we’re joining a society of professionals stretching back millennia and that we’re all colleagues with Galen. Perhaps they’ll sneak in one last lesson on professionalism and ethics. Probably a few people will gently poke fun at me for being in so many plays when I should have been studying. And then I’ll be Dr. Me, with a light hangover.