Fragments From Floyd

"When did you first start writing?" I hear the imaginary interviewer asking me, holding a globular microphone in front of my mouth like an ice cream cone, offering me a bite. And in this mock interview, like so many times before, I am entertaining myself with my thoughts as I drive to work. And that fact is the answer to the question. I started writing when I started working.

Not the teaching at the community college; I told my stories then often enough, to my students--at least the stories and yarns that had to do with nature and the environment. I really started writing when I started working in physical therapy; when I drove away from my private life of stories and into a public life where I was only one thing: an objective-scientific, highly discrete, highly focused healer where my stories were left at the door.

I started writing on the way to such a day, creating paragraphs, phrases, metaphors behind the wheel, and when I got inside the doors of the hospital or clinic, they all dissolved like snowflakes in sun. Even so, that was where I started putting words together.

And so as I drove to my current part-time clinical job the other day, I sulked as I mused my anecdotes to myself, knowing in a half hour, I would become Fred First, PT--no stories, no fragments, no tales of the dog or the creek or the ravages of mountaintop removal. That was the part about this work that I could not take again, full time. It leaves too many words unwritten, too many heartfelt impulses unfulfilled, too little of me at the gut level.

I walked into the clinic, put my satchel down, got out the laptop and was about to lay it down on my two feet of 'desk' space, but there was a small sack with my name on it. Curious. I opened it up. Inside, the evidence that what I have just told you is not entirely true. While working on total hip replacement exercises with an older patient over the couple of weeks I've been a therapist again, we HAVE talked--about her painting, about my writing, about what in the world is going on out there. Inside the little bag, a book: Eats Shoots and Leaves. She had brightened one day when I told her I was an aspiring writer. "You have to read this book" she said. And now she made sure I could.

Language. Yes, it is about the kind of language we use in our work. Teaching, for me, gives voice to it, therapy less so. But these days, I have struck a good balance and find my own voice (which includes photography) on those days when I'm not listening to that of my patients, and totally focused on their well-being and its documentation to keep the bean counters happy. This seems to be about the right mix of head and heart. I am a fortunate fella. Balance is a hard thing to come by.