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Show blue eyes, these made my early portrait of Father bending over me. I soon found that the sunny blue could freeze to ice when he grew angry. No, the word ice is misleading. The real keynote to Father was warmth, warmth kindling to anger sometimes but more often love of Mother and us kids, and love of life. I mean the best in life, whenever he could, he took us to see noble churches, grand alpine summits, broad seas shining with sunlight or tossing in tumult. A poetic nature was Father's. That warmth was to prove his undoing, despite his sturdier qualities. He was fearless, he was strong. His capacity for acquiring facts was immense. Besides he was said to have had a subtle sense-who knows, Extra-Sensory Perception?-that rose above facts in diagnosing illness. His professors at Iowa City had disciplined him to assume, in time of need, the role of calm, confident physician. But the imaginative, sensitive poet in him made him suffer too much with a patient in pain, with a widow and children when he lost a male patient, with anyone bereaved. That quality makes a doctor beloved but it tends to shorten his medical career. With Mother he'd try to relax during brief vacations. . .down the Mississippi in a Mark Twain-type steamboat with tall smokestacks and lots of red and gold gingerbread from pilot house to gunwale. . .to the St. Louis Fair celebrating a century of progress since Lewis and Clark explored the West. . .to Salt Lake and on to Los Angeles on a new track so bumpy Mother feared that I unborn might emerge months early. But on those jaunts he couldn't really unwind. He couldn't forget his St, Ansgar patients, especially the doubtful or dangerous cases, in the hands of youngsters just out of medical college. So ^frter seven years of practice at St. Ansgar, some of it 24 hours a day, he made a decision. He'd specialize in post-graduate study at noted hospitals in Copenhagen and Vienna. Then when he returned to America he'd establish himself in a larger center where he could have help of nurses, colleagues, a hospital and modern equipment. |