Fathers, Doctors, and Wizards
by E. Noel Preston, MD

   My father was on his way out the door one morning when I was 12 years old and my mother wanted him to speak to the yardman. She was upset because the yardman had pulled up all the flowers in her garden as well as the weeds, but my father said no, he had to get to the hospital and besides, "I take care of the office and you take care of the house." My mother was furious: "You're afraid to talk to him! When you were an Army doctor all the nurses and enlisted men had to do what you told them, but now, when you have to tell a simple yardman he's made a mistake, you're afraid to talk to him!" My father said that was ridiculous, he didn't have time to discuss it, he was late enough as it was, and he left.

   My mother whirled around and pierced me with her flashing black eyes. "Noel Preston," she said, "When you grow up, be a man! Be a husband to your wife and a father to your children! Don't be afraid to talk to a yardman -- and don't make your wife do your dirty work for you!" Then she went out and gave the yardman a tongue-lashing he wouldn't forget.

   Ever since then I wanted to be strong. I wanted to be bold instead of timid. I wanted to make things happen instead of have things happen to me, but it was very hard. My father joined the Army Air Corps at the start of World War II when I was three years old, and for the next five years, I was raised by my mother and grandmother. We traveled from one Army base to another and wherever we went I was always the new kid in school. It was 1946 before my father could leave the Army and rebuild his shattered medical practice. All the other doctors in town had a year's head start on him and he was frantic to get started again.

   Dad's father had been a foreman in a Pennsylvania coal mine. He died in the Great Flu Epidemic when my father was only 15, and there was no money left to take care of the family. To make ends meet, Dad's mother had to rent out rooms in her house to make the mortgage payments. When Dad finished high school he heard that Louisiana was offering free college tuition to state residents, so he moved to Baton Rouge. He made it through college and medical school by working at the weather bureau and delivering telegrams, and when he graduated from medical school in 1931 it was just in time for the Great Depression. My mother always said that's why he worked so hard -- fear of being poor again, and for the rest of his life he would tell my sister and me, "Nothing's more important than a good education."

   Dad became the Miami doctor for the Florida East Coast Railway and was house doctor for several of the big Miami Beach hotels. Sometimes he took me with him on evening house calls, and one night we went to a trailer park out on Tamiami Trail where he did a life insurance physical on a big sweaty man in a dirty white undershirt. Another night we went to a Miami Beach mansion and I waited in the living room with a man's wife while Dad examined the man in the bedroom. Whenever the phone rang, she would pick up the receiver, cover it with her hand, and listen to the conversation. She said you could never be too careful and she didn't want anyone bothering her husband.

   When I was in school, I was always the last one chosen to be on a team at recess because I wasn't any good at sports. For a long time I believed my mother's fantasy that it was because Dad had been off in an airplane flying from one military hospital to another, or that he was in an emergency room saving someone's life, and that if he hadn't been doing all those noble good deeds he and I could have been playing catch and throwing footballs and I would have been the Fourth Grade Athlete of the Year.

   But then I noticed other doctors played catch and went camping and fishing and water skiing with their sons, and their sons were good at sports. Their sons could throw baseballs and footballs and pitch tents and put live bait on a hook, and I couldn't. One day my mother took me down to the War Memorial Youth Center and signed me up for boys' softball. All the other guys were there with their dads, or grandfathers, or uncles -- and I was there with my mom. I couldn't throw, or catch, or bat, and I didn't want to go back the next day -- and Mom said I didn't have to.

   Years later, I can understand my father was terrified of leaving his family destitute, just as his own young father had left him. Dad wasn't afraid to talk to the yardman -- he just felt he had to get to work and earn some money. There are thousands of young men and boys who don't have fathers, and they can throw and catch and play tennis and excel at any sport. It wasn't Dad's fault I couldn't catch. If I had had natural ability I would have been the first one chosen at fourth-grade recess whether he was flying around in an airplane or not. But that doesn't mean I've forgiven him for all those lost afternoons we never spent with each other. Things should have been better, but they weren't.

   When my daughters came along I was determined to be the father for them my father hadn't been for me. But I didn't go to Six Flags or rafting or hiking along the Chattahoochee River with them to be a "good father." I did it because I liked it, and had as much fun as they did. And they liked it too. The father-child bond I never had with my own dad I've had four times over with the girls, and it's been wonderful.

   But sometimes they would get annoyed with me for taking so many photographs of them and hanging them in my office. They were angry and embarrassed when I would call the school principal to protest low grades given to obviously superior term papers. And they didn't like it at all that I didn't like some of their boy friends at all. Later, when their mother and I divorced, the girls and I grew apart from each other and we stayed that way for too long a time. 

   A few years ago I replaced the pipes in my bathroom sink. I put in new valves, pipes, and faucets, and wrapped white plastic tape around the ends of the pipes to keep the joints from leaking. Dad and I had bought that roll of tape a long time ago to fix a leaky faucet at a house where I used to live. At the time I was astonished he thought we could fix the leak by ourselves, but he just said, "Let's go to the hardware store and get some stuff to fix it," and we did. That cheerful confidence that nothing's too hard to do made me tackle my own bathroom sink years later. It's what made my father make house calls to a trailer park to build a successful medical practice, and it's what made me certain that someday the girls and I wouId know how much we love each other -- and now we do.

   In “The Wizard of Oz” Dorothy tells the Wizard, "I think you are a very bad man," and the Wizard replies, "Oh no, my dear -- I'm really a very good man, but a very bad wizard." My dad never taught me how to catch, but that doesn't mean he was a bad father. He tried to show me that part of the world where he really was a wizard -- a very fine and caring doctor -- only I didn't want to see it. And I know my girls wish I hadn't taken such an active, if not intrusive, part in their lives, but that's all right. Now that they have children of their own, someday they will know why.

   Some things just can't be fixed like a leaky faucet, and it's best to leave them alone and leave them behind. Sometimes things just fix themselves.

E. Noel Preston, M.D. is a pediatrician in solo practice in Peachtree Corners. 6063 Peachtree Parkway, Suite 202-A, Norcross. (770) 448-1553. More information can be found at www.PeachtreeCornersPediatrics.com

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