When I Grow Up

{Prompt: If you had to go back in time and start a brand new career, what would it be?}

Fire Station Six

When I was five or six, I remember going with a gaggle of children to Raleigh Fire Department, Station 6, at the corner of Fairview and Oberlin.

Sidebar: The corner of Fairview and Oberlin was near the edge of my known world, at the time; across the street from Johnson’s Pharmacy, where we could go for shakes and burgers, and spin on the bar stools after school, when I was older.

And it was on the way to Hayes Barton Methodist Church, where I would struggle to stay awake, on Sunday mornings, during the interminable oratory of the 11 o’clock service. (I spent most of the service looking through the pages of the hymnal or entering a slightly hypnotic state, by gazing at the stained glass windows of the chapel.) But I digress. Back to our story….

I knew it was Fire Station Six, because it said so in big blocky, aluminum letters on the front of the red brick building — so big and so legible that even a preschooler could read them. As we milled around the concrete driveway of the fire station garage, firemen in faded yellow canvas outfits with indefinable gear (indefinable for a little kid), gave us pep talks on the civic virtues of the fire department, showed off their impressively clean and bright, metallic red fire trucks, and showed how the shiny poles inside the garage led up into the living quarters above.

I think it was about that time that I wrote “Fireman” on a little piece of lined elementary school writing paper, carefully printed in graphite, in answer to the question of “What would you like to be when you grow up?”

Shiny Ladder & Pump Truck at Station 6 (Credit: Mike Legeros).

Our Backyard Brick Patio

As a child, I remember my father being pretty handy with tools, and taking on many small projects inside and outside the house. I’m pretty sure he built a storage shed in the very back of our backyard, beneath the oak tree that had held our treehouse the year before.

And he had planted a garden on one side of our backyard, with rows of corn, tomatoes, and something called “Dill”. I remember that clearly.

And we had a sturdy clothesline running at a jaunty angle from one pine tree on one side of the backyard to another one way down at the other end. Pulling in the laundry was a way I “helped” my Mom from time to time.

But I was about 12 when my father decided to undertake a project in our backyard unlike any he had done before. He decided to build a curved brick patio, serving as a transition from the 10 by 10 foot concrete slab (our de facto backyard terrace) to the previously unimproved lot, of trampled pine straw, clay, and tree roots. This patio was to serve no useful purpose for a child or a teen — it couldn’t be drawn on with chalk or used for playing marbles. It wouldn’t be good for rolling around on a bike or a scooter, or root-filled enough to serve as an imaginary WWII landscape for our little green army men. As a matter of fact, it was planned to have a gently flowing border with a short retaining wall, a bench, and a small pond for keeping fish. It was built purely to be a place for relaxation and to be aesthetically pleasing.

Over the span of several weeks, my dad leveled the ground, laid out the bricks, spread out sand to fill the spaces, and constructed a small sitting wall and pond using bricks and mortar. I don’t recall any celebration or party, but to me, at the time, the undertaking seemed Herculean… the result, somewhat mythical. (Years later, my brother and I built an addition to the patio — a wooden deck that I like to think my father would have approved of.)

A photo of the patio (taken by Gerald Gallup).

It was about that time that I entertained the idea of becoming a Landscape Architect when I grew up.

A typical illustration of a landscape architect.

Vocational Planning

In junior high school, back in the day, we all were given a reprieve from our lessons for an hour or two, to take a vocational aptitude test. Sometime in the 70s, I think I took the Strong Interest Inventory. It was designed to match our expressed interests and our personalities with those of people in various careers. Based on our responses, our interests were graded and categorized as “Realistic”, “Investigative”, “Artistic”, “Social”, “Enterprising”, or “Conventional”. I’m pretty sure that I was told on the computer-generated report (something new, at the time), that my scores highly matched those of people in “adventure” careers, and in “science” careers. My scores poorly matched those of people in “clerical” or “service” careers. Consequently, the top matches for me were careers like “Airline Pilot” and “Medical Doctor”.

An array of workers from various vocations.

I think it was less than a year later that I entered the School of Science and Math. Although the school took pains to be sure that we had a complete education, including the humanities, I think that we all felt an unspoken (or thinly veiled) pressure to succeed in our future endeavors — or, at least, not to fail and bring disgrace to the school — a publicly funded experiment of a residential school for students gifted in science and math. So I guess, I drank the Kool-aid, as it were, and I found myself applying to colleges in the School of Mathematics or the School of Engineering. Mind you, it wasn’t a wrong choice. I was quite good at math, and I had an interest in design and problem-solving. Engineering was a solid, logical choice.

However, when I took the Intro to Engineering course at Vanderbilt University, I found out that Engineers are frequently beholden to corporate entities, working at the behest of others, with what I perceived to be limited autonomy. Something about the experience turned me off, and when I transferred back to NC State University (due to tuition costs), I entered the Department of Agriculture and Life Sciences as a Pre-med major.

I honestly think that was the best decision I ever made, although it was really only the first of many decisions to be made in choosing a medical career.

Patterson Hall - at NC State University (Credit: Bryan Pollard)

Medical School and Residency

Later I narrowed my medical ambitions to either Emergency Medicine or Family Practice. Ironically, those are the two specialties that treat the widest variety of medical conditions, so I hadn’t narrowed my focus by much.

I matched to a Transitional Year - Medicine Internship at Montefiore Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a city where there were several highly regarded residency programs in Emergency Medicine — the direction I was leaning at the time. I even interviewed for Emergency Medicine residency programs, traveling as far as Worcester, Massachusetts, and Albuquerque, New Mexico, to explore the options.

But when it came time for me to rank my residency programs for “The Match”, I had serious doubts about how much I wanted to subject myself to critical level scenarios on a daily basis. I tried to pivot to a match in family medicine where continuity of care and bedside manner were more important. Unfortunately, by the time I realized that family practice is a perfectly respectable specialty (contrary to Duke Medical School’s culture), I failed to match with any program at all.

At this time, I was married, and I had already taken my wife from the warm Southern weather of North Carolina, to the Arctic winter and sunless skies of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Now I had to tell her that we were moving again. And mainly because of my lack of foresight regarding my career aspirations.

Luckily, Dianne has a job that relies on medical data, and a job that would be in great demand at nearly any institution that I chose. Together, we looked at the options for programs that had unmatched openings for second-year residents, and one location sort of popped off the page — Columbia, South Carolina, the city in which my mother had been born and raised.

Columbia— the capital of South Carolina.

Would I Do It All Again?

So I went to residency in South Carolina, and following residency, I practiced family medicine for 26 years. I retired in 2019. I think I can honestly say that I never regretted my choice of career. I’m not saying I wasn’t exhausted, overwhelmed, or unprepared. I just knew, when I went through medical school, that I was in the right place. I was in a field of study where there was—and still is—so much to be discovered. A field of study that would allow me to exercise my independent streak, by opening a private practice, and yet allow me to give advice and comfort to people in all walks of life, while enjoying just a little bit of small talk with each encounter.

When I retired, I made a list of jobs I would consider, if I had to return to work (if our financial resources were insufficient). The jobs I had listed included Teacher, Surveyor, Ecologist, Landscape Architect, Writer, Park Ranger, and Bookstore owner. I even entertained returning for a residency in Pathology, or serving as a Medical Director for a Hospice program or a nursing home, or working as a Medical Examiner (for disability determination), or keeping my hand in the medical field by serving as a Scribe.

But I have little interest in returning to medicine after 30 years of medical school and practice. I would prefer to feed my hunger for the outdoors, or strike out into the world of the arts. Neither of those fields are likely to bring me much profit or acclaim, but they might bring me a measure of mindfulness and satisfaction.

Then again, is it too late to become a firefighter?

(Credit: Cosumnes FD)