Crispy Doc

Dear A, In 2002, I was a resident in Emergency Medicine finishing up my training at XXXX. I’d arranged through one of our part-time faculty to rotate through the Nairobi Hospital for about 6 weeks. When my sister mentioned to a friend that I was heading to Nairobi, her friend noted that her older brother’s good friend was working there …

[Some time ago, I came across the recommendation to write thank you letters on a regular basis as part of a gratitude practice. What follows is my first attempt.] Dear E, If you are receiving this, it probably took a few minutes of amateur internet sleuthing to track you down. Let’s get a few things straight out of the gate …

The headline of a throwaway article on my newsfeed recently drew my attention to a topic that I’d not considered before. It proclaimed that part of the boredom that besets some retirees comes from the loss of an audience. Not just any audience, mind you – it’s about being seen to do things that matter by people who matter. Feeling …

My father died almost two-and-a-half years ago. I think of him every day. It began as a profound sadness, an absence that made me feel deficient mixed with a tinge of relief that he was finished suffering. It was a good death, and it was the right time in the trajectory of his illness. Any longer and he would have …

Since our eldest was accepted to university, I’ve spent a bit of time thinking ahead about what life could be like in this next phase. I’m trying to incorporate wisdom from the excellent book Designing Your Life, by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, where they advocate exploring a transition to a new activity or role gradually to determine whether the …

Today one of the strategy gamer dads from my inner tier of friends surprised me by gifting me a subscription to an online board game platform. It was an act of spontaneous generosity from someone who knows me well enough to know I wouldn’t buy it for myself. We met when his family moved to our area 9 years ago, …

Through a serendipitous series of events, I was invited to a book club that explores what’s next – a group of fifty-somethings figuring out their next act after kids leave, the divorce is finalized, or your life trajectory’s resemblance to your parents’ less than ideal narrative becomes too strong to ignore any longer. The group included an accomplished academic, a …

Today is my birthday. I was up early for a bike ride. Dramatic clouds caught the colors of the dawn, and were in turn reflected on the surface of the Pacific. Shortly after walking through the door and receiving warm wishes from my wife, she informed me that an acquaintance we saw at social events (whose kids played sports alongside …

When I was assessing how my actual life fell short of my ideal life, one of the most obvious shortcomings was that my life had far less music infusing it than I would like. Some of this was a function of how my brain works – I can’t concentrate with music playing in the background – it immediately goes to …

The past few years have witnessed a proliferation of gigantic skeletons popping up on lawns around Halloween. While there’s a certain novelty with these holiday decorations, there’s a countervailing argument that the rest of the year’s worth of storage in the garage (to say nothing of the time required to set up and take down the items) might make these …