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(photo courtesy of thefost)
When my father was alive, he considered himself to be the luckiest guy and said so many times. Through what he considered a real stroke of luck, he ended up going to medical school in Scotland. Looking at what was going on at the time, the chances of that happening were pretty slim: It was 1938. My grandfather had gone into bankruptcy and lost his business. My father was not a very good student. He had a lead on going to the University of Minnesota and trying to get into the medical school there, but it was only a shot – he could get out there and be refused and would have to go home, a waste of a train ticket. He was working for the summer in the Catskills in a terrible hotel and had basically resigned himself to going back to New York, enrolling at City College to get a high school biology teaching certification and giving up. At the end of the summer, his father called him to tell him that they’d just gotten a telegram from a medical college (a prep school really, one of those places where regular medical students who were not doing well could go for extra tutoring to get through the boards) in Glasgow, saying that if my father could get there by the first week in September, he’d have a place. My grandfather, who goodness only knows was coarse, illiterate in about 5 different languages, and generally a nasty SOB, asked him if he really wanted to do it. My father said yes but there was no way to get everything done – a passport, clothes, a ship fare, especially with my grandfather’s situation. “F**k you – if you want it, go do it – we’ll find a way.” (more…)