V1: Dr. Huston

I knew him because of his MGA parked in the Hine’s parking lot down at the pool. At the time, the MGA was my fourth favorite British sports car, behind the XKE, the Austin Healey 3000, and the Triumph TR3. The MGA later moved up to No. 2, because, well, that’s another discussion. About what lines mean.

Met him in person when an Irish Setter with heartworm tried to take my face off in the Hine pool house. I leaned down to pet Duke and he launched at my face. Friends sped me into town while my hysterical mother followed in another car. I was ushered into Dr. George Huston’s office on his day off.

I’d seen hm before. A lined face, older looking than some of the other Hine friends. Close cropped head. Big jaw. Closer when he looks at you like that.

He put me on a table. He asked me about Duke. Putting me at rest. But he was not was not wasting time. He came at me with a needle.

“This is going to hurt for a moment,’ he said. All these laters, I keep remember this was the one doctor who used the real word. I was eight. “Try not to move.”

He put an icepick in my upper nose. Another one in my upper cheek. Quick.I tried not to move. My face was screaming, but I was not going to move or cry out. I think my body twisted a bit.

Then he sewed me up. I could hear the laces going in all eight of them. After some interval I sat up. All done. 

“That could have gone a lot harder if you hadn’t stayed still,” said Dr. Huston. “You’re a brave boy.” 

I knew just enough about him to understand the compliment. He’d been a surgeon in Korea (the real Korea, not the MASH mish-mash standing in for Vietnam). Stationed on a hospital ship where the most serious surgeries were performed. What he shared in public was a memory of odor. The most evocative of all memory triggers, and oddly one that can be triggered by the merest hint of familiar scent. Even when he told it for laughs you could detect a faint shudder at his smelt recollection of Kim-Chi. 

“All of them stank of it. The whole ship stank of it. They threw vegetables, meat, God knows what all, into a pot, cooked it for a while then buried it for weeks. When they pulled it out again and heated it, you had Kim-Chi. Enough to make you throw up.”

As a kid I felt it was about rotten food smell. Years later, I realized it was an elemental set of associations with his time in Korea. Desperate surgeries, mangled bodies, the smell of death somehow intermingled with a kind of food, a way of life, that was too alien to bear. But he did bear it. Served his time and came home to his wife and kids and MGA, and those prematurely old lines in his face were the fossil leavings of his time of war. He was a brave man. A good man with sad eyes. Proud he once gave me a compliment. Pleased to remember him. He was also the surgeon who saved Emma.