Doctor Guitar

I do love being a doctor, but have over the years managed to maintain my hobbies. Apparently, this is good for healthy aging—both physical and mental, not to speak of one’s marriage after retirement. Speaking of avocations, although I have strummed a guitar and sung for many years now, it has been a long time since I played a gig in front of a gaggle of summer camp counselors—all of them age 17 to 25 years. Of course, I used to do this quite frequently, but that was when I was 17 to 25 years old. Over the ensuing years, I have occasionally performed, usually with the reluctant but melodious help of my wife. In those cases, however, it was always in front of a less chronologically challenged audience.

But one night last summer was different, and I found that I had inadvertently entered a kind of time warp. Who says that there is no such thing as time travel? Having just entered my 7th decade, it has been at least 45 years since I last played for an audience exclusively at the delicate age of camp staff, but this little performance did take me briefly back in time. As chief medical officer at a children’s summer camp in the wilds of Canada, my main duties were to deal with bumps, scratches, sprains, home sickness, and the occasional undisplaced fracture. I was, of course, also on call for more serious events such as (God forbid!) drowning, electrocution, serious trauma, and bee sting allergy. Fortunately for all of us, of these more serious threats, I only had to deal with hymenoptera anaphylaxis. One might with some justice ask, given the fact that I am now a geriatrician, how it was that I found myself looking after children. Fortunately for us all, I began my career as a family doctor and despite the years, apparently have not forgotten too many of the basics.

Beyond my clinical persona, I find that as camp doctor I am sort of like the Invisible Man—albeit not nearly as scary. As far as the kids are concerned, I am just an elderly guy up in the infirmary whom only the more neurotic or physically ill ever get to meet. Although I do join the camp minions thrice daily in the mess hall for meals, I am hardly one of the boys. I am the proverbial fly on the wall, buzzing in from another time and place. Someone once said that the past is another country. How true that is. These kids are in so many ways different from what we were like. First of all, when I went to camp it was in the 60s. Need I say more? Our generation still read newspapers made from trees not electrons, and we could recognize and even dial a rotary phone. Of course, there were no personal computers, and the closest thing to a handheld device was your girlfriend’s hand. We had no iPods, no Internet, no e-mail (ah, those were the days!). Of course, there was music (did I already mention the 60s?), and, fortunately, there still is, although I don’t recognize it all, despite being the proud owner of three kids, one of whom is still a teenager.

Given my relative social isolation, how did I know anything about music at camp? Well, as I have been the doctor there for several years now, some of the music staff knows I play and have lent me a guitar whenever I have asked. A few of the kinder ones even occasionally come to my cabin to jam. Otherwise I have nothing to do with the musical activities there. But when one of them politely—and a bit tentatively—invited me to play a piece at the “Coffee House” they were organizing for staff recreation, how could I refuse? In fact, when had I last heard the term “Coffee House”? (Have I already mentioned the 60s?) Dan, one of the music staff and a very fine musician, was even kind enough to offer to accompany me, perhaps rightly sensing that I might be a bit shy to get up in front of all those kids on my own. After all, I am the camp doctor with all of the status and honor that role is meant to involve. What if I forgot a chord, or more likely, given my increasingly frequent senior moments, a word, a line, or even messed up an entire stanza? Who would trust my clinical skills on the morrow? Even worse, what if my voice cracked—not in the way it does during the surges of excess male hormone so characteristic of the adolescents I was on guard for, but rather due to a fall in those very same compounds supposedly associated with the andropause, which as a board-certified geriatrician I surely don’t believe in.

Despite my fears, I found the courage to get up in front of the camp’s kliegs. I did give careful thought to what I would sing. As such, my choice of repertoire was guided primarily by intergenerational concerns. I figured that most of these kids would not be too enthralled by any of my more lugubrious Irish and Scots ballads from the 18th century. I also assumed that most would not know who Woody Guthrie was (they didn’t), so I stayed away from any dustbowl ditties. More to my surprise, they were less than familiar, not with Dylan himself, of course, but with so many of his classic songs that I pride myself on being able to belt out (along with harmonica accompaniment). As such, I chose an old depression era classic, “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out,” popularized by Bessie Smith. Of course, most had never heard of Bessie Smith and not even of the Depression, but I was right to guess that many knew the song through Eric Clapton’s soulful rendition. Dan played a beautiful lead instrumental at the appropriate point, and the whoops and applause at the end were very respectable. For an encore we played another old blues number, “Born Under a Bad Sign,” with interesting lyrics, especially for someone like me who does not believe in astrology. A sample: Born under a bad sign,

I’ve been down since I began to crawl,

If it wasn’t for bad luck,

I’d have no luck at all.

In the end, despite my doubts and the message of those lyrics, my luck held and it all went very well. My voice stood the test, as did my hippocampus. Nary a word nor a chord was lost to the ether. I certainly enjoyed my 10 minutes of celebrity. However, later, in the clear light of the next day, I thought a bit more about what I had wrought and became increasingly distressed. I imagined going back more than four decades to my younger self at age 18 and witnessing just such a scene.I think I would have pondered as follows: “What is this old guy trying to do up on that stage? Why doesn’t he act his age? Doesn’t he have better things to do, like looking after a sprained ankle or taking care of a heat rash?” I was grateful for one thing. Fortunately, none of my kids caught the gig.

Dr. Clarfield is at the Department of Geriatrics, Soroka Hospital, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel, and in the Division of Geriatric Medicine, McGill University, Montreal, Canada.