Irving

I often heard it said that he missed his calling.

He was a decent small town doctor, but he loved the english language and was so much the master of it. My parents often said that Irving should have been a College English Professor, and he would have been a good one.

His family moved to our town when I was young, though I do not know the exact time. His wife was a good friend of both my mom and my grandmother.

We had and have a pretty large contingency of Hispanic people, and he delivered a LOT of their babies. I asked him if he spoke Spanish. He grinned and said, “No, but I speak enough Mexican to get by.”

When Miriam was pregnant we were living in Irving’s town so we had him deliver our first born. He was kind and gentle. His fee for the pre-care and delivery was a whopping $75. The hospital was a similar fee.

One night I came home from a long trip. I parked the semi across the street from our little rental house. Miriam was gone and I knew full well where she was. It was time for the baby to appear! But I was bone tired, so I went to bed.

A couple of hours later. Mom came by and woke me up. “You get down to the hospital and be with your wife, son.” I minded mom!

Irving came into the hospital room. It was in the middle of the night and he was obviously tired, but he smiled, cracked a joke and got to business.

I had a job driving truck for my step father and was making $50 a week, but we paid for that delivery out of my income. Wow, how things have changed.

Irving was a tennis player, an amateur campion as I remember. He played well into his 60’s when Parkinson's took away his ability.

The last time I saw Irving, he was packing up to move to be closer to his MD son. One of my daughters was helping them pack. Parkinson's had taken a huge toll on him, but he still had his sense of humor. He told me how he had read a letter from his sister and from his father. Then he grinned and explained that the letters were decades old but he had found them and had enjoy rereading them.

“Dave, you are once a man and twice a boy.”

I never saw him again. But his memory is indelibly etched in my mind. He drove a Packard, his only extravagance. He was a very common man who loved his language and was a decent family Doctor as well.