The pay was poor, but compensation was the hours, vacation time and the camaraderie of the office staff. The pace was perfect, constantly busy, but never frantic. Every month the office manager would ask me to carry two or three, two foot high stacks of patient charts down the hall from her office to Dr. Fleming's. He would tell me to wait as he would write: "Write Off" on every one of them. "Write off" meant forget the bill; do not send the patient another one, nor send them to collections.

Dr. Fleming never fired a patient until he quit seeing patients and focused on training geriatric specialists thirteen years ago, after he suffered spinal cord damage. He founded Winter Park Internal Medicine in 1968 and even during my days as his office nurse in the late 80's early 90's, every Wednesday afternoons; Dr. Johnny would make house calls to all the patients who were too weak to get to the office but not bad enough for the hospital.

Johnny was born in 1938 and I was born his senior year of high school, 1954. As a child, Johnny had golden curls and eyes as blue as Paul Newman's. He played piano by ear at the age of three, graduated high school at seventeen and Nashville's Vanderbilt Premed Program at the age of twenty. Between 1958 through 1961, Johnny attended the University of Tennessee's College of Medicine. In 1962, with a wife and two children he filled his internship requirement at Charity Hospital in New Orleans.

"I never saw the light of day. We worked our asses off before the days of counted hours. Twenty-four hours on then twelve off, twenty-four back on again, constantly. When they finally figured out how impaired working without sleep can be, things changed for the better... I saved a few babies in those days. Probably some of them were on a roof when the levees broke, what's it been now, one year or two?

"Saturday was Gladiator Night, we'd get ten or more stab wounds into the ER and line them all up in a row and watched and waited until one collapsed a lung. Those who did, went immediately to surgery, the rest were discharged after eight hours if their lungs didn't collapse."

Only Dr. Fleming's family and oldest of friends call him Johnny, everyone else calls him Dr. Fleming or John. He was John all through the years of weekends he played piano at the Memphis University Club while attending the University of Tennessee's College of Medicine.

"I didn't know then how racist it all was. I never gave any of it a thought; it just was the way it was. Back then everything was segregated, blacks-colored back then, were hired to work in the country club and only white folks-and no Jews allowed. It was great when Clearance Saunders, a Jew denied country club credentials built the enormous pink place directly in view of the University Club golf course.

"I was friends with all the waiters and they were all black, but back then we said colored and nobody thought anything about it. It wasn't until I was in the military did I see blacks as equals. I hate admitting this, but it really was so accepted not to see them as equals. It was a cultural shock to wake up and understand that indeed all men are created equally. We just evolve unequally.

"Before the days of civil rights, half the population of Memphis was black, but they all lived in enclaves; small sections of poverty in the inner belly of the cities where they worked. When I attended Vanderbilt it was all white and the students and professors smoked cigarettes all during class. Nobody thought a thing about it back then." 

During one of Dr. Fleming's home visit Wednesday afternoons he told me that in the summer of 1958, during Elvis Presley's first leave home from the army, a few of Elvis's boys knocked on Johnny's door. They were seeking a new piano player and offered 20 year old Johnny a once in a life time chance. Johnny said no thanks then and added that day, "I'd probably would have died before Elvis."

On April 4, 1968, Johnny was a 30 year old Air Force Captain in the Medical Corps traveling standby after attending a medical conference in Boston on his way home to Memphis and learned of the demise of Reverend Martin Luther King when he landed in Chicago, "I was in full uniform in a plane filled with the reverend's brethren all wearing black arm bands. I never felt so white in my life.

"You have to understand that I never gave it a thought that I was never to address the sharecropper's wife as Mrs. although every white woman was that or Miss. It was a different world not that long ago and by the time I was three years old my family moved from the farm in Mississippi to Memphis, so my mother could play bridge without driving twenty miles on dirt roads to get to the nearest town. When I was 14 years old I would drive the Chevy from Memphis to the farm and deliver the furnishings; that was the word for the meager wages my father would pay Rueben's family with thirteen kids in one room. It was a wooden structure built on stilts and the wood floors were routinely drenched with kerosene to keep the roach population under some control.

"Rueben and I would fish together and when he stood trial for disemboweling a man on the porch of Brook's Grocery Store, I went to his trial and spoke for his character. Nobody flinched when the judge said, 'This is Quickens County and one n----r has killed another. Court is adjourned.

"It's not easy looking back and seeing how inbred the racism actually was and realizing how blind I had been to it at the time. But when I was a kid it was customary to see colored only water fountains, colored folks only allowed into the Memphis Zoo on Thursday afternoons. It wasn't until those outside agitators from the north pricked a few consciences did anyone even considered that blacks-colored back then, weren't OK with things just as they were. It just didn't register until those outside agitators blew it up in our faces...

"It was third world conditions at John Gaston Charity Hospital at the University of Tennessee, and segregation was status quo. Only the dirt poor white folks would even go to Charity and nobody went to Charity until they were nearly dead.

"In '58-'59 I was a senior medical student doing obstetrics rotation and naming babies. All the mother's were multips; they already had three or more kids at home and their labors went fast. Hours before discharge they still hadn't named the latest bundle of joy and would ask us docs for suggestions. Somewhere out there in America are dozens of 48 year old Positive Wassermanns, Esophagus Lees, Vulva Jeans and Vagina Maries.

"I'll never forget the day I was a 16 year old kid and drove the furnishings down to Rueben's folks. The family was in a panic because they accused the old man of drinking up all the furnishings before food was obtained for the kids. What could I, a 16 year old do and imagine there this family looked at me as some kind of authority, just because I was white. Turned out the old man was just buying a half pint of cheap bourbon...I don't remember how much furnishings were left after that..."

The kitten I began craving last spring, as far as the vet estimates, is now about 18 weeks old. Before I left for Israel Palestine for the fifth time in two years on Friday the 13th of July, Kat would follow me all around the house. She would curl upon my lap or stretch against my butt as I sat at my computer. She slept in a kitty bed next to my pillow, and would purr and paw at the edges of her bed until she fell asleep. She would not even stir until the morning sun and then she would playfully attack my feet under the sheet and bite my toes just hard enough to get me to say, "NO!" Oreo would chase Kat away and I would fall back to sleep for a few hours.

I have been home for two weeks since my two weeks in Israel Palestine. Kat, grew her up in a hurry and although she greeted me on my arrival home, she no longer followed me around. She no longer jumped upon my lap or next to my pillow. But, she always insists on accompanying me when ever I go rock on the back porch. Kat would stretch out on a table or behind one, but last night she jumped into my lap and purred.

The above is the first in weekly Wednesday installments of excerpts from my third book, So This is 53...