Someone Like You

Chapter 9 - The Alpine Slide

Zoom, located in Park City is the best kind of restaurant: totally unpretentious but with good food at a decent price. The grilled artichokes are out of this world. We each ordered one. Andy had the steak, I had the fish special and we both had a cocktail and wine with dinner, even though it was only about 5 pm.

"What's it like being a doctor?" Andy asked, taking a bite of steak and mashed potatoes.

"As with most things, there are things I like about it and things I really hate about it. I'm sure that's true for your job too." I took a bite of fish, which had the most exquisite buttery texture and it absolutely melted in my mouth.

"How so?" He asked, sipping his wine, drawing my attention to his beautiful lips, completely distracting me from the conversation.

"Uh... Well, I like the diversity of my patient population. My clinic accepts Medicaid, Medicare and private insurance, so I have patients spanning the entire socioeconomic range from homeless people without any insurance to lawyers and professors. And because it's family medicine, I see people in every stage of their life: newborns, kids, adolescents, college kids, young professionals, people getting married and divorced, people starting families, middle aged, retirees, all the way up to geriatric patients in their 90s who live in nursing homes. My job is a lot of things, but it's never boring. I guess the thing I don't like about it is that I spend a big chunk of my day doing busy work like signing forms, charting notes in the computer, reviewing labs, signing prescriptions. A lot of that stuff is central to the clinic, but it doesn't require a medical degree, and yet I still have to do it. I haven't even graduated residency and I'm already frustrated by that, so I imagine that doesn't get any better, and may even get worse when I'm out in the real world. What about you, what frustrates you about your job?"

"Same thing, I suppose. Regulations and codes can be annoyances, but helpful too, because they help to prevent errors, but mostly they're a source of frustration. I get frustrated by clients who don't know what they want and keep changing their minds about plans. I used to do a lot more design from the ground up, which is what I'm really interested in, but there was a lull in new construction after the recession in '08 and the housing market only started really picking up in the green sector in '12. I've always wanted to build my own house, but I've never been in one place long enough to do it."

"Are you planning on staying in Salt Lake City long term?" I reached for my wine and finished it off.

"That's the current plan. When I moved to Utah, I joined an architecture firm in town that specializes in eco-friendly remodels and new construction and I think I'm really going to like working there. Like you said, I'm drawn to the outdoors here. I love to snowboard in the winter and hike and camp in the summer, and there's really no place else like this in the states."

"Where did you grow up?"

"My mom was in the military, so we moved around a lot. We ended up in San Diego in the end, which is where I went to high school, but now no one lives there. With Mom gone, all of us kids sort of spread out. I'm the middle of three. My older sister, Jessica, lives in San Francisco and works as a software developer and my younger brother, Michael, lives in New York City and works in finance. My Dad lives in Scotland, he is semi-retired but was most recently in real estate."

"So your Mom was American and your Dad is Scottish? How'd they meet?"

"My Mom joined the US Air Force after graduating college, mostly, I think to avoid returning to the small town in Nebraska where she grew up. Her parents expected her to get married and take over the small hardware store they owned. She wanted bigger things though, had dreams of living all over the world, speaking different languages. I think that she thought that the Air Force would be a way of doing those two things: leave Nebraska and travel. She was eventually stationed at Mildenhall in England where she met my dad who was also stationed there as part of an attachment to the Royal Air Force. Some friends of Mom's dragged her to a party where my Dad and some of his friends were and they got to talking and hit it off. They were married a few months later and Jessica was born about a year after that. At this point she was working for some pretty high ranking generals, and he wasn't terribly excited about staying in the RAF, so he didn't reenlist and instead moved with us when she got transferred to Germany. That's where I was born. After Germany, we got transferred for a short time to Hawaii, which is where my brother was conceived, but they separated after that and my Dad moved back to Scotland and the rest of us moved to Texas. Eventually, she was transferred to San Diego and that's when things sort of settled down. She eventually left the Air Force and started working for a marketing firm as an executive secretary and stayed there until I was a senior in high school when she first got sick with breast cancer. My sister was already in college, and Dad had sort of been out of our lives for a long time at that point. It went downhill pretty fast after that and she died while I was a junior in college and Michael was a freshman."