Readings

Last night I read most of one book (short one) and started another. Both got me to thinking.

The short one: The Five People You Meet in Heaven. I'd heard about it, mostly comments of the dreamy nature that I tend not to trust, and just about exactly the kind that I made when my wife asked me, last night, what I thought of the book thus far. I was about halfway through it at the time, and I thought for a couple of seconds, then came up with the best that I could: "Its one of those books that....you just have to believe in " And now, having finished it, I still think thats a good summary. I had heard that the last chapter was on the emotional side, and it was. I can be a sentimental person at times, so it came as not too much surprise to me to find that my eyes were getting a bit damp at the Grand Finale. Because (and skip here if you don't want to know the ending) what the book is saying is: When you die, you get to meet five people from your life who will help you understand what it had all been about; when you're done with the last of them, you will be completely at peace and happy.

Well, shucks, who wouldn't want that?

The other book, the one that I just started, is Walk on Water: Inside an Elite Pediatric Surgical Unit. I went to sleep after having just read a harrowing description of a surgery prep on a forty-hour-old child which has just gone badly wrong. Blood is gushing out, the surgical field is flooded, the kids blood pressure is in his socks, his oxygen saturation is dropping equally fast, and efforts to plug the hole are like trying to sew tofu.

And then the kid goes into cardiac arrest.

Its going to be a great book, I can tell already. The guy who wrote it, Michael Ruhlman, has written three that I've read, and two of the three were remarkably good -- one, about the making of a professional chef, and the other, about men who make wooden sailing vessels almost entirely by hand, each captivated me. Even the one that wasn't that good was still better than most of the genre, but when this fellow gets moving, you can smell the sauce pots bubbling, feel the smooth curve of the keel as its being laid, and feel the heat of the lights in the surgical suite glaring down onto you. You're there.

He says that he chooses to write about people who do their craft as well as it can be done, astoundingly better than most in their field, better than anyone has a reasonable right to expect -- people who do it by expecting so much of themselves, so often, at such an intense level of excellence that most people can't even imagine it, let alone attain it. And they do it every day.

Well, shucks, who wouldn't want that, either?

Could I do it? Well... put it this way. I'm reminded of the woman doing a comedy routine who said, remarking on a thin friend, "I'd do anything to look like that....except, you know, diet and exercise."