The doctor came home to find his wife dead. She had committed suicide. The evidence was there beside her. On the bedside table an empty glass on its side and the bottle of pills taken from his black bag, empty too. Her death was briefly reported on the inside pages of the city news. She was Korean. The doctor’s patients seldom read newspapers and the news made no impact on them. His practice was not thriving and continued to be slow.

Within the year the doctor’s name appeared in the lead paragraph of the newspapers. He was charged with selling drugs. Not prescribed but selling drugs; there was a difference, it seemed. Still, there was sympathy for the doctor. He must be in shock from his wife’s suicide and depressed and did not realize what he was doing. There was no follow-up story. Apparently the charges were dropped. And the doctor was back in his office, practicing. Older Koreans (whether to show support) became his patients, and since they were elderly remained with him until they died. During this time, the doctor remarried. The wife was American. Since the doctor and his new wife did not mingle socially, Koreans knew little about her. Then the birth of a son was announced. That settled any question about the wife. She had done her duty, the boy was her witness that she was a good woman. However when the son was about three years old, the doctor and wife divorced. Divorces were common and not newsworthy unless the parties were movie stars or very famous.

Then there was the account in the newspapers about a woman and her brother arrested "rolling drunks" in Main Street bars. It was wartime and soldiers arriving in Los Angeles’s Union Station found Main Street beckoning, the attraction the bright lights of wine, women and song. The soldiers were America’s heroes on their way to do battle overseas and were dear to every citizen’s heart and must be treated with respect. Yes! To spike their drinks and roll them for their wallets was indeed outrageously unpatriotic. Yes again! The brother-and-sister act that had been going on before the war was looked upon with great disfavor. After many misdemeanor charges and jail sentences, the pair received prison terms and Main Street was safe for the soldiers. The doctor’s divorced wife and mother of his son was the sister in the brother-and-sister act.

The mother, removed from her motherhood role, lost custody of the son, who was given to the father by court order. The doctor was not particularly paternally-inclined. He was self-centered and his first interest were sick people. The boy was healthy and normal, interested and curious about everything, including people. His father was people, and he took his father’s hand without questioning the events that brought him into the father’s life once more. His mother had gone away for awhile was the reason he was given. She’d often been away in the past and the answer sufficed.

A housekeeper maintained the doctor’s house. She ran it like a hotel without room service, but the doctor did not notice. She kept the place sanitized and that he appreciated. Few visitors came to the house, but among them were his brother’s associates in KNA (Korean National Association). The boy’s appearance changed the atmosphere of the hotel-like house and the housekeeper went along with the changes. She did not complain nor did she quit. The rooms looked like galleries filled with still life pictures. Toys dropped as the child went through. Life trailing in once-static rooms. Now colorful and warm. The doctor remained unaware of his son and the changes until ...

The mother was released from prison and started a custody fight to regain the boy. California law generally supported mothers when custodial care of minor children was involved. More so when race (ethnicity) entered the picture. In this instance, an American mother versus an Oriental father. Surprisingly, the father won permanent custody, with the mother granted visitation rights. The mother turned the visitation rights into confrontations, threats and tears. Upsetting the boy’s equanimity. The doctor took matters into his own hands and did what he thought was best for the boy. He spirited the boy into a school in the country and gave the mother no forwarding address. The school in its brochure described itself an educational institution making boys into men. Meaning a military academy. It was located some distant, but not too far, from the city. The mother was from Okie country, familiarly referred to as the Dust Bowl, and detested the very word country. She would make no effort to traipse through dust and sage. Which she didn’t.

Instead she offered to end the litigations in return for compensation for the suffering caused her by the loss of the son. She named a sum in only four figures. The doctor who thought himself hardened to anyone else’s words or deed was chilled and felt fear. Not for himself but for the boy. Who stood a lonely bit of humanity and only a child, with parents at odds with each other. What was his fate, left in the hands of the mother? She loomed rapacious in the doctor’s mind, ready to devour her young. He was sickened by the greed, to which he also contributed. The woman went on, "Then we will be quits." The words clinched the matter. He saw his lawyer, made out a trust fund that was foolproof, the lawyer said, and the boy would be safe, secure in the event of the doctor’s death. His brother was named guardian, the same brother who had seen him through medical school and been the moral support in recent years when his life was in shambles. The doctor was not religious, not spiritual, rather an agnostic. But at this moment the words of William Cullen Bryant’s lines surfaced: "There is a Power whose care/Teaches thy way along that pathless coastÑ" The doctor surprised himself, placing his son in His hands.

A father-son relationship was in the making. Each one a life on its own, on separate levels, merging. Into what? The doctor surprised himself again: Immortality. They were going on forever, father and son. It was a moment of metamorphosis, a supernatural change. And like all supernatural change it quickly vanished from the mind.


The routine of their separate lives went along smoothly. The doctor to his office where patients waited for his arrival. The boy at the military academy where he was becoming a man. The doctor renewed his studies in medicine. Strides were made in science and new equipment devised. He traveled to seminars and lectures, and immersed himself in medical journals. He was kept occupied in the office and out of it, too. Weekends he and the boy were family. Missing was the mother person. The housekeeper who did well keeping them fed and housed did not fit that need. She’d had two divorces and looked upon the doctor and son as children, not a menage. These sentiments she did not voice. The doctor said their social life must be enlarged, speaking to his office assistant, who was of Mexican descent and an extrovert type. She suggested why not take the boy to Baja (lower California) and let him see a foreign country. He liked the idea.

Their first visit to Rosarita Beach was unlike any California beach town, and it was to become their playgroundÑswimming, fishing, lazing in the sun. The office assistant’s family lived near Rosarita and she spent her weekends with them. And then the doctor picked her up Sunday nights to return to Los Angeles, usually late to avoid the traffic.

This was their last weekend until the boy’s summer holidays. He faced a heavy schedule when he reached the school Monday. It included desert training, mountain climbing, cross country hikes to strengthen muscles for the fall semester when the boys were promoted from their present junior cadet level. The stay had been pleasant, Rosarita beaches were quiet as this was the weekend after Easter. The boy met more age-group friends, mixed with them, and communicated in several languages. Mexican, American, and a few Oriental words. It was great, the boy said, packing himself in the car between the driver and his father, and fell asleep. The doctor dozed off, knew his assistant was a competent driver. When they reached the border, he would take the wheels and finish the trip into Los Angeles. Everything in the doctor’s life was organized now and he felt better for it, then he fell asleep too.

Coming around a curve on the two-lane highway, only the driver saw ahead. There parked across the road was a tractor. Her cry, "Omigod!" was followed by the impact of the car and tractor’s colliding. She gripped the wheel, slammed on the brake. She could do nothing more. The slumbering passengers may or may not have felt or heard the impact. Their heads crashed into the windshield Ñseat belts had not been introduced Ñand were killed.

The driver escaped with bruises and broken ribs. Her life was spared.


I had been one of the doctor’s patients, getting vitamin shots for anemia. That Monday was my appointment. It was then I learned about the deaths. For the living, death is unspeakably cruel. And so it was for the doctor and son. Their lives had taken a fresh direction and their deaths were to all senseless. The story about the Buddha made some sense here. The Master pronounced the enlightenment of a disciple, who walked away and was gored by a rampaging bull. Why, he was asked, had this tragedy happened when the man had only been enlightened. His reply, "It was his time." The doctor and boy crossed over to Immortality. It was meant to be.

Sometime later, one of the doctor’s friends, a Korean woman, put closure to the story. The doctor’s brother, she told, went into probate court, and as the son was dead, requested to be named heir to the son’s trust fund. A goodly sum of 100 thousand dollars. The ex-wife arrived with her lawyer and claimed the estate as the boy’s natural mother. The court awarded her the trust fund. In California laws, when parent and child died simultaneously, the living or surviving parent inherited, not relatives even though there was a will. "Cream of the jest" was the fitting title ending the litigation.

And even more so was the doctor’s fee paid to the lawyer in the drug case. The lawyer, when asked his fee told the doctor, "You will pay me 200 dollars a month for the rest of your life. The fee is a 50-50 gamble. I may die in a year. You may die in a year. Take it or the fee I will charge will rattle the teeth out of your head." Or words that had the same meaning. The lawyer had empathy for the doctor. They were both of minority races and the lawyer was a man who had walked in another man’s shoes. The sum was agreed upon. The doctor served out his life (sentence) in useful healing. The lawyer was a criminal lawyer and became famous and very rich, protecting movie stars and Las Vegas gangsters. Who is to say which man served the more useful life.