Preface: Dear Reader, I am including this autobiographical “sketch” for only one purpose, to explain the importance of curiosity and understanding how structure relates to function. I think all children need to thirst to learn and understand how things work, some do not have this curiosity, I feel lucky that I did.

To start where everyone else does: I was born in Los Angeles in 1954.

As a child I was very curious about how things worked. To satisfy my curiosity, I was given almost every Revell plastic model kit ever made. I would spend hours (stay up all night) assembling boats, cars and my favorite, airplanes. These models became the educational tools that enabled me to understand how many of things we take for granted work.

Later, on my birthday, I was given one of those fantastic large metal chemistry sets. (The kind you can’t get anymore, product liability has made sure of that). For those of you around that remember, there was a neat kit containing a real microscope and real dissecting instruments; that came with a fish, a crayfish, and frog preserved in formaldehyde.

Having these new tools I vividly remember the architecture of butterfly wings, leafs, the anatomy of those animals, and the joy that I used to obtain by studying nature and all of her wonderful creations.

My parents thought it fine for me to satisfy my curiosity, but very hard on the stereo amplifier, phonograph player, and a few other expensive devices, (gold pocket watches) that all seemed easier to disassemble than reassemble. My buttocks bare witness to my frequent forays into overwhelming curiosity.

Our Bel Air house was humble in comparison to our neighbors. It did have a large back yard and my parents were very good about pets, we had many kinds of pets. We even had a monkey when I was very young.

I vaguely recollect an early Thanksgiving dinner when our monkey was confined to the bathroom as not to interfere with the formal affair. During dinner the front door bell rang and my mother rose up to answer. Opening the door, the monkey paid tribute to my Mother by biting her in the thigh (she still bares the mark). Our monkey found his place at the table, upon the left shoulder of one of our ‘bee-hive” hair styled guests. Our guest sat totally paralyzed and petrified, as several hairy fingers reached for the peas off her spoon. Needless to say our monkey graduated from residential life and was evicted to the Los Angeles Zoo. (This is obviously a true story, because no amount of imagination could have thought it up, not even mine).

We had many white geese, but they didn’t last long after spotting up the back yard. They were beautiful to touch but they hated being petted, they learned quickly how to escape the coat hanger as I tried to catch them. 

I also remember our rabbit hutch. It was a baby’s playpen filled with several rabbits…these didn’t seem to mind being petted, and we were free to play with them ad lib.

Elementary school and a move to Beverly Hills:

To digress a bit here: We were living in Bel Air at the time, actually up the street from Howard Hughes and the Beverly Hillbilly’s Mansion (you have all seen that magnificent home).  I didn’t know it but later Hawthorne, our elementary school, was to become locally famous as Monica Lewinsky’s alma mater.

First grade started my lifelong and dearest friendship with Gene Finley. Gene and I were to play many roles in each others’ lives  in future years. We knew little about that then. We were just real great friends, and we were lucky, our mother’s became friends too.

All of this occurred around the time of the first James Bond movies. Gene and I decided we could invent some of Q’s gadgets and were to become super spies too. We spied on the closest local paramilitary organization we could find: Beverly Hills Boy Scout Troop #17.

After dark finds us dressed in our secret agent black stealth outfits spying upon Troop #17’s field maneuvers, (camping upon our school’s front lawn). Gene being a little larger than the pup tents they set up resulted in one hilariously fun time. As the Scouts were preparing for bed, Gene repeatedly toppled their tents by gently lifting the center pole and having the tents cave in upon the residents. The scoutmaster gave the boys quite a lambasting, as we barely held our laughter while hiding in the bushes between the lawn and the building, , unseen and undetected.

We had a strict and very tough fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Neiter. She made it clear who’s the boss. She was so terrifying a kid in our class was afraid to be excused for the restroom, and preferred to relieve his bladder right in his seat!  Oddly, I saw Mrs. Neiter crying when she saw my report card. I failed math, and didn’t do all to good in the other subjects either…(as you can probably tell by my grammar and writing of this document…oh well).

Everyone said I was so bright, they just couldn’t understand why my grades were so poor.  They had expectations that I was not willing to live up to.

I had found a great college chemistry textbook somewhere around our house. This book had pictures of the glassware and was more of a how to book. How to generate hydrogen, or oxygen, make aqua regia (supposed to dissolve gold, a combination of Nitric and Hydrochloric acids).  Well Gene and I were not to be outdone by James Bond, and we were going to make sure everyone knew it too!

Mrs. Neiter let me demonstrate our James Bond toothpaste-tubed jellied gunpowder…(the chemistry set I mentioned earlier provided, sodium nitrate, sulpher, plus glycerin, from the local pharmacy, mixed well and forced into the back of an empty toothpaste tube). This worked just like in the movies, it burned a hole right through the containment vessel and a good way into my school desk.  Mrs. Neiter only thought she was sorry for letting us do that experiment.

One of our other experiments on the electrolysis of water, (a 10-gallon aquarium and 110-Volt aluminum electrodes, dash of salt and plugged directly into the wall), resulted in the near electrocution of the janitor. On the weekend he picked up the aquarium, since the water had turned into hydrogen and oxygen, Monday morn we found it broken in the sink, our favorite janitor, now one shade lighter; we found his hair became quite a bit more curly after that near death experience.

Gene, my younger brother Scott and I, used to make rocket engines by filling Mason Jars with gasoline, a pinhole in the metal lid, provided the combustion chamber and the nozzle. Lighting a fire underneath this apparatus causes the gasoline to boil violently. When the gasoline came streaming out from the jar, it would ignite and make a flame thrower-“rocket engine” of sorts.  Wow, flame thrower and rocket all in one!

This was all fine unless the nozzle was pointed towards the old sofa in the garage that rapidly caught fire.

Reader, the really bad thing about our move to Beverly Hills, was the ornamental hedge of Bamboo that separated our house from our northern neighbor. My Dad, never one to pass on an economic opportunity, found a handy supply of free, easily obtainable Bamboo “switches.” For those of you familiar with crackling of lightning through air, there is no sound quite like the effect of a fine piece of Bamboo moving at high velocity towards its target. We quickly learned to anticipate these events with several extra pairs of under-pants our own “undercover armor.”

My dear brother Scott and I decided to make a Chinese stick-rocket on day. We had read about how the Chinese had invented gunpowder and made rockets. We had a working knowledge of principles of construction. We planned on making a stick rocket from the gunpowder contained within a thousand large firecrackers our father had recently brought back from Hong Kong.

Instead of a rocket, (we didn’t realize it before ignition), what we assembled was not a rocket, but a very large, military-industrial sized “Fire Cracker” stuck in the ground with…yes…a Bamboo stick. More than a sonic boom occurred in the northeast quadrant of Beverly Hills that day.  Several of the large heavy glass doors at our neighbor’s house had more than shaken.

It blasted the air out of Scott’s lungs, as he lay suffocating and gasping for air, luckily still alive on the back lawn. We were scrambling to pick up thousands of pieces of newspapers and Bamboo shards as we heard the neighbors gathering in the alley. Wondering if “we really had a problem over there?”

Dear Reader, the greatest mystery to me is not Einstein’s General Relativity, but how we survived childhood.

I now wish to skip a few years and fast forward to high school; but… not without mention of some early junior high romances. Seventh grade finds Gary and I, walking “very bowlegged” to his house after a little early afternoon soda party between Laura and Eleanor, in our outside guesthouse.

It is amazing how much better sex was in those days.  Little more that “Second Base”, a few bra straps, and some heavy kissing.  Since we all really liked each other anyway, little did we know then, we had invented swapping.

Unknown to Gary and I at the time, an unfortunate discovery, the resultant pain from several hours sustained with no release. Anyone want to bet that “Blue-Ball-Syndrome” really exists? (My personal advice: try to avoid this syndrome at all possible costs.)

I am skipping the rest of the 70’s, the Beatles, free love, being hippies and psychedelics, those stories by personal request only. Suffice it to say, we continued our experiments in all the finer things the 70’s had to offer.

Beverly Hills High School

High School permanently changes my life: Mrs. Muchmore’s High School biology class found me in 100% attendence. Mrs. Muchmore taught the biology invented by Watson & Crick, DNA to RNA to protein. She was the finest teacher I ever had.  She turned this complicated subject into something very easy to understand. She taught it so well that it was second nature to me and her lectures are as vivid in my memory today as in 1971.

She provided some of the answers about how living things work.  The structural and functional relationships involved in living cells.  This stuff was awesome.  This was wonderful because we now moved from plastic airplane, boat, and car models, to chemistry large enough to have a structural functional relationship. The plastic parts were now proteins and nucleic acids…totally awesome! I never needed any more biology after that class; it was taught so well that I understood the basics of nature. How nature works and had to work!

Few things are far more important in life than Biology. I can prove this to you: At age fifteen I met Donna, my seventeen-year-old girlfriend with the new Pontiac Firebird. Now biology class had a different meaning, ditching High School and long drives to the beach while listening to Arlo Guthrie’s, “Alice’s Restaurant.” 

My new “biology” classes we supplemented by knowledge of the hide-a-key to the parents’ beach house in the Malibu Colony. (Some guys have it all… Heaven in High School….I hate to gloat…but believe me Donna was something to gloat about).

To prove what I say is true you can ask Larry Hageman (the actor). His house was a few doors down the beach. He used to plant long streaming flags, and build a bon-fire at sunset. He greets everyone on the beach with his Monk’s robe and friendliness. While he was dreaming of Jeanie, I had Donna.

Well Heaven never lasts long, Donna left me for an older man, and my heart found a new kind of Bamboo switch, this pain is worse than any other. If you want to really be alive, you can never build armor against this pain, many people do and I feel great sorrow for those that armor their hearts with hardness.

Donna’s departure brought on, the old feelings of rejection that I felt when my father gently shook me off his leg as he was leaving my mother, before their divorce. Ever the optimist, this emotional pain has its purpose. Extreme emotional pain has a very important benefit. If you are able to release the bitterness, and channel the pain into creativity you can delight in yourself! As if a door was opened to your soul and your soul could come out and play with you.

This pain can make you very religious, and extend your spiritual knowledge. As a result poor Gene found himself suddenly developing a talent for sculpting, oil painting, music composition. We would get some red clay and work all night long listening to Beethoven’s Fourth and as dawn approached Walter Carlo’s synthesized Bach. Oil painting, sculpting, and my long time friend photography, with a little help from Donna’s younger sister, Lorelle, helped me get over Donna, an important lesson referred to as “sublimation” in clinical psychology textbooks.

It was around this period of time that Gene and I took our most important and fateful SCUBA night-dive at Zuma Beach.  We didn’t know it then but that night was so important. (You can read about that adventure at biotoy.com).

Let me return back to high school academics and Mrs. Muchmore: We went to see a lecture by James Watson (of DNA fame), at UCLA. We met a mutual friend at UCLA, Marietta, who later introduced me to one of my greatest mentors, Dr. William H. Hildemann at the Department of Immunology in the UCLA Hospital.

Dr. Hildemann didn’t really understand why he gave me the keys to his lab. Or why he assigned me a project under the patient tutelage of one very special mentor, Laksman Reddy, PhD. Our mission was to transplant skin grafts on primitive pre-vertebrate animals to see how and try to figure why they rejected the grafts.

Our animals were housed at the now historical Marineland of the Pacific, (I didn’t know this marine exposure would surface again three decades latter).  We performed experimental operations on “the Sea Penis” as we later called our tunicate animals due to their anatomic similarity to their distant relatives, humans.

We were trying to figure out where immune recognition started. How two individual animals of the same species recognized that the skin we transplanted was not their own. Bill did the same work on corals, and they too, recognized a foreigner in their midst’s and rejected it.  Our job was to work this out on the next higher animals, Tunicates and Hagfish.

Marineland (now condominiums) was a wonderful place to be exposed to marine diversity.

Bill Hildemann had given me the key to the largest smorgasbord of knowledge and education in the known world. UCLA! It’s professors, students, medical school, and lectures. All free for those really interested in learning. My God what a great gift UCLA was to me. 

Unfortunately, for my friend, Gene, his first experience with this “Brave New World” came at the sharp end of a very large horse sized syringe when I needed some human plasma for my cellular growth media. I drew about 125 ml of blood from him, and then I was looking at the barrel of this new gun myself.  Shaking and sweating, we did it. When a big needle and quart sized syringe barrel is being thrust towards your distended arm vein, by unskilled hands, the term “Blood Brothers” takes on a whole new meaning!

I was not initially able to register at UCLA…my poor high school grades…even though I did well in the classes I liked or respected the teacher. I was never one of those “good students” everyone wishes their child should be. My overall GPA was abominable. It took two years at Whittier College and a lot of work to finally be formally accepted into UCLA. Even though I maintained my job doing research and used to drive from Whittier almost daily. UCLA was worth it once I was finally accepted.

Gene and I meet boy genius, Randy Murphy.

Randy had more lab space and more stuff going on in organic chemistry, biology, high pressure physics, noble gas work, electronics, you name it…Randy had it all, it was totally awesome. His mentor had a Nobel Prize in Chemistry so Randy had a lot of material and equipment at his disposal.

For the first time in my life, I did well academically at UCLA, my over GPA 3.5. The stimulation and the challenge of competing with all those Asian pre-medical students  made it fun. Gene who was always a good student, always had an easy time with school, was already enrolled there.

Gene and I performed lots of “medical” experiments; some notable examples follow:

We isolated poison oak extract to test its’ effect on tumor cells. I wasn’t exactly sure the plants we had collected were really poison oak. To be absolutely certain, I tested this by placing the smallest micro-drop on my arm, guess what? My arm became the size of a football. I still wear the scars today.

We did this plant extraction late one Sunday night when no one was in the lab. Later that week a lot of people were inexplicably scratching.  Mum’s the word! I still had my key and the run of the lab, this is one experiment that we didn’t want to mention to anyone. ( There is a biotechnology company engaged in using Poison Ivy/Oak Extracts to treat cancers).

One of the more senior researchers in our lab, Ed Karp, was trying to induce a shark to grow a tumor by prolonged treatment with known cancer causing chemicals. After many years of exposure, no tumor growth was observed in his sharks. 

I had an idea that we could inject some rat tumor cells into sharks and then use the shark’s antibodies to fight the rat’s tumor. So we made antibodies in sharks to rat cancer cells.  On preliminary investigation, this actually prevented the rat from getting a tumor when 10 times the normal number of cells required to create a tumor in our rats was given followed by the serum.

This serum treatment also seemed to work at reducing the size of pre-existing tumors, but we ran out of shark antibody and the job of getting into medical school, disrupted this research.  For my Readers that are not scientists, and for those that are, few people know that shark, rat, cow, and human blood factors can substitute for each other.  Shark antibodies will activate either rat or human “complement”  (a series of proteins that drills holes in cells to kill them). Shark blood can be coagulated by cow clotting initiators…Guess what? Few people know this because you have to have to be crazy enough to think of mixing  them to find out.  (Oh while I am bragging…have you ever tried to draw blood from a shark?)

Career moves and motivations:

At that time we all knew DNAand genetic engineering was going to be the future, (it still is, more than anyone can imagine). The tools to make it happen were not developed enough twenty years ago.

I was emotionally split between going into medicine as a career and going into genetic research.  I loved medicine more, from hanging around the UCLA hospital, and watching Yoko Mullen, (a tough little Japanese lady PhD/MD.

Yoko worked on kidney transplants in rats. She was far and away the best micro-surgeon I ever met.  She could have re-implanted anything. I watched her do a rat kidney transplant in less than 30 minutes. Reader, do you have any idea how small a rat ureter, renal artery and vein are? Try connecting two tubes with the diameter of six human hairs, end to end with a needle and thread!

Yoko probably figured out that I would come back at night and try to duplicate what she did.  She never realized how much she taught me.  (Since I was never like the other meticulous detail oriented academic students, she wrote me off right off the bat). Bill must have been in the background otherwise, I am sure she would have thrown me out of the lab and taken away my key, in a nano-second.

Several years later, after finishing medical school, I called the lab to see how things were going. Yoko answered the phone, and since knowing her she only ever asked me one medical question.  Half testing me to see if I finally became a good student, she described a disease, (she was sure I wouldn’t know), and the answer I gave was Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, half shocked that I knew the answer, she informed me Bill had it.  I went to see Bill right away. It was very sad for me to see one of my truest friends in a wheel chair. Bill was an avid scuba diver, exerciser, and extremely vital person with a nice family.

I came up with a game plan for Bill’s “cure.” It involved the insertion of a long tube woven like one of those Chinese finger traps, we used to play with as kids. Designed to expand the luminal diameter when it was pulled from either end. This long woven tube would have to be magnetically guided up the motor columns of the spinal cord and into the brainstem.

Cloned embryonic neurons would then have to be instilled up this new path to the motor cortex. The tube would have to be made of something that would degrade like absorbable suture so as to be absorbed gradually.

I asked Bill if he wanted me to drop what I was doing and devote all my energy and time to work this out. I would have gladly worked on it. Actually I already had some volunteers in the physics department lined up to help me build the magnetic-guide.

Bill refused, gracefully accepted his fate, and a six pack of his favorite Swan Lager, (which he couldn’t drink anymore). He later died from respiratory complications.  I promised myself then that I would try to do something about spinal diseases one day.

Well life has its paths, and each one of us is a stream flowing unto ourselves; there is little one can do about the course and path our lives take. Do we make our own destiny? Or are we preplanned from the big bang? Can we create our own universe with our minds? Are there many parallel universes?

Did God plan it all out at the big bang, in which case everything would already be known? Or does randomness and free thought exist? I can make an argument for both cases. I personally live within these two realities simultaneously… for those of you that took physics, if you understand conservation of charge, momentum, and energy, then the universe can have no randomness whatsoever.

A big move to a small town:

1976 finds me in the small town of Vermillion, South Dakota, I am sure that all my dear Readers have heard about Vermillion, South Dakota, No? My parents, trying to teach me the value of a dollar (something I never learned even today) and limited me to a strict allowance during school.

To save money I rented a small and cheap little house on Walnut Street. Since you all know Vermillion, you know that Walnut Street is on the poor side of town. I was renting across the street from an Indian family, that used to drink a little too much and get a bit rowdy. Every Wednesday a camper topped pick-up used to park across from my house and this obviously adulterous couple used to go for it, the neighbors and I all loved to see that truck shake. The neighbors knew what the adulterous couple didn’t.

The climate in Vermillion is anything but Vermillion, it is very cold in winter! Burrrrrr! 

My new place came well equipped with “central heating.” This consisted of one metal freestanding gas burner.  When the wind blew in the winter you were never more than two inches from that stove. If you could hit the toilet from that stove you did! The basement was dirt, until it rained, then became a mud basement. I was intellectually and socially completely isolated, wow, what a shift from Malibu, Beverly Hills, and my fast movie star friends.

My neighbors could feel my depression from next door. Charlie and Mrs. Irma Eileen Gray, my local and true friends. (To set the proper stage for this part of my story: Irma and Charlie had a bath tub, to fill it took water heated from a large pot on their cooking stove). They were used to this life and wouldn’t have it any other way.  They took pity on their forlorn, fish out of water, new neighbor from Beverly Hills to where? Vermillion South Dakota, now you’ve heard of it.

Mrs. Gray, like other country women, would knit, sew, quilt, and frequently invite me for dinner. She would laugh and tell me stories about how her and Charlie, when first married, were living on an island in the middle of the Missouri River.  How they ran out of food and the ice was too thin to walk but too thick to boat across.  How they met, and their kids, grandkids and the hard life, the good old pre-electricity days they had together.

Charlie taught me to fish the Missouri River and Lewis and Clark Lake.  He held the world record for his 105-lb. Blue Channel catfish! Toothless and smiling, his Field and Stream picture, the catfish held up between two men on a pole, was his claim to fame.

So what brought me to Vermillion? At that time it was pretty hard to get into UCLA medical school, 8,000 applicants was fierce competition. I wanted to get into medical school anywhere, and for sure.  Upon discovering the odds were 60% of being admitted at USD, for state residents, I moved there to become a state resident.

Being originally from Los Angeles and only technically a state resident, I was rejected from USD, (and about 48 other schools…I was applying with a 1.9 GPA). I really wanted to be a doctor, but my grades at USD were lousy, it just wasn’t UCLA. I had good medical college admission test scores, despite some significant research experience my overall GPA number never got me to any admission committee.

I was not what medical schools would look at, or even consider. So just how did I get into medical school anyway? Well here is another interesting chapter in life:

I did not receive a rejection letter from only one remaining school, and it was getting late in the year, why? I can only thank an imaginary secretary that probably just trashed my application when she saw my numbers. At least that’s what I assumed when I later found out that I was not rejected from the Chicago Medical School. (This did not mean the same as accepted).

My stepfather, Robert, who entered my life when I was fourteen, took over my alpha male role at home. Can you imagine signing on to care for four kids, two teen boys and two girls. Well needless to say, he became a very loving father and great parent to us all. (How he did this is a whole book in itself, and well worth the reading).

One day Bob, as we called him, telephoned me and asked about my medical school status. When I told him about Chicago Med he said get on a plane and we both met up in Chicago. We simply showed up and surprised the Dean, and with my father there, they didn’t just brush me off, as I am certain they would have done had I been alone.

Well the Dean, later to become my greatest benefactor, Dr. Ted Booden, asked to see my credentials. (The school had no record of them or me). When I explained that I had been doing significant clinical research and he saw the complexity of courses I took at UCLA, he understood immediately that I was capable of finishing medical school. (What I neglected to tell you, my dear reader, is I took many advanced courses and many out of my field, complex graduate level courses, such as medical embryology, and physics for physics majors, quantum mechanics, worked on ultra low temperature physics, advanced anatomy, etc.).  I was not your typical pre-medical student just trying to get numbers. I went to school for one reason…to know how things worked. To study only what interested me.

Dr. Booden had a hard time convincing the admission committee to accept me. They rejected me despite his request for them to seriously consider me. Ted was persistent! He batted for me and made a deal with the admission committee. He put his neck on the line (he was only the associate dean at that time).

As per Dr. Booden’s instructions, I found myself driving to Tampico, Mexico to enroll in the Universidad Del Noreste Esquela de Medicina. Dr. Booden instructed me to take the first year of school there and would arrange for me to sit for the first part United States National Board examinations to see what I learned in Mexico.

I was asked to study just the first year courses and was not promised anything, but at least there was hope.

When Dr. Booden presented my Board scores to the committee, they still didn’t believe it.  I passed, the first two years of medical school in one year, with exceptional scores, to boot. The only poor score was pathology, a second year course. I studied it all, (except for pathology, that book was just too thick, and too boring) including pharmacology. Passed it all with pretty good scores, being that I was competing with US medical students on their own turf.

The admission committed must have been in a quandary over me. I either cheated, but they had to rule that out because my GPA was so low, or was I an idiot savant? or genius? (luckily for me, they never found out I wasn’t a genius). 

After a year in Mexico, a winter in New York working in an Emergency Room, with my medical school mate, fiancee and  love, Ariadna.  I found myself moving into a studio apartment in Roger’s Park,Chicago, and spending another month under the scrutiny of the admissions committee. I was to work in the private pediatric offices of Dr. Rothshild during the summer.  He would determine if I was for real or not and report back to the committee.

Fate had it that Dr. Rothschild worked the inner city free clinic one day a week…well my knowledge of Spanish and our working relationship lead me to find a note on my windshield in the parking lot of the free clinic, it read: “Congratulations young man, you’ve been accepted.” I put my hands up in the air; very few moments in life get much better….

Well there are other things in life far more important than medical school could ever be.

…while on the subject of elation; the only other time I felt more elated was when Glenna said she was coming to be with me back in South Dakota.

I was devastatingly in love with a girl in my abnormal psychology class (yes, abnormal psychology was extremely appropriate). To set the scene a little better for you my Reader friend; South Dakota had about 60 straight days of below zero winter, yes that is below zero, Centigrade, (You know, the point at which water freezes). The wind blows at a steady 15 knots, and if you aren’t wearing a full four-pound down sleeping bag at all times, even indoors, the dogs will usually find your decaying body during spring thaw!

Being chained to my stove, sunlight deprived, depressed and inside for several months with a terrible case of Cabin Fever…well you get the idea…bleak! When spring finally shows up, freezing is T-shirt weather. Five or ten degrees above freezing is bathing suit weather. The birds and the bees are in full swing; there is not much time till the next big freeze so you better get hopping while the sun shines, and it usually does most of the day.

Glenna, the woman I loved, (still love as dearly as the day I first saw her) and pursued with the energy of a thermo-nuclear reactor, to the end of this earth and beyond. Glenna was my ultimate mental energy channeled into creativity for one sole purpose, winning her. All I was capable of, to the point of every waking moment, obsessed to the max, wanting to be with her more than life itself…is this explicative enough?

My one single greatest moment of joy in life:

College out and Glenna went home with her boyfriend, Craig back to Rapid City, a full 400 miles away. A few days after school was out, I received a call from Glenna, she told me she was leaving Craig for me. Awesome! (Was it the notebook sized volume of poems? The three hundred pages of letters, maybe found its way to her heart.) I so hoped and felt. I was to pick her up at the airport in Sioux Falls that weekend and she would be mine, or so I thought.  She came to my little house and spent the weekend with me.

I mean, I wanted to marry this woman, more than air. To give her the ultimate experience I could think of, I found my entire life savings going into the purchase of a new beautiful blue Pontiac Sunbird sports car.

I wanted her to have a gift of a car in the driveway as a surprise the next morning.

Seeing her expression sitting in that car, our weekend together, the Missouri River sand bar, strawberries and whipped cream, a fish that we freed having grounded itself at our feet, and her sweet smile, deep blue eyes, and my passion more than life. Was she really there? Could this be happening to me? Am I that lucky? Now you know my secret…my best days and happiest moments ever, never topped, not even “34% fewer cavities” or the Nobel Prize could have compared to the joy Glenna had brought me for those three days we were together.

My fourth law of thermodynamics:

“Great joy never lasts long,” (this rule should really be Newton’s first law). Yes some poets were able to maintain this state I call being in Heaven while on Earth, but they all usually die after a year or so existing in this state. It is as if nature does not want you to have this, or if you accept it you pay the price by an early demise. To me it has always been worth it, at any price.

Two weeks later, I find myself in Los Angeles, having to help my parents move their company, the company that provided everything for me and I had to help. I left my car in Rapid, with Glenna, a very bad turn of events occurred the week after Glenna went home from her visit, Glenna’s youngest brother had died in a car accident a week after her coming to visit me.

I was there in Rapid, patiently waited as unobtrusively as possible, for her, but Craig was closer and wanted her back. She was really in love with her Craig, more than me. Even though she knew that he would be a painful life experience for her. She had her true love as mine evaporated. The moments I shared with Glenna were worth a lifetime.

An early Wednesday morning dream reveals me packing Glenna’s belongings, placing them in the trunk, handing her the keys to her new Pontiac Sunbird and setting her free, she was gone.

When we spoke, later that same morning, she told me that my dream was prophetic…she went back to Craig, her first man. She vanished from my life but luckily never completely. Her glow still warms my heart, and the touch of her hands upon my back, were the most love anyone could give another. (To relate a similar experience, which the author says is fiction, but I know that no one could understand or feel it, without living it. The Bridges of Madison County, when I saw that movie I lived every moment in complete déjà vu and know that it must have been true.

This dream of Glenna’s departure somehow allowed me to let her go and made me happy in a way, because I foresaw myself in my white medical coat, and I was at work in the hospital, as a doctor.

I wanted Glenna to be truly happy, even if not with me. I sent her air tickets to Kauii as a wedding present, to share the magic of my special place, Kalalau, with her new husband.  (The went to Kauii, but she still has not been to my special place).

The car ended up as a $5,000.00 gift from Glenna to the Crippled Children’s Hospital in Sioux Falls. A place where her little nephew was being cared for.  You see, Glenna’s mother and older sister were killed, and her nephew seriously retarded, after a car accident took them six months before my Glenna met me.

Okay, enough of life’s greatest moment, let’s move forward in time to:

Graduating Medical School in the top third of my class and did well. No way I was going to let Dr. Booden down! (Dr. Booden doesn’t yet know that I went on to clone six new luminescent and fluorescent genes, build a new company for bio-entertainment, create biotoys, and design and patent beverages that self illuminate. The same protein chemistry can make tumors-light, enable a diagnostic bio-chip, and become part of a silicon synaptic junction…(I am proudest of my “Bud-Lights” it will actually make it’s own light when you pour it out of the can and glow in the glass).

Our medical school had very flexible elective schedules. I was able to link all my summers together so that I could have a long vacation at the end of medical school, (before starting what was sure to be the most gruesome time of surgical internship training).

I planned to get a head start on reading our thick surgery text, but I also wanted to sail and be on vacation.  How to combine these two disciplines and generate the most…fun?

Back to "CV & AUTOBIOGRAPHY"

CV & Autobiography | Tissue Bank/Genetic | libraries | Movie Treatment
Patent Links | Future ideas | For Bonny | Selected Poems | Bioluminescent Store
 | Cancer Cure? Idea | Bruce in the News | Bruce's Pictures | contact me | Home