Personal History

In a room of our remodeled packing house—an outbuilding in back of our farmhouse on one of the Finger Lakes of upstate New York, where, in the nineteenth century, grapes were packed into boxes for shipment—hangs a framed photograph of a pelican. The room is one I enter daily. A further clue to its identity and utility is this: a water bird should feel at home there. This bird (its picture, that is) previously hung in the same essential room in the home I occupied, with my wife Sally and our children, when I practiced and taught neurology on the faculty of the University of Rochester, directed the amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) clinic, and pursued an interest in ethics. Since then, my wife has died, my children are grown, I am retired, I have a new wife and home, but the bird hasn’t changed. The pelican perches on a piling, its contours startling. Its body, in light and shadow, presents the patterns of an Art Deco schematization of a bird. Its gleaming eye fixes me. I know that a bird is incapable of displaying emotion by change of facial expression, but I have never doubted that it is eyeing me with scorn. I like to take pictures and to have them enlarged to hang in my home. In my office in the packing house, next to the “Pelican Room” (otherwise known as the bathroom), for example, is a photograph I took years ago, its fading surface textured to look like canvas. It shows my three little boys running down a country lane beside a whitewashed fence, the smallest boy bringing up the rear. The feelings that snapshot evokes in me are still keen, but they aren’t guilt or regret. Not so with the pelican. The man who shot the picture …