By John Hargraves.

Somehow she had learned about my situation and offered to help. I was about to lose my berth. My delicate chances of completing a Hail Mary pass would be forfeited. My plan for survival and to make my heavenly mother proud was an early admission into the RPI Albany Medical College biomedical program at age 16. Being homeless again would be a problem.

At 14 I had left my father’s house on Palmer Avenue after he remarried. We couldn’t get along and I was declared an emancipated minor. A gaping hole remained from missing my mother. My big sister tried to fill it with love and took me in for nearly two years, but finances forced her family to move out of reach. A friend’s family took me in for a few months as they prepared for a new baby. After painting the baby’s room I slept there not knowing the arrival would displace me at Christmas. 

When I got the news that I needed to find another place I must have prayed. Certainly not to God because He wasn’t my friend. 

Mrs. McKee prayed a lot. She was the elderly widow of a shop teacher at Linton High School and a devout Baptist. She said I could stay and do chores to earn my keep. Somehow she knew not to proselytize and to just love thy neighbor. 

We ate breakfast and dinner together everyday. We watched Marcus Welby MD and Medical Center on her color TV.  She would encourage me with positive words and a steadfast presence. The snow got shoveled and the lawn mowed. Mrs. McKee was the pillar of patience as I probed and tested her with my unwashed neediness. She never once mentioned the nocturnal cigarette smoke that billowed about my bedroom. I thought I was clever leaving the window open on winter nights and tossing the butts out the window. She never admonished me for hitchhiking to Albany to see my girlfriend and coming home late at night. 

That Spring, just before high school graduation, I got real sick with a fever of 105. She didn’t have a car, so she called my father who I hadn’t seen in two years. She had never spoken with him and was worried. I cried, hearing her stern voice chastising his refusal to bring me to a doctor. She won out. He arrived with stepmother in tow and brought me to Ellis Hospital. Koplik spots suggested an early diagnosis of measles. 

“Is that all?” scoffed my old man to the doctor.

On the way back my father generously stopped at the Central Market on Eastern Parkway. He bought me a bottle of aspirin and my choice of orange or the more expensive grape juice. I chose the latter. I didn’t see him again until his near fatal heart attack almost two years later. 

Mrs. McKee was proud that I graduated early and got accepted into the program. She must have known from watching those shows that I would emulate the motorcycling young doctors rather than the avuncular Dr. Welby. I never saw her again.