About an hour southeast of Dallas there’s a little town called Athens, Texas. When Michele finished residency, their hospital hired her to set up a pediatrics clinic, and me to work in the urgent care of their ER. We lived there a little less than two years. It was in many ways a “starter relationship“ with a town and a career, where the first hard lessons are learned. 

Athens had a few hints of being a progressive town in some ways. It had a huge private-grant park in the middle of town, with an olympic pool and sports fields. It had the first real disc-golf course I’d ever seen. The course threaded through the pines, like a huge hedge maze. There were moments I felt as likely to see Narnia as Texas. Athens was a tiny town: It still has a population of just over 10,000 people, and an outlook on the world that is almost exactly the caricature of a small Texas town. Not long after we got there a group of doctors invited Michele and I out to dinner at the country club, and the only Hispanic woman there besides my wife was the woman clearing the table. Not long before we moved, there had been a horrendously newsworthy racial killing in a county south of ours.

The jobs both had a touch of the unearthly and surreal. Michele‘s hiring had apparently been more about keeping a rival hospital system from getting a toehold in the town, and she was never really supported by the institution that set up her clinic. She struggled to balance her hospital and clinic duties with the scant resources doled out to her from the “big city” of Tyler, where her administration was based. During my time in the Urgent Care I picked up one literally certifiable super-fan, who wrote me a multi-page manifesto accusing me of being in league with the alien influences I was submitting him to in his medicines, which was weird enough that my boss forwarded the letter to the local police department. My tenure in Athens also contains the low point of my medical career. I failed to recognize the abnormal vital signs of a young mother who had the flu. She died of pneumonia a few days later. If my math is right her newborn son will be graduating high school soon.

We struggled to make success of our choice to move to Athens.  We briefly considered taking jobs with the competing hospital system which offered more support and structure.  Ultimately we decided that moving closer to San Antonio and Michele‘s family was a better choice. 

Athens had been my swing and a miss at an ill-defined target. It was far enough north and east in Texas that it caught just the last tip of the great forest that made my beloved Atlantic Coast. The pine trees dropped beautiful brown needles in the winter. The leaves changed to familiar oranges and reds,  albeit in November or December, before they dropped. The hills on a certain Appalachian curvature. It was the first taste of a cure after a decade of homesickness. 

But it was never going to fit. When we left Athens, almost everyone of our friends said “oh it’s about time. I wondered what you guys were doing up there.” Not unlike what your friends say to you after you break up with a girlfriend that everyone knew wasn’t right for you, but didn’t want to be the one to say it. I at least failed to see the forest for the trees.