Dr. Jedidiah is a psychiatrist who loves
traveling, meeting new people, and exploring different cultures. As a single
father who lost his wife Demi to drug overdose 10 years ago, he has not been
his old perky self for the last decade. During those hard years, he has met
hundreds of, thousands of people from various walks of life around all over the
world. Meeting new people and listening to their stories outside his office
have given him different feelings from the ones through the formal encounter
groups or support groups for therapy. These people he has accidentally come
across were the paths through which Dr. Jedidiah could look back on his own
life, being truly honest with himself. Here is Dr. Jedidiah’s monologue that
has left him with some food for thoughts in life….or a fodder to justify his
own mistakes in the past.
Episode # 21. Aliens in America
Doug was a 54 year-old man that I met at the monthly volunteer
visitation to our local Soup Kitchen. His obnoxiously bright colored T-shirts
were telling me how deep his midlife crisis was developing. Although he was
trying hard to keep smiling while passing the divided plates to the hungry, he
looked more like an exhausted straggler than a happy, generous volunteer
there. When a homeless guy asked him why the long face, Doug said ex cathedra
“I appreciate your concern about me, but I am perfectly alright.” And then he
forced a smile to hide his gripe. Most people in need there at the soup
kitchen might have thought of Doug as an orgulous, stuck-up type of
person. However, with some educated guess and based on my psychiatric gut feelings,
I knew that Doug was fighting back some problems in his life.
As an immigration official who interviews various desperate
people from other countries with hopes for better tomorrow, Doug must have put on
an expressionless face with a strict, blank look most of his days. That wooden
face with compressed lips could not easily melt away into an angelic smile in
this once-a-month occasion at a place for homeless folks. As Doug and I had gradually
become tight with each other, we got to let our hair down and started to
talk more about our untold stories in the past. As always, I was the one who
showed true colors of myself first by telling him how hard it had been surviving
the days without my wife. I was able to see more and more emotions on his eyes,
lips, and the way he responds to the sore spots of my life story.
Doug said he would like to leave his job of dealing with
immigrants. Throughout more than 25 years, he had seen good, bad, and sad cases
of applicants for green cards. Whenever he became suspicious of a married
couple, he was struggling to find out the truth about their love. He asked
himself over and over again if this woman or man decided to marry this American
solely by their love or with their strong desire to become American. At times,
some green card applicants wanted to bribe Doug and inserted some cash in between
their paper works. Doug felt sick when he found himself perturbed at the hidden
envelopes below the thick bunch of documents at his office. Those applicants might
have wanted Doug to be a venal official and took a risk of pushing their
luck by money to no avail.
Doug said he wanted to stay clean and now would like to leave
all this drama filled with immigrants’ prismatic hopes and frustrations.
Sometimes he felt himself like Prez Trump’s huge border wall against Mexican
refugees. “Even if I had lied to them about what life in America is like in a
bad way, quite a lot of the immigrants I interviewed would have fallen for my
words without demur.” said Doug. Doug asked me who in this country made of
immigrants is an alien and who is not.
I guess I understood why Doug had been volunteering to
help feeding the homeless at this Soup Kitchen. He might have felt bitter for
the outcast at the shelter and soup kitchen, a lot of whom were staying as an
illegal aliens here. Doug said “Maybe I’ve contributed to mass-produce undocumented
immigrants to a certain degree….or maybe not. But I still wish to leave this
job of evaluating humans based on paperwork, not on their hearts.”
Expressions
1.
straggler: a
person in a group who lags behind or becomes separated from the others,
typically because of moving more slowly
2. ex cathedra:
(adjective
and adverb) from the seat of authority; with authority: used especially of
those pronouncements of the pope that are considered infallible.
3. gripe:
a
nagging complaint
4. orgulous:
haughty/
proud/ condescending
5. to let
one’s hair down: to behave in an uninhibited or relaxed or honest
manner
6. venal:
showing
or motivated susceptibility to bribery
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