Brookline Stories

Stories from the Road
July 7, 2015
Brookline Village, Mass.


The hospital reminded me of the old communist structures in Slovakia. It sat high on a hill overlooking Boston with an enormous waiting room and wide corridors. In its heyday New England Baptist Hospital was the place to go for orthopedic surgery.  Now all the hospitals have orthopedic departments, and it’s hard for a specialization hospital to make a go of it economically. The doctors and staff there are still excellent, but the hospital has perhaps seen better days.

We went to this hospital last night to visit out friend Steve Valle, who had a knee replacement. In hospitals I am always struck by how friendly and professional the nursing staff is. Of course, how a patient treats the staff is a variable in their treatment of him or her. I saw a number of examples of bad patient behavior, when I was at Scripps. Demanding, rude, and entitled behavior is not good! The staff not surprisingly responds to positive, appreciative patients who put forth effort at getting better.

I had lunch today with a high school and college classmate, Brian Thompson. He was a French professor at The University of Massachusetts in Boston for 40 years. He married a French woman, and spends a month in France every year, whether at his apartment in Paris or at his wife’s family’s country house in Normandy.  Brian, who was bi-lingual in English and Finish at three years of age, never took a French course. He has a PhD from Harvard in comparative literature and learned French through his wife and time in France.   Many years ago Brian and his wife started a camp for economically disadvantaged youths from the Boston area. The camp has twelve co-ed adolescents at a time at its location in Vermont. During the school year volunteers provide tutoring services to campers. In recent years 100% of former campers have attended college.

Have a good evening.