I find myself settling into the ambulance crew with ebbing fears and frustrations at the process of making new (friends?) acquaintances. It wasn't so long ago that I realized that one of the things I've missed about emergency medicine is being around people who, like me, are a little fascinated with damage. This revelation has made me more relaxed with my crewmates because I now know that they're part of the reason I'm there.

The latest shift at the squad featured less sleep and more action. I felt some of the old knowledge coming back. I didn't have quite so much trouble getting my shivery hands into those evil-smelling latex gloves. I pulled equipment off shelves and attached the right tubes to the appropriate nozzles. I put my hands on scared people who might never see me again and might not recognize me if they did. When that tone goes off in the squad building and they call up my crew, I have a purpose and I know it. Life can be miserly in its provision of such moments.

In between calls, an old hand at the squad told stories about how he once took out an entire flower bed in front of a local hospital, because he'd accidentally driven past the emergency entrance and his crewmate was yelling from the back that they'd gotten a pulse on a man who had been pulseless and blue. Fuck it, he thought, and cut the steering wheel hard and made a driveway for himself. The patient, once dead, lived. The tulips did not.

I drove blearily home on Saturday morning, having a Coke and a smile to insure I would make the trip back into DC in a fully conscious state. At one point, I witnessed a flagrant act of bad-neighborliness, as one driver refused to let another slip into his lane. I felt no more than my usual irritation at this common disregard of the common good, but the next traffic light presented me with an opportunity for revenge: the offending driver had run out of lane and now needed to get into mine. Vigilante-like, I seized the opportunity and accelerated aggressively, paying back the evildoer with a dose of his own medicine. It was about a block later that I began to feel monstrously stupid for my silly act of vengeance-by-proxy.

I often believe that we, as a species, are simply too primitive to handle the power that cars place at our disposal. God forbid we should ever have a more effective tool for aggressing against each other, available for a small price and a short wait at shops and shows around our great nation.

Shortly after I arrived home, my mom called to see if we wanted to meet her halfway between our domiciles to transfer over a load of plants that she'd ordered for us. It was about a two-hour drive each way, but we had nothing in particular planned, so we said okay. On the highway just outside of Washington, we encountered a mysterious traffic jam which reduced us to a crawl for several miles. Finally, we passed the familiar sight of a fender-bender: blinking lights and small groups of people standing around looking contemplatively at the mooshed front ends of their cars. But the accident was on the opposite side of the highway, meaning the whole holdup had been the product of human curiosity as people in our lanes slowed to gander at the sight. Again I wondered what we might be like if we used our tools with a little more intelligence. (But I looked, too.)

We met my mom at an Amish grocery off the highway, where one can buy bulk spices, Bible tracts, and plain sandwiches made by extremely pale women. As we sat outside eating them (the sandwiches, not the women), talk turned to the recent essay in which I recounted my early-life encounters with the emergency room, and attributed my fascination with the rescue squad to the feeling of helplessness that those events generated in me.

After posting that entry, I'd wondered what, if any, response it might generate from my parents. In the past, anticipating how someone would react to what I posted in the Tales was a frequent job hazard, and some frictional run-ins with friends over my characterizations of them made me wary of sharing too much info about other people. Oddly, waiting to see if there would be a response felt almost good this time. The journal hasn't scared me much for a while, and there's not much point to it if it isn't frightening. I have a rule (so far unbroken, but I know what is meant to be done to rules) that once I put something up on the page, I never go back to alter more than grammar screw-ups or typos.

I'd been concerned that both my parents would feel I was blaming them in the essay, or claiming that they should have done something different in those trying circumstances. My mom seemed to see this wasn't the case. It led to an interesting discussion of our family's lush emergency medical history. Are all families so accident-prone as mine? I found that many of my earliest memories are of accidents or small humiliations. My earliest memory of all is when my sister was going to first grade and the school bus driver drove the bus up to our house for her to see it -- I was so excited that I barfed on the bus floor. I had just turned three. I remember only how embarrassed I was.

I'm in no way claiming a horrific childhood, only observing how the yucky stuff tends to stay with you even when overshadowed by an overwhelming measure of goodness. My mom pointed out that on the day she fell and broke her tailbone (an enduring and terrible memory for me -- and her), we were walking happily along a stream that ran near our house. Sadly, that nice moment failed to make it into my mind's scrapbook. The slot where that mental image should go is occupied by the less pleasant memory of seeing her injure herself and not being able to do anything about it.

My dad, too, emailed and indicated that the entry brought back a lot of memories. But he didn't seem bothered by my account of them, and was very complimentary about my decision to go back to volunteering at an ambulance. It might be strange for both of them to think that something I feel passionately about now was nourished in part by those accidental moments in our shared past, the exact incidents we might most want to forget.

It's so therapy to claim that we savor our cars and guns because we're sick of a childhood mental tape that replays the moments we were most powerless over our world. I certainly don't feel like my every behavior is prompted by an internal program that went online, read-only, by the time I was ten. There are a few things that have happened since then, like having sex, that figure prominently into my decision-making. But I believe there is an element of childish desperation in our persistent efforts to remake the world and insure that we'll always be in the driver's seat. If there's no enduring Parent to tell us that everything's under control, cars and courts and fists can easily become the means by which we assure ourselves that we aren't totally helpless.