WHAT DOES “DER WIENERSCHNITZEL” MEAN BESIDES “THE WIENERSCHNITZEL”?

In the mid-80s, my parents had a drawn-out, slow-motion, frog-in-a-boiling-pot breakup. My father, ever too cowardly for direct confrontation and therefore clean breaks, left our family a little bit at a time, at first absent from our house the occasional night, then a few days at a time, and then for a week, and so on and so forth until he just stopped coming home entirely, as though the pattern of his absences were meant to fit a Fibonacci sequence of ghosting us, a fractal divorce. (Astonishingly I learned that although this departure began in my early teens, my parents’ legal divorce was only formalized recently, in my mid-40s.)

My parents had immigrated from South Korea during the 70s, shortly after my younger sister was born. We were the beneficiaries of the Immigration Act, and for all of the hue and cry about the way it changed America, that law is fascinating for the fact that it in effect rewarded a great many people from Asian countries that had been involved in the proxy wars that the U.S. waged against the commies in that region. My father, who first arrived in Los Angeles as a low-level executive for Korean Airlines, called for my mother, my sister, and me, and we made our home in LA, our family growing with the birth of my younger brother, eventually moving out of our one-bedroom apartment in the city to a house, a real house with separate bedrooms and everything, which was when my father, perhaps restless now, began to leave.

The four of us, my mother, my younger sister and brother, and I found ourselves marooned in a Southern California suburb without our primary breadwinner, who would eventually have another family, occupying a single-family dream home that we could no longer afford, let alone keep essentials like the electricity and telephone and water on. I’m not exactly sure how my mother had found herself a job that was 12 miles away three or four towns over, the networks adults make for themselves opaque to us children, perhaps it was the Guatemalan woman who lived down the hall when we lived in LA who’d put her in touch with people from the Korean church down the street, that kind of thing, but somehow my mother, who barely spoke English, much less German, landed minimum wage work at a franchise of the Wienerschnitzel fast food chain in Glendora.

If you’re unfamiliar with Wienerschnitzels it may be because you grew up outside of the western U.S., which is where most of these restaurants were located. Curiously, despite the name they don’t actually serve schnitzel but rather the mid-century American version of ethnic food, think the German version of Taco Bell, sausages or hot dogs, really, with sauerkraut, LA standards like chili dogs, crowd-pleasers like burgers and fries, etc., and even though I understand that they dropped the definite article from their name some time ago for us locals it’ll always be “Der Wienerschnitzel”.

My mother would come home from a shift late in the evening that we children spent alone, unsupervised, somehow still alive but deathly anxious with stranger-danger, this being the period of time that the Night Stalker had been active. For some reason my mother drove a maroon red Ford Mustang, the kind with sticky vinyl seats, not for reasons of sportiness but rather automotive penury, my parents must have gotten it on the cheap given the number of times it left us stranded on the side of various dusty Southern California freeways, but the ‘Stang would get my mom home, reeking of the fryolator.

The first few times she came home from working at the Wienerschnitzel I noticed that her forearms were covered with little black dots, like this German fast food restaurant had decided to sprinkle toasted sesame seeds on all of the food and some had stuck on my mother’s arms. It was only later that I realized that those tiny black dots were all actually burns from splashing oil, charred bits of epidermis that would eventually fall off leaving pink healing wounds the size of, well, a toasted sesame seed. When it came to raising the children, our father took off, and it was our mother who had the real skin in the game.

She would often bring home a stained brown paper bag with the Wienerschnitzel logo on it, full of leftovers from the restaurant, and at first the foreignness of eating, say, a hot dog with a pickle spear or ‘kraut on it was a novel departure from whatever dreary food-stamp provisioned stuff lining our cabinets that we’d usually have for supper, but I began to associate the taste of these salty hot dogs with poverty and absentee parenting, with the constant phone calls of bill collectors, with the threat that the water would be shut off, followed by the electricity, or the gas.

The thing of it is, the flavors of Wienerschnitzel are also the taste of the water staying on, the electricity and gas still in service, my mother’s desperate, minimum wage job kept these bills paid and us children fed, the seed-sized burns on her forearms exchanged for the coin of the land that we’d immigrated to. Somehow, even while working those long hours, my mother enrolled in school to study early childhood education. She’d graduated from a prestigious women’s university in Seoul with a degree in sociology, my mom is a literate, educated woman and not the anti-immigration strawman of the dirty, unskilled, layabout criminal, but life happened, as it could to any of us, and she found herself abandoned by her husband with three children, unable to speak the language, and despite her college education without any other, more genteel means to provide. But she could work at Wienerschnitzel.

The realities of the minimum wage aren’t that of your high schooler looking for summer income (the heartwarming ad campaign of McDonald’s and their “commitment to being America’s best first job” notwithstanding). The facts are that the average minimum wage earner is 35 years old with a quarter of them parents, like my mother. (By the way, the website minimumwage.com is fronted by Berman & Co. – even though it’s a top hit on Google, it’s important to know that the site is run by a restaurant industry PR firm that opposes increases to the minimum wage. It’s akin to Googling “child labor” and having a top hit be kidsneedjobstoo.com.) Minimum wage workers have to provide for themselves and their children, and since on average they provide half of a family’s income, they’re the ones who keep the water running and the lights and heat on.

The bitch of it is, you would think that growing up hard would have made us close, my mother and me. But maybe in the hard scrabble of keeping us fed, clothed, and sheltered we somehow became uneasy, despite perhaps both of our best efforts, my mother’s need to be correct, to meet her ideals, maybe her controllingness and need for control an attempt to fix a broken past, means that I yell at her in front of my young daughter in ways that I can only imagine I will regret, I tense when she puts an arm around me, I am quick to conclude that her intent is self-serving rather than giving her the chance to finish her sentence. I grew up likely abused, well, there you have it, the fact that I have to couch it as likely abuse means that, yup, I was abused, neglected, and yet somehow still alive.

Recently, at the conclusion of a visit (she spends most of her time out of the country doing missions work with her church) that was awkward as always she put her arms around me and looked me in the face. I could feel my shoulders tense, wanting to pull away, but for a second I imagined myself 40 years from now, my arms sagging with age, wrapped around my daughter’s neck, gazing in to her eyes, and despite our history, I softened a little.

“You know, I always loved you,” she said. “From when you were a baby, I always loved you.”

I imagine my own arms covered with little black sesame-seed burns, holding my daughter’s face near mine.

“I know. I know, mom. I love you too.” Somehow, I do.

Cambodia, 8 Feb. 2006

Here's something I wrote when visiting Cambodia for the first time in 2006:

Today was the first sort of free day I’ve had here in Siem Reap, and at the behest of my colleagues I took a tour of the local temples, including Angkor Wat, shepherded along by an English-speaking Cambodia tour guide.  He was soft-spoken, and Cambodians seem often to drop terminal hard consonants, so “nice” becomes “nie”, “lake” becomes “lae”, etc.

“Is this your first time in Cambodia?  Where are you from?”

“Yes, it’s my first time here.  I’m from California.  Where are you from?”
“I’m from Phnom Penh.  I’ve lived in Siem Reap for 4 years.”

“Oh, really!”  His English is pretty good, and he seems pretty well-educated.  “Did you go to university?”

“Yes, I studied economics and my country’s history, and graduated in 1999.  I worked for an NGO for two years, and then I studied tourism and became a guide.  I wanted to meet people from other countries.  What do you do for a living?  Are you a student, or do you work?”

“I work.”

“What do you do?”

“Um, I’m a medical doctor.”

“I see.  How old are you?  What year were you born?”

“I’m 32, I was born in 1973.”
“So was I!”

“No kidding!”  We’re the same age.

“Do you have a family?”

“No, I don’t.  I have brothers and sisters.”

“Ah.  Do you have a girlfriend?”

“No, I don’t.”

“You have an education, and a good job, you help people.”
I don’t have the heart to explain to him that I’m a total loser.  “Uh, thanks.  It’s because I’m not good looking.”  We laugh.  “What about you?  Do you have a family?”

“No.  I have brothers and sisters, no girlfriend.”

“Huh.”

“My father was killed by Pol Pot in 1975.”

“Oh.  Shit.”

“He was a university lecturer.  In 1977 our family was evacuated to the forests to farm and escape the Khmer Rouge.”

In 1977 I was watching Star Wars.  In the theater.

“I learned to speak English in the forest, in secret, because the Khmer Rouge would beat us if we tried to learn to speak English.”

I spend much of the rest of the day blinking frequently and regularly clearing my throat.  But oppressed or not, the fucker’s still taller than I am.  “Um, is it just me, or is this camera strap feeling heavier?  Whoo!  It’s getting kinda hard to breathe.”

“Here we are at Angkor Wat.”  We get out the car.  “What did you do yesterday?”

“We went to a children’s hospital.”  It was a really good place, the nicest I’ve seen in the developing world.  People have a tendency to romanticize children and childhood.  Still, there’s something about seeing happy kids, whether they’re yours or not.

“Would you like to take a picture by this pool?  The temple is reflected in it.”

“Okay.”  He takes my picture for me.  “Hey, I’ve got an idea – stand here.”  I dig my Polaroid camera out of my bag, snap his picture, and hand him the little photo.  “Wait a minute.”  His face and the temple behind it materialize out of the grey film.  He smiles.  It would have felt like a totally lame gesture if it hadn’t have been spontaneous.
“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“How long are you here on tour?”

“I’m leaving Friday, but I’m not here on tour.  To tell you the truth, I always feel kinda guilty if I take a holiday.”  I smile like it’s a joke.  We keep walking towards the temple, dissolving into the sea of tourists.

“I hope you enjoy your stay here.”

“Thank you.”  I’m glad I listened to everyone’s advice and went site-seeing.

Leaves in a Stream

Let me be plain:

We are leaves in a stream

Caught up together

In this eddy, this pool

This tide, this time

Our deaths not just inevitable

But begun as soon as we dropped

To the river below from our great tree

That was watered by the rains

That came from the vast sea

To which we rush
Together, alone, together, alone

Marriage

Marriage

“Hey. Come here.” It is Thanksgiving week, and my wife and I are in the guest room of her sister’s home in Short Hills, New Jersey. Our three-year-old child is downstairs, playing with her cousins.

My wife is topless. She pivots to bring her left breast closer to me. “Can you look at this? What do you think it is?” Her voice is ambivalently worried. As a medical doctor it’s not uncommon to have family, friends, even acquaintances show me their bodily oddities, but this is my wife.

She shows me her left nipple. At about 2 o’clock, near the nipple’s base, is a dark black growth, about 3 or 4 millimeters in size. “It just showed up this morning,” she tells me.

“Does it hurt? Is there a discharge?”

“No. No. I just noticed it this morning.”

There’s a saying in medicine, the doctor who treats himself has a fool for a patient, meaning, of course, that one cannot be adequately objective in practicing medicine on oneself, and by extension, of course, one’s friends and family. Meaning that whenever someone falls ill, it’s going to be one extreme or another, it’s always cancer or it’s never cancer, you minimize something because in the back of your mind you naturally don’t want something horrible to happen to your loved one, or you assume the worst because the alarm bells immediately trigger that you must do something to protect the one you love. A few years ago, my brother-in-law, then in his late 30s, who as a neurosurgeon would spend hours upon hours at work, that is to say that he is no shrinking violet, if not an unstoppable force, commented during our holiday visit that his chest hurt every now and again, rubbing at it distractedly. I replied that that seemed weird but then changed subjects; we later found out that he had critical coronary artery disease and he soon required bypass surgery. If I had been at work and a patient had come to me with a complaint of chest pain, I would have at the very least taken a thorough history and physical exam, which was what Jim’s doctor actually did discovering his illness, but I didn’t, because we’d been drinking beer and talking about family stuff, not sitting in an exam room, each of us in a respective role as doctor and patient.

“I think it might be a skin tag,” my wife tells me. It might be, she had a few before this thing appeared. I’m an emergency physician – I deal with acute diseases. Cancer is deadly, but it takes its toll over months and years, a slow moving, inexorable train of medical inertia, not the seconds to minutes acuity of emergency medical conditions. The kind of breast cancer I see is the woman who’s waited for months to even years with a growing, fungating breast mass, now erupting from the skin and oozing discharge, the patient, who was in denial, now at death’s door and finally convinced by someone close to them to go see the doctor, with no idea as to whom to go to, appear in my ER. I wrack my memory for everything I learned about breast cancer as a medical student. “No discharge?” I ask. “No.” “Any lumps?” My wife and I spend a few seconds examining her breast for masses, and finding none I return to my med school memories. We’d learned about masses, discharges, but none of my teachers had ever mentioned what a blackened, lentil-sized growth on a stalk on the nipple meant, or how that would change the way you think about the next imagined thirty years of your life.

Keeping in mind the whole you-shouldn’t-treat-your-own-family-members-due-to-bias thing, I told her that we really needed to make an appointment for her with her primary care doctor first thing when we returned from our trip. She agreed, clothed herself and we walked downstairs to join the pell-mell romp of child-cousins that was ongoing.

The week passed in the cheerful kind of winey haze that characterizes joyful family gatherings as opposed to the self-medicating, baleful kind of alcoholic fog I’d grown up with. My wife’s family genuinely enjoys each other’s company and over the years I’d grown increasingly grateful to have joined them. I’m not an orphan or anything, but holidays growing up were thick with the tension of having to choose between two estranged parents, and the fact that most of my friends had equally despair-filled family lives meant there was no home of safe harbor, just endless ping-ponging about on the freeways during the season that hosted the few rare, clear, cool days in Southern California.

My wife had covered her lesion with a band-aid, and every morning that week, around her shower, we’d have a status-check, maybe a little soreness, perhaps a change in size or color, could be because she was worrying at it, kind of a discharge, sort of an odor. She read on the internet that if it was a skin tag she could try infarcting it off by tying a thread in a tight knot around its base, so one morning she tied a length of mint dental floss around it which kept coming loose, requiring an occasional adjustment during the day.

Whenever my wife and I have an argument there’s a small, child-shaped part of my psyche that worries that the discordant feelings between us presage an inevitable breakup and divorce. In the early years of our union that fear was much larger, shrinking over time with reflection, attention, and naturally just plain old time, but given that in the experience I had of my parents fights meant a messy divorce, I hope I can be forgiven of that anxiety, whereas my wife would always look at me like I was crazy when I’d express that fear to her in the midst of a knock-down drag-out. So a part of my natural instinct is to worry about the direst possible conclusion when confronted by any adversity in our marriage. Over the days since my wife had shown me the black lump on her areola, a small part of my lizard-era-of-evolution-survival-brain kept sounding the alarm that she was going to die, that my present happiness had indeed been meant solely set me up for an even deeper despair than I’d been in before I met my wife

The stuff we fight about is the usual mélange of forgettable topics that married couples argue over: her not cleaning the inside of the microwave standing in for the difference in ways we keep house, I spend too much on my hobbies without thinking about the budget we need to have in order to support my aging mother, she drinks too much when there’s wine at our friends’ gatherings, she can’t believe I’m going to use a pocket knife to cut the skin tag off her nipple.

It’s now been a week and a half since the blackened spot of doom has appeared on my wife’s breast. Her appointment with a doctor is still a month away, but the comforting security of that promised encounter has inebriated the rational me that recognizes that treating one’s own family is foolhardy and fraught with bias, sedating the monkey-brain that had been screaming doom, doom, doom, enough such that one evening on the way home from an event I decide that a skin tag is all it must be so of course it has to be removed. Tonight. Anyway, the tying-a-string-around-it thing hasn’t been working, the ligature keeps loosening which mitigates its effectiveness, and now the lesion has a funny odor which of course means it’s not cancer, right? so it’s okay to just cut the fucking thing off and be done with it, over, out, right?

To my poor, afflicted wife, this ordeal had been of the most personal in nature; breasts are, perhaps even more so than hair, the primary external signifiers of womanhood in most cultures; one’s menarche may be when you think of yourself as coming of age and joining the great sisterhood of traveling pads, but the blossoming of one’s titties is what others can see and marks you as a woman, or a mother, or an object, the plot of the movie Osama (which, by the by, was written and directed by a dude) notwithstanding, hey, you sonofabitch my eyes are up here, asshole. But getting back to my wife, the fact that her breast was what was sick made this episode in our lives a totally different deal than anything else that had struck her before, entangling core parts of her identity.

I figure the best, quickest, cleanest, and least painful way to do this is by using a scalpel, which I have in the medical bug-out bag I keep; the stalk of the lesion is thin, something I could cut through with one decisive, swift motion. I’d need a pair of forceps, or pick-ups, surgical jargon for tweezers, and as it happens, my wife’s eyebrow tweezers were available and precise enough for the job. I pull the car in to our garage and run upstairs to retrieve the scalpel in my med kit.

Only the problem is, I can’t find a scalpel. I rummage through my med kit, turn it over to empty out the contents through which I paw, to confirm that I have indeed neglected to include that most fundamental of all tools, a scalpel, which is, after all, a knife, which is, after all, a sharpened stick, which is, of course, the first tool that made us humans human. But no matter, I have a contingency plan, so I run back downstairs and begin to gather supplies, alcohol wipes (I have plenty of those), matches (for sterilization), band-aids (to staunch what I hope would be a very minimal amount of bleeding) and the tweezers. The tweezers, which also turn out to be missing.

We just had them, the tweezers. But allofasudden, they’re missing, just like the scalpel that was supposed to be their partners in, if not exactly crime, and maybe not unethical but just foolish because of the cognitive biases involved, procedure, let’s just leave it at that. I run out in to the night with a flashlight trained on to the ground, finally bespying the pink eyebrow tweezers on the ground near our parked car. Sure, the instrument I’ll be using in what’s essentially a kitchen surgical procedure has been on the ground, but hey, I have alcohol wipes and matches, it’ll be totes sterilized when we start.

So we’re always trying to be better people in our marriage, but some things about ourselves may never change, may never be changeable, and it’s a matter of compensating, by both parties, for the sake of our continued relationship. My wife is an anxious person, and that fact leads to tensions over anticipated scenarios that never materialize but cause unnecessary turbulence in our day to day lives; for example, having people over for a simple dinner becomes an ordeal because she fears that the recipe will come out wrong even though we live within walking distance, mere steps, from at least a dozen restaurants. I, on the other hand, never seem to be listening, focused so intently on my own internal checklist of tasks that even though I have been told, over and over again, that it’s really, really important to her that I not schedule a complex and attention-diverting pickup of bulky trash items for her to end up doing herself the night before her critical work-meeting, I overlook her priority in favor of my own sudden need to clear out something that’s been cluttering the garage literally for years. And like I said at the top of the paragraph, some of these things about us may never change to the eternal distress of the other, but we are held together by our commitment to each other, as well as our shared history, and the fact that I am about to lop off a piece of her flesh.

“What the fuck is that?!” she exclaims when I pull out my pocketknife. I’ve started carrying an EDC knife, a little Spyderco Dragonfly with a 2 inch blade that so far I’ve found most handy in cutting paper for crafts that keep our daughter occupied when we’re out at dinner. It has a serrated edge, which I chose in the event that I’d need to cut through fabrics such as seat belts, but it’s a tiny thing, really… although when she puts it like that, what-the-fuck-is-that, particularly in the context of cutting her own flesh, I can sort of see why the jagged edge of this pocket knife might look a little – hmm, let’s say, menacing? “I thought you were going to use scissors or something!”

“No,” I reply, “scissors would crush and damage too much tissue, a clean cut with a knife is better. What - did you already finish that beer?!” My wife is sitting on a little stepstool in our kitchen, a bag of ice inside the cup of her bra to provide anesthesia. She has already chugged a can of beer that she opened while I was collecting my tools. Our 3 year old is on the couch watching videos on the iPad, surprisingly not reacting to any of the screaming ongoing in the kitchen.

“You’re going to use a fucking switchblade?!” she replies.

“It’s a pocketknife, and it’s the sharpest blade I have right now, I’m sorry. But like I said, scissors would crush too much tissue, it’s better to use a sharp knife.”

“Okay,” she says, a wounded look on her face, “okay. Let’s just get it over with.”

I wipe things down with the alcohol pads, I run a lit match over the things that need to be sterile with flame. My wife has opened a second can of beer.

“Ow! Fuck! Is it over?”

“No, I’m sorry, that was just the string.” I’ve only cut through the Gordian knot of dental floss that she’d tied around the base of the lesion, and I toss the ineffective ligature aside. “Okay, you ready?”

“Okay, okay, just do it already!”

I attempt to grasp the thing with the tweezers, but it’s surprisingly… squishy is the medical term, I guess, and difficult to get a hold of. I finally gain traction and make the first attempt at amputation.

“Ow! Fuck! Is it over yet?”

“No, I’m sorry.” The first cut draws blood but goes nowhere.

“Fuck! Stop! You’re not doing it right!” There’s blood now, on her breast, on her fingers, on my knife’s blade.

“Stop moving. Jesus.” I’m sweating now. A light perspiration, but sweat nonetheless.

“Ow! Fuck! You’re not doing it right! Just fucking use some scissors!” I ignore her protests and keep sawing at the stalk of the lesion, now full on pouring sweat, the tweezers slipping off the lesion, then re-gripping it, slipping off, then re-gripping, knife sawing at the base of the thing, my wife screaming in tears, our child still oddly unmoved on the couch, thank god for the diversion of videos.

“Okay! It’s done!” The tweezers have popped off her nipple with the lesion clamped between its teeth. There is blood on the blade of the knife, but all that’s left on her breast is a tiny spot of red that’s easily controlled with a small band-aid.

When I was twelve, my mother tried to shoot my philandering father. We children were in the back seat of the car that my mom had insisted dad drive to the apartment of his mistress, and we were in the parking lot of a Denny’s in Hollywood when my parents started struggling in the front seat. There was a blinding flash, no sound, except after a few seconds a high-pitched ringing in our ears as our hearing recovered from the discharge of the handgun in the confines of the car, the gun that my mother had probably meant to use in a murder-suicide. While he tried to restrain my squirming mother, my father handed me, his oldest child, the gun, and I bolted out of the car with the weapon, figuring out how to unlatch the cylinder of the revolver and dumping the remaining cartridges and firearm in a bush, which my father later had me retrieve instead of leaving as a crime scene. I remember later that evening, at home, my father sitting in a chair in our living room, chain-smoking cigarettes and contemplating the revolver he held in his hand, the instrument that could have resulted in his death.

My parents’ slow motion divorce continued on its inevitable arc, we saw less and less of our father as the years passed. But the violence of their marriage, an example of which was that evening in a Denny’s parking lot, was somehow entirely unlike, even diametrically opposed, to my wife and me sitting in our kitchen with a bloodied pocketknife and nipple, both panting with breaths stinking of alcohol.

“I’m sorry I yelled at you,” she says, collapsing on to the floor, another can of beer in her hand.

“No, honey, no, you did great, that was crazy, you did great,” I reply.

“Where is it, can I see it?”

“No, I already threw it away; you don’t need to see that shit.”

We sit next to each other on the floor of our kitchen, spent. Our daughter continues to watch videos on the couch. That’s what a marriage is – a marriage is made of moments like these, two people becoming relatives by sometimes spilling actual blood. 

Dreamgirl

Dream Girl

I had a dream last night. I stop the car I was driving at an intersection when three stray dogs dash across my path. The smallest dog, that looks like a dachshund or something, however, changes direction and leaps inside my vehicle. For a confused moment I couldn’t find it in my car and think that I may have been wrong, but then I spot it sitting on the back platform behind the rear seats.

I pull the car over and coax the dog out, and then the dream-thing happens where causality is sort of fluid or squishy, and I start driving after it or it starts chasing my car down this long, long hill towards a little park and community center.

And then it turns in to a little girl, with her hair in two little puffs atop her head the way I’ll sometimes do my own child’s, she looks vaguely like my own three year old only the skin on her face is puffy, red, and scaly from being exposed to the elements while living on the streets. The little girl in my dream keeps calling after me to give her “huggies”, which is the way my own child will ask me to cuddle her, but I keep running away from this dream-child, thinking to myself that I already have a little girl I love at home.

It was while I was evading this little girl that a swarm of wasps descends on the park we are in, scattering the grown ups and children who are at play, or sitting on benches reading newspapers. I’ve recently been dealing with hornets trying to establish nests in the eaves of our home, maybe that’s where this part of the dream originated. I start swatting the wasps away and now am running from them. As will happen in a stampede random groups of people start to run in unplanned tandem with others, which is how I found myself next to the little girl again, and now I can see more clearly her chapped, sun-exposed face, the same skin I had seen on the cheeks of street urchins in Kabul. She is crying, saying that she has an owie, a wasp had stung her little tongue, and one of the older ladies nearby stops her to look. We peer inside her small mouth and see that there is indeed a stinger embedded in the left front corner of her tongue, with a green colored envenomation spreading from it. One of us pulls the stinger out, and the little girl tells us that she has to tell her mommy about her owie, but of course, the dream-me realizes that she is a stray, she has no mommy to tell about her owie, and that’s when everything falls apart.

One of my favorite photos taken from my child’s birth in the hospital is one that represents one of my early attempts at parenting. We’d been told that skin-to-skin contact was best for newborns. My wife was exhausted and needed a break; our child had been born a tiny thing (our perinatologist kept referring, to our bemusement, to our developing fetus as a “dinky kid”), so I tucked her in to my shirt, and there we are in the picture, both of our eyes closed, her nestled against my chest in my shirt. I can’t imagine not loving this child as much as I do, her skin against mine.

I hug the little dream-girl to my chest, feeling her squirm away from me a little the way my own child does when I squeeze her too hard, and right before I awake I think, I can’t not do something, I can’t just let this child go with this owie, without a mommy. All day today, every time I look at my daughter I think about her as a little, motherless child, clever, articulate, injured, with no one who would hold her close, this girl alone, trafficked, used, not an end to herself, growing harder to the world around her, instead of the little baby I held, her skin against my own. I remember thinking about Louis C.K.’s quote that you don’t look in to your neighbor’s bowl to see if you have as much as they do, the only time you look in to your neighbor’s bowl is to make sure that they have enough.

I’ve been to some shitty places in the world and have been in some shady circumstances. There are people who have made some incredibly poor choices in their lives, fucking things up not only for themselves but also for entire tribes of people around them. But everyone began as a baby small enough to hide inside her father’s shirt.

After Newtown

I am a life-long gun enthusiast. Although my father never owned a firearm, some of my fondest childhood memories are of the avuncular Vietnam veterans letting me shoot their AR15s and 1911s at what was then an unregulated firing range in Lytle Creek Canyon at the east end of the San Gabriels. As soon as I was old enough, I started buying my own firearms, and I’ve had guns ever since. The stereotype of the firearm owner may be that of a bug-eyed, slavering fanatic in constant fear of black helicopters, pulling a trigger as rapid-fire as a gun will allow, but that cliché does not match the reality of the vast majority of American sport-shooters and hunters who, like me, have grown up with guns as a part of their daily lives.

I am also an emergency physician; as an ER doctor at the only Level I trauma center in Southern California’s Inland Empire I have treated hundreds of men, women, and children who have suffered gunshot wounds. Having seen it firsthand, I have learned to respect the destructive power of these weapons, including the guns that I myself own. In no uncertain terms guns are far more able to cause grave injuries than knives or other common weapons. Modern soldiers are sent in to combat with guns and not swords for a reason.

As an emergency physician I am on the very front lines of medicine and see how health care needs manifest in a community. Winters bring more cases of pneumonia. Surges in gas prices like the one in 2008 when a gallon topped $5 meant an uncanny decrease in the number of car accidents that summer. And firearms have been used far too frequently in the violence that has afflicted our communities. The recent spate of mass shootings in America has given further urgency to the need to have a discussion about the way we live with our guns.

As a gun owner I have skin in the game when the question of how we will address firearms regulation is raised. I value my right to own my guns and participate in the sport which I have enjoyed my whole life. But the majority of us firearms owners agree that in the wake of the mass shootings in 2012 alone, such as at Oikos University in Oakland, California; the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin; the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado; and Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, gun ownership, like any right, is not an unfettered one. Just as the right to free speech does not mean one may yell “fire” in a crowded theater, the right to own firearms does not guarantee one should have the means to commit a mass shooting in one.

The gun lobby has, with some success, been assiduous in its efforts to frame this question as a matter of the right to own firearms versus the abrogation of that right, which while raising tempers and inciting the passion of gun owners neatly sidesteps the real issue: the need for gun safety. Whenever the national conversation has returned to the question of gun safety, the National Rifle Association and its fellow lobbyists have instead blamed video games, indolent law enforcement, poor access to mental health services, etc., conscripting an army of straw men to divert the discussion to the false dilemma of gun liberties versus gun bans. Instead of taking this opportunity to engage in the gun safety debate, thereby helping shape this discussion, the gun lobby has instead chosen this answer: more guns, and more bullets.

Claiming that the only choice that can be made is either absolute prohibition or unrestricted access to firearms forces a false dilemma. The truth, of course, is that it will take an all-of-the-above approach – enforcement of existing laws, greater access to mental health care, an examination of our culture of violence, and yes, regulation, to prevent even more victims of gun shot wounds from entering my ER, and more national tragedies like the one in Newtown. The question we face as Americans, and as gun owners, is what we will choose in our communities: will we honor the lives of those twenty children by enacting common-sense, reasonable regulations, or will their deaths be remembered as sacrifices to the Moloch of the gun lobby’s relentless demands for unrestrained access to firearms?