DIGGING
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests: snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
...
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.
- Seamus Heaney
Digging
When I was younger my father would take me to work with him. He would strap a lead vest on my shoulders and tuck me in the corner of the operating room behind a blood shield. I didn’t mind the needles or the scalpels. I didn’t mind the smell of iodine or the latex gloves and paper masks. I didn’t mind the blood that squirted in little jets and left reddish-brown freckles on your shoes. I didn’t mind the dim hum of the x-ray light. I liked listening to my dad dictate x-rays into a little voice recorder and I liked the nurses who called him “Dr. Jensen” instead of just Dad.
I think he hoped I would be a doctor. He helped me with science projects and we stayed up late out on the deck talking about liver regeneration and protective antibodies - who I always imagined wore police hats and said, “What’s all this, then?” when germs would invade. I know part of him wanted me to be a doctor - to carry on the Dr. Jensen legacy in the operating room and come home with red-flecked tennis shoes. But I’m not a doctor.
Much the same way that Seamus Heaney was not a farmer, I broke away from the literal occupation of my father. I’m not a doctor, nor should I be, it’s just not my line.
I’ve always loved writing. From my very first debut entitled “Turkey Up, Turkey Down,” I’ve felt an instinctive knack for recognizing good stories. I love reading and searching for bits of self-realization through literature. I still love talking with my Dad about the antibodies and why my eyes twitch when I’m tired - but it plays into my academic future more than my medical future. I am carrying on my father’s legacy, and indeed my family’s legacy, in a different way. I will use my scalpel to carve up mental dialogue about anything and everything - to frame stories and ideas in ways that anyone can comprehend - to bring an understanding of great thoughts to people who weren’t the geniuses of history. That’s what great art is, isn’t it? To express great ideas and emotions in ways that humanity can take hold of and appreciate.
Healing the gaps of humanity with art - much like Dr. Jensen healing the gaps between bones and clearing arterial clogs - I want to make my occupation something selfless. I want to teach and to give a sense of intellectual health to more than just myself. I want to dig with my pen and discover things about literature and life that, for now, are buried beneath a thick crust of self-doubt and my own limited mental faculty. I learned this from my father, from my mother, from my teachers, from anyone who has gone before me and tried to define themselves through how they live their life. They taught me to dig to find myself, and helped me do it. In the same way Seamus Heaney was able to reconcile the pen with the spade, I can choose my own direction and, in that way, carry on a legacy.
Perhaps it’s a little ambitious. Perhaps I will never make it past Grad school, perhaps I’ll never get a PhD. Perhaps I’ll never publish a single thing. Perhaps no university will ever hire Dr. Jensen. But for now I’ll take my scalpel, my spade, and my pen and just dig.