I’ll Be Seeing You

Here I am at the Cleveland Clinic, of all places, where they have the best doctors, for some of the sickest people in the world. Kings, sheiks, movie stars fly here from all over the globe, seeking cures for ailments that others can’t help.       

My first appointment ever at Cleveland’s LeBron of medicine.  And I’m a little apprehensive even though I’m not really sick.  Never liked hospitals or doctors.  Too many bad experiences as a kid.  My mind had long ago been infected was unpleasant memories. I had drifted into day dreaming of as we rode down the hill toward Carnegie.

       Didn’t sleep well the night before, since the appointment was very early. Much too early for me. My daughter was picking me up for the short drive down the hill, and will join me for the session. “Patients” are invited to bring a significant others. So I’m bringing Susan, a wonderful human being, and a marvelous giving, caring daughter.  I am so lucky, I thought. I was up, wobbly but wide-eyed by four thirty, dressed by six, and somewhat awake well in time for the arrival of my ride.

           As we approached the pink granite pyramid like Crile building that has become the centerpiece of this amazing campus, I marveled at how it has changed the face of “Uptown” Cleveland, as we used to call it. (107^th and Euclid down to 79th St.)

           If anything has changed radically in this town, it has been this neighborhood. Once it was ablaze with nightclubs, movies, hotels, the Alhambra bowling alley and pool hall, the Trianon Ballroom where our high school fraternity had sponsored Tommy Dorsey band and kid singer Frank Sinatra.  Lindsay’s Sky Bar, where Nat King Cole played with his trio, well before he was a famed singer on his own.  Where I hung out on Army furloughs during the War. Every sign of life you can imagine

       Now it is an impersonal looking industrial type complex of stone and steel and glass buildings for the sick, the very sick and the dying. A new kind of Cleveland that no one thought they would ever see in our town. Not in my day, at least.