something wicked this way comes

Ray Bradbury's 1962 novel, Something Wicked This Way comes, deeply affected me when I read it.  I think I read it when I was bout twelve, which meant I read it about 1965.  I am surprised to learn, as I just did this afternoon, that this novel was only published in the nineteen sixties.  I read very little contemporary fiction in grammar school. There are so many 'classics' for children to read.  I dedicated myself to reading everything that anyone said was good. I don't know how Ray Bradbury entered my system.  I am pretty sure he wasn't promoted at my provincial Catholic grammar school.

When my daughter was growing up, I tried to gift her all the books that had been important to me as a child. I always bought Katie lots of books. She had a hard time reading library books. She fretted about the germs of strangers.   When Katie was ten, in the fifth grade, her therapist diagnosed her as obsessive-compulsive, then he referred us to a psychiatrist to 'manage' her personality disorder.  Both Katie and I recoiled at the idea of psychotropic meds for a kid but we made an appointment to meet with the shrink, to see what he had to say, to sense into the idea.  Neither of us expected that we would go the med route.  Both of knew my Katie struggled.

I knew as soon as we entered the waiting room of the psychiatrist that Katie would never return.  The waiting room was dirty.  This was not a public clinic. It was in a medical office building. It was a private psychiatric practice.  The carpet was noticeably dirty.  I am not OCD. I am not very fussy about someone else's carpet.  If that carpet was dirty to my unfussy eyes, I knew, the place was unbearably filthy for my kid.  I knew we might as well leave without seeing the doc, knew she would never agree to come back but, for reasons I no longer recall, I felt like we had to stay for the meeting.  Perhaps my insurance would have charged me if I stood the doctor up whereas if we met him, then our insurance would cover things.  I don't recall.  I just remember beging creeped out in that waiting room, trying to hide my discomfort from my obsessive daughter. As if.

The doc kept us waiting way long.   He came into the examination room, after keeping us waiting far beyond a reasonable amount of time. He was very fat, he reeked of cigarette smoke and he leaned over my daughter (surely her records indicated she was OCD?) and hugged her.

She cried out, pushed him back and said "Please, mom, let's get out of here."

"Fine with me, honey," I said as I rose, gathering my coat and bag, she doing the same.

"I think you are making a mistake," he said, "I think you should give me a chance. I don't think you should indulge your daughter like this."

"I would normally try to overlook your dirty waiting room, your surly receptionist, your keeping us waiting and even your cigarette smoke, even though you must have kept us waiting so you could smoke that cigarette, after  you had already kept us waiting way too long, but I can't overlook the fact that you are a psychiatrist, you are supposed to know that you were meeting a new patient, a child, with a personality disorder for the first time and that you touched her before you had exchanged names.  You touched her."

I knew, Katie didn't have to say anything except 'get me out of here' that she had noticed all the same things that had creeped me out.