LEAVING MY MARK

Kay White Drew

Every few years I concoct an excuse to visit Baltimore, the city of my youth and the place where I came of age. One bright, frigid January day, my pretext was to purchase copies of the University of Maryland at Baltimore’s (UMAB) literary magazine, which had recently published one of my essays. I pored over Google Maps as I planned the trip, even checking photographs of various buildings. I knew how much the place had changed in the 45+ years since I’d lived and worked there. Even so, the elegiac feeling that overtook me on the drive to the city surprised me. I was now in my 70s; how many more opportunities would I have to do this?

My breath caught a little as I drove up the graceful arc of the Russell Street exit ramp from I-95. As a pediatric resident over 40 years ago, I’d taken that ramp every day when I drove to work at the University of Maryland Hospital, before I-395 and Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard provided more direct access. I’d driven that route through rain, snow, and ice, through storms of tears after a breakup or the loss of a loved one or a patient, and through mind-numbing exhaustion after nights on call.

After parking in the Pratt Street garage, I set out to explore the campus. The traffic noise, the beeping of trucks backing up into hospital loading docks—my pace quickened as my body slipped back into the rhythm of city life as though I’d never left. The old hospital where I’d worked was almost hidden, buried within a glamorous new facade, like an elderly actress in stage makeup. As I walked north on Greene Street, I passed a familiar building across from the hospital. The shiny letters across its front read the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Office Building but carved into the concrete lintel in WPA-era script was Frank C. Bressler Research Building—the site of the anatomy lab during my medical school years.

Suddenly I’m transported back to December 1973. My professor-lover and I are laughing and kissing in his office on the third floor of the Bressler Building. We’ve known each other for a few months and been lovers for a few weeks, and I am giddy with joy when I’m around him. He’s not especially tall or large, but he has a compelling physical presence and magnetism. Our love affair shines a beacon on my life during a very dark time; my mother had died several weeks earlier, two months after I started medical school, making my adjustment to the rigors of the curriculum that much harder.

He steers me away from the window where we’re standing. “We have to be careful my boss doesn’t see us,” he says. His boss is the chairman of the Pediatrics Department. His office is on the fifth floor of the hospital, directly across the street from my lover’s office window.

Shaking off this memory, I stopped on the sidewalk to check its accuracy. Sure enough, the third floor of the erstwhile Bressler Building is directly across from the fifth floor of the old hospital, the floor I came to know so well a few years later. The man who was his boss became my boss when I started my pediatric residency. A bittersweet smile, a shake of the head. My professor-lover has been dead for well over a decade now.

I continued my walk through the campus and saw many changes, some quite recent, to this place where I’d spent my formative years as a physician. All university buildings, including parking garages, were now clearly marked by a sign incorporating the distinctive black, red, and yellow logo of UMAB. Many buildings were new or recently renovated. Within a few blocks of the hospital were several modest, attractive new rowhouses, giving the area an orderly, prosperous air that hadn’t been there in my medical school and residency days. Some of the building signs bore mottoes such as “Respect for all.” I was pleased to see this in the neighborhood that housed the very people who’ve taught me and my colleagues the practice of medicine for generations.

After completing my original errand and purchasing the magazine, I decided to check out the newly renovated Community Engagement Center (CEC), a collaboration between UMAB and several local community associations four blocks west of the hospital. Besides a variety of programs of interest to West Baltimore’s residents, volunteers from all the UMAB professional schools provide medical screenings, law clinics, and tutoring for middle and high school students.

Some months before the CEC’s renovation broke ground in 2019, members and alumni of the UMAB community received solicitations for financial support that offered a brick with the donor’s name or other inscription in return for a contribution. Hmmm . . . there was something appealing about the idea of a brick with my name on it—the idea of leaving my mark on the place where I’d learned, loved, worked, and suffered. Yet it also seemed, well, arrogant: Who was I to have my name on a brick in front of a community center in West Baltimore? Sure, I donated to the medical school regularly; but it’s not like I was some renowned clinician or researcher, some distinguished alumna. I talked to my husband of 40 years about it, who said, “Why not? You gave that place seven years of your life. Go for it.” And I did. Now, since I was here again, on a cold January day, I figured that I should try to find “my” brick.

The street was quiet, and I was the only one in front of the building, which reminded me of the Community Pediatric Center where I had done outpatient rotations as a student and resident. A recent winter storm had had its way with the front walk and step. The red bricks sported white shovel scrape marks, and small patches of icy snow remained among the clusters of greenish ice-melt. I perused the bricks looking for my name, starting with the row farthest from the doors. When I got to the front walk step itself, I finally found the brick. A smile spread across my face. A welter of feelings arose. Nostalgia and affection for the institution that had formed me; the pleasure of feeling that I had left my mark, in some small way, on the place that had left an indelible mark on me.

Good call on the brick thing, I told myself.