John Brodsky, MD

In his teens, Newsletter editor Brodsky considered a career in photography, but rejected this for lack of business acumen. He worked on a moving van each summer for eight years, found this satisfyingly productive and rich in human interaction, but rejected it for lack of advancement possibilities. He ended up in medical school because his family doctor - on a house call - found him peering through a microscope at his aquarium scum, and remarked, "This boy should go into medicine!" He enrolled at Clark University, missing Freud's visit by a few years, and entertained himself making artistic histology slides and firming up his rigid philosophic determinism. He married a classmate who found his iconoclasm exotic and his immaturity challenging, and they raised three children successfully. While in medical school in New York, he discovered the lost art of harpsichord making and indulged in fantasies of becoming a 17th century craftsman. After settling into a general practice in Chester, Pennsylvania, he began to read widely in the various psychoanalytic psychologies in order to balance his wife's growing interest in the more expressive and cathartic world of gestalt. Widowed before the age of 50, he remarried and with his talented wife has adopted two Asian babies. Always in love with beauty, but despairing over his inability to create it, he has had to satisfy one calling by copying the paintings of Jacob Van Ruisdael (who Goethe called "The Poet of Painting") and Edward Hopper, and another by emulating the poetic voice of Andrew Marvell. He was once a marathoner, enjoyed the process less than the pomp and circumstance, and is now reduced to a shuffle. Friends have on occasion urged him to become a psychiatrist, but he recognizes that as a healer of emotions, he would be a pot, calling kettles black. Currently up to his neck in childcare, his activities have been reduced to his basic expressive form of letter-writing. Sometimes he dreams of being alone in a thatch roofed cottage on a hedgerow in The Cotswolds, living on an aristocrat's inheritance with nothing to do but preach an agnostic sermon to an atheistic flock on Sundays and tend his herb garden.

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