Jeff Waggoner, M.D.

I’m still learning. That surprises me. It’s not as though the high plains is thousands of miles away from where I used to live. I’ve not even left Colorado. But I’m still learning.

If I had moved from Denver to rural Louisiana, I’d have expected this prolonged period of learning. It might even have taken me months to understand the Cajun dialect. Someone would have said, “Ya’ll dnhare tu be socyated wif medsin fo shoor, no flin?” and I’d have stood silently, my mouth hanging open and my face wearing my oft’ used expression of absolute confusion. But the residents of the high plains do not speak in an unfamiliar dialect. That’s not what I’ve had to come to understand. It’s the little things like addresses. The other day, I gave someone my address so they could come to my home. They looked at me, thought for a moment and asked, “Where’s that?”

Eads has a total of 15 east-west streets and 15 north-south streets. They run at right angles to each other. This person has lived within the confines of those streets for all her life. My obvious conclusion was that she was pulling my leg. I laughed.

“What’s so funny?” she asked. “Where’s your house?”

I repeated the address, and she shook her head. “No,” she said, “I mean who used to live there? Who’s your next door neighbor? Who’s across the street?”

As I said, I’ve no problem with dialect so I understood the words. But I did not understand the question. “What are you talking about?” I asked. “My neighbors? Well, one of them is a young girl, and the person on the other side of me has a blue heeler and…”

“There are lots of blue heelers around here,” she said. “You’re renting aren’t you? Who’re you renting from?”

I told her.

“Oh sure,” she said, “That’s her mother-in-law’s old house. I know exactly where it is. You are …” She then rattled off the occupants and in some cases the past occupants of the 10 or 15 houses surrounding me.

I thought that whole thing to be simply an odd aberrancy in someone I knew was otherwise quite normal until 2 days later. Someone else asked me where I was living, and I again gave them my street address. “Whose house is that?” they asked.

We went through a similar process of defining who lived around me. What I had thought was aberrancy was not. In fact, as I questioned a number of people, many of them knew only a few of Eads’ 15 streets’ names. They didn’t use them. They defined addresses on the basis of relationships. Addresses are defined by the people who live there, the people who used to live there. It’s the people who are important not the pieces of property.

Relationships are also part of people’s names. When I am introduced to someone, there is usually more than a name included in the introduction. “This is such and so. He’s such and so’s uncle who is a first cousin of the person who runs the lab at the hospital.”

This has caused me a bit of a problem because I am horrible with names. In the past, if my wife and I ran into patients—while grocery shopping for example—she learned to quietly slip away. It saved me the embarrassment of stumbling through an introduction because while I might be able to list every single medical problem a patient had incurred for the last 20 years, I wiffed on names. And now I am being given a name PLUS a complex description of a person’s relationship to other people I might know.

I’ve no doubt that the town of Eads has some concern about its doctor’s memory.

I’d think this way of introducing people strange except I know it’s how names were constructed in the first place. The name Antonio de Agostos de Comparto del Rio is not something that a mom and dad just happened to think of while rummaging through “2,000 Common Names.” It is a name that defines a person’s relationship to his family. There was a time when the name “Johnson” was owned by—John’s son.

People—relationships—family—the core factors defining things as basic as an address and an introduction. That’s not something I’m used to. Like I said, I’m still learning.

Dr. Waggoner is a family practice specialist at Weisbrod Memorial Hospital in Eads.