My brother and I got together yesterday (Christmas Day) around noon and drove over to the local cemetery where my mother is buried. We thought it good to pay our respects. My mother would have liked that, maybe even would have expected it. (When she was able, she regularly visited the gravesite of her parents, and eventually her siblings and her husband.) She’s not around to expect it, or to be pleased by our compliance with the ancient rituals anymore. But something of her presence still remains in our memories, and by doing what would have made her happy, we keep her memory happy. Yes, I am saying that our memories of those who were close to us have a life of their own, a life that goes on after the remembered person is gone. I got this idea from Douglas Hofstader in I Am A Strange Loop (regarding his late wife Carol).

After bro and I finished satisfying the memory dynamics within our brains with the ancient graveyard rituals, we decided to stop for a beer. So we drove around looking for a bar that was open. Usually at 1pm in northern New Jersey, that’s not a hard problem. But just about every drinking hole that we could think of was locked tight. We finally found a liquor store that doubles as a bar, and grabbed a seat. There were a handful of other guys watching TV or quietly reading the paper; the situation was amiable enough. My Heineken went down easy.

At the bar, we talked about years past, when it was not so hard to find a bar open on Christmas morning. This would be in the 1980’s and 1990s. There seemed to be a lot more restaurants open then too by mid-day. Now, only a few places open on Christmas, and mostly in the evening. Hmmm, I wonder what has changed. It seems like a move towards public piety, towards a religious holiday that is more “precious” even on the secular front. When did we get so Puritanical? Sort of like Ramadan or Hajj in Saudi Arabia or Iran. Is America going “fundamentalist”? Have we in fact changed because of our unfortunate experiences with extremist Islam?

Admittedly, America is still an extremely secular state, and our culture is still far from being bound by religious fidelity. But I still thought the quiet on Christmas mid-day was kind of creepy (something like a cemetery!). I agree that most people should be with their families on Christmas, but there are still many people who could use a quick break from the family scene (which is not without its own pressures and burdens), or don’t have families to go to at all. Bars and taverns are an integral part of the social fabric of a community, offering a flexible, easily accessible opportunity for human interaction. They offer a relief valve of sorts from the negative pressures that can build up in society’s major social institutions, e.g. the workplace and the family household. Sure, there are some bars that are “dens of evil”, i.e. sales fronts for drugs and prostitution, or places where tragic DWI incidents start. But the great majority are just places to kill time with other people around, where everyone gets home safely. I don’t like it when public notions of religious obligation (or fear of those who would enforce such obligations) shut down that relief valve – even if just for a few hours.

P.S., in the afternoon, I met up with my cousin, and he found another place –- another “social relief valve” — that was open. This was a bar in the local American Legion post where he is a member. My cousin happens to be friends with my doctor, and it turned out that doc was in the neighborhood, as he had to visit the local hospital to check in on a patient. Before returning home to his own family, doc decided to stop by for some quick relief of his own from his workplace and his household. So we three sat together for about half an hour, and I asked the good doctor what he thought about the health care reform legislation now pending in Congress. He said there were some good things about it, but in general it was part of a trend that will cause the extinction of one-doctor private practices like his own. He said that a guy like him has a hard time keeping up with all the regulations and might not be able to make a buck as Medicare and the insurance companies kept on increasing their hurdles and decreasing their rates of compensation. Doc is considering joining a larger doctor’s consortium, where the paperwork and overhead can be shared.

I asked him where it was all headed. He said that medicine on the local level is clearly going the way of the big commercial clinic, of the “medical supermarket”. You will no longer have local doctors who stay in one spot for a lifetime. Doctors will change as quickly as produce managers or meat cutters at your local supermarket. You will be assigned to a doctor for a year or two, until she or he moves on to something else. You won’t have much time to get to know your MD. Their knowledge of you will be almost completely from the records. Medicine will largely be practiced “on paper”. It will be more efficient; but will it be better for the patient? My doctor doesn’t think so. He said that he will try to hang in there, but can’t help but consider retiring early, maybe in 5 years or so (when he would be in his early 60s). Medicine is changing, and he may not want to change with it.

My doctor is not the most personable guy in a white coat, but he isn’t so bad over a beer. He’s a smart guy, and that’s why I go to him. Regarding his diagnosis about the future of local health delivery, I can’t help but wonder if he’s right.

Yes, that’s the kind of conversation that can occur at a bar that just happens to be open on Christmas day.