rekkidblogga

Home base

Most people were born in public hospitals. I wasn't. I was born at Fort McPherson, right outside Atlanta. And I mean RIGHT outside - like, with the city limits on the other side of the high, chain-link, barbed-wire fence. The house I grew up in from 1972-81 was within walking distance of post.

We went there every day to buy clothes at the PX (Post Exchange), feed the ducks in the duck pond, bank, attend Mass on Sunday, go bowling, wait in hour-long lines for gas, go to the doctor, steal abandoned balls off the golf course, play Frisbee on the 1880s-era parade field, send mail, see movies at the Post Theater and play in the swimming pool. I didn't know what it was to shop in a regular grocery store until I was in my teens because we'd always bought all our groceries at the Commissary. My niece and I got our Cher dolls, our Donny and Marie dolls, our Six Million Dollar Man and Bionic Woman dolls and anything else that was a must-have cool kids' toy in the '70s at the Toy Store on Post. To us, going "on Post" was fun - an adventure. We loved seeing the men and women in uniform in this special community that we were part of.

They closed the hospital at Fort Mac, as it's called by the locals in East Point, the city where I grew up that's right next door and that stands to suffer the most when the historic old post is closed in the future, long ago. I keep thinking that, like a good, responsible military kid, I should make arrangements to drop by the 1940s-era, red brick U.S. Army Health Clinic there and pick up my official Medical Record, documenting my medical life from age 0 to around nine, when we moved and I started seeing civilian doctors.

Before Fort McPherson is finally shuttered, I will pick up my records the way I remember my mother doing it so many times when I was small -- early in the morning when the Records Department opened, with proper ID at the ready, silently waiting her turn in line and with the understanding that uniformed military personnel always, without question, have priority.

posted by rekkidbraka @ 12:04 AM