At the hospital vending machine.
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I miss old Mr. Clifton. He was what many Southerners would call a tad eccentric. Tall, lanky, snow-white hair and goatee. He looked a little like a skinny Robert E. Lee. Raised on a small farm in Texas, he had attended college in a day when not many young men did. Already working, he was too old for the draft in WW2, so he volunteered. A microbiologist by trade, he served in the South Pacific during the war. To be honest, I'm not sure if he was Army or Navy, as he never talked a lot about the war, other than how drunk you could get on the hooch the marines made.
At one time, he was a very big man, but a heart attack knocked him flat. Being before the days of thoracic surgery on the heart, the docs told him his best chance of living a normal lifespan was to lose a lot of weight and mild exercise. Mr. Clifton lost well over a hundred pounds. He biked or walked everywhere, rain, shine or storm.
He was definitely an Anglophile. Dressed like an Englishman, invariably with a turdmuckle dunn, Harris Tweed jacket and a cocksucker cap. He and his brother, along with their wives, would meet up in the UK every other year to do durn near anything. Explore castles and ruins. Pub crawl. Bicycle through the countryside. See the shows in London. He always thought it was hilarious that his brother got mugged multiple times...His brother dressed like the prototypical Texas rancher or oilman...Jeans, custom boots and big, black Stetson. The UK thieves thought the brother had money.
Mr. Clifton could quote Bergey's or Shakespeare at length, could recite a decent amount of English poetry and knew more dirty jokes and tidbits than any man I've ever known. He used to swear what attracted his wife to him, was the handkerchief worn in his breast jacket pocket, after he had wiped his crotch with it...Early pheromones, Napoleon style, I guess. He lived in the last house on a dead-end street, a house that looked like it had been transported out of the English countryside. A stone cottage - something you don't see much of down here - half covered in ivy, with a black wrought-iron gate, a red brick walkway with roses on either side.
He established four hospital microbiology labs that I know of and was responsible for many of us learning the practical aspects of that area of the laboratory. Old skool style. Nothing like staggering in after one too many the night before and have that old man stick a Mueller-Hinton damn near up your nose, waxing on about how much haemophilus smells like wet dog fur. He knew what he was doing, you could tell by that shit-eating grin he wore, when he did it. He thought it was hilarious. But Mr. Clifton was never too busy to answer a question. And his work was meticulous, up until the day he retired.
Which was not until he was 80. He'd cut his hours down to a half-day, but he still came to work, five days a week. Sometimes more. Rain, shine or storm. Often I'd pass him, bicycling down Main Street, usually within 30 minutes of the crack of dawn, white hair poking out from under his cap, flitting in the breeze.
I miss that old man...
