Snorth Dakota

Once upon a time I was a member of a small multispecialty medical group in a small town in South Dakota. One of our perennial problems was recruitment of new physicians, even though the town was pleasant enough, and was in a scenic part of the state. The problem was, we were in South Dakota.

So when we finally had a physician come to look us over, we often looked beyond aspects of their personalities that might be thought of as irregular in order to add their expertise to our mix of doctors. But there were limits to which we would go. One example follows.

A middle-aged orthopedic surgeon came a-looking. We already had one physician with that specialty on staff, but being the Lone Ranger was growing tiresome to him, so we wanted desperately to find him a companion. Someone who spoke his language and could share the burden of being on call. This candidate looked good. He was well-trained, with good references, a personable man with only two areas that were worrisome.

The first was that he loved sky-diving as a hobby. From the clinic’s standpoint, if you have a precious resource you hated to think of them jumping out of airplanes where gravity and a recalcitrant parachute could put you right back where you’d been before they came.

He still might have made the cut if it wasn’t for the fact that he liked to sky-dive in the nude. With his girlfriend. And take photographs as he fluttered down.

Somehow this last bit of business was too much for our board of governors, and they told him goodbye. Our clinicians didn’t think of themselves as a prudish bunch, not really, at least not when measured against the average American. Oh, we had our occasional affairs and office intrigues, but as the rest of the world knows, our country has a problem with nakedness at any time outside of infancy. We are a clothed people, and that was that.

That seemed easy enough to accommodate, and he was helped to find a home on the edge of town where confrontations would be highly unlikely. We were also sensitive that the deck not be on the west side of the home, where our prevailing westerly winds could be a problem.

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There were two things on Monday that prompted an unscheduled trip to Paonia, a village an hour’s drive from Paradise. The first was that a friend of Robin’s had discovered a restaurant there that she thought was special, and the second was that the weather was a cold (but welcome) drizzle. So off we went. We’d visited this town a couple of times before, but hadn’t really given it a close look, usually we were on our way to somewhere else and stopped for a coffee or something similar.

But this day we located the restaurant, which is called Nido, and at the waitress’ suggestion, ordered the bubblegum plum carnitas tacos on soft corn tortillas. Its ingredients were listed as “crispy pork, local bubblegum plum/jalapeno jam, mixed greens, miso molé mayo, b.p. hot sauce, plum pickle, and cilantro.”

There’s not much to say except that we’d never had a taco like them, and I mean this in the best possible way. They were lovely to look at, actually, and so tasty … excuse me while I salivate at the memory. ‘Twas real food artistry.

Paonia is a town that has a definite cultural vibe. It is artist-friendly, DEI enough to give a Republican acid reflux just thinking about it, with some unobtrusive modern elements nestled among leftovers of the coal mining town it once was. The depressing aroma of gentrification is still absent.

Now, I asked myself, when was the last time I dined at a place that offered such options? NEVER! That’s when! What are these people, anyway, socialists? Sheesh! Where were they when I was an impoverished college student barely surviving on the dollar bag lunches dispensed from a campus food truck?

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It is almost beyond belief that we are still talking about child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church as an unresolved issue. But the gaps in supervision haven’t been closed, the new perpetrators keep coming, and the old perpetrators die of old age without ever being held to account for their crimes. The Church has been a foot-dragger all along, and this includes Pope Francis, who started out better than his predecessors in this regard, but ultimately failed in his duty to protect the children of the Church. And he had nearly twelve years to do it.

This is a church that has completely lost its way and doesn’t seem to want to find it. Until and only if it does, no child should be left alone with any member of the Catholic clergy. Not for a moment.

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