I was amused, and glad I had my camera with me.
But I was reminded of my feverishly imaginative and impressionable younger self, the boy who turned down invitations to horror movies and watched The Twilight Zone peeking out from behind the big armchair in the living room.
My freakish car accident described earlier this week has let loose a number of medical memories.
When I was growing up in East Orange, our family pediatrician was a kindly German immigrant named Dr. Kornfeld.
He was short and broad-shouldered, with a stooped posture and a jowly face. He wore round metal-rimmed spectacles and spoke with a heavy German accent.
This wasn’t an entirely unfamiliar sound. My maternal grandparents, Louis and Celia Malina, spoke English in the candy store, newsstand and soda fountain they ran in Jersey City, and Yiiddish mixed with English in the apartment upstairs where they raised their daughters, my mother, Rosalind, and my Aunt Gladys.
My mother and my aunt, who spoke excellent English, would sometimes converse in Yiddish with each other or their parents–especially, it seemed to my father, my sister and me, if they didn’t want us to know what they were talking about.
But a heavy German accent was different. This was the mid-1950’s, when in Sunday School Jewish children studied the Holocaust and the founding of Israel not as history but as current events.
It didn’t occur to me at the time, but Dr. Kornfeld most likely was someone who managed to escape from Nazi Germany before it was too late. Though he was kind and gentle, he had a certain no-nonsense clinical manner that did not put me at ease.
And when he said the word "injection," it was all I could do not to run screaming from his office.
Then he would lead me into this dark room lined with glass cabinets full of metal instruments I did not want to know the purpose of. Even after he turned on the light, the room seemed dim and claustrophobic.
The nurse would bring in a kidney-shaped stainless steel bowl in which lay a formidable glass syringe with a gleaming hexagonal steel nut that held the disposable needle in place.
Dr,. Kornfeld would unscrew the small black cap from an amber bottle, press a large cotton ball against the mouth and turn the bottle upside down.
The smell of alcohol would fill the room. The harsh invasive odor and the icy wetness rubbed on my upper arm would again put me on the verge of panic.
Not a callous man, Dr. Kornfeld would tell me to relax and say things like "just a pinch," which would have the effect of reducing my entire field of consciousness to the square inch of pale flesh the needle was about to penetrate.
My fear of injections went away soon after I outgrew Dr. Kornfeld’s services.
When I became a parent many years later, I was amazed at how pediatric offices had changed.
By comparison, Chuck E. Cheese party rooms looked like Alcatraz holding pens.
Instead of the somber Old World panelling of Dr. Kornfeld’s home office, fields of pink and yellow bunnies frolicked across polka-dot wall paper. Instruments were kept out of sight in drawers and Formica cabinets. The waiting room was carpeted. Children’s books and toys were piled everywhere. A TV played cartoons.
One waiting room had a 20-gallon tropical fish tank.
But watching the fish swimming back and forth, looking for something they never seemed to find, reminded me strangely of Dr. Kornfeld’s gloomy office, with its brocaded armchairs facing his imposing carved wood desk with its gooseneck lamp and a rolltop wooden cabinet behind it.
His ground floor office had large windows with venetian blinds that I would try to stare through, searching for sunlight, green leaves on the trees in spring, the roofs of cars driving past.
Nothing felt better than the scrape of my hard-soled Wuensch’s shoes descending the stone steps beyond Dr. Kornfeld’s front door, returning to the scuffed slate sidewalks of old East Orange and the wide door and soft front seat of my mother’s car.