{"id":537,"date":"2013-11-22T15:21:14","date_gmt":"2013-11-22T15:21:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/?p=537"},"modified":"2014-06-14T15:33:05","modified_gmt":"2014-06-14T15:33:05","slug":"is-there-a-doctor-in-the-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/?p=537","title":{"rendered":"IS THERE A DOCTOR IN THE HOUSE? – Ashley Sardoni-Davis"},"content":{"rendered":"

When you are young, you believe in things because you have no reason not to: a fat jolly man riding reindeers across the sky. \u00a0Sure. A bunny that lays eggs in a basket. \u00a0Why not? And when your grandmother\u2019s doctor\u2019s name is Jack Kevorkian, you simply don\u2019t question it.<\/p>\n

When you\u2019re young and hear conversations between grownups, you hang onto every word, hoping to hear forbidden things like curses and dirty jokes you know you aren’t supposed to understand. So when my uncle would come to visit my grandma he would always bring up \u00a0her doctor.\u00a0 It was routinely said that he would call her for everything from a headache to a hangnail. And everyone but my grandmother would laugh, she doesn\u2019t get the joke either<\/i>, I thought. \u201cWhat a nice doctor,\u201d I\u2019d say, always on call waiting to help my grandma. \u201cDr. Jack Kevorkian,\u201d my uncle would say, as if he were a family friend, \u201cI\u2019ll call him right now to come get you.\u201d<\/p>\n

When I was young, Dr. K was on the news. I thought my grandmother was so lucky to have such a famous doctor readily available. It made me hate my own doctor, a large stern Russian woman with hard heavy hands. She made me wait forever in the dark small waiting room. I couldn\u2019t even enjoy the Highlight magazines there because all the hidden objects were always found and circled.<\/p>\n

When I was older and watching the news, I saw Dr. K again. This time I paid close attention to the details, hoping he would mention my grandmother and how she was a star patient, perhaps his favorite. But then, I finally got the joke, not really a joke at all; a decade after the punch line had been delivered.<\/p>\n

\"headshot,<\/a>Ashley Sardoni-Davis teaches creative writing at her alma mater Bloomfield College. She received her M.F.A. in creative writing from Fairleigh Dickinson University in 2009. She is currently working on a collection of memoirs and a short film.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When you are young, you believe in things because you have no reason not to: a fat jolly man riding reindeers across the sky. \u00a0Sure. A bunny that lays eggs in a basket. \u00a0Why not? And when your grandmother\u2019s doctor\u2019s name is Jack Kevorkian, you simply don\u2019t question it. When you\u2019re young and hear conversations [&hellip<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1090,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[47],"class_list":["post-537","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-creative-nonfictionmemoir","tag-art-from-atomic-summer-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=537"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2140,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537\/revisions\/2140"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1090"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}