On Shrinks and Singers

“You really should review Iguanas,” I said to my shrink, to whom I had given a draft (and a very rough one at that) on my first visit early last year.

“I’m not gonna commit to that,” he said.

‘Hmmm, that’s very close to where “no” starts,’ I thought.

Well, those long years of toiling in the Wal-Mart fields taught me a few tricks.

“You know, your life is not gonna be fulfilled until your read that book,” I said.

He just laughed.

I should have known he wouldn’t buy in. True, he is a bit unschooled. He has only one diploma in his office, unlike the dozens any respectable doctor would have. So apparently he just attended that little school up there by the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts. You know, the one founded by…

…John Harvard.

Right—so we can move that concern to the inactive list.

If you’ve never done it, the process of seeing a shrink is curiously personal and impersonal. There’s the shrink, who knows a lot about you. There’s you, who may know very little about the shrink. It’s a one-way window—the psychiatrist peering in, the patient seeing his own reflection.

Which may have been why I felt like a bit of a stalker, when I spent half an hour this morning this morning researching the guy. I had looked him up before my first visit; you really should know into whose hands—rather brains—you’re entrusting your psyche.

Here’s what I read:

Alan del Castillo was raised in Puerto Rico, the son of British and Spanish parents. He has pursued a rich variety of musical disciplines parallel to his medical career. He has traveled often in Latin America, absorbing musical influences from throughout the continent. He first fell in love with South American music when he was studying medicine while living in England. There he met Chilean refugees who deeply influenced him. He performed classical music with the University College Choir and Chorus of the Philharmonic Orchestra of London for 3 years, as well as recording for the BBC. After moving from London to Boston, he continued to play South American music with the trio Andanzas, recording and touring widely. He currently lives in Puerto Rico, where he practices psychiatry, though more often than not he comes to the U.S. to tour with Sol y Canto, particularly since the 1999 release of their CD, "En todo momento," which prominently features Alan as a vocalist. A talented singer, Alan's soulful quena and ocarina playing is one of his fortes.

OK—I’m a cellist, he’s a singer; that might work. Then I met the guy, liked him (which is nice) and trusted him (which is everything).

Well, does he pass the litmus test? That is, is he one YouTube? (Confession, I am not—so who am I to judge?)

The answer—very appropriate for a psychiatrist—is maybe. Sol y Canto is there, and is (with the exception of the songs aimed at children) wonderful. It’s clear—these are talented and committed people, the Amadors and company who make up the group. Rosi Amador is one hell of a singer, and her husband Brian is a great guitar player.

And they’ve attracted attention—garnering reviews from Billboard, The Christian Science Monitor, The Washington Post, and People en español.

Right, but where’s the good doctor, with his soulful quena and ocarina? In addition to “En todo momento” he also has recorded “El doble de amigos.” So I went to the group’s official site, logically if not very originally called solycanto.com, and listened to the little snippets they give you as musical samples. Besides Rosi, there’s another singer, a tenor.

But is it del Castillo or Brian Amador?

Fitting, somehow, that I don’t know, as I also don’t the man. I get glimpses, of course—he is blessedly far from being the sphinx that most Freudians are. He’s a gentle man, with a dry sense of humor, and—says Raf, who met him at a party—a very good mimic. He hates to drive, and thinks of retiring in a small Spanish town. He gets my being gringo, but can become very Puerto Rican on seeing an old friend—a receptionist who used to work in the office. He’s my age, but is still running around with a backpack—hasn’t he figured out he’s not back in Harvard Yard?

He uses silence, of course, as a good shrink should do. Which means that he’s quite happy to let the silence grow—he doesn’t return the conversational ball immediately. He’ll wait and see—is there more?

Or perhaps he’s reflecting, testing my comments in his mind. Or observing.

And though I suspect the thrill of being a shrink may have dimmed some for him, he does it with consummate skill. I’m lucky to have him.

Now, doctor, what about that review?

¡Basta ya!

Let me tell anyone reading out there a little secret.

The world is a mess. Our country is a mess. Yes, the economy is slowly improving; some of us even have jobs! But there’s lots of stuff to do. We should be worrying—and maybe acting?—on global warming. We’ve got big issues like the widening disparity in wealth, the horrendous question of the national debt, terrible problems in our mental health system, to say nothing of a huge group of vets who are facing posttraumatic stress disorder.

Into this picture steps Dianne Feinstein, to whom I cheerfully gave four minutes of my time this morning (not, happily, having a job to have to get to…). 

Well, you can imagine that of course I like Dianne Feinstein—I was happy to be the choir at which she preached. Though I did find myself getting a bit annoyed with her. She was rational, she had done her homework, she was explaining one of the criticisms of the 1993 ban on automatic weapons and going into great detail about how gun manufacturers had gone around the law by removing one bolt or piece on the weapon, and boom! Legal!

So why was I annoyed? Don’t I want my senators to be intelligent, articulate, prepared? (Answer, for those who may need it—yes. Actually—with a nod southwards here—I’d really like my president to have the stated characteristics…)

Guys—how much time are we gonna spend on this issue? How many gazillion hours are we going to waste talking rationally to zealots who will never, never, never change their minds on the issue?

Oh, and by the way, didn’t we use to have a democracy, before the NRA roared into town, bought all the senators and representatives they could, and cowed all the rest? And weren’t there guys called journalists, who let us all know what was happening?

I spent four years of wincing as I watched Obama trying to reason with Tea Party republicans. And I felt the same way—almost—just now with Feinstein.

Well, well—I turned from that to the clip below. I knew that the fifteen-year old kid in New Mexico had taken his family out. And I know that apparently he had thought to go see my old pals at his local Wal-Mart—and no, not for those every-day low prices! He had the minivan all packed with his then-dead dad’s semiautomatic weapons.

So what happens? He decides to go to his church, instead. And spends the day there, hanging with his friends and girlfriend. A parishioner tells the pastor—something isn’t quite right with the boy’s family.

Well, by one of those things I call coincidence and more churchy people do not, there’s a guy on hand doing a drill on what happens if there’s a mass murderer in church. (Pretty obvious, I’d say—dive under the pews and pray!) So the guy giving the talk / drill speaks to the fifteen-year old kid, and they decide to go check it out. The kid has said, “yeah, I came home and discovered my whole family dead.” But he hadn’t called the cops, or told anybody but—presumably—his friends. Somewhere on the way to the murder scene, the former cop / now security consultant gets the whim-whams. He feels evil in the back seat, where the kid is riding. So he stops the car, pulls out his cellular, calls 911.

“Do you feel that you may have prevented the next Sandy Hook,” the reporter asks the pastor. The pastor thinks maybe.

Wrong question.

Well, we now live in the land of Google, where most questions now have answers. And so I looked into it—are guns an effective means of self-defense? Jack, my father who had a gun (kept in his underwear drawer—Sigmund? You in the house?) always said no. You hear a noise in the living room, it’s two in the morning, you get up, see the bastard, lift your gun, squeeze the trigger and BAM!

Killed the fucker!

Your fifteen-year old son, who had a little craving for cookies and milk.

And Google, predictably, has the answers. Guess what? According to something called guns4U.com (invented, but you get what I mean) the answer is….

OK, scroll down to a study by Harvard University. Of course the NRA won’t trust it, but the rest of us do. So what do they say? 

 Across states, more guns = more unintentional firearm deaths

We analyzed data for 50 states over 19 years to investigate the relationship between gun prevalence and accidental gun deaths across different age groups. For every age group, where there are more guns there are more accidental deaths.  The mortality rate was 7 times higher in the four states with the most guns compared to the four states with the fewest guns.

Miller, Matthew; Azrael, Deborah; Hemenway, David. Firearm availability and unintentional firearm deaths. Accident Analysis and Prevention. 2001; 33:477-84.

Now can we get down to work?