FROM HIS TINY room in the Coates Hotel on Concord Street in South St. Paul, my father looked down on a brave new world, the heart of which was Obert’s Lunch. He worked two grueling janitorial jobs during the week, took some night classes, and peeled potatoes at Obert’s on Sundays. His cause: college tuition. During the week Obert’s was a bustling place. Regulars who worked in the stockyards or at one of the packing plants came in for breakfast and left with their lunch buckets and thermoses. They returned for a leisurely evening meal. Many luxuriated over one of Obert’s giant T-bone steaks. Nothing fancy: a mountain of fried potatoes, four slices of bread, and all the coffee one could drink for 45 cents. Beef or pork roast with mashed potatoes and gravy was a 40-cent option. Harry O’Shigley was the chef, a man with a massive torso placed on a pair of short legs. Oscar Nelson, a thin small-boned man, ate little else than hot milk and toast, known cheerfully at Obert’s as Grave Yard Stew. The Wee Cook lived at the fire station, but drove a city truck. Some years back his daughter had refused to let him see his newborn grandson because he came drunk. He had not touched a drop since that day, but the ravages of an earlier life were evident. Billy Muir, better known as the Windbreak because of the primitive shelter he had built for himself on the Mississippi flats, was a general handyman and a homespun philosopher. Persons who wanted his services made contact through Obert’s. A Reverend Christianson, known for his conservative views, came by one Sunday to talk to Billy about some repair work.

“What’s cook’n in the parish?” asked Billy.

“We need a hundred good new members,” said the parson.

“Why don’t you get a hundred bad ones and make good ones out of ’em?” said Billy.

My father took warmly to the splendid riffraff he found himself among, to Happy Kramer, Push ’Em Up Tony, Jerry the Dip, and Putsy Schultz, characters who would brighten his inner landscape for the rest of his life. They are the creatures of a young man’s perception, preserved forever in the glow of his first steps away from home. My Concord Street was New York City, a town loaded with the vibrant, the eccentric, and the outré. In the first two months after my arrival, I met Boris Izcovich, a homeless, alcoholic former cellist; Marian Pibble, the cheery one-eyed cashier at Bubba’s Bagels; and Big Rita, the first drag queen I’d ever laid eyes on. Only a couple of inches shorter than I am, she liked to stop me on the street, lean her head on my shoulder, and coo, “I just love a big man.” My first super was a character named Dumpy Gonzales, who repeatedly dared me to heal him. “Hey, young doctor man, I got a pain in my knee. Take a look down my throat, will ya?” An ambulatory catalogue of complaints, from imaginary tumors to fantasy hair loss, Dumpy was a medical student’s nightmare, but I remember him and all the rest of them fondly nevertheless. They were so vividly un-Minnesotan, so un-Lutheran, so unknown to me and, as such, they have lingered as the radiant symbols of my urban initiation. I am less impressionable now, more prone to tune out the mad diversity of human life that confronts me every day on the subway and in the streets. I am inhabited by my patients, who have spoken every language and come from every walk of life. They have provided me with as much variety and color as I could possibly want.