Emory Adjacency: Med Students and Doctors

Lyrics

Six fifteen.
The air still holds the night.
Pine needles and car exhaust.
This is the hour of the crossing.

From the brick split-levels built in 1956,
from the small ranches bought with the G.I. Bill,
they come.
White coats folded over an arm,
or already on, flapping like tired wings.
The residents, the students, the fellows.
Their keychains jingle a quiet rhythm
against the morning.

Just a walk across North Decatur Road.
From a borrowed bed to a histology lab.
From a front lawn needing water
to a fourth-floor ward.
This deliberate adjacency,
this planned ecology
of a neighborhood tethered
to a school of medicine.

I remember the pathology residents.
Their black leather bags, worn at the corners.
Carried a faint, sharp smell even out here.
Formalin.
The ghost of the anatomy lab,
walking home with them to a dinner someone else made.
A strange perfume for a subdivision
dreamed up in 1954.

Just a walk across North Decatur Road.
From a borrowed bed to a histology lab.
From a front lawn needing water
to a fourth-floor ward.
This deliberate adjacency,
this planned ecology
of a neighborhood tethered
to a school of medicine.

And others walk this same path.
The night-shift nurses in their blue scrubs,
walking home as the doctors walk in.
The hospital aides, speaking Spanish on the phone,
waiting for the bus that stops right here.
Their paths cross for a moment on the curb,
a whole ecosystem held
in the quiet of these streets.

The walk back is different.
Smells of brisket from the Kroger.
The white coats are gone.
The black bags are set down by the door.
And Emory is just a low hum
on the other side of the road.
Just a neighbor, sleeping.