The advice came from a doctor I found in the ’90s, pulling a name at random from a phonebook-sized directory. Dr. Lowen had a basement office in Manhattan’s Stuyvesant Town. Physicals lasted an hour. There was no part of my body he didn’t look at or touch.
Dr. Lowen had a sly sense of humor, though I wasn’t always sure when he was joking. At our first appointment, he reviewed my intake form. “Appearance,” he read, then looked up at me and pretended to write: “menacing.”
Once, I came in worried about a mole. He waved it off. I asked where he thought it came from. He pointed to the ceiling and said, “God.”
Later, Dr. Lowen closed his office and moved to a larger medical facility. Everyone had a standard business card. Dr. Lowen kept his original: printed with formulas for calculating cross streets from any Manhattan address, the kind of thing you needed before cell phones.
I don’t need those formulas anymore. But I still get off the subway one stop early and walk. And I think about Dr. Lowen every time I do.
