Closet Anthropologist

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The other day I found my lab coat hiding under an old holiday sweater on a closet shelf and I tried it on just to see if it might still fit after all these years. Goodness knows why I’ve kept it - the shoulders are much too tight now and I would never be able to button it over my clothes as I once did, never mind the prominent ink-stain on the pocket and the grimy sleeves, frayed from a thousand turns in the washing machine. The truth is I still love the coat.

I acquired the lab coat early on, during my second stint as a medical office manager for a large family practice. Back then, the crisp, white coat was a prop of sorts, a pretension, required by the office I worked for even though it bore little relation to my front-office duties. Yet from the first day I put it on, the garment made me feel…well, medical. Smarter. Heroic. Altruistic. As if any minute I might be called upon to dash out and save someone’s life, or head over to my microscope and discover a new bacterium. I developed a new lift to my posture, an assured, professional tone when I talked to the physicians and patients in the office. Certainly, Mrs. Green, I’ll schedule that ultrasound right away and check on the results of your CBC. I worked long hours, a few of them unpaid, not only because I enjoyed the setting and found my job intriguing, but because the coat called up something noble and responsible in me. I was, if not exactly a healer, a helper: someone who could tend to others with care and concern, do the right work for the right reasons at the right time. When I put on my lab coat in the morning, I felt like a better person altogether.

My lab coat is an old friend. Professional organizers, in their infinite wisdom, dictate that any article of clothing in our closets which hasn’t been worn in a year must be discarded. I greet this advice with about the same equilibrium as would a museum curator. (“They’re so right, that ancient Persian wedding cup hasn’t been used in quite awhile. Let’s toss it in the giveaway bin, along with the Van Gogh and the Grecian urn and the Chinese horse statue from 800 A.D.”)