011 – Met State

1980.  You can’t really imagine what it was like and how its face changed with the passage of years and seasons.  I took that job simultaneously with beginning law school nights, right after falling out of the tree and dislocating my right elbow, right after meeting Lynne, right after Steven’s father died.  But here I go again, back to World War II, back to the Bronx and Brooklyn, back to the old countries, back to the cave.  Never should have been in that tree.

Metropolitan State Hospital was huge, immense, occupied hundreds of acres of incredibly beautiful pastures and woodlands in the suburbs just outside of Boston.  There was a history to the place and old photographs and archives to document it.  It was one half do-good social services for the chronically mentally ill and one half Bedlam.  Whoever build the hospital had been inspired by an era of plenty and hope and kindness.  Of a largess that seems by today’s lights boundless.  The physicians were the royalty of this medieval estate.  Their flocks and charges were the abandoned mentally ill.  The staff was the peasantry who minded the flock.  Sometimes it was benign, even healing.  Sometimes it was blackjacks and straightjackets.  Some times it was all lobotomies, or electroshock, brains in formaldehyde in jars, and a potter’s field for the unnamed dead.