Dragged Off: Refusing to Give Up My Seat on the Way to the American Dream by David Dao

Author:David Dao [Dao, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Essays, Civil Rights, Self-Help, Political Science, Law, General, Human Rights
ISBN: 9781642504019
Google: -TQ5zQEACAAJ
Publisher: Mango Media
Published: 2021-03-15T08:17:58+00:00

Chapter Twenty-One

After I voluntarily gave up my medical license in 2003, I had a lot of free time on my hands. And with my increased isolation from friends and professional associates, I found myself spending a lot of time at home with nothing to do. This is when I began watching more television.

Some of my favorite programs were cooking shows. Before meeting Teresa, I’d spent several years living on my own and had become quite a good cook. In the past, I’d told people that I wanted to become a professional chef one day, but I’d never meant it as more than a joke. After all, a chef needed to attend school to train in the culinary arts. On top of that, I loved being a doctor and would never have seriously considered giving up that career to be a chef.

But as I watched one cooking show after another, I realized that I had the time, the money, and the desire to pursue this completely different career path. And I needed to do something with my time for at least the next two years. So I enrolled in the culinary arts program at Sullivan University in early 2005 and began classes that fall.

Ordinarily, I would have discussed this sort of career shift with my wife prior to enrolling in classes, but Teresa still wasn’t speaking with me. At that point, she still believed that I had been involved in a prescription fraud scheme with BC, and I honestly don’t know whether a not-guilty verdict on all the charges would have changed her opinion. For that matter, I had no idea how my children, patients, or fellow doctors would have felt if the verdict had been different. In a way, I wanted to go back to school not only to learn a new skill, but also to cultivate new friendships with people whose opinion of me hadn’t been changed by the trial.

Given my medical background (especially my surgical work), I picked up cutting and knife skills quite easily. I had plenty of practice holding a blade steady in my hand. And after all the medical terminology I’d needed to memorize, recipes were easy to remember.

But my background in music was what I feel helped me the most in studying culinary arts. Cooking is far more like an art form than a science. You need to be precise (both in cutting and measuring), but you also need a passion to create something new. As I continued with my studies, I found that each chef produced meals that were uniquely his or her own. Think of it like a dozen blues musicians all playing the same standard: the notes are always arranged in the same order, but each musician produces a version that no one else can duplicate.

Besides my background in medicine and music, it turned out that my background in marathon running also helped me become a better chef. At fifty-six, I was at least twice as old as most of the other students in the program.

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