Poem after Robert Frost:
If the words of Robert Frost are to be believed, one person cannot tread two roads at once.
But I–in pondering the pathways I have trod, have wondered if that’s true these past few months.
A singe body and a single pair of feet, for certain must be physically confined
To walking just one pathway at a time, but many can be followed in the mind.
When paths diverge amid the oaks and elms, they may appear to lead to different realms. But after we have followed one a spell, we find they really run in parallel.
Or curving out then inward in wide arcs, return to where our journey made its start.
Norman Dovberg, July 19, 2025
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When I was accepted to the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, I was also on the waiting list of Albany Medical College. Although the degree of Doctor of Osteopathy, D.O., and the degree of M.D. had long been recognized by the government as completely equivalent, the allopathic establishment continued to stigmatize D.Os. Had I waited for admission to the allopathic Albany Med, or taken a year of postgraduate study after which Albany would surely have admitted me, I would have graduated with an M.D. and also had been close by to my fiancee during her senior year at Skidmore. I decided on “a bird in the hand…” and headed for Philly. After my first year at PCOM, Sandy and I began married life in the City of Brotherly Love, the place I had been born and raised. There we dwelled until I completed my internship at an affluent suburban hospital whose physicians lived in gorgeous homes in the prestigious “Main Line” neighborhood, drove fancy cars and belonged to exclusive country clubs.
Sandy and I benefitted in many ways by living amid the cultural advantages offered by the big city, but, in the end we longed for a simpler, laid back, lifestyle. When Albany Med accepted me into its psychiatric residency, the first D.O. they admitted to it, we loaded our earthly possessions into a U-Haul truck and headed north, back to the Upstate New York area that had been our college stamping grounds.
Four years previously, shortly after we had settled in Philly, we had the good fortune to befriend a couple who introduced us to the pleasures of vegetable gardening and hiking and camping in the great outdoors. The huge Adirondack State Park nearby New York’s capitol city and good job prospects (and, we like to think we, ourselves) induced them to follow us when we moved. We have been best of friends ever since. Parallel paths, indeed.
I suspect our professional lives and pastimes would have pretty much followed along in parallel as well whether we’d stayed in Philadelphia or not, and our social life would have been similar, differing mainly in the individuals we encountered and befriended. Had we stayed in Philly, we might even have become the avid skiers we became up North, though the greater distance to the mountains would have presented an impediment.
But in one way, the two paths were truly divergent, even if they ultimately made long, wide arcs, for if we had not chosen the path that led to Albany we certainly would never have adopted one particular baby girl who was born there. Not to have been granted that blessing is unimaginable. If there is such a thing as destiny, we did not choose the path we took, but were required by fate to take it.
And as Frost says in “The Road Not Taken,” “that has made all the difference.”
An Author's Inner Mind 