I keep telling myself that I’m going to relate the tales of my autobiography in chronological sequence, but I never seem to get around to it.

Meanwhile, I feel like mentioning a particularly memorable physical.

It was shortly after I had moved to Philadelphia in August of 1980 and went to work at what was then the Defense Personnel Support Center at 20th and Oregon in South Philadelphia, the place that most folks refer to as the Quartermaster, even to this day, though it’s long since been closed down. (Last week when I had the emergency with the clogged drain, one of the workers was asking me where I used to work and when I began to explain, he said, “Oh, you mean the Quartermaster.”)

I thought I might have some documentation of exactly when the physical took place because I still have my folder of all the personnel actions from my time there, but I went through it last evening and couldn’t find anything.

Anyway, for some reason I needed to have a physical conducted by a government physician, so several other of the recently hired employees and I were loaded onto a bus and taken to— 

—the Philadelphia Navy Yard.

Now as you know I’m not religious, so I don’t hold anything sacred.

But for me and probably for many science fiction fans of a certain age, the Philadelphia Navy Yard comes as close to being hallowed ground as anything.

That’s because during World War II, the Philadelphia Navy Yard served as the employer for not one, not two, but three giants of science fiction.

Yes, there they are: Robert A Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp, and Isaac Asimov.

OK, so perhaps it’s not hallowed ground, but still, I was at least a little bit awestruck to be walking over the same grounds as those three, particularly Heinlein and Asimov, my two absolute favorite writers in that genre.

As to the physical?

Oh, who remembers that?

Well, wait a bit. Yes, I do recall one silly little thing.

The doctor was a woman, and she had an accent of some kind that I wasn’t able to place, and I remember that she made a notation on one of the forms that had me curious: w.d.

What did “w.d.” mean?

I don’t know why that stood out because I couldn’t have seen everything that she wrote, but for some reason I saw that and it piqued my curiosity. What Latin phrase was it an abbreviation for?

So I asked her.

She laughed.

She told me it referred to my abdomen, which was “well developed”.

Huh.

I don’t think anyone, before or since, has ever referred to me physically as well developed.