This is the story of one year in the life of a family physician in Belfast, Maine, and his connections not just to that community but to the Human family. In thoughtful, elegiac, often lyrical prose, David Loxterkamp muses about his patients, his colleagues, his family, and his relationship to his Maker as he recalls the daily minutiae that constitute "the bookmarks in a bountiful life, a string of facts and circumstances that have moved beyond the mere documentary" to his discovery of "peace and perspective and companionship along my muddled way."
That way, which is faithfully mapped by journal entries, is populated by the characters he has come to know: the lobstermen, millworkers, church-goers, back-to-the-landers, and "those from away" who share this picturesque, bare-bones, blue-collar piece of Maine coast. We meet Elena, whose fatal Lou Gehrig's disease reduces her speech to air made into letters on a computer screen. Bernitha languishes in a slow death from lung cancer. A laboring mother deals with her pain, uncertainty, and the realized possibility of a deformed infant. Through the dull and the dramatic, the mundane and the magnificent, Loxterkamp finds his way and fashions "an anthem to the Good God" with deeply moving, "everyday stories of an irrepressible human spirit, a spirit refined by adversity and renewed by love.