June 2, 2014 "Soaking Up Sun"

First Words

      …thoughts of an anachronistic, solo pediatrician

                            by Glenn Feole, M.D.

"Be careful too that the reading of your story makes the melancholy 

        laugh and the merry laugh louder," Cervantes, Prologue to Don Quixote

Contact: ishmaelish36@gmail.com

Blog site: ishmaelish36.blogspot.com

Monday, June 2, 2014

Chief Complaint: 

     “When eats, stomach inflates.”

Interesting Name:

     Zingo G.

Anecdote:

(3/2007, South Carolina)  One very nice, soft spoken mother had one last question for me during her child’s exam.  She reached down towards her one year old daughter and started pulling her diaper down.  “She has a rash down there…all over.  It’s been there for a while,” she sighed.  She waved her hand languidly over the baby’s body in bafflement.  “It’s some kind of…I don’t know…some kind of…conjunctivitis or something.”
     March, 2007, South Carolina

Poem:

Soaking Up Sun

By Tom Hennen

Today there is the kind of sunshine old men love,

the kind of day when my grandfather would sit

on the south side of the wooden corncrib where

the sunlight warmed slowly all through the day

like a wood stove.  One after another dry leaves

fell.  No painful memories came.  Everything was

lit by a halo of light.  The cornstalks glinted bright

as pieces of glass.  From the fields and cottonwood

grove came the damp smell of mushrooms, of

things going back to earth.  I sat with my grandfa-

ther then.  Sheep came up to us as we sat there,

their oily wool so warm to my fingers, like a strange

and magic snow.  My grandfather whittled sweet 

smelling apple sticks just to get at the scent.   His

thumb had a permanent groove in it where the

back of the knife blade rested.  He let me listen to

the wind, the wild geese, the soft dialect of sheep,

while his own silence taught me every secret thing

he knew.