June 10, 2014, Tuesday "My head hurts a little bit"

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

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Blog site: ishmaelish36.blogspot.com

June 10, 2014


Chief Complaint:

     “My head hurts a little bit of a bunch.”

Interesting Name:

     LuLu and Fortune (sisters)

Anecdote:

Max, age eight, told me proudly that he didn't have any cavities or fillings in his teeth.  I asked him what his secret was.  Spinach perhaps, I asked him hopefully, trying to get a plug in for some good nutrition?  He seemed pensive as he calmly sat there thinking.  Finally he said, “No.  I really don't know.  My sister has a lot of cavities.  I think it's because I'm more mature than she is.”  
          Westport, Connecticut, 1986

Poem:

Paterson

Driving down mainstreet

past boarded-up stores

through a cracked window

a child's hardened face

I turn the wheel

to avoid broken bottles

scattered like mines

for the uninitiated

A plastic garbage bag

gently rises and hovers

above the gray asphalt

flexes and leaps

an olympic high jumper

reaching his peak

and stops

gently pirouettes

arms outstretched and floating

pausing for me

dark interior silouehetted

against blue crisp sky

and sinks

Glenn Feole, M.D.

Paterson, New Jersey

November, 1986

Coup d'essai:

    I can still see "snap shots" of life in inner city Paterson where I worked in the Public Health Service paying back my medical school loans.  A Jesuitical experience that I longed for...  Motionless faces of children in grimy windows of tenements just watching as I drove by.  The motion of this delicate plastic bag was like a choreographed dance that had me in awe at a stop light, the gentle breeze softly making it lift and twist delicately, a subtle crescendo of movement, a decrescendo as to music in a ballet.  An irony, a contrast, a sign, an inspiration.