June 17, 2014 "Echo"

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

June 17, 2014

Chief Complaint:

     “My tongue is allergic to vegetables.”

Interesting Name:

     Echo

Anecdote:

     One Father was telling me what medicine he had been giving his one year old.  Instead of "Nitelite" he said, with almost a wistful tone, "Nite-life." 
     Westport, Connecticut, 1990's

Poetry:

X-RAY

Some prowl sea-beds, some hurtle to a star

and, mother, some obsessed turn over every stone

or open graves to let that starlight in.

There are men who would open anything.

From my journal, often gentle statements
during yoga asanas at retreats.

Harvey, the circulation of the blood,

and Freud, the circulation of our dreams,

pried honourably and honoured are 

like all explorers.  Men who’d open men.

And those others, mother, with diseases

like great streets named after them: Addison,

Parkinson, Hodgkin – physicians who’d arrive

fast and first on any sour death-bed scene.

I am their slowcoach colleague, half afraid,

incurious.  As a boy it was so: you know how

my small hand never teased to pieces

an alarm clock or flensed a perished mouse.

And this larger hand’s the same.  It stretches now

out from a white sleeve to hold up, mother,

your X-ray to the glowing screen.  My eyes look 

but don’t want to; I still don’t want to know.

   By Dannie Abse, from New and Collected Poems

Dannie Abse is a physician in Wales and I was fortunate enough to come across his work in a medical journal.  Poignant, sensitive poetry from a doctor's perspective - I have long admired his work.

Quote:

To paraphrase Tristram Shandy, "Take sorrow, and pleasure, horizontally." 

Coup d'essai:

Favorite Musician/song:

    Bill Evans - jazz piano.  You Must Believe in Spring

     A tie between Thelonious Monk and Evans as my all time favorite jazz musician.  His sensitivity at the keyboard is legendary and breath taking as opposed to Monk's shear genius and lack of self-consciousness as he creates at the keyboard with such abandon.
     I asked my Uncle Ray, a professional jazz pianist in Texas and a mentor in my own musical development, who his five favorite jazz musicians were and he said, "Bill Evans, Bill Evans, Bill Evans, Bill Evans and Bill Evans."  During high school, he visited me and said, "Glenn, you have to listen to other jazz besides Monk.  It's like eating whipped cream all day."   Once he showed up in my living room in Connecticut, and in a very mysterious, zen like fashion, his gentle eyes and smile, simply handed me a CD without saying anything.  The only one he gave me, Bill Evans' You Must Believe in Spring.   A piece of gold.  More on Monk later...

Favorite Book/author:

     Tristram Shandy but Lawrence Sterne
He influenced so many people (read by Wittgenstein, Thomas Jefferson and Nietche…to name a few);  Vonnegut-like in his hilarious insights and words spoken directly to the reader.   

Favorite Movie/DVD:

     Music From the Inside Out
     If you love music in general, classical music in particular, this is a superb DVD.  If follows several members of the Philadelphia Symphony, asking them why and how they developed their passion for music.  It crescendoes (for me) into a tender ending featuring a Brahms Symphony that has become one of my favorite…a thing of great beauty.