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:
“Parents speaks well English”
(A note written in the clinical alert section by a provider regarding a new Hispanic family)
Interesting Name:
Mute
Anecdote:
The cute four year old girl was chewing her gum quietly as I started to examine her. When I went to look in her mouth, I saw a large wad of fluorescent green gum and asked if she wouldn't mind taking it out. She looked at me pensively and, every so slightly, nodded yes. All of a sudden she gave a loud, violent cough and the gum flew out of her mouth and wrapped itself around the long tube of my stethoscope. It was so sticky that it took me a few minutes to patiently pry it off.
When I finally removed it from my stethoscope, Sarah quickly clutched it and threw it back into her mouth. (December, 2007, South Carolina)
Of Love and Other Disasters
The punch-press operator from Flint
met the assembler from West Virginia
in a bar near the stadium. Neither
had anything in mind, so they conversed
about the upcoming baseball season
about which neither cared. We could
be a couple, he thought, but she was
all wrong, way too skinny. For years
he’d had an image of the way a woman
should look, and it wasn’t her, it wasn’t
anyone he’d ever known, certainly not
his ex-wife, who’d moved back south
to live with her high-school sweetheart.
About killed him. I don’t need that shit,
He almost said aloud, and then realized
she’d been talking to someone, maybe
to him, about how she couldn’t get
her hands right, how the grease ate
so deeply into her skin it became
a part of her, and she put her hand,
palm up, on the bar and pointed
with her cigarette at the deep lines
the work had carved. “The life line,”
he said, “which one is that?” “None,”
she said, and he noticed that her eyes
were hazel flecked with tiny spots
of gold, and then – embarrassed – looked
back at her hand, which seemed tiny
and delicate, the fingers yellowed
with calluses but slender and fine.
She took a paper napkin off the bar,
spit on it and told him to hold still
while she carefully lifted his glasses
up on his forehead, leaving him half
blind, and wiped something off
above his left cheekbone. “There,”
she said, lowering the glasses, “I
got it,” and even with his glasses on
what she showed him was nothing
he could see. He thought, better
get out of here before it’s too late, but
knew too late was what he wanted.
By Philip Levine
from The New Yorker (in the book The Best American Poetry, 2008)
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