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
Wednesday, June 4, 2014
Chief Complaint:
“My tongue is allergic to vegetables.”
Stormy Sky
in the park in Boston. Moving.
Anecdote:
Michael was just a newborn when the very soft-spoken foster Mother brought him in. As the months and years crept by, he accumulated a long, complicated history of multiple allergies, formula changes, an immune deficiency evaluation, wheezing, allergic rhinitis, bronchitis, otitis and a myriad of antibiotics. Each visit was a recapitulation of my in-depth knowledge in all areas of my pediatric training. It seemed like I was always trotting out of the exam room and grabbing my latest handout on the intricacies of allergy prevention or hydrolyzed protein formulas.
The Foster Mother always sat there demurely, gently nodding as she took in each detail of my intricate instructions. Her clothes were fresh, her back straight and legs held with knees touching. Michael always sat there placidly, a blank stoic stare on his infant and then toddler face, dressed in crisp immaculate clothes, his health balanced on this fragile scale of antibiotics and other medications.
One day, when he was almost four years old, he came in and was preceded by a loud, brash cowboy boot wearing woman in her twenties who strutted in as she bellowed to Michael, “Hop up on that stretcher right now you little cowboy! I said now!” She had a slight grin on her face…sort of. I could smell manure on her worn, mud-caked boots as she shot past me with big, powerful strides. Her hair was brown and straggly. It had knots in it. She wore a red plaid wrinkled shirt and worn jeans that clung to her heavily muscled thighs. Her face was weathered, just like the inside of her lungs.
I didn’t recognize Michael. He was…happy. He had mud on his face and his hair hadn’t been combed for weeks. He squealed and lept up onto the stretcher as his Mother, ignoring me, put him in a half-nelson and pinned him to the exam table. They were looking into each others eyes, nose to nose, yelling and laughing. He was not wheezing. I thought to myself, “He is not going to survive.”
Well, he survived and thrived. No more medications. No more allergy prevention handouts. You might call it exposure therapy as he scampered after his Mother as she shoed horses and did other things that cowgirls do. I got to know his Mother over the years and she has a gentle heart behind the leather vest. But I sure miss Michael. I haven’t seen him much since then.
December, 2011, South Carolina
Poetry
Cowboy Boots
for my Father-in-law
and best friend,
George Dewey Clark, Jr.
We took him feet first out the front. He should have had
his cowboy boots on. The New Jersey sky he loved
was darkening, the black hearse crouched on the well worn driveway.
The undertakers laughed as they closed the doors. So I looked back
by the garage where he had listened to the big bands on Saturday nights
the steak sizzled on the half-cut industrial drum
the wine and whiskey flowed, the cigar smoke drifted
Year after year glided by as we talked and changed.
It was there I learned how to laugh, in the evenings by the glowing logs.
My wife smiled as Mr. Clark whisked me away
for late night Creme de Banana by the blazing fire
in the golden oaked, rough beamed kitchen
Willie Nelson and a dance with the girls in the living room
at 2 a.m. And singing and banging pots at the New Year
and stories and more stories about the past, about cowboys,
about New Jersey and tobacco and the ports of World War Two.
The last story was about dying and how to do it. I watched.
A shower, more pillows, an accident in the bathroom. No matter.
Like St. Francis' kiss, like Theresa crying in Calcutta,
his groaning body was transformed before my eyes.
It was Guantanomo bay, 1944, again.
A Cuban cigar, lots of wine, singing
and, of course, stories of beautiful women.
Thank you's for my help, a look,
a bond between buddies going through their last battle together.
So I read to him my stories this time. The circle
was closing on twenty-one years of tales. I told him
how much I'd learned by watching and absorbing his life
an Apache warrior at the feet of the wrinkled man
by the dying fire on the wide Wyoming plain.
And by the garage was Cal with an empty bottle
of beer, a rocket waiting, a match cracked alive.
The hearse rolled down the sloping driveway slowly,
the flag he saluted by the well house, lifted out of the way,
was at half mast, as the rocket sped to the waiting sky
in a widening gyre, a deafening roar, and exploded
as we watched him slowly leave his beloved farmhouse
the dying sparklers hanging limply from our hands.
Glenn Feole
December 5, 1996
Westport, Ct.
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