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
July 12, 2014 Saturday
Chief Complaint: (written on the chart before I go in the room)
“eats like a hog”
Interesting Name:
Waqar
Anecdote:
I was talking with one Mother on the phone about her child's medication and I asked her how often she was giving it. She told me, “Oh, I don’t know. I don't understand that ‘bid, tid, qid’ stuff.”
Westport, Connecticut, 1990's
Poetry:
The History Teacher
Trying to protect his students' innocence
he told them the Ice Age was really just
the Chilly Age, a period of a million years
when everyone had to wear sweaters.
And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age,
named after the long driveways of the time.
The Spanish Inquisition was nothing more
that an outbreak of questions such as
"How far is it from here to Madrid?"
"What do you call the matador's hat?"
The War of the Roses took place in a a garden,
and the Enola Gay dropped one tiny atom
on Japan.
The children would leave his classroom
for the playground to torment the weak
and the smart,
mussing up their hair and breaking their glasses,
while he gathered up his notes and walked home
past flower beds and white picket fences,
wondering if they would believe that soldiers
in the Boer War told long, rambling stories
designed to make the enemy nod off.
by Billy Collins, from Questions About Angels
Coup d'essai:
PART XIV of XX: Migrant Health Clinic Journal
9/10/02:
I’m in Salemburg today and at lunch time I took a drive through the country. The town has a main street with a barbershop and even a tiny Salemburg Bank that advertises CD rates outside its front door on a banner. The elementary school is new and large, and set alongside a trailer park, which in turn is nestled in a large corn field. (I had never seen a trailer park until I left Connecticut.)
I continued on that long, idling road going an amazing twenty miles an hour behind a woman in an old sedan, a native Salemburger. She didn’t seem to mind that I was behind her. There’s just a different sense of time out here. I have taken to playing the beautiful soundtrack to The Straight Story while driving on these country roads, which typifies this peaceful farmland with its slow, deep rhythms of country violins.
Eventually I came upon some huge farms. I turned into one dirt road, as it baked in the heat. There was a small sign with a turkey on it at the entrance and about a thousand feet up the road you could see several low-lying, one story grey metallic buildings stretched out across the horizon. The business of supplying America with turkeys was silently taking place in this warm, solitary field.
Another driveway down the road had a sign with a huge hog on it, and a similar set of buildings almost out of sight. The farms were modest. One had an actual windmill that led down to a well. The wind would pump the water up into a wooden barrel that was lodged half-way up the wind mill. This was a new sight for a city boy like myself.
Favorite Musician/song:
I remember the first time I heard this and was swept away by the creativity of the guitar work, better than the Hendrix original.
Favorite Book/author:
Favorite Movie/DVD:
Cast Away, Tom Hanks
Can anyone create a total world as well as Tom Hanks? A master.
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