July 25, 2014 Friday "Remedy"

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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July 25, 2014 Friday

Impressions of the Met, p. 7 of 10

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Chief Complaint: (written on the chart before I go in the room)

     “discuss milk”

Interesting Name:

     Remedy

Anecdote:

     I was in the Public Health Service in Paterson, N.J., from 1985 to 1987, serving two years after my pediatric residency.   It was a rough inner city neighborhood.  There was  a janitor there named Roy whom I liked very much.  

     We were talking after hours one night as he was mopping the entryway.  It was a warm pleasant night and we were enjoying telling each other stories and anecdotes.  He suddenly looked serious and told me about some illness, some mild aches and pains, he had had  recently.  He decided to share some medical knowledge with me and I felt honored. 

     "Codliver oil breaks the cold, and castor oil works the cold.  And the most important thing about pneumonia is to keep it from going to your skull, chest, and knee caps."  I slowly and seriously nodded in gratitude for this information.

          Paterson, New Jersey, 1985

Poetry:

Carlos

My first day leading the prison writing workshop: Carlos 

complimented my choosing the chair nearest the door. 

I read a poem by Whitman that once sent me hitchhiking 

and Carlos stood up, asked to read a section from his four hundred-page work-in-progress, 

a poem that turns on his first finding Neruda's "One Year Walk"; 

he said it lit up the night like a perfect crime, so I left everything—

I had no choice—walked three thousand miles to the Pacific. 

From memory he recited a passage in which his father left the family 

a small fortune, all counterfeit: though I doubted the facts, I can still see 

that worn briefcase, almost-perfect hundreds stacked neatly in shrink-wrapped packs. 

I was young, it took me two weeks to accept that I could teach this lifer 

nothing. World of concrete floors and everlasting light: 

he was grateful to God who gave him a blazing mind not granted to anyone living or dead, 

and wouldn't have changed a word anyway.

    by Theodore Deppe

Coup d'essai:  Words

"…my master will out-talk thirty lawyers," Sancho Panza, Don Quixote, Part I, Ch. 47, p. 422

"Sometimes, in a summer morning…I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness…until by the sun falling in at my west window…I was reminded of the lapse of time.  I grew in those seasons like corn in the night," Thoreau, Walden.
   

Favorite Musician/song:

James Taylor, "Carry Me On My Way"

    My all-time favorite musician.  Too big of a topic to even talk about right now…  I first saw him perform his first album while I was at Princeton, perhaps 1971.  Long hair, acoustic songs with their gentle messages.  The gym was packed to the rafters, Taylor with just his acoustic guitar, playing softly.  Some one yelled out, "Louder!"  He replied with a smile in his self-deprecating way, "Softer."

Favorite Book/author:

Edmund Morris

     Teddy Roosevelt (biography)

Gripping, with details of TR's early life…cigars and horse drawn sleigh rides for asthmatic episodes as a frail child and then…a transformation when he took a trip out West in his twenties to hunt buffalo.   He came back a changed man - "as tough as a hickory nut"… you could enclose his waist with your hands.  

Favorite Movie/DVD:

Mystery Train

    A lot of silence here and cinematography that draws you in.  Humorous and touching.