Don's Blog Acknowledging the Great People in Your Life 2-28-22

   Here is an editorial from April of 1983 - in which he describes a few of the favorite radio shows

of his youth and some of the heroes that helped shape the fabric of his life.

Don's Blog (668)

My oldest son sent this to me as he was cleaning out some old college notebooks. As with some of my recent posts
it is about our attempt to communicate the unsayable.

(668)
"Nature" is what we see --
The Hill -- the Afternoon --
Squirrel -- Eclipse -- the Bumble bee --
Nay -- Nature is Heaven --
Nature is what we hear --
The Bobolink -- the Sea --
Thunder -- the Cricket --
Nay -- Nature is Harmony --
Nature is what we know --
Yet we have no Art to say --
So impotent our wisdom is
To her Simplicity.

Emily Dickinson

The poet addresses the impossibility of languaging Nature's mysteries. We do not notice Nature in itself , or tend to ignore its impact on our senses: sight - Hill & Squirrel and sound - Crickets & Thunder. "We have no Art", she says, to capture the mystical experience of Nature which despite its Simplicity remains indescribable.

Don's Blog The Day Lady Died 2-23-22

How about this for a change of pace?

The Day Lady Died

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday

three days after Bastille day, yes

it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine

because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton   

at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner

and I don't know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun   

and have a hamburger and a malted and buy

an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets   

in Ghana are doing these days

                                                        I go on to the bank

and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)   

doesn't even look up my balance for once in her life   

and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine   

for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do   

think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or   

Brendan Behan's new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres

of Genet, but I don't, I stick with Verlaine

after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE

Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and   

then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue   

and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and   

casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton

of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of

leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT

while she whispered a song along the keyboard

to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

Frank O'Hara, "The Day Lady Died" from Lunch Poems. Copyright © 1964 by Frank O'Hara.

Note: Billie Holliday's name was 'Lady Day'.  Bastille Day was July 14, 1789 and 

marked the start of the French Revolution -  170 years before the poem was published. That 

year,1964, I was a resident in Surgery at Vanderbilt University Hospital in Nashville, Tennessee.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCYCad_Y53U

Don's Blog On Life and Death and Closets 2-21-22

Several years after I joined the staff at Barnes Hospital I began sending editorials to St Louis Medicine. They were practical suggestions about cancer education, CPR training in secondary schools, and dancing with the government regarding payment. About ten years later Barnes Hospital had become Barnes-Jewish Hospital and the local bulletin was now St Louis Metropolitan Medicine and I was named editor. At that time I started addressing in my editorials more personal issues for physicians concerning who we are as humans; what we are up to; how well we are doing it: issues that can make us uncomfortable. Here is one of my early editorial efforts from November,1982. I had a way to go to speak clearly but it was a start.

What are your thoughts?

Don's Blog February Snow

This is from my friend Katie's blog - so appropriate I had to share it.

"You wake up on a winter morning and pull up the shade, and what lay there the evening before is no longer there--the sodden gray yard, the dog droppings, the tire tracks in the frozen mud, the broken lawn chair you forgot to take in last fall. All this has disappeared overnight, and what you look out on is not the snow of Narnia but the snow of home, which is no less shimmering and white as it falls. The earth is covered with it, and it is falling still in silence so deep that you can hear its silence. It is snow to be shoveled, to make driving even worse than usual, snow to be joked about and cursed at, but unless the child in you is entirely dead, it is snow, too, that can make the heart beat faster when it catches you by surprise that way, before your defenses are up. It is snow that can awaken memories of things more wonderful than anything you ever knew or dreamed."

--Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets

Reading Katie's blog you always come away with more than you brought. I found in looking up Frederick Buechner that he is a Presbyterian minister and successful author. In fact we both went to Princeton University. The bond between tigers of any age is strong. Buechner later went on to Union Theological Seminary where he studied under Reinhold Niebuhr

and Paul Tillich. One of Buechner's mantras is, "Who knows?", undergirding his theological twist on Socrates, "the unexamined human life is a lost chance to behold the divine."

Don's Blog The Alchemist Prologue 2-16-22

The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho is a powerful book. Here is how it begins.

                                    Prologue

The alchemist knew the legend of Narcissus, a youth who knelt daily beside a lake to

contemplate his own beauty.

He was so fascinated by himself that, one morning, he fell into the lake and drowned. At

the spot where he fell, a flower was born, which was called the narcissus.

But this was not how the author of the book ended the story.

He said that when narcissus died, the goddesses of the forest appeared and found the 

lake, which had been fresh water, transformed into a lake of salty tears.

"Why do you weep," the goddesses asked.

"I weep for Narcissus", the lake replied.

"Ah, it is no surprise that you weep for Narcissus," they said, for though we always 

pursued him in the forest, you alone could contemplate his beauty close at hand".

"But was Narcissus beautiful?," the lake asked.

"Who better than you to know that?" the goddesses said in wonder. "After all , it was

by your banks that he knelt each day to contemplate himself."

The lake was silent for some time. Finally, it said:

"I weep for Narcissus, but I never noticed that Narcissus was beautiful. I weep because,

each time he knelt beside my banks, I could see, in the depths of his eyes, my own

beauty reflected."

from: "The Alchemist", by Paulo Coelho (1998)

Don's Blog Completion 2-11-22

Here is an editorial from March 23,1983.

Editors note: Getting complete with the people in your life can be a full-time opportunity, especially

those who have passed away. I assert that it is valuable - you know its not about them anyway. 

Please let me know what you think.

Don's Blog Meditation at Lagunitas 2-9-22

Here is a strange organic penetrating poem. Its almost impossible to read it just once.

Meditation at Lagunitas

All the new thinking is about loss.

In this it resembles all the old thinking.

The idea, for example, that each particular erases

the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-

faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk

of that black birch is, by his presence,

some tragic falling off from a first world

of undivided light. Or the other notion that,

because there is in this world no one thing

to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,

a word is elegy to what it signifies.

We talked about it late last night and in the voice

of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone

almost querulous. After a while I understood that,

talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,

pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman

I made love to and I remembered how, holding

her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,

I felt a violent wonder at her presence

like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river

with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,

muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish

called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.

Longing, we say, because desire is full

of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.

But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,

the thing her father said that hurt her, what

she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous

as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.

Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,

saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

Robert Hass, "Meditation at Lagunitas" from Praise. Copyright © 1979 by Robert Hass.

Don's Blog On Raising Children 2-7-22

I am not a great source on how to raise children. My children were lucky enough to be raised by their mother, a wonderful amalgam of a no-nonsense German (even if south St Louis German) with unflinching artistic sensibility and spiritual sensitivity. I was off working - when our first son was born I was on call in the hospital (every other night for three years), and when the others were born there was a similar song. With me out fighting (and loving) the health wars, the joys and awesome  responsibilities of bringing up three boys rested on her shoulders. Jan Feldwisch Sessions did a magnificent job. She disciplined with love and not so veiled threats. For instance she was famous for screaming above the din while driving, "If you don't quiet down, I'm going to run into that tree." (On purpose, of course). As a result of her keeping them 'on edge' they learned to dance in life.

I'm not sure how children are raised today - certainly there is an overemphasis on having a 'safe space'.  I tend to think Rousseau's ideas in the 18th century were right on.

"The child raised for his station, never leaving it, could not be exposed to the disadvantages of another. But given the mobility of human things, given the unsettled and restless spirit of this age which upsets everything in each generation, can one conceive of a method more senseless than raising a child as though he never had to leave his room, as though he were going to be constantly surrounded by his servants? If the unfortunate makes a single step on the earth, if he goes down a single degree, he is lost. This is not teaching him to bear suffering; it is training him to feel it. One thinks only of preserving one's child. That is not enough. One ought to teach him to preserve himself as a man. to bear the blows of fate, to brave opulence and poverty, to live, if he has to. in freezing Iceland or on Malta's burning rocks. You may very well take precautions against his dying. He will nevertheless have to die. And though his death were not the product of your efforts, still these efforts would be ill conceived. It is less a question of keeping him from dying than of making him live. To live is not to breathe; it is to act; it is to make use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, of all the parts of ourselves which give us the sentiment of our existence."

― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education (1712-1778)

Don's Blog FLW House in the Snow 2-4-22

You may know that in our back yard to the southwest we have Ebsworth County Park which houses a Frank Lloyd Wright House (the Russel Kraus House), one of two in our area. Russel was close to Jan (artists together) and was a great neighbor. Now the house is owned by a foundation and is open for tours. We have been able to walk in the park during the pandemic.

Here are some images of the house after our recent snowfall. Mr. Wright was famous for nestling his Usonian houses into the land. The tracks in front of the house are from our local white tail deer. In front of the house is a grove of persimmon trees. There is also a resident coyote family which serenades us occasionally.

Don's Blog Do You Hear Me 2-3-22

We are having a standard February snowfall which is being advertised as 'Snowpocalypse", so here is a bonus post.

This editorial was published in St. Louis Metropolitan Medicine on February 23, 1983. That's only 19 years ago.

Editors note: I met George and Jill Gates when I was on active duty as the Hospital Otolaryngologist at Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage,Alaska  in the late 1960's. Were they to bring their son in for an opinion these days he would most probably be offered a cochlear implant which could result in him regaining the ability to hear speech. The editorial addresses communication issues. Would that we had an operation for that.

Please let me know what you think?

Don's Blog Lines for Winter 2-2-22 (an all '2's day)

As the snow falls silently here is one for winter. This poem reminds me of the ending of People of the Deer by Farley Mowat. As the Inuit character in the book settles down in   the cold windy Arctic night under the warm skins in his igloo, "He didn't know if this would  be his last night. He did know that when his last night came, that this is how it would be." 

Lines for Winter

for Ros Krauss

Tell yourself

as it gets cold and gray falls from the air

that you will go on

walking, hearing

the same tune no matter where

you find yourself—

inside the dome of dark

or under the cracking white

of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow.

Tonight as it gets cold

tell yourself

what you know which is nothing

but the tune your bones play

as you keep going. And you will be able

for once to lie down under the small fire

of winter stars.

And if it happens that you cannot

go on or turn back

and you find yourself

where you will be at the end,

tell yourself

in that final flowing of cold through your limbs

that you love what you are.

Mark Strand, "Lines for Winter" from Selected Poems. Copyright © 1979.