On Fathers’ Day

Suddenly the young man standing one tier below me in the amphitheater sits down and hangs his head. His torso trembles beneath his short-sleeve cotton shirt. The woman I know to be his wife stands beside him, her right hand resting on his shoulder.

On the other side of her sits the couple’s young son. The little boy has picked up a small sprig of clover from among the stones at his feet and nibbles the tiny green leaves, as though he were a rabbit. He squeezes past his mother and climbs up into his father’s lap. The father gives him a big long hug. As the father turns his head, pressing his cheek against the little boy’s face, I notice that the stubble of some of the whiskers is white.

When the boy turns and sits on his father’s knee, you can see the mid-line surgical scar coming down from the back of his baseball cap along the nape of his neck. No hair protrudes from the scalp beneath the cap. As the boy stands up, he seems a bit unsteady on his feet.

The man sits with his head down for a long time. Even after he stops shaking, the woman’s hand remains gently on his shoulder.

Today, on Fathers’ Day, this father is suffering; not because of himself, but because of his son.

When a father faces daily the possibility of losing his only son to a devastating illness, the prospect of an empty ache on Fathers’ Day haunts him for the rest of his life.

The gift of the Magicicada

This is the year, this is the month; indeed, these are the days of the emergence of the 17-year Magicicada.

This genus of cicada is found only in eastern North America. Although there are 7 species, just 3 inhabit New England.

Once every 17 years, the nymphs emerge from the ground to shed their exoskeletons and emerge as winged adults, ready to mate. Males court females in choruses of song. There are three distinct types of calls, the most famous being the pharaoh call of the septendecim. One musician has actually harnessed them in concert.

Periodical cicada populations have been in decline, perhaps a reflection of climate change or land development.

The oldest known cicada specimens, dating back to 1843, are housed at the Peabody Museum in New Haven, Connecticut.

Thoreau makes mention of the 17-year “locust” (a misnomer) at the conclusion of Walden. He writes: “If we have had the seven-years’ itch, we have not seen the seventeen-year locust yet in Concord…Who knows what sort of seventeen-year locust will next come out of the ground?”

He goes on to relate the story of “a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer’s kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and afterward in Massachusetts,—from an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. Who des not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened by hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasoned tomb,—heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festive board,—may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society’s most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!”

Thoreau knew something of the magic in the Magicicada.

One hundred and sixty-eight years later, would we could tune our ears to hear what this bug might be telling us.

A Kodak moment

I step into the exam room carrying a small tray of supplies: one unit-dose syringe, a cotton ball moistened with alcohol resting on a 2 X 2 square of gauze, a Band-Aid dot. On the exam table the patient, a 5-year-old girl, squirms in her mother’s lap.

“She’s here for her flu shot?” I ask, merely to verify the inevitable.

“Yup,” her mother replies. “And it’s not going to be easy.”

“Most kids don’t like shots,” I mutter in a quiet voice as I slide the tray onto the counter top. “Here, let me show you how to hold her.”

I instruct the mother to turn the child to the side, sitting her on the mother’s thigh with the child’s legs draped between her own. “She can give you a big hug under your arm, around the back. Now hold her forearm with your one hand and hug her tight with the other.”

The mother complies with my instructions. As I pick up the syringe and cotton ball, like a frightened puppy the child lets out a yelp and begins to writhe in her mother’s lap. “Hold her tight,” I reiterate, as I slide my free hand beneath the girl’s upper arm to steady her shoulder.

I dislodge the needle cap with my teeth and stand poised, ready to slip the hypodermic into the deltoid muscle. Suddenly the child breaks free, kicks and screams, turns and twists, thrusts her head back and forth. Blindly, the mother sweeps her arms through the air in an effort to recapture the child. In the fray she falls to the side, taking the child and me with her down to the padded surface of the exam table.

There we lie, like the Marines in Iwo Jima, a frozen fleshly sculpture of arms and legs, intimately conjoined in intricate knots of skin, bone and muscle.

Eyeglasses cocked awry, the mother looks up at me, hugging her daughter for dear life, while I rest along the contour of her curves. The image burns into my mind. Without thinking, I say, “You know, if this were a photograph, it would undoubtedly appear as a black-and-white full-page spread in Life magazine.”

Quickly, I administer the shot. The mother releases the little girl and we all sit up. The child is sobbing, and so is the mother, as tears squeezed from her laughing eyes cascade down her cheeks.

“Thank God you’ve haven’t got a photographer in house,” the mother wheezes, as she wipes her face with the back of her hand.

Another memorable Kodak moment in primary pediatric practice to treasure.

This piece was originally published in the Spring 2013 edition of ConnAPA News.

Evensong

“What is that?”  My wife poked her head out of the kitchen doorway.  ”Hear it?”

Seated in the parlor, I looked up from the book in my lap.  A series of notes sounded in the distance, reminding me of some long ago boyhood dream.

I marked my place in the text with a finger and rose from the love seat, padded to the kitchen and stood by the open back window.  The tall maple trees in the neighbor’s back yard stood silhouetted against the twilight sky.  Three fluid notes sounded from deep within the wood, over and over again.

“That’s a whip-poor-will,” I said.  ”I haven’t heard one of those for years.”

Actually, this was the first whip-poor-will I ever remember hearing in these parts since we moved here three decades ago.

Perhaps this was a harbinger of good things to come, I thought.

And then, just this morning…

Spring beauties

Spring pig

“A little girl is one thing, a little runty pig is another.” E. B. White, Charlotte’s Web

E. B. White opens his children’s classic with the birth of a litter of spring pigs. One of them, the runt of the litter, will just make for trouble; and so Mr. Arable is poised to do away with it.

“This is the most terrible case of injustice I have ever heard of,” announces Fern, his daughter, the young girl who will save the pig on her own terms.

Thoughts of Fern ran through my head when my younger daughter pulled into the driveway with a large yellow bin sitting on the seat beside her.

“What you got there?” I asked.

Proudly, she pulled the bin from the car and held it down so we could see inside. There, nestled in with old newspapers and several towels, lay a pink spring piglet.

“The sow at the farm had a litter, but she killed all of them except for this little guy. We rescued him from certain death. His name is Lucky, because he’s lucky to be alive.”

She carried the yellow bin into the kitchen and sat it on the floor. From her pocket she pulled a plastic baby bottle, filled with formula. “Wanna feed him?” she asked, handing me the bottle.

I pushed the rubber nipple gently against the piglet’s pink snout. He soon latched on and began to suck and swallow like a hungry newborn.

“How does he get along without his mother?” I asked.

“He’s got his own bed under a heat lamp at the farm. He’s gotta be fed nearly every hour round the clock. I’m usually up with Mr. Christensen anyway, so I offered to take a couple of feeding shifts over the weekend.”

Mr. Christensen is the octogenarian that my daughter takes care of during the week. He’s got Alzheimer’s dementia. My daughter makes his meals, bathes him, helps him get dressed, drives him to the adult daycare program at the assisted living home, and makes sure he gets to his doctors’ appointments on time. She did the same thing for his wife up until she passed away this past February.

Lucky dropped the nipple from his mouth and lay down in the bin. He pushed against the towels with his snout and closed his eyes. For all appearances he looked to be one contented piglet.

“Are you going to keep him here overnight?” I asked my daughter.

“No, he might get cold. He’ll probably do best in his own bed under the heat lamp. I just wanted to stop by and show him to you.”

She picked up the bin with the sleeping piglet inside and carried it back outside to the car. The engine roared to life.

“I’ll drop by sometime next week for dinner,” my daughter said. “I’ve gotta get back to the farm to look in on Mr. Christensen.”

I watched her back down the driveway, negotiating the tight turn into the street. She waved from the open window. In that moment, she seemed supremely happy.

I reckon spring piglets will do that to you. Taking care of older folks who can’t fend for themselves does that as well.

“Lucky” 2013 © Brian T. Maurer

Brace and bit

Last Friday evening after dinner my wife asked me to walk down to the Pinney house with her. Barely five feet tall, a petite Mrs. Pinney, along with her daughter and son-in-law, was busy sorting through household items to be put up for sale Saturday morning. Mr. Pinney, who had been a big man, passed away late last fall; he was 80-some years old. He left behind a shed of tools and paraphernalia—many items that Mrs. Pinney wouldn’t be able to take with her when she vacates the property later this spring.

The son-in-law was in the back yard, seeing if he could get the small cement mixer to run. The belt on the pulleys hummed along happily, turning the old spattered orange drum. In the garage there rested a walnut a gun cabinet, several old wooden surf-casting rods, and various yard implements such as rakes, hoes and spades.

The shed adjacent—the former site of the Pinney cigar factory—housed a workbench laden with all sorts of tools: a drill press with scores of different sized bits, hammers, jack planes, socket wrenches, screw drivers. A table saw stood in the middle of the floor next to a small jig saw with the original manuals describing their operation and upkeep. A chest of drawers opposite the workbench held old coffee cans full of various types and sizes of nails and screws. Next to this, on a shelf along the side wall, rested an old Coleman stove and lantern with sentinel cylinders of white gas. Centered before the rear wall stood an antique cast-iron stove, complete with removable top to access hotplates for cooking. Immediately behind the stove a short supply of split firewood lay stacked against the rear wall.

Mrs. Pinney told me how Mr. Pinney had got his hand caught in the table saw several years back. The blade mangled three fingers on his left hand. A Hartford hand surgeon put the fingers back together in two separate operations: the first lasted five hours, the second three. With the exception of some residual stiffness of the index finger, Mr. Pinney had nearly full use of the hand up until his death.

“Here is the grips he used to strengthen his hand after the accident,” Mrs. Pinney said, lifting the implement from a nail on the shelf.

“What’s this?” my wife said, picking up a bent metal bar from a bin near the table saw. “Some sort of crank?”

“No, it’s part of a tool,” Mrs. Pinney said.

“It’s called a brace and bit,” I explained. “It’s an old-fashioned hand drill. You insert the drill—they called it a bit—here, and then lean on the wooden knob as you turn the crank. It was part of any carpenter’s tool box.”

My wife bought a number of pieces of porch furniture: a small table with two wrought iron chairs and the wicker rocking chair that Mr. Pinney used to sit in with his ever-present cigar most summer evenings.

“How long were you married?” I asked Mrs. Pinney.

“Fifty-five years,” she said. “I was 17 on my wedding day. By the time I was 21, I had 3 babies. Now I’ve got 4 great-grandchildren, with another one on the way.”

Afterwards, on our way home, we stopped off at the cemetery. It took a while, but we located the Pinney family plot beneath the ancient maple near the arborvitae hedge. A granite stone bore the dates of Mr. Pinney’s father and mother. His mother was a Fahey, an Irish schoolmarm. We couldn’t find Mr. Pinney’s marker; sometimes it takes a while before it’s set in place.

A runner’s legs

My wife had the TV on when I got home from work. News of the Boston Marathon bombing was breaking. I popped my tie, unbuttoned my shirt at the throat and slumped onto the couch.

I had been a runner in my youth. Forty years ago running was just beginning to come into its own as an accepted sport. Many times we runners were mocked by the locals as we tooled down the streets and roads of the sleepy little town where I attended undergraduate school.

Back then, runners stood a world apart from most athletes. Running was a lonely sport. The only glory one could hope for was the moment of hitting the tape at the finish. Many who ran seldom felt that exuberance, but they were runners just the same.

A runner’s strength lies in his lungs and legs — the lungs oxygenate the blood, the legs carry him along. If a runner has been true to himself, he finds himself spent at the finish. If he’s in good shape, he recovers quickly. He wipes the sweat from his brow and takes his victory lap. All is well — until the next race.

Imagine pushing the pace for 26 miles, lungs and legs burning. You round the final turn into the home stretch. Up ahead the finish line awaits. It won’t be long now. Just keep the pace, swing the arms, drive the legs, keep the rhythm — and soon you will be there.

The roar of the crowd surges in your ears, easing the pain in your body. A few more steps, then — an unearthly blast deafens your ears, a ball of orange flame blinds your eyes, smoke chokes your throat. Your legs give out as you collapse to the ground. It takes several eternal seconds before you realize that those legs that have carried you 26 miles are now pummeled with nails, ball bearings and shards of metal.

National tragedies affect all of us. As a people we grieve, as a people we stare in disbelief, as a people our anger rises collectively. Once again we question another senseless act of violence, devised and delivered by deranged malevolent minds.

Only this time round I am touched at a deeper level, for I too have been a runner. In a special way these wounded are my comrades, once fleet of foot, suddenly cut down moments before their final finish, lives shattered forever.

Breaking camp

“Lake Jean” 2013 © Thomas A. Doty

On the morning of the third day, when we broke camp, my companion remarked that the ice in the cooler remained unmelted. “In all of my years of camping, that never happened before,” he said. “This is a record.”

Indeed, it was a record of sorts. Over the course of our first night in the woods, the temperature dropped to 18 degrees Fahrenheit. Although cloud cover helped to insulate us a bit on the second night, it was not much better at 22 degrees.

The first night had been crystal clear; constellations burned in the sky: Orion, Leo, Taurus, the Seven Sisters. An unknown planet shone brightly overhead, later identified as Jupiter.

Snow lay at the periphery of the campsite and in patches on the forest floor. Lake Jean was still frozen, blue and clear. We stood at the edge and listened to the ice groaning in the morning sun.

This year the Falls Trail was closed, socked in ice. Only those with crampons and lines were permitted to descend the glens. We had neither and so had to content ourselves with a leisurely stroll along the Beach and Bear Walk trails. A woodcock suddenly rose at our feet, wings drumming as it shot into the forest. Woodpeckers knocked on hollow bellies of far off trees.

When the camp stove malfunctioned, we cooked over a hickory fire: bacon and eggs, spaghetti, scalloped potatoes and ham. We boiled water for tea and scrubbed the dishes in the sink at the latrine.

When the zipper on my parka got stuck, a pair of pliers carefully applied popped the snag out.

As we sat by the fire the last evening, a red Yukon towing an antique Airstream trailer appeared. Six children, scantily clad, hopped out and marveled at the snow. One toddler stood mesmerized at the edge of the frozen white bank. “We’re from Alabama,” her mother hollered over. “She ain’t never seen snow before.”

One of the girls danced off among the trees and shortly returned. “Mama, mama,” she cried, “I got snow in my shoe, and it’s cold!”

So many unanticipated turns of events in such a short period of time.

It was only later after returning home that we learned that on the morning of that third day when we broke camp, an old high school classmate had succumbed to cancer.

Infinite wonder

The boy, who is just 11 years old, sits on the exam table in his briefs. According to my afternoon schedule, he is here for his annual physical exam.

“Did you drive here yourself?” I ask him with the hint of a smile.

“Naw, my dad’s in the waiting room. He thought I could do this on my own.”

“And what do you think?”

He shrugs his shoulders. “Fine with me,” he says.

I leaf through his chart. “What grade are you in this year?” I ask him.

“Fifth,” he says.

“And how is school going?”

He thinks a moment and then says, “Good. I’m having a good year. I like my classes, especially science.”

“Good for you!” I offer a word of encouragement. “What do you like to do for fun when you’re not in school?”

“Well, I like to read and draw and ride my bike. Sometimes I like to go outside and look up at the stars.”

Suddenly, I’m intrigued. “What interests you about the stars?”

“We’re studying space in science. They’re teaching us about the solar system and the planets. But mostly I just like to look at the stars. Some are brighter than others. There’s this one star — at least I think it’s a star — that I can see outside my window when I’m lying in bed. I always look for that one.”

“Ah,” I say, “do you know how to tell the difference between a star and a planet? No? Well, a star emits its own light, like the sun, so it twinkles in the night sky. A planet, on the other hand, reflects light, like the moon, so it doesn’t twinkle. Planets have a steady light, even though they might look brighter than a star.”

“Wow, that’s cool! I’m going to check that out tonight.”

“You do that,” I say. “And now I guess we should do your physical exam and check you out.”

The exam is normal. He is a healthy boy, still full of wonder. As I fill out his exam form, I smile to myself, pleased that such a boy has yet to discover the Hubble photographs of deep space, Whitman’s When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer or even descriptively rich lines from Joyce’s Ulysses such as “the heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.”

When I was a boy, I remember warm summer evenings, when my friend and I would capture fireflies at twilight and put them in a Mason jar. We’d lie in the grass and watch, fascinated, as the myriad soft lights would blink on and off. Then we’d roll over on our backs and look up at the sky overhead. Sometimes, if you were lucky, you might spot the flash of a falling star. Shooting stars, my mother called them. If you saw one, you could make a wish and your wish would come true.

At his age this boy still possesses that infinite sense of wonder which will hold him in good stead as he sets out on his journey to Ithaka. Who knows what ports of call he will visit, what adventures might lie in store for him ahead?

At his age, I reflect, the possibilities are limitless.

At mine, less so.