From The Midden

Tree Doctor




Pastoral Kitsch



I Can't Believe It's Not A Lily Pad



Apportez-moi La Poussiere De Pingouin !

Si

Ever the obedient consumer, the river path pedestrian took the message in the bottle seriously: DO NOT EAT. THROW AWAY.

Was he tempted, just for a second, to tear open the little packet and squeeze the forbidden substance onto his tongue ?

What's this ? Maybe I can get a buzz offa it. "Si-li-ca gel." What wuzzit I read about silica -- is that the stuff you can make speed outta ? No, wait. That's sudafed. Oh yeah. Tits. It's the stuff they shoot into tits to make 'em bigger. Better chuck it. I don't need no big tits.

Sand. Silicon dioxide.

I worked in a diode factory for six months before I began medical school. The company was called American Power Devices and it was down a winding, tree-lined road from my parents' house in northern Massachusetts. It was 1973. Silicon Valley was still a twinkle in capitalism's eye. IBM punch cards and Univac were household words emeriti.

I guess that would put me in on the ground floor of the microchip revolution.

It was a fascinating place and I had a fascinating job. There were long, tubular furnaces into which I had to slide trays of silicon wafers, thin and perfect as communion hosts, to imbue them with boron and phosphorous and turn them into semiconductors. Then there was the little plexiglass hood, bigger than a breadbox, smaller than a coffin, under which I scoured the wafers with a waterpik-like sand jet. It seemed far too delicate an operation for its name: sandblasting. The radio played Killing Me Softly over and over that summer. To this day the song reminds me of sandblasting silicon wafers -- the hiss of sand on silicon, the slowly burnishing surfaces.

There was another machine -- a bell jar the size of a juke box -- that vaporized little corkscrews of gold wire and gold plated the silicon wafers. I remember the gutteral glug glug glug of its vacuum pump. Then there was a cold, windowless room where I'd coat the wafers with a purplish gel to prepare them for etching. I don't remember the details of the process, but I remember how peaceful it was in that little room with its humming ventilators, precise little instruments and aromatic reagents. It was like a hermitage. I loved it in there. I loved performing the meticulous little chemical liturgies. Like saying mass. Sand from sand, light from light. I felt safe in there, protected from the unruly, impinging world.

Out back, across a narrow, empty meadow, freight trains passed several times a day . I'd stop and sneak a long look at them as they went by. Cows used to graze that field, and in its previous incarnation, the factory had been their barn. I'd visited it as a child after buying ice cream from the dairy stand next door. I loved the hot, shadowy, redolent barn and the placid animals, languidly swishing their tails against the fat, lazy flies. How odd to be there , fifteen years later, in an ultra-clean, chilly room anointing little wafers with purple resin. Burnishing them under a plastic hood. Blasting boron atoms into silicon. Vaporizing gold in a big bell jar.

And how odd to be revisiting these places thirty years later, led back by a bright trail of silicon crumbs. What if I'd heeded the alchemical seductions of these magnificent substances and become a chemist instead of a physician ? Listened to my deepest, most reclusive inclinations and spent three decades in the clean, lonely space of a lab (or hermitage or library or writer's garret) instead of the thronged, malodorous and messy cowbarn of the clinic ?

The smells of manure and xylene mingle, contrapuntal, in memory. Killing me softly with their song.

Gloria Mundi

The river path gives many profound teachings in transience.

In early June, campion resemble blousy, leg-o-mutton sleeves. They seem fresh, girlish, even virginal.



Now, in August, they have become little burnished urns



full of tiny, ash-gray seeds.

I find this oddly exhiliarating. The summer, having reached its blaring crescendo of green, prepares for death. It's about time. As things senesce and die they become deeply interesting. Of course first there's the whole going to seed thing. August is one big late-term pregnancy.

Consider, as a thematically appropriate example, milkweed.

From a fuzzy morula of pale green nubbins




spring stalked, rosy buds



which open, one by one,



to form a hemispheric cluster of intricate, pink, star-like blossoms



each elaborate and complex;



each stalk elongates, sagging with its heavy, blanching flower,



as the whole flowerhead attenuates and wilts



shrivels and browns



and dies -- as a fresh green pod emerges from its base



and burgeons



and bulges



and splits -- its bright, tufted, seeds taking to the air --



leaving behind a graceful, gray shell, and emptiness --



how grateful I am to witness all this.

Transcendental Etude XII

What was transcendence anyway ? She was in one of her blue fugs of disgust, lately. If there was such a thing as an inner landscape, hers was positively Boschian this week -- a death and demon ridden charnel plain of catastrophe, complete with plumes of smoke, catherine wheels and a tattered, out-of-work, pissed-off court jester snarking away at everything.

She thought of fluorescein, the yellow-orange dye she'd instill into patients' eyes to check for corneal abrasions. "Things will look orange to you for a few moments," she'd warn them. "You," she never said, "will soon be casting a jaundiced eye upon things. Just as I do !"



She'd opened a book of hours the other night, looking for some vespery quietness, and at the first "The LORD" she'd thrown it down in frustration. "Who the hell is this The LORD dude, anyway," complained the jester, brushing a few cinders off her cheek. "Master, ruler, husband," replied the OED, "from the old english hlaefweard, or bread-keeper." Bread keeper ! He who earns the bread, locks it away, and parcels it out according to his whims ?

She was drowning in, choking on, the metaphor.

She thought of her ex-husband telling their friends how she'd once eaten a whole box of saltines in one day. "All four sleeves," he'd marveled at the climax of the tale, "all four sleeves." The same husband who, when she'd starved herself to bone after their child was born, had filled their cabinets with all the wretched, horrid junk food she could never resist and would eat compulsively, and thereby "cured" her. Or so he liked to boast. The very same hlaefweard, in fact, who'd once said "I'll divorce you if you ever get fat, unless, of course it's because of a thyroid problem, or some other medical conditon."

She knew a thing or two about LORDS.



And yet hadn't she found her way to sleep on many a restless night, repeating The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not want ? That was the munificent, sheltering The LORD of green pastures and still water, the prepared table and the overflowing cup.

And where was this The LORD leading his flock ?

Right through a vallombrosa worse than her inner landscape. Smoke, lowering clouds, slaughter, blight, decay, the whole ravaged nine yards. Which was, strangely enough, also meadow and brook.

Apocalypse and pastoral at once.

Good Lord. How peculiar.

Redrum

Last month all our fitted sheets wore out at once. Both of them, that is. One developed a long fault line near my shoulder and the other a gaping sinkhole under my pillow. I had to admit they were unsleepable-upon. That they would probably not survive another washing. What this meant, of course, was shopping for linens.

I had a visiting professor at Wellesley who taught a wonderful course in Greek drama in translation. He liked to pepper his lectures with asides about the wealthy community in which he found himself teaching, a town so unabashedly upscale, he'd complain, that it lacked a proper grocery store. A town whose housewives, he imagined contemptuously, spent all their time "shopping for linens."

In retrospect, I'm not sure why we did not tear him limb from limb, a la Bacchae, for that sexist remark.

Anyway, DK got out the straight jacket and the gag, bundled me into the backseat of the Honda, and drove us to the mall. The experience is a blur of impossible colors, inscrutable numerologies, and strange ancillary bed garments called shams and skirts. Suffice it to say, we bought a set of sheets. Bright red sheets. Red by default, not design. The only other color was a bilious pumpkin orange with a green-at-the-gills tinge.

So I put them on the bed.

"Shouldn't we replace that wall hanging" I asked DK, pointing to a little Amish-toned quilt I'd made decades ago, "with a velvet painting of a tiger ? And maybe get some lava lamps ?" I was trying to get into the spirit of the red sheets. The Dionysian sheets.

That night we climbed into bed. Was I crazy or did the bed seem, well, hotter than usual ? Can one feel colors through one's skin ? I suddenly recalled an old Life magazine article, circa 1960's, that had impressed me mightily as a child. It was about some Russian scientists who claimed that certain people could distinguish colors with their fingertips. They'd called this skill "dermo-optical perception" or DOP, and the article included some test swatches where we could check ourselves for this skill.

I tried and tried and tried. I was, alas, not one of the lucky gifted ones.

Until now and the arrival of the sheets. The red sheets. The blood red sheets. The meat-red sheets. The sheets incarnadine. The wine-dark sheets. The pomegranite-red sheets.

I can feel them through my skin. They redden my dreams. I awaken tired, as if I'd been fleeing hellfires all night. Sitting downstairs in the den, I can hear them pulsating through the floorboards, even over the Red Sox game.

"DK -- did you hear that ?"

"What ?"

"Upstairs. That, uh, throbbing."

"Throbbing ? It's probably just some kitty."

The sheets are unhingeing me. August is unhingeing me. The upstairs is hot and smells of litterbox. The railings are too sticky to touch. The flies are lording it all over me, buzzing just out of reach. And this morning, right in the middle of my passion-red pillow, curled a single, long, witchy gray hair.

At that moment I gave in. Stopped fighting. And waved a blissfully, cool, crisp, Apollonian white flag of surrender at the victorious, red sheets.

Instructions for the Doc

Dogen's "Instructions for the Tenzo," the cook in a Zen monastery, is a great Monday morning text. As I look down a five day stretch of week, I'll often imagine a nightmare scenario: an unbroken string of patients complaining of low back pain. It's a common enough complaint, one of the most common, common to the point of dreariness. Lumbago.

It hurts to move. I can't sleep. Tylenol does nothing for me, doc. My orthopedist died. I can't even pick up my baby. I tried ice and heat. Nothing works. Except -- what was that pill my doctor used to give me -- perco -, perco- ?

Dullsville. Never much on exam. Often the subtext of narcotic-seeking.

How much better to have an articulate, stoic, grateful patient with classic symptoms, great findings on exam, and an exotic, curable disease ! Zounds ! What a brilliant physician I am ! Let me tell you about my Great Case !



But Dogen says:

When making a soup with ordinary greens, do not be carried away by feelings of dislike toward them nor regard them lightly; neither jump for joy simply because you have been given the ingredients of superior quality to make a special dish.

He could be talking about low back pain. And the purpuric leg rash that points to the strep bovis endocarditis which in turn points to the colon tumor.

Handle even a single leaf of a green in such a way that it manifests the body of the Buddha. This in turn allows the Buddha to manifest through the leaf.

A single leaf of a green. A human being.