Day 2 Day radishes

August 31/ A sermon about a sermon

 

Sunday was the 50^th Jubilee service at St. Aidan’s Episcopal Church where I attend.   For the sermon we heard about the original St. Aidan; and this is the short version.  A King Oswald conquered a territory in Northern England, but the territory which he captured had barbarians, and ruffians for citizens and only spoke Gaelic.  In 635 the King wrote away to a small monastery in Iona to get monks who would tame the country.  The Monastery sent an older monk, Corman, who arrived in northern England, now Scotland, and turned around and went home saying that the people were uncouth.  Later, at the monastery was a meeting with all the monks.  At that meeting was young Aidan from Ireland who said that he would take the challenge to tame the savages, and he went to Northern England bringing with him a few compatriots. He constantly walked over the whole countryside greeting people and talking with them.  (People stopped giving him horses because St. Aidan gave the horses away to people he considered less fortunate.) Although he was good friends, and he socialized with Oswald, St. Aidan gave away his gifts and food to the poor.

The people were eventually on their way to being civilized Christians.   He was a man who stopped anywhere and everywhere to talk to who ever was where he was.  He lived by the Rule of St. Benedict, and he built a monastery to carry on the next generation of Christians.

 

The message of St. Aidan is to get out there and meet the people including the poor.  For anyone out there today who wants to know what God wants from you.  Treat everyone as though they were Christ.  

 

We can do this.  How hard can it be to say hello?

august 28/ photoshoping

This is a photo that has not been Photoshoped.  I happen to like it this way.  I could make it brighter and maybe later I will, but for today I like it.  The day is hazy and it feels like the day actually is temperature wise and light wise; the summer is all dried up. Watching Chariots of Fire the other night was interesting because it did not look like it was Photoshoped. It seemed as if  real camera man doing his work and the editor respecting him.  The camera man was the artist. 

Last week my new Martha Stewart Living came and I kept looking at the cover and also a photo inside.  I could not put my finger on what was wrong, and then it hit me. Her face looked like it was pasted on the body. It might have been her face . . . from some other year.  It might have been her body.  But it seemed to me that her body parts did not match.  Oprah is something else again. On magazines her skin is better than a babies butt. 

August 27/ random thoughts of a Conservative nature

The information that I gave that tonight Mars will be the size of the moon tonight is a hoax. 

I remember Mary Jo Kpoechne from Chappaquiddick.   I also wondered over the years  if Joan Kennedy could have avoided alcoholism had she not been pregnant with her fourth child at the time of Chappaquiddick..

 Once I heard it reported that the CIA was of the liberal persuasion, I was not crazy about it.  Having said that, I do not want them eliminated. I want them working in secret to protect us.   I do not want the agents interrogated for what has worked in the past.  I like  more people saved by stealth rather bombers.  And I want people who will join the CIA and know they are not going to be persecuted, or prosecuted when they still to a code. This is a case of the greater good.

Ezekiel Emanuel, brother of Rahm, is Barack Obama's head adviser on health care. He has advocated the revision of the Hippocratic Oath eliminating what is good for patient for the good of others and reduction in costs.   

 I do not support encouraging people to end their life.  I am alright with people having control over their own death. People can easily be lead by suggestion. We all in the privacy of our heads have a general idea what we want for end of life.   It is horrible for society to have a general death plan, and one of the places where it is repugnent, is to youth.  When youth feels there us no hope for the future , this depresses them.  Basically why bother reproduce? We need reproduction. Guiding people toward death is not a good case for the greater good.

 

August 26/ Esther Clark 2

My sister after the first post on Dr, Esther Clark went looking into her on the Internet, and this is one of the pieces that she found.   I think it is from one of the Palo Alto Clinic newsletters.  I loved this bit of information. I hope Dr Hartzell will not mind my passing it on. 

Recalled retired pediatrician Harry Hartzell:

Esther Clark was unique. She had a ranch up in Northern California and she would invite us to go up there for a weekend with her. We went up once with our kids. Esther had a pond that she’d dammed up and it was down from her house, and we went swimming with her in this pond.

On the way back up the path, a rattlesnake appeared. My daughter, who was then five years old, was in her bathing suit and going along this path, and Esther looked over and said, ‘Oh, Emily, be careful, there’s a rattlesnake there.’ Emily stepped back and Esther in her Speedo went up to the house, got a rifle, came down, took one shot, killed the rattlesnake and then said, ‘You know, we should dissect this. I’ve got a comparative anatomy book here.’ She opened it up to ‘snake’ and we spread out this rattlesnake on a board. Got the cutting board out of the kitchen and tacked down the rattlesnake and opened it up and dissected it. And she demonstrated to my kids the various organs of the rattlesnake. I’ve never known another woman who could have done that.

Esther could be a very prickly person. Most patients were frightened of her. But every now and then I’ll run into somebody who says, ‘I knew Esther Clark and that’s why I went into medicine.’ Esther had that kind of flavor, and for a generation of women who were just beginning to feel their wings, Esther really was a big role model.

August 25/ More Pasta

 

 

I thought of myself as Marcella Hazan the famed doyen of Italian cooking in America. I took up pasta making when I could afford a hand cranked machine.  My children remember my setting up   chairs in the kitchen with broomsticks in between the chairs to dry the pasta strands.

 

Yesterday I got out my new Kitchen Aid pasta maker as I was planning uncooked tomato pasta for dinner with tomatoes from the garden.  One of the problems in pasta making for me has been how to keep the pasta from sticking together before I cooked it. I never liked hand cranking and cutting pasta just before putting it in the boiling water. You would be exhausted, possibly sweating, and there was ten minutes of prep work to do in the two minutes the pasta was cooking. 

 

Most of the time, I floured the pasta heavily and put it in the freezer.  But yesterday recalling the past, with the quaint pasta on broomstick, I said to myself, why bother with the broom stick; I will put the pasta on my black, ladder back chairs.  The process was painless and once again a reminiscent vignette. 

 

The evening weather was pleasantly warm and I had a drink on the deck smug in knowing I had a delicious, cheap meal under way to be ready in minutes. But then when I went to get the pasta off the chairs instantly the pasta broke, fell to the floor leaving white stripes of pasta pasted over the tops of my black ladder back chairs. I am not one to worry about a little dirt, especially when it is going in boiling water so I did not worry about the food, but the chairs are another matter, and I have not finished cleaning up the mess. 

August 24/ A few photos

 

August 22/ Chariots of Fire

Bring out your calendar and turn to November to rent the movie Chariots of Fire.  It is a perfect movie. the story is  about two young men runners sticking with their principles, the cinematography is exceptional, the costumes and the locations authentic and interesting.  No sets were constructed.  Be sure that you have time to watch the part about how the movie was made.  All the young people were unknown actors, but they will likely be familiar to you as this movie launched their careers.  And children can watch the movie.  Be charmed again. 

August 21/ Good doctor

The first good doctor I remember was the first woman doctor in the Stanford area.  Dr Esther Clark was her name, and her reputation went before her.  She was a no nonsense doctor, abrupt, to the matter at hand, and there were no lollipops. Like now there was a doctor shortage.  There were only three pediatricians.  For a while it was because of the Great War, and later it as a matter of training more doctors again.  She was invariably correct with her diagnoses. Of course, in the 50s how many diagnoses were there?

 

 

Once when I was in high school and I was horribly sick with the flu, she made a home visit,  it seemed she clomped down the hall to my room with her black leather bag.  For me it could have been Hitler coming.  She sat a long time on my bed talking with me about something I was hallucinating, perhaps my parents divorcing .  When my brother was in the operating room getting dirt cleaned out of his brain from a bicycle accident, she sat with my parents during the operation.  She allowed me to be a pediatric patient long after 13. I was in college when I last saw her.  She was reassuring. 

 

If I should meet someone who was a child in the Palo Alto area during the 40’s and the 50’s it is kind of a game to play, Who knows Dr. Clark? “Oh yes, I remember Dr. Clark.  If you went to her once, you remembered her. Many people went once and it was the only for them.  You were at her office to be cured and not coddled.  “And by the way, Joey must stop sucking his thumb.” My mother was expected to carry out her instructions.

 

Much later I heard  the rumor that Esther had a long love affair with a doctor in town.   This seemed to make her, with her short and stern manner, much more human.  Should that have been the case, knowing how hard she worked, I was happy for her.

August 20/ Doctor choice

With out being dramatic, having a doctor that I like and of my choice is very important to me. Here is a partial list of ex-doctors who I did  not like then and my opinion has not changed. 

 

1.         Dr.------- from Korea who could not speak English, got the drugs right and the doses to the point of lethal. Saved by the druggist.

2.         Dr. Shakes, a neurologist, when taking my 10 year old daughter to him said to me that all children who have migraine headaches have neurotic mothers. 

3.         Dr. Full of Himself, who yelled at me when asked where he went to school, that I was hostile and had a chip on my shoulder and perhaps we should reconsider our patient/doctor relationship. I had come prepared to tell him the same thing. The way that I took care of that doctor was by crying.  He had to clean up that mess, which believe me was harder for him than my chip. 

4.         Dr. O. B. Livious, acclaimed by clinic to have been excellent student in med school and the health group felt fortunate to have her.  She told me that nothing was wrong with me, but in fact I had a bad case of viral congestive heart failure and was in the hospital in eight hours for six days. 

5.         Nurse Ratchet, who told me when moving to Humboldt County, CA that the reason I was sick all the time, is that I did not wear undershirts. 

August 18/ Teddy's Birthday

  

This is three year old Teddy.  I have many pictures from his birthday, but likely you will never see them because I am too stupid to get them either on here or facebook. 

Sunday we had a family dinner party and he opened gifts.  Teddy's actual birthday was Monday.  The most interesting gift was that his five year old brother, George has been whispering in our ears so that Teddy could not hear, is that his birthday gift is to toilet train Teddy.  We have been saying, "You go boy".  We asked George when he was going to start, because we wanted to see it.  He said Tuesday.