A Tidings of Magpies

Truly, the first day of spring.

...in NeuroLand

Breaking local news on television--Matt Maupin's body has been found, missing in action-captured- in Iraq since April 9, 2004. As his father stated,"Matt's coming home." A sad, yet somehow fitting, bookend to my weekend off. Friday was spent trying to save the life of an 18 year old young man shot in the head outside his mother's home. He'll live. The gangstas on these streets do not aim to kill anymore. They aim to paralyze. More suffering that way. The killers in Iraq extract a different but similiar pain from their victims. Young men, still boys to those of us old enough to have parented them, fresh off the playing fields into the fields of battle. Beirut. Cincinnati. The battles change, the cost of battle does not. God's speed, Matt, and a prayer for parents everywhere.

Yes, Virginia, there will be a spring, and there will be fabulousity...

Op-Ed Contributor Did Your Shopping List Kill a Songbird? By BRIDGET STUTCHBURY Published: March 30, 2008 Migratory songbirds are suffering mysterious population declines, and pesticides may well be to blame. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/30/opinion/30stutchbury.html?ex=1364616000&en=51cc29503f23a4e8&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

For those who enjoy another day of chilly, grey, and drizzly weather today will be fabulous. I can see a handsome male cardinal singing his heart out on the bare branches outside the windows. He sounds lovely, but happily I don't understand birdsong--it's probably some highly aggressive territorial bantering like, "Get the hell away from my tree or I will peck your eyes out." Birdsong sounds much better without the words. Cruising the blog-o-shere I've been intruiged by the reading challenges. Yes, I see also that they have been in existence for many years now, but apparently I have been living in some parallel universe and unaware. The shame and horror... I believe I will start with one of the Man Booker choices. I've started two which are on my list, but stopped reading. No memory why, sometimes it's just not the right time for a certain book, or something else caught my eye and I forgot. The others listed I chose quite simply because I liked the covers....

Snow, Aldo by Kate DiCamillo Once, I was in New York, in Central Park, and I saw an old man in a black overcoat walking a black dog. This was springtime and the trees were still bare and the sky was gray and low and it began, suddenly, to snow: big fat flakes that twirled and landed on the black of the man's overcoat and the black dog's fur. The dog lifted his face and stared up at the sky. The man looked up, too. "Snow, Aldo," he said to the dog, "snow." And he laughed. The dog looked at him and wagged his tail. If I was in charge of making snow globes, this is what I would put inside: the old man in the black overcoat, the black dog, two friends with their faces turned up to the sky as if they were receiving a blessing, as if they were being blessed together by something as simple as snow in March.

Yet ANOTHER day of living the dream...

The other day at work one of my patients was a 49 year old Hispanic gentleman who had been transferred to us from one of the smaller community hospitals as a head bleed from an assault. Head bleed in hospital language meaning bleeding on the INSIDE of the skull. He did in fact have quite a large bleed on the CT scan--even I could see it--but it was deep in the brain and there were no signs of trauma. He probably bled as a result of untreated high blood pressure and one of the vessels in the brain, in the basal ganglia, broke open. His neighbor,"some cranky old lady," in the apartment building where he lives called the police complaining about "a fight" after she saw/heard four men dragging him up to his apartment. The truth is that Hispanic man worked at a Chinese restaurant, and that he had lost his speech and couldn't walk, was dragging his right side around, and the four men from the restaurant drove him home and got him up the stairs to his apartment. The ho...

"A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a homesickness or a love -sickness. It is a reaching out toward expression, an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found the word." Robert Frost And, "In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on." Robert Frost

24 March 2008 We saw a deer on our walk today. A bushy white-tailed female bounded in front of us from Dunore Park and ran into the ivy woodiness of land next to the graveyard. Brutus was on it like the mighty but slow hunter that he is, and stood at attention looking northward every time he saw a flutter of movement to the side. No more deer sightings though. Wouldn’t even be much of a mention except that we live in the city and Dunore Park is just a snip of land in the shape of a half-moon that’s grassy and has a swing set for the neighborhood kids and two park benches for their parents or lazy dog walkers. It’s a cut- out from Ludlow Avenue, now a four lane road that comes up from Hamilton Avenue in Northside and the expressways. Our lone deer must have come from the wooded areas surrounding the homes of Clifton Crest and run across the four lanes of road and traffic back to the sheltered wood of the graveyard. We’ve seen a family of deer there before, their tracks left in the snow ...

the long shadows of a late March afternoon drape themselves across the highway like discarded pairs of stockings lightly covering the graveled brim of road and extending out until just touching the wheels of the cars but never rustle at their passing. filigreed tips of the trees stretch into sky, blue giving away hints of the hazy pastel of evening soon to settle. exit 144-Corinth/Owenton and a bare stretch of interstate overpass empty to the right and left but for a white wooden sign, “Bob & Lois’s Diner,” a thin, red wagon wheel, and a dusty black pickup truck in the lot. we take the large 8-top by the window, orders of grilled cheeseburgers, slaw, and fries all around and settle in for our family meal. stories are told, laughs are laughed, and voices mimicked. stories of new puppies oohed and aahed as evening creeps forward and the folks of Corinth come and go after their supper eaten on the way home after work, still in their work clothes. we make our way home guided by a full ...

She felt it gnawing away inside her, just below her breastbone like a small little mouse nibbling away at the core. A little sweet faced mouse, nothing like that long, brown, sharp nosed shape she’d seen sliding along behind the stove last week. She would think about a tiny little grey mouse like the ones who came to help Cinderella. Cinderella had all kinds of mice and birds living in her house, no one thought that was disgusting and vile. She burrowed her way deeper into the blankets enveloping her, trying to not lose the small pocket of warmth she had created. The bed became colder, the grey light through the window frosty. The objects around her though were not sharpening in clarity in the chilled air, but hazy and pale, fading at the edges. Warm liquid seeped beneath her, saturating the bed, its sticky heat quickly dissipated. She lay motionless not wanting to surrender what small territory of comfort she had claimed and closed her eyes to the waves of twisting and tearing that we...

Brutus the boxer sleeping with his head on stuffed squirrel squeaky toy, Felix the cat sleeping on my true love’s dining room chair, Bella the cat silently padding across dining room table to hiss and swat at Felix. HoneyHaired girl sleeping. Megan the rat watching all from her cage, standing up tall on hind legs. 3 small birds on tree outside, one with pale red top of head. Grey, quiet, drizzly day. My true love not calling me back.

Red coat beneath red umbrella and the sky is beginning to snow.

If you ever find me here lying on the floor Dead of a broken neck Please look no further for the guilty culprit Than the 60 pounds of boxer dog at my feet. The one who won’t look at you. He will respond to firm proddings eventually With a sigh heavy with reluctant resignation And a look that could speak volumes If the subject was, “Whaaaaaat???”

I have a note in my pocket from my husband, “Meteor shower… midnight-dawn tonight. Perseus?” How often is a person in Montana in the middle of August During a meteor shower… Walking out the front door Into a jolt of cold air We hear sharp, insistent barking As the collie alerts the other two. The retriever sniffs us once Then turns back towards the front yard and interrupted dreaming. The black lab, Juice, stays with us, a genial host, and we walk Past the barn with its bright beacon of light, Dirt and gravel make soft, crunching noise under our feet. We lean in towards each other, strides matching, And make our way in the dark towards the sluice. The air smells fresh, like nothing, until the smells of grass And hay and horses and fresh water single themselves out. The sky is completely clear, stars are everywhere. “Stars are the holes in the sky where the souls of the dead Passed through to be with the Great Spirit.” In this field, on this night, this is the only truth present For the...

Oh, to be Felix the cat Who anticipates every front door opening With sunbaked sidewalks for snoozing And a new flock of birds to chase. Oh, for the life of Felix Where every door opening Means a warm pillowed couch And a honey haired girl to love you.

He pulls me out to the front porch, door slamming, unable to contain his exuberance, runs to the end of the walk and comes to a quick halt. Nose to ground. Every day there are no less than five stops he must make before we reach the park, reading the messages left behind; a golden stream added on to some, not others. Stepping lightly up and down moss covered and grassy patches littered with September’s acorns, he pauses on the hills to look out at his kingdom below and sniff the air above him. On the grass by the swings he lets loose and runs and runs and runs in circles surrounding me in a ring of dog. I watch him now asleep on his carefully arranged collection of blankets and one pink, stuffed pig, nose twitching, paws trembling, chest heaving, and wonder where he’s gone.

Something is different this morning. I wake to the same grey day, same cold day; searching through the bedroom window I see the same snow covering the ground of the backyard. But this day feels different and I don’t know why. It’s the sound of this morning that holds the change. I can hear it...a bird’s song. Must be a returning bird, that I hadn’t realized was ever gone until I heard its return. The morning song of an ordinary robin becomes enough to make a woman get up out of bed, walk down the hallway, and spy around the corner looking for hope.

Today was the second day of two days ACLS mandatory testing--Advanced CardioPulmonary Life Support. Two days after two weeks of going over and over what to do in worst case scenerios..."you're going through the parking garage in the morning, on your way to work, and you see a young man--30ish slumped next to an open car door, nonresponsive..." "coming back from the Starbucks in the cafeteria you find an older man lying unconscious in the stairwell and he is not breathing, your patient's wife comes out of his room and tells you that she feels as though her heart is being squeezed through a keyhole and suddenly collapses and is pulseless," and now a weight has been lifted from my shoulders. I passed. As the American Heart Association has emblazoned on all their videos, "Learn and Live." While the specter of Christmas Future hovered in the corners of the classroom in his grey hooded robe we frantically attempted to save the 52yr old woman who came in ...

Seamus Riley's photos Sets Tags Archives Favorites Profile View as slideshow ( ) var photostream_owner_nsid = "27785903@N00"; pretty lat/long Ring School © All rights reserved. Uploaded on Dec 11, 2007 1 comment Gone © All rights reserved. Uploaded on Sep 12, 2007 0 comments Crows Conversing © All rights reserved. Uploaded on Sep 12, 2007 0 comments

This Christmas tree must come down. It absolutely must come down today, the20th of January; a free Sunday since I was called off work. It is well past the Epiphany and the end of the Christmas season. In fact, I faintly heard both those days heckling each other as they ran past our house on the sunlit sidewalk below. The dog heard them first and added his yelps out the window. I saw the tail end of a couple of pairs of jean legs and boots, and the flying tassle of a stocking cap. Can’t say I blame them one bit. They have finished their required duties in this year’s festivities. No cups o’kindness, no present mirth nor present laughter remains for those of us left behind. Probably the curly headed baby Jesus is with them. They’ll meet up with the three wise men and go ice skating up at the lake in Burnet Woods, swooping past the ducks that live there, laughing at the chorus of cantankerous quacking. In years past I couldn’t wait to put up our tree and ornaments with the company of “Whi...