On A Cat Aging
by Sir Alexander Gray
He blinks upon the hearth-rug
And yawns in deep content,
Accepting all the comforts
That Providence has sent.Louder he purrs and louder,
In one glad hymn of praise
For all the night’s adventures,
For quiet, restful days.Life will go on forever,
With all that cat can wish;
Warmth, and the glad procession
Of fish and milk and fish.Only – the thought disturbs him –
He’s noticed once or twice,
That times are somehow breeding
A nimbler race of mice.
MERLIN
I loved Merlin – King Arthur’s court wizard — when I was a kid and that was just about the time that Disney came out with “The Sword in the Stone.”
WOW – nearly 50 years ago!
Later I was to love the Arthurian legend in many deep and symbolic ways — love it so much that for a long time I kept a light-up, plug-in sword which was (actually, fairly easily) removed from a plastic pseudo-crystalline rainbow light-shooting stone. Doing so didn’t make me a queen of anything, though.
It is almost impossible, I think, to be human and anything more than partially literate without knowing the splendor of the Arthurian legend.
Fast forward to the present, and I am a wizard in my own way – a doctor. I wanted every patient to have the smiling sense of the Arthurian splendor that I had when I pulled that ersatz sword from the ersatz stone. Most of them did, until that piece, like many dear to me, was lost in a series of moves.
Filed under Aging by on Mar 9th, 2011. 1 Comment. 
I remember when I was very tiny, getting a TB (tuberculosis) skin test as part of some public school campaign. It was negative. My parents were pleased with me, but they never had any doubts that I would be “clean.” They said something about poor people with poor hygiene being at risk, but not nice middle class folks like us. No problem.
Fast forward to a far more vivid memory. I had to get another TB test in France when I attended medical school there. It was a hassle, as I had to get someone to take class notes for me while I went to a cavernous and overwhelming public health office.
I was in line with all the rest of the “aliens” as the laws required me to be. There were people who looked more terrified than I — young mothers from North Africa with four or five young children orbiting around them like out-of-control satellites. Unlike this frightened young lady, at least I knew what they were going to do to me — even though I was only a first year med student. They called it a “scarification.”
There was a very petite nurse who had to reach up to give me some scratched parallel lines on my left shoulder. It was the BCG, the “Bacille de Calmette et Guerin.” They told me that it was a strain of tuberculosis that had been developed in Lille, a few miles to the north of Amiens where I was, and that it was a gift to the world. It was a benign form of tuberculosis that would give me immunity. Read more on Antibiotic Abuse — We Are Creating Monster Epidemics…
Filed under Disease by on Mar 11th, 2010. Comment.