Monday March 23 2009

Skulls seemed like a good subject for today.

Perhaps March is going to roar out like a lion. We got some snow yesterday and today it is snowing and blowing. Both the state's freeways I-80 and I-25 - are closed further east. Rollie is stuck down in Laramie because of the blizzard - coming back to Pinedale from meeting Judi in New Mexico for a week. Certainly not unusual for this time of year. And not as cold as it could be, at 27. Joe's back from coffee. Sitting and listening to NPR. Until something comes on he doesn't like or agree with and there's the muffled swear words and he turns it off. He wasn't gone as long today and leaves me to wonder if no one else showed up - maybe they are all sitting home by the stove.

Peggy called from Atlanta, I'd emailed her a message since I couldn't get her on the phone (she'd left it on her son's washer last week) and told her I wasn't going to come to Atlanta in April. It just seems like a kind of stupid thing to do, in case I got sick that far away from home. They might come up here instead.

I have a lot of errands to do this afternoon, but not much else to write about. So I put an interesting poem in for you to read instead. I thought it was interesting anyway. Because I'm an organ donor. I doubt they will harvest mine though, here in Pinedale WY. I don't know how that works, especially if you're going to be cremated because that has to be done in a certain number of hours. Would Dr. K do the "harvesting"? And put them in a playboy ice chest and give them to the man I see go in and out every afternoon when I'm at the clinic, carrying the ice chests to his van. Surely those are just vials for blood tests. We always smile at each other and I hold the door open for him.

Good story here: http://www.offthepavedroad.com/

Article and 17 photos of the program we went to last Wednesday night:

http://www.pinedaleonline.com/news/2009/03/TheDallasBrass1.htm


The White Museum
by George Bilgere


My aunt was an organ donor

and so, the day she died,

her organs were harvested

for medical science.

I suppose there must be people

who list, under "Occupation,"

"Organ Harvester," people for whom

it is always harvest season,

each death bringing its bounty.

They spend their days

loading wagonloads of kidneys,

whole cornucopias of corneas,

burlap sacks groaning with hearts and lungs

and the pale green sprouts of gall bladders,

and even, from time to time,

the weighty cauliflower of a brain.

And perhaps today,

as I sit in this café, watching the snow

and thinking about my aunt,

a young medical student somewhere

is moving through the white museum

of her brain, making his way slowly

from one great room to the next.

Here is the gallery of her girlhood,

with that great canvas depicting her father

holding her on his lap in the backyard

of their bungalow in St. Louis.

And here is a sketch of her

the summer after her mother died,

walking down a street in Berlin

when the broken city was itself

a museum. And here

is a small, vivid oil of the two of us

sitting in a café in London

arguing over the work of Constable

or Turner, or Francis Bacon

after a visit to the Tate.

I want you to know, as you sit there

with your microscope and your slides,

there's no need to be reverent before these images.

That's the last thing she would have wanted.

But do be respectful. Speak quietly.

No flash photography. Tell your friends

you saw something beautiful.


"The White Museum" by George Bilgere. Reprinted with the permission of the author.