ARTICLES
Medical Paraphernalia
I. Behind the Mask
"My father was a doctor, a pediatrician.
He was the kind we all long for today.
Me, too.
When I was little, I was aware of loving him."
II. The Microscope
"I watched the mystery of life swimming by,
as I examined a gob of the goo in my underpants
with the high-power lens. So many little me's ...
or were they just tadpoles?"
III. Lilly and Me
"I always assumed that Eli Lilly was a Jewish pediatrician.
Only when I started school and learned about
Eli Whitney's cotton gin and Elihu Yale's university,
did I learn that he was no more Jewish
than Orville Redenbacher."

READINGS
Leumel
"Would she encourage a telephone call
after these fifty years? Would she invite me to come visit
and meet her family? Would she want to talk about
that time so long ago when we were such innocents,
such innocents in love?"

Suicide in the Desert
"I fanned into the land,
rippling across the surface in all directions.
I could smell the ground, its dark volcanic dust
driven into crannies and protected beneath mats of stone.
I felt the shape of every crag. At that moment I realized that
I had fed my life to the land.

Great Readings of the Past
200 Horsepower Cheeses
"What did Tom say about those cheeses?
I replied that he had directed they were
to be kept in a moist place, and that nobody
was to touch them. She said:
Nobody's likely to touch them. Had he smelt them?
I thought he had, and added
that he seemed greatly attached to them.
You think he would be upset, she queried,
if I gave a man a sovereign
to take them away and bury them?"