Sitting across from me,
In a wooden chair,
In an open room,
Full of light,
And many things unknown to me.
Was an old man,
Who appeared to be a miner.

His clothes were worn,
And as wrinkled as his face.
His beard was long,
And his hat was large and frayed.
His worn out dusty boots,
Run over at the heels,
Were made of blackest leather.

As he arose with the slightest effort,
He clomped and scraped across the floor,
His eyes dancing in my direction.
And then he said to me in gentle voice,
Just wait a minute,
Whilst I get you a survival kit.

I once had dreams of small gods.

I was walking down a wide and sweeping, steep street with my brother Steve and with Hannah and my sister Kristi. I was wearing a flowing, as light as gossamer, silk gown worn only by the princes of this world, over a soft and airy gauze-like under garment. The sunlight was softly warm, yet bright. My robes were moving with the breeze as we walked liesurely in quiet conversation.

I gave birth, while we walked, to a beautiful baby. The baby was glowing, awash in a lovely scented oil that sparkled as if infused with glitter. The baby was very large and difficult to carry; he was so large and heavy and the oil made him hard to hold onto. Occasionally I would drop him but he was never hurt. He was so beautiful and brown. I opened my gown for him to suckle.

We were on a street of large modern homes separated by mature landscapes. We arrived to a wide, stone staircase that led up to a house that was mostly glass and made of natural wood. We knocked on the door and were let in by Harpreet and Joga and Hardeep, Dhillon’s, my lover’s, children. Dhillon was upstairs in a bed of silk and kantha quilts. All of us climbed the stairs to the upstairs bedroom, of luxury, the like but rarely seen by common man. I sat on the bed, holding out the baby for Dhillon to take.

We all knew that I’d given birth to a small god. The baby had double rows of teeth and could speak in full sentences.The baby was saying many things but in my memory, it remains, that it complained of pooping because it was too messy. I presented the baby to Dhillon as the small god that he was.

I dreamt that I gave birth to a baby. I was in a house that I didn’t know and there were two midwives waiting for me to give birth. I hadn’t been in labor long, if at all, but I could I feel the bulging in my perineum and I said, “The baby is coming”. And I laid down on a beautiful velvet couch and the baby was born without any difficulty whatsoever. It was born face down and it laid on its stomach. When it was born it was as though it had not come through the birth canal. It was as clean and fresh as though it had just been bathed. Again, the baby could speak in full sentences, just as in the first dream, but I can’t recall what it said. As I held it to my breast to nurse it, it transformed into a cat. That’s all I can remember of this strange and mysterious dream.

As I was writing in my journal tonight, I turned to the next page to continue my thoughts and there was a message that read simply, “miss you”.

The rest of the page was empty. I have no idea how long ago these two, painfully, lonely words were written. I didn’t recognize the hand writing and couldn’t imagine who would have found my diary.

The word “miss” was inscribed in ink and the first letters, m and i were standing separate from each other and the final letters ss; these two letters were nestled close together. The word “you” was in pencil and seemed to be placed an unusually long distance from the word “miss”.

These words, printed by hand, were not particularly large, but being alone on the page, they surprised me.

Pressed between this message and the next blank page, were these two, fragile pansies on the sheerist of paper, the color of pond silt.

My heart is full… it is at once sad and yet with a strange sense of being loved or having once been loved. How long had I not known that some one was telling me that I was missed?

Perhaps, whoever left me these words of yearning will feel my heart tonight and know that I miss you too… with all of my being.

Pick an ad any ad
And you can buy magic
To save yourself from the
White yellow sun’s spell
That will destroy your youth,
What’s left of it that is.

You need the protection,
For crying out loud,
From doing any more damage
That is so offensive
to the ma(i)n in the street

Put yourself together
Or let the sting from the
Ocean salt on your skin
Eat you alive again
Hissing and slithering
Like a woman in love
With your brown rough snakeskin

And make up dances that
Make them all laugh loudly
And question who you are,
Old woman, and why you
so stubbornly resist
protection from the su(o)n.

written by Mary Beth St. John
sometime between
1996-2004

As I was drawing near the end of my time as OHSU’s first and only archivist in the entirety of its 125-year history, I was waxing a little (maybe a lot) nostalgic and poetic. I, since 1999, had my way in the Archives. I was privileged beyond my wildest dreams. I was the first to open boxes and was blown away by the treasures therein. I was “the decider”: this we will keep and this we will “weed”.

I had the most amazing opportunities to meet pioneers in healthcare and selfless individuals who have given to the world, to society, to students and to patients alike. I met researchers who are dedicated to uncovering the ultimate holistic history of people, events, and institutions. I was a liaison between donors and the repository for funds and materials and marveled at their generosity.

I wished that my mom was there to walk with me as I ended my career at OHSU, but do not be mistaken, I was joyously looking forward to the rest of my life.

Below is a little story that I wrote for the Oregon Health & Science University, School of Medicine monthly newsletter. Perhaps, you might enjoy it.

It is a very small book, just 14cm in length and 7.5 cm wide and 4 cm thick. It is the 1638 edition of Hippocratis coi Aphorismi. It is a marvel to behold and an amazing thing to hold. The soft, yellowed vellum binding is cool to the touch and completely unembellished, while the text-block edges are rough cut and stained tea brown. The cover of the spine is slightly separated revealing the narrow leather thong holding the stiff cover to the text block. In hand lettering, it reads Hippocrates Heurnio. The paper has a slightly sandy texture and nary a page is torn. Hippocrates wrote Aphorisms in 400 B.C.E.

And how did it happen to come to us… this valuable and rare edition? There are only two clues left to us. Revealing the tiny manuscript’s custodial history are two bookplates glued to the endpapers. One bookplate displays a coat-of-arms and a banner which reads: Prodess Quam Conspici, below in a lovely script is the name Peter Nouaille, Greatnefs. This I have learned is Peter Nouaille of Greatness, Kent, England, a breeder of silk worms who had built a silk mill on a tributary of the River Thames at Seven Oaks. “This mill was built in 1761. Peter came into the possession of the manorial watermill on marrying Elizabeth de la Mare of Greatness. Nouaille went bankrupt in 1778 but recovered, employing 100 people when he retired in 1800. It closed down after Nouaille’s death c1828.” The mills on the river’s tributaries were immortalized in the poem Ode on the Silk Mills at Greatness by Joseph Harrison.

How Peter Nouaille came into possession of this charming little book, and how dear Peter was divested of it, we shall most assuredly never know. But on an auspicious (for us) obscure date, another custodian came into possession; when and how we cannot divine. But we do know his name because we find the second clue… a bookplate belonging to the Medical School Library with the inscription: “Presented by J. Ettelson, M.D.”

Jesse Ettelson, MD, was born in Sprague, Washington in 1885, the son of Washington pioneers. He graduated from the Washington State University and the University of Illinois, gaining his Doctorate of Medicine from Rush Medical School in 1910. He went on to graduate studies at the Vanderhill Clinic in New York, where he studied dermatology and studied also at the University of Vienna in Austria. He came to Portland and served his internship at Good Samaritan Hospital and was one of the first dermatology specialists in Portland. He taught for a number of years at the University of Oregon Medical School and practiced in Portland until his retirement in 1941. He died at his home on a Thursday in 1968.

How then can we imagine Ettelson coming upon this book? Was he strolling along the street of some city in Europe, or in New York or even in Portland?  Had he entered a small dim bookstore and found the small volume of interest? Did he pick it up, examine it and found it as lovely as I have on a dark and rainy day? Perhaps.

You can find the lovely poetic work in translation from the Latin and the Greek http://classics.mit.edu/Hippocrates/aphorisms.mb.txt  You can see other copies that have been scanned at Google Books. But the real thrill to be found is beyond its content and lies within the context of the object and its history. On a Friday, Todd Hannon, reference librarian, carried it to the History of Medicine class at 12:00 noon for the students to see and to handle. Oh! The joy of rare book collections.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Darent

I just left my neighbor’s cozy house and entered the cold and sparkling world of untouched snow and the full moon in cancer in a crystal clear sky of pure and inky black. The perfectly dry burgandy wine and the warming amber whiskey I drank made me long for something un-named, more deep than the desire of most of mankind… I could cry.

Then I reached my door, reluctant to leave the wondrous night outside. My dog greeted me with a smile at the door, so happy to see me, wriggling against my legs and there were five 16 year old boys at the dining room table playing Dungeons and Dragons, empty popcorn bowl on the table, sleeping bags spread out on the floor, the warmth of a gas furnace… emails and texts of love on my phone.

Isn’t life awesome…

Ten days eating grapes makes watermelon magical.

I’ve always been a watermelon eater. As a kid, grandma had cold watermelon in the fridge all summer long. We’d eat a whole, giant watermelon, just the two of us, in an afternoon, sitting in her garden with the birds and honeybees and a shaker of salt.

These watermelons were not the wussy watermelons we eat today. These were the size of a two-year old child, dotted with big black fertile seeds. I’d spit them in the grass, I’d spit them in the garden, and some I’d plant among the zinnias.

We didn’t bother with plates and forks and spoons. Grandma would cut thick slices, I mean 2 inches thick, then she’d cut them into half moons.

I’d start by taking big, juicy bites, juice running down my bare chest, up to my elbows and dripping onto my legs. As I ate deeper and deeper, the rind would reach my ears, leaving my cheeks wet and sticky, until I’d eaten all the red and pink right down to the white part.

It was a good thing Grandma would have the rotating sprinkler on that kept her weedless grass green and her flower-laden garden blooming all summer long. And it was a good thing I was in my cotton panties… in later years, of course, I was in my bathing suit.

Grandma and me were serious watermelon eaters, but we’d laugh until we were crying. While we’d eat until our stomachs were bulging, she’d tell me the story of how when she was a kid, her and her brothers and sisters would eat the watermelon growing out under the fences along the road in rural Kentucky.

No wonder I loved my grandma so much. She’d peel me oranges ’til I had my fill, too. But that’s a different story.

I can’t eat watermelon without thinking of the best grandma that ever lived.

Postscript: So, this post is going up without photographs because I’m tired of waiting on myself to add them. I have a very good reason to publish it, which soon you will discover. Read this and you will uncover some deep “truths” about me if you care to dig.

(Written July 2016)

Where does my ego flee when wounded by intellectuals… to lick my wounds. It runs to that dark cave where lives a monster whose name is imposter. It lies in wait to further disembowel what is already dying.

My cries for help to one on the road passing by:

“Feeling kind of… Uh huh. Mmm mmmm. Yep. Nope. ‘Cause I know nothin’ ’bout sports, less ’bout music, even less ’bout movies and TV, zip about Judaism, Islam, Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Occultism, Activism, zero ’bout philosophy, geography, photography, cartography, biography, cardiology, musicology or any other -ology or cracy or sophy or ism… or so it feels to me tonight.”

I just want to be quiet.

My cries are heard. To this fellow traveler:

“My challenger thinks I’m hallucinating.
But one knows how one feels.

Was it my monster insecurities raising ugly multiple sepentine heads to eat the blood of my dying, intellectual road-kill ego? Yes! It always is and your crystal clear words of wisdom soothing and healing what’s left of my ailing heart where the wounds from its teeth bit deep. I will make it, since I embarked on this steep climb of my choosing. Battered and torn with my ego nearly dead but my heart still beating, I will arrive but better, much better for it.”

I escape the cave and walk on…