Primary Health Care

There, lodged securely in memory
the visage of a dapper, concerned
and invariably white-coated man
who was our family doctor for over
forty years of his life and ours.
Meticulous, busy, empathetic and
involved, we wondered how much
of his valuable time his own family
received in his dedicated profession.

A white wisp of how he first appeared
all those years ago, wearying life
finally retired him from proactive
duty to his vast community of
private-practise patients. Now, our
family doctor is a practitioner within
a group medical practise, operating
out of a vast building called a "big box"
supermarket, alongside an optometrist,
passport studio portraitist, wine shop,
florist, pharmacy and dental office.

While the doctors on staff are casually
garbed, minus white coat, mine presents
in a low-cut dress that emphasizes her
elegant form, and none have festooned
themselves with the once-symbolic
stethoscope. When my physician is
absent on maternity leave, other, older
doctors fill in, assessing the state of
patients' health, renewing prescriptions.

A phalanx of medical support staff,
receptionists accepting health cards
and inputting data in their computers,
scheduling follow-up appointments,
sending out blood tests to laboratories,
and nurses administering vaccines, while
nutritionist/dietitians prescribe best
eating practises in service to the new
paradigm in supermarket health care.

Bleak Vision

Note to doubting self; no, there
is not, cannot possibly exist an
arcane conspiracy concocted by
circumstances and fate, against
your wholesome well-being. This
is simply an instance of entirely
neutral Fortune gone on holiday,
leaving events to occur as they will
themselves and that collective
will is simply more powerful
than the puny fearful one
you just happen to possess.

Admittedly, you feel abandoned,
alone, bereft of the comfort of
a single concerned soul. Bleak the
outlook. Your state of mind, at
present, is little better than your
physical state, so removed from
that lithe and carefree time of youth.
You have borne much, granted;
persevere, and this too shall pass:
on authority you have it.

Repeat Ritual

The late January hour prepares
to complete its compact with the
day. There yet remains ample
light to refract gloriously from the
ice shards glittering like jewels
fallen from Winter Wonderland
forest branches shed carelessly on
mounded snowbanks by the wind
gusting ferociously on the frigid air.

The setting sun burns a fiery hole
in the wide expanse of sky, setting
afire the wisps of white cloud
gathering in an excitement of orange
bonfire of the heavens, inspired by
that ovoid furnace feverishly flaming
but to no avail on the landscape
utterly consumed in frozen white.

From Riches To Dross

As I child I learned how bewitchingly
opportune it often proved to be, to
proceed in my daily perambulations,
conceivably risking life and limb as
I crossed busy intersections to determinedly
focus my sight on the street before me
rather than oncoming traffic, despite
my mother's constant admonitions.

For my absorption on what might
lay before my eagerly questing gaze
tended toward occasional jubilant rewards
of objects serendipidously found that others
had inadvertently dropped; cash, jewels,
toys and hair ornaments I would never,
by other means, be in proud possession of.
As though Dame Fortune nodding in
approval at my childish fantasies of
come-by-chance, possessions, with
no harm ever coming my way.

Now, infinitely older, albeit perhaps
no wiser, I still keep my gaze affixed below
as I proceed, but now I do so in the confines
of my home. For my very elderly companion
dog, now somewhat physically decrepit,
no longer mentally alert, has been dropping
fecal treasures whenever the urge takes her
in her state of dementia; items I much
prefer not to discover having trod upon.

In Evolutionary Terms....

Flash, this just in: brilliant
behavioral scientists, after much
study of many previously published
studies have concluded that the
"male warrior" instinct is nature's
genetic male inheritance in designed
perpetuation of the species expressed
in perpetuity through aggression toward
outsiders of the defending tribe.

Women, they rhapsodical conclude,
have been endowed by nature to be
nurturers, peacemakers who tend to
"befriend", resolving conflicts to
protect their offspring. Men wage
wars resulting from those instinctual
violent tendencies meant to improve
status and attract nubile mates.

The researchers arrived at their
stunning analytical response to the
mysteries of these deep philosophical
differences entrenched deep within
the visceral psyches of men and
women, presumably despite a tendency
in modern day higher education
no longer teaching the classics.

Mars is the god of war, after all,
and Venus the goddess of love.
Haven't we been through all of this
before? We've witnessed this scenario
played over and redundantly over again.
Acknowledging the vast distance in
the grid of human interaction and
compulsions that have managed to
somehow withstand the test of time.

So Mars informs the males of the
species, urging them to take pleasure
in hating the enemy and bringing stark
disorder and desolation, laying waste in
the glory of the battlefield. And Venus
sends her female cohorts down the
ages to despair at the gory deaths of
sons and brothers, fathers and future.

Remembering ... Forgotten

The gentleman will please remember that when his half-civilized ancestors were hunting the wild boar in Silesia, mine were princes of the earth. Judah Benjamin, in reply to a taunt by a Senator of German descent.

None could have been more greatly taken by surprise and mortally offended than secular Jews in civilized, cultivated Germany - who considered themselves more affected and deeply steeped in modernity and creative energy and intelligence by their venerated generations of German citizenship than their Jewish heritage - to discover that they were regarded as mere Jews, fit for nothing but eradication by the Third Reich.

Their steep complacency at having attained acceptance at the highest levels of German society, academia, political life and wealth would be shattered by the reality of the military-political juggernaut that would overtake Europe and reach out to Asia, enveloping as it progressed, the near east and North America.

The intellectual vastness and social connections to the master race admitted of a moral certainty of racist exceptionalism that excluded Semites from the stellar genetic superiority of the Aryan race of supermortals.

You call me a damned Jew. My race was old when you were all savages. I am proud to be a Jew. John Galsworthy, Loyalties, Act. II.

Hungarian and Czechoslovakian Jews considering themselves culturally superior to Polish and Italian Jews never imagined their countries would accept that they were dross too, to be disposed of summarily along with their Latvian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian and other European countries' Jewish counterparts.

The massive round-up, degradation, humiliation, scorning, enslavement in ghettoes and death-camps located around Europe with infamous names like Auschwitz, Sobibor, Treblinka, with their slave labour, their medical experiments, their punishments and starvation rations, their gas chambers and chimneys puking the dark detritus of burnt bodies in a ghastly parody of orderly convention, bespoke the Nazi ideal of eradicating the impediments to the attainment of human perfection.

The Jews are among the aristocracy of every land; if a literature is called rich in the possession of a few classic tragedies, what shall we say to a national tragedy lasting for fifteen hundred years, in which the poets and the actors were also the heroes. George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

The quietly determined theatre of extermination became a subterranean affair of cleansing the world of a plague, a dread scourge of those posing as human whose subhuman facade had been revealed by Nazi ideology that wallowed in the worship of pride, pursued perfection, and visualized a very exclusive and choice Utopia. The very physical characteristics of the perfect Nordic male would effectively have excluded the German chancellor.

And the Jews, en masse, no offence, merely acknowledgement of the most appalling inferiority soiled by genetic traits betraying their unworthiness of sharing the air, the water and other precious natural resources, were specifically chosen, in their totality, for annihilation, to make the world of the truly entitled by nature and inheritance, a better place.

Who hateth me but for my happiness?
Or who is honoured now but for his wealth?
Rather had I, a Jew, be hated thus,
Than pitied in a Christian poverty.
Marlowe, The Jew of Malta

One might think that a collective representing the world's religious leaders would seek to intervene. They did not, presumably on the presumption that God would look after His own. The saving grace being that a small but noted number of religious and their laity took it upon their consciences and moral certainty to act on their own to save whom they could among Jews.

Suavity toward the Jews! Although you have lived among them, it is evident that you little understand those enemies of the human race. Haughty and at the same time base, combining an invincible obstinacy with a spirit despicably mean, they weary alike your love and your hatred. Anatole France, The Procurator of Judea

As in medical science, when an anomalous, sinister, threatening bacteria or virus emerges to threaten humanity as a horrible existential pandemic, all scientific and technological means must be harnessed toward the imperative of destroying the threat to the well-being of humanity's continued existence...

And, since time immemorial Jews, with their strange religion insisting on an especial status with their Maker, and exhibiting typically hideous traits offensive to others already held a tradition of suspicion and rejection, there was little problem in reaching international consensus that Something Must Be Done.

When people talk about a wealthy man of my creed, they call him an Israelite; but if he is poor they call him a Jew. Heinrich Heine

If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German and Germany will declare that I am a Jew. Albert Einstein

That 'something' emerged as an exquisitely planned and executed genocide. So expertly dedicated to its task, it succeeded in destroying resources to the military deeply engaged in challenging and overcoming resistance to German fascism's indomitable need to conquer the world and to dominate it for at least a thousand years.

And while it hampered the military, it succeeded in its exemplary mission to rid the world of a menace. The Jews sacrificed for the salvation of world civilization.

A hopeless faith, a homeless race,
Yet seeking the most holy place,
And owning the true bliss . . . .
Or like pale ghosts that darkling roam,
Hovering around their ancient home,
But find no refuge there.
John Keble, The Christian Year: Fifth Sunday in Lent

The tradition of a two-millennium-old story of sacrifice and redemption repeated. World Jewry has never recovered its numbers. The Jewish population of Israel, established post-war as the traditional homeland of the Jews, and considered by Jews to be its only safe haven on Earth, is now roughly reflective of the numbers that perished in the Holocaust.

And Israel shall be a proverb and a by-word among all people. Old Testament: 1 Kings

The invidious scourge of ethnic hatred known as anti-Semitism lives on, succeeding once again in the temporary wake of post-Holocaust remorse. The world and its affairs returned to normalcy.

Still on Israel's head forlorn,
Every nation heaps its scorn.
Emma Lazarus, The World's Justice

This Winter Scene

The sky a dome of silver, has
clamped itself tightly over the
late afternoon arras of mid-winter
woods where silence has muffled
the chastened pathways of hushed
furred-creature presence. And then,
shattering that silence like the
ripples of a placid lake reacting
to a stone flung by a careless
hand, the percussive, shrill call
of a Pileated woodpecker sharply
reverberates on the stillness.

A pair of crows, wings spread
black, scissoring the frozen tree line,
silently observes small creatures
of the forest scurrying and foraging
among the white humped ghosts
of summer's tree stumps, transformed
by winter snowfalls to sturdy sentries.
Three robins, breasts ruddy and
bright against the prevalent white,
fly from bough to naked branch
seeking seeds and berries, sleek and
fat, oblivious of failed migration.

And May The Most Deserving Candidate Win

A figure of power and authority, a
personage of dignity, integrity and
uncommon intelligence and grace
to infuse the people with hope in the
future and trust that the promise the
candidate for high public office as a
civil guide and lawmaker is well placed
and worthy of the tasks at hand.

Why then, is it that those who present
as officious charlatans, prideful
mountebanks whose pasts reflect
failures of moral certitude, commissions
of grave ethical lapses, yet all is forgiven
as the rhetoric soars into implausible
denials and bombastic accusations
against others clearly their superiors.

Seldom does the rectitude of the
trustworthy and those proven to have
zealously served with distinction in
the public sphere appear to rise to
the heights of public acclaim as yet
do those skilled in oratorical
sleight-of-truth, those who spin tales
of improbable dreams become reality,
they leading the impossible way.

The temperate, insightful, focused
mind reliant on reason and resolve
to the public weal, proven by experience
dedicated to service and leadership
fails to ignite the passion of support
for lack of the charismatic flavour
of vaunted celebrity however tainted
by ignominious social violations.

In the final analysis triumph falls
to the facade of righteousness, as the
empowerment of self-interest elevates
the unworthy, disdaining the solid
candidate. What does this reflect upon
those who prove the truism that we
earn the government we injudiciously
choose to select in our fair judgement?

Not The Merest Hint

Not the merest hint of a
serene whisper that any
living thing is present in
this late afternoon forest
besides ourselves. There's a
gathering gloom as winter
daylight fades, an ephemeral
mist on the monochromatic
and still black-on-white.

We are dressed to shelter
from the cold, our boots
crushing the ice-pebbled trail.
There is wind, unleashing skeins
of still-powdery snow like
ectoplasm, from overhead
branches. The ravine's creek,
frozen and snow-dusted, boasts
the pawprints of animals we
do not see, but do see us.

The atmosphere under a
closed, silver-draped sky
mischievously addles our
expectations for the snow has
become freezing rain, tiny
silver bullets of frozen pellets,
tapping us, bouncing off onto
the white-on-black arras.

It's So Unfair!

The inertia stifling the
initiative of self tackling
a project has a way of claiming
more victims than merely
the resentful tasked with
tackling and completing
that school assignment.

For the self-absorbed teen
anguish in the irritating face of
expectations becomes manifest
through the groans of grim
resentment echoing throughout
an otherwise peaceful house.

There truly are none so
desperately, unfairly put upon
as the young and academic
uninspired, so hugely protective
of their tender brains charged
with the entitlements of
youthful ennui with life.

Travel Broadens the Mind and Horizon

If you plan to travel, and why not, to other parts of the world, plan carefully, and go not as a tourist on an organized trip, but as a curious sight-seer and organize your own trip.

See the world's diversity, its geography and geology. Look at the Earth that we live upon. Peruse the cultures and heritage of the countries of ancient lineage.

Pack along courage and curiosity and strike out boldly to expose yourself to experiences not to be had on organized tour trips.

Before embarking, educate yourself, read about the country and the countryside, its history, people and background. Reveal to yourself what is of most interest to you and then pursue it.

And if that opportunity is open to you, and you can somehow manage to make the most of it, congratulations. You have opened yourself to a greater appreciation and understanding of the great adventure of living.







Photos courtesy of J.S. Rosenfeld

Requiescat in Pace

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Rising like a blazing meteorite
of galactic ice and space dust,
lighting up the sky with its
fiery tail, youth flings itself
with the passion of defiant grace
into the void of exuberant hubris
to flicker and spark and collapse.

The young are, because of their
brave youth, immortal. To believe
otherwise is to deny the phantom
reality of their world that informs
their lives, inspires and rescues
them from the tedium of
existence without excitement.

They cannot imagine a sudden
cessation of vitality, the quick
abandonment of an aspiring
elite, extreme athlete, to a morbid
failure to surmount gravity-defying
soaring arabesques nature permits
only winged denizens of the air.

Who among the insouciant
bold, the immortal young, can
conceive of disaster such as is named
a ruptured vertebral artery, whose
irrevocable effect of intercranial
hemorrhage disastrously closes
down that effervescent brain?

Not they, nor any others celebrating
the physically impossible made
possible by youth pushing the
boundaries of human strength, vision
and agility, loosing itself from the surly
bonds of the commanding atmosphere,
challenging the very nature of
indomitable nature herself.

Free Will

How strange it is that in the
great Sweepstakes of Life some
choose their numbers so poorly.
Reflecting perhaps, not so
greatly on their qualities of
personal discernment but on
the chameleon abilities of the
other half of the equation to
take on the prevalently trusted
colours of the social contract, a
covenant that seems on the
surface to reflect well for the
future, but is destined to collapse
as the shades drain and the
grim reality of bleak black
emerges with dread finality.

Shush, Nothing

HO/AFP/Getty Images The Planck Surveyor satellite shows the universe in microwaves. The dust emission of the Milky Way is visible as a broad, horizontal band. Near the galactic north and south pole, at the top and bottom of this sky projection, the temperature variations of the cosmic background radiation are visible.

Bend your mind around

nothing. Make that a
timeless nothing. As in
no existence. None,
whatever, therefore nothing.
Stir in Creation; that would
be, you see, the Universe
suddenly creating itself.
Out of an immense,
meaningless, non-existence.

For where there was nothing
a space, a huge yawning
unimaginable, silent, dark
and motionless space containing
nothing aroused itself
mysteriously to welcome
the existence of something.

An explosion of matter,
a gaseous, fiery-fierce
maelstrom of radioactive
inchoate matter, the
unerring intelligent design
of natural science. Ah,
that would of course be
the wakening into being
of the science of nature.

Astonishing, yes. Beyond
belief, for it is fantastical.
The Universe declares itself
into existence in all its dark,
mesmerizing elasticity and pull,
in a luminous display of colour
and light. The spheres evolve.

And they majestically revolve,
cool and coalesce, draw
energy and light and coax
amoebas of life forms to
populate those revolving,
gigantic geodes, as shooting
stars and meteorites cross
the heavenly firmament of the
ever-emerging, definable
essence that is something.

The Downiest of Coverlets

Sullen expectation hangs
on the air like a dark mood
of juvenile irritation, the
landscape rejecting Nature's
indifference to her elements;
cold, wind, icy sleet and snow
pellets recapturing the stage,
just when the climate agreed
to a gentler presentation
relieving the creatures of the
forest from their most current
barrage of inclement events.

But these too are Nature's
creatures and the formulae
of her design are not always
inimical to the preservation
of life. Agreed, then, to descend
from the steel-grey-plated sky
occluded with the the dense
descent of gentle, soft flakes
sans the ferocity of wild wind,
to simply bed the landscape
with the downiest of coverlets.

Sharing and Caring

The challenge and the goal - now
encased like a fossil in amber
remains well known for its high
rate of success, yet little practised
today and more's the pity, observing
the sorry slate of fleeting marriage
contracts - is to infuse the relationship
with the truly unerring flavour of
mutual love and commitment.

The generations succeeding those
that took serious notice of the woman's
way to a good man's heart places little
credence in "old wives' tales", requiring
basic homebody skills for both, each
complementing the other, for nowhere
in a frantically triple-tasking society is
there the quaint notion of available time.

Caring solicitation nurtures love and
affection through assurances of devotion,
an ancient formula, tried and true.
Cherish and ye shall be cherished. Dare
to care enough and the rewards are
amply presented. The dedication is to
the other, and the self awarded fidelity.

Love can indeed be evoked through
countless other premium manners,
of natural means or society's popular artifices.
But slight veneer begets casual response,
a caricature of sincerity, soon worn
past endurance. And the moving hand
writes the story of pretense then
moves inevitably, disconsolately on.

The Starry Firmament

The cosmic stars have become
blinking diamonds, suspended
in frozen animation, slowly
revolving across the dark
blue-velvet of the winter sky.
We observe the firmament,
in awe of its stunning immensity.

Mankind's communications
satellites, like clockwork,
wind their mechanical presence
above the half-sleeping Globe,
transiting messages, communing
with far-flung Constellations.

We theorize, yet cannot quite
imagine great distant planets,
pin-pricks of planetary
existence in a dark void
rippling with mysterious
luminous matter, life-giving
suns and gaseous planets.

From this vantage, the familiar
is sighted and celebrated and
the secrets of the Universe, both
dark and light tantalize even as
they elude. Who are we, after all,
to posit and define the science
of Nature's precise design?

A Temporary Passage

The morning crackles with the
icy grip of winter under a ceiling of
grey-white cloud formation, whipped
by Arctic winds dominating the arras
below. Bare tree tops clacking, spruce
and cedar boughs rippling green
over the layer of white steadily
accumulating as morning progresses.

Light snow, lapping itself in a
gradual, orderly sheet of glittering
soft facets over the sheen of ice below.
The cold so bitter it penetrates all
warm-blooded creatures, chilling
their long-term survival prospects.
Their distress surely muffled by
the tender, falling crystals.

Or so one imagines. Then,
suddenly a faint, distinct trill and
there on two bristling-bare hawthorn
branches the scarlet pride of a
pair of cardinals, preening, singing,
obviously unperturbed, fully capable
of sustaining themselves, the
weather a temporary passage.

This Wintry Day

It's a blizzard of a day that
has been unleashed upon us,
scarce warning by the weather
office; Nature in her officious
occasionally malicious way
having capriciously determined
we were in for a surprise.

So, surprise! then, and welcome
to an all-day, all-night, all-time
barrage to most certainly enliven
an otherwise normal, perhaps
slightly boring day of plodding
along too smugly. Waking in the
wee hours before dawn, a spectacle
of heavenly lit beauty revealed.

The atmosphere speckled with
lazily floating clusters of crystalline
snow. Bedazzlingly smocking all it
smothered, a ghostly, humped
landscape emerged to greet the day.

A chaser of suddenly freezing
rain tinkling with faerie iceballs
captured the landscape as a
slippery-slick mantle of ice
layered the soft whiteness of
snow. For light comedic relief,
the wind sent little zephyrs

to ruffle the following curtains
of snow, and look! just look at
all those people shivering and
shouting, slipping and shovelling,
revelling in the persnickety
nature of this wintry day.

An Ambush of Crows

Above the sleeping birch
and beech, oak and pines
circle the dark forms of
a clatter of crows
busily reclaiming their
proprietary rights to
the sky below the
silver-grey of snow-laden
clouds, the roosting rights
to steepled firs and spruce,
the carrion-devouring rights
of the forest floor, and
none there are to contest the
ravenous ravening claimants.

Keeping The Peace

Pots and covers, cutting boards
and dishes, utensils, bamboo
stirring spoons and paring knives,
cleavers and peelers litter every
conceivable space; briefly used
and discarded, soon lost in the
detritus of frenzied preparation.

Observe, ye females, and quail
with the futile despair of hopeless
envy! When all is done and
fragrantly dispensed, partake and
gush admiration of the zest and
skill that surpassed expectations.

Remain genuinely compatible to
agree to the sublime superiority
of the effort entailed culminating
in a meal of exquisite execution
and prepare, post-prandially, to
wipe up spilled excess and to
clean up that incredible morass.