Quitters

Before I forget, the deadline for this month's Carnival of Hope is tomorrow, Thursday, at 5 PM PST. I'm more or less begging for submissions; I've gotten a lot of bland, impersonal personal-development posts this month, rather than the personal narratives I specifically ask for in the guidelines. So if you have a personal story about hope, gratitude, or good deeds, please send it to SusanPal (at) aol (dot) com, with the permalink of the post and a 2-3 line description.

Here's my own hopeful (or semi-hopeful) anecdote of the week:

Back in January, One of My Favorite Nurses at the hospital (hereafter abbreviated as OOMFN), decided to quit smoking. I learned about this because I'd seen OOMFN, clearly in a rush, buying a meal for an ED patient at the hospital coffeeshop; as I was buying my own chocolate-chip cookie, I said something like, "Wow, now there's an energetic person," and the cashier said, "Yeah, and giving up smoking didn't help."

So when I went back to the ED after my cookie break, I found OOMFN and said, "Hey! I hear you've quit smoking! Good for you! That's a really big deal! Congratulations!" OOMFN seemed startled, but thanked me. Since then, I've asked several times how the non-smoking campaign's going, and been told that it's going well, although "it's hard." (Giving up nicotine is supposedly more difficult than giving up heroin; I wouldn't know, since I've never indulged in either. But I can't even give up coffee, so it's a good thing I haven't used anything more dangerous!)

Last week, during my standard end-of-shift sweep of the waiting room, I met a young woman who said, "I'm pregnant, and I want to stop smoking. Do you have any information about that?"

I immediately thought of OOMFN. Could I get the two of them together to talk? But no: there might be HIPAA issues, and anyway, OOMFN (like all the medical staff that night) was running around like the proverbial headless chicken. And I didn't know how OOMFN had managed to stop; if the patch had been involved, that would be no help to the woman in the waiting room, who couldn't use the patch because that could hurt her baby, too.

Did we have how-to-quit-smoking info in the ED? I was constantly hearing doctors telling patients to stop smoking, so we had to have some printed material, right? But when I scanned the racks of wall pamphlets -- on heart disease, diabetes, stroke, alcoholism -- I didn't see anything about smoking.

I asked a tech, who suggested that I ask a doctor. I asked a doctor, who scratched his head, said, "I dunno. Tell her to go cold turkey?" and then suggested that I talk to the case manager. "I thnk maybe the hospital has a smoking cessation program." I talked to the case manager, who found a handout for me on the benefits of stopping smoking, with some do-it-yourself advice, but wasn't sure about the cessation program.

"Telemetry has standing orders to tell all their patients to quit smoking. They may have info we don't. Let me call up there." So she called telemetry, and sure enough, they had some pamphlets, and I went upstairs to get them. It turns out that there's a Nevada state hotline for people who want to stop smoking, paid for by Big Tobacco money. I gave one to the woman in the waiting room and gave the rest to the case manager, who said I should give them to the charge nurse, who said they should go in one of the wall racks. So I photocopied a bunch, but there were no empty wall racks, so they went into an obscure folder instead. At least the ED has them now.

During this long, involved process, I kept thinking, "It would have been so much simpler if I just could have gotten OOMFN together with that patient." I still wonder if I should have tried, if only to give the young woman a role model, although I think all of us know people who've stopped smoking.

My mother smoked a lot during her pregnancy with me; I managed to emerge without major birth defects, but I wasn't going to tell the young woman that story, because I was 150% in favor of her quitting. (My sister and I nagged my mother into quitting when I was about nine.) I see so many people in the ED who are addicted to all kinds of things, and so many of them really seem to want to quit, and so often, they face obstacles, especially the lack of rehab programs for patients without insurance. AA and NA are great, because they're free, but some folks -- especially the ones who've relapsed after some time in 12-step programs -- need closer supervision, at least for a while. OOMFN is already one of the more empathetic nurses at the hospital, but I hope that the experience of quitting smoking has created new and deeper empathy for addicted patients.

It's ironic, though, that in a part of the hospital where patients are constantly told to stop smoking, finding information about local resources took a good twenty minutes of my time. Maybe the logic there is that info on how to stop smoking is readily available on the Internet and other places, but it still can't hurt to be able to give patients printed information. And it can't hurt to remember that giving up smoking is really difficult: even for healthcare providers who know the risks of smoking all too well, even for parents motivated to stop by love for their children. We need to praise people who've given up nicotine as much as we praise people who've given up heroin or meth.

I think, and hope, that OOMFN has appreciated my interest and encouragement. I'm pretty sure the young mother appreciated my getting that information for her. Knowing that they're both trying to quit makes me very happy, and I hope their efforts succeed.

Grand Rounds, and a Stalled Sonnet

This week's Grand Rounds is up, thanks to the efforts of four-time host Allen. Thanks for including me!

And, by popular demand, last night I tried to write another ED sonnet (or, rather, the first poem of a pair of them). At the moment, it's tied up in one of those metric knots -- rather like a snarled ball of yarn -- to which formal poetry is all too susceptible. But I'll keep working on it, and if I get it untangled, I'll post it.

And now it's off to the gym, to work out some of the knots in my back and shoulders!

The Inner Life of Illness

In my Women & Literature class, we're currently reading Anne Fadiman's brilliant book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, about a Hmong girl named Lia Lee whose medical treatment for severe epilepsy was tragically compromised by cultural mis-communication -- or, in many cases, non-communication -- between her parents and her American doctors. My students love the book, and it's evoked unusually passionate classroom discussion.

Part of the problem, aside from nearly insurmountable language barriers, was that the Hmong have a completely different cultural understanding of disease than Western doctors do. In her discussion of cross-cultural medicine, Fadiman quotes "a set of eight questions, designed to elicit a patient's 'explanatory model,' which were developed by Arthur Kleinman, a psychiatrist and medical anthropologist who chairs the department of social medicine at Harvard Medical School" (p. 260).

Here are the questions:

1. What do you call the problem?

2. What do you think has caused the problem?

3. Why do you think it started when it did?

4. What do you think the sickness does? How does it work?

5. How severe is the sickness? Will it have a short or long course?

6. What kind of treatment do you think the patient should receive? What are the most important results you hope for from this treatment?

7. What are the chief problems the sickness has caused?

8. What do you fear most about the sickness?

Fadiman points out that although these questions at first seem obvious, their value lies in the fact that many patients, especially non-Western ones, will answer in ways their doctors would never expect. For instance, the Lees believed that Lia's epilepsy was caused by her soul being startled out of her body when one of her older sisters slammed a door. Imagining how the Lees would answer these eight questions, Fadiman includes, as part of her answer to number six, "We hope Lia will be healthy, but we are not sure we want her to stop shaking forever because it makes her noble in our culture, and when she grows up she might become a shaman" (p. 260).

This made me think about some of the patients I've seen in my own work as a volunteer hospital chaplain. I've written here before about the father, undergoing his third heart surgery after the death in an auto accident of both his teenaged daughters, who told me, "My heart problems are God's way of showing me that my daughters are better off in heaven than they would be here, where everything hurts." While I don't agree with the theology of this statement, the patient had found a way to give his illness meaning, even (in some dark sense) to see it as a source of comfort. I found myself wondering how he would react if his heart problems could be fixed. Would he miss the reassurance he had found in them? And how could comfort be offered in other, less damaging and painful forms?

As this patient illustrates, people from other cultures aren't alone in assigning meanings and values to their conditions, in writing narratives that would never occur to their medical caregivers. I've seen plenty of American patients do this, and I've begun to wonder if perhaps doctors and nurses should, when possible, ask the patient some version of, "Has this condition or course of treatment done anything good for you? Is there anything about it that you would miss if it were gone?"

It's well-known that some patients invent illness to get attention, but Munchausen Syndrome isn't what I'm talking about here. I'm more interested in how and why patients find value in medical problems they haven't caused or created themselves. Bipolar patients, famously, are often reluctant to take medication because they enjoy the heightened excitement and creativity of manic phases. I've heard many cancer patients say that while they wouldn't wish cancer on anyone, the disease has given them new insight, new appreciation, a new sense of living in a generous world where people reach out to help each other. And although cancer treatments like chemotherapy and radiation are notoriously difficult and harrowing, several cancer patients I know -- including my mother -- have found themselves feeling newly frightened when those treatments ended. "As long as I was getting chemo and radiation, I was doing something active to stop the cancer. Now I'm just sitting here, and it makes me feel helpless." How can cancer patients find new sources of empowerment after treatment?

In my own life, my periods of illness -- a life-threatening infection in 1994, gallbladder surgery in 2000, various bouts of depression -- have been times of heightened spirituality and creative inspiration. While I certainly can't say that I enjoyed these experiences, or that I'd want to go through them again, I wouldn't erase them from my life history even if that were possible. My personal challenge has been to achieve those same spiritual and creative states when I'm healthy.

Many patients, of course, find no benefit at all to whatever's wrong with them, and would be purely and entirely delighted could their problems be fixed. But I think medical caregivers need to be sensitive to the ways in which illness may be useful for patients, and help patients find alternate sources of whatever gifts the illness has bestowed.

FoM: The Podcast!

Here's the link for the podcast. I'm only one segment of the show, towards the beginning, so you may want to fast-forward a bit.

I don't look nearly as dorky as I expected -- only semi-dorky -- although there is a bit of the bobblehead doll about me. Oh well. Professors are supposed to be eccentric, right?

Happy viewing!

Lenten Confessions

Our preacher today, a member of the clergy, spoke very movingly about feeling distanced from God and wanting a more personal relationship with God. This is someone who's recently become conscious of a gut belief in a God of punishment, despite the strongest possible intellectual belief in a God of love. "I don't know where to look for that God."

I was incredibly impressed that an ordained person was that willing to be vulnerable in the pulpit (or anywhere else, for that matter). That really took guts, and I'm sure people in the pews were more willing to be open about their own fears and doubts as a result.

Afterwards, I gave the preacher a hug and said, "God does love you; you know that, right?"

"Sometimes I know it."

"Well, when you don't know it, remember that we love you, and look for God in us."

I hope that helped, although I'm sure the problem can't be fixed just with hugs and affection. Hugs and affection can't hurt, though.

I wonder how many other clergy have crises of faith, and how many are comfortable talking about them in church. I'm glad our parish is a place where it's safe to do that.

Another Good (Mostly) Review

Claude Lalumiere just published a review of FoM in the Montreal Gazette. Because this site is subscription only, I'm posting the entire article below.

Animals Give People Something to Think About

In The Fate of Mice, Susan Palwick mostly focuses on two themes: one, that agency and intelligence might not be as limited to human beings as the dominant world view holds; two, that stories are alive, and their repeated telling can have an effect not only on how reality is experienced, but how it unfolds.

These two ideas unite most effectively in the collection's striking title story, in which a lab mouse given the ability to speak learns about the roles mice play in various human stories, from Cinderella to Flowers for Algernon, and beyond.

The poignant Gestella, another story that presents a non-human perspective, puts a werewolf into a disturbing domestic drama and explores unflinchingly the implications of living on the margins between two species. Ever After adds perceptive new twists to fairy-tale tropes and vampire lore, illuminating the sexual and social dynamics at work behind such popular legends.

There's a powerful and complex utopian streak that motivates Palwick's protagonists -- a mouse who refuses to conform to human narratives, a conspiracy theorist who cannot believe a better world has actually come to pass (The Old World), mutants desperately seeking a safe haven in an intolerant society (Sorel's Heart). Their intense yearnings make their struggles vividly immediate.

Except for the false note of the collection's closing piece -- GI Jesus, a clunky melodrama about a miraculous recovery, peppered with unconvincing comedy and peopled with bland characters -- every story displays a keen intelligence and a fierce imagination.

This is a smart, thoughtful review; Lalumiere's identified some themes other people haven't talked about yet, and obviously gave the book a careful reading.

I'm intrigued, though, by his antipathy towards "GI Jesus." That's a story that most reviewers so far have singled out either for special praise (Booklist called it one of the standouts of the collection) or particular opprobrium. Its initial reception in the field wasn't much different; Gardner Dozois, for instance, who likes most of my stuff, hated that story, but other people must have really liked it, since it wound up on the World Fantasy Award ballot.

This is very similar to reader response to The Necessary Beggar, which people seem to love or loathe with equal vehemence. People who detest the book are especially enraged by its happy ending, and I suspect it's not a coincidence that "GI Jesus" is the only story in The Fate of Mice with an unqualified happy ending. It's also the only story that deals explicitly with faith, a strong theme in TNB as well.

My theory -- which may well be completely wrong, since of course I'm far too close to the issue to be objective -- is that Rickety Contrivances of Doing Good are particularly offensive to non-believers when they involve faith; or, perhaps, that Doing Good seems most Rickety when motivated or enabled by faith. The simplest way to put this, maybe, is that nonbelievers don't accept the posibility of miracles, and feel furiously cheated by stories that use them as plot elements.

Most of my evidence for this is purely anecdotal. A friend of mine who's distressed by my Christian conversion once glared at me and said, "Oh, come on: the resurrection? How can you believe that?" A friend at church, on the other hand, when I told her about the anti-happy-ending sentiment of folks who hate TNB, shook her head and said, "Well, for non-Christians, there aren't happy endings: everything gets worse until you die, and then nothing good can happen." I think that's far too simplistic a formula: plenty of non-Christians, including my husband and my mother, both believe in happy endings and liked TNB, and faiths other than Christianity embrace happy endings of various sorts.

But I also think my friend may be on to something, because one of the deepest divides I've seen in the world is the gulf between people who believe in happy endings and work for them, motivated by whatever beliefs, and people who embrace despair as a worldview. And this means that stories with happy endings may be anathema to certain readers not just because those endings seem contrived or are badly written or whatever -- it's certainly possible for happy stories to be unskillful ones, and I cheerfully accept the possibility that mine may fall into that category -- but because those endings contradict these readers' view of reality.

Every few years, I teach a Tolkien course at UNR. One of the things we always look at, and ponder, is the chasm between people who adore Lord of the Rings and people who are almost hysterically, even violently, contemptuous of it (think Edmund Wilson, China Mieville, etc.). That chasm usually runs through my classroom, too, since some students come in having never read LotR and find that they despise it.

Tolkien writes consciously and explicitly about a providential universe, a worldview articulated most eloquently by Gandalf. ("Behind that there was something else at work, beyond any design of the Ring-maker. I can put it no plainer than by saying that Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its maker. In which case you also were meant to have it.") There are no accidents in LoTR; there are, instead, many seeming coincidences, some of them so rickety that they stretch even my credulity. Granted, there are other reasons for people to dislike LotR, which can be daunting indeed for sensibilities acclimated to the modern psychological novel. But one of the things I always tell my students is, "If you accept Tolkien's view of reality, if you believe in a providential universe, then his plot will make sense to you, because you'll believe that things like that can really happen. But if you don't accept Tolkien's view of reality, the book merely seems outlandish and contrived, and may actually make you angry, because you can't understand how any rational adult could think this way." Most of my students seem to think this makes sense.

Please note, by the way, that I'm not for a second comparing my writing to Tolkien's -- if only! -- but simply comparing reader responses.

(Gary just wandered into my office, having read the Lalumiere review, and shook his head. "Wow, 'GI Jesus' sure pushes people's buttons." Yep. True fact.)

On a related note, I've had some conversations with my fiction-workshop students about why stories often aren't considered serious and literary unless they're bleak and despairing. Happy endings are relegated to popular culture, the stuff not-smart people like; despair often seems to be viewed as a sign of superior intelligence. There are exceptions, of course, but -- as I think I've said here before -- one of my students last semester explained that children tell themselves stories with happy endings, which means that happy endings come to seem childish.

I'd be very curious to hear other people's views on all of this. And if you dislike TNB and "GI Jesus," that's okay; you're certainly in excellent company!

My fourth novel, Driving to November (currently sitting in very messy first draft on top of one of my filing cabinets), is a retelling and expansion of "GI Jesus," moving the story to central Nevada and picking up where the novelette leaves off. I predict very mixed reviews for this book if and when it's published!

When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Accessorize

The newspaper photo shoot has been rescheduled for Monday, which may give the latest crop o' zits time to clear up. Yay!

Even after the haircut, which is reasonably cute if you overlook the zits, I was nervous before the video filming. I'd decided to go casual and comfy, so I was wearing jeans, a v-neck cotton top, and a black shawl, but I decided the shawl looked too heavy with the jeans and top (which are purplish-magenta and gray, respectively), and the bookstore sells some nice fair-trade clothing and accessories. So of course, I wound up buying a $30 woolen scarf from India, in red and gray paisley, after holding up several possibilities and asking three nearby women of About My Age, "Which of these is better?" They all stopped what they were doing to scrutinize the scarves, and they all picked the same one. (Women know how to help each other with shopping crises, let me tell you!) A few minutes later, I ran into one of them in another aisle, and she reassured me once again that I'd made the right choice.

Yay for moral support from strangers!

Anyway, the podcast went okay, or at least I feel that way now. I'm sure I'll be mortified after I watch it, but that will be because it will be me on the screen. I expect I'll seem pretty dorky, but dorky is more or less the image the guys who do the show are going for. Nice guys. They brought me water and gave me a free UNR hoodie ($40 retail value) to thank me for being on the podcast.

Yay for free clothing!

I also have to say that the UNR Bookstore is doing a bang-up job of publicizing the book. When you walk into the store, the first thing you see is a wall display of The Fate of Mice and Flying in Place. They've also created large posters to advertise my reading on the 12th -- where the mass-market TNB will also be available -- and they'll be sending flyers out across campus. And there will be food at the reading.

Yay for food!

Speaking of food, Gary's made some new, super-duper chocolate cookies for our BSG evening tonight. Even though I've more or less given up sugar for Lent, and in honor of the unattainable Jane Fonda goal, I do allow myself to have treats on BSG night. (I cheated and ate some malted milk balls on Thursday, but that's not my fault, because they were sitting in a bowl in the English Department office, out in the open, the shameless things, and ambushed me when I walked through the door.) Gary assures me that each cookie contains enough calories to meet the nutritional needs of a small third-world country for a year. However, since I'm wearing my free sweatshirt, which is both very soft and wonderfully roomy, I feel safe eating a cookie. Or two.

Of course, that means I'll have to keep wearing the new sweatshirt until I've done 5,000 more crunches.

Oh! And the biggest news! We got a new DVD player which will display non-widescreen items in the correct aspect ratio! Which means we can now watch Buffy and The Wire and Scrubs downstairs, on the big screen, instead of upstairs, on Gary's computer! Also, old movies, although he's more excited about that than I am.

In other TV news, we just finished watching the second season of Veronica Mars and remain unimpressed. The plots seem overly convoluted and implausible, and we just don't find ourselves caring deeply about any of the characters or outcomes. In short, it's not suspending our disbelief.

In other writing news, I'm determined to get back to the ED Sonnets. I made some movement in that direction today, but it didn't extend to writing any actual lines. However, I still hope to have a draft of the entire cycle done by the end of Lent.

More Book News

I didn't post yesterday because I was frantically finishing some work projects, due today, on which I'd procrastinated for far too long. They're done now: yay! The next challenge will be my homily for a week from Sunday, combining the burning bush with the parable of the fig tree. Okay, so there's a definite agricultural theme, but yoking those two together will otherwise be a bit of a challenge. I have some ideas, though.

I also haven't read anybody else's blogs for, like, forever, because I've been so busy. I'm hoping that will change now!

The good news is that I've maintained my schedule of working out at the gym six days a week, which generally makes me calmer and happier, although it hasn't yet succeeded in making me look like Jane Fonda. I'd hoped to look like Jane Fonda by the time we left for Maui. I mean, I'm doing crunches -- which I loathe -- along with forty minutes of cardio a day (alternating swimming laps and using the elliptical). Surely the reward for all that should be looking like Jane Fonda?

But this post is supposed to be about book news, so here we go:

1. The mass-market edition of The Necessary Beggar is now in stock at Amazon.com. Only $6.99, with all the same words as the $24.95 hardcover! What a bargain! How can you resist? The TNB link on my sidebar will now take you to that edition, for your purchasing convenience. Not that I'm being crass and commercial or anything.

2. The Tachyon publicist, the awesome and wonderfully named Jennifer Privateer, just sent me a copy of the Booklist review of The Fate of Mice. And a glowing review it is, too:

Palwick's literary output until now has been limited to two critically acclaimed novels, the most recent of them the complex and moving ghost story The Necessary Beggar (2005). Thus her first story collection is a welcome addition to her oeuvre and a fitting introduction to her wide-ranging talent and vision. In the title story, a touching homage to Daniel Keyes' classic "Flowers for Algernon," an IQ-enhanced lab mouse awakens to the knowledge of his own impending demise. "Gestella" recounts the unsettling fate of a female werewolf who ages more rapidly than her increasingly less interested human lover. In one of the volume's standouts, "GI Jesus," a small town woman finds hope in the face of Jesus imprinted on an X-ray of her abdomen. All 11 pieces explore the most challenging conundrums of human existence, from the perennial pursuit of utopia to the many faces of mortality. Embracing elements of both horror and speculative fiction, Palwick's unique and commanding fiction never fails to trigger an emotional response as it captures the imagination. -- Carl Hays

Hey, they don't come much better than that! Thank you, Carl Hays!

3. Speaking of FoM publicity, tomorrow's the filming of the video podcast. I also have an appointment to be photographed by someone from the Reno News & Review, our local alternative weekly. (I'll be doing a very short interview with their arts editor on Monday.) You'll notice that these are both visual situations.

Have I mentioned that I don't look like Jane Fonda? Furthermore, I generally photograph so badly that not only don't I look like Jane Fonda, but I don't even look quite human: more like some kind of space alien with bug eyes, too many teeth, and really twitchy hands. So I'm pretty nervous about tomorrow.

I'm even more nervous because I'm caught in a terrible dilemma. I really need a haircut, see, so I won't look like a space alien with bug eyes, too many teeth, really twitchy hands, and a shaggy bathmat on her head. But I'm also in that charming phase of perimenopause which harkens back to the halcyon days of high-school zits. In other words, my forehead's broken out. Which means that if I get a haircut before the photo shoots, removing the hair that now mostly covers my forehead, I'll look like a space alien with bug eyes, too many teeth, really twitchy hands, and acne.

Bathmat or acne? Bathmat or acne? Which do you find more attractive? And what would Jane Fonda do?

Don't let anybody tell you that the literary life isn't stressful.

Meanwhile, UNR's online PR publication, NevadaNews, has done a pleasant little article on The Fate of Mice. This story, thank God, includes a picture of the book, rather than one of me.

That's it! Problem solved! I'll just hold the book over my face tomorrow!

Grand Rounds, and Not Enough Snow

This week's Grand Rounds is up! I'm delighted to be included, and equally delighted that my friend Inez's hilarious and harrowing post Mammosity is included too. Welcome back to the blogosphere, Inez!

In less happy news, today has not been declared a snow day, much to my and Gary's disappointment. We got a lot of snow last night, and we were both hoping that it would continue well into this morning: I didn't want to have to drive to work in the snow, and Gary didn't want to have to shovel the driveway. But alas, this morning's clear as the proverbial bell, and UNR's open.

Nertz!

Heeeeere's Harley!

Sir Harlequin informed me this morning that it isn't at all fair for Bali and Figaro to be featured on the blog so often when he's hardly had any portraits posted at all. After all, he is the senior cat in the household, with the thickest and most beautiful fur. He's the cat who rescues the other cats from closets and the garage, and who rescues me from the shower (by racing around the bathroom yowling) and from naps (by prancing on my ribcage until I wake up, because humans who are sleeping during the day can't perform their true calling of feeding cats).

So here's Harley, also known as Harley the Hilarious and Harley the Handsome. And if you think he has a lot of fur here, you should see his belly. The white fur underneath is longer than the black fur on top; my mother always says that he looks like his stuffing is coming out. Also, when he grooms himself, he looks like he's pulling taffy with his tongue, an effect you can see a little bit in these pictures.

The Gospel According to Milton

My first semester of graduate school, nine years before I began attending church, I took a Milton course for which I wrote a paper on Paradise Regained. This is Milton's version of Christ's temptation in the desert. I really enjoyed writing the paper, and my conclusion was that Christ refuses the devil's temptations not just to back the right party, but because a world in which all problems are solved by miracle leaves room neither for human agency nor for salvation. If all stones became bread, there would be no need for people to feed their hungry neighbors; if everyone agreed on the same priorities, there would be no need for people to work towards the Kingdom of God; if angels stepped in to save Jesus in every peril, neither the crucifixion nor Easter would ever have happened. Shortcuts short-circuit God's work, which unfolds in God's own time.

As someone who didn't yet consider herself a Christian, I didn't use those exact words, but that was the gist of it. The professor, a deeply humane and devout Jew, wrote, "This is a great sermon, but only a so-so essay." I didn't get a very good grade on the paper.

At the time, I was devastated. I thought the professor was sneering at me. Now I realize that the essay was indeed essentially shaped like a homily, and that the professor's comment was a matter-of-fact observation about genre (and a prescient one, since I began preaching ten years later). As a religious man, he wasn't putting down sermons; they simply weren't appropriate for a graduate seminar.

Today's Gospel, Luke 4:1-13, is the passage on which Milton wrote his four-book exegesis:

Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those days, and when they were over, he was famished. The devil said to him, "If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread." Jesus answered him, "It is written, 'One does not live by bread alone.'"

Then the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And the devil said to him, "To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours." Jesus answered him, "It is written, 'Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.'"

Then the devil took him to Jerusalem, and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, "If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written, 'He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you,' and 'On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.'" Jesus answered him, "It is said, 'Do not put the Lord your God to the test.'" When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time.

I woke up this morning, late, to snow and cranky sinuses, and seriously considered staying home from church. I decided to go partly because I wanted to hear what the homilist would say about the Gospel.

We had a family service today: kids present for the entire time, rather than coming in from Sunday school just in time for communion. That means a children's homily, which are notoriously difficult to do. (I've never done one, because I wasn't very in sync with kids even when I was one myself.) I was very curious to hear how our preacher, a seminarian specializing in youth ministry, would handle it.

She gave a nice children's homily, but it wasn't on the temptation. It was on the Parable of the Sower.

I have to admit that my mind wandered, because I didn't want to think about the Parable of the Sower. I wanted to think about the Temptation in the Desert. So I sat in my pew and pondered how I'd try to present this Gospel to children.

I think I'd tell some story about a time when I was a kid and an adult refused to do something for me, so I'd learn to do it myself. There was the time I'd climbed up on a high rock and was afraid to climb down, but my babysitter kept saying, "You got up there, and you can get down," and finally I did. There were all the times when my mother patiently gave me pointers on how to do homework that looked impossible, but made me do it myself instead of doing it for me. There were the times when my parents insisted that I learn to swim without a raft, learn to ride a bike without training wheels, learn to cross the street by myself. What seemed to me at the time like cruelty, like a mean refusal to help me be more comfortable, was really love: they knew I could do those things under my own power, and they wanted me to know it too.

So I'd tell one of those stories, and then I'd probably ask the kids if they had stories like that. (This is always the part that takes a while!) And then I'd explain that Jesus was doing the same thing, refusing the devil's temptation to do for us what we can learn to do for ourselves. Jesus, like his Father, was being a good parent.

And then I might give them some bread, and ask them to find someone in the congregation to feed.

Bali Behind Bars

Cats, as we all know, love warm places, especially various kinds of vents. This means that our cats have always loved to snooze on top of Gary's stereo receiver, thereby depositing lots of fur on and inside the equipment. A while ago, we hit on the stratagem of putting an upside-down wire mesh "in" basket on top of the receiver to keep the cats from being able to sleep there comfortably. However, Bali's still small enough to squeeze underneath the basket, and today Gary took two pictures of him.

Here's the one that's in focus, but where Bali's eyes are closed:


And here's the one that's out of focus, but where Bali's eyes are open. (Quoth Gary, "It's not blurry; it's art!")


Bali's latest eccentricity is a fondness for unusual vegetables. Gary was cooking with white beans the other night, and Bali acted very interested, so Gary gave him a couple. Bali ate them. Of course, cats in the wild eat little animals who have vegetable matter in their stomachs, so they do need veggie roughage in their diets.

I have no idea, though, how to explain the passion that all of my mother's cats have had for jelly roll. We had one Siamese who, if she was on the second floor, would begin yowling the minute the jelly roll, ensconced in a bag of groceries, came in the front door. She wouldn't let up until we gave her some.

Gary and I don't eat jelly roll, so we don't know if our own cats like the stuff too.

Gala Day! And Buttons.

Today's mail brought all kinds of great stuff: my new scrubs, two new pashmina-and-silk shawls I ordered on sale (one black, one red), and my contributor's copies of The Fate of Mice. Yippee! I now have actual books!

I'm in the process of making some interesting plans for next week. On Monday, I'll be getting together for coffee with the medical-humanities person at the UNR med school, who's interested in hearing about my volunteer work. She read my blog entry on Charon, whose visit she was instrumental in hosting, and enjoyed it.

On Friday, I'll be doing a video interview podcast at the UNR bookstore to promote FoM. One of my students will be one of the interviewers, so it should be fun, if slightly nerve-wracking. I'll post a link here when the podcast is up.

I have a lot of stuff to do between those two events, in addition to the usual teaching. It's going to be a busy week!

In the meantime, I just ironed out a misunderstanding with a dear friend whose buttons got pushed by some of the chaplaincy material on the blog. She had a hideous experience with a hospital chaplain when she was in her twenties, and sent me sharply worded e-mail about how a chaplain's help would be the last thing she'd want if she were ill or waiting for bad news. The initial e-mail didn't mention her own history, though, so I thought she was criticizing me personally. That pushed my buttons, not only for the obvious reasons but because I've had two long-term friendships implode at roughly this time of year. Both of those disasters were sparked by e-mail misunderstandings, and both culminated with the erstwhile friends telling me exactly what they'd thought of me -- not much, in either case -- for many years beforehand. Both were situations where people I loved a lot wound up delivering very hurtful laundry lists of everything they thought was wrong with me.

So when I got my friend's e-mail last night, my first thought was, Oh, s***, here we go again. But after a few more rounds of e-mail and a phone conversation this morning, all is well. Once my friend told me about her chaplain-from-hell experience, I had a much better sense of where she was coming from; once I told her about my imploding-friendships experience, she had a much better idea of where I was coming from. She hadn't intended to hurt my feelings and was upset that she'd done so -- and agreed that the original comments were "harsh" -- and I was inordinately relieved that she hasn't, in fact, secretly loathed me for many moons (that appears to be what was going on with the other two people, although I'll probably never know for sure).

Whew! Hey, this communication stuff's really a godsend, when it actually works.

Change of Shift, and Rita Charon

The new Change of Shift is up over at Protect the Airway, and I'm delighted to be included. AC has done a splendid job with this edition, which is clearly organized and provides an excellent sense of what each post's about.

I just have to kvetch, though: does anybody else hate black blog backgrounds? For me, it makes the text very difficult to read, and my middle-aged eyes have enough trouble already!

And for our next topic: Rita Charon and Narrative Medicine.

Charon's a family practitioner in Manhattan, serving mostly poor patients, who runs the Narrative Medicine Program at Columbia (the only one of its kind in the country). This program teaches medical students to be better listeners to patient stories, and to use writing as a way to reflect on their practice and form closer bonds with patients. Charon's also a literary critic and scholar with a PhD in English Lit from Columbia; impressive lady!

On Tuesday, she gave a series of talks at UNR. I was only able to attend one, but it was excellent. Charon's an eloquent and compelling speaker; listening to her, you can tell that she must be a wonderful teacher and doctor.

What struck me most about her talk was her description of how she takes patient histories. The traditional way of doing this is to ask about history of the current illness or condition and then about broader medical history, followed by a review of systems. While Charon gets to all of that in the course of a first visit, it's not where she starts.

She starts, she says, with two sentences; she's trained herself not to say more than that. "I'll be your doctor, and that means that I have to know as much about you as I can. Please tell me what you think it's most important for me to know about you." (I may have the precise wording of that wrong, but that's the gist of it.) While the patient talks, Charon just listens; it took her a while to train herself not to write notes. ("At the beginning, I literally had to sit on my hands.") She said that patients will start all over the place: with family history, with what's happening at home right now, with their fears about their current condition.

She told us how moved many patients are by being asked to do this. One man started crying, because Charon was the first doctor who'd ever asked him what he thought was important.

While the patients are changing for the physical examination, Charon will type up as close to a verbatim transcript of what they said as she can remember. At the end of the visit, she'll give them the transcript and say, "Is this everything?" Sometimes she'll have forgotten something, and sometimes the patients will read the report and say, "Well, we left something out, and we should put it in." Charon told her audience: "You can imagine the things that get left out at first. The traumas, the stillbirths, the losses, the abuse."

Charon gives the patient a copy of this document to take home, as well as putting it in the chart. Her patients get copies of everything that goes in their chart; she encourages what she calls a "co-authored record of care."

Charon's patients must love her. I've certainly never had a doctor take my history that way, and I've had some excellent doctors (as well as some lousy ones). Obviously there are some specialties, like emergency medicine, where this approach would be impractical for time reasons. But I think the state of American medicine would be vastly improved if more physicians listened to their patients' priorities.

And hearing Charon has made me rethink how I introduce myself to hospital patients. I usually say, "I'm a volunteer chaplain, and I visit everyone in the ER to see if anyone needs to talk or would like a prayer." Many patients hear this, correctly, as an invitation to tell their stories, but some patients still seem to view chaplains as people who talk at them. (One recent patient responded to my little intro by glaring and snarling, "I wouldn't call you if I were dying!")

So I think I'm going to try a slightly different intro, something along the lines of, "I'm here to listen to anything you want you tell me." I won't have time to write down what I hear and show it to the patient, but in my work, reflecting what I've heard in how I pray with that patient (if the patient requests a prayer) often serves the same function. A well-worded prayer lets people know that they really have been heard.

At last night's Ash Wednesday service at church, we sang a Taize chant that reinforced the theological importance of listening:

O, Lord hear my prayer,
O Lord hear my prayer;
when I call, answer me.

O, Lord hear my prayer,
O Lord hear my prayer.
Come and listen to me.

When people pray, they want a sense that they're praying to someone, that a living entity has heard them. The same is true when they talk to chaplains, or doctors.

Into the Dark

Here's my Ash Wednesday homily. After debating the meaning of the song lyrics with Gary and revising my first draft to include the possibility of suicide, I ran the text by my two parish priests to make sure I wasn't committing any theological or pastoral blunders. To my great relief, both of them like the homily very much and don't think it's too morbid. I hope the congregation will agree!

Here are the Scripture passages, not that I talk about them a lot.

And to start off on a slightly lighter note, here's my favorite Ash Wednesday story. Patrick Nielsen Hayden, my editor at Tor Books, converted to Catholicism a few years ago. The first year he observed Lent, he went to Ash Wednesday services before work to receive the imposition of ashes. Walking down the hallway at Tor afterwards, he was stopped by another Tor editor (who shall remain nameless), who gawked and said incredulously, "Patrick! Don't tell me those are ashes on your forehead!"

Patrick, never one to miss an opportunity for a snappy comeback, answered, "No, it was a tragic photocopier accident."

May all of you have a holy Lent!

* * *

There’s a song I’ve been hearing a lot on the radio recently. Sung by the unfortunately-named band Death Cab for Cutie, it’s a love song, called I’ll Follow You Into the Dark. (Note to blog readers: there's an audio file of the song on the band's homepage, which will play automatically if you go there.) The singer -- or, at least, the character he is singing about -- promises his lover that when she dies, he’ll follow her, no matter what happens. “If there’s no one beside you when your soul embarks,” he tells her, “then I’ll follow you into the dark.”

My husband and I have been having a running argument about these lyrics. Gary thinks they’re about a suicide pact, but -- maybe because the music is quiet, thoughtful, and acoustic -- I’ve never heard them that way. I think the words are a statement of faith, an expression of belief that love survives death. The singer tells us that he was driven away from Catholic school by a nun who taught that “fear is the heart of love.” Rejecting that idea, he sings instead about love that conquers fear, and pledges his devotion to the one he loves.

I thought of this song a few weeks ago, when I read the news story, one many of you probably also saw, about the 5,000 year old skeletons found locked in an embrace in Italy. Although one might see a Romeo-and-Juliet style-suicide pact here, too, the archaeologists who discovered the skeletons were deeply moved by the obvious love between these two ancient people. Anthropologist Luca Bondioli says that there are “other prehistoric burials in which the dead hold hands or have other contact.” These discoveries, according to Bondioli, prove that people’s relationships with each other, and with death, haven’t changed that much in the past five millenia. For all that time, we’ve been vowing to follow our loved ones into the dark.

Today, Ash Wednesday, begins the forty days of Lent. We mark Ash Wednesday, and are marked by it, in a somber reminder of our own mortality: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” We know that Lent will end with the glorious sunrise of Easter, when love will conquer death forever, when our “light shall break forth like the dawn,” and our “gloom be like the noonday.” But we also know that the road to Easter leads through deep shadow, the utter darkness and desolation of Good Friday. There is no resurrection without death. On Ash Wednesday, we promise to follow Jesus -- whom we love, and who loves us -- into the dark. Lent is the annual process of preparing for his death, and for our own.

That process requires us to reorder our priorities; to decide what is most important to us; to discern where our hearts, and our treasures, truly lie. Whatever Lenten disciplines we embrace during these forty days, they should heighten our love of life and of the people in our lives. That is, I think, the point of Jesus’ repeated warnings against public display of good works in the Gospel. What we do during Lent should be done not to impress strangers, but to honor God, the source of everything we have, and our ultimate promise that love will indeed conquer death.

Dying people rarely care what strangers think of them: they face the urgent task of completing unfinished business while they still can. Everything non-essential falls away. Lent reminds us that everyone is dying. These forty days invite us to ponder what is truly essential, and what isn’t. I’ve read that there are “five last things” that dying people need to hear, and to say:

“Forgive me."

"I forgive you."

"Thank you."

"I love you."

"Good-bye."

Saying those things now, or at least the first four of them, might be an appropriate Lenten discipline for all of us.

If loving one another even unto death has been a human trait for the last five thousand years, so has fear of the dark. Very few people face sudden darkness, much less dying, without being afraid. We fear what we don’t know, and we fear the loss of what we do know. But ours is a theology that is much more about love than about fear. Our faith promises that when we are afraid, we will be comforted. The God we worship and serve, the God who took human form to love and serve and save us, will follow us into the dark.

Most of you know that I volunteer as a hospital chaplain. Several years ago, I spoke to a patient whose fear had literally landed him in the emergency room. He was at the hospital to rule out a heart attack, but he told me that his chest pain and shortness of breath were probably caused by an anxiety disorder. One of the things that got him through his panic attacks, he said, was the memory of a profound encounter with God he’d had when he was a little boy.

When he was eight or so, he’d been playing softball. Running across the field, he had a vision. It only lasted a few seconds, but he had never forgotten it. “I was running to first base,” he said, “and suddenly everything was transformed. I felt love radiating from the grass, the trees, the sky, the sun: everything was love. And I felt God running with me, just behind my right shoulder. I was as certain of God’s presence as I am of yours right now.

“But then something happened, and there was a gaping hole in front of me: a rectangle, like a grave. It was deep and dark, and I was afraid of it. But I stood on the edge and looked down into it, and I felt that same love blasting up at me from the darkness. If the love had been wind, it would have knocked me off my feet. And I heard God’s voice, just behind my right shoulder, saying, ‘Don’t be afraid of the darkness. There’s love there, too.’”

As we follow Jesus into the darkness of Lent -- as we face his death and our own -- let us remember that he never asks us to go anywhere he has not gone himself. No matter how dark some of the places may be where Jesus has gone, we can be secure in our faith that there is love there, too: the love that will transform the darkness of Lent into the light of Easter, revealing the empty tomb.

Amen.

Academy Grand Rounds! And other stuff!

This week's Grand Rounds is up, with an Oscar theme. I didn't make it in this week: pfui! But as I tell all my writing students, we have to get used to rejection; and this way, I'll appreciate the next time I get in even more.

I've been submitting to Grand Rounds since, I think, August, and there have only been two weeks when I've submitted something and haven't gotten in. So really, that's a pretty good record! Certainly better than my print publishing record, since like nearly all writers, I collected the proverbial shoebox of rejection slips before I actually sold something. In fiction, that is; actually, the first two poems I sent to SF magazines sold right away, but SF poetry is such an esoteric little field that this probably says more about the scarcity of material than about my own skill.

Speaking of poetry, this past week I got up the courage to tell my supervisor at the hospital -- my erstwhile CPE supervisor, and one of our staff chaplains -- about the ED Sonnets. He was very supportive: pleased that I'm writing about the work, and less concerned about privacy issues than I feared he'd be (although if I ever get a complete manuscript together, I'll run it past the Community Relations guy at the hospital to make sure I'm not likely to step on any toes). At the end of the conversation, which happened up in his office before I went down to the ED to start my shift, he even said, "Go down there and get material for your blog!" Which is very definitely how I try to avoid thinking about the hospital work, but never mind. Viewing everything that happens to us as potential material is one of the more vampiric habits writers can fall into.

Meanwhile, the ScrubQuest saga seems to have attracted unusual reader interest. Who knew? Maybe the TV show Scrubs needs a spinoff series about the lives of the characters' scrub shirts?

Anyway, my friend Inez from Iowa -- former star student, mom of the adorable Rickie-dog, and writer and professor extraordinaire -- sent me the following fabulous suggestion about what to do with my old, faded Magic Shirt:

I think you should keep all your scrub shirts as they wear out and have a quilt made in a few years. You can use it for decor, but also cuddle up under it when you need a psychic hug -- or lend it to friends who need one, etc. Plus, good excuse to keep in newish scrubs before they wear to threads.

Think of like, old fashioned patchwork quilts; it will become a record of your ministry -- "oh, I was wearing that shirt when x happened."

So is that a great idea, or what? Especially since I love quilts but have neither the patience nor the skill to make them myself. One of my most prized possessions is a beautiful little wall quilt, hand-dyed and hand-sewn, that a student's mother gave me to thank me for helping her daughter out when she was sick. Someday I'll post a picture of that. If the house were on fire, that quilt's one of the things I'd grab before I fled.

That and my computer. And Gary. And the cats.

Hmmmm. I think I need more arms!

Clergy Night

Last night's hospital shift was very busy. My final census was 97, which is a record. Obviously, those don't all represent substantial conversations, just people to whom I made myself available: the pastoral-care department needs to keep statistics, like everyone else. But it was still a tiring shift.

In one of those statistically improbable patterns that seem to happen so often in the ED, where we'll have a run of patients with the same complaint or the same background, four of the patients I spoke to last night were retired clergy.

I've written here before about my struggles with status issues in the hospital, and also about my difficulties around ordination. All of this guarantees that talking to patients who are ordained clergy tends to throw me into an acute state of impostor syndrome, especially when said clergy are fellow Episcopalians.

In my most awkward encounter, several months ago, both the patient and his wife were Episcopal priests -- and personal acquaintances. The wife had helped interview me for ordination. She was also a chaplain with several units of CPE who had made it quite clear that she didn't think I should drop the program. I prayed with them, but the entire time (and I'm sure I'm wrong about this, since she certainly had more important things on her mind) I felt like she was watching me with the wincing forbearance of an adult waiting for a child to finish sawing her way through a really painful violin recital.

And then there was the Lutheran pastor, with her mother in the ED, who seemed to consider it her duty to convince me to quit my job and attend seminary to become a priest. This happened back when I was still actively in process for the diaconate; I kept trying to explain that deacons are a full and equal order and that I didn't want to go to seminary, thank you, but this very determined lady was on a mission from God. She wasn't about to listen to my trivial objections about, oh, having to keep working so I could pay my mortgage.

One of my best visits, on the other hand, was with a patient being watched by several corrections-department guards, who told me shyly that he was a chaplain in the prison. He was delighted to have me pray with him, and we blessed each other's work and talked about prison ministry. I don't think he was ordained; in any case, there was no question of either of us pulling rank. We were both doing work we loved, and we respected each other.

Last night's clergy were a mixed bag. The first was a retired Episcopal priest from another diocese, whose wife peered at me and demanded, "Where are you from? Are you from a seminary?" No, ma'am. I'm sure she didn't intend the question to make me feel defensive, but it did anyway.

The second and third patients beamed at me and were very happy to have me there; I suspect it helped that neither of them were from my denomination, and wouldn't have had the vocabulary to question my qualifications even if they'd been inclined to.

The fourth patient also wasn't from my denomination. He was 100 years old and had worked in ordained ministry for sixty years before retiring at age 90. No one was with him in the hospital. I sat next to his bed, and we had a long talk about his work and his family and the changes he's seen over the last century. He remembers when people used horses instead of cars; his first car, a Chevrolet, cost $750. "You've gone from seeing people ride horses to seeing a man walk on the moon," I told him, and he smiled and laughed, and we pondered what amazing things will happen in the next hundred years, finally agreeing that we probably can't even imagine them.

He'd been a missionary, a church pastor, and -- for ten years -- a hospital chaplain in another state. "I think my work is what's kept me alive so long," he told me simply. It was obvious that he loved what he did and that he loved people, and grieved whatever divided them from each other and from God. And when he talked to me about my own work, he made me feel as if we were equals, even though he's more than twice my age and has more experience in ministry than I'll ever have. He'd tell me some story and then say, "You know what that's like from the work you do." He used his own experience to affirm mine, instead of discounting it.

I want to be like him when I grow up: especially if I ever am ordained, but even if I'm not.

Good Stuff (or: Whales for Lent)

Yesterday I got e-mail from the fabulous Maggie, who has evidently been following my scrubs saga with great interest (perhaps more than it deserves?). She's a quilter, and she told me that on her trips to various fabric stores, she's going to look for the magic-shirt fabric. If she finds it, she offered me to make me a scrub shirt -- she has a pattern for scrubs -- which I won't have to pay for, even. "I love the story of the magic scrub top and I want to see it keep going!"

How completely and utterly cool and kind and generous is that?

Of course I said yes. How could I not say yes? Thank you, Maggie! And I hope you find the fabric!

Good hunting! (Looking for fabric's more fun than looking for Cylons, yes?)

This morning I got e-mail from my friend Pamela K. Taylor, a progressive Muslim who's been on several of the "Religious Left" panels I've moderated at WisCon. The Washington Post has selected her as one of their "On Faith" panelists, so she's now writing a weekly column for them. You can find the first one here. I don't know nearly as much as I should about Islam, so I always welcome the chance to learn more. Congratulations, Pamela!

And last night, I finished a draft of my Ash Wednesday homily (which, of course, I'll be posting here on Wednesday). Writing the homily, I finally stumbled on a useful way to think about Lent, which I've always considered an unpleasant season of gloom and guilt-tripping. Last night, pondering Ash Wednesday's reminders of mortality, I realized that what Lent's really doing is calling us to live as thoughtfully and intentionally as people do when they know they're dying: to strip down to the essentials, to figure out what's really important and what can be let go. It's like that "What would you do if you knew you were going to die tomorrow?" question, except that Lent asks us, "What would you do if you knew you were going to die in forty days?"

And the answer is surely some combination of "Give up the nonessentials, to have more energy for what's important," and "Have fun in ways you've always wanted to." Which means that our Spring Break Maui trip isn't anti-Lenten at all. If I knew I were going to die in forty days, I'd definitely squeeze in a trip to Maui to watch whales.

And two more!

Oh, dear. I just ordered two more scrub tops, partly because these are the 100% cotton I've been looking for.

As you can see, these are in put-your-eye-out colors. It's been very grey here today, and I suspect I'm jonesing for brightness, even with my lightbox. I wear them with black slacks, and with a black turtleneck underneath in the winter; I guess the tops are my version of garish vestments. I shouldn't have let myself shop for them until spring -- rather like not going into a supermarket when you're hungry -- except that the magic shirt wouldn't have held out that long. But I at least shouldn't have shopped for them until the sun was out.

Really, this is kind of pathetic. I spend four hours a week max at the hospital: why do I need four scrub tops? One for each week of the month? Well, at least these should last a while, right? Now I just hope they fit! (Although I can return them if they don't.)

My rationale for wearing the magic shirt every single time was that people would learn to recognize it, easing some of the who-are-you-again? thing that happens when medical staff only see you for ten seconds a week. I guess the same general notion will hold now. "Oh, the chaplain? She's the one you can't approach without sunglasses, because her scrub tops will vaporize your corneas."

Kind of like the transfiguration. Only different.

Well, the bright colors should help cheer up patients, just like the magic shirt did. And really, that's most of the point (although I'm careful to maintain the black background, so I'll look at least semi-somber if I have to spend time with grieving families).

ScrubQuest

As I've mentioned here before, Gary tried to get me another magic shirt for Christmas, only to learn that the pattern had been discontinued. I've been doggedly wearing the old one, even though one seam is slightly frayed, but when I got home from the hospital last week, Gary shook his head and said, "That shirt's really faded. You need to get a new one."

So I embarked on an online shopping expedition for a new scrub top.

Gary and I do as much of our shopping online as possible; it's easier and much less stressful than venturing out to stores, and online merchants often have a greater selection than physical stores do. But my early efforts to find new scrubs -- and I browsed nearly every online uniform store -- were incredibly frustrating. I'd find a pattern I liked, only to learn that it wasn't available in my size or that it only came in polyester, rather than my preferred cotton.

This morning, worn down, I finally ordered two tops from Amazon. They're both poly-cotton, and I don't like either of the patterns as well as I like the magic shirt, but they'll do for the moment. I'll find another magic shirt when the time is right. I'm looking for something else with a celestial theme; I found a lovely one with suns and moons, but the color scheme I liked only came in extra-large.

Of course, now that I've ordered these two, a new magic shirt will probably pop up right away. That's how these things generally work. But it can't hurt to have a few backups, right? I haven't been slimed by a patient yet -- and that's not too likely, since I'm a chaplain rather than a medical person -- but it could always happen.

I don't know what I'll do with the old, faded magic shirt. If I were better at sewing, I'd make it into a pillow or a quilt. Maybe I'll cut out a little square and frame it.

Rest in peace, magic shirt. You served me well.