Too Much To Ask

A few days ago, and barely a few hours before the medical consultation from Hell described in James' post (where is my daughter who knows everyting about apostrophes when I need her?), Pam and Greg and I were sitting in the hospital scene pictured near this post. I'd been downstairs and brought back a couple of lattes and muffins, and we had settled in with the newspaper, quietly determined to superimpose a normal day on top of what is after all a pretty surreal scene. Greg and Pam were doing a math puzzle and I was interrupting them by reading aloud favorite turns of phrase from Times auto Critic Dan Niel's column.

Somehow the subject turned to Marie Curie and Herr Doktor Roentgen (our minds are much taken up with radiation these days), and how they absolutely had to do science. Next, Spanish poet Garcia Lorca popped up, and from him other artists who were simply compelled to do their art. We who share Greg's guitar-centric world differ only in degree--we simply must play the guitar, whether we are great players or not. It is part of our very humanity. There are also medical scientist/artists whose determination can help us so much. I suppose we really cannot ask that as well as amazing powers of memory and deduction, alchemy and manual delicacy, they also have perfect emotional sense, diplomacy and tact.