Category Archives: angels

by

The Brewer’s Big Horses

This is one of the Songs to Raise Girls, songs that I learned before Kindergarten. A very weird list of songs.

This song comes from my maternal grandfather. My mother said that it was a Congregationalist temperance song….

The photograph is Morris D. Temple and his grandson, F. Temple Burling. F. Temple Burling is my maternal grandfather. I am related to Temple Pumps. According to my mother’s stories, Morris Temple was more interested in Japanese art than in Temple Pumps and the company eventually folded. I don’t know if that is true, or if it was a different Temple then Morris. However, my middle name is Temple.

This song is one that I don’t have memorized, though I know the tune. I have my mother’s handwritten lyrics, with her drawings framing it. There is a tape of my grandfather singing it in the Library of Congress, according to my mother. I would like to go listen to it some time.

I’ve copied it just how my mother wrote it out. There might be an issue about political correctness, but I have a picture of Morris Temple in the 1860s, in his civil war uniform, with a sword. You will have to wait for that post to see which side he fought for….. I presume that my mother wrote it down as she was taught it. I am not sure who talked like this in Iowa in the 1880s, but maybe it was most people.

The Brewers’ Big Horses

O, the brewer’s big horses, comin’ down de road
A totin’ along old Lucifer’s load
Dey step so high and dey step so free
But them big horses can’t run over me

Chorus:
O no! boys O no!
De turnpike’s free where ever I go
I’m a temperance ingine don’t you see
So them big horses can’t run ovah me
Repeat with “toot toot toots”

O de liquo’ men been actin lak de own de place
A livin’ off de sweat o’ de po’ man’s face
Dey’s fat and sassy as dey can be
But deir big horses can’t run ovah me

Chorus

I’ll harness dem horses to de temperance cart
I’ll hit ’em with the gad fo’ to give ’em a start
I’ll teach ’em how fo’ to haw an’ gee
So them big horses can’t run ovah me

Chorus

It took me a while to find this song on the internet. It is listed in temperance songs in wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperance_songs and is mentioned in The Christian Advocate under lyrics: The Brewers Big Horses. It is listed as written in 1913 by JB Herbert and HS Taylor. Isn’t it interesting that Budweiser still uses the Brewer’s Big Horses in advertising?

Again, this is a song I was learning way before I know what a brewer or a turnpike was. My parents stopped singing a bunch of songs when they realized that I was memorizing all of them. They did not want me singing certain songs in Kindergarten.

They did not need to worry. I shut up when I got to school, because no one wanted to sing and no one knew the songs. They all talked about television and we didn’t have one.

I was very disappointed in school. Not enough singing and it was lonely.

by

Juxtaposition

The photograph in my Quimper Family Medicine home clinic and guest room is of my grandmother and my daughter, in 1988. I took the picture. My grandmother is Evelyn Ottaway. The other picture is one of my mother/baby or parent/child pictures. I like the juxtaposition.

It’s not just parent/child that is important. It is parent/child, grandparent/child, great grandparent/child.

I am reading a book that appeared in my little free library box, about grandmothering skills. It’s got some very interesting ideas and I am enjoying it! Radical, man.

My grandmother had amazing organizational skills. I think that my daughter got them from her.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: Radical.

by

Deep Vein Thrombosis

Our clinic had a band back before 2009. Me and 4 of the nurses. We were into heavy metal. This was when I was working for Port Townsend Family Physicians. The county let me go and PTFP changed their name. Could not have been because we wore our band regalia to work, right? After all, it was Halloween.

Maybe they were afraid that the songs would catch on.

Little blue pill

Don’t code in the waiting room

Evidence based BM

Probiotics make you psychotic

Better that way

Alcohol is better than benzos

Mr. Sable is Unable

Buprenorphine: better n morphine

EMR means Eat My Rear

The 18 Patient Blues

Idaho Gigolo

I played flute and saw. J played fiddle and air siren. The others, well, you should ask them. I think all the tapes got burned by the hospital. Too bad, so sad.

I can’t credit the photographer. I don’t know who took it.

by

patience

The Ragtag Daily Prompt today is patience. We still have some fog. We hope for clear sailing. We hope the fog bank will shrink. Right now we can see what is under it and avoid it. Patience, patience. Mask and immunize, please, please, push back the fog.

by

Quota

Quota

honestly
I feelΒ despair
when I try
to think about the newΒ schedule

Twenty four slots
Of 20 minutes
See three people
For 40 minutes
Twenty on the schedule

UnansweredΒ questions
Wake me on Sunday morning
If I am called to a labor patient
Must I make up that clinicΒ face time?
What ofΒ holidays?
The clinic is closed.
Night callΒ is nowhere addressed
Will they hire more and more
Who don’t take call
Until I am the last woman standing
Red rimmed eyes staring
Numb with fatigue

What of my nearly deaf patient
WhoΒ reads lips
May we take forty minutes?
All the fairly deaf elderly?
New parents, anxious
Questions pour out like
Coins from a jackpot win
What of the tearfulΒ brokenhearted
And anxious?
I shrink at the thought
Of crushing their hearts
Into twenty minutes

And what if I’mΒ sick?
(sick leave & vacation all one)
It’s not aΒ holidayΒ if I’m on call
No make-up day off
If I cancelΒ clinic
For illness
Do I make up those days
A quota of patient face days

I am in theΒ factory
TheΒ mines
People are the shirts I must sew
TheΒ tons of coalΒ I must load
I mustΒ meet a quota

Doctors die younger
Our life is measured out
InΒ patients
I won’t let theΒ quota
KillΒ my love

by

vagrant

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: vagrant.

A vagrant can be “a person without a settled home or regular work who wanders from place to place and lives by begging.”

Right now, our local Legion is helping the local Coast Guard employees who are not getting their paychecks, by giving them 1300 gift cards for $100 for food. The story is here.

I am angry that our government is locked up, that 800,000 people are not able to work or are working without pay, and that another twice that number contract with the government. They will not get back pay.

The photograph is not the Coast Guard, it is a zoom of Indian Island.

The employees furloughed have been invited to the Food Bank. I think Congress and the President should donate their salaries, no, not salaries but their INCOME to all the people they’ve affected until the shut down ends. How dare they make vagrants of honest workers.