Good
things that happened this past year of infamy. 2020
will
be pivotal just like 1929 or the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Or like the
Truman years or 1918 or 1945. Those years will
always be
associated with certain images in my brain. I wonder
if
they are for everyone?
It
must have been some lucky consequence of COVID that fewer cars
prowled the suburbs. That meant suburbia was being
reclaimed by wild animals, so very different from our pets or farm
animals. First, foxes were reported in backyards,
then
there was talk of coyotes, and finally a big hawk or some sort of
eagle landed in our front yard, and was busy tearing apart a rabbit.
Suddenly, all the other birds in the neighborhood gave their
hatchlings a verbal warning, but stayed put in the trees where they
had formerly been foraging for food for their insatiable broods.
Meanwhile,
the raptor found it all highly amusing but somewhat
irrelevant. I
lost all sense of time, so busy was I viewing this magnificent
bird, not to mention his morbid mission, eating the
disemboweled
bunny, which just lay on our grassy lawn. I tried to
determine whether the rabbit was still alive, but quickly
concluded that it was indeed dead. In the wild, there's little
intentional cruelty. That too is a human invention.
I’ve
been writing informally since I was a kid. In
November
2010 I had a stroke, and can only communicate a bit, though I have
continued to teach. Recently, something clicked in my brain, and I’ve
started writing again using a large monitor, a “big-keys”
keyboard, and my right thumb.
I
am a tenured
faculty member in the Department of Molecular Biology and
Biochemistry at Rutgers University. I have published
scientifically in Nature, Science, and the New England Journal of
Medicine among other journals as well as a short humanistic essay in
Hektoen International. I was an
undergraduate at
Harvard and received my MD degree as well as my MPH from Johns
Hopkins.
