The Stethoscope Man

I sat a picnic table outside a tavern in the neighborhood on a weekend afternoon. My ale tasted flat. I'd brought my journal along but wasn't feeling it.

A man down the sidewalk came into view. I recognized him as one of the local homeless men but he wasn't a member of the Old Crow Book Club. We'd met a few times and he always polite and intense.

As he walked past, he looked at me without any recognition. I didn't say hello.

I noticed he was wearing a stethoscope, a real old school model with thick rubber tubing. It probably accompanied a doctor making thousands of house calls in Portland back in the day of such modern cheap medicine.

The sight of a homeless man wearing a stethoscope jolted me, even more so that observing a stripper pole in an encampment and two men blow torching crawdads for supper.

I didn't know how to write it up until a few days later...

The Magic Stethoscope

A homeless man found it on the sidewalk.

Sure, why not pick up a free stethoscope and wear it?

Someone left it outside for someone's use.

Just like the croquet set and globe with the Soviet Union still on the map.

The homeless man used them both.

He knew what to do with the stethoscope.

He'd watched

Marcus Welby MD,

Doc on Gunsmoke,

Prince's keyboard player

from Purple Rain.

What he didn't know:

The stethoscope was magical.

Only it could hear

what was wrong

inside the nation.

He listened to an oak tree.

Nothing.

He listened to a lottery ticket.

Zip.

He listened to the wind.

Silence.

If only he knew where to place the chest piece.

Somewhere,

in America,

something,

has an arrhythmia.

What is it?

Is it fatal?

What's a treatment?

Or consider this:

The magical stethoscope

finds that something,

listens,

and hears nothing.