Imagine a science fiction species that loses weight by breathing and poops bacteria instead of digested food. Can you picture it? If not, my friend doyle has a suggestion: go look in a mirror.
I met doyle on the internet. I feel closer to doyle than some people I have shared a bathroom with for years. I have only met doyle once in person. I want doyle to bury me.
All of that is tangential to the main point, which is that doyle has a blog called Science teacher and I think you should follow it.
Michael Doyle was born in Northern New Jersey, a good-for-nothing Mick like so many no-good-for-nothing Micks born in Northern New Jersey. (By the way, he prefers to refer to himself as “Oirish” as if that were somehow more PC.) He worked briefly as long shoreman. He went to med school. He became a pediatrician and worked in the ER and the projects. Think about that for a second. An emergency room pediatrician in Newark. You may think you know hell, but doyle has a crisper acquaintance with the place.
The reason I call doyle “doyle” and not “Michael Doyle” or “Michael” or “Dr. Doyle” or even “Doyle”, is that “doyle” was all I knew him by for months. We met as contributors to an on-line gathering site for weirdos and writers and weirdo writers called Everything2, a quasi-prophetic mash-up of Face Book and Wikipedia if the former only allowed text and the latter had a sense of humor. I’m not sure the following piece is the first thing I ever read of doyle’s, but I do remember it arrested me. He was on pilgrimage to some mid-western city where his sister had recently died in a car crash.
December 9, 2004 (person)
The driver seat is still intact--inside scattered cd's with burgundy stains, her impossibly colored scarf, glass, pens. A bottle of chardonnay meant to be shared with her love survived. The other side of the car is splayed open, a gaping wound letting in rain, letting in sunshine.
I picked up a couple of cd's--Frankie Allison and the Odd Sox....and now my hands with bright red blotches, my sister's blood when she bled for the last time. I absently rubbed my hands on my jeans--the bright red dulled to burgundy again. I took the scarf with me.
Last summer a feral cat mutilated a mourning dove near my garden. I gave it water. It took a little. It hopped a few feet. It died. Its partner would not leave. It looked sad. A tiny puff of feathers still marks where the broken bird fell.
Her ashes are in a cardboard box, decorated with construction paper, stickers, sparkly glue, and (of course) hearts.
I kept going back in the car, not sure what I was looking for, but sure I would not find it.
At least I got something right this week.
Doyle and I hit it off early. He seemed to like my plays about science and my doggerel poems. I liked pretty much everything he wrote.
During my teaching rounds, I will occasionally show pediatric residents wheat berries, and ask them what they think they are. These fine young minds have been charged with teaching nutrition to parents, so quizzing them about the most common source of grain calories in this part of the world should be fair game.
I have yet to have an American born physician get it right.
My other Everythingian buddy “iceowl” grew up with doyle and liked to fascinate me with stories about him. (Keep in mind when you read the following that iceowl has been to Antarctica three times and has written about it better than Hemmingway ever could have.)
[Doyle’s] done much more for humanity than I have. I'm just a silicon valley idiot… He is one of those guys who is blessed to do well doing exactly what he wants in the world. Classic Joseph Campbell example of, "Following your bliss." He wants very little from the world, and gives a lot. So, Doyle couldn't possibly do anything he didn't want to do because the worst that happens is he gets nothing for his efforts, and he's perfectly happy sleeping under the highway overpass if it comes to that ….. He just wants to do things none of us could stomach for more than a day - like dodging bullets and the cops both while illegally vaccinating kids in inner city Newark.
Five years ago doyle hung up has white physician’s coat and traded it for the white lab coat of a high school science teacher. He calls his students his "lambs", though I suspect few of them understand how closely he has observed the slaughter in his former life.
In his blog he mixes the same blend of adoration and frustration that I came to love him for at Everything2. Here he is breathlessly elevating a discourse on respiration to a paean of the universe, because as he sees it— and trust me, doyle sees it as it is— there is no meaningful difference between the two. (I’ll do my best to capture doyle’s rapturously manic formatting.)
Carbon dioxide that traveled through the hearts
of every child in our class.Carbon dioxide expelled as a sigh,
broken down by a few brain cells that would
rather do anything but this school thing.We ruin it, this carbon dioxide communion, reducing it to hieroglyphics on a page, to be regurgitated by spilling bubbles on a sheet, a religiously messy communion of sorts sterilized to a formula:
C6H12O6 +6 O2 => 6H2O + 6CO2
And yet, for a moment, the moment before eating the bean, a few students allow themselves the beauty and the power of the story to let them believe what they've always known to be true, that this whole life business, as messy and complicated and incomprehensible as it seems, gets down to this:
Each living thing, every living thing, shares an intimate bond that goes beyond the language of science, beyond the language of art, beyond human boundaries.
The universe belongs to all of us, as we belong to it.
No matter how we do in school, no matter what we know, now matter what we do.
I would trade all the biochemical pathways we "teach" for a child's grasping, for more than a moment, that we are indeed the stuff of the universe around us, and that this stuff cycles through us, is us.
Without an iota of the effort I put into it, Doyle writes the way I yearn to, with a high-wire walker’s combination of improvisation and precision. Because he flat-out knows so much, thanks to an enormous education and equally enormous experience, he can produce an uncannily free of flow of ideas without the so-much-smoke-blowing of so many formally educated, professionally self-identified “writers”. After I’ve been steeping myself in his prose for a while, I start to feel my own prose improving, taking flight. It could just be my imagination; but given how much both doyle and I believe in imagination, I’ll take it.
Neil Gaiman first introduced me to the Talmudic legend of the 36 Tzaddikim in his Sandman series. "They say that the world rests on the backs of 36 living saints – 36 unselfish men and women. Because of them the world continues to exist. They are the secret kings and queens of this world." I’m not going to come out and say Doyle is a Tzaddik. Such a pronouncement would be absurd, given the the legend’s clear and emphatic stipulation that no one can know who the 36 are.
I just have my suspicions is all.
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