At the encouragement of my daughters, I thought it might be entertaining to recall a number of events which occurred during my practice of medicine which were initially strange and scary, but which with time and telling are now benign and entertaining. Entertaining, especially when told to grandchildren, on a dark summer evening while sitting around a campfire, talking listening to the night sounds, huddled under a blanket with a three year old on your lap.

85 years ago, my mother gave birth, with the aid of extraction forceps. The delivery was successful, but I bear a scar on the right parietal aspect of my head from the extraction. Technology wasn‘t much, but kids had been born for centuries. She had minimal pre-delivery sedation, one nurse attendant, and a physician trained in the 1920s. But it worked out well.

This cheese-making is like life. The enzymes of nurturing, along with the bacteria of living produce the cheese and whey. Swiss cheese with its individual holes, never two pieces alike are likened to people; never two alike, never two equal, never one without some blemish, and most giving off gases, not always innocuous carbon dioxide.