Meet Alfredo Fabrega, MD
Clinical Associate Professor, Surgery; Renal Transplant Surgeon, Banner University Hospital
Describe your morning – what time do you get up, what do you do first, next and what is for breakfast?
I get up at 5 am and walk 30 min with my wife; phones are left behind, so we talk sans interruptions. Then...breakfast! Always the same: Monday-Friday cereal with homemade granola and blueberries; Saturday + Sunday toast with almond butter and honey; coffee de rigueur. Trying to learn Latin, I read one line from the old Testament in Latin every morning; I have to look up almost every word (so 1 line/day is all I can do), but I enjoy discovering the etymology of many of our words.
What happens next? What do you do for lunch?
Then...commuting! I have a 40 min drive to BUMC-P, so I listen to my French courses or lectures about philosophy, history, etc...love my commute.
Then...work! Usually conferences and clinic in morning, surgery in afternoon. The transplant ward is on the 17th floor and I always take the stairs; since I’m slow, have time to do a Duolingo lesson on Latin, Italian or French. Lunch is whatever Banner lounge offers; usually on the run.
What’s for dinner?
Whoever gets home first, makes dinner. I don’t know how to cook, but do know how to make granola, chickpea/bean hummus and baba ganoush. Once I make a batch, guess what’s for dinner the rest of the week?! Thus, my wife always tries to get home before another batch is done!
How do you end the day and what time do you go to bed?
After dinner it’s another walk or, if too hot, stationary bike. On the bike, I can listen to my Italian and French songs; I have all the lyrics, so I can sing along (worse than any shower serenade) and look up any words I don’t understand...good practice!
Then, I go to bed at 8pm. There, I watch my art courses or read.
What art are you doing and when do you do it?
I’m not an artist, more like a parrot standing on the shoulders of giants. I do enjoy studying art (“the love of beauty is taste; the creation of beauty, art”). I also enjoy reading poetry: verse expresses what prose calls ineffable. I do like to pair great paintings with great quotes, and sometimes add a little narrative. (See below for art musings)
What are you reading?
Currently I am reading a book on the history of Florence, but always keep Rimbaud, Baudelaire and Neruda on my night stand for a quick read.
What are you streaming?
Last streaming binge was Queen of the South, but usually prefer something with at least some historical background, like Medici: Masters of Florence or The Last Kingdom. Los Espookys is a whimsical delight!
How are you feeling?
I’m always fine: when work is busy, it’s great (I love my work); when slow/quarantined, it’s great (I love to learn)!
What's the first thing you're going to do when the quarantine ends?
When quarantine ends, I’ll go visit my family in Panama, and then go back to Florence!
The world is a book, those who do not travel only read one page.
Art Musings
JM Synge was an Irish playwright/poet; he spent 5 summers on the Aran islands (small islands off the west coast of Ireland) trying to learn Irish folklore from the locals, which lived there isolated from the rest of the world. Fishing in small boats in the rough North Atlantic was a way of life. In his Nobel prize acceptance speech Yeats talks about his friend:
When he (Synge) found that wild island (Aran) he became happy for the first time, escaping as he said «from the nullity of the rich and the squalor of the poor».
Synge, of privileged Anglo-Irish background, befriended the Catholic peasants expressing his love and admiration with these words:
“... I would have liked to turn the prow to the west and row with them forever.”
Maybe it’s time for all of us to turn our prow towards justice and row with them* forever!
*anyone we consider alien to us.
As we gaze over this sea of fog, unsure of what lies ahead, I’m reminded of the defiant words of the Nobel laurate poet Pablo Neruda (the people’s poet): “Podrán cortar todas las flores pero no podrán detener la primavera.”
(They may cut all the flowers, but can never hold back the Spring)
“Impression, soleil levant”
Monet’s painting “Impression, sunrise” inspired the name of the Impressionist movement of the 1870’s. Their paintings were not realistic, nor romanticized; instead, they were hazy, unfinished..., just an impression.
I don’t really know what the future will bring, nor want to romanticize it; but as I stare into the dark night of this pandemic, I’m left with the impression of a rising sun.
Almond Blossom, 1890
Flowering trees were special to van Gogh. They represented awakening and hope.
Hopefully soon, all our efforts will blossom, so “hope and history rhyme.”
History says don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.
Seamus Heaney
Questa non è mia arte!
When Pope Julius II asked Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, he declined by saying: “questa non è mia arte” (this is not my art/skill)...for he considered himself a sculptor, not a painter. Much will be asked of you in the next few months; are you going to rise to the occasion, or fall to your level of training?
This pandemic has changed everything and brought out the best in many. In his poem Easter 1916, the Irish poet Yeats, said it best when expressing the good that is born from tragedy.
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild
Was it needless death after all?
No!
Now and in time to be,
Wherever scrubs are worn,
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
In these difficult times I find hope in the prophetic words of the most radical of poets, Rimbaud...the clairvoyant.
...et à l'aurore, armés d'une ardente patience, nous entrerons aux splendides villes!
(...and at dawn, armed with an ardent patience, we will enter our splendid cities!)
Qui docet discit
(He who teaches learns).
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