Madeleine Mysko
"Picturing Daniel Berrigan's Poetry" : A Review of Prayer for the Morning Headlines by Adrianna Amari
Sojourners Magazine, February 2008
The Sister on the Chronic Ward: A Bow to Dignity
American Journal Of Nursing, September 2005
I entered my three-month rotation at Seton Psychiatric Institute through a leafy drive, a pastel tunnel of old trees and flowering shrubs. I was nineteen years old and eager to leave behind my dark and creaky nurses' residence in downtown Baltimore. So Seton was a welcome escape, with its sloping lawn and the distant, treeless hill where the home for elderly nuns gleamed.
Even the "chronic ward"--as it was calledi n 1966--had a wholesome, scrubbed charm, not unlike a nursery suite tucked under the eaves of a Victorian mansion. On the top floor of the hospital, it was a low-ceilinged space, checkered by light from a row of dormer windows.
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Braving Hurricane Hazel With A Little Sister In Tow
The Baltimore Sun, Real Life, August 27, 2006
August, hurricane season. We're all out on the porch with a pile of
steamed crabs, swatting mosquitoes and telling stories. I tell the one
about Hurricane Hazel in 1954, and how I had to walk a mile through 50
mph wind gusts with my little sister Corinne in hand. Corinne, who is a
grandmother now, rolls her eyes and accuses me of "creative recall."
Everyone laughs. My husband quips that I have joined the ranks of
oldsters who tell exaggerated "walking miles in bad weather" stories.
Everyone laughs again, my children the loudest.
Really, I tell them, it's true.
You could look it up: On Friday, October 15, 1954, after a freakish
heat wave, with temperatures well into the nineties, Hurricane
Hazel struck North Carolina and turned furiously north, up the coast
toward Maryland.
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Illustration By Penelope Dullaghan
Visiting the Very Quiet Baltimoreans
The Baltimore Sun, City Diary, October 9, 2002
A friend who was in town for genealogical research needed to get to Mount Carmel Cemetery. I located it on the map--5712 O'Donnell Street, right across from the Baltimore Travel Plaza--and on impulse offered to drive her there.
We arrived late on a Saturday afternoon in a light rain. Unfortunately, my friend's research on her lost relative had yielded nothing more than an obiturary mentioning interment at Mount Carmel.
"So, we're just looking for her name on a stone?" I asked. The caretaker's house was vacant, the front window broken.
"That's right," she replied. "We'd better spread out." She popped her umbrella and headed off on her own.
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