M R Swans. C M Wings?

It was 50 degrees and raining steadily when my flight out of Newark International Airport was cancelled for high winds. My aunt and I were an hour from home and still 30 minutes from Newark, so she turned the car around while I called United Airlines and my chief resident. The airline was so backed up that it couldn’t put me another another aircraft until almost 24 hours later. Unfortunately, that meant that another resident had to work my emergency room shift on Tuesday. I was granted an extra day of vacation, and I thoroughly squandered it by sleeping past 8am, going for an hour-long walk in a chilly but beautiful park, and goofing off on my laptop writing blog posts like this one.

This is the Musconetcong River near Hackettstown, NJ, on land once occupied by the Lenape. The park now includes ball fields and paths along the river and the fish hatchery canals, where two swans joined the mallard ducks and Canada geese. I booked this solo trip to visit cousins right after my grandfather’s memorial in Charlotte and the shooting at Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh happened on the same day. Having swapped shifts with a colleague, I discovered I had a 3-day weekend and decided to spend it with family I hadn’t seen in a long while. We traipsed through Princeton’s campus and the Princeton Art Museum, watched football and played games, decorated the Christmas tree, ate pie for breakfast, watched my cousin's kid make an awesome header goal in his last soccer match of the year, and generally caught up with each other’s lives. I’m really glad I made the trip.

p.s.--I hadn't realized I had made the title joke before: see M R Fish. C M Gills?