I've never explained the title of my blog. It's a short story. It starts with my grandfather and when I told him that I was going to apply to medical school.
"Do you know what borborygmus means?" he asked me.
"Borgurbigmus?"
"Bor-bor-ig-mus."
"No." We played this game a lot with Grandpa. He had a extensive vocabulary, loaded with the most obscure words in the English dictionary, which gave him a terribly unfair advantage in family scrabble games. We always played, split into three teams. A team of three and a team of two and a team of one, the permutations in team combinations altering each time - except for one thing: Grandpa was always the team of one.
"I asked my doctor, who's a young, intelligent doctor, what borborygmus meant," he tells me. "And he didn't know. I was astonished. It should be one of the first things they teach you in medical school."
"So what does it mean?" I ask, fully aware that he knows he hasn't told me yet, but biting at the bait anyway.
"Borborygmus. The rumbling and gurgling of the stomach."

I eventually did come across borborygmus, again. In my GI class. It was not my first day of medical school. It was in fact, almost at the very end of this year. I made a mental note to tell Grandpa. I couldn't tell him right away. He was having a tough time with his Parkinson's and I had lost direct touch with him while he was shuttled back and forth from the psych hospital to the ER to the psych hospital. Finally things settled down and I got a chance to assure him that my medical education had met his standards. It was the first good, long conversation I had had with him in a while. I knew things were back to normal when he opened the conversation, "I'm asking this with some trepidation, but how is your social life? It sounded like you were going through some rough times." I laughed it off and he graciously let me, but not without instructions to tell anyone I ever liked that I was exceptional and then giving me a blur of compliments I probably don't deserve and ending: "tell him your grandfather says so."

That was the last conversation I had with him. He died just two weeks later while I was studying for the boards. I told my Dad tonight that I'd say something at the memorial service in Chapel Hill for Grandpa this Sunday. I thought it would be easy. All I have to do is tell stories. Put together a greatest hits of the emails we sent back and forth.

Then I started looking through all the emails we exchanged and thinking about my favorite stories about Grandpa, and realized that wasn't going to work. For two reasons: 1- way too many are just too personal. They're embarrassing stories about dating that only my closest friends know. They're confessions to things I wouldn't tell my parents. And from him, a few memories that I don't think he shared with many other people. And 2- the more innocent memories coming back to me all seem to be stupid little stories. Scrabble games and funny things he said to people in the street and comments he made about TV shows he hated. And words like borborygmus. I want to say something that does justice to someone that I loved and that I am missing intensely. How does stomach grumbling and Dr. Mcdreamy's character on Grey's Anatomy do that? So I don't know what I'm going to say.

He left behind quite a legacy. I couldn't escape that the last two weeks when I was partially trying to procrastinate appreciating that I had lost him as a pen pal, as an editor, as a confidant and advisor and cheerleader for good. Obituaries my dad was sending me from newspapers around the country and even a line in High Yield Behavioral Science about TV violence adversely affecting children that referenced the research he devoted a significant amount of his career to made it difficult to do that. There are "big things" I could dwell on about Grandpa, but I'm finding that the smaller things are more important to me. And borborygmus sticks with me as one of my favorites.

So I'll finish this entry, which may be the only entry I write this year if third year is as miserably busy as rumors report, with a little reflection on the word borborygmus, itself. I won't lie. I titled this blog after it just because I liked how such a long absurd-sounding word exists to define the most banal of medical conditions. But in retrospect: borborygmus is so much more (I'm writing this just a little faciciously). The body works miraculously smoothly, but never perfectly. And since all bad metaphors should extend to *life* in general, let me be as cheesy as possible while I'm at it and say life is exactly this, too. Sometimes it's the stupid little bumps and gurgles that are what make life precious. They're the stories worth telling your friends. The stories worth only the primest real estate in your memory.