Silent crash

It was a silent crash again, just like the first time. I was rocked by a computer crash a couple of decades ago. This time I could read the signs; I knew it was coming. But there’s something so radical about a computer crash that the silence is not normal. The machine ought to growl or bark as it chews up years of memory, so the yelling of the user will not be so stark.

Those of us who have been diagnosed with Multiple System Atrophy (MSA) are philosophical about this kind of thing, learning as we do that the joys and debits we save may erase themselves, every trophy a potential atrophy.

All diseases are bullies. Like the armed bullies in current headlines, they remind us that all of our plans are subject to change. A crash could even be for my own good, an intervention by a sort of angelic editor--admittedly a rare description of an editor. Such a supereditor, coming out of his or her (its?) black hole to screen the product, glancing at the million words I wrote for periodicals, books and letters, scrunches a blue pencil through every line. Words a writer inspires an editor retires.

Much of the stuff that was wiped out on my senior computer is still available on the laptop I’m using now, and I think more is stashed away in backup. I’ll check it out. MSA lets me think about one thing at a time, although I still walk and eschew puns at the same time. But it takes me two hours to watch “60 Minutes.”

About this time of the year, when Chicago gets its first snowfall of the season, I have in recent years begun my production of Christmas cards. MSA and its co-conspirator, Arthritis, ruled out handmade holiday cards even before the crash. I believe in Santa Claus as first among seasonal apps, and I wish you a Merry Christmas. Christ gives meaning to everything, even including MSA. Christ gives power to prayer.

This was not always my view. When I was 6, in the second year of the Great Depression, I was shocked to find that Santa had gone wild. His idea of Christmas presents was some new union suits, knickers, long johns with flaps, and a nightgown. I met Santa at the church Christmas celebration, and was reassured when he gave each kid an orange and the thin curlicue candy I still associate with Christmas trees. I did not recognize Santa, who was my costumed grandpa stuffed with a secret pillow.

Nobody, not even Google, knew anything about MSA in those days. Nobody knows enough about it today, but a cure is evolving from research. Pam Bower, Vera James, Philip Fortier, Larry Kellerman and others have generated support for research via The MSA Coalition. I’m one of many who value the work of the volunteers and the professionals who are going to find a cure for the disease I call MSA, or Honey I Shrunk the Brain.

There’s nothing like an incurable, progressive disease to stir thoughts about the dependency of everything that lives. Not a person, not a plant or an insect probing a plant, not even the wind or the water, has a life independent of all life. Anxious patients and generous caregivers tend to ponder, to meditate on, the purpose of the living, loving Eternal.

Catholic New World /

Dolores Madlener with Pope
John Paul II

November 15 - 28, 2015

Dolores Madlener puts down her pen and paper

By Michelle Martin

Staff Writer

The following is an updated version of a story about Dolores Madlener that originally ran on Sept. 28, 2008, on the occasion of Madlener’s 30th anniversary working for the Archdiocese of Chicago’s newspaper. Madlener, 86, retired Nov. 1.

Over the years, she profiled every parish in the archdiocese, spread “benevolent gossip” in Church Clips, introduced readers to dozens of priests and religious in “Five Minutes with Father” and “Conversations with the Consecrated” and spent decades doing the most tedious of jobs, compiling the “Around the Archdiocese” calendar listings.

Her presence in these pages will be greatly missed.

In early September of 1978, Pope John Paul I was in the midst of his 28-day papacy, Cardinal John Cody led the Archdiocese of Chicago and A.E.P. “Ed” Wall, the editor of The Chicago Catholic, as this newspaper was then known, was in need of a secretary.

Dolores Madlener, meanwhile, was working at the American Medical Association headquarters in Chicago.

Madlener, who celebrated her 30th anniversary working for the archdiocesan newspaper on Sept. 11, 2008, said she can thank Father William P. Murphy, then pastor of Queen of Martyrs Parish in Evergreen Park, for pointing her toward the job of editor’s secretary.

“We both thought I’d be a perfect fit, except Father Murphy was never wrong,” said Madlener, who put together the “Around the Archdiocese” events listings, wrote “Church Clips” and “Five Minutes with Father” in every issue.

“I was active in my parish as CCD coordinator at the time. Actually I was involved in my parish since it was founded. Father knew I had good secretarial skills and he knew I took the church seriously.”

Madlener was no stranger to the pages of the paper. She was a loyal subscriber, she said, “and I wrote letters to the editor at the time. Usually complaining.”

Wall evidently agreed with Murphy, because he hired Madlener and even had her coming in after-hours to help out after she gave notice at the AMA.

Madlener noticed the difference immediately.

“We think there’s a bureaucracy in the church, but it was nothing compared to the AMA,” she said. “The ‘hierarchy’ at AMA differed from the hierarchy I found on the fourth floor in the Pastoral Center. It’s really been the people as well as the subject matter that’s kept me here. AMA was so impersonal compared to the archdiocese.”

The waves of young journalists who have worked at the newspaper have kept her young, Madlener said, and each of the six editors — not to mention four archbishops — have made enough changes to keep things fresh.



“As the years went by, I don’t think I’ve ever felt the passing of the time,” she said. “I try to live in the present moment. When I do, it doesn’t feel like 10 years, doesn’t seem like 20 years. It’s like a river, I guess.”

It’s been decades since the Catholic New World editor had a secretary. When Wall moved to Florida after Madlener had been on the job for 10 years, she continued as secretary for a time, handling correspondence and signing her name and title, “secretary to the editor.”

“But I realized with no editor, that position was going to be obsolete,” she said.

So she transferred her skills from the electric typewriter to the newsroom computer system and volunteered to take on the “most tedious job in the newsroom” — putting together “Around the Archdiocese.”

But Madlener did not find it so tedious.

“I had been active in PR in my parish for years,” she said. “I knew how important it was to A&R (Altar and Rosary Society) women to get their card parties and craft fairs in. They were like my sisters ... even though I wished they’d remember to put in the phone number or address so I wouldn’t have to check back.”

Madlener also continued doing secretarial work for successive editors. When Sister of Providence Cathy Campbell came on board, Madlener was taking minutes at an editorial advisory board meeting when the talk turned to perennial worries about circulation. Someone joked that it was too bad the paper couldn’t run a horoscope column, or better yet, a gossip column.

Inspiration struck, and Madlener went home and wrote a prototype of a “benevolent gossip” column, and “Church Clips” was born. It debuted Aug. 5, 1988.

Over the years, Madlener also took on a regular question-and-answer column similar to Chicago newsman Bob Herguth’s “Chicago Profile” column in the Sun-Times. It was similar enough that when she was asked to do “Noteworthy,” Madlener felt like she was imitating, and called Herguth to ask if it was all right to copy his format and say, “By the way, how do you do it?”

“He was very gracious, and said people copy things all the time,” Madlener said. “And he told me how he went about it.”

Later, when Madlener asked Herguth to consider doing a profile on then-assistant editor Mary Claire Gart, he turned the tables and asked to do one of her, instead.

She also profiled each parish in Chicago, in “Parish Pride,” and, in 2007, started a feature to help Catholics get to know their clergy, called “Five Minutes with Father.” This year, that has become “Conversations with the Consecrated” in honor of the Year of Consecrated Life.

“I really think ‘Five Minutes with Father’ is my favorite feature,” she said in 2008. “It’s touched me the most. I always start by asking the priest to lead us in prayer. I’m impressed by their generosity of spirit, to be so open. I hope that by getting to know them better, our readers will be moved to pray even harder for our priests.”

Madlener maintained a close relationship with those readers, many of whom feel as if they know her.

“I just feel about my readers that I know each one of them, one at a time,” she said. “In a social situation, I don’t know NASCAR from ‘Desperate Housewives.’ But if you say what parish you’re from, we can go from there. … I know people by the letters they write to me and the phone calls they make. I especially like when I put something in the column asking, ‘If you’d like a copy of the Angelus, send me a self-addressed stamped envelope.’

“Then I get all these really nice notes from people who share what’s in their hearts. And I write them a note thanking them for subscribing. Without them, where would we be? We’d be writing this in our diary, instead of in a newspaper.”

© 2015 New World Publications

835 N. Rush St., Chicago, IL 60611

(312) 534-7777

Waiting for the crash

Once again I’m the caregiver, hugging and holding on while my elderly desktop PC struggles. Sometimes it remembers what computers do, but it often forgets how to do it. It is running out of time. I will miss it because it contains my treasured PageMaker, which I bought about 15 years ago, and other programs too cranky for installation in today’s Windows 10.

Soon I’ll switch to my backup laptop. I’m not at ease using a laptop keyboard with its relatively large space in front of the keys. My first computer was an Apple, a generous gift from Our Sunday Visitor and its associated Noll Printing Company when I retired from their boards around 1983. My son David has it now.

It wasn’t easy to get this old Dell online this morning.After it connected I read in Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac that 11/12/1889 is the birthday of DeWitt Wallace. Wallace and his wife created The Readers Digest, which once sold nearly 30 million copies in 15 languages. When I was in junior high school The Reader’s Digest contained no advertising, and we kids were encouraged by our English teachers to buy a copy each month for 15 cents.

When I was 12 I was teased about my enthusiasm for this magazine. After all, it was not like being a fan of The American Scholar or Foreign Affairs. The Digest provided ideas and funny stories and shortcut books. Heinz condensed soup. The Wallaces condensed books. Someone once wisecracked that the American Catholic bishops ended an annual meeting and headed for their hotel rooms, copies of The Reader’s Digest in hand. If they’d all been carrying The American Scholar, they’d have been rapped as elitists.

I saw a current issue was when I was in my dentist’s waiting room. It was not the magazine of DeWitt Wallace’s time. I haven’t read it in more than half a century, but it was just right when I read it in the 1930s and when I worked for it for half a year in the late 1940s. First came an invitation to have lunch with DeWitt and Lila Acheson Wallace in their Pleasantville, New York, offices. Then they offered me a three-month assignment at a dazzling $500 a month, and I took it.

Everything changes. The magazine that enlivened English classes more than 75 years ago is different from the one that’s published now. My computer doesn’t go back 75 years, but computers age more like faithful dogs and so it is allowed, under the laws of political correctness, to be sentimental about them.

  

Good luck, good times, and don't forget the password

            It has taken time for me to learn why I am a slow learner, and to discover that’s not all bad. I forget slowly, too. There’s a slow leak in my brain, according to a neurologist who assigned me to tests in a noisy cylinder, tests with needles and even fill-in-the-blanks tests. I didn’t need medical machinery to remind me how many times I had made wrong decisions. Wrong decisions, even when they are made with good intentions, are still wrong. Somebody has to pay, and that’s where the wincing begins.

            It can be a mistake to change jobs and move to an unfamiliar city. How about taking a job that require lots of days out of town? What about promises not kept, games and picnics and holidays missed? Don’t forget careless financial decisions that squeeze family budgets. All of those errors fit on the tiny tip of a titanic iceberg of bad choices. Penitents sometimes think they are their only victims, overlooking the pain to kids, spouses, parents, pals, co-workers, neighbors.

            Most of my friends are Christians, Buddhists or nonbelievers. Anyone may have an agnostic moment because of events or the lack of events, or maybe boredom, but believers have the advantage of knowing they are not alone and that even the most confounded life is worth living. Life is never lived alone. It is awful that lonely people don’t know this. There’s a radiance emanating from each of us that wants to embrace others. Some respond with a radiant radar of their own, but others brace themselves and electrify their fences.

            For years I’ve described the ways a rare and incurable disease has worked its way from a small tingle in my legs to loud jingles here and there. It is called multiple system atrophy, MSA. Symptoms and the speed of their movement are not the same in all patients. I’m lucky enough to be writing this at age 90, more than a dozen years after I was diagnosed and decades after the symptoms began to appear. I started keeping my balance with a walking stick around 1970 and with a rollator by 2005. I acknowledge that I’m lucky, but then again I’d have been luckier not to have any disease at all.

            Then I remember. Life starts with a jolt. Saints have endured torture and painful diseases. Life is nifty in many ways, but life also is tough. Ask Christ Jesus about that.

            But Christ shows us that satisfaction comes from passing on the blessings that come to us, and doing what we can to overcome the bad luck of ourselves and others.

            Did I mention how lucky I am? It is true. I’m lucky that you have read this far. I’m lucky to have been shown that mistakes open the way to corrections, that the mistakes called sins may be forgiven. I’ve reshaped my reading of the Daily Office to fit my shrinking attention span, the length of time I read  before I doze off. Reading all of it would require starting yesterday. And thank God for the Kindle, which recites the Daily Office out loud, so nobody knows when I forget the words.

            It doesn’t matter if I forget the words to my daily reading of fiction. I just finished reading a Western and today I’m starting Patricia Cornwell’s new novel, “Depraved Heart.” I’ll soon know who Dr. Kay Scarpetta is sending to jail or the morgue. Maybe she’ll find that missing cure for MSA.

            Words come and go. My daily reading includes The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune online. The mail carrier brings the New Yorker, America, Esquire, Catholic New World, Commonweal, Sports Illustrated, Scientific American, New York Review, the Progressive and a bunch of additional favorites. MSA makes it a challenge to hold the magazines with flexible fingers, especially Foreign Affairs and other heavy ones, and shrinking type is a bother.

            Life makes time for meditation, especially prayers for victims of disasters, crimes and sickness, appreciation for family and friends, the cooling of global warming.

            Remember the password: Aloha.

 

           

           

Remember Aunt Addie

Happy birthday to my Aunt Addie, whose cake would be a fire hazard with its 127 candles. She was born Addie Olmstead in 1888, married Archie Vaughn and loved him intensely. She wanted children, but had none. The last time I talked with her she was about the age I am now, and she said she hoped my children would remember her. After her retirement she became a full time volunteer at her church. A neighbor warned her that she worked too hard in her garden and risked collapsing there, and she replied that she couldn’t think of a better place to collapse than among her flowers. I hope she knows she is remembered.

Another birthday is at hand, and this man will be remembered by a few thousand of his best friends and admirers. The Rt. Rev. John W. Howe, retired Episcopal Bishop of Central Florida, has shown many how to pray. He still does. There will be Happy Birthday prayers for him on November 4.

Sally, my amazing wife, loved her family and was a compulsive do-gooder. She fought back against polio and massive surgery. I used to tease her that it was easy to remember our wedding anniversary because it was five days ahead of the Marine Corps birthday. One of them is 61 years, or maybe 62, and the other is 240 years, both early in November.

Remember the Alamo, Remember the Maine, Remember Mama—and don’t forget to remember Aunt Addie.

Who's thinking about Henry Ford?

Honey, I shrunk the kids brain!

Friends tell me that God has a plan, but I’m not so sure. God’s spontaneity hints that all plans are subject to change. People turn to God for solutions. Maybe that is not God’s plan. The willingness of God to reply to prayer with the certainty of a bank’s cash machine is told in the book of God that has shaped Western ideas and ideals.

A listener flicks the radio on without thinking of Marconi. Another hops into a car and drives to work without recourse to Henry Ford, and images of the Wright brothers are surely outnumbered by images of Jesus, Mary or maybe the Buddha when passengers settle down for a long flight.

The notion of God as creator, inventor or developer leads to another notion, that God is available 24/7 to grant prayerful requests. Requests for a new radio aren’t sent to Marconi. The Wrights are not invoked to fix airborne wrongs.

As soon as I learned to read, a Bible story book with grand pictures of David and his slingshot and other excitements was on a table next to my bed. Bibles have been within easy reach ever since, including my favorite, the New Revised Standard Version, in print and on Kindle. What I was taught about scripture in 1929 gave me a living foundation, and appreciation of ongoing scholarship. In 1929 I learned what was commonly known about the Bible, even as I also learned how to assemble a crystal radio and how to enjoy the rumble seat in my Aunt Addie’s coupe.

I was born with all of the parts God planned for baby boys. We humans have evolved slowly. We have a lot more evolution ahead if we’re to understand God. Atheists have given up on this. They wonder why God wouldn’t have started people out with brains prestuffed, as the marketers might say, with everything required to understand the divine. I wonder, too, and meanwhile enjoy the encounters God thinks I can handle. Kids curled up on their kindergarten sleeping rugs don’t even know what there is to know.

They will find out that if God has a plan, it will not be the same for each of them. Some will be born in lands of rice, some in places of wheat and corn, others maybe among coconuts and oranges, some of one race, some of another, some sick and some well, some into wealthy families and some will be poor. They will hear that all men are created equal. It will be true only where theory has been given the power of law.

Not so long ago there were no bumper stickers because automobiles had not been invented, but posters and pamphlets announced that God is good, God is love, two claims found in all religions if you look carefully. God frees people from being automatons, mere consumers acting out a placid puppetry, and lets them figure out how to deal with matters of health, joblessness, hunger, warfare, humor, family, religion, education and art. God offers to forgive the errors of folks who also forgive. That catches my attention, and the attention of others who also are error-prone. God is known as Mind, Love, Father/Mother, Holy One, Holy Trinity, the Word and as other words of wonder.

Maybe people are turned loose to work out their own lives, whatever their gifts and misfortunes. Humankind need not feel embarrassed because there’s such a big hole in understanding the patterns of life. After all, black holes are a shifting challenge to the brains of the brainiest among us.

That category does not include the brain I have, because I have a disease called multiple system atrophy (MSA). It causes atrophy, or shrinking, of the brain.

Robin Leach wrote about the passing of an MSA patient in the Las Vegas Sun last Friday. "Iron Chef" star Kerry Simon, he wrote, “had fought a brutal, 2-year debilitating  fight against the hideous brain disease Multiple System Atrophy.”

I’m one of the lucky ones, still telling about my diagnosis a dozen years after my neurologist gave it a name. Luck is sometimes lucky, sometimes not so lucky. Here in Illinois, where I live, a State Lottery winner of any prize greater than $25,000 is given an IOU. The legislature of this financially suicidal state has not approved a budget, and the treasurer cannot write big checks.

 As a 90-year-old MSA patient I try to avoid unlucky falling, choking, mumbling and the like.

A lot of effort has gone into the study of multiple system atrophy since an online support group was established by the Vanderbilt Autonomic Dysfunction Center in 1995. Several dedicated, knowledgeable volunteers lead the support group. Two who are best-known as moderators are:

Pam Bower: NS Canada pbower@accesscable.net

Vera James: CA USA fvjames@aol.com

Medscape defines MSA as “an adult-onset, sporadic, rapidly progressive, multisystem, neurodegenerative fatal disease of undetermined etiology, characterized clinically by varying severity of parkinsonian features; cerebellar, autonomic, and urogenital dysfunction; and corticospinal disorders.” 

Is your calendar within reach? October 3 is World MSA Day. You can make a world of difference.

My mom, dancer and sleuth

One day when my mom was in her 90s she looked at the bearded guy standing next to her and asked, “How old are you?”

I said, “Mom, I’m 70.”

That was 20 years ago. It was one of the times she said that we had switched roles and she had become the child needing care. I had heard this comment many times. My mother had a talent for repeating herself day after day and year after year. It is a notoriously inheritable talent. I thought, but did not say, that elderly folks whose strength shrinks while their health needs explode are not like children. Children grow up, becoming less dependent as they get older.

My mom was generous and friendly. She loved to dance and she was a garden club enthusiast. She was a department store sleuth, a nightmare for shoplifters. Later, in her 70s, she dispatched trucks for charity pickups. She outlived three husbands. Her cooking was pretty good even during World War 2 food rationing when her specialty was boiled beef heart.

Her daughter-in-law, Sally, Sally’s brother Frank, church friends and neighbors took her to visit doctors, to lunch, to the hair salon, and talked with her. She was 95 when she died as quietly as the sleeping child she thought she had become.

Now that I’m 90 years old, my skin resembles a relief map of Hawaii, volcanoes and beaches included. My days are busy. I spend part of the day putting my socks on. I spend more of it changing my clothes, which wakes up one or two muscles, former muscles and jagged joints.

But first there’s steaming coffee brewed and delivered by my daughter or son-in-law or a grandchild. My meals are prepared, my mail sorted, my fabrics laundered, my Amazon packages brought indoors. I’m supported all the time by sons and daughters-in-law and by my grandson out West, with visits, emails, phone calls and whatever. Friends know that my slights and slips are unintentional, and they are giving of friendship while forgiving of faults.

I don’t like to boast about my disease, but it is almost probably rarer than anything you may have. It inspired the movie “Honey I Shrunk My Brain.” I was originally diagnosed with olivopontocerebellar atrophy, but it became so popular as a computer password that the name was changed to multiple system atrophy. It strikes its victims in a variety of ways. There is no cure. I can still push my rollator the distance from our front door to the curbside mail box. I leave the house to see the doc or the dentist. The floors and sidewalks are swaying everywhere.

Family and friends are gifts from the Eternal, a dizzily cheerful thought.

Doris Olmstead Wall Matas Veytia, 95, is in her wheelchair enjoying Easter 1999 with, from left, Katie and Dr. Marie Veldman, Sally Wall, Dan and Kristen Veldman, Great Grandma herself, then Matt, Mike and Dr. Mark Veldman. Grandson John Wall and his wife Pam Heyda, and grandson David Wall, his wife Toni and their son Jacob, were at home, thousands of miles to the west.

The world can use a body shop

Along with the joys of being a Christian there are some painful distractions. Jesus himself knew torture by agents of government long before there was an American lawyer to declare it legal. Many have observed that being a Christian is not easy. It is worth the effort, but few of us stick to it. (I’m a late-comer myself.)

              For generations we’ve tossed drunks out of our churches. Need help in overcoming an addiction that’s destroying your life and your family? Visit Alcoholics Anonymous, where you’ll receive the love of the whole A.A. congregation. You won’t be shunned in the name of a church.

              Christians know something about the behavior we call sin. Every day we ask God to forgive us our sins the way we forgive the sins of others. Maybe that’s why we need so many tranquilizers to swallow, sip or inhale.

              We could forgive, but instead we revoke memberships and shun the weak. We have opportunities to help ease a recovering alcoholic back into the community, and we look away. We hear about children starved for food and appreciation, and we muffle the thought before it makes us more uncomfortable.

We could, you're probably thinking, stop writing like the town scold and become more cheerfully focused.

              Human sexuality has been a preoccupation of religion from the time the first cell split with an unmentionable purpose. It is written into traditions and scriptures of early centuries

.

              There has been some reconsideration of divorce and remarriage, and reconsideration of marriage itself. Sexual misconduct is a feature of the information society. What’s factual about what’s sexual has not changed. Nor has the voice  of compassion, recorded in John’s gospel, cautioning those quick to throw stones to ponder their hypocrisy.

              Schools and religions have handled it as though it is one of the costs of doing business. Now they back away from their long-standing  influence over a topic history knows to be elusive. Maybe they are relieved to have human sexuality become simply secular, something to ponder or pander. Maybe courts and commissions will find out what makes a person become a sexual monster, preying on children, mangling bodies and leaving dents in the conscience of the world.

               When I was in a class for Christian doctrine teachers more than 60 years ago a priest said that, in confession, sexual predators commonly expressed regret and promised to stop. But they came back, again and again. Someone asked what the church was doing about this. The teacher shrugged his shoulders.

              Hey, this is the way it looks to me. I am not the teacher. I am not the priest. I’m the one the lifeguard is trying to save, but I’m down here at the bottom of the pool. All he sees is some bubbles.

Is it a lifetime pass, or the pass to a lifetime?

              Jim O’Neill and I were walking past the Trevi fountain on our way to the Rome bureau of the National Catholic News Service, now called the Catholic News Service. It was my first Rome trip there since my appointment as director and editor in chief. Jim, the bureau chief, was telling me about visiting a friend in a Roman hospital.

              So I asked Jim, “Where do you go for treatment when you get sick?”

              “To the TWA ticket counter,” he said with a smile.

              TWA was the airline of choice for many American bishops, and for some folks who worked for the bishops. Like me. I have a life membership card for the TWA Ambassador Club, along with another for Pan American. I thought they would be good for my life, not the airlines’ lives.

              Life is a gift from God, according to preachers and poets. All of us are created equal, according to patriots and philosophers. Life is a gift that keeps on giving, prompting some to ask What gives?

              One day I read an article in Catholic Mind, a magazine published for many years by Jesuits in New York. The author was Bishop John Wright of Worcester, Massachusetts. I wrote him a note about his article, he replied, and eventually I went to work on the Worcester Telegram copy desk. That was a long time ago.

              About the time Sally and I left Worcester for Honolulu, Bishop Wright left to become the Bishop of Pittsburgh. Our friendship flourished. When our first son was born in Hawaii we named him John Wright Wall. It was at the bishop’s home in Pittsburgh, years later, that I met a gifted young priest, Donald Wuerl, newly-chosen secretary to the bishop.

              Wright became a cardinal when he was named prefect of the Vatican’s Sacred Congregation of the Clergy, and Wuerl became a cardinal decades later after he was named Archbishop of Washington. It really is a small world.

              Honolulu was the center of the world for lots of transplants like Sally and me, with three children born in Hawaii. I was managing editor of the morning newspaper, the Honolulu Advertiser, when a long-time friend asked me to meet secretly with him in Washington’s Watergate hotel. Bishop Joseph Bernardin was general secretary of the  conference of U.S. bishops when he invited me to become head of the news service with two major objectives. The news service budget was blotched in red ink, and losses were mounting as clients cancelled their orders. Objective number one was to regain the lost clients and pull the budget into black ink.

The news service prepared bundles of mimeographed news reports each day for mailing to clients. My job, objective number two, was to find a way to send the daily news report to clients everywhere via leased wire. The service had been negotiating with a domestic news agency that was better than nothing, but it was an answer to prayer when negotiations began with Reuters instead. Our contract gave us hours of transmission to anyplace in the world served by the giant news agency, plus the guarantee that news reports written by our correspondents would be wired to us in Washington within 20 minutes of being presented at any Reuters office. It was a suspenseful time for me, because Bernardin had told me I had to make all of the decisions and be responsible for the consequences.

              I don’t suppose that left you in much suspense, but in case it did, both objectives were met. I kept my job, not aware that an incurable neurological disease was already sampling some of my brain cells. Bernardin departed to become Archbishop of Cincinnati and eventually the Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago. And I wrote a book about him.

              That neurological disease was eventually given a name, olivopontocerebellar atrophy or OPCA, later renamed multiple system atrophy (MSA). Somebody told me there can be as many as 100 billion neurons in the brain, and the brain controls thinking, memory, talking, walking. Anyone with MSA may be subject to zoom-speed dizziness, sudden falls, shocking headaches, gagging, distorted vision and so on – and not necessarily be aware of it.

              Awkward behavior is part of the package. I’m glad I have friends who overlook promises I forget to keep, and conversations that skid right through my neurons, sliding out through my pores, never to be remembered. Friends know that MSA and arthritis coexist, gout is part of it, sometimes a shirt is easy to button, sometimes touch typing is still possible. The give and take of friendship, the giving and forgiving, is part of the mystery. Friendship is medicinal, prescribed by the usual folks, like Jesus, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Francis of Assisi, the other Francis in Rome.

              A few years ago I gave up my drivers license because I could see highways swaying like hula dancers, and other dizzy distractions of MSA. One of these days MSA will revoke my touch typing license and etch my dizziness into the hard drive. After I stopped driving I had my pick of what to do next, read some lively murder mysteries, listen to music accumulating on my i-pod, buy things from Amazon, watch movies on TV, notice all the stars I never heard of who have become famous since James Cagney, Mae West, Bette Davis and Tallulah Bankhead, whatever.

              Slowing myself down on my two active  computers is as simple as deleting more commercial emails without reading them, enjoying hours of Jamestown photos and other Internet nostalgia, and savoring endless action via online newspapers, broadcasters, social scans and such. Everything gets older, including the bottled grains of Scotland and jokes via email. People get older and the luckiest of them are nudged, nagged and nurtured by family and friends. Thanks, nudgers. Thanks nurturers. Thanks naggers. Thanks proofreaders.

Why pray?

             So, how come someone with a disease called incurable prays for healing?

              Why am I a life member of the International Order of St. Luke the Physician, a worldwide healing ministry, even though I still have multiple system atrophy a dozen years after my neurologist diagnosed it? Good questions.

              Someday medical specialists will find out what MSA and other rare diseases are, but they are semi-mysteries today, much like prayer and the Eternal.

 

              Physicians and theologians have examined healings of the sick at Lourdes and in other places and circumstances. Sometimes science seems to be in remission along with the sickness, but science keeps at it.

              Prayers for healing have something to do with overcoming MSA, but that’s just part of it. Prayers reach out for healing of cynicism in politics and business, healing of greed and murder, healing of warfare and person-to-person nastiness. Prayers embrace family, friends and others who are not friends.

              The consequences of prayer are often, maybe usually, overlooked. People tend to define healing in terms of perfection. Either the disease is gone or it isn’t. But this is not the way it works. Most gains in reality are incremental, not instantaneous as in magic

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              Paul the apostle writes in his second letter to the Corinthians that his prayers did not succeed in relieving him from a “thorn in the flesh,” but he kept on praying. Who knows what was healed in Paul’s life and in the lives of his friends? Luke the physician, close friend of Paul, may have been one of the beneficiaries even as he prayed for his own health and clarity.

              Some modern Christians hesitate before repeating an ancient affirmation, beginning “I believe in God…” They may pause before they acknowledge the Eternal, necessarily described in the relatively primitive language of many religious texts. There simply were no words to express concepts awaiting discovery. A limited vocabulary, at a time when few persons were able to read and write, was made to serve. The prose of scripture was expressed in poetry, the language of the mystics. It may be condensed into one word. Amen.

Opinions expressed in this essay are my own and do not necessarily reflect opinions of other persons, publications or organizations.

Ouch! Confession of a barefoot writer

            All kind of things were going on. Frank Sinatra made his singing debut, Finland surrendered to the invading Soviets and Benito Mussolini joined his buddy Adolph Hitler in going to war against Britain and France. It was a lively year, 1940, and the U.S. census folks counted more than 131 million Americans. That included nearly 13 million African Americans.

            In 1940 I heard a talk by a middle-aged Georgia teacher who smiled a lot when she talked about growing up in the heart of the old Confederacy. She was born about 30 years after Sherman’s Union Army burned Atlanta, which 1940 moviegoers were watching in blazing Technicolor.  “Gone with the Wind” swept the Academy Awards.

            This lady, who began absorbing racism with her first breath, and didn’t seem to know it, was an up-front volunteer when the needy of any race needed anything. In her talk she described a visit to Tuskegee with a group of white teachers, invited to lunch at the famous black school in Alabama. The white guests were seated, she said, while the black hosts remained standing. “They knew their place,” she said.

            Of course they knew their place, but it took decades for many Americans to recognize that dismal place. Union soldiers by the thousands had given everything they had to destroy slavery; their victory was diluted by racial segregation, a dissimulation invented by the defeated. Many remember the signs marking “white” and “colored” drinking fountains and rest rooms, laws requiring separate seating in buses and, the greatest scandal of all, in churches. Blacks did not often make it into newspaper stories, except an occasional piece by a police reporter. A major newspaper declined to identify any black woman as married; there were no Mrs. John Smiths—just Jane Smith—in stories about black citizens.

            I admit a certain bias. I’m a life member of NAACP. I’m also a life member of the USA. I believe in what they both stand for, but I do not agree with everything either one does. It is easy to be a card-carrying automaton, allowing the outfit to make all the decisions, and lots of people carry those cards. Judgments are swift and impersonal.

I make another admission. I’m writing this while hosting gout in one entire foot. Occasional gout visits are part of the mystery of multiple system atrophy (MSA).  Just because the writer is barefoot he is not Gandhi. Gandhi spun with a wheel. This writer just spins.

            Now consider the case of Rachel Dolezal in Spokane, Washington, a nifty city in one of the most beautiful parts of the country, home to Gonzaga University and a lot more. Maybe you, too, were lucky enough to be there for Expo ’74. Rachel was president of the NAACP chapter. Her long-time claim to be African American was challenged by her parents, then by others who did not know her and had never seen her. Here was an opportunity to extend an arm of comfort to a troubled person, of trying to understand a woman’s need and confusion. But critics scolded her, sent her back to where she came from.

            We Christians do that in our churches. We commonly pray for the Eternal to forgive us in precisely the way we forgive others, a state of mind and heart demonstrated so powerfully by African American Christians following the church massacre in Charleston, South Carolina. But we do not always respond in the way of Jesus and his Charleston disciples.

Is that macaroni under your scalp?

I had the great American brain food for dinner, macaroni and cheese. You know, the tasty dish that looks like the brains that illustrate magazine articles like “The Pea Diet for a Pea Brain.”

A momentary slippage of the brain cells makes people laugh at each other, no matter how hard they try to keep a straight face. There wouldn’t be any “America’s Funniest Home Videos” without prats in free fall.

Anybody who laughs too soon risks realizing, too late to call back the comic decibels, that the lady who slipped on the ice is a pregnant impoverished amputee recovering from a brutal mugging.

Reaction will be as quick as a scared cat and as lingering as a cat-o’-nine-tails, especially if a cell phone lens took it all in for sharing on the Internet, where rush to judgment goes supersonic. Some of us remember public school lessons about the shame of intolerance, and the Statue of Liberty as a welcoming symbol of a nation united, a melting pot won by Americans in the Revolution, the Civil War, the World War and more.

Americans had a right to think what they wanted to think, even when almost everybody thought they were wrong. There was a tolerance for bad jokes. Sally and I once moved into a circle of folks who assumed we shared their non-Roman religions. We heard lots of anti-Catholic jokes, and we laughed to ourselves about dumb jokes, dumbly told. That was tolerance, letting people exercise their right to make fools of themselves, while looking for ways to defrost their fears and prejudice. By the way, Sally and I knew more, and better, anti-Catholic jokes than any of our prejudiced pals.

That was a long time ago. The emphasis on national unity has become an emphasis on diversity. The tolerance of diverse ideas, cultures and lifestyles has yielded to insistence that nobody be allowed to say anything that offends another.

When I was a kid we had not yet fought World War II, and we had not lost wars in Asia and the Middle East. The population was about 123 million when I was a first-grader in 1930. Since then it has grown by nearly 200 million. In 1930 there were no TV programs, no jet airliners, my only encounter with air conditioning was at the movies, high speed communication was via Western Union telegraph and its boys on bicycles. People admired cops, even as a Jamestown  Sunday School teacher kept boys as attentive as disciples when he talked about the exciting sins of John Dillinger and other Most Wanted headliners.

Doctors worked hard, but didn’t know a whole lot about curing diseases. No hearts or kidneys were replaced and medical offices had ashtrays. Kids in art classes made ashtrays for their dads. When adults chatted while children could hear they spelled c-a-n-c-e-r and other scary words.

I’ve lived during the most interesting 90 years the planet has known. Have you noticed how interesting the people are?  

Rocking with grandma, a rock of ages

            Take a look at grandma’s rocking chair, handcrafted by her grandpa when the first Johnson –Andrew–was president. A collector might pay thousands for that chair and its memories, but there’s no bidding for grandma. Elderly chairs can be worth a lot of money, but elderly people are harder to invoice.

            Priceless antiquities in Syria and Iraq are damaged and destroyed by the Islamic State, works of art and architecture already ancient when Columbus cast off. The loss of the old and irreplaceable saddens and enrages people everywhere, even as it forever denies youths from now on an encounter with their ancestors. Age is everything, highly valued in auction rooms, even as people are massacred along with the artifacts. It can seem that to some persons, venerable columns and statues are more valuable than the people who live in their shadows.

            The other day I received an email with photos of famous women and men of the theater, close-ups of their familiar faces at ages 70, 80 and more. The sender invited me to look at the pictures, then look in the mirror. That was a nifty idea, but when I looked in the mirror for wrinkles I found that I have grown dimmer. A dim and foggy face looked back at me. Whom should I see first—the ophthalmologist or the dermatologist? Whom is a word used by retired editors and others of that sort.

            Some things are valued because of their age, including people, except maybe when they are being surveyed. One reason why some online pollsters get folks to tell their age up front is to spare themselves the trouble of reading responses from the elderly.

            In his latest book, “The Stranger,” Harlan Coben introduces his readers to a lawyer who specializes in eminent domain cases. The Supreme Court has allowed governments huge leeway in their seizure of private property for public purposes, but when I read the eminent domain reference in Coben’s novel I thought it could describe MSA at work. Multiple System Atrophy exercises a sort of eminent domain on the bodies of its hosts, as I noted when I looked into that mirror. As the poetic scholars of the King James Bible wrote in First Corinthians, seeing through a glass, darkly, is nothing new.

            Drinking through a glass, even lightly, is another matter. When I was given hiring and firing responsibilities at a daily newspaper I was told that many personnel issues would involve drinking, that journalists who favored foamy drinks and peppermint candies seldom got over it. I was disappointed that the alcoholics I talked with were sometimes shunned by their churches. While some churches were tossing these folks out of their congregations, Alcoholics Anonymous was taking them in, praying with them, giving them hope.

            The kind of eminent domain MSA invokes is a seizure of a patient’s property one piece at a time. It seizes the brain, then uses it to break up the rhythm of walking. It extends its domain into the swallowing apparatus, sometimes like waterboarding the patient, sometimes fiddling with the vocal cords. Then it grabs the control tower and trips its victims, causing falls. MSA applies eminent domain wherever it chooses, from aches at the top of the head to twitches at the end of the big toe.

            MSA pokes around in the brain, but most of its damage is physical. Patients tend to keep their identity intact, to avoid or defer dementia. G. K. Chesterton, a friend of George Bernard Shaw and wiser, said this a long time ago: "The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen. Nay, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman.”

            There’s talk about recognizing Chesterton, a convert to the Catholic Church, as a saint. This is astonishing, not because Chesterton is being considered for sainthood, but that a journalist is being considered.

            The fictional crime-solving Father Brown entertains on television, which had not been invented when Chesterton wrote the stories. The saint-makers know who wrote the Father Brown books, even as they argue about authorship of ancient books, how much of them is fact, how much fiction, how much the words of a journalist who liked to write mysteries.

            Old merges with new. Families probe the Internet for information about ancestors they never knew they had. One generation births babies, and adopts them. Another generation sits babies. Tom Brokaw called people of the World War II era the Greatest Generation. We who arrived between 1925 and 1942 comprise the Silent Generation. A demographer at the Census Bureau said that the “oldest old” are 85 or older, while more Americans than ever are in their 90s.

            Some folks get agitated as they move upward in the generation scale. They worry about old age because, of course, they haven’t been there before, and don’t know exactly what to expect beyond the menu of personal disasters laid out on TV screens. Some worry about a future in Hell, even though there’s no evidence anybody has ever been in a hell that has a capital h.

            Others may see old age as the normal living of life, and see life as a largely unknown adventure, maybe like a first trip to Hawaii, London or Melbourne, Australia. You know what they say about that: Bon voyage.

             

             

When mind and brain get together

          Life began at 40 when I was in typing class. The goal was to finger a 40-words-a-minute rhythm, the minimum needed to pass the first semester. Years later I sat in front of my rugged Underwood, pounding out the succession of short takes expected from a reporter at the rewrite desk.

          Typing may have been the most useful class I took in public school. It was useful in English, history, journalism and drama classes, especially in doing homework, and it raised me from the fast index finger category to touch typing. I could look at my notes, and didn’t have to look at the keyboard. Thirteen was my lucky year.

          It was many years before multiple system atrophy started a different rhythm in those fingers. MSA lives and works in the brain, where it can twitch a finger away from an intended key, or turn feet loose to slide off a sidewalk or trip on the invisible. This is the same MSA that short circuits the brain’s wiring system and routes lots of thoughts to a dead letter orifice.

          Many of us who’ve been diagnosed with MSA, or who are caregivers, trade information with each other via email. This morning I began writing an email to a friend: I love BBC's offerings during the late night via Chicago's public broadcast station. They make…

          What? What do they make? The word was suddenly misty, but I wrote down the first word that came to mind. Anchovy. It couldn’t be anchovy. It didn’t make sense. Another word popped up, amnesia. No, not amnesia. I worked at it, thinking about it, and that’s when the notion of “sleepless” came to mind. So I looked up sleepless in my Merriam-Webster and there it was: insomnia. I’d been trying to write this: I love BBC's offerings during the late night via Chicago's public broadcast station. They make insomnia almost desirable.

          You don’t need a brain disease for that. Anybody can forget a word now and then. MSA folks just do it more often, shooting mental blanks at a vanishing target.

          Nor do you need a brain warp to believe that there’s a reason for such things as MSA, beginning with the acquiescence of the Eternal,  James Moffatt’s favored name for God in his translation of the Bible. Maybe you prefer God, or Divine Mind or even Higher Power or something else that evokes the creative energy of loving, unseen parents. Sometimes it takes a lifetime to name God. Some never speak the holy name.

          No matter how deserved a punishment might be, sickness is not a punishment. If people were born so they can be tormented, with agents counterfeiting the ID of angels and a favored saint standing guard at the pearly gates of Guantanamo, the creator would need prayers for healing. We trust that human intelligence will lead to cures for MSA and other incurable diseases of this century, just as other cures have been celebrated in the past. The miracles come after mind and brain get together.