Even after 70 years, veteran journalist A. E. P. Wall still has something new to say...about politics, wars, religion, people and other lively things.
Tuesday, December 12, 2017
Wall's Paper: Christmas makes holidays great again
Wall's Paper: Christmas makes holidays great again: Christmas gets merrier and New Year’s gets happier. It happens year after year. The hand I’ve been using for 92 years is now holding ...
Monday, December 11, 2017
Christmas makes holidays great again
Christmas gets merrier and New Year’s gets happier. It
happens year after year. The hand I’ve been using for 92 years is now holding a
fountain pen I’ve been using for more than 60 years. No matter that my pen
could be a little jackhammer, fracturing my words letter by squiggly letter.
The holiday greetings I started to write in a Methuselah cursive look like skinny lines of imaginary-Sanskrit. If I could
no longer read my own handwriting I had to face the fact that it is too late to
become a doctor. I’m writing this on my word processor and getting lots of
experience correcting my keyboard misstrokes.
I’ve been lucky. I’m still here, years after I was diagnosed
with a rare disease affecting as few as 15,000 Americans, maybe as many as
50,000. That leaves 323 million Americans who do not have multiple system
atrophy, MSA. Another name for it is olivopontocerebellar trophy, OPCA. There’s
no cure and no treatment that will slow progression of this disease.
There are some oddball consequences. Books I collected for
reading in old age became part of a patient’s surplus to be relocated. Thus my books
are on somebody else’s shelves. and my remaining titles are mostly little jots
of electrons in my Kindle Fire tablet. I’d been an Olympics-speed reader, but
MSA’s range of speed is between Slow and Stop. When I bought Perry Mason
detective novels as soon as they were in the shops they were like many other
book of the 1940’s. They had a list of characters and a few words describing
each one. Now that I need you, where are you, Erle Stanley Gardner? All of a
sudden I need those reminders, because I forget so quickly. Books go in one eye
and out the other.
Even as MSA stirs up more confusion, and memories get stuck
in deep places, and childhood friends vanish, Christmas keeps going. I’ve made
stacks of Christmas cards for many years, and I wish I could do it again. Instead
of printing cards the old fashioned way this year I am sending my greetings via
mental telepathy. You should begin to feel a sort of tickling at the edge of
your brain right now, You are pondering my message at this moment: Merry
Christmas and Happy 2018.
We MSA folks have favorite movies, such as Bob Hope’s
“Thanks for the Memory.” I remember that film, made in 1938, when I was 13
years old. I am able to forget what you are telling me as fast as you can say
it. I don’t want to forget your friendly ways, and I like to remember the
lifeline I’ve been given by my daughter and son-in-law, Marie and Mark Veldman,
two doctors who have five children and bunches of patients, co-workers and
friends. I live with them in all the security and comfort that an MSA victim
can have. MSA is a rotten disease and I don’t suppose MSA patients are fun to
care for. Two sons and two daughters-in-law are loving supporters, too. You may
know John Wright Wall and his wife, Pamela Heyda, along with David A. E. Wall
and his wife, Toni. I submit that these nifty people, with my grandchildren and
a great grandson, are all the proof I need that there is a god. Grandson Jacob
Taka Wall is beginning to study law at Duke. Dan Veldman and his wife, Margaret
Madaras, are parents of Theo. Then there are my granddaughter Kristen Andel,
P.A., and her husband David, a firefighter; grandsons Michael, also a grad
student at Duke; and Matthew Veldman, a U. of Chicago graduate now in Brazil,
and granddaughter Katie Veldman at the University of Illinois. It has not been
announced yet, but all of the folks named above are saints, and you are, too.
MSA is more than a distraction. During my years as a
journalist I wrote something like this is an hour. It has taken many hours to
produce this, largely because MSA pays little attention to what I’m saying, and
puts my fingers on the wrong keys. It surprises me by erasing a sentence of a
paragraph, just as it sometimes causes a vocal cord paralysis that rules out
using the telephone until the paralysis eases. I no longer have visitors, but I
know the world of the Web is populated by countless friends. I think of you. I
hope you think of me. Aloha.
Monday, April 10, 2017
A silent journalist? What next?
No, this reporter was not taking a pizza order from Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. at the U.S. Capitol. |
Well, yes, I
admit under questioning that I enjoyed a suite at Mar-a-Lago at a time when
Donald J. Trump may have been building towers with a child’s erector set. It
was about the time of my first visit to the White House, too, but I was there
because I was a young reporter. The only newspapers I ever owned I bought for a
nickel a copy.Edward F. Hutton, the stock broker who invited me to the home he
and Marjorie Merriweather Post built in Palm Beach, did not know that my
bedroom suite in his home was larger than my basement apartment, where there
wasn’t even a butler. I think Hutton would have voted for Trump, but I’m not so
sure about the 40 servants who kept Mar-a-Lago dust-free and hospitable.
Newspaper
reporting was fun most of the time, except maybe at the coffee machine at the
Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, a smoky jewel of the Hearst empire in the days before
an Australian fellow became the news emperor. There was foxy news, but no Fox
News, in the late 1940’s.
Neither was
there anything called multiple system atrophy. The disease was around for quite
a while, but it was treated as three separate
ailments. It wasn’t much more than 15 years ago when my neurologist diagnosed
sporadic olivopontocerebellar atrophy (OPCA), which is now called multiple
system atrophy (MSA). Same dizziness, same pains, same tumbles, same tendency
for patients to talk about it whenever they can corner a listener. Same all of
that but they were known as three diseases. Diagnosis takes time. There’s
plenty of time because the disease has no cure.
Now that I’m
92 I still enjoy life with my daughter Marie and son-in-law Mark Veldman.
Living with them, and being in close contact with son John and his wife Pam,
along with son David and his wife Toni, six grandchildren and a
great-grandchild expected soon, is the best medicine.
MSA, which
some say was invented by the Marquis de Sade, whose name inspired the word sadism, is
said by others to have been invented in an overheated cellar pungent with sulphur fumes. MSA sharpens arthritis in people’s fingers, makes feet
shuffle, trip and puff up with gout. It does noisy things inside heads,
interferes with the swallowing apparatus, sneaks in a Jeopardy memory game that
has neither questions nor answers. And so on.
Thank you
for reading this far, and thanks for your friendship. MSA has imposed low speed
limits on everything its impatients do. I used to get fully dressed faster than
I now pull on a pair of socks, and computer keyboards mock me when I start
touch-typing. My notes on Facebook and Wall’s Paper are switching from Central
Standard Time to MSA Saving Time. I’ll miss making greeting cards and tuning in
regularly to Facebook. Every once in a while when you feel a mild thunk in your
head you’ll know I’m thinking of you.
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