First the competition, then the trophies

 

 

            Spring break and other happy inventions have lured family and friends out of town, except for my granddaughter Kristen. Her classes move her closer to her goal to become a physician assistant. A tough grad school program prepares students to “conduct physical exams, diagnose and treat illnesses, order and interpret tests, prescribe medications, counsel on preventive health care and…assist in surgery.”

            She was up and out early this morning, but left briskly-brewed coffee to help her grandpa float into the day. It could not have been more mellow in its bright red Liverpool Football Club mug. It is the morning after a 2-1 encounter with Sunderland.

            All of a sudden everybody will be back home. Matt will return to the University of Chicago with three national swim meet trophies. Out in the state of Washington, Jacob and his high school team returned home to Kirkland with first place honors in a mind-boggling robotics competition. The next competition will be for Mike and fellow gymnasts, and not long after that will be his MIT graduation. While all this is going on, Katie prepares to be the fifth Veldman to graduate from Sandburg High School. She’ll follow Dan, now a regional general insurance adjuster, and Kristen into the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.

            One reason I believe in God is that I don’t know how else to account for the favors I’ve been granted, especially Sally, my wife of constant memory, our children and their spouses, our grandchildren and my choice kinship with moms, dads, siblings and other in-laws. To believe in God, I might add, is to be hopeful.

            Every once in a while I update you about the progress of the rare disease I first acquired as OPCA, olivopontocerebellar atrophy, a form of parkinsonism. It is now known as MSA, multiple system atrophy, which is easier to spell but otherwise the same thing.

            Less than a month ago I moved out of my condo and into the cheerful home of my daughter and son-in-law, to which they added a sturdy stair riser, a spacious bedroom and bath for the stair riser rider, and plenty of space for my computer and its gadgets. Computers are treasures for folks who seldom leave home. They enable imaginations to go anywhere.

            All the while that I become slower and flimsier, I find that I have more time to be slow and more leisure to be flimsy. Not the best deal, maybe, but a deal. I tell people that I’m dizzy, but that’s because dizzy is the closest word I can think of to describe a complex feeling of being dazed, confused while spinning in a whirligig and occasionally tumbling. Bruises, yes, but nothing broken for the well padded.

            Even headaches  can be taken for granted, but some caution is called for to reduce choking. There are ways to communicate when lips sag into mumbling or the vocal cords freeze up, such as waving arms, rolling eyes or scribbling notes. There are things to do when eyes won’t process printed words for a while, or when a chapter just read vanishes.

            People with incurable diseases are not the only ones who deal with challenges. Everybody does, and everybody has satisfactions . We don’t get to make all the choices.

We don’t always know we’re making them.

 

 

           

           

             

Time to strip

 

 

 

This is the morning I’m supposed to strip my bed. The sheets and pillow cases are to go into the sturdy wooden hamper I made in shop class in 1936. Later today the bed and mattress will be hauled to my new address.

 

I’m not going with it. I’ll spend a few more days here in the condo Sally and I moved into more than a dozen years ago. The bedrooms will have no beds in them, so I’ll get to use the foldaway sofa bed in the family room.

 

The huge change here happened when Sally left for the hospital and didn’t come back. That was in 2002, not long after Tom became our cat.

 

Yesterday there was a different kind of change when two brothers came from the monastery to choose hundreds of books for transfer to their Benedictine library. It took me a while to figure out that the great Mind of all creation, the one Paul refers to in his the second chapter of his letter to the Philippians, provided those addictive shelves for nearly a lifetime of pleasure. Now I’m returning them, and there’s pleasure in knowing they won’t get dusty in their new place.

 

I still have some books on religion, reference books for writers, even some very old Perry Mason hardcovers, but anybody who’s interested in having any of them should get in touch with me very soon. I expect to complete my move into the loving lively home of my daughter and son-in-law within a few days. One of the first things I’ll do is locate fresh sheets for that bed. I can think and change sheets at the same time, so I’ll be thinking how blessed I am by family and friends.

 

               *Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus. Philippians 2:5.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



Still looking for the right words

A high school classmate sent me copies of two little poems I wrote for a school magazine in 1940. They survived the mice for almost three-quarters of a century, and the ink has not peeled off.

 

What we kids liked most about poems was the sound of them.

 

            “Shoot if you must this old gray head,

            but spare your country’s flag,” she said.

            John Greenleaf Whittier kept his quill in tune.

 

            Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered,

            weak and weary…

            While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came

            a tapping,

            As to some one gently rapping…

            Edgar Allen Poe knew tintinnabulation, and how to use it.

 

The rockets and dive bombers of World War II were thundering across Europe, and the war was spilling over into Africa. The U.S. was legally at peace, but the vibes of blitzkreig were felt everywhere. Pearl Harbor was not far ahead.

 

That’s why there was a commotion in the press when members of the Jehovah’s Witness denomination, who were conscientious objectors, refused to salute the flag.

 

While this was happening, the tensions in English class were about infinitives, to split or not to split. And the teacher wanted her kids to write modern verse that did not rhyme, to write in the free and slightly spooky spirit of Orson Wells’ “War of the Worlds” and Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” stark and shadowy.

 

Hence, this verse from a 15-year-old who didn’t know he was just two years short of boot camp.

 

            Why do we salute that piece of cloth waving in the wind?

            We do not salute a cloth. That is the flag.

            Why do we pledge allegiance to a brightly colored rag?

            We do not pledge allegiance to a brightly colored rag.

            We salute the pioneers, the explorers, the soldiers.

 

            But they are all dead.

            They are not. They live today:

            The pioneers in aviation.

            The explorers in medicine.

            The soldiers in science—and war.

            We salute them in respect—not worship.

 

And this to accompany another student’s article about telephones, which had already been discovered by teenagers in 1940.

 

            Poles. Tall, silent telephone poles.

            But how loudly they speak—

            What a message they carry.

            Poles. Wires.

            Strong, taut wires,

            Poking into stock markets

            In New York. Into the mellowing buildings

            Of San Francisco’s China Town.

            Into the suburban bungalow,

            Tight, slick wires,

            Glistening in the moonlight.

            Death. Fire. Birth. Money. Tragedy.

            This is the story of telephone wires.

 

And so, after nearly 75 years, we still have wars and we still have telephones. We still have verse-writers, too. Dorothy Parker’s now in e-books that were no more than science fiction when she wrote that men seldom make passes/ at girls who wear glasses. Another quarter century, almost, would pass before Betty Frieden explained in a famous book that feminine vision had nothing to do with spectacles.

 

They still write verses in high school English classes. Chances are there’s more teen poetry for peace than there was in 1940, and that more verses are written to be sung than recited. Chances are the crafting runs deeper. Teens of the first fully computerized generation have a knowledge breadth unimagined when their grandparents were memorizing dates in schools where the cops were never seen, unless maybe for a safe driving lecture. With that breadth of knowledge comes a reach for depth, and words do the digging.

 

It only hurts when I list

Why not? I’ve been asked to do goofier things than list some of the little things a person with multiple system atrophy (MSA) may deal with during a day. These are not the spectacular things, such as falling over in the kitchen and leaving the eggs to keep frying solo.

 
These are little things that people seldom talk about outside their support groups.

 

There’s the pain in the back of the neck that pops up when you turn your head, or lift something, or for no apparent reason.

 

Then there is the frustration trimming fingernails when the thumb’s too weak to click the nail trimmer.

 

Or dropping a glass of iced tea you thought you were holding securely.

 

How about the vocal cords acting up during a conversation, like a violin squeaking?

 

Or choking and gagging that feels a lot like waterboarding, triggered by a drop of moisture or a breath of fresh air.

 

Maybe speaking to the person whose shadow just moved up beside you and getting no answer because you’re all alone.

 

Starting to gasp like an old steam locomotive spinning its wheels, then stopping whoever’s starting to call 911.

 

Walking off the edge of the sidewalk because straight lines are tricky.

 

Squinting at the TV screen because your headache du jour is distracting, like a wriggle of electric current across your eyebrows.

 

Little things can annoy, especially if they are mosquitoes or gnats, but they are less annoying than big things, like angry elephants or rolling out of bed and breaking the other hip.

 

The best thing I can say about this is that nobody actually likes MSA and its incurable misdemeanors, but among the scores of victims I’ve known via the Internet, there are doers, planners and givers, but no whiners. The confidence that medical science will find a cure for this and other diseases is virtually unanimous. Maybe it will be soon, maybe not. Meanwhile, some support research, some pray, some write lists.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Split personality? What about split persons?

Texted prayer
 

God, whose presence in my heart

   clears my path before I start;

God, whose love within my eye

   keeps my vision leveled high;

God, whose purpose in my feet

   makes my journey straight and fleet;

God, whose life within my blood

   gives me power of tropic flood;

God, whose breath enlivens me

   opens windows, shares the key;

God whose spirit’s everywhere

   reads all thoughts as texted prayer.

A. E. P. (ED) WALL

 Split personality?
What about split persons?
 

Split personalities are just what the doctor ordered if you are writing a movie script or hosting a televised talk show. But Americans especially, and many other folks, are born into a formally declared belief that all persons are created equal.

          That was understood, in the 18th century, to mean that social classes are artificial, that candlemakers and cooks have just as much dignity, and are just as entitled to justice, as any lord, count, bishop, baron or princess.

         The absence of equality in personal wealth, health, housing, employment and personality was known to all.

          Voters, workers, capitalists and citizens of all races include the bright, the beautiful and the ugly. Nations and neighborhoods are populated by the gifted, along with sociopaths, psychopaths, thieves, killers and rapists who have jobs, shop in the supermarket, patronize the movie theater, date daughters and raise their hands when volunteers are called for.

         Some are Christians, some are not, some are Republicans, some are not. Do angry sociopaths interpret Bible verses the same way smiling optimists do?

          Do they hear the promises of political candidates the same way?

          Everybody is created equal. The presidents of the United States and Iran, the creators of Windows and the Edsel, Italian Catholic bishops Chinese Methodists, children going to school in Japan and in Afghanistan, all find that equality is subject to definition.

          Some equality is handed out, like the number of toes ordinarily provided at birth. Some has to be reached for, like the rights due to women. An equality obscured by prejudice, power and politics is everyone’s equal access beyond the sublime to the divine. Just as some believe in no religion, some believe in all religions.

 

 

What about Tom?

Thomas Henry James rolled over for the last time while I was too young to remember him. My grandma’s cat was in her kitchen every morning while she flipped the breakfast pancakes. He knew she would make one small but tasty pancake for him. All he had to do was listen for her to say, “Thomas Henry James, roll over.” Then he rolled over, and Grandma flipped his pancake into his bowl.

            The first cat I remember was with us in Jamestown, NY, when we moved 104 miles away to Coudersport, PA. At age 4 I was younger than the cat. My mom had arranged his adoption by friends in Jamestown, but about a month later he appeared at our door in Coudersport. The saturation love of cats for humans, and vice versa, is a happy mystery, like the Trinity.

            Some may think it is a confirmation of my brain disease that I keep a polished wooden box of ashes in the room that’s stuffed with my computers and books, printers, pictures of upbeat memories, things like that. The ashes recall Abraham, my Titusville/Orlando cat for 16 years.

            Abe was succeeded in Orland Park, IL, by Thomas Henry James II, known to his friends as Tom. He arrived at my condo as a young adult cat and has stayed for more than 12 years. He’s never been outdoors and lives like a cheerful puppycat, although in cat years he may be close to my age, a few weeks short of 89.

            A couple of weeks ago he started acting the way Abe did in his last days, sneaking off to quiet corners, ignoring tuna treats, crying out in loud meows every now and then. After a lifetime of living with cats I chose not to expose my elderly housemate to treatment by well-meaning veterinarians. I thought he was dying.

            This coincided with a loving invitation from my daughter and son-in-law to leave the isolation of my condo and move into their large home one mile away. My five grandchildren who grew up there are sometimes home, but more often away at college or enterprises. The household includes one with a severe allergy to cats, and so any cat is, for good reason, felina non grata.

             My driving is limited to my power wheelchair and my four-wheel electric scooter. Standing up is an adventure. Winter weather keeps me from crossing the street to the mailbox. I wear a Rescue Alert button, but punching a number into a telephone or into a garage door opener can be a challenge.

            Marie and Mark are looking into the installation of a stair lift, because a head packed with dizziness and feet that dance jigs to their own tunes rule out the ordinary use of stairs. The reason for all this is called olivopontocerebellar atrophy/multiple system atrophy, a form of parkinsonism.

            While we’re getting organized for my move into the household of a grandpa’s dreams, I’m formidably anxious about Thomas Henry James II. What to do?

 

 

 

President Kennedy wasn't finished

Fifty years ago today the tolling of a bell momentarily paralyzed the news room. It was the bell on the wire service machine. It signaled a rare “Flash,” a designation reserved for the most urgent stories.

            The staff of The Honolulu Advertiser didn’t want to believe the report on the wire, that President John F. Kennedy had been fatally shot in Texas.

            Three years earlier both Kennedy and his Republican opponent, Richard Nixon, had campaigned in the 50th state of Hawaii. The population was small, but statehood was new, and journalists from all over were happy to dateline their work from Waikiki or Kona. When the votes were counted, 50.03% went to Kennedy and 49.97% to Nixon.

During the campaign I interviewed both candidates when they visited the Big Island, where I was editor of the local daily newspaper. When that heartbreaking flash came on November 22, 1963 I was Sunday editor of the morning paper in Honolulu.

            Almost everybody took the assassination personally. Kennedy was a personal president, in the minds of countless Americans.

            President Kennedy was scheduled to move on from Dallas to Austin to address the Texas Democratic State Committee. I received the text of that address from the White House, framed it as a minor memento of that terrible time.

            The President was not finished. He had planned to speak that night about the linkage of Texas and the Democratic Party in “an indestructible alliance.”

            Alas, alliances come and go. Religions come and go, and so governments. But the mystery of human behavior hangs on.