Don’t call them idiots

We talked about relatives on Thanksgiving day.  One of them was described as an idiot savant.  Uncle Hank has lived as a pariah.  When younger, he would ride the city bus drunk out of his mind and beat up the drivers.  He has never been functional, is alcoholic and wanders the streets in the small town in which he was born.  He is wasted and has been wasted since he was a boy.  We treat folks like this like trash–throw away people.

I worked with kids like him.  Odd balls, they’re called, odd ducks, and if they have a particular and overdeveloped talent, we call them idiot savants.  Hank was gifted in mathematics.

We’ve all heard about folks like this or watched the movie Rain Man.  What we don’t necessarily acknowledge is the scope of their genius.  What could they offer us as a society if we brought them into the fold rather than treat them as if they’re parlor amusements, another oddity like the two headed lamb?

They see the world differently, through the  narrow lens of numbers.

I laid in bed last night thinking about this man and thinking about the Fibonacci sequence.  Now, please forgive me.  I am not a mathematician and such talk makes me feel dizzy and slightly nauseous, but the point I am trying to make, however tenuous, is that mathematics is a language for understanding the natural world, the “geometry of plants, flowers, fruits…”  There are recurrent structures and forms, mathematical regularities all around us.

Fibonacci saw these regularities in mathematical terms.  It’s just a matter of language isn’t it?  Here he is:

What if Uncle Hank only speaks in a foreign language?  What if he has spent his whole life unable to communicate in his tongue?  What if his way of seeing the world is totally alien and therefore discarded by the rest of us?

What if his brain is built in such a way that he, somehow magically, is able to see the deep form of our world.   Divination:  The act of discovering hidden knowledge through unusual insight.  We regular folks like our divine knowledge in church with an officiant who is tidy, socially adept, and doesn’t make too many demands.

I am not saying that all savants are alike.  Some can’t function in the world:  they can’t cook or clean or socialize appropriately.  They forget to bathe or wash their hair.  Some hear voices, hallucinate and poop their pants.  They frighten us, they embarrass us.

Their brilliance is narrow but it is brilliance nonetheless.  It’s a lopsided brilliance, but it ain’t no parlor trick.  It is an asymmetry in their brain.  What if we could use their abilities?  What if they can see things, patterns, regularities, that they rest of us are blind to?  What if?

These “oddballs”, these outcasts, might have much to teach us.  Don’t call them idiots.

Here is a little something to show you, the fearful symmetry of nature:

 

Poetry in motion

Kathy asked me to share a poem with her.  I thought of a poem, a, to me, perfect poem about a dying man in a long garden like the one Rosalie and Trevor lived in in Islington.  And in this long garden, a man sits in a wheelchair looking up at a tree he purchased for his daughter.  This tree, he thinks, will come into it’s own after he departs this life.  It will not bud out for him.

It is a beautiful poem, full of love and acceptance.  I can’t find it.  I saved it somewhere, but I can’t find it.  It’s killing me because I know Kathy and her friend would love this poem and so I am left with all the other poems I read this morning looking for just that one.

Oh, I read so many wonderful poems and I will share one with you.

What the Living Do   Marie Howe

I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:
I am living. I remember you.

 

Forgiveness

“FORGIVENESS is a heartache and difficult to achieve because strangely, it not only refuses to eliminate the original wound, but actually draws us closer to its source.” To approach forgiveness is to close in on the nature of the hurt itself, the only remedy being, as we approach its raw center, to reimagine our relation to it.”

As we wander through the woods, my friend and I talk about forgiveness. Forgiveness is not something you “do”.

I had come to think of forgiveness, the act the process of forgiveness would be an end to it.  There is never an end.  Everytime I go to forgive, the wound is reopened and I go there quite a lot.  Forgiveness, like love, is an action.  Again and again and again, I must forgive.

Funny how we grow up thinking things are open and shut.

“To forgive is to assume a larger identity than the person who was first hurt, to mature and bring to fruition an identity that can put its arm, not only around the afflicted one within but also around the memories seared within us by the original blow and through a kind of psychological virtuosity, extend our understanding to one who first delivered it. Forgiveness is a skill, a way of preserving clarity, sanity and generosity in an individual life, a beautiful way of shaping the mind to a future we want for ourselves; an admittance that if forgiveness comes through understanding, and if understanding is just a matter of time and application then we might as well begin forgiving right at the beginning of any drama rather than put ourselves through the full cycle of festering, incapacitation, reluctant healing and eventual blessing.”

-David Whyte-

Psychological virtuosity—what a concept.  I myself have often been into festering and reluctant healing.  But I aspire, folks.  I aspire.

 

Dreams of Mama

Getting chilly outside.  Time to go in and whip up a little treat.  With all the horrible news, we just need to settle down in front of a warm fire and munch our way to stillness.

Oh fuck.  I’ve lost my mind.

Stalwart

I read these things I write, ie., Betsy deVos is a cunt and I immediately aware of how naive I sound.  Guess who pops up to remind me of what is real in this world,

That’s right, Aunt Fran.  I love her.  Stoic, smart right down to the pads on her big black paws.  Reality is no mystery to Fran.

She is like those workers who cleaned up Chernobyl.  She knows someone has to take the fall and it is rarely the folks on top.  Occasionally, those folks get toppled, murdered in their beds, exiled and expunged from history, but it’s the little guy who usually gets chewed up in the maw.

She’s not surprised.  She takes care of what she can, lives small, keeps her opinions to a very few intimates and just gets on with getting on.

She’s Mother Courage walking through war zones, and epidemics and the foolish dreams of outraged folks like me who believed in Christmas.

She’s Jesus accepting that humankind is flawed and sticking in there, forgiving and just moving on.  Maybe we should celebrate Franmas.  I like that idea.  Keep your head down, do what’s right, have some fun, eat and drink and be merry and let the rest go.

She knows there are good people, writ small, and bad people, large and small and she just keeps her own counsel.  She’s a canny peasant, unfazed by the whirligig around her.  Feet planted, hair under a scarf in case of high winds, believing in what she can see, smell and touch around her and her small crew of confidantes. 

We keep wanting a savior and when that doesn’t work out, when it turns out that our savior has clay feet, or orange hair, we throw up our hands. There is only us on this planet.  Eternity?  I don’t know.

Clean up your small world.

I can’t remember who said it but:

“It’s the same the whole world over.

It’s the poor wot gets the blame.

It’s the rich wot gets the gravy.

Ain’t it all a bleeding shame.”

Aunt Fran wouldn’t say no to some gravy.

 

 

 

 

 

.”

 

 

Betsy DeVos is a bleep

My daughter Emily is a nurse.  She was just nominated for best cancer care nurse of the year at Children’s Hospital by a family with whom she worked.  She’s had plenty of these awards over the years.

Emily is compassionate, funny, observant and intelligent;  all qualities you want in a nurse.  She also is passionate and outspoken.  I would imagine that the floor she is on shakes a little when she is upset.  She has been told more than once to keep it down.

Em’s in school now.  She is pushing herself to the limit.  She is stressed.  She works 3 twelve hour days, spends two nights in class and cares for her son.

She doesn’t have it any worse than anyone else in her position.  If you want to get ahead, improve yourself, you have to bleed a little.

I’ve read wonderful testimonials to mothers and fathers of old who worked two or three jobs, managed to raise a family , etc, etc.  I know Em doesn’t have it as tough as some but then she has it tougher than others.  The touchstone seems to be that if you survive you’re a hero.

This is less about Em, though, and more about the working stiffs of America who are taking it in both ends.  This is for them. The richest country in the world grinds the people into dust and then charges them for the clean-up.

You would think that wherever Em works they would want to encourage her.  They would be in the business of not only healing their patients, but developing their staff.  It would accrue goodwill to them (the hospital) and would do much to help retain staff.

The hospital is a business.  The hospital is in the business of keeping the hospital growing.  Nurses seem to be expendable.  They want to retain doctors so they get the perks—parking spots at the hospital, childcare at the hospital, free food, training opportunities and on and on.

I understand they want to keep great doctors, but, how about keeping great nurses.  Nurses, RNs, CNAs, these are the grunts of the hospital.

This is an old ax I’m grinding here.  I’m pissed off.  We live in a country where to get an education to become a better nurse, my daughter has to take out loans. Student loans now are a racket.  The loan agencies fuck you and then the Hospital where you have to work to support yourself fucks you.  Then you graduate and have to pay off those  loans until you die.

Newsflash:  working people get fucked and it’s getting worse.

My husband will say—“it’s always been this way.  Don’t get so worked up”.  But I am worked up and the more I know about this world the less inclined I am to stay calm.  What happened to the corporation as a family who took care of their own?  What happened to compassionate capitalism?  What happened to the idea of all men are created equal?  What happened to the idea of responsibility to those who work for you?

What the fuck happened?

 

 

 

 

Corn

I started reading Meghan O’Rourke’s memoir about her mother: The Long Goodbye.  In the first paragraph she describes crossing the road as a child to pick fresh ears of corn. I didn’t get much into the book after that as I remembered my sister Betsy and I picking green corn.

Betsy was living outside of Boston in a rural community in a house she set up exactly to her liking.  The house was small and square with shiny wooden floors; simple and clean and open with big windows and a large bedroom and living room.   The house was like her, I thought.  Big, generous, light and airy but substantial.  The rooms were also spare, just a few pictures on the walls.  Carefully curated.

Betsy was a creature of extremes.  Oh it would have been wonderful to see how she reconciled her various parts.  Or maybe not.  She was precise, precise like an engineer.  Her simplicity was hard won and deeply considered.

We went for a walk up to the cornfields that lay behind and around her house.  It was a glorious day and I was with my glorious sister away from my crazy life in Brooklyn.  The fields spread out in front of us for as far as we could see.  The stalks made a scritchy, creaky sound as the breezes blew through.

We picked a few ears, stripped them clean, peeling off the silk carefully and laid down on a grassy slope to talk.  We ate that corn raw.  It spit when we bit into them, the kernels fat and pale yellow.  The juice ran down our chins and we laughed and talked into the late afternoon.

We were at ease.  It was the last time I was at ease with my accomplished, exuberant, and outrageous sister.

Things get complicated when you get older.  When she was little, I was her big sister, part Mom, part friend, always guardian.  I was ten years older and that gap widened as I reached 17 and 18.  I moved away and in those years, she grew up and I lost sight of her as a person.

By the time we reconnected, Betsy joined me in New York.  I was living with my husband on the Upper Westside and she moved just down the street to attend Columbia.

I fell into my old role and I believe she chaffed at that.  The dynamics had changed.  She no longer confided in me.  I don’t remember making an effort to reacquaint myself with her.  I sensed that she was critical of me, but maybe I was projecting.

I cannot tell you how I ache with the knowledge that I let her down, and more selfishly, let myself down.  As the years passed, I was preoccupied with work, husband and children.  I believe I was depressed much of the time.  My husband and I were fighting.  I was consumed by my life.  I lost her.  I lost that easy intimacy.

We did Thanksgiving and Christmas together, she visited us in Brooklyn.  She brought her boyfriends.  I never questioned her—“are you happy?, is he good to you?, how are you?”

She graduated and moved, first to Florida and then to Massachusetts.  When I visited her in Florida, she was aloof and I was hurt.

The next time I saw her she was in Boston and she and I were walking in a park by the river. She was miserable, in an unhappy relationship with a complicated rather cruel man. We were alienated from each other;  I felt disoriented, almost dissociated from her.

I didn’t say “What’s wrong with you?”  For some reason I just stayed in my miserable little narrow lane and she stayed in hers.

It was a warm, wet Fall day;  a day full of portents and ghosts.  She was in an angry fugue trying to make a relationship work all by herself and I had two young kids and was pretty trapped and miserable myself and had no patience or time for her in her misery.  I couldn’t make her happy, couldn’t make myself happy, my usual bent for humor was dried up and gasping for air.

I let her down, I thought.  I have let her down.  Well, this is my usual go-to.  It’s all my fault.  Really, it was no one’s fault.  We were both out of sorts and the succor we looked for in one another was not there.  I wasn’t what she needed at the time, he wasn’t what she needed at the time, and I felt I never had enough time anymore.

Betsy was not just warm and generous and open;  she was complicated.  She was open, she was shut, she was courageous, she was frightened, she was gregarious, she was alone.  She was a whole world and I only saw a part of her.

We’re all complicated.  Some of us hide it better than others.  I think we make a mistake when we assume that people are static.  Nobody is static unless they choose to be.  Our lives shape us sometimes in surprising ways.  Different qualities and characters emerge at different times.  We are in flux.  Some of us hide this better than others.  Betsy didn’t hide anything.   She was herself.  I just expected her to be the same.  Maybe I needed her to be the same.  She probably expected me to be something other than what I am.  Oh fuck.  It’s so complicated isn’t it?

We do this to our parents, don’t we?  We do this to our friends.

We need to open our eyes, open the windows, throw up the sash and see truly.  I could have learned from Betsy and my inability to see clearly prevented that.  My little sister was my hero and I didn’t get to tell her that.

The next time I saw her I was flying up to Boston with my sister Jane to fly Betsy home for burial.

December 11th, 1986.