And soon, a farewell

That would be to Dr. John. Actually, I've already been to the hospital, on Wednesday, and patted his hand and told him he's one of the greatest men I've ever known. I don't know that he knew I was there, or who I was, but I told him. I haven't been back but I understand many, many friends have made that same pilgrimage since they heard the word "hospice" in the same sentence with his name. I've spent a good part of two days plowing through historical files about his presidency -- it's what I do at times like this. The stack is high, and full of great stories, but it doesn't begin to tell the story. My humble summation of them won't do him justice either, though I'll try.

Writing about people at the end of their lives seems to some an odd task, even a depressing one. To me, it's a gift, gifts actually. To tell the truth of a life one more time is one of the few gifts that matters that I can offer a family at such a time. And to have the privilege of telling it is an honor and gift I receive from them and never feel I deserve. Especially this time.

Having been here since Noah, I often encounter notes and memos in those stacks of files that I wrote myself 25 years and several job descriptions ago. In this stack, I found several of those. I found a few paragraphs I played with when drafting a story about him as he stepped out of the president's office and into the chancellor's. I don't recall whether I used them then, but I will now:

"His eyes twinkle when he tells a story, and they flash when he speaks his mind. He followed the steps of a man who could not be folowed. Choosing not to follow, he has become a legend in his own right.

"His presidency has been shaped not only by his common sense, but by his sense of history, his sense of purpose, and his sense of humor.

"In 1938, he signed the college yearbook of a friend [my Dad], 'John Stevens, the executive,' a quip prompted by a photo of him with Dean Walter Adams at the opening of the annual's administration section. A cynic would call it a quirk. A Christian calls it providence.

"Providence has placed him in the most difficult places at the most difficult times. During the Depression, he was a student. At Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge, he was a chaplain. And during the '60s he was a college president."

Tonight, he's frail and mortal, a shadow of the greatness he shared with us. But soon, immortal, and in the shadow of His hand. Godspeed, Dr. John, and farewell. May this victory march be swift and sweet.

Weeks and waiting

I knew it had been a long time, but didn't realize six weeks had gone by until an email reprimand arrived from a friend and reader -- with many friends but few readers, I felt obligated to revisit this experiment. How to summarize those weeks -- Michael had migraines for all but four days of that time period. We've been back and forth to the doctor in Dallas several more times including a visit yesterday to a new one -- a neurosurgeon. My research is at a standstill, and clearly I'm battling writers' block. But the past two days were pleasant ones, two of the days he felt good before the vertigo returned again today. So I'll share a few moments from yesterday.

Hospital waiting rooms have a great equalizing effect. UT Southwestern is a monstrous place, a city in itself, and I've only been on the edges of it. Yesterday, I sat in a waiting area where I'd never waited before, browsing through aging magazines and trying to ignore how green the faces were on the ceiling-mounted TV in the corner. My fellow residents of the waiting room: a very nervous man of middle-eastern descent, and an elderly black man in a slightly tattered Northrop-Grumman ball cap.

The nervous gentleman was dressed in the hospital gown and pants required of those about to go "into the tube" as my MRI-experienced son calls it. A nurse arrived to ask him if he still had a bullet in his shoulder, he replied quickly.

"No, the bullet is gone -- I was shot in the shoulder, yes, but no bullet is still there."

When the nurse left he turned immediately to explain to me that he worked for a jewelry store at a North Dallas mall and had been shot during a robbery attempt. I have no idea whether the old bullet wound had anything to do with the MRI he was facing yesterday. But I was struck by how quickly he felt compelled to explain why he would have a gunshot wound. He offered me more details than I could understand through his thick accent. What little of his scar I could see extending beneath the sleeve of his hospital gown appeared to have healed long ago. But other scars remained, in the nervous twitch of his hand, fretting with the locker key that dangled from a bright pink, plastic-coated instruction sheet. I wondered how many times others had gazed at his dark features with fear or suspicion thus prompting this unrequired explanation.

The elderly gentleman was with his son, a frail, small man who appeared to be about my age, and whose central line was visible beneath the loosely tied hospital gown.

"We think we'll pass before our children, and that they'll take care of us, but it doesn't always happen that way, and I'm happy to do my responsibility to him," the father said, nodding with each phrase.

"Abilene, ah I've been to Abilene, with my prison ministry," he said when I told him where I was from. He had been to Huntsville and other prisons as well.

"I haven't always done my best in this life, so I can identify with them in that way. I've never been to prison, so I can't understand what that is like, but we all make bad decisions, so I can go out of God's love for me, and minister to them."

HIs freckled complexion was fairer than his son's whose light eyes stood out against his ebony skin. The two bore no resemblance but shared a soft-spoken manner. The father was a tall man, still fit despite his age, his hair still more black than gray. His eyes were dark, and they twinkled despite the occasional melancholy in his voice, especially when he spoke of his first wife. "We were together 30 years before she passed of breast cancer," he told me, and unconsciously touched his right hand to his own chest.

"She died holding my hands -- she got to the bathroom and I was helping her back to bed when she slumped to the floor and she just exhaled -- 'uuh', like that -- and I knew she was gone. She didn't suffer long, just a month she was down, but you don't forget something like that, being with her when she passed."

As he talked I was struck with how comfortable he seemed to share such a sad and intimate moment with a stranger. He offered no complaint, no bitterness, and I left him after an hour feeling I'd left an old friend. A friend I never would have met except in a hospital waiting room.

Primary Colors

Brown. Not espresso, or beige or caramel or sienna or any of those lovely shades. Just brown. Dead. Dry.

That's what I observed as we drove to Fort Worth on I-20 Tuesday. Bleak and dusty brown. So brown that the primary colors of the road signs were vivid beacons against the landscape -- red and blue Interstate markers, green mile markers and "Next Exit" signs to Strawn and Gordon and Stephenville, yellow yield signs and caution signs. Even the orange warnings that "traffic fines double when workers are present"were a welcome visual break as I calculated whether 70 or 75 was a safer risk when said workers seemed nowhere to be seen.

I know. Green and orange are secondary colors. Still, all the signs in a road sign coloring book could be colored using just the eight crayons in the basic Crayola box, with the purple left untouched.

When I was growing up in Colorado I thought of January as a white month. We didn't always have snow for Christmas, but we always had snow in January. Not sleet. Not ice. Not a wintry mix or freezing rain. Snow. Snow we could play in, snow my parents could drive on without sliding, snow my friends and I could ski through and stop in spraying glittering powder against the bright blue of the sky, and the vivid green of the pines. White.

In West Texas, the white signs announce the speed limit, and black and white state trooper trucks enforce it.

Michael slept all the way to Fort Worth. The pain of the migraine that had plagued him for nine days, and still remains today on day 13, only eases while he sleeps. Every waking moment is marked by pain. And so with no radio to keep me entertained I passed the time by searching for colors in the landscape and mentally reciting the hymns of prayer that have soothed my soul on other brown days.

"Father and friend, thy light, thy love, beaming through all thy works we see."

Really, even in these brown, dead works?

"Father hear the prayer we offer, nor for ease that prayer shall be."

Good thing. Ease seems hard to come by this week.

"Dear Lord and Father of mankind, forgive our foolish ways . . . . Take from our souls the strain and stress and let our ordered lives confess the beauty of thy Peace."

Please. Peace.

No Tears (or algebra or migraines) in Heaven

School is hard. I can't imagine at this point in my life having to master history, English, Algebra, science and who knows what else all at the same time. I'm so glad I'm not 14, or 17. The beauty of college and then graduate studies is that we gradually narrow our focus more and more -- it gets easier. One part of me enjoys helping my kids with their homework because I relearn things I forgot years ago. But another part of me says, "I can't believe they have this much stuff on a history test in the 8th grade!" Tonight, I relearned the Virginia Plan, the New Jersey Plan and Madison's compromise. That was fun, and not so hard. But algebra is hard. For that, I hired a tutor.

Life is hard, too. Those T-shirts that say, "Life is hard, and then you die," have always annoyed me. Of course, they're right -- maybe that's why they annoy me. Life IS hard. And then we die. But that's the good news. The next life is better. Believing that makes all the hard parts of this one more bearable. Life is hard. Algebra is hard. MIgraines are hard. When the pain analogies alternate between sledge hammer and vice grip, even the metaphor is hard. When the vertigo hits, the tile floor is hard.

I've never been a weeper. But I still love that old song, "No Tears in Heaven." In part, because the alto line is great.

"No tears in heaven.
No sorrows given.
All will be glory in that land.
There'll be no sadness
All will be gladness,
when we shall join that happy band."

"No tears in Heaven fair.
No tears, no tears up there.
Sorrow and pain will all have flown.
No tears in Heaven fair.
No tears. no tears up there.
No tears in heaven will be known."

( Lyrics by Robert S. Arnold [Public Domain])

Aside from the irony of how many times I sang that song in churches that would have no part of any happy band in this life, that old song still says something important to remember about the next one. No algebra in Heaven. No migraines in Heaven. No vertigo in Heaven. Sorrow and pain will all have flown. Praise God.

What a headache

Literally, and figuratively.

My son suffers from chronic migraines and migraine associated vertigo. Despite a very good 12 or 13 months in a row, they returned in mid-December with a vengeance and he's had 13 migraine days in the last 30. That's the literal pain -- in the head for him, and of the heart for me. I once tried to explain to someone that the maternal bond is such that a mother with a child in pain can never be free of that pain herself. When he hurts, I hurt. When he is confined by the pain, I am confined by it as well, literally and figuratively.

Figuratively, this blog is a bit of a headache, too. But I'm determined to play out this experiment. Two years ago when I applied for the professional development leave I wanted to explore narrative journalism, and included in my proposal the writing of a major narrative feature. One of the possible topics I conjectured at that time was a story about children in pain. We were in the middle of a three-year marathon of dealing with the migraines and I longed to write about it but was too physically drained and time stressed to think about it. Now that the leave is here, I find myself struggling to write and no longer longing to. And I have no desire to write about children in pain. Don't want to go there. Spend too much time there. Can't bear the thought of jumping in any deeper than I am.

I do feel a need some days to write about the experiences of this past year -- separation, divorce, single parenting, financial crises, and all the little daily crises that went with them. Through the course of it, many friends asked me if I kept a journal, and I never have -- other than the journal I've kept about the migraines. My emails to and from close friends have been a journal of sorts, and in the past weeks I've gone back and read again many of those missives. Some days I feel no need to write, no desire to write, and I'm mystified that something I've enjoyed and felt confident about throughout my life brings me no solace.

I don't want this to become a journal of my personal traumas -- for one thing that's boring and tedious for everyone, and for another I'm often struck by the personal nature of things some people include in their blogs that just shouldn't be out there for the world in general to read. But a colleague of mine in the English Department who also has an interest in narrative writing did encourage me to write personally, to explore that genre and experience, and so I think this blog will be a melding of my search for narrative, for story, and for a new place of peace in life. You're welcome here.

Paths

One of the things that intrigues me about blogs is how people find them. Not, do they find them interesting, or do they find them tedious. But, how do they find them? I know that some bloggers send out an email to their friends and announce it. Some bloggers are famous and their blogs are linked from other blogs or websites. But for those of us in the cheap seats, how are we found? Having just resumed this experiment, this seems like a good time to ask the question: "What brought you here?"

Another Newer Year

Two years ago I wrote one post and though I enjoy reading others' blogs I just haven't been able to make myself return to my own. Of course two years ago I could not have imagined how my life would change over the course of 24 months. I now find myself a single mom of two teenagers, daughter of aging parents and occasionally feeling like the peanut butter in the sandwich generation.
This spring, I also begin a new adventure. Officially, the powers that be call it a "professional development leave." Unofficially, the lay term is sabbatical. Contrary to popular belief, professors don't get every seventh year off to watch soaps and eat bon-bons. I've been back in the classroom for 16 years and this is my first.
My plan is to learn more about narrative journalism than I know now. And maybe do a bit of it. But at least learn about how it's being taught on other campuses, and perhaps what newspaper editors think its future will be in the daily press.
I also hope to learn a bit about myself in the coming months. I haven't had six months of self-scheduled time in my entire adult life. Now, self-scheduled is a bit deceptive. I have two teenagers, and two parents, and a host of friends who will schedule more than a few hours of my days for me, and I'm grateful for that.
Will I return to this blog again? Not sure. My students coerced me into FaceBook and I've enjoyed that, so maybe I'll find a reason to blog. Let me know what you think.