Not My 9/11

I found the magazine in the library in the English Department last week.

Right away a glimpse at its slightly fatigued cover told me it wasn't new, but vintage like many of the books and journals our profs have squirreled away on the oak shelves to free up some much-needed space in their cluttered offices.

But in my instant glance I knew more. This copy of People was almost 10 years old. It has been that long.


On the Nature of the Media
Often people who ask me about The Van Winkle Project are curious as to why it began on Sept. 11th last year and will end that way in just a matter of days.

I point out that when I conceived of the project in late August 2010 a September 11th date seem like an made-to-order marker date. With a date like that, I'd be able to easily remember when I gave up the news, entertainment, sports, and weather and look ahead to the exact month and day when I would again be free to access them.

But there was another reason.

It occurred to me that Sept. 11, 2011 would be different this time around. Even typing it is different:

9-11-11

With the tenth anniversary of the "worst terrorist attacks in the nation's history" in store for all of us, I anticipated that the media would "play" and "re-play" that terrible day (and its aftermath) as if it were the re-release of the blockbuster movie of a season past.

Image by V.W.

Count me out.

No, it's not that I fear that we have such bad taste that 9/11 Firefighter Hero toys will be given out at McDonalds or images of the blazing Twin Towers will be put on T-shirts.

What I do expect is a series of talking heads appearing on TV and the Web, all of them all of them ever-so-sincerely feeding us a combination of nostalgia, reliving the grief,  "making sense of it all," and pondering the unanswerable question: "How have we changed in the ten years since?"

Old news will become new news for as long as it's convenient and people can be induced to pay attention.

And what could be more of an emotional draw? 9/11. Have two numbers ever had more poignancy when pronounced?

I'm guessing the 9/11 revival has already begun. Perhaps weeks ago. I don't know. Van Winkle, as planned, has set me free of it.

On the Nature of Memory
For anyone who does want to remember 9/11 in his or her own way for however long suits them, you mustn't think I disapprove. I speak only for myself.

It's not that I'm of the mindset that "it was a long time ago and I've moved on."

Neither am I keen on the idea that "I and my country changed forever on that day." Historians far down the line will have to decide that.

And I do believe there are memories worth keeping about that time as long as I don't fondle or make a fetish out of them.

Going for a morning run, coming around the corner to my street, in a cool-down, walking mode, and seeing my wife on the front lawn waving at me to hurry into the house. Our son is three years old. I start running again! Something might have happened to him. I just run! And find the TV on (why? we never turn the TV on until the evening). It's showing a fixed view of the North Tower burning from the first airplane strike.

Over the next few days, I watch more TV than at any time in my life.

 I open my mailbox one day during the anthrax scare and I see a package with a return address I don't recognize. A feeling of creepiness and icy dread comes over me. Inside the house I stand at arm's length as I open the packet. A rational voice tells me that no one is going to pick me out from the entire population of the planet to poison or blow up in a fiery explosion, but at a deep animal level I've never known before I am spooked. Then I have the package open and with relief hear myself say, "Oh that! From that person! Why didn't I guess?"

 I put a flag decal on the back window of my car. I've never been the patriotic sort, but it feels like it is a way of saying something in the only available channel I have: "We're not bad people. This shouldn't have happened to us" and "We're going to bury our dead, praise them, and rebuild what's been destroyed, and do it together."

 I move through an airport, almost completely empty except for National Guardsmen who stand apologetically with their M16-A2 rifles. Everyone seems so nice and speaks soothingly to one another. The message: "Sorry about this, but we're getting through this together."


Those are my memories. All of them are passing away.

Ten years later the flags have become much less numerous, even here where I live, which happens to be the most flag-waving of small cities with its military base and its proud remnant of silver-haired World War II veterans.

Along with the vanishing flags, the images of the burning Towers and a blackened Pentagon wall have dimmed. Like old photographs bleached by sunlight.

Long ago they made the movie about the heroes of United Flight 93 who really were heroes in the original sense of the word because they put their lives on the line to try to stop something. That film opened in theaters, got reviewed, was released on DVD, and then I watched other movies.

As far as I can tell, 9/11 was a season. Seasons end. What followed were two wars. And then came another kind of war engendered by an economic collapse that was like a bomb falling on millions of people around the world.

Those wars have not been seasons. They are more like eras. My memories of 9/11 are crushed beneath everything thing that has happened since.

On the Nature of a Legacy
All this is to say that the extent of my 9/11 memories has just taken place out here in the open in the naked space of a blog post.

When I awake up literally on the morning of September 11, 2011 as well as metaphorically (The Van Winkle Project ends) I will turn to other considerations.

What has happened to the world and America over the past 365 days?

Still, my thoughts and analysis can't help but be informed by 9/11. I did glimpse something there of worth. It's become a standard by which I'm perhaps tempted to measure people by. Because I now know what we're capable of.

9/11 was a reminder that humans can be together. During those gray days I found out that violence, which is a great uniter of peoples, doesn't have to be part of the equation.

It is possible to subtract out the "hate" and achieve "one" by joining together in the sum of our "love," "compassion," "caring," and "bearing of sorrows" and a desire to restore. I was witness to how for a brief interlude we had:

• Gracious and freely given kindness toward strangers
• Prayer stripped to its Book of Job essentials: Help Us Whoever You Are because I don't understand what's happening and can't get through this alone or bear such pain!
• A quieting of the usual non-stop commercial voices that call us from our highest purposes and beg us to be small, craven, self-interested, isolated individuals day after day

If there were disasters and loss of life in the last year, as I assume there must have been, did people somewhere find strength in the behaviors listed above?

And I wonder will we ever as a species turn this direction without it requiring a great calamity that drives us to our knees? Because that seems too hard and costly of a means to get there, much too hard. To find love and our better selves and to learn what really matters only by walking on the smouldering bones of our dead? This is an appalling vision. Surely there is another way? - V.W.

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Whatever Happened to the Great Society?

One thing I know, even in my Van Winkled state, is that we have reached the time of year when caps and gowns are worn and students walk across the stage to receive their college diplomas. This means that throughout America esteemed men and women are stepping to podiums to offer words of wisdom and encouragement to the about to be graduated.



President Johnson articulates his vision
of "The Great Society.".

Forty-seven years ago this Sunday past there was a famous person addressing the graduating class at the University of Michigan. Standing before the microphone and cameras for approximately fifteen minutes, he delivered what some rhetoricians have listed as one of the 100 greatest American speeches of all time.

I refer to President Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" speech of May 22, 1964.

Flash Ahead Two Years...
Back when I was growing up my father worked for a major petroleum company. This explains why by the time I was ready for junior high our family had moved about as many times as I'd spent years in school. Our parents practically had rehearsed lines. Each time they told my brothers and me, "Dad is being transferred. We're going to have to sell the house, pack up, and move to... [city, state]."

In 1966 we received the biggest shock of all. Mom and Dad filled in the blank for their three sons as follows:

"We're going to move to Anchorage, Alaska."

Living Out of a Suitcase
When we arrived in the 49th state it had been just over two years since the Good Friday earthquake that struck on March 27, 1964. That epic earthquake was the strongest ever recorded on the North American continent.

The day the earth shook. Along Anchorage's 4th Ave.
four blocks dropped 20 feet below street level.

Parked cars were left in an odd position.

Two years was long enough that most of the debris had been hauled off. My brothers and I were a bit disappointed. We had seen pictures of downtown Anchorage like those above. Yes, it was tragic, but it was also drama writ large and the childish mind desired to be titillated by devastation.

Instead, the city was in full recovery mode. Especially near our new temporary home, the third floor of the Turnagain Arms Apartments. The oil company was leasing this apartment for us until our parents found us a house to buy or rent.

The Turnagain Arms was an unimpressive structure across the street from the high-rise Anchorage Westward Hotel. The first day we were in town our parents took us for lunch at the Westward. Two things happened.

There was an earth tremor and we stared, mouths agape, as the large chandeliers in the dining room swayed above us.

A bigger shock came when our parents (ever thrifty even when eating on the oil company's expense account) tried to order us the cheapest thing on the menu, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. They'd heard that "due to transportation costs" Alaska prices were 30-40% higher than in the States, but in 1966 they weren't prepared for a $5 PJB.

We never dined at the Westward again.

In 2008 I returned to Alaska and took a picture
of where our family lived in the fall of 1966.

The cost of living wasn't the only problem.

Just down the street from us was the "Buttress Area" where the destroyed downtown buildings had been cleared away. Engineers were supervising crews who were driving iron piling into the earth in order to reinforce it so it could be built upon again and (perhaps) survive a future earthquake.

Clank, clank, clank was our soundtrack. They were driving piling twenty-four hours a day. Like the world's worst headache, it never stopped.

The President is Coming
It was a definite adventure being in Alaska in those days. The city of Anchorage was half raw frontier where you could see how recently the land had been scraped away and the bears and moose pushed back a short distance in order to make a tenuous urban existence for about 60,000 souls. You only had to drive for five minutes and you were out of the city and into the woods.

Modern conveniences taken for granted in the rest of America were a big deal here. For example, people still remembered how the Turnagain Arms Apartments were home to one of the first elevators installed in the city. They said that people used to come over and ride it just to experience it.

All I knew was our apartment was old, the wall-to-wall carpeting smelled of cigarette smoke, and that the once shiny new Otis elevator was rickety and slow.

It was a weird life living out of suitcases (all our furniture and possessions were in storage) and walking through downtown to go to school each day, and on weekends getting into the car to join Mom and Dad when they went house hunting.

We had arrived in August and by the fall, with the first snow imminent, we still didn't have a real place to live. That's when we heard that the president was coming. He would be staying across the street from our apartment. In the Westward Hotel.

The LBJ Style
There's really not much of a record of the president's trip to Alaska on Nov. 1-2, 1964. Perhaps that's because it was just a stopover. LBJ and Lady Bird were ending a 17-day Asian tour. They overnighted in Anchorage, which meant they were with us only 9 hours total.

Still, it was memorable.

We kept waiting for a gentleman in a suit to knock at the apartment door, show us a badge, and ask my mother a few questions about who we were. Oddly, no one from the Secret Service came by. I say oddly because it was only 6 months since bullets cut down President Kennedy in his motorcade and it was all too apparent that the windows of our apartment would give us a sniper's view of LBJ's limousine as it arrived at the Westward Hotel.

The president issued an executive order.
Everyone would go to the bonfire located on
the west end of the Buttress Area (red star).

A further breach of security occurred courtesy of the president himself. Was he worried about his safety? Hardly.

As soon as the limo pulled up we leaned out our windows for a perfect view. The president got out, waved, and shook hands, exposing himself directly to the crowd.

Soon the people in the street was surging forward in an almost uncontainable fashion. LBJ deftly backed away and got on the running board of the Lincoln Continental. He grabbed a microphone that was wired to a speaker on the car while the Secret Service agents, some of them holding Thompson submachine guns, no less, nervously scanned the crowd and those of us dangling out the windows.

"Now everybody stand back. We don't want anyone to get hurt," LBJ said in a gentle drawl. "We're all going down to the bonfire."

It seemed that Lyndon Johnson had a spontaneous urge that night. The president's Alaska hosts had built a giant fire in the Buttress Area in honor of his arrival. There were plenty of demolished building materials to ignite. Although it was not on the official schedule, LBJ had decided he wanted to check out the "bawn-fower," as he pronounced it. Why? I have no idea. Maybe he thought it would be neat to see. Maybe he thought it was the polite thing to do. Maybe it reminded him of his youth. Maybe he was cold...

So to the bonfire the presidential party went. The limo rolled ahead, out of my  sight.

It was the closest I ever got to a president of the United States.

The Beginning and End of Something
I have to admit that until now I've hardly thought about Lyndon Johnson. But with the anniversary of the Great Society speech I find myself taking stock. That speech represented Johnson's vision for his presidency. If you read it or listen to it, you'll notice that there were three areas he believed should be improved in order to make a better America: our cities, the natural world (what today we'd call "the environment"), and education.

And it's also worth noting that four times in a speech that was only 1,800 words long LBJ used the word "beauty," including my favorite paragraph in which everything is summarized thusly:

    The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich
    his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome
    chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness.
    It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and
    the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for
    community.

What happened to the Great Society? Well, the record shows that Congress passed 84 bills submitted by President Johnson. Everything from Head Start to Medicare to the National Endowment for the Arts had its genesis in this ambitious reshaping of American civil and cultural life.

But that was never supposed to be the whole story:

      The solution to these problems does not rest on a massive program
      in Washington, nor can it rely solely on the strained resources of local
      authority. They require us to create new concepts of cooperation,
      a creative federalism, between the National Capital and the leaders
      of local communities.

Ah, we supposed to all work together. But look at what happened.

By 1968 many of the cities LBJ wanted to regenerate were in flames as race riots spread across the country. Crime was on the rise. City streets were not safe to walk.

As for the beauties of nature and LBJ's desire to prevent "an ugly America", ahead of us were Three Mile Island, Love Canal, the Exxon Valdez, and the strip malling of the suburbs.

The percentage of Americans graduating from
high school soon leveled off.

And education? The goal was to increase the number of Americans graduating from high school. For the next five years this number rose from around 73% of the total population. But as you can see in the graphic on the left, it plateaued in the seventies and has stayed at mid-80 percent.


Presidential Report Card
The problem that LBJ was beginning to face in 1966 was a seemingly containable situation that had grown into an enormous conflagration: Viet Nam. This was why he had been on the 17-day Asian trip and was stopping off in Alaska. What would follow would be regular announcements from the White House, echoing the generals who assured the president that we were "winning the war."

Until it became obvious that we weren't. After that the political ground began to shift beneath the president.

People often talk about what America might have become if John F. Kennedy had not been murdered in the streets of Dallas, but I'll always wonder what would have become of us if Lyndon Johnson had turned away from Viet Nam. Could the Great Society have become a project we labored mutually to bring into being? A society where our cities were temples of commerce, education, and culture? A place where leisure meant a chance to both build and reflect? A place where we encouraged each other to seek beauty and community? A place where all of us appreciated the beautiful land we live in the midst of?

I can't help thinking that LBJ's response to the Gulf of Tonkin "crisis" in August 1964 became his equivalent of the Great Alaska Earthquake. His resorting to an ever-escalating military solution shook to the foundations all his Great Society plans to the point that he decided not to run for re-election in 1968.

After LBJ left office others tried to rebuild from the fractures of the sixties and all the rubble that piled up. We heard about George H. Bush's "Thousand Points of Light," Bill Clinton's "Bridge to the 21st Century."

All such dreams may well be unrealizable, but I have to say I still like, best of all, the idea of a Great Society.That's why in my memory I continue to stare at the flames of a bonfire on a cold northern night. If only that fire would never go out, but of course it did and that's what they call history. - V.W.


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Welcome to Nat'l Poetry Month - Part 2

Twelve of us are sitting in nooks and crannies of a downtown book store on a Thursday evening. The students have notebooks flopped open and are scractching out words between ruled lines.

I'm at a table with a computer and a printer near the front door where the sign at my elbow catches patrons' eyes as they walk in the door.
 "Really? That's cheap." a customer says to me.

"Only one American dollar," I underscore. "All proceeds go to charity. We'll write about anything you want."

 "Something about this weather? My back pains?"

"Sure. You'll get a laser-printed custom-made poem in twenty minutes, a poem that will last a lifetime."

Welcome to Rent-a-Poet, an event I dreamed up for my poetry workshop students. With this exercise we're stretching the city limits of a place called "Creativity" (can we write on demand and under severe time constraints?). At the same time we're putting nice little poems into the pockets of people who a minute ago were totally bereft of such.

Most of all, everyone, including me, is having fun.

This is an odd outcome when one considers I'm the guy who used to absolutely hate poetry.

O' How Poetry Doth Sucketh!
I suppose it began in grade school. The poetry I was exposed to tended to be cobwebbed and not about subject matter I felt drawn to. A poem about a jet pilot or an astronaut? I would have liked that! But no such luck.

Step right up! Get your rhyming words!

And the language was a treacle of old sounding English. While it rolled musically off the tongue, it sounded artificial to me.

As did the end rhyming. What was with all the rhyming? It reminded me of books read to me as a youngster and I was no longer a child.

The last problem was that the poetry was presented by teachers as a sort of mystery we expected to puzzle out.

Here's how it worked:

We would read a poem, barely grasp what it was about. Great! We were present to be educated,were we not? So tediously, line by line, we had to examine individual words and discover half an hour later, "Oh! That's what the poet was saying!"

Who had the patience for such literary games?

Poetry? I loathed it. And that would be my attitude for decades.

The Poetry Pagan Gets Saved
When I went to graduate school I received some bad news. I had been accepted into my MFA program as a promising ficiton writer, but guess what? The curriculum called for all poets to take one fiction workshop and now, too late, I saw it coming: all fiction writers were required to sign up for a semester of poetry workshop.

 What? Me? The person who hates poetry with all the undying effusive, overheated passion of a spewingingly verbose romantic poet? I was going to have to write @#!$%@%*& poems?



Read some books of poetry, try writing some poems
and a person might even end up liking this stuff...

 It was an interesting semester. I discovered, among other things, that I had no idea about the wealth and range of poetry possibilities available to me. It turned out I could write a poem about a jet pilot, if I wanted. And the poem didn't have to rhyme or be written in anything other than the everyday speech that most appealed to me.

The important thing was that my poem move. That it have a sort of rhythm, a burning, palpable urge behind it. That it go somewhere and take me and the reader to some place or angle of life we hadn't seen before.

The best thing, as far as I was concerned, was that a good poem was hard to write. I could revise a single poem upwards of twenty times and it was just starting to sound slightly good...

I liked that challenge. I was the man who hated brussel sprouts, but came to love them, not by eating them (that would happen later), but by being compelled to grow them.

I finally "got" what a poem was all about by being placed inside the finely meshed verbal gears and wheels of one, the one that I wrote myself.

Reading Poetry
It was natural that I started to read some poetry and discover favorite poets. The first was May Swenson. She actually had poems about astronauts!

However, there were many other poets whose work I failed to appreciate. It was too obtuse, cerebral for my taste. One of the poets I studied with in grad school, Edward Hirsch (a poet of luminescent clarity whom I like) wrote a book called How to Read a Poem, and Fall in Love with Poetry. Did I fall in love with poetry? Not quite. I began to like it a great deal. It was more like I was now willing to very selectively date certain poets from time to time, but I would never marry one, if you know what I mean.

But that's the point: a person doesn't have to like all poetry ever written to appreciate the art form and enjoy it from time to time.

Listening to Poetry
Some of the greatest moments of literary pleasure I've ever had were when we had the opportunity to bring major visiting poets come to our campus. There's nothing like hearing poetry well read by its author. This is actually a fairly rare occurence.

 

The incomparable Li-Young Lee
doing his poetry thing...

Not with Li-Young Lee.

No poet reads better and slower than Mr. Young. He goes around the country dazzling audiences with his poems.

Each poem is introduced in a humble, personable way. There's nothing dry or dusty or academic about Mr. Lee. Though today he's a very gentle man, he describes his teenhood as a time when "I wore around my neck dog collar with spikes sticking out" and he was into martial arts.

At our university Li-Young Lee read to an audience of over 400 undergrads. Most of them walked out afterwards saying, "I thought poetry sucked, but I liked that!"

The other poet whose readings are in a class of their own is Galway Kinnell. As one person said of the voice this poet has been endowed with, "Galway could read the phone book and you'd be entranced."

Galway: La voce of poetry...

Kinnell can recite some poems by memory, a rarity these days. His poems "in concert" rumble past--like weather. They are the most intimate human vibrations. You hear him and suddenly you feel more present, more alive.

Galway Kinnell is getting on in years yet he remains another poet quite capable of changing the minds of those who think they hate poetry.

Poems for Sale, Cheap!
So I've come to believe poetry is not so bad. A poem sometimes works to surprise us or call our attention to something we otherwise would miss and a poem can even make us laugh (Billy Collins). That's reason enough to expose more people to poetry by taking it into non-traditional venues.

Just think: What if Wal-mart endorsed poetry and had books of it at every checkout stand? What if you could find poems hanging on hooks for 25 cents each in the bread aisle of the grocery store? What if at the restaurant instead of an after-dinner mint you received a complimentary poem? Or your fortune cookie was stuffed with, yes, a poem?

I think I'm getting carried away. And purists will argue that a poem will never be a retail item. Like buying a loaf of bread, a Coke, a newspaper. There's too much human blood and soul poured into a good poem.

I guess so, but I still like those little one-dollar poems my students wrote when they "rented" out their poetic abilities. The customers seemed so pleased walking away. Sometimes they sought out the student who wrote the poem and thanked them. Sometimes they asked for the student to sign the poem.

And all we're talking about is a few words. Words on the page. But when it works it's like nothing else. - V.W.

Coming: What is poetry anyway?

To Be Seizure Free

I will miss the National Walk for Epilepsy which takes place this Sunday in Washington, D.C. Since I'm "Van Winkled" I won't know what the turn-out is like either.

But I do know that with the cherry trees in blossom, thousands of people will gather on the National Mall and walk together to draw attention to this disease and lobby for more research to find a cure.

It's an American habit to walk or run for this or that malady. We gather, listen to speeches, collect money from the sponsors of our walk, and then we go home and hope something changes over time...

...that the life of someone whom we love gets better. Or, if it's too late for that, that others don't have to live with the disease.

But what about epilepsy? In the past I would have shrugged my shoulders. It wouldn't have mattered if you told me that 200,000 people will be diagnosed with it this year. It wouldn't have caught my attention if you said that the prevalence of epilepsy would fill 30 cities the size of the one I live in.This disease was invisible to me.

Not any more.

It Looked Just Like He was Dying
There was a bright, happy only child living an idyllic life. He was a straight A student, he loved to read and draw and make things. He sang in the shower.

I speak of our son.

My wife and I sometimes joke that for two melancholics like ourselves to have such an upbeat, cheerful offspring amounts to a natural cure. As long as he's in the house and pulling us toward sunlight and rainbows, we'll never have to start taking anti-depressants.

But a cloud came over this ideal family portrait. On May 26, 2008, our son had his first seizure.

Quickly, it went like this...

He had been running a fever for several days. He had a stomachache and he vomited several times. He was a bit better and napping with his mom that afternoon. Suddenly he began to tremble and moan.

His mother, phone in hand, punching 9-1-1, ran to the outbuilding where I was lifting weights and listening to loud rock music. She screamed at me. She then ran barefoot across the street to where our neighbor, a fireman lived.

I ran into the house and reached the bedroom. Our son's eyes were rolled up. He was pale, shaking all over, and completely unresponsive.

I held on to him and said, "It's all right, buddy. Stay on your side. Be comfortable." I was terrified.

This had come out of nowhere.

It looked like he was dying.

He was turning blue.

The EMTs arrived.

I"ll always remember what record was playing on my old turntable when my wife interrupted my workout. I ran out of the room with the needle still riding in the groove. It was the second album by a band called Steppenwolf. The song was "Magic Carpet Ride."

I have never listened to the song since.

A Literary History of Epilepsy
What little previous knowledge I had of epilepsy came from literature.

We read William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in high school. The mighty ruler collapses early in the play and is said to have "the falling sickness."

I was surprised to learn that Shakespeare hadn't just stuck this in for dramatic effect, but that it was believed to be historically true. Caesar had suffered in his adulthood from what appeared to be what today we call epilepsy . At school I was assigned to lead discussion of the play. I thought I was clever when I began by writing on the chalkboard.

My other literary exposure to this disease came around the same time when I read The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky. The great Russian writer, afflicted with epilepsy himself, knew what he was doing when he gave his Christ figure protagonist, Prince Myshkin, the disease.

Through Myshkin's perceptions we understand the sort of pre-seizure halo effect that some epileptics experience. It's a feeling of connectedness and calm that is so great that Myshkin briefly considers that it might be worth be dying for just to have those few seconds.

Prince Myshkin decides this exquisite feeling isn't worth dying for. The violence and the distress of the seizure upon himself and others are horrific. At one point he is attacked by a knife wielding adversary. The shock of the assault causes him to go into a "fit" and he falls down a set of stairs. This actually saves him from being stabbed to death.

At the time I thought, "Oh nice! This Russian writer guy may have a reputation, but this is pure melodrama!"

I didn't know what I was talking about. I would have to wait almost forty years to read the scene right. With tears in my eyes.

Diagnosis

When a second seizure occurred a week later (after our son's other symptoms had gone away) we knew he not had a "febrile seizure," i.e., one brought on by a fever. Something else was going on. An MRI revealed a "white area" in the temporal lobe, an indication of excessive neural activity and a clearcut diagnosis of epilepsy could be given.

He began taking 300 mg. of Tegretol each day. He would do this for two years. Last year, because he had remained seizure free, the doctor took him off the medication.

Anti-seizure meds are a blessing and a curse. For most people they are powerful enough to keep the brain from kicking into the hyper activity mode that causes seizures. However, they can eventually lead to side effects including sexual dysfunction and organ damage and a shortened lifespan.

This is why it's fortunate that 70% of epileptics are eventually able to be taken off medication.

Still, this is not the same as being "cured." All these years after Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, little is understood of this disease. A Newsweek cover story a couple of years ago explored this--how epilepsy is as widespread as breast cancer, yet research dollars directed toward it are only a fraction. Why is this? Could one reason be that the disease is invisible? That it is kept further "undercover" by an unwillingness to talk about it?

Hence the need for a Walk for Epilepsy.

By the Cherry Blossoms
In Washington, D.C. there will be several messages conveyed by the walkers.

1 - This disease strikes primarily the young and the old. It does not single out more than anyone else the gifted like Julius Caesar and Fyodor Dostoevsky or, most recently, it has been theorized the great composer and pianist Frederic Chopin. Thus there is no silver lining: have the disease and you'll be compensated with some special talent or genius.

2- Epilepsy can happen to anyone. Chances are someone you know has it or knows someone who does. The woman who comes to clean our house has a grandson with epilepsy. You can tell how he's doing when you see the expression on her face when she arrives at the door each week.

3 - Epileptics and their families live in the shadow of not knowing. Will it happen again? What if I'm driving a car or operating equipment or standing in the bathtub when I have a seizure?

4 - People are afraid if they happen to see someone having a seizure. Little wonder. As I've tried to relate it's one of the most frightening things one can witness. This is why in old days epileptics were considered demon possessed. It was so bad looking it had to be happening at the behest of forces of evil or because the person was an "idiot." There's still that social pariah aspect of the disease. This needs to change.

So they are walking in Washington, D.C. to show everyone we are your neighbors, we are just like you except we have this thing we have to live with. We seek your acceptance and your understanding. We walk in the hope that something can be done. - V.W.

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The Spelling Bee and D-a-d-d-y

Speller No. 9 is studying word lists right up to the last minute

I acquired a bit of local news this past Saturday in the only way permissible as long as I'm engaged in this project. I didn't need to read it in the newspaper or find it on the Web or see it on TV.

I lived through it.

There I was seated and yawning on a Saturday morning, in an auditorium full of parents and family members. We were steeling ourselves for the city-wide spelling bee.

I now know something that I didn't before.  I know who won that spelling bee. More importantly, I am coming to terms with the contradictory fact that I like spelling bees except when I don't like spelling bees.

CARPENTERS OF LANGUAGE
What I like about spelling bees is that we have a rare opportunity to witness a word under construction. The pronouncer at the podium says the word and the student speller hovers over the microphone, mentally preparing to make for us a thing of beauty.  The lips part, the mouth opens...

p-a-d-d-o-c-k

In those seconds, human breath creates acoustical waves that are no mere noise. The speller peforms a feat only our species is capable of. From organized sounds emerge symbols representative of our language. These symbols adhere to one another in such a way as to allow us to communicate without being physically present. That is why you can read this sentence made of up these words and know what I am communicating. Yet where am I at the moment you read it? Far, far away... in distance and in time.

As much as the word-nerd in me likes hearing words spelled, there is a certain situation that leads to my not enjoying the spelling bee. It is when our seventh grade son is up on stage, hammering and sawing and putting together a word letter by letter. An all expenses-paid trip to the National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C. this June awaits the winner. The suspense kills me.

c-a-r-t-o-g-r-a-p-h-y

If at any pont he says a wrong letter, it's in the air and in microseconds it enters the judges' ears and registers in their brains, and now it can't be taken back. His word house collapses, a fact that will be soberly registered by one of the four judges sitting at the table who reaches toward a bell.

Ding!

And this is what eventually happens. In the wake of the misspelling, our son, following directions, walks off the stage and goes to the "comfort room." Waiting there are cookies, bottles of water, and his mom who gives him a hug and whisper in his ear that it doesn't matter; we're proud of him.

A WORD NOT HEARD
So our son didn't win. He didn't totally lose either. The city-wide event began with 21 students, fifth grade through eighth. They each had won a spellilng bee at their respective schools, public and private. They were the best spellers their institution had to offer.

Less than an hour later there were 16 empty chairs on stage. Our son was one of the remaining five spellers still in contention.

To ease the tension I felt, I thought of the weeks he'd spent in preparation. He took his study lists of words and read each word out loud multiple times to impress it like a physical thing into his mind.

The word might have been a stone and his brain damp mud.

He would say the characters in sequence over and over:

c-o-m-m-e-n-s-u-r-a-t-e...c-o-m-m-e-n-s-u-r-a-t-e...
c-o-m-m-e-n-s-u-r-a-t-e...c-o-m-m-e-n-s-u-r-a-t-e...

Then we quizzed him on the words. It was during this process I realized that there are words that I know the meaning of and use from time to time in my writing, and perhaps--on a good day with a strong spelling wind a my back--I can even spell them correctly, BUT I've never heard anyone deploy them in a sentence. This means, lacking an audible model, I am uncertain of how to pronounce the word.

It turned out there were many words like this on the spelling bee list that troubled me in this way.

Is wainscot pronounced "wayne's cot" or "wayne-scoat"?

VOCABULARY DEPRIVATION
It's been said that Shakespeare must have known around 60,000 different words although I've heard that an actual word count of his plays and sonnets yields a figure far lower (17,500).

The English language's No. 1 wordsmith...Will

In any event, Elizabethans had the opportunity to be "ear-witnesses" to Shakespeare's command of the English language which by all accounts was prodigious. Presumably, if theater-goers were listening closely and often enough, they would come to know how to pronounce the most unfamiliar words themselves.

Using a word in everyday speech is key to keeping it alive and relevant to ourselves. Words that are never spoken, remain stuck inside books. They are like pressed flowers that await the day the book is opened. Then the word tumbles out. Brittle, faded. Not as useful and "alive" as one might wish.

But even if we know a lot of words, there may be constraining factors in our using them.

Speller No. 9 bides his time...

One doesn't want to use words others don't understand. And it might not be a good idea to sound too literary or as if we are "putting on airs" and bearing down with some kind of class distinction.

Our spoken vocabulary is further impoverished by the cultural influence of the vocabulary we receive from electronic media. The movies and television do not draw upon an extensive vocabulary. It's a simple if not simplistic word pallette.

And what can one say about texting? This medium turns fertile fields for vocabulary into parched patches of tiny screen views where only a few weedy shoots are allowed to sprout.

Shout wher ur wen u a min  Thx

This could be a reason why one study published in a journal contends that a teen in 1950 had a vocabulary of 25,000 words and that today's teen has one of 10,000.

TIME FOR A NEOLOGISM?
I face a problem that's not going to go away. With so few of us speaking actual smart, non-ordinary spelling bee-type words, even when I'm in a language-appreciative crowd, it's hard for me to use certain wordswithout risking mispronouncing them. I could sound foolish to some rare soul out there who has total mastery of the word.

I think we need a word for these words that out of auditory ignornance I tend to fumble as soon as they come out of my mouth. I wish to call each of them a...

DARE TO SAY IT...
Thanks heavens for pronouncing dictionaries which can be found on-line. Before that I had to turn to a physical dictionary, leaf to the proper word entry, and then try to decipher the esoteric pronunciation and accent marks.

It's much better to hear a real, albeit disembodied voice saying the word and then allow myself to imitate it. Which leads me to my partial personal list of "vergewords" that I'm still working on.

duenna
phillippic
Baedeker
bromeliad
jeremiad
pitchblende
coloratura
bravura
incunabula
apparatchik
pampas
cacao
ecru
recidivist
megalopolis
tritium
potash
isinglass
peloton

If you hear me saying one of these words and mangling the pronunciation, please give me credit for trying. And then after my cookie in the comfort room, you may kindly, so kindly correct me! - V.W.


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The White Album (Black History Month - Part 1)

Even though we probably don't think of it very often, I'm sure most of us would agree that at least some of today's news derives from what was once news in the past, but we now choose to call it "history."

For example, a "new" military conflict turns out to be just a revival of an ancient war. The animosities and divisions have never been healed.

This month in America happens to be devoted to a study and appreciation of the life and times of African-Americans. I find this fertile soil for my thoughts and dreams as I reside in my Van Winkled state.

You see, there's much that happened back in the early days of America that affects every breath I take today whether I read the headlines or not...

THE FAMILY ALBUMS
Years ago, my grandmother on my father's side took all the faded sepia and black and white photos that had been stashed in an old trunk and shoe boxes and she pasted them onto photo album pages like this...

As I turn the pages I see men with squashed down hats, women in flouncy, long dresses, children with dirty knees and scissor cut hair.

As for these old ones' predecessors, I'm left to guess at their garb and dimensions because they inconveniently lived before the age of the camera. I assume I would see much the same thing as in my photo album, minus the occasional glimpse of a spindly Model T Ford in the background.

White faces. No black faces.

Page after page of just white faces, ...

There's a reason why it's worth remarking the absence of something in these pictures.

A long time ago, I encountered the hard documentary evidence. My family in long ago days owned slaves.

Over 150 years later I think it's necessary and just that I claim those black men, women and children as something more important than the chickens and mules and the dogs and cats that wandered in and out of the barnyard.

They were human beings who shared their lives with my ancestors. They were purchased and then expected to labor and in return they received food and broken down houses to live in and maybe some cast-off clothes.

In their forced degradation, they lived and died alongside my kin. I think that's enough to make them part of my family.

HOW I FOUND OUT
In 1976 my Great Uncle John went to the copy shop and placed on the glass the first page of over 100 carefully typed pages and genealogical charts he had composed in his retirement. When he was finished he mailed copies of the resulting comb-bound, cardboard cover document, entitled In Search of Roots, to my paternal grandparents and each of their siblings. I started reading my father's copy.

My great, great, great grandfather...
ready to go to war for the South.

No surprise, there were no heroes in our family line, no artists, no inventors, not even any sports stars. I was disappointed, but I had to admit that there wouldn't be such a thing as "average" in this world if most people didn't fit that mold. Our family certainly did.

The one thing my ancestors had in common was their Southern heritage. On my great grandmother's side, they were from Kentucky. On my great grandfather's side, the side that gave me my surname, the family locus was Smith County, Tennessee.

From 1861-1865 at least a half dozen men bearing my last name fought, and some of them died, for the Confederate States of America.

These ancestors of mine weren't fighting to hang onto their wealth and a privileged existence such as that of the Southern plantation owner. In my family all of the men had small farms and large families. And, as I learned to my dismay, they had slaves to help them get the work done.

This is when at light bulb illuminated for me: slavery was such a widespread way of life in the southern United States that one didn't have to be rich to own slaves. It was part of agrarian life. Just like you had buckets, wheel barrows, and shovels, you purchased some slaves and they helped work the land.

EVIDENCE

In the age before photography, newspapers printing engravings
of drawings that showed what a slave sale looked like.

One of the first pieces of paper that Great Uncle John found as he began to authenticate where the family was living before the Civil War was a bill of sale for a slave purchased in 1856. Who was this person who was bought and sold by my family? I don't know.

But as my great uncle engaged in further research he unearthed a paper trail of wills that offered up a treasure trove of names.

In 1845 in Smith County one of my ancestors bequeathed to his wife "the tract of land whereon I now live & the following negroes..."

Their names were...

James, Adam and Sisley.

The will continues in the very same sentence to blandly leave to the wife after these three human beings "two bedsteads and furniture and as much other household & kitchen furniture as may be necessary for her convenient support, also my Black mare and the Toney filly and as much of my stock of cattle, hogs, sheep, and farming tools as will be necessary for her to have."

In the eyes of the law, and my distant relations, James, Adam and Sisley were property, just like kitchen furniture and the hogs.

That noted, the will isn't finished yet with disposing of the slaves...

Item four offers a bequest to a grand daughter named Elizabeth of "my negro girl by the name of Mary."

Item six bequeaths to a son Henderson upon the death of his mother "my negro man James and woman Sisley & hur (sic) increase from this time."

Item seven bequeaths to a son Sanders "my negro boy Andy, and at the death of his mother my negro man Adam."

I'm getting depressed reading and thinking about this, but I'm not quite to the end yet.

In item eight daughter Frances is to receive "my negro girl Cinthy and I have a negro boy by the name of Hillard that is afflicted and if he gets well I wish him to remain in my family..."


ANOTHER WILL
In 1863, while the War Between the States raged on, the aforementioned Henderson who had received James and Sisley from his father, sat down and wrote his will in "a low state of health but in sound memory..."

After bequeathing 280 acres of land to his wife he added "all my Negroes (to wit) Gim, Sisley, Alexander, Suix, Em, and my interest in Harry the Blacksmith," then goes on in the same sentence to dispense "horses, cattle, hogs, sheep, household and kitchen furniture, and farming tools."

What names might have gone with these faces toiling in the field?

KENTUCKY PROGRESSIVES
A slightly kinder picture emerges from the will written by a maternal ancestor living in Casey County, Kentucky in 1848.

She lists her slaves: Mary, Rose, Eliza, Hiram, Robert, Malinda, Reuben, Oliver, Mack, Barnett, James, John, Sampson, Mariah, Mary, Elizabeth, Sally, Francis and Josephine...and then she provides that after her death they be hired out for five years and then the heirs shall...

A new home for freed slaves?

"constitute a general fund for the benefit of all my slaves...and (they) and their increase are to be free upon the condition they remove to Africa...settling them in Liberia or any other African colony to which they may desire to emigrate and which will be be open for the Emigration of Free persons of Color."

Were Mary, Rose, Eliza, Hiram, Malinda, Reuben, Oliver, Mack, Barnett, James, John, Sampson, Mariah, Mary, Elizabeth, Sally, Francis and Josephine ever given their freedom? Did they make the long journey to Africa? If so, did they survive and thrive?

I don't know. It's a family mystery.

ONLY ONE THING I WANT TO SAY
Yes, I'm sorry that my ancestors owned slaves and actually did so with free consciences because they honestly didn't believe people from Africa were fully human. But there's a bit more to be sorry for.

What happened after the Civil War when those slaves were freed was far from an automatic redress of past wrongs.

My father still remembers a succession of "colored" people who were in his life, including some who lived in a shack out at the edge of the farm. Supposedly they were now "free," but life remained adamantly hardscrabble. They helped out by performing chores, including hauling water from the well  a long distance to the farmhouse. They left when my father's father decided he ought to charge them some rent. The shack they were living in was turned into a chicken coop.

White Southerners at the time liked to point out bright spots in race relations. I suppose one came in the form of several black women who cared for my father when he was young. The first was Ida who actually wore a maid's uniform. He doesn't remember Ida, but he says somewhere there is a picture, now lost, of him and Ida sitting on the porch. How I wish I could have found that one spot of non-whiteness in our family album!

Then there was Susie Lacy. My father remembered her very well, including her husband with the unusual name of Clearview Lacey. Susie made such an impression on him that when my brothers and I were children, he took us back to the farm and drove around looking for something. Off a dirt road he eventually found an old, toothless black woman sitting on the porch of a stack of boards that was supposed to be a house. Yes, Susie remembered him. Wasn't that fine! He'd grown up and had sons of his own. My father gave her some silver dollars and kind words.

What else could he do? Progress in those days when Dr. King was just beginning his sit-ins and marches was slow. My father's father, a kindly Christian farmer, had only recently transitioned from saying the "n" word to "nig-ra." He couldn't quite get himself to say "Negro," though now and then he talked about the "colored folks." I'm sure he died without the word "African-American" ever coming out of his mouth.

Each generation is arguably less racist, but that cannot mend the past. There is no help for James, Adam, Sisley...Mary, Rose, Eliza, Hiram, Robert, Malinda, Reuben, Oliver, Mack, Barnett, James, John, Sampson, Mariah, Mary, Elizabeth, Sally, Francis and Josephine and all the others who crossed paths with my ancestors. They were falsely judged to be dumb and ignorant creatures by people who themselves were ignorant--in a way I can only hope will never happen again. - V.W.

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