What We Are Not

In educational terms, I'm what's sometimes called a triple threat.  I have three significant learning disabilities.   Born into a generation where educators and doctors first began to treat these conditions, although they'd known about them for many years before, I was diagnosed with: Dyslexia, all four types, and its lesser-known cousin, dyscalculia, which is the same thing but for math, Developmental Stuttering, and Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder.  Three severe threats to any form of education.

For men of my generation (most were, and still are, men), we were often considered uneducable and incorrigible.  Many of us never completed our education.  I never actually graduated from High School.  I took two courses at the Education Center and a test and went to college a year sooner than my classmates.  Having been held back in the second grade, I ended up going to college right on time by skipping my senior year in high school.  I received one degree in college and lack just a few semester hours for three more.   My Grade Point Average was far below stellar, but I crossed the finish line and completed all the work, just not always on time.

My dyslexia and dyscalculia were treated at home by my mother.  Already having an education degree from Belhaven, she taught herself Montisory Methods, so I might have a chance.  Among other things, she cut letters and numbers out of sandpaper so that I could feel them with my fingers in hopes it might sink in that way.  With these and many other means, I did eventually learn to read and write, things I cannot imagine life without.

The Stuttering was treated at St. Andrews by a woman who came twice a week to work privately with a few other students and me.  They call it developmental stuttering because it can't be traced to any brain damage, deformation, or emotional trauma.  In other words, they don't know what causes it.  After third grade, they treated my stuttering by enrolling me in every form of public speaking or acting class they could find, with hopes that it would give me more confidence and become less shy.  This is the same sort of treatment the Gentleman Caller in The Glass Menagerie prescribes for himself, so maybe it was common in the fifties and sixties.  I can't say that it made me more confident, and I'm as shy now as I was at six, but it did give me a life-long appreciation and love for acting, so there's that.

When I was in school, the treatment for attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder was sports, sports, and more sports and lots and lots of punishment.  The operative theory being that we needed a way to burn off that extra energy and learn some discipline, goddamnit!   

Unlike the previous two, I can't say this worked very well.  Modern methods are much more effective.   Everything ended up feeling like punishment, which made sports that were supposed to be fun sometimes a miserable experience for me.  While many of my coaches are men I still love dearly, many others became the bane of my existence because I associated them with punishment, and to be honest, some of them did too.  

Even today, scientists disagree about the causes of these conditions, and educators disagree on the best method to cope with these conditions, so I can't really tell you what people like me are, but I can tell you what we are not with a high degree of certainty.

We are not stupid.

I can understand any subject or concept you can.  I can read any book or poem you can.  It may take me more time, but I'll get there, and I almost always do.  I've met very few people who said they had dyslexia, who I couldn't describe as above average in intelligence.  Whatever happens in our brains to cause this condition doesn't impair our ability to think.

We don't lack discipline or motivation.

Living with my father, discipline was never an option.  It was a survival tool.  Motivation, I brought myself.  I can and do sometimes want to accomplish things with a burning desire that I rarely discuss with anyone because I'm worried they'll think I've gone mad.  What breaks discipline, motivation, and determination in people like me is not a lack of character, but depression, which becomes our life-long companion.  We know we don't fit in.  We know it from diapers to death.  That fact can sometimes break even the strongest desire or most constant discipline.  

We're not bad kids.

We can be, and often are, deeply moralistic people.    No amount of punishment will resolve our issues.  This one might be the most important.  I've spent my life trying to understand the intricacies of right and wrong.  Morality is not something you ever really figure out.  That man's reach should exceed his grasp; else, what's a heaven for?  Because we are different, we often see things differently and make different decisions from other people.  That might make us seem bad in the eyes of a society that places a high value on conformity.  I would conform if I could.  So would most people like me.  It's not an option, though.  

If you're considering becoming a parent, or a grandparent, or an educator, you will encounter people like me.  We work differently and think differently, which sometimes will be very frustrating and annoying for you.   Sometimes you'll wonder if the extra effort we require is worth it.  We're not enemies, though.  I can tell you this:  we struggle to understand you as much as you struggle to understand us, but if you make the effort, so shall we.  If you make the effort, we will love and remember you our life long.  There are many, some who may even read this, who made the effort for me, and I will remember that until my eyes shut for the final time.   

The Shofar

 I had lunch today with two men.  They're older than me, and I've been aware of them and their family my whole life.  Listening to their perspective on events of the past was fascinating.  One of the things we talked about was how difficult it is to get people to stay in Mississippi once they become motivated and educated.  

One of them had just this experience.  After leaving Millsaps, Mississippi just wasn't big enough for him, so he moved on, but then, news came that a friend had his house bombed in Jackson.  "I figured I'd better get back to Mississippi," he said.  

In 1967, I was watching a lot of Captain Kangaroo while my mother was trying to figure out why I could say my alphabet but not write it or recognize the letters on flash cards.  My struggles with dyslexia were pretty insignificant compared to what else was going on in Mississippi.  Our own people were turning into monsters to prevent Mississippi from evolving.  In 1967, men in Mississippi, motivated by the anti-Semitic rhetoric of a political campaign, made bombs to destroy a synagog and a home, hoping to intimidate Jackson Jews into staying out of our cultural struggles and moving away if they could.

"I figured I'd better get back to Mississippi,"  my friend said.  He heard the alarm, and he answered it. His homeland needed him.

Without other means of distance communication, ancient Jews developed a musical instrument whose sound could be heard over long distances.  They made it from a ram's horn and called it a Shofar.  Although mostly ceremonial now, the original purpose of the Shofar was to communicate alarm and call for help.  "Wolves are attacking my sheep!  Alarm!  Alarm!"  "The city is under attack, Alarm!  Blow the Shofar!" Help would come because men afield recognized the call.

A bombing, a murder, a flood, economic distress, broken water systems, these things are all alarms.  "Help us!  The community is in great peril!  Alarm!"  We don't use the Shofar anymore, but the intent is the same if the alarm comes over the news or the internet or however you hear it.  The Shofar is a call to your countrymen, "Come now!  We need you!"

It would be so easy for me to stay in Madison once I'm well again and shop and eat and do all sorts of innocent, unchallenging white people things until I die, except that I'd never have any peace because all I can hear is the Shofar calling from my home.  "We need you!  Come now!  Come NOW!"

I am not yet well, and I'll never be as strong as I once was in some ways, but I'm strong in other ways, and I know what I must do.

The Manger

A manger is a table where we lay out food for our animals.

An altar is a table where we lay out food for our god.

If you're a Christian, an altar is where God lays out food for you.

Because we package Christmas for children, we can easily miss some of the more challenging but essential aspects of the Nativity story.  It begins with the Roman oppression of the world by taxation.   In later chapters, Roman taxes and tax collectors would become integral to the Jesus story.  Seventy years after the birth of Christ, Rome burned the temple in Jerusalem and the rest of the city to the ground and dispersed the children of Abraham throughout the world.  The story begins with oppression and ends with the holy family hiding in Egypt to escape the mass infanticide ordered by Harrod the Great in his attempt to destroy the Christ.  That's a lot of negative feelings for a child, so we tend to omit those ideas from the Christmas story.  

I start the Christmas story not with the birth of Jesus but with the birth of Isaac many years before.  To prove his devotion to God, Abraham moves to sacrifice his own son and builds an altar to offer Isaac to the Godhead.  God stops the hand of Abraham and provides him with a perfect ram for sacrifice, setting a new standard between the people and God.  

Today, we think Abraham's actions were horrific, but human sacrifice was common among ancient peoples.  All over the world, there are stories of royal and tribal people offering a non-heir child as a human sacrifice.  Agamemnon provides the sacrifice of his daughter, Iphigenia, to Artemis so that the she will provide him fair winds on the way to Troy.  By stopping Abraham, God began a new paradigm among his people, who no longer were expected to make a human sacrifice to please their god.   

An altar is a table where people lay out food for their god to eat.  Agamemnon lays out a table where he offers his daughter's blood to the Goddess Artemis to drink.  In return, she forgave Agamemnon and allowed him fair winds.  In Abraham's case, he built a table, an altar, for the lord where the food was to be the meat of his son Isaac, but it ended up being the meat of a ram.

In French, the word "manger" means to eat.  A manger is an archaic term for a table laid out with food for animals to eat.  It is a humble altar dressed so that we sacrifice food for our humble servants: the beasts of the field.  

There is very little in the Bible that isn't a symbol for something else.   In time, we learn that God flips the dynamic between himself and his people, and instead of our offering sacrifices to him, he sacrifices his own son to us.  Laying the newborn Christ child in a manger doesn't just mean that he was born of humble surroundings; it means that God puts his own son on the humblest of all altars and offers him as sacrificial food for us. 

Later, in the Jesus story, Jesus says, "Hoc est corpus meum pro vobis; hoc facite in meam--Take, eat; this is My body."  God reverses the story of Abraham.  We no longer offer our children as food for gods; God offers his child as food for us.  

A manger might begin as the humblest of all altars, fit only for beasts, but the nature of God's offering on it elevates the manger to the greatest of all altars.  On a manger, God offers food for all humanity.

Moral Obligations

This sounds like a confession story, but it's not.  Confession would mean I thought I failed, and I do not.  You can't always have a happy ending for all the characters in a story.  That I could not arrange this isn't an indication that I failed, but it might indicate that I learned something about life.

One of the first things you learn as a Christian is that good deeds can get you killed.  Sympathy means you regret the bad things that happen to people, but empathy means it hurts you too.  The universe tends toward declination and decay, and the only way to counteract that is with sacrifice.  That's a lesson taught me not only by my father in Mississippi but by the Father of us all.  

My father only had one commandment.  "The Lord has been generous to you; it's your moral obligation to be generous with everyone else; otherwise, you waste the blessings you were given."  An obligation to God is pretty serious business.  It wasn't a platitude--it's how he lived his own life.  Being generous with the world around him was one of the reasons it was so difficult to make time with my father.  The rest of the world required some of his time too.  I understood this, so I never resented it.

When I was younger, I didn't understand this lesson in a practical sense.  Everyone I knew was about the same as me.  They had homes and parents and either went to my school or one similar to it.  But, as I grew older, I began to notice differences in people.  The first was a boy down the street, who was very much like me, except that he had nearly crippling juvenile arthritis.  I enjoyed spending time with him, and it didn't make much sense to me that he should have arthritis and I should not.  I tried to be as generous with him as I could because I was grateful for being healthy, but finding ways to be generous when you're eleven can be a challenge, and none of it was making his body any less painful.  That he hurt was hurting me, and I didn't have any idea how to fix that.

I'm quite sure that applying the commandment to be generous in social situations was part of the order, but I sometimes had trouble knowing how to apply it.   Even though I would eventually learn to socialize, one of the reasons I began to write was because one-on-one communications were intimidating to me, an artifact of my stuttering, I suppose, even long after it became difficult to tell I ever stuttered.  Writing allowed me to communicate freely, even though it would be many years before anyone ever saw these communications.  

By thirteen, I'd gotten fairly good at communicating with other boys, but girls were starting to become part of the world, and they terrified me.  It didn't seem fair to introduce a new element like that.  They taught us to read and write and add fractions, but there were no classes on this new phenomenon, just a sixteen-millimeter film on how our bodies were about to get hairy.  

The idea that someone could change how I thought and how I saw the world just by standing there was both fascinating and intimidating.  And then there was my father's commandment.  How was I supposed to be generous with people who could destroy me with a glance?

The romance thing, I decided, could wait.  I would focus instead on getting strong and learning to draw more realistically.  Most of my friends were pairing up, but that seemed very confusing to me, some of them had pretty disastrous results, and I was absolutely unclear about the rules or goals, so I just avoided it.

Within a few years, I did find a girlfriend, though.  My first one.  I probably should say that she found me because I didn't really have much to do with it.  At first, it seemed pretty much like everybody else.  This girlfriend thing was easy.  You talk on the phone a lot, and you touch at every opportunity when no parents are looking.  But then, one night, I found her father lying in a pool of his own blood in the bathroom.   That changed everything.

My father's commandment to be generous hadn't really applied to the concept of girlfriends before, but now it did.  I had a father, but she did not.  The Lord was generous to me; it was my obligation to be generous back.   How to be generous, as much as I wanted to, was complicated, though.  At sixteen, all I really had to give was my time, and so I did as much of it as I could, and I listened a lot, and I acted like I was much stronger than I really was.

Trying to fill the hole left by a missing parent made me less interesting and less entertaining than other boys though, so eventually, I found out I was not the only fox in the hen house.  The feeling of betrayal was tangible and crushing.  She said she did it because she never felt worthy of me, which, I suppose, is also my fault.  After all, the first thing you should do for someone you say you love is to make sure they feel appreciated and worthy.  I asked to be released from my commitment and my obligation to her.  I believed I had done my best, but it wasn't working out, and it was starting to really hurt.  She agreed, which she probably would have done anyway since she already had my replacement lined up.  Being generous was the right thing to do, but it didn't offer the promise of a happy ending for me.

In college, I decided this business of a steady girlfriend was pretty confusing and pretty complicated and something I wasn't very good at, so I avoided it entirely.  If I couldn't complete the story in one or two months, I just didn't engage.  There were a few girls who were satisfied with the two-month dance, and for that, I was grateful.  There was one girl who I managed to stretch out the story for almost a year.  We were rarely ever sober together, though, which might explain that.  She eventually transferred to Mississippi State to sober up and meet a much nicer boy.   I gave her an opal pendant to say goodbye.  So long, friend.  Thanks for all the fish.

The obligation to be generous continued, though, only without the more complicated, long-term commitment.  I became known as someone who would listen to anyone who was hurt, which I always thought was odd because I thought everyone did that.  Those were really very pleasant days.  I was very rarely ever really hurt, but I was lonely sometimes.   There's never really been a time when I wasn't lonely.  Most of me is locked up inside of me, and I don't suppose that will ever change.  Empathy costs nothing when all you have to do is listen, and so I did.

After college, I met a very tiny girl who leaned into my chest one night and said her head hurt, putting a noose around my heart for almost two years.  I was devoted to her, but she was devoted to someone else, and he was devoted to yet another person, so our sad love quadrangle limped along until it collapsed in on itself.  No harm, no foul; everybody went home without a penalty, at least on my behalf.

After that, things started going very wrong.  Being out of college and into the make-or-break real world changed everything.  Many of my friends were making forever kind of relationships, but I was struggling to find someone I wanted to take with me to the movies more than a few times in a row.  

Another more complicated element appeared.  I had a stable and productive relationship with my parents.  I had a stable job, and my income exceeded my expenses, and my health was pretty good.  None of this would matter, except that several of the girls I met, even ones I had known before, couldn't say the same.   My life wasn't exciting or glorious by any means, but it was stable, and theirs was not, and I had the commitment to be generous with people who were not given the things I had been given.  Setting me up for a situation where I had to decide whether or not to get mixed up in their problems.  My life was fairly easy, and theirs was not, which wasn't at all fair.  Surely they deserved the same sort of life I had.

What happened next was complicated and confusing.   There were times when I would meet someone and say to myself, "This person is interesting and attractive.  I would like to know more about her."  So, I would make a few engagements with them to get to know them, and as I was learning about them and becoming mildly attached to them, I would find out that their lives hadn't been going so well since college.  Their jobs were unstable or gone, and their relationships with their family were unstable; one I learned had a father who was recently sent to federal prison, leaving the family in a terrible spot.  

These stories triggered my commitment to be generous and my life-long desire to be useful and helpful.  Ultimately, the question would come up, "can you help me?"  That put me in a bit of a spot.  My intention was to find someone to go to the movies with, not get entangled in someone's struggle for existence, but my intentions wouldn't change anything.  Neither would my walking away without helping.

"Well yeah," was my answer, "but it'd be complicated and expensive."  Having someone you already think is pretty say they needed you can be a powerful inducement.  Helping a little made me a little more committed to them, which led me to help a little bit more, which led to more commitment, and pretty soon, the briars of their life's entanglement had me pretty firmly trapped as well.  I let the thorns dig into my skin rather than into theirs because the Lord had been more generous with me.

For their part, they were equally committed to solving the problems of their life, so at that level, it looked like we were working together.  But, from another perspective, they weren't committed to me at all, other than as a benefactor, so very soon, it became clear that I was becoming more and more committed to someone who, at best, would walk away from me once their problems were resolved because they had no more use for me, which ultimately is what happened.  

The power dynamic in a situation like this is very uncomfortable.  I'm not longer a friend or a companion but more like an unwilling parent, taking the place of a parent who, for some reason, wasn't in the picture anymore.  I wanted someone who enjoyed being with me, not somebody who felt obligated to me, yet if I withdrew my support for whatever they were going through, I had no idea if their lives would work their way back on track.  One of them didn't get their life back on track, which made everyone I would meet afterward much more complicated.  I worried about what would happen to them if I turned away. Would that make me responsible for what happened next?  

Because I had a steady income and a stable network of relationships in my life, I felt obligated to stay in this lopsided partnership until their lives were stable again.  Otherwise, I'd be disrespecting the things I've been given.  This was not a comfortable situation and not at all what I was looking for.  I was stuck, and finding a way out was always complicated.

Eventually, it got to the point where I had to ask that they allow me to extricate myself from the situation.  That became complicated because it meant they would have to find ways to support themselves without my help, and at least two of them had grown to believe that I was obligated to support them forever if need be.  I'm not sure why.  

Ultimately I would twice have to get lawyers to help untangle me.  They set up payment plans so I could be reimbursed for the sometimes considerable sums I'd loaned these women I met who said they needed me.  One almost immediately found another guy to pay off her debt to me.  I felt sorry for that guy.  I have no idea how many times she repeated that pattern.  Another made steady payments for almost a year.  She had several more years to go before paying it all off, but I asked her one night if she was even sorry for what happened.  Had she ever thought about what lying about her feelings had done to me?  She began to cry, and I could see she felt maybe not sympathy for me but shame for what she'd done, so I told her to forget the rest of the payments.  I really just wanted some acknowledgment of what I'd gone through for her sake.  I didn't need the money back, and she wasn't ever going to do anything to make it a better memory for me.  I'm not sure how she could.  

This pattern repeated itself enough for me to think that's all there was for me.  I was beginning to wonder why I couldn't find someone who just wanted to hang out and spend time together.  It began to make me very suspicious of people.  When I would meet somebody new, I'd wonder, "what is it you really want from me?"  and avoid their eyes.  I'm sure this became annoying to everyone around me.  I didn't mean to be suspicious and untrusting, but I was, and I'm sure for some, it was kind of offensive when I began trying to figure out what was wrong with their lives that might become a problem for me later, especially when there wasn't really anything wrong with their lives.  I'd begun to expect these tragedies everywhere I looked, which just wasn't how the world really worked.  Some people had no need of anything I could do at all, and I'm sure the whole concept seemed curious to them.

Ultimately, I gave up on the idea of finding a companion.  It was just too complicated, and I didn't want to set my foot into another trap.  I'd buried myself in my ideas before, which seemed like the most logical thing to do then.  These and other wounds made me much less willing to be a part of that world, and I began to put on weight because I didn't really care anymore.  The darkness that one day became the predominant climate of my world began forming around the edges. 

For four years, I completely gave up.  "Lots of people live their whole lives without significant relationships," I thought.  About this time, I met someone who, for the life of me, seemed to just enjoy spending time with me.  Her life, as far as I could tell, was really very stable, and we got along on just about every subject.  I couldn't discern any part of her that might indicate that she needed anything but companionship.  She was eight years younger than me, but we adapted pretty well to that, and you couldn't tell that much difference.  

Despite the intensity of our relationship, I had overlooked something very important.  She had not menstruated since three weeks before our first kiss.  She was, in fact, quite pregnant, and her unseen and unspoken purpose in being with me was to hide that fact from herself and carry on as if he life wasn't about to irrevocably change.  This deception continued until even her stretchiest clothes wouldn't fit anymore, and we both had to face up to the truth.

I'd taken a pretty serious blow, and even though I very much wanted to escape, the story involved yet another life now, and I didn't think it would be right for me to abandon them both, so I agreed to stay at least until the baby's future was secured.  One day, she said that the child's father decided he wanted to be a father, and she released me from all promises and commitments.  They would eventually marry and had a very happy life together.  The experience left a hole in me that took quite a while to heal.  The darkness around the edges of my life gathered strength.  

I would eventually marry, and I'm still alive while I write this, so obviously, it's not the ultimate end of the story, but it's the end for now.   I would eventually contact nearly all these women, either by phone or by writing, and say that I forgave them and that I had no hard feelings.  They owed me nothing, only to have a good life.  They were doing the best they could to get themselves out of a bad situation, and I was doing the best I could to help them; that nobody was particularly looking out for me was regrettable but ultimately not as important as getting their lives into a more stable situation than where I found them.   The Lord blessed me in so many ways, but that doesn't mean I will have everything or be happy. 

There was a price to pay for all of this, and I would pay it, but that's a story for another day.