Chapter One, Part 3: How To Describe My Dad

One thing that some people who knew my dad may not know about him is that he was very competitive, mostly with himself. He regularly set goals for himself in different areas of his life, probably most often in the sport of running.  His objective for events varied from race to race, whether it was to be among the top finishers, to run the race in a certain time, or to complete a race that was unlike one he had done before, like an ultra-marathon, an adventure race, or a triathlon.

Even with an objective in mind, though, Dad always tried to help other people who were also competing in the races in which he ran.  He often cheered people on in the middle of a race while he was running.  He thoroughly appreciated the spirit of competition and admired people who overcame adversity and challenges to rise to the top, especially when their success wasn’t expected.  On more than one occasion, Dad won a trophy or a medal in a race and then gave it to someone else who had competed in the race but who hadn’t won, often a child who had finished a race for the first time ever.

When I was a teenager, Dad took a couple of guys from my high school and me to a state park in Mississippi to compete in a small-town road race.  We left early on a Saturday morning, and, as we drove the last mile or so to the starting line, we saw a teenaged boy walking along the side of the road in basketball shorts, walking barefooted and carrying spiked track shoes.  The guys in the car and I laughed when we passed the boy because he seemed so poorly prepared for a race that was about to be run on a paved road.  Dad didn’t laugh, though; instead, he said, “You never know who’ll get the last laugh.”  We found out how true that was after the race when we found out that the boy had finished in second place overall, running on Dad’s heels with his spikes clicking on the pavement for the entire 5-mile race. 

From the time I started running, Dad often found out about races that were coming up in the area and registered me as well as himself in those events.  He and I ran in a total of roughly 100 events together over the years. One of his routines before a race was to size up the competition for himself and for me; in my competitive days, he gave me an honest assessment of how he thought I would fair in the field and if it seemed like I had “a shot at placing,” or finishing in the top three spots overall or in my age division.  Whenever possible, we drove the course ahead of time, with him pointing out any big hills or sharp turns along the way because, as he always said, those were the places to “make a move” to pass other runners just ahead on the route. In every race, he finished before me and then ran back to find me on the course, to cheer me on and give me advice, especially if he saw me struggling.  Once he had seen that I was ok, he would run ahead to the finish line to wait there for me to make it in. 

One thing that I think my dad learned from me after I had finished running competitively in high school is that there is a sense of pride and accomplishment that can come from just finishing a race, if that is one’s objective.  When I left home to go to college after high school, I went from running six days a week on a strict training program to running when I felt like it and when I could fit it into my schedule, a pattern which continued into my adulthood.  Dad told me many times that a runner has to “make time to run,” but he saw my priorities change and understood that running did not carry the same weight for me as it did for him. 

When I was in training to run my first half-marathon many years ago, I asked my dad if he would go on a long run with me so I could work on pacing before the race.  On the morning of the run, my brother-in-law drove Dad and me out into the country and dropped us off ten miles out of town so we could run back on mostly farm roads with limited traffic.  

I remember that I was wearing a running shirt that day that said "Run the mile you're in." After we'd gotten out of the car and started on the run, Dad looked at my shirt and said, "I don't get it - what else would you do besides running the mile you're in?"  That turned the conversation into a Who's On First-type of exchange that last for several minutes, until I said, "I think it's referring to the way that a person can choose to be grateful for what he has instead of thinking that the grass is always greener or that someone else is luckier than he is."  He thought for a second and then said, "I just don't get why somebody wouldn't do that, because, really, if you think you're lucky, then you are!"  

And that, in essence, was my dad.

The Sweetness of Life

There are some things that so easily serve to bring us joy in life, to make us remember that we are lucky to be wherever we are, to show us perspective if only we are willing to see it:

A ray of sunshine breaking through the clouds after a storm

The sound of shells tinkling that can only be heard in the stillness underneath the ocean

The sweet surprise on a newborn baby's face when his eyes focus on something for the first time

The taste of too-strong kool aid

The sound of a grandparent singing a made-up song to a grandchild

The sound of siblings laughing at something only they recognize as funny

The drop of one's stomach on that first downhill of a roller coaster

The sight of a loved one's face in a photograph

The sound of crickets on a summer night with no curfew

The tears of pride that come from witnessing your child show kindness to another person

The pride felt as the National Anthem is played during an Olympic medal ceremony

Hearing a song on the radio that holds special meaning

Seeing the color of a flower as it's just begun to bloom

Seeing a baby smile in his sleep

Smelling honeysuckle, wisteria, or hyacinths at the start of a new season

Opening a new book, full of anticipation for the words ahead, and

Closing it later with the swell of satisfaction from the read.

Mustering up the courage to set a goal, to try something different and new, 

With a parachute of surrounding support from friends and family.

The Smell of Colors

I once worked with a child who said that he could smell colors; I was intrigued by his claim and asked him to tell me more about it – how he’d first noticed it (“I just did,” he said) and what each color smelled like to him (interestingly, I thought, white smelled like flowers, whereas I thought it would smell like the “fresh cotton” scent of an air freshener).  Some of the other people who worked with this child seemed to think his behavior was bizarre, but I thought it was fascinating.

Obviously I can’t tell other people how a certain color smells, but what I can do is to describe what certain emotions sound like. 

On the first night after we’d gotten to Durham when we took my dad to the Brain Tumor Clinic at Duke, my sister Jennifer and I lied down to try to sleep on the pull-out couch in the little room that adjoined with the bedroom where my parents were. Dad, who was both exhausted and wound up from the very long, tedious drive there that day and somewhat disoriented about what was going to happen the following day, had finally gotten to sleep, and Jennifer and I had only then realized that all of the pillows and blankets were in the closet of the bedroom.  We didn’t dare go in there for fear of waking Dad up.  We lay there on the thin, spring-violated mattress with a threadbare sheet over us, without pillows for our heads, and suddenly we both started laughing.  Punch-drunk is what I guess it’s called: laughing when essentially nothing is funny - out of fatigue so thick we could hardly think – and stress and terror and so many more things that felt so much more powerful than we were at that moment in time.  We had to keep shushing each other until we finally giggled ourselves to sleep that night, with the laughter somehow helping us to steel ourselves for the next day, which was both Jennifer’s birthday and the first day Dad got chemo.

The metaphor that comes to mind most often when I think about my emotional state during the time Dad was sick is a glass that’s completely full: whenever anything additional was added to what was already in there, the overflow was out of my control, and I was completely incapable of handling it.  One of the many things that happened during those ten weeks that threatened to put me over the edge was the car trouble that mysteriously started happening just after Dad’s diagnosis.  Just days after his surgery, I remember hearing a faint buzzing noise coming from under the car hood after I'd parked and taken the key out of the ignition.  My husband checked it out and said that it seemed like the battery was still running, despite the fact that the car wasn’t.  He took it to the repair shop, but they couldn’t get the problem to reoccur while it was there.  It didn’t happen again for about a week; the next time I heard the buzzing noise, I was in the parking lot at the rehab hospital, about to go inside and take an overnight shift with Dad. 

I was torn; I needed the car because I had to drive back home to go to work the next day, but I needed to be with Dad.  In a move that seems totally uncharacteristic for me, I threw caution not just to the wind but completely into outer space and left the car – and the buzzing – in the parking lot and went into the hospital.  Since my dad’s diagnosis, my priorities had never been clearer.

The next day when I went outside to the parking lot after Mom had come back to be with Dad, I unlocked my car door and tried to start the engine.  Nothing.  The battery was obviously dead.  Luckily for me, my aunt, who was at the hospital too, offered to help; we called AAA and they sent a repair guy to check it out.  He replaced the battery, and, when the same incessant buzzing sound started up again as soon as he connected the new one, he told me to get the problem checked out to be sure it wouldn’t happen again.  I took the car straight to the dealership near the hospital, but they couldn’t find a problem; they said they’d disconnected and then reconnected the battery and the buzzing noise had stopped. 

Looking back and remembering the amount of stress I was under at the time, I’m a little surprised that I didn’t just tell the people at the dealership to keep the old car and bring out a new one for me; having to deal with car trouble on top of everything else was definitely an overflow of the stress with which I was equipped to cope.  Instead, though, I drove the three hours home and told my husband what had happened (again), and he showed me how to disconnect the battery under my hood and gave me a yellow-handled wrench to keep in the side pocket of my car door, just in case. 

Just in case was a language in which I was fluent by that time.  I’ve always felt the need to have plans and back-up plans, and, since Dad had gotten sick and had begun to need around-the-clock care, I knew that careful strategies and consideration of all the variables was essential to my entire family.  Having to tote a yellow-handled wrench around did not at all – pun intended – put a wrench in the plans we had laid.

A couple of days later I drove back to where my parents lived and parked my car in front of their house.  I heard the buzzing again after I’d turned off the engine, and I inexpertly used the wrench to disconnect the battery. I became much smoother at the process over the next couple of weeks, even performing the procedure later in snow and in the dark.  On the day when I was driving home from my parents’ house on icy roads and had to turn back due to the route being impassable, I pulled up in my parents’ driveway, stepped out of the car, and heard the buzzing again.  In the snow and ice, I hurriedly used the wrench to disconnect the battery and then closed the hood of the car and went inside, wet from the snow and shaken from the precariousness of the road conditions.  Dad, who was sitting in his red leather recliner chair in the den, looked up from reading the newspaper when I walked in and noticed the wrench that I’d forgotten to put back in the car in my hand.  When he asked and then I explained why I’d needed the tool, he laughed and said, “Well, if the whole OT thing doesn’t work out for you, I guess you could always be a mechanic.”

When Dad was in the hospital the last time and my family was having to deal with getting to and from the hospital on icy roads at all hours of the day and night, I got so adept at disconnecting and reconnecting the battery that I could do it in the hospital garage in under ten seconds each time.  I ignored the stares of the people around me in the garage and declined the help of the security guard who saw me with the yellow-handled wrench and my car hood propped open.  The battery hookup/unhook became part of my commute routine, just like defrosting the windows and driving through Sonic on the way to the hospital to get Dad a Diet Coke.

I still sometimes think about the boy who said he could identify colors by their smell, and it makes me think that maybe part of the reason I made it through the difficulty of the time when my dad was sick and since then is that I somehow recognized that, because my family is lucky, we had the sound of laughter to remind us of the love and hope and devotion we shared even through the most challenging times.

How It Feels

I didn't go into politics - or even business, for that matter - for a reason; one that, if you know me, you probably already know: I do not have a poker face.  I am not at all good at, as they say on Saturday Night Live, strategery.  I don't like office gossip or sneakiness or favorite-playing.  The way I prefer things to be in my work place is when, as my dad used to say, it is what it is - because what else would it be??

Unfortunately for me and for a whole lot of other people who live and/or work in the same school district I do, though, we have been involuntarily drawn into a situation over the past couple of years that has come to involve a lot of the undesirable aforementioned things.

As a result of the citizens of the city voting to give up their school district and the resulting imposed adoption of that system by the county school system, people in my area are talking about budgets and politics and outsourcing and other things that have regrettably become a very large part of the equation in public education.  One thing I haven't heard much talk about in meetings or in the media, though, is how it feels to have been swept into this maelstrom.

This has been the most difficult, most stressful year of my nineteen-year long career with the county school district.  I am proud of the efforts of many of my coworkers as we've entered into what can only accurately be described as a battle.  At times, I've felt sure that I want to do everything in my power to stay with the district, to continue the work I've started, and to try to control what I can in hopes of protecting my coworkers and friends - and ultimately, the students.  But, at other times, increasingly as the actual date of the change approaches, I feel as if I am in danger of going down with the ship.  Like a lot of my coworkers, my health and my personal life - and my overall happiness - have suffered a lot during this past school year because of the impending "merger" - a term, by the way, that really gets to a lot of us on the receiving end of the punches.  To merge means to join forces, to unite, or to team up, and to me that implies that an action is taking place between two roughly equal bodies, a situation which, in my opinion, this is not.  Always a fan of running metaphors, I liken what's going on here to a runner that has dropped out of a race who later asks an accomplished runner if he can train with the better runner.  One of them needs improvement; one doesn't.  One needs help; the other was fine on his own - and, in fact, is likely to be slowed down if the less skilled runner joins him on training runs, even though the faster runner may still be willing to take on the job of coaching the slower one.  It isn't a merger; it's more of an adoption.

In the district of people who did not get a vote in this decision, our leaders and our administrators are scared for their own jobs, for their livelihood actually, and it feels like there's an "every-man-for-himself" mentality that I have never before felt in this job.  Watching the process unfold in slow motion over the course of this school year has felt a bit like Chinese water torture, and in many ways I am glad to see the year come to a close, although I feel a distinct sadness at the same time that my job and this school system - both things that I have loved and have put my heart into since I was 25 years old - will certainly never be the same after end of this school year.  

Everybody knows that educators in this country generally don't make a lot of money.  They don't win Oscars or Pulitzer Prizes or get big raises or promotions or even get much recognition by their bosses or their "customers," unless, of course, a scandal of some sort is featured in the media.  The rewards we get come quietly and often only if we are looking hard for them, but most of us are lucky (and diligent) enough to see them, and we are glad to have this as our chosen career.  We realize that there is no other profession that would allow us to have such a part in shaping the minds of children in this way and to impact their future on such a personal level.  Teaching is about so much more than teaching - and I don't mean politics and jerrymandering and elbow-rubbing; it's about the power of relationships.  It's about the connection that can be made between one person and another person or between a person and a lesson, a link that can only be developed when the learner knows that the teacher cares about him or her.  When a mutual respect has formed between the teacher and the student, that's when the best kind of learning occurs.

But in an environment when educators are scared for their jobs, when school staff members know that they and/or their coworkers and friends may end up on the chopping block at any moment, when program cuts aren't a "maybe" but a "when," it's hard to be positive every day.  It's hard to focus on the lessons that need to be taught - and on the children who are the most important part of the equation.  From either side of the argument about what's fair or who deserves what from the limited funding available in the district now, one thing is for sure: teaching and learning have been hindered, and that doesn't feel good to any of us.

This is mostly a blog about grief and perspective, but I guess it's also about enduring and overcoming life's challenges, and I guess that's what has to be done in this situation as well.

The Power of Choice

Have you ever found out about something - or someone - and then experienced a disappointment akin to grief when you simultaneously found out that they were no more?  That happend to me today, when I was lucky enough to be directed to this video, which goes along with a brilliant 2005 Kenyon College commencement speech given by author David Foster Wallace, who died in 2008 at the age of 46, tragically and ironically by his own hand:

CLICK HERE FOR A LINK TO THE VIDEO

At the bottom of this entry is the transcript from his speech, which includes more commentary than does the video, in case you're interested in reading it in its entirety.  

This piece speaks to me.  It's about perspective - and choice - and everyday freedom.  It reflects many of the things I've learned over the past couple of years and many of the thoughts I have on a daily basis, essentially: you can feel lucky or not; it's your choice.

I heard a story one time about a guy who went to the grocery store one afternoon and came across a mother and a child much like the one in this video.  The man said he watched the kid throwing a fit as he stood in line beside the mom and the child and that, after a hard day in the office and a hectic shopping experience, he said, "Get control of your child," to the mother, rolling his eyes in exasperation.  Later in the week, he coincidentally ended up in line with the same mother and child at the same grocery store again, with the kid whining AGAIN.  This time, though, the man thought twice before unleashing on the mother; instead, he looked her in the eye and said, "Parenting is the hardest thing I've ever done."  Her eyes welled with tears, he later reported, and her posture changed completely; in fact, a few minutes later, she whispered something in the little boy's ear and then he laughed and the fit was over.  "I learned an important lesson about myself that day - and about humanity," the man later said.  And so did I when I heard that story: words are powerful, but not as powerful as the choices we can make on a daily basis.  

HERE'S THE TRANSCRIPT:

Greetings and congratulations to Kenyon's graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"

This is a standard requirement of U.S. commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I'm supposed to talk about your liberal arts education's meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff.  So let's talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about "teaching you how to think." If you're like me as a student, you've never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I'm going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to get in a place like this isn't really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.  If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I'd ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your scepticism about the value of the totally obvious.

Here's another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: "Look, it's not like I don't have actual reasons for not believing in God. It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was 50 below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'" And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. "Well then you must believe now," he says, "After all, here you are, alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp."

It's easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people's two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience.

Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy's interpretation is true and the other guy's is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person's most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there's the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They're probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists' problem is exactly the same as the story's unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up.

The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centerdness because it's so socially repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of.  The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

Please don't worry that I'm getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being "well-adjusted", which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education--least in my own case--is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualise stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.

As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotised by the constant monologue inside your own head, which may be happening right now.  Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about "the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master".

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in, day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.

By way of example, let's say it's an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home. You haven't had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it's pretty much the last place you want to be but you can't just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store's confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to manoeuvre your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough check-out lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can't take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.

But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.

Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn't yet been part of you graduates' actual life routine, day after week after month after year.

But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it's going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.

Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, 40-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] (this is an example of how NOT to think, though) most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.

You get the idea.

If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn't have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It's the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.

The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he's in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.

Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.

Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it's hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat out won't want to.

But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she's not usually like this. Maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles--is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving.... The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don't just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

"This is water."

"This is water."

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.

I wish you way more than luck.

World Autism Awareness Day

There are many people who played a role in my career choice many years ago, and I regularly think about the fact that I am so lucky to have found a profession that is fulfilling, challenging, and rewarding on a daily basis.

Once I decided on and then entered the Occupational Therapy program at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, though, there were still several different career paths within the field of O.T. that I could choose, based on various demographics of the patients with whom I would be working in the future - from very young to very old, by diagnostic grouping like "hand therapy" or "neuro rehab," and/or in different treatment settings such as an inpatient hospital or a school system.  In fact, the diversity of the options within my chosen field was one of the main things that drew me into Occupational Therapy initially.

During my final year as an O.T. student, I landed a part-time job working for my favorite professor, the woman who taught the pediatric-focused courses in our program.  Some of the work I did was data input, mainly typing the treatment notes that she had recorded on a mini-tape recorder and entering appointments into her schedule on a brand-new Mac Classic computer that seemed so high-tech and cool to me at the time.  I liked that work; it allowed me to learn a lot about computers and my teacher's clinical practice from the sidelines.  A second part of my job was to go to the medical library and research topics about which my instructor needed more information; through this, I learned to love research and to how to be organized in my approach to finding out what scientific studies and data said about a particular subject.

There was one more part of my job, though, and it was the part that I thought was the best: going with my instructor to clinical visits.  I primarily served as a hauler/transporter/equipment cleaner at the treatment sites, but, rather than feeling like a grunt who was limited to schlepping and scrubbing, I felt like I was a sponge, soaking up knowledge and inspiration from all around me.  Two of the children in particular who were being treated by my teacher that year ended up influencing my decision to set a goal of practicing in the field of pediatrics as an O.T.; after getting to know each of them, I was certain that my future was in working with the younger population.  

One of these kids was a boy named Johnny who had cerebral palsy that affected all four of his limbs, his trunk, and his speech.  A couple of month after I'd met him, my instructor had me sit with him while she left the room to take a phone call.  I had to focus and listen closely to make out what he was saying as he chatted away about his love of the Cardinals, St. Louis's major league baseball team.  After a couple of minutes of that, he abruptly changed the subject by asking, "What does it mean to be handicapped?"  His question took me off-guard; I spent several seconds trying to think of the best way to respond.  He beat me to the punch, though, blurting out the answer to his own question before I could say anything: "Oh, I know: it means you have to work harder to do things,"  and then he went back to talking about baseball.  I thought his answer was perfect, and I knew at the time that I would never forget this exceptional child or his profound words.

The second child was a girl named Casey who was at a different facility than Johnny.  Casey was a six year-old girl who had been diagnosed with autism.  She was verbal but had many social and other challenges that affected her ability to interact with the world in what is considered to be a "typical" manner.  Casey wasn't as touchy-feely as Johnny was; in fact, she didn't like to be touched at all, but I still found her to be very lovable and sweet.  She had some "quirks" - some habits and patterns of behavior that I found to be both interesting and endearing during the year that I knew her; one of these idiosyncrasies was that she coped with stress by pretending that she was interacting with a cat that she kept in her pocket.  Cleverly, I thought, she used this as a way to divert attention to something other than herself whenever she felt like she was being put on the spot; instead of answering a question or completing a task that she didn't feel like doing, she often emulated taking the cat out of her pocket and petting and talking to it.  

I was fascinated by this tactic; I thought the fact that she had devised such a creative strategy for gerrymandering was brilliant in many ways.  Some of the people who worked with Casey scolded her for talking about or to her pretend cat; I, in my squeaky-clean lab coat and with my very limited knowledge base and experience in the clinical world, tried to find out more about her and her world by playing with her and by asking her about the imaginary creature.  In turn, she often made better eye contact with me, and she talked and talked about things that were on her mind, all while pantomiming holding and/or petting the make-believe cat.  

Not long after my job working with Casey ended, I decided to get a kitten, and, as I looked through the want ads in the newspaper, I knew already that I wanted to name this cat Casey, after the child that first drew me into the world of autism, a condition about which I was sure I wanted to learn much, much more.  I ended up getting a male cat instead of the female I had envisioned, but I still went with the name Casey for the first pet I had as an adult, the cat that was with me as I graduated from college, found my first job, moved into my first apartment, met and later married my now-husband, and had both of my children.  

Like Johnny and his words of wisdom, I will never forget the girl named Casey, the child who drew me into one of the main fields of interest in my profession.  Today, on World Autism Awareness Day, and on many other days, I will think of her and the cat in her pocket and hope that she is somewhere doing something she enjoys.

Memories on April Fool's Day

Twenty years ago today, my then-fiance and I went to the County Courthouse during our lunch break and got our marriage license.  We had intentionally planned to get our license that day: I've always loved April Fool's Day - even if I don't have a good idea or an opportunity to pull a prank on someone, I love the idea that I COULD - and also it was the only day that we could coordinate our schedules to make it downtown during business hours before our wedding date less than three weeks later.  

It's a good thing we did it that day, because, as it turned out, on April 2, the next day, my grandmother died.  

My maternal grandmother was the grandparent to whom I was the closest at the time; I saw or tried to see some of myself in her - or I guess I should say I tried to see some of her in me.  Anyway, even though she had been sick for awhile as she struggled through a relapse of breast cancer, I was shocked by the news.  I was grateful that my grandmother had hung on long enough to meet my husband-to-be and to hear about my wedding plans - and most importantly to meet her youngest grandchild, whom she held in her arms not long before she went on ahead, but I was so saddened by the loss that I could hardly put one foot in front of the other.  It was the first death that I had experienced of someone to whom I was close, and I was at a loss of how to even try to cope.  

Needless to say, the next few days were a blur as we made our way to the city where she lived and gathered together as an extended family to pay our respects.  I remember that I didn't think I would be able to sit through the service in the church without bolting for the door because I was afraid my cries would be too loud.  I remember hardly being able to bear the pain of looking at my mom, at my two aunts - one of whom had a two year-old and a two-week-old baby - and most especially at my grandfather, whose sky-blue eyes held such endless sadness that there seemed to be no possibility of ever being able to comfort him.  I remember that I stood with one of my cousins and my fiance long after the rest of the people had gone back to their cars at the cemetery; the funeral director had dismissed us after they'd lowered the casket into the ground, but I just couldn't bring myself to walk away before I'd seen her body buried, one final thing I felt I could do, if not for her than in her honor.  We stood there by the headstones of the other graves around her plot, and I looked for four-leaf clovers while the dirt was placed over her beautiful silver casket, adorned with beautiful tiny daisies.  I remember that I was a little bit comforted by wearing one of my grandmother's sweaters to the funeral; it was the only thing I had of hers besides the opal ring she had given me - "October birthday girl to October birthday girl,"she'd said - when I celebrated my sixteenth birthday.  Years later, I pulled that sweater from the back of my closet and wore it to the funeral of a friend, and in the pocket I found the handkerchief that my dad had given to me at my grandmother's funeral, a reminder of both the tears I had shed and of the love my family shared as we tried to support each other through those rough days.  

I knew my grandmother well enough to know that she would absolutely have wanted "the show to go on," and so, just a couple of weeks after we laid her to rest, my dad walked me down the aisle and I said "I do" to my new husband in front of many of our family and friends, at sunset on the banks of the Mississippi River.  I wore the gerber daisy wrist corsage that was intended for my grandmother during the ceremony; I felt my her absence profoundly that day as I have many days since. 

Wearing the corsage meant for my grandmother

Today, when I think back on that April Fool's Day at the Courthouse, to the days afterwards leading up to the wedding, and to the wedding itself, so many emotions run through me.  I feel lucky, I feel loved, I feel happy for what I have learned and shared and survived.  Twenty years, wow.  Pretty incredible.

My grandfather, at my wedding, just two weeks after he'd lost his wife.
"I'm here for two," he said, and I knew just what he meant.