Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Prelude 1: Homework, Sleep and Being a Little too Curious

(Author’s Note:  While this blog is for thoughts on various subjects of interest, its main purpose is to tell the story about turning my dream school concept into real brick and mortar.  This school project is deeply motivated by the continued absence in our City of New York, in our home boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens, in our family neighborhoods of Bay Ridge and Rockaway, any institutions of learning which would have worked well for our son, and would work well for those like him.   Our son was forever severely mentally hurt by his first four years of schooling, by being caught between compulsory attendance law and no school in New York understanding and working with his unique synthesis of gifts and disabilities.  And still today, there is no school which would do well by him.  I want to start a school in which those like him will thrive.  These Preludes are vignettes on the history of how I’ve gotten to this point in my dream.)

At the time, my parents could afford only a small three room ground floor apartment in that part of Brooklyn where Bay Ridge becomes Bensonhurst.  They gave me the bedroom while they used the living room for a bedroom and for its original purpose.  Like good parents of the day, the mid-1950’s, they furnished my room with the proper accoutrements for being a solid young scholar, including a rather large wooden student desk.  And there I would sit night after school night plying the student trade in arithmetic, sight reading, spelling and, yes, penmanship.

The elementary school in which I was placed was Downtown Brooklyn.  Among the reasons for placing me in St. Angela Hall Academy (which, by the way, closed many years ago) was that it was the only Catholic school they could find with bus service.  Bus service was a necessity as both were working, both had a commute which enabled neither to drive me to school, and they thought I was too young to walk to any of the parish schools in the area.  So, I, too, had a commute, of more than an hour each way. 

As it turned out my mother, the nurse, had the shortest commute, but the longest hours; so, she arrived well after my father and I.  My father, the high school English teacher, got out of school when I did, but arrived home later than I since his commute was longer.  That meant I got home first.  And having that privilege allowed me to have a quick snack and to get out of the house to meet friends before either parent was able to rope me into my desk chair to do my homework.  However, I did have to eventually come in for supper, and that’s when I got caught!  Right after supper it was homework time.  Supper was usually about six and I started homework about six-thirty or so.  By close to ten, I was sleeping on my books.  My first grade teacher loved homework and so she indulged her love with a passion.  Finally, with not everything completed either my mother or my father would wake me up, close the books for me and tell me to get ready for bed, which I dutifully did, climbing into bed as quickly as possible.  But then…

The soft, white bed sheet and dark blue blanket rested comfortably on me, as I stared at the off-white ceiling of my room.  I was concentrating on hearing whatever my mother and father had on the television; incredibly there was no sleep in my eyes or desire to be asleep in my mind, although I lay easy in bed.   

As much as I strained to hear, I couldn’t make any sense of any sound visiting my wide-awake ears since the kitchen lay between my bedroom and the living room where the family television sat as the focal point.  Years later living in the second floor apartment of my grandmother’s house, my bedroom immediately next to the living room, I would know everything about what was gong on on the television.  But, then, at six years old, the apartment floor plan put me out of range.

I ‘d be focusing on the television sounds when I would hear the hard shoe, even cadence of my father’s steps growing louder until he was in the room looking down at me.  His face had an annoyed appearance.  He explained to me something about needing to go to sleep so I could easily get up for school the next day.  Frankly I hadn’t an idea of what all this fuss was about.  Still, he said he had to do something to “get me tired”.  

He requested I sit up and on the side of the bed, which I did.  He handed me a book to read with pages pre-selected.  He said that sometimes reading that late at night makes people sleepy, so he said I should try it out, which I did.  On completing the selection, I was returned to my bed covers. 

He left, but there still was no sleep in my eyes or desire to be asleep in my mind, although I remained easy in bed.  Eventually sleep would catch me.  I suspect it must have been somewhere after eleven-thirty since I would discover much later that my folks had the habit of shutting the television off just after the local news and I remember there being silence from the television as I slipped off to slumber.

My father was a stubborn person, at times, given to repeating an activity even if the objectives weren’t being met.  And so, night after school night he would have me read a chosen selection.  But, night after school night I would finish and remain awake.

But, also, morning after school morning, I would hear through a drowsy mist my mother’s voice calling my name over and over and saying many, many times that it was time to get up for school.  Eventually, the mist would clear enough for me to nearly fall out of bed.  Like a cat, somehow, I always landed on my feet.  But, I must admit, the bus ride most mornings was spent asleep.

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

What to Read to a Dying Mother?

My mother lies quietly in the hospital bed in her room at home.  Her intentional muscle control is now limited to her right arm and hand.  At times, she reaches comfortably into the air moving as if to grasp and to arrange or to rearrange what she has grasped.  Her eyes stare at the space where her arm moves.  She is silent.

In the next minute remaining at ease she lowers her arm and begins talking out loud to someone she sees in her mind, her eyes moving in the manner you would expect when in conversation.  From moment to moment she is inside dream-like scenarios, playing them out loud until she completes the scene.  Sometimes whatever is happening in her mind is very disturbing.  One time a Jane was at the door and she needed to answer the door to let Jane in, but she bumped into something which toppled an object onto the floor; she became very upset because her mother-my grandmother-an orderly and insistent person when my mother was a child, just couldn’t stand anything bumped or dropped on the floor, especially if the object broke.  So, my mother was frightened of being chastised for her clumsiness and for not answering the door in a timely fashion. 

There are many such disturbances.  I was at a loss to know how to comfort when they were upon her.  Then I decided to use what is called “guided imaging”.  I’ve used it as a relaxation exercise many times for myself and for students, especially in acting classes.  So, I conjured a number of images I thought would calm, bright sunny skies, our lovely beach on a summer’s day, sweeping placid meadows.  And what do you know, it works, but only when I am talking.  Once I stop, if there was a disturbance coming, it erupts and I can’t prevent it.

From this I wondered if it is solely my voice which calms or if, indeed, it is both my voice and the pleasant images.  I like to think it is the latter, which brings to mind a rather unsettling question:  Do I in my choice of readings contribute to her disturbing scenarios?

My wife and I decided to entertain my mother as she is at times consciously aware of being confined to bed without any real ability to help herself.  Being nearly blind and hearing poorly presents problems with most forms of entertainment with the exception of radio and being read to.  We have played the radio occasionally, but she seems bothered by it more often than not.  So, we decided to read to her.  But, what to read?  We thought since she loved detective and spy novels to start with one of our family’s favorite authors, David Baldacci.  Before becoming ill she had started Hell’s Corner and I thought she might like for me to continue it.  Like all of Baldacci’s Camel Club books, this one starts with a big bang; in fact a bomb blows up a few folks in Lafayette Park, the one just across the street from the White House.  The hero, John Carr, aka Oliver Stone, and his Club colleagues must plow through a whole mess of bullet ridden bodies and attempts on their own lives to uncover who was doing what.  Toward the end of the book I was getting a little nervous relating all the death and mayhem to someone who herself was dying.  Still, I finished the book.

Next on the list was an author my wife and I like, Jasper Fforde.  Shades of Grey was the story I thought might amuse my mother.  Fforde writes a genre-bending kind of thing.  This one is a fantasy, sci-fi romance cum socio-political commentary.  To give a flavor of the world he creates as the backdrop of his action I quote from the dust cover:  “It’s summer, it’s hot, it’s our world, but not as we know it.  Entire cities lie buried beneath overgrown fields and forests.  Technology from another time litters the landscape, and there is evidence of a great upheaval.  Welcome to Chromatacia, where for as long as anyone can remember society has been ruled by a Colortocracy.  From the underground feedpipes that keep the municipal park green, to the healing hues viewed to cure illness, to the social hierarchy based on one’s color perception, society is dominated by color.  In this world, you are what you can see.”  Well, the first real action centers on the narrator helping his father try to heal a person who is dying.  Unfortunately, they fail.  Again, as I read paragraph after paragraph on the way to this the poor man's death I feel none too queasy myself!  Well, I put that book down just after the pronouncement.

Still, I thought it was the genre-bending which was more inappropriate so I went to an author I knew my mother loved, Dick Francis, and a book I felt would do well, Silks.  However, it didn’t take long before the hero, barrister Geoffrey Mason, gets very nicely beaten-up by a former client he couldn’t get off, and a jockey the barrister knew murdered possibly by the trainer of the barrister’s racing horse.  I fine pickle and a great start to a mystery.  But, again I felt unsettled as I was reading the mayhem and murder.  So, I stopped and moved on.

Next I turned to poetry, taking in hand and in voice one of my father’s old books, 1000 Years of Irish Poetry:  The Gaelic and Anglo-Irish Poets from Pagan Times to the Present, which to the editor, Kathleen Hoagland, were the years between WWI and WWII.  Now, there is an old saying about the Irish, which I think horrid, “With the Irish all the wars a merry and all the songs are sad.”  War is never merry, but that is beside the point for now.  But, poem after poem were singing the blues, about lost loves, lost innocence, lost lives, lost nationhood, loss in general and in particular, to the point that I found the latter half of that statement quite accurate:  Indeed, all the songs are sad!  For a fourth time as I read I got the feeling what I was reading is not good for a person dying to hear!

A search of other material available uncovered what I thought would be just perfect, Celtic Meditations by Edward J. Farrell.  Well, after flowery discourses on the pleasures of the God given sun and of the God given earth, air, wind, spirit, I came to breath, that one source of God given life my mother at some moment, at any moment, will not be able to draw.  As I read, I saw distress in her, and frankly I was getting a little upset myself.  That booklet went back on the shelf forthwith.

With many tries, I’ve come to wonder, what can I read to a dying mother?  On Sundays, my wife reads the weekly church bulletin and the funnies from the New York Daily News.  And they seem to be okay.  But beyond that I am at a loss.  So, what does one read to a dying mother?