personal

Hospital Stories (4)

A few years ago I worked at a hospital as a constant observer.  It was a transitional job as I tried to figure out the next step of my life. What exactly is a constant observer?  one might reasonably ask.  A constant observer is basically a nurse’s aide who stays in one room to be with patients who might be a harm to themselves or others. Hospitals try very hard not to tie people down on their beds anymore.  There are a lot of reasons I might be assigned to a patient: dementia, adverse reaction to medication, brain injury, detoxing, or suicide watch, to name some.  I saw people at their most vulnerable state.  This is the fourth in what I plan to be a series of vignettes on my experiences in the hospital.

He looked like a caged animal.  I went into his room in the morning, and he was there only in a diaper, a grown man probably in his 70s, a retired farmer, on his hands and knees on the bed, which was covered with a mesh enclosure to make sure he didn’t get out of bed during the night. I was supposed to wash him up and have him ready for the occupational therapist, who would help him get his clothes on.  I wasn’t used to washing up a moving target.  I asked the nurse aide to help me—she was a little put out I couldn’t do it by myself.  His diaper needed to be changed as well.  And the bed linens, but that could be taken care of when he got up.

I had been with him the entire previous weekend down on Neuro Acute.  He had fallen down the basement steps and hit his head, causing internal bleeding.  He had more tubes and lines when he was down there.  A central line, a feeding tube down the nose, telemetry leads, a catheter.  He picked at everything—it was a constant battle so he wouldn’t pull things out or off.  The tele- leads weren’t a big deal, just an annoyance, but the others were serious.  I couldn’t let him get a hand on them or it would be big trouble.  He grabbed all of them at one point or another.  I would grab his hand so he couldn’t continue pulling.  Then I had to pry his fingers off one at a time from the tube or line.  Sometimes he would try to roll over or get on all fours, which was a problem with so much attached to him.  I felt like I was wrestling him in order to keep him safe.

He looked like a writer I had known while I was in grad school.  In fact, the resemblance was rather unnerving.  It made me feel protective of him, that he was in my charge, that his care was my responsibility.  So that’s why it especially hurt when I got chewed out by a nurse down on Neuro for not alerting her right away when some machine started beeping.  Things were always beeping in his room: bed alarms, telemetry monitors, IV pumps.  I was still pretty new at the job and didn’t know what was a priority and when I should get the nurse right away.  This time it was a leak from his central line.  I put on the call light.  Eventually his nurse was able to come to the room and check, only to find that some med that he needed had leaked onto his chest.  The connection between the central line and IV pump had been tenuous.  Instead of putting on the call light, I should have found her immediately.  Now she couldn’t properly chart how much medicine he had received.  I had screwed up.

When he was upstairs later in Rehab—a halfway unit intended to transition patients out of the hospital and where I found him on all fours like a naked animal—he did manage to dislodge his feeding tube.  I couldn’t stop him in time.  It was the last evening I spent with him before he was transferred to a nursing home.  Earlier he had begun to smile and even make jokes.  He pretended that he was going to drop a cup, and then smiled broadly when I fell for it.  He still couldn’t talk, but I could see the pleasure he got from this normal human interaction.

Before he left for the nursing home, he curled up on a couch in his room (the couch was a pull out bed for guests).  Still tethered to an IV pump on a stand with wheels, he seemed like my sleeping child that I was watching over.  I put a blanket on him so he wouldn’t get chilled.  My shift was almost over.  I turned the lights off in the room.  It was already dark outside on a late November afternoon.  And we both waited to leave the hospital.

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personal, writing

New Year’s Day

“Nothing changes on New Year’s Day”

Dear stranger, I am a writer.  I’ve decided to self-identify as a writer for the first time in my life.  I’ve always been too scared that writing is something that I couldn’t succeed at, or that it’s not something that I could ever do as a job or vocation, though I could do it on the side as a hobby.  But not owning it means that I never have given writing my full concentration and effort, not even when I was a grad student.  Back then I was still aiming to be a professor or teacher, not a writer.  This identity is going to take some getting used to.  I don’t feel comfortable calling myself a writer, but I think it’s a necessary step.

Part of this change in orientation means that I am planning to devote more time to writing this year than I did last year.  I hope that means that I have more content for the blog in the coming year.  It’s a struggle to find time as a stay-at-home parent.  Even when the kids are napping or in bed for the night, it’s so much easier to sit back and stream a TV show or waste time on the internet.  But I’m making the declaration of my identity as a writer and my goal to write more here on the blog so that it’s public and it forces me to live up to my aspirations.

I meant to have this post up on January first, but I’ve been busy painting our basement.  Our basement flooded last summer, and we’re still putting it back together six months later.  It’s a split level home, so the basement is half the living area of the house.  It’s been an adjustment, to say the least, not to have use of half of the house when three little kids want to play, play, play.  When the weather was warmer, that wasn’t as much of a problem.  But today, for example, we were house bound because of below zero temperatures and even colder wind chill.

I’m not one who usually makes resolutions for each new year.  It’s not that I think it’s a bad practice.  On the contrary, self-improvement is a great goal to be renewed every year.  And it’s not that I have no areas of my life to improve either.  There’s plenty that I should be working on.  When I was in high school and college I used to set reading goals for the summer vacation.  I would make a list of books that I wanted to read during the break.  I was always overambitious and unrealistic.  Usually I only read one or two books from the list, if any.  Sometimes I would read other books not on the list, but often I ended up not even reading all that much.

The last few years I’ve made informal goals to read approximately 50 books a year, or about one per week.  Looking back over my records (because I like to make lists), I read 44 books in 2009, 55 books in 2010, 40 books in 2011, neglected to keep records in 2012 (or lost the file), 36 books in 2013, and 29 books last year.  So I made my goal once in the past six years, and, as I recall, I was able to read a lot that year while holding our first child as he napped.  I’ve gone ahead and made my 50 books a year goal more formal this year by posting it on goodreads.com (feel free to friend me at goodreads.com under the name Andy Zell).  I’m also planning on writing short reviews on most/all of the books I do manage to read this year, and I’ll collect them monthly and post them here on the blog.

As for the song embedded above, I used to be a huge U2 fan back when I was making those reading goals for the summer.  I would try to listen to this song on New Year’s Day, although I’m not even sure why.  Perhaps because I liked the line quoted above so much.  Nothing changes.  There’s so much continuity from year to year.  I’m still the same person on January first that I was on December thirty-first.  Except things do change.  I’m not the same person I was 15-20 years ago.  I still enjoy some old U2 tunes now and then, but they’re no longer my favorite band.

In 2015, I’ll continue writing about the change and continuity of my life.  I am a writer.  I am a stranger.

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personal

A Few Dollars Short, or The Reluctant Samaritan

[edit: this is a true story from my life, in case that wasn’t clear]

I hate grocery shopping. Usually I stop at this small Hugo’s on the way home from school. It reminds me of the grocery store my mom would go to when I was little. I prefer the small in this case; I have enough trouble making decisions I don’t need to be overwhelmed by food. My food choices stay simple. Frozen pizza. Macaroni. Canned soup. Soda. Potato chips/Cheez-Its. Microwave dinners. I zip up and down the aisles so I can get out of there faster. One of my former students works here. I hope I don’t see him. Sometimes he works the checkout and then he’ll be unavoidable. He’s not there. I put my groceries on my credit card. I don’t have the cash to cover the groceries. What I do find after I check out is her.

I’m almost out the door. “Excuse me.” I stop, my chest feeling a little tight, fearing what words would come next. Could I pretend not to hear even though I’ve already signaled that I have? “Excuse me, do you think you could give me a ride?” I turn back towards her and it’s too late. I know I won’t say no even though I desperately want to. The first thing I notice is her ugly brown coat. Her hair is stringy and her face unwashed. She’s squinting up at me. She’s fairly heavy set and sitting in a motorized cart provided by the store. Someone else can give her a ride. Please. It’s already 4 o’clock and the sun is going down on this Autumn day way up north. I tell her okay, but I have to put my groceries in the trunk first. Then I’ll pull around to the entrance and pick her up.

Much later I’ll realize that I could have just driven away. I’ve walked by lots of people asking for money in big cities, stared straight ahead and ignored them. Didn’t give them or my decision a second thought. I can’t help everyone. I don’t have the resources. But I gave her my word.

She has a walker that I stash in the back seat. She plops down in the passenger seat. Her unpleasant smell fills the car. Her voice is nearly as unpleasant. Whiny and nasal. She says she missed the bus and that her friend was unavailable to give her a ride. She wonders if I could take her to the bingo hall. She also wonders if I could give her thirty dollars for a motel room. She informs me that she is homeless.

How could anyone be homeless in North Dakota? It’s too far north—you can’t sleep outside in winter no matter how thick your coat. It’s going to be cold tonight. Below freezing. She needs shelter.

I don’t have thirty dollars. I know there isn’t much money in my wallet. I don’t like to carry cash because I’ll just spend it. My dad tells me frequently that I should keep some cash on me in case of emergencies. To illustrate the point, my mom carries around an emergency $20 bill which, if she uses for any reason, she immediately replaces for the next time.

Before I get in the car I check my wallet. Four one dollar bills. If I’m going to give her anything approaching what she’s asked for, I’ll have to go to the ATM machine. The only problem is that you can only take money out in multiples of $20 and I’m fairly positive I have less than $40 so the most I can withdraw is $20, plus the bank will charge a $2 service fee. I really need to open an account locally, but I hate banks and dealing with money. I don’t want to overdraw the account, though. I did that once already and it was a mess. Since I don’t have a branch within a few states adjacent, I can’t make a deposit to cover any overdraft. My paycheck from the school is directly deposited, but that’s not until the end of the month. The other time I overdrew the account, I had to ask my sister in Ohio to make a deposit to cover the amount plus penalties, and then I paid her back when payday finally rolled around. I live month to month. I have no savings, but no outstanding debts either.

I like to help people when I can, but the giving of money is so awkward. I hate tipping situations. How much to give. What to say. I hate it when the offering plate is passed in church.

But she probably needs the money. She needs to be indoors tonight. Though there’s no way I’m inviting her to my basement apartment. I don’t even have a bed for myself. I sleep in a sleeping bag on a thin pad filled with air. Basically I camp out every night in my basement room. I don’t have any furniture, either. My TV sits on a plastic crate. Naturally I have a TV, even if I don’t have a desk, dresser, or bed, because of course I have a TV. With cable, no less. It’s included with my rent. I share the phone with the other dormer who rents the other basement bedroom. The main room in the basement has a pool table, a hi-fi tuner, and a dart board. I find it all rather dreary and depressing. In addition to my dismal living conditions, my girlfriend of the past six months broke up with me right before I moved to North Dakota. A few weeks after I moved, my mom nearly died from complications with her hysterectomy. I haven’t made any friends here yet. Overall, this is not the best time for me.

I’m not aware of any homeless shelter in town. I ask her if she knows of one.

No, she doesn’t.

I drive to the ATM of the not-my-bank and slip my card in the reader. I type my PIN and accept the $2 fee. The machine spits out a twenty, and I hand it over to her along with the four ones I had in my wallet. I explain that it’s all that I have right now. Then I drive her over to the bingo hall, which is across the street from the bank. It’s connected to the mall. At least they call it a mall. It has a K-Mart, a Christian bookstore, the DMV, and a climbing wall. Oh, and a bingo hall. The entrance on this side has a hair dresser. Her friend is going to pick her up here.

I tell her I have some change back in my apartment, and that I’ll come right back so she can have the full $30, though I’m not sure I have six dollars in change. The house is right around the corner from K-Mart. It ends up I have $4.82. I stuff it in a plastic sandwich bag and head back to the bingo hall. She’s not there. I walk inside the mall, peer into the hair dresser’s, go further down the empty hall. Where could she be? She can’t have gone far. She can hardly walk. It’s only been a few minutes since I dropped her off. I give up. She’s gone.

The daylight’s faded completely. Now I have to go home and unload my groceries.

Later on I call my ex-girlfriend and tell her what I’ve done. There’s no one else to tell. I can’t figure out if I’ve been taken. It’s so easy to assume the worst about the woman. She wants money to gamble or for drugs or whatever, anything but shelter for the night. I don’t even feel particularly benevolent, but neither do I feel regret over my actions. Regret would imply I could have acted otherwise.

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literature, personal

The Beginning

As I intimated at the end of my 10 Books post, I do have some thoughts to share about Chaim Potok’s novel In the Beginning.  It started off slower than his other novels, but I ended up loving it just as much as I have the others.  Perhaps one of the reasons it took me longer to get into the book is that I find I read books in smaller and smaller chunks at a time.  I rarely have the luxury to sit down and become fully absorbed in a book and read 100 pages at a time as I did in earlier days.  Now I have to prioritize more which books I even pick up.  I find that I set down a book much quicker than I used to.  I used to try to finish nearly everything I started.  These days, not so much.

In the Beginning is the story of David Lurie, a boy born in the Bronx to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.  David is a bookish and sickly little boy.  He has problems with a local bully who hates him because he is Jewish.  Because of its historical setting—it starts in the late 1920s before the stock market crash—I knew some of what to expect.  It was a Depression-era story, followed by World War II.  I knew about some of the American anti-Semitism of the time because of Philip Roth’s alternate history novel The Plot Against America.  But I still cried when the narrator and his family find out the full extent of the Nazi atrocities against Jews.

Like the other Potok novels I’ve read, it’s a book about fathers and sons, and the inevitability of conflict.  They’re all told from the perspective of the sons.  In this novel, the conflict stems from expectations, as it often will.  Before coming to America, David’s mother had been married briefly before to his father’s brother.  They had no children before he was killed in a pogrom—an organized anti-Jewish riot, often a massacre.  His father then stepped in and married his brother’s widow according to the ancient tradition of levirate marriage (Deuteronomy 25: 5-10), though he could have easily gotten out of it.  He is a man of honor and his word.

David looks up to his father, but he doesn’t understand him.  He thinks about his dead uncle whom he is named after, and how he wouldn’t exist if his uncle hadn’t been killed.  He considers the contingency of his being.  Out of death comes life.  I’ve considered my own contingency lately.  Like many kids, when I was little I had a security blanket.  Mine was handmade by my Grandma.  It was red, white, and blue with the number 76 on it for America’s bicentennial.  The thing is, I was born in 1977.  The blanket had been intended for someone else—someone whose existence would’ve precluded my own.  But that baby didn’t survive a full nine months gestation, and so I had a chance at life.  It’s terrible to think my parents had to suffer such grief for me to enter the world.

When David considers his contingency on the death of his uncle David, he still “wants to be [his] own David” (311).  And I need to be my own person, too.  I’m still figuring it out.  In my own family, I’m a bit of an outlier.  I still have the faith that I was taught as a child, but it’s changed.  I no longer attend an evangelical church, instead finding solace in Episcopal services.  On political issues I’m often on the opposite side of the spectrum.  And while both my wife and I came from homes where our moms stayed home, now I’m the one home with the kids.  It’s traditional, except not in the expected way.  Fortunately, none of these differences has lead to any breaks with my family.  We still love each other very much.

As he grows older, David asks the hard questions about Judaism.  He becomes interested in source criticism.  He wishes to defend Torah from attack, but first he must learn what the goyim say.  He starts by reading books given to him by an old neighbor.  He finds books that are critical of the Graf-Wellhausen hypothesis.  Basically, this hypothesis posits that there are various sources that have been edited together to make up the Pentateuch, or the first five books of the Bible traditionally ascribed to Moses.  Reading these books, even though they defend Torah, is frowned upon by his family and community.  They are dangerous to contemplate and read.  His father will not allow him to read books written by Germans while he is in the same room, even though they are written by important Orthodox rabbis.  No one in the community wants to consider what modern scholarship might say if it could destroy Torah.

I relate to David’s predicament.  When I was in Bible college I had a confrontation with a Bible professor about the inherent worth of studying secular literature.  At the time, I was an English major, and all I wanted to do was figure out how a Christian should relate to and read literature.  In my own way, I wanted to be a David and defend Christianity and the Bible from the evils of deconstructionism and other literary critical theories.  But my professor saw the reading of secular literature as a sullying influence, one that could easily lead one into sin.  Reading salacious stories could inflame lust in the mind, which was just as bad as committing sin with the body.

David’s curiosity for books and knowledge is insatiable.  One of my favorite moments in the book is when David finishes reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  He’s at a cabin on a lake with his family for an August holiday.  He spends a moment reflecting on how great the book is and how his understanding has changed because of it.  Then he goes back into the cabin to find another book to read.  I’m not nearly as prodigious in my reading or intellect as David, but I still relate to his curiosity.  I want to learn about so many things.  This blog is the testament to my curiosity, the place where I lay out what I am learning and starting to think.

In the end is his beginning.  David pursues his studies of the Bible as literature to the tremendous disappointment of his parents.  I’m about to embark on my own intellectual journey on a smaller scale.  Though practically having majored in Bible while at Bible college, I’ve never seriously grappled with any modern scholarship.  I’d like to know what scholars have to say about where the Bible came from and who the original audience for it was.  It’s important to my faith that I seek the truth about the book that is the vehicle for my knowledge of God.  I’m planning on reading through James L. Kugel’s How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture Then and Now, in which he attempts to thread the needle between ancient interpreters and modern biblical scholars.  In his designation, the ancient interpreters are the basis for today’s traditional understandings of the Bible, while modern biblical scholars arose about 150 years ago and are those who read the Bible “‘scientifically’ and without presuppositions” (xiii).  I assume he means the presupposition of belief in its literal truth and divine origin, which in itself would be a presupposition.  I’ll have to read more to find out exactly what he means (chapter One is helpfully titled “The Rise of Modern Biblical Scholarship”).  I say that he is threading the needle because he claims traditional faith, even as he wrestles with scholarship that “contradict[s] the accepted teachings of Judaism and Christianity” (xvi).  Kugel, by his own account, is a modern David Lurie.  I’d like to find out what he has learned in his journey.  I’ll report back on my own journey.

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personal

Hospital Stories (3)

A few years ago I worked at a hospital as a constant observer.  It was a transitional job as I tried to figure out the next step of my life. What exactly is a constant observer?  one might reasonably ask.  A constant observer is basically a nurse’s aide who stays in one room to be with patients who might be a harm to themselves or others. Hospitals try very hard not to tie people down on their beds anymore.  There are a lot of reasons I might be assigned to a patient: dementia, adverse reaction to medication, brain injury, detoxing, or suicide watch, to name some.  I saw people at their most vulnerable state.  This is the third in what I plan to be a series of vignettes on my experiences in the hospital.

The moment I step into the room she’s in the middle of packing to leave. She’s already kicked her sister out that morning (after calling 911 twice). Her therapies for the day have been canceled. I convince her to take a walk with me around the unit, but when she gets back to the room she keeps packing. It’s not going to be an easy day.

She carries her bag out to the hall and looks for the exit in another patient room. She sets her bag down because it’s heavy with her hair products, magazines, and clothes. Her nurse manages to take her on another walk around the unit while holding her hand. Her nurse is very good with her and has a calming influence (and medication). When she comes back she takes a nap for a half hour (like I said, medication). When she wakes up she’s fairly calm and normal again for half an hour or so. Then she realizes her washer/dryer aren’t there, so they must have been stolen. Obviously I am involved in their disappearance.

The day before she had blown up at me when she couldn’t find her appointment book. I had tried to explain that her sister was holding on to it while she was in the hospital and had called many of her clients to let them know of the situation. She was in the hospital because of a brain aneurysm. She accused her sister of trying to ruin her business, and then she said I had taken her sister’s side and that I should just stay out of her family business. She had trusted me, and she thought I was couth. The nurse was able to calm her down, and later in the day I came back in the room and she had totally forgotten the incident.

Whenever she wasn’t mad at me, she treated me like a confidante. She would complain to me and talk bad about anyone after they left the room. While the nurse or aide was in the room, she would act relatively nice and compliant, but as soon as they left the room she would launch into them. Everyone was bitchy, or would cut your throat, or was snotty. I wondered what she said about me when I wasn’t in the room.

Later that day, right before I was off for the night, she looked for her cigarettes. I tried to explain that she didn’t have any because there was no smoking allowed in the hospital, but she said they had been in the drawer and now they weren’t so I must have stolen them and thrown them away. She walked out of her room and then right back in, but when she came back she wouldn’t look at me. She faced the other direction, towards her bed and the window, with her arms crossed. The night shift came in while this was going on. I slunk out of the room, escaping her silent accusations.

So now we’re back together again, and she’s upset about the missing washer and dryer. She goes to the bathroom, and when I ask if she’s okay in there (she could be unsteady at times) she comments that she can’t even go to the bathroom without a guard. Then she storms out in the hall and one of the aides asks where she’s going. The aide offers to show her the washing machine on the unit. This doesn’t satisfy her She wants hers, so she’d rather leave the hospital.

The aide turns off the WanderGuard alarm as we leave the unit (the woman had on a tracking anklet since a previous escape attempt). We try to direct her back around to the unit, but instead the woman bolts right towards the elevators. She hits the down button but then looks towards the windows at the winter landscape (a feint, I later realize). The aide goes back to get help. I stay, hoping I can delay her from getting any farther, but then the elevator door opens. I don’t want her to get to it in time, but she reaches a hand in just before it closes. I try to steady her/restrain her, but she shrugs me off and then glares at me because I was touching her. She tells me not to do it again. She’s seething with fury at me.

Once in the elevator she hits the ground floor button, and I keep hitting the open door button. It starts beeping loudly, so I let it go. We travel down, and I worry how I am going to stop her from going out the front door. It’s zero degrees outside with a wind chill even lower. I’m in a near panic about what to do. When we get to the ground floor she tells me she’ll yell if I touch her. I keep thinking about how to delay her or call security. I somehow manage to divert her to the information desk. She wants to complain about her treatment, but she has to wait because there is someone ahead of her. Then she sees her niece’s boyfriend and I see the niece and I motion almost frantically for her to come over. I’m so relieved that she happens to be there at that moment. She talks to her aunt, soothing her, and leads her back to the elevator.

Back on the unit, her nurse talks to her as well. I stay away for an hour. I sit in the nurses’ station and try to soothe my nerves. I’m tense and almost shaking. I go back to her room as her dinner arrives. She’s completely forgotten the incident and isn’t mad at me or anything. She falls asleep soon after dinner and sleeps nearly the whole night through. I find out later she does get up in the night for 40 minutes or so and apparently thinks the sink in her room is an oven and tries to light the gas burner.

Coda: The next day we watch a marathon of “What Not to Wear” on TLC together.

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literature, personal

10 Books

Not too long ago on Facebook, there was a meme making the rounds of 10 books that made an impression; basically an excuse to list one’s favorite books. I’m a sucker for lists and list-making. No one asked me to make a list, so I figured I’d do one for the blog, with explanations. I’m following the guide of books that made an impression, rather than my ten favorite books (which would be hard to figure out). I’m putting them in the approximate order that I read them.

Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley
Perhaps the first book I read by an African American, and considering I was a freshman in college when I read it, that is very sad. Given to me by my sister, a beat up paperback held together with a rubber band. I remember being struck by many moments in the book, first of which was young Malcolm being told by a teacher that he couldn’t be a lawyer when he grew up, instead he should plan on something more realistic. Another moment was his descriptions of getting a “conk,” a lye treatment to straighten his hair. It opened my eyes to a cultural experience that I had never imagined (and later learned even more about when I saw Chris Rock’s Good Hair). I hope to have a lot more to say about Malcolm X soon as I’d like to read the recent biography by Manning Marable.

A Brief History of Time (Stephen Hawking)
I’ve talked about this book previously and how it changed my views on the universe. Until I read it, I felt comfortable in my insulated worldview of a young universe created approximately 10,000 years ago. It shook everything up.

Rose (Li-Young Lee)
This collection of poems, Lee’s first, is important to me personally for two reasons. I can’t remember reading a contemporary poet’s collection before this one. I was drawn in by the poems about memory and inheritance. It’s a lovely collection. But even more importantly, it was the first gift I gave to my future wife (that and a mix CD—ha! remember those?)

The Things They Carried (Tim O’Brien)
Searing Vietnam stories that show the power of storytelling in the aftermath of trauma. That doesn’t make it sound nearly as good as it actually is. Memory shifts, unbalancing the reader. And the stories accumulate and adhere and echo, and the fiction all becomes more true.

The Blind Assassin (Margaret Atwood)
Layers of fiction where a novel within a novel is more true than the story the narrator of the main novel tells. I’m not sure if I still go for that kind of book, but at the time I read it, I was fascinated by the slipperiness of truth, and how we tell ourselves stories (even bold fictions) to make sense of our lives.

Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith (Kathleen Norris)
This book came at an important time in my life. I had recently moved to North Dakota as a grad student and didn’t know anybody there. I was looking for a different church experience and found comfort in the Episcopal service. I also found Norris, first The Cloister Walk and then Amazing Grace. She talked about Christian community that was rooted in history, tradition, and literature. Her books, too, were comforting.

So Long, See You Tomorrow (William Maxwell)
When I first read So Long, See You Tomorrow, I didn’t imagine Maxwell would become my favorite author. I read it too quickly for a class assignment. But I read it again on my own, and then his other novels and stories. I don’t think I’ve come across a writer with so much empathy and compassion for other people. And he writes such beautiful sentences.

Virtually Normal (Andrew Sullivan)
This book (along with What God Has Joined Together by David Myers and Letha Dawson Scanzoni) made me rethink gay marriage. I realized that disallowing gays and lesbians from traditions and social institutions and then condemning them for not conforming to traditions and social institutions makes no sense. And I’m not the only one. Public opinion on gay marriage has changed quite a bit since he wrote the book in the mid-90s.

My Antonia (Willa Cather)
This is a beautiful coming of age story set on the American prairie, tinged with sadness. The title character is only seen at a distance, through the eyes of the narrator Jim Burden. It’s a story told in episodes, much the way our memory works. I supposedly read it in high school, but I had trouble reading for class back then. I read a lot on my own, but I didn’t like being told to read a book. I rediscovered the book shortly before moving to South Dakota. I wanted to read a novel of the prairie, and I ended up falling in love with Cather’s books.

My Name Is Asher Lev (Chaim Potok)
It was hard to choose which Potok book for this list. I’ve only read three of his so far, but I’ve loved each of them (and I just started a fourth). This was the first one I read, and our oldest son’s middle name is Asher. What I love about Potok is that he takes religious belief seriously in his characters. Though his characters live in the world of Hasidim and Orthodox Judaism I can see the similarities and parallels in the fundamentalism I grew up in. Purity and piety are prized above all else. There is no room for art because it is dangerous. Asher Lev wrestles with the twin pulls of God and artistic expression in this beautiful novel. Perhaps I’ll manage to have something worthwhile to say about the current book I’m reading in the near future. I hope not to take so long between posts in the future.

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poetry

Two poems and an explanation

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year’s horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

(James Wright, “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota”)

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

(Rainer Maria Rilke, “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” trans. Stephen Mitchell)

Last week I received a mysterious call from Pine Island, MN. After listening to the voicemail, my confusion cleared. It was the basement waterproofers calling to confirm the dates of the work crew coming. But the mention of Pine Island on my phone’s caller ID made me think of the poem by Wright, which in turn made me think of its cousin, the poem by Rilke. Both poems turn on their last line and go big. Definitely ending with a bang and not a whimper. One a pronouncement of regret, the other a call to arms. It’s the kind of trick a poet can only pull off once; to try it again would be to negate its effect. I almost feel that putting them side by side like this does the same thing, canceling each other out. So why put them together? Their differences are interesting. One is an encounter with nature, the other with art. In one, the viewer is ignored by the surroundings; in the other, the viewer cannot escape the gaze of the sculpture. In the first, the speaker despairs; in the latter the speaker compels the listener to transform.

While I like these two poems very much, the bold pronouncements they end with don’t appeal to me as much as they did when I was younger. It’s not that I’m immune to the warning of wasting my life and the exhortation to change, it’s just that I’m more likely to listen to a quieter voice now. Does this mean that I’ve grown complacent, settling into middle age? I don’t like to think so, but it’s hard to rule out. Now I’m a homeowner who has to call specialists to help us keep water out of our basement.

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personal

Hospital Stories (2)

A few years ago I worked at a hospital as a constant observer.  It was a transitional job as I tried to figure out the next step of my life.What exactly is a constant observer?  one might reasonably ask.  A constant observer is basically a nurse’s aide who stays in one room to be with patients who might be a harm to themselves or others. Hospitals try very hard not to tie people down on their beds anymore.  There are a lot of reasons I might be assigned to a patient: dementia, adverse reaction to medication, brain injury, detoxing, or suicide watch, to name some.  I saw people at their most vulnerable state. This is the second in what I plan to be a series of vignettes on my experiences in the hospital.

The call light was on. Normally I was assigned to one room to care for a patient who might be a harm to themselves. But now I was on a wing of an understaffed department, assisting where I could. I ducked into the room to see how I could be of use.

“Hi, my name is Andy, and I’m one of the nurse aides on this floor. How can I help you?”

She looked surprised and frustrated (and maybe annoyed) to see me. Her nurse, a woman (the nurses are almost all women, that goes for nurse aides, too), had been in the room less than five minutes ago. The patient had just come out of surgery about a half hour ago. She looked to be in her mid-40s. The bed was uncomfortable. The instructions were for her to lie on her back, completely straight, for four hours and not to bend her leg. Her nurse had set the blood pressure cuff to measure her systolic and diastolic every fifteen minutes per usual post-op procedure. She had a peripheral IV of saline.

“How am I supposed to go to the bathroom?” A reasonable question.

A man at the bedside (her husband? her brother?) chimed in, “She’s not supposed to get up because of the surgery.”

“Oh, well, then you’ll have to use a bedpan. I’ll get one.” No one likes to use a bedpan.

I brought back a pan and a towel from the service center. I was trying to be a professional. Most of my experience with assisting toileting involved helping people who were out of it or elderly. She looked disapprovingly at me. I could tell she did not want me to help her pee. I didn’t really want to help her pee. But everyone else was busy. I didn’t want to have to ask anyone else to come to the room after I had answered the call light. I shifted my weight from one leg to the other. “Would you prefer that a woman assist you?”

“Yes.” She nodded.

The man looked at me as if I hadn’t even been an option.

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history

The Scopes trial and Christian subculture

One last time about Summer for the Gods and the Scopes trial (parts 1 and 2 here and here). But first a quick recap: In 1925, spurred on by Christian fundamentalists, the state of Tennessee outlawed the teaching of evolution. The ACLU wanted to show the law was unconstitutional, so they worked with John Scopes in the small town of Dayton as a test case. He was brought to trial for teaching evolution, thus breaking the law. William Jennings Bryan, a former politician and a leader in the anti-evolution movement, joined the prosecution against Scopes. Clarence Darrow, a defense attorney and famous atheist, joined the defense team.

During the trial, antievolutionists felt that the media was biased against them, and they were right. Most newspapers in the country stated that they were for Darrow and the defense. And it wasn’t just the Scopes trial. There were creation-evolution debates back then just as now, and creationists such as George McCready Price (a precursor to Henry Morris and John Whitcomb, writers of The Genesis Flood) complained that the press didn’t acknowledge when they won a debate. Larson points out that media bias probably wasn’t malicious (aside from the obvious attackers like H.L. Mencken), but rather “due to its insensitivity to faith-based arguments” (125). This makes sense: most outsiders don’t understand the intricacies of another group’s thought system or values.

Though Scopes was the defendant, the defense team went on the offensive against a narrow reading of Genesis. Darrow asked that Bryan be put on the witness stand as an expert on the Bible. Against the advice of the rest of the prosecution, Bryan thought it would be a good idea to defend Biblical literalism in the public forum. Darrow took the opportunity to attack every aspect of the Bible, forcing Bryan to defend every miracle or hard question (i.e. Where did Cain’s wife come from? or How could Jonah survive three days inside a whale?). He eventually pushed Bryan so far that he had to repeatedly admit that he didn’t know or couldn’t explain how the event took place as described in the Bible. As for the Genesis account of creation he had to admit: “I believe in creation as there told, and if I am not able to explain it I will accept it” (189). Bryan had defended his faith, even if he couldn’t explain it on all points, but most media saw his reticence as a failure in the face of scientific explanations.

Because they didn’t think they were getting a fair shake with the media, “[a]ntievolutionists increasingly turned to interdenominational journals and publishers to communicate their side of the story” (127). In the immediate aftermath of the Scopes case, both sides declared victory. The antievolution prosecution could claim victory because the jury agreed with them and convicted Scopes. The defense claimed the moral victory that their ideas had triumphed when Clarence Darrow humiliated William Jennings Bryan on the witness stand. Larson shows that it took quite some time for the latter narrative to take hold as the consensus view, aided especially by the play and movie Inherit the Wind, a highly fictionalized version of the trial that really was more about the communist witch hunts of the 1950s (much like Arthur Miller’s The Crucible) than the Scopes trial of 1925.

The Scopes trial highlighted the fissure between modernists and fundamentalists in many denominations and seminaries at the time. Fundamentalists increasingly withdrew from the broader culture and “set about constructing a separate subculture with independent religious, educational, and social institutions” (233). This is the subculture I grew up in, one that only accepted the Young Earth Creationist account. It was also a subculture that was separate and removed from the broader culture, which is how I could seriously never encounter anyone who entertained the notion of an old earth or evolution.

The Christian subculture I grew up in was all-encompassing. I attended private Christian school. On Sundays we attended morning and evening services at church. Wednesdays were prayer meeting. For a grade school boy like me, we had Christian Service Brigade, a more Christian version of Boy Scouts. Brigade had summer camp, which I attended four different times. When I was in junior and senior high we had Wednesday evening youth group. The youth group had socials, took missions trips, and attended the big youth conference for our denomination. For entertainment I read Christian fiction from the Christian bookstore. It wasn’t all that I read, but I did read a number of books by Frank Peretti and the like (my reading habits as a high schooler may be a topic I return to, and for those who don’t know, Peretti’s best known work This Present Darkness is a novel of spiritual warfare between angels and demons). I mostly listened to Christian music, and I wrestled with my conscience when I sometimes listened to secular music. In junior high, I had a dubbed copy of Amy Grant’s secular album Heart in Motion, but I taped over it when I became convicted that secular music was sinful. In high school I eased up on some of my conviction about secular music a little bit, but the majority of my music listening was Christian (or religiously friendly like U2).

Christian fundamentalists perceive that media is against them so they in return reject much media and have created and/or turned to their own alternate media. I was originally going to write on this interesting and worthy discussion, but my thoughts grew as I realized that Christian fundamentalists withdrew from more than just media but from the larger culture and set up their own subculture to replace it. Certainly there were elements of the subculture already in place before the Scopes trial, but the trial served as a wake-up call to fundamentalists that they had to train their believers in the true faith and that could only be done by withdrawing from the larger culture which was antagonistic to their faith.

Most important was setting up alternative education. Bryan College was founded in Dayton, Tennessee not long after the trial, and many other fundamentalist educational institutions sprang up with similar missions of upholding biblical inerrancy and a Young Earth interpretation of Genesis in the wake of the trial. The college I attended, formerly a high school, became a four-year Bible college in the 1930s, along with the wave of other institutions.

So this is the reason I find the Scopes trial so fascinating—the fact that it was a defining moment for American Christianity that led to the fundamentalist subculture that I grew up in. It was a defining battle in what later came to be defined as culture wars. Fundamentalists staked their position as being anti-evolution, and that stance led to a withdrawal in many other areas of life, from media and entertainment to education. They created an entire separate culture that paralleled the broader culture, but was antagonistic in many ways. It was and is an us vs. them mentality. These are all issues that I plan to return to in the future.

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personal, poetry

Forget the Words

I told you once to forget the words I say,
and I told you twice to remember that.
You told me you never listen anyway.

Most of the time my thoughts are on display,
written on my face, shallow and flat.
I told you to forget the words I say.

And then I asked you, “Parlez-vous Français?”
to find the difference between chien and chat.
You told me your French is rusty anyway.

So then I tried some Spanish andale!
But you never studied the other Lat-
in tongue—just forget the words I say.

Our languages never can convey
meaning beyond one little caveat—
you weren’t even listening anyway.

I love and hate you. I listen. I pray.
The words didn’t stir you; you still sat.
I told you to forget the words I say.
You told me you never listen anyway.

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