John Thomas ClarkOTHERINGSafe. Safe at last! Safe here in my own living room. No more falls going to work. Or at work. Retired now. After twenty years. Made it through twenty years in the classroom. Loathed having to leave teaching, but there was no choice; the falls were becoming more frequent. Not just missteps on root-lifted sidewalks. Not merely misjudging a curb height. Bookbags sticking out from under a desk... A heel coming down on a floored pencil... You heel a pebble and take it in stride, So, what to do? Days of watching soaps and game shows had no appeal. Luckily, there was the Queens College Homebound Program. This NYC educational innovation maintained that if a disabled person without physical access to the QC campus had a speaker telephone, he or she might attend college-level, credit-bearing undergraduate and graduate courses. Armed with a speakerphone, an Apple IIe computer, a tape recorder and a dowel stick with which to type, courses in Irish and Celtic Studies began to resonate off the walls of my home. Recent trips to Ireland in 1981 and 1984 to visit relatives known almost entirely through letters compelled me to avail of QC's vast educational array to learn more about the "Emerald Isle." As the considerate professors allowed themselves to be tethered to a stationary microphone, notes from their lectures in Irish history, anthropology, sociology, mythology, literature and poetry materialized on my computer screen as I listened while stabbing at the keyboard with my dowel stick. Embellished later by replaying the tape, these jottings were further enhanced by carbon copy notes generously taken down by a classmate sometimes heard on the phone but never seen. Ultimately, years later, they would provide the impetus for me to pen The Captivity of Patrick - a 700-page novel recounting the kidnapping, enslavement and eventual escape of St. Patrick from fifth-century Ireland. During a survey course of Irish poetry, when, unbidden and, for a lark, I completed a take-home test in verse, Professor McKenna suggested some poetry workshops with the staff of the QC English Department. At the beginning of these writing courses, I felt at sea with moonbeams and dewdrops, then swamped by relentless tides of sunrises and daffodils; feel-good poems were not going to float my boat, they were sinking it and I needed a life raft. Keats' advice to "fill every rift with ore" James Clarence Mangan (1803-1849), a Dublin poet, essayist and translator to whom Yeats paid homage, was a sad, melancholy man. A man susceptible to mood swings and depression, his most powerful poems were the patriotic laments for an idealized and free Ireland. Beaten down and scarred by life, some scholars maintain it was an unrequited love that sent him into his downward spiral. Very little sunshine penetrated the clouds of this man's life, and it was to his consequent gloomy output I was drawn, for I felt my love for life was growing unrequited as I became something other than what I'd been. Each passing year was slowly othering me more and more. In the beginning, you lose your balance, trip, The time-honored truism of "write what you know" surfaced. And there began the building of a fleet of life rafts. Some of these crafts were small, like blockade runners - poems about the ADLs of being disabled - turning the pages of a newspaper without the use of one's hands, picking up a dropped book, or wondering which muscle would be next to succumb to the disease. Others were like destroyers - the results of public encounters where I was told, "Gee, I've never seen anyone so old with this disease," or being told on taking a fall, 'It's too early in the day to be drunk." Still others were as large as aircraft carriers from which I'd launch attacks on NASA for attempting to find aliens in space with their Hubble telescopes when we've got aliens right here on earth awaiting discovery with our microscopes. Wishing to streamline my craft, I encountered various verse forms under the stewardship of Marie Ponsot and, through her, my fleet became poetic PT boats - sonnets. I delighted in their hit and run tactics. One hits the reader with a quirky or catchy title, makes a raid on the reader's thinking and runs off. What a challenge - to say what must be said, all in fourteen lines. Fred Buell helped me to outfit them with the armaments needed for runs on the poetic ocean; and Derek Mahon, who would, as Poetry Editor of The Recorder, later publish some of my sonnets, made sure the salvos I fired were launched from a seaworthy galley. A word... A proper beat... A pithy phrase On being the first student to graduate from the Queens College Homebound Program with a Master's Degree (in Creative Writing), life's encounters continued to provide fodder for my sense of "othering," like the parking attendant who upon seeing the blue handicap sign dangling from the rearview mirror told us where to "drop your handicap" before we parked. Sometimes a physician can prime the poetic pump like the one displaying me to a hospital amphitheater full of his colleagues who whispered to me, "We're all betting on what you've got." Sometimes it's a waitperson who on seeing the wheelchair assumes one can't speak and asks "What would he like to eat" or speaks slowly and loudly assuming one is hard of hearing. Other incidents can be humorous, though. On a visit to England, for our children aged eight and twelve at the time, a visit to Madame Tussaud's was called for, and the Chamber of Horrors a must-see. But that room was dark and crowded, and the slightest bump from someone would sprawl me. So, I leaned against a space at a dimly-lit wall, apparently very still, between two wall figures. Along came this woman, peering in at these figures, up close and personal. You can imagine what happened when she came nose to nose with me, and I gave her my most intimate wink. While I don't think of my life as a downward spiral as I've "othered", my life certainly has taken an upturn since I've been teamed with Lex - the best service dog in the world and about whom I've written The Joy of Lex - an upbeat romp, of seventy-two sonnets and a crown, which takes the reader through our training at Canine Companions for Independence, graduation, life at home and life in the outside world. While Lex works tirelessly for me performing such tasks as opening a door, turning on a light, tugging off a sock or picking up my dropped mouthstick, our life together is not always serious; it does have its lighter moments. Although he has even saved me from injury in a serious wheelchair mishap, perhaps the best boon he has provided is that he has enabled me to finally find and write about a positive dimension of a disability - that positive dynamic is Lex himself. New World Navigators |