Death hits hard, not only for the dying, but for those of us still alive. I’m pretty sure our understanding of death, our fear of it, changes the way we live.
For example, not long ago I was driving my car down an Ottawa street and pulled over, parking alongside a house on a residential street. I had received a text message from a relative and needed to return it. I sat motionless in the driver’s seat, my car idling, my head bowed looking at my smart phone, my thumbs working furiously. I was startled by a tapping on the passenger side window. It scared me. A man was crouched beside my car, smiling broadly. I rolled down the window.
‘SORRY,” he said very loudly. “I SAW YOU SITTING HER FROM MY KITCHEN WINDOWN AND HAD TO COME OUT AND CHECK ON YOU.”
“Thanks, I’m fine. Just texting. I thought I’d be safe for a change and pull over.”
“NO, HELL, DON’T APOLOGIZE. I COULDN’T HELP BUT CHECK ON YOU. SEE I USED TO LIVE OVER BY THE PARK. HAD A HOUSE OVER THERE, AND ONE DAY I WAS OUT IN MY YARD AND SAW AN OLD GUY SITTING IN HIS CAR REAL STILL , LIKE YOU, AND I JUST FIGURED, YOU KNOW, HE’S READING, OR WATCHING HIS GRAND KIDS PLAY ON THE SWINGS AND I DIDN’T THINK NOTHING OF IT.”
I wanted to finish my text but listened politely.
“AND THEN, LATER IN THE DAY, I REALIZED HE WAS STILL SITTING THERE! HADN’T MOVED! AND SO I WENT ON OVER THERE AND WOULDN’T YOU KNOW…”
“He was dead?”
“YOU GUESSED IT. DEADER THAN A FREAKIN DOORNAIL, RIGHT THERE ON THE STREET!!!” He said that even louder than capital letters can express.
“SHOOK ME UP I’LL TELL YOU. I DIDN’T HAVE A CELL PHONE, SO I TOLD THE KIDS IN THE PARK TO JUST KEEP PLAYING AND I WENT IN THE HOUSE AND CALLED THE POLICE. THEN I KEPT THE KIDS AWAY AS THEY GOT THE, YOU KNOW, AMBULANCE AND STUFF.”
“That must have been quite a shock.”
“YOU’RE NOT KIDDING IT WAS QUITE A SHOCK. I DON’T THINK I’VE BEEN THE SAME SINCE. AND YOU KNOW WHAT? I COULD TELL RIGHT AWAY HE WAS DEAD. I’D NEVER SEEN A DEAD PERSON, A REAL HUMAN BEING, BUT THERE WAS NO DOUBT I’M TELLING YOU. HE MUST HAVE BEEN DEAD ONLY A COUPLE HOURS OR MORE BUT I’M HERE TO TELL YOU HE WAS DEFINITELY GONE.”
“Well I’ll be gone in just a few minutes here myself, except I’m going to drive away. Sorry to bring up bad memories, but as you can see, I’m still breathing.”
The man at my car window laughed. He was a long good bye kind of a guy. He repeated parts of the same story just told, an abbreviated version, and laughed some more. He proved hard to get rid of. That’s an annoying habit, and one I hope I don’t fall into as time stretches out in the years to come. But finally he walked back to his house, I finished my text, and that was that. But it turned out to be an omen for things to come.
I’m sixty two. I’ll be sixty three in August. But it’s funny how our definition of old changes as we age. I’m learning about deaths in our community first now on Face Book. I don’t know what to think about that. It’s much the same as opening the newspaper to the obituary section and having the news of an old friend’s death slap you in the face, but there’s something creepy about seeing the news on your phone. Maybe I’ll get used to it. The Face Book post I first saw was from an old friend’s daughter, referring to missing her father. She was our first babysitter after our daughter was born. She’s now in her forties. And while I used to attend funeral services to console my friends who lost their parents, I’m now attending the funerals of friends. There’s a very big difference. My friends are like me.
The man whose funeral I attended died accidentally and alone in his home, his death discovered a short time later. He was sixty three. That’s so young. When I was moved up into the YSB office from a caseworker’s position, he took my place as the counselor in Ottawa. He had a great way with kids, and parents, and later used those same skills to work for the city enforcing building and other municipal codes. He was tactful. He spoke to people in a kind way. And he enjoyed life very much. Too much sometimes. He had a spark. And now he and that spark are gone.
Tuesday night I was in the shack listening to music and before I went into the house I checked my phone and found yet another fatal Face Book post. It was a post written by a young man, shared by his father, lamenting the loss of his grandmother. His grandmother was one of my first board presidents when I became director of YSB. I met her three years earlier when I first came to work at the agency. She was a single mother raising a family of four kids, which included twin junior high girls, and working very hard to make ends meet. No one would have blamed her if she said she didn’t have time to do charity work but she did it anyway. She served as a volunteer on this county’s first mental health board, was a charter member of YSB’s first board of directors, and went on to help United Way immensely. She was smart. She had drive and tenacity. She died suddenly, also alone in her home, of an acute condition still undetermined. She was seventy one. I now count that as very young also.
I am hungry for many more years of life. Just as I am anxious for this spring to arrive I am equally anticipating many more springs. I’d take twenty more or so, and more if I can retain enough brain cells to think and write. I’ll even live through winters like the last one to be alive for twenty more springs. In an attempt to avoid death I’ve finally heeded all the dire warnings and pulled over to text, just as I quit smoking thirty years ago and recently got serious about taking my cholesterol medication every day. I want to live a lot longer. I go so far as to expect to, as I’m sure my friends did. But in a flash they are gone.
It’s not that I saw these friends every day. I didn’t at all. Our lives took different paths. But we had a sort of bond because we worked together and knew each other in good ways. Whenever I saw either of my recently departed friends we would take time to talk, and catch up. We always talked about our families. I think we all cared deeply about our own kids, just as we cared about the kids YSB served. Couple of times a year we would run into each other and talk. When we last talked we didn’t know we would never talk again.
So it’s not that I’ll especially miss the contact with my recently departed, because it was so infrequent. It’s that the community seems now to be different without them. That may be a silly sentiment, and I don’t exactly know how to explain it, but I can’t shake it. They were here when I arrived. They were two of the people that made this town what it is. I know others step up to fill their shoes, but their lives had meaning, and they brought meaning to mine. I miss them already. I’m starting to lose my friends, and as I do I realize how much they mean to me. These deaths, and those sure yet to come, will not be easy by any means. It’s going to be painful. I didn’t see this coming.
Friday, March 28, 2014
Friday, March 21, 2014
We've Only Just Begun
In the category of coincidental and strange these two events both happened during this past week. On Wednesday night I was at church waiting in line for a bowl of soup at our Lenten service when I looked on the floor and saw a tiny slip of paper. I picked it up and found it was a fortune from a cookie. It read “All of us are ignorant, only on different subjects.” I put it in my pocket.
Thursday my wife brought home Chinese food from a local takeout joint and in it were two fortune cookies. I opened mine and found, for the first time ever, no fortune. It took me until today, when I found Wednesday’s fortune in my pocket, to put the two events together. I can only surmise that the message on the tiny paper I found the night before belonged in that empty cookie and was especially meant for me. We all know, or should, that we’re ignorant, but it’s good to be reminded.
And now to the week’s main event:-the primary election. I was an election judge for the first time. Why? That’s a good question. My Mom was an election judge. I grew up in a part of Illinois where there were so few Democrats it’s possible everyone with that affiliation worked the polls. I’d served as a poll watcher for a couple of elections, including Obama’s election six years ago, so I was familiar with what went on. I believe we all need to be involved in our political system, and this was a way to do so. So I applied to be a judge. I don’t think they turn many people down.
There must be a balance you know, in Illinois’ system, of a Democratic judge for every Republican judge. In the precinct I worked, not the one in which I vote, I served with two Republican judges, a middle aged couple who had been working elections for a very long time, and a seventeen year old from a local rural high school. I think it’s smart to involve young people. He was excited to have been selected as a judge, to have the day off school, and to enjoy 4G on his smart phone all day. He and I were lucky to be serving with veterans who were nice people that knew what they were doing and helped us learn.
Every judge attends a training every year and receives a handbook of rules that outline their duties and details every part of what happens at the polling places; when to allow provisional ballots, how to operate the ballot reading machine, how to care for the ballots, how far from the door of the polling place campaign materials may be displayed, how and to administer the oath and to whom. I had no idea. On paper it’s intimidating but in practice it went very smoothly. The training for judges was conducted by our County Clerk, whom we also elect. She knows her stuff and is a hands on county official. If we had a question her office was a phone call away and they answered immediately. In addition they sent people to the polling place to ask us how things were going. I was impressed.
There is no head judge but rather we make decisions as a group on a consensus model. Duties are segregated so that Democratic and Republican judges share them equally. The ballots and the system for counting them are closely monitored and controlled with lots of checks and balances. The count on the machine must agree with the number of ballots distributed and the number of ballot requests singed by registered voters on the spindle. There are lots of ways to make sure everything is in order. It works. The only feasible opportunity I can imagine for fraud in the system would be collusion among judges to stuff the box with ballots of people who did not vote. I worked in a large hall that served as the polling place for six West side Ottawa precincts. Looking at the people serving as judges in those precincts, many of whom I knew, there’s just no way that would occur. From observing who showed up at the training and at the precincts as judges I know good people are involved. I can’t speak for the rest of the state, but here in LaSalle County I’m confident we have the concept of free and orderly elections under control. I have a new respect for the process. Developing democracies should be so lucky.
Not that elections are cheap. Election judges are paid. I don’t know all the costs to running an election but if there are four judges at each precinct, the cost of judges being reimbursed for their efforts in the 119 precincts in LaSalle County alone is a little over $57,.000. That does not count printing costs of all the many ballots, the investment and maintenance involved in the voting machines, and other things of which I’m sure I’m not aware.
Very few of us voted in this primary. LaSalle County has a population of 112,973. Of those 66,775 are registered to vote. Between early voting and Tuesday’s showing 12,244 ballots were cast for an 18% turnout. In the precinct I worked 579 voters are registered and 74 of them voted, for just under 13%. That’s low by every standard. Republican ballots were taken by 45 voters, Democratic ballots by 29. That’s not to say there were Republicans or Democrats in those numbers, it only reflects the ballot they chose to take that day.
Of course in Illinois you must request either a Republican or Democratic ballot. I gather from Face Book that bothers people. I honestly don’t know the arguments for and against that practice. I do know that a lot of people crossed over, or took ballots of the opposite party in order to participate in another contest. In Tuesday’s election that would be primarily Democrats taking Republican ballots in order to vote for a particular candidate for Governor, which I’m guessing would be Dillard over Rauner. I’m just guessing because it’s a secret ballot, but I’m fairly sure about the crossing over because it’s a small community and I knew many of the people voting.
People I’ve been with in Springfield identifying with and participating in Democratic party politics took Republican ballots, sometimes sheepishly, in order to influence the Republican gubernatorial race. My Republican election judge counterpart was especially interested in our precinct results for that contest. When he saw our little precinct had, at the end of a slow and boring day, Rauner winning by five votes he let out a worried sigh, taking it as an ominously bad sign. He proved right. Of course it all depends on how you look at it. His primary interest is as a state employee. He has been involved in AFSCME as a local union leader and fears a Rauner administration would be “a mess” for state employees. I’m guessing he may be right on that count as well. But we’ll have to see.
There are people of both parties in all kinds of occupations, with divergent views on every issue, who have as many different takes on politics as you can imagine. When we begin to generalize about each other according to what party we say we belong to we’re just fooling ourselves. Nothing and nobody is that simple. You are reminded of that when you give your neighbors their ballots. I know many of them as individuals, not Republicans or Democrats. As real people we are much too complex to be thought of as a package of beliefs espoused by the party with which we identify. That’s worth remembering I think. It is so convenient to pigeonhole each other, to think we know what other people believe because of a political label. Doing so is ignorant of human nature. And it’s good to realize our ignorance every so often, as a wise author in a fortune cookie factory once wrote.
Elections are humbling experiences because all kind of people vote-rich and poor, young and old, working and retired, professional and non professional, white and otherwise, informed and without a clue. It’s truly the people, warts and all, choosing for whatever reasons they hold dear, based on whatever information or lack of information they’ve gathered, who will represent them. It’s the collective us choosing them. It may not be pretty but it is certainly democratic. We’re hurt however when so few of us participate. It allows politicians to be chosen by too few. In elections I’m pretty sure the more voters the better.
Not that voting is an especially invigorating experience, especially in the primary. On the Democratic ballot there were virtually no contests. It was either no candidate or one candidate save for County Treasurer and State Central Committeeman. And few if any present in the hall Tuesday knew what a State Central Committeeman actually does. Conventional wisdom among the election judges I talked to, twenty of them or so, was that they act as the precinct committeeman’s committeeman in Springfield. We do not believe they get paid. At least we hope not.
I was interested in the County Treasurer’s race because one of the candidates running was a bright young man, the same age as my son, with a MBA and a desire to get involved. That’s rare and should be encouraged. I think there must be so many ways we can modernize and bring efficiencies to local government using the ideas, especially around technology, of smart young people. He won by a thin margin over an older candidate with some political experience and a good local name. That’s positive I think.
Other than those races there were no referenda and little actually happening. Aside from the Governor’s race on the Republican side their ballot was equally dull. We’re still electing both a State Comptroller and Treasurer, rather than combining those offices, for no apparent reason. We’re electing a Regional Superintendent of Schools. No issues arise concerning those offices. Few of us understand their duties. In LaSalle County we’re filling a large portion of our 29 County board member seats. At least we were spared the township elections. I’ve been told that in Illinois we elect more public officials than in any other state. I believe it.
It’s not a well oiled operation, Illinois politics, it’s clunky and old and due for an overhaul. But I think you have to be part of it, pay attention to it, and be ready to vote for change when change is needed. It starts with the primary. I’ll be there working at the general election too. I’ve sort of signed on for a cycle here. The silly season of election year politics is just getting underway. I’ll report again in November, or maybe once or twice along the way. Who knows what happens next?
Thursday my wife brought home Chinese food from a local takeout joint and in it were two fortune cookies. I opened mine and found, for the first time ever, no fortune. It took me until today, when I found Wednesday’s fortune in my pocket, to put the two events together. I can only surmise that the message on the tiny paper I found the night before belonged in that empty cookie and was especially meant for me. We all know, or should, that we’re ignorant, but it’s good to be reminded.
And now to the week’s main event:-the primary election. I was an election judge for the first time. Why? That’s a good question. My Mom was an election judge. I grew up in a part of Illinois where there were so few Democrats it’s possible everyone with that affiliation worked the polls. I’d served as a poll watcher for a couple of elections, including Obama’s election six years ago, so I was familiar with what went on. I believe we all need to be involved in our political system, and this was a way to do so. So I applied to be a judge. I don’t think they turn many people down.
There must be a balance you know, in Illinois’ system, of a Democratic judge for every Republican judge. In the precinct I worked, not the one in which I vote, I served with two Republican judges, a middle aged couple who had been working elections for a very long time, and a seventeen year old from a local rural high school. I think it’s smart to involve young people. He was excited to have been selected as a judge, to have the day off school, and to enjoy 4G on his smart phone all day. He and I were lucky to be serving with veterans who were nice people that knew what they were doing and helped us learn.
Every judge attends a training every year and receives a handbook of rules that outline their duties and details every part of what happens at the polling places; when to allow provisional ballots, how to operate the ballot reading machine, how to care for the ballots, how far from the door of the polling place campaign materials may be displayed, how and to administer the oath and to whom. I had no idea. On paper it’s intimidating but in practice it went very smoothly. The training for judges was conducted by our County Clerk, whom we also elect. She knows her stuff and is a hands on county official. If we had a question her office was a phone call away and they answered immediately. In addition they sent people to the polling place to ask us how things were going. I was impressed.
There is no head judge but rather we make decisions as a group on a consensus model. Duties are segregated so that Democratic and Republican judges share them equally. The ballots and the system for counting them are closely monitored and controlled with lots of checks and balances. The count on the machine must agree with the number of ballots distributed and the number of ballot requests singed by registered voters on the spindle. There are lots of ways to make sure everything is in order. It works. The only feasible opportunity I can imagine for fraud in the system would be collusion among judges to stuff the box with ballots of people who did not vote. I worked in a large hall that served as the polling place for six West side Ottawa precincts. Looking at the people serving as judges in those precincts, many of whom I knew, there’s just no way that would occur. From observing who showed up at the training and at the precincts as judges I know good people are involved. I can’t speak for the rest of the state, but here in LaSalle County I’m confident we have the concept of free and orderly elections under control. I have a new respect for the process. Developing democracies should be so lucky.
Not that elections are cheap. Election judges are paid. I don’t know all the costs to running an election but if there are four judges at each precinct, the cost of judges being reimbursed for their efforts in the 119 precincts in LaSalle County alone is a little over $57,.000. That does not count printing costs of all the many ballots, the investment and maintenance involved in the voting machines, and other things of which I’m sure I’m not aware.
Very few of us voted in this primary. LaSalle County has a population of 112,973. Of those 66,775 are registered to vote. Between early voting and Tuesday’s showing 12,244 ballots were cast for an 18% turnout. In the precinct I worked 579 voters are registered and 74 of them voted, for just under 13%. That’s low by every standard. Republican ballots were taken by 45 voters, Democratic ballots by 29. That’s not to say there were Republicans or Democrats in those numbers, it only reflects the ballot they chose to take that day.
Of course in Illinois you must request either a Republican or Democratic ballot. I gather from Face Book that bothers people. I honestly don’t know the arguments for and against that practice. I do know that a lot of people crossed over, or took ballots of the opposite party in order to participate in another contest. In Tuesday’s election that would be primarily Democrats taking Republican ballots in order to vote for a particular candidate for Governor, which I’m guessing would be Dillard over Rauner. I’m just guessing because it’s a secret ballot, but I’m fairly sure about the crossing over because it’s a small community and I knew many of the people voting.
People I’ve been with in Springfield identifying with and participating in Democratic party politics took Republican ballots, sometimes sheepishly, in order to influence the Republican gubernatorial race. My Republican election judge counterpart was especially interested in our precinct results for that contest. When he saw our little precinct had, at the end of a slow and boring day, Rauner winning by five votes he let out a worried sigh, taking it as an ominously bad sign. He proved right. Of course it all depends on how you look at it. His primary interest is as a state employee. He has been involved in AFSCME as a local union leader and fears a Rauner administration would be “a mess” for state employees. I’m guessing he may be right on that count as well. But we’ll have to see.
There are people of both parties in all kinds of occupations, with divergent views on every issue, who have as many different takes on politics as you can imagine. When we begin to generalize about each other according to what party we say we belong to we’re just fooling ourselves. Nothing and nobody is that simple. You are reminded of that when you give your neighbors their ballots. I know many of them as individuals, not Republicans or Democrats. As real people we are much too complex to be thought of as a package of beliefs espoused by the party with which we identify. That’s worth remembering I think. It is so convenient to pigeonhole each other, to think we know what other people believe because of a political label. Doing so is ignorant of human nature. And it’s good to realize our ignorance every so often, as a wise author in a fortune cookie factory once wrote.
Elections are humbling experiences because all kind of people vote-rich and poor, young and old, working and retired, professional and non professional, white and otherwise, informed and without a clue. It’s truly the people, warts and all, choosing for whatever reasons they hold dear, based on whatever information or lack of information they’ve gathered, who will represent them. It’s the collective us choosing them. It may not be pretty but it is certainly democratic. We’re hurt however when so few of us participate. It allows politicians to be chosen by too few. In elections I’m pretty sure the more voters the better.
Not that voting is an especially invigorating experience, especially in the primary. On the Democratic ballot there were virtually no contests. It was either no candidate or one candidate save for County Treasurer and State Central Committeeman. And few if any present in the hall Tuesday knew what a State Central Committeeman actually does. Conventional wisdom among the election judges I talked to, twenty of them or so, was that they act as the precinct committeeman’s committeeman in Springfield. We do not believe they get paid. At least we hope not.
I was interested in the County Treasurer’s race because one of the candidates running was a bright young man, the same age as my son, with a MBA and a desire to get involved. That’s rare and should be encouraged. I think there must be so many ways we can modernize and bring efficiencies to local government using the ideas, especially around technology, of smart young people. He won by a thin margin over an older candidate with some political experience and a good local name. That’s positive I think.
Other than those races there were no referenda and little actually happening. Aside from the Governor’s race on the Republican side their ballot was equally dull. We’re still electing both a State Comptroller and Treasurer, rather than combining those offices, for no apparent reason. We’re electing a Regional Superintendent of Schools. No issues arise concerning those offices. Few of us understand their duties. In LaSalle County we’re filling a large portion of our 29 County board member seats. At least we were spared the township elections. I’ve been told that in Illinois we elect more public officials than in any other state. I believe it.
It’s not a well oiled operation, Illinois politics, it’s clunky and old and due for an overhaul. But I think you have to be part of it, pay attention to it, and be ready to vote for change when change is needed. It starts with the primary. I’ll be there working at the general election too. I’ve sort of signed on for a cycle here. The silly season of election year politics is just getting underway. I’ll report again in November, or maybe once or twice along the way. Who knows what happens next?
Thursday, March 13, 2014
Finding your Place
Remember that young man I bailed out of jail one of those many cold nights this winter? I’m still in touch with him, trying most lately get him proper identification. He has none, zippo, and finds without it he can do very little-buy a bus ticket, open a bank account, fill a prescription, get a job, and so on. How he came to be living without identification is, he says, a long story.
Actually, it’s not long at all. In the interest of personal safety, as in, I’m convinced, fearing for his life, he walked away from an apartment which had in it his driver’s license, birth certificate, social security card, high school transcript, a manila folder with the important papers we all have somewhere, usually entrusted to us when by our parents after reaching adulthood. In addition to those items he also walked away from everything he owned. Ran away is likely a more accurate verb to apply to what happened back then, far from here. How he found himself in that predicament probably is a long story, and I don’t want to hear it. But from what little I gather running away may well have been a good decision. But it left him nameless, paperless, cardless, without identify. Surprisingly he found an employer and a job that required none of that for a short while. But that was months and months ago. Now he’s unemployed and pretty much stranded.
I’ve always had all the documents I needed to prove myself a legitimate person with a traceable past. However I did get one of those jobs, like my young friend, that required nothing but a strong back and showing up. While traveling in Europe I found myself in Aberdeen, Scotland working some low level but real job in an urban lumber yard, having failed to get onto an oil rig in the North Sea as planned. In a bar I met three Irish kids new to town who had made their way up North hoping to work for a guy they knew from back home, County Cork I think, who was assembling a crew to do the dirty work of laying a natural gas pipeline North of Aberdeen by a town called Peterhead. They invited me to come along.
We ended up outside a tiny house late at night on a dark street in a bad part of Aberdeen, the light from inside the house blocked by a very big man in the doorway. I stood behind the Irishmen as they introduced themselves, referencing relatives of the man they knew from a community back home, whom he recognized. He shook their hands and told them the corner where they should meet the bus in the morning to take them to the job.
“And we met this Yankee,” the most talkative of the three said, “who looks like he could work. Grew up on a farm he tells us.”
He stepped aside so the man could see me better. He looked me over without smiling, not saying a word. When he did speak he spoke to them not me.
“Well he’s big enough. Bring him along.”
That ended the shortest job interview in my life. There was an oil boom in the North Sea, labor was in short supply, and the man hiring us that night was there to deliver able bodies to work. He had just included mine.
I worked that job till the weather, mostly rain and mud, shut it down. At noon each Friday while it lasted the man that hired me came out to the job in the Scottish lowland countryside in a tweed sport coat, its pockets bulging with cash. His assistant, a fast talking little man with a squeaky voice, called out our names and the foreman in the field, consulting a dirty list he kept in his shirt pocket, confirmed how many days we worked that week. The man then counted out an appropriate wad of paper notes, each man stepped forward to take his pay, and we went back to work. They never called my name. When it came my turn the man with the squeaky voice simply yelled
“Yankee!”
After which I walked up and got my money. It was a simple arrangement. I did think from time to time that if the Caterpillar tractors with side mounted booms, while swinging the big pipes up onto the timbers we stacked as a platform in the mud on which they were welded, had hit me in the head and killed me they would never know who I was. Maybe my Irish friends would alert the people at the hostel where I lived and they would find my passport. Hard telling what would have happened. Needless worry. As you can tell I made it through that experience just fine.
As did my young friend, who successfully negotiated a similar but safer experience in America on his own. As far as I can tell that stands as one of the few successes of his life. But he finds himself today in a different time and place. Without ID in this century he is less than invisible, he’s suspect. So I set out to help him become authentic, a real person once again, with papers. At times he’s skeptical, but cooperative. His demeanor is of a person beaten down. Hope barely flickers in his eyes when he talks about the future. I tell him making himself legitimate is his only chance to enjoy a decent life. I’m not sure he sees it.
He started with absolutely nothing that would identify him. Our first step was to go on line with the county in which he was born to order up a birth certificate. Not hard. He knew his birthday, his full name, his parent’s full names (including his Mom’s maiden name) and that was all it took, plus twenty dollars. Did it all on line with a credit card (not his).
Next we ordered a transcript from the high school he attended, a document which would contain his social security number. He didn’t graduate from that school mind you. He later got a GED from another school. That wasn’t what we were after. We were after a piece of paper from a legitimate place (schools have a solid sort of standing) that confirmed he was who he said he was and contained his social security number. We got that one fairly easily as well, after they received a personal check (not his either). The only complicated part was the confirmation process. They required a phone number in order to talk personally with the former student and confirm it was truly him requesting the document. Phone numbers are a mess for the poor these days.
He’s only been in town since last fall but I have in my phone at least five numbers for this kid. I’ve taken to entering the number, his name, and the month in which it’s active. He loses phones, runs out of minutes, gets old phones from people buying new ones, calls on the phones of friends. It’s a jumbled communication mess. His numbers are fluid, from month to month, or week to week. He texts me, because it’s cheaper, from an unrecognizable number and starts his message with
“Hey Dave, it’s me. Here’s my new number.”
I used to know the phone numbers of my friends and relatives by heart. They were land lines and the numbers never changed. They were in the phone book. I can still recall them. That’s over. We had to give his old school district a number so they could talk directly to him to verify his request. We did so and hoped the current connection lasted until they processed the application. It did. He texted me one day to say he’s just talked to someone at the school district office who “asked him a bunch of stuff” and predicted the transcript would arrive within five days. It did, in my mailbox.
Armed with that and the birth certificate, along with some bills indicating his address, we went to the Secretary of State’s office in Ottawa, took a number, and after a very short wait were called to the counter. This young man grew up in an urban area. “Back home you would wait hours to get called,” he said. Almost everyone realizes enjoys that advantage of small town life, or should. We take so much for granted.
His documents proved not enough to get a photo ID. We were given a list that designated acceptable proof of identity in each of four sections, and delineated what was not acceptable for each section. The residency section requires two documents, neither of which we had. Common to all the sections save for residency was a social security card. So we got in my car and headed to Peru to the relatively new Social Security office on Wenzel Road.
There were three people waiting including us, a security guard, and a couple of staff behind the counter. I have a new appreciation for the Social Security system since they began to deposit money in my bank account. I thought to myself that working for them must be a good job, Federal, with pensions. That being said the staff didn’t look all that happy.
The security guard showed us to a touch screen computer for a little machine interview. The first question was “Do you have an appointment?” to which my young friend answered no. Given the lack of folks waiting it didn’t appear that would be a problem. The security guard directed us to take a seat until we were called.
As we waited an older man, perhaps a little younger than me, with a very long beard, worn out boots, and a folder full of papers approached the counter after his name was called. He, like my young friend, was trying to establish his identify and get a new social security card. He presented his stuff with the pronouncement “this is all I have.” The woman behind the desk, who was curt, shuffled though the documents and told him it wasn’t good enough. She gave him a list similar, I guessed, to the one we were given at the Secretary of State’s office, and pointed out what he lacked.
“But I know my social security number,” he said. “And I’ve paid into social security.”
“Yes but how do I know that you are the person associated with that number, sir? You have not proven your identity.”
“But these papers are all I have.”
“You’ve said that several times but what you have is not sufficient.”
“Is there someone else I can talk to?”
“No one else will tell you any different. We have strict rules. Now please step away from the counter. We’ll be glad to help you when you produce the documents required on this list.”
There was a long pause finally broken by the woman behind the counter. “You can stare me down all you want sir, but we’re done here. I can call the security guard and you can be escorted out the door.”
He didn’t move. “Jack?” she announced loudly. “Will you please show this gentleman the door?”
The guy stayed at the desk. The security guard came over and talked to him about the list, pointing out that he would be best served by getting a birth certificate.
“But I was adopted,” he said.
“Then you‘ll need your adoption papers. What you need to do is to contact some of these places on the list who have your records, get them, and bring them here. We don’t look them up for you.”
The security guard was more helpful than the woman behind the counter. The bearded man turned and walked quickly out the door. He looked absolutely disgusted. Or was it defeated? Those looks can be a lot alike.
It was my young friend’s turn next. He breezed through. We had a newly issued birth certificate, a school transcript with his social security number on it, and that was all we needed. The woman behind the counter, much more pleasant than before, promised to mail a replacement card to my young friend’s current address. I cringed at that. He lives in an apartment with a relative and I’m not sure how secure the mailboxes are in that building. But mailing to that address might help establish residency for him. I warned him to find out when the mailman came and to check every day close to that time. Whether he will is anyone’s guess. But he seemed encouraged at the ease of the transaction.
“It’s going well because you’re getting your shit together,” I said, borrowing an old phrase from the sixties. “Once we get all your shit in one bag you’ll be ready to get on with a real life.”
As I watched that bearded old guy walk out of the social security office I realized that I didn’t want my young friend to be him. I didn’t want his life, thirty five years from now, to be one of what I imagined was constant struggle, and finding yourself entering the last part of your life with nothing to show for it. I shouldn’t judge. The old bearded man may have had a lifetime of rich experience and only recently fell on hard times. But I don’t think that’s the case. I think I saw the struggle in his eyes. I see that same despair sometimes in the face of my young friend, during this cold Illinois winter when nothing good has happened for him. I know how that feels.
I have never lost my passport or had a driver’s license get away from me. But I have had times in my life when I had no idea what I was going to do next. No hint of a plan, and no ambition to put one together. In that way I understand my young friend. He won’t even talk about the future unless I make him because it scares him. I don’t think he’s convinced he has one.
Even when I felt most uncertain of my future, like standing in the mud as a Yankee laborer in Scotland, I always felt I had assets. I had caring parents and stable family, an education, a work history, and some confidence. I got a good part of that confidence from being successful in jobs. I worked hard, they kept me on, and I was paid for my efforts. In addition to that I always felt I had skills.
What I want for my young friend, in addition to establishing his identity on paper, is to find an identity within himself. He needs to be successful at something, anything, so that he develops confidence in his ability to make his own way. He doesn’t start with my assets. His life has not followed the same path as mine, but then we all come from different places. I believe it is too late for no one. Keep your fingers crossed for this young man, and so many others like him. We all need for them to succeed.
Actually, it’s not long at all. In the interest of personal safety, as in, I’m convinced, fearing for his life, he walked away from an apartment which had in it his driver’s license, birth certificate, social security card, high school transcript, a manila folder with the important papers we all have somewhere, usually entrusted to us when by our parents after reaching adulthood. In addition to those items he also walked away from everything he owned. Ran away is likely a more accurate verb to apply to what happened back then, far from here. How he found himself in that predicament probably is a long story, and I don’t want to hear it. But from what little I gather running away may well have been a good decision. But it left him nameless, paperless, cardless, without identify. Surprisingly he found an employer and a job that required none of that for a short while. But that was months and months ago. Now he’s unemployed and pretty much stranded.
I’ve always had all the documents I needed to prove myself a legitimate person with a traceable past. However I did get one of those jobs, like my young friend, that required nothing but a strong back and showing up. While traveling in Europe I found myself in Aberdeen, Scotland working some low level but real job in an urban lumber yard, having failed to get onto an oil rig in the North Sea as planned. In a bar I met three Irish kids new to town who had made their way up North hoping to work for a guy they knew from back home, County Cork I think, who was assembling a crew to do the dirty work of laying a natural gas pipeline North of Aberdeen by a town called Peterhead. They invited me to come along.
We ended up outside a tiny house late at night on a dark street in a bad part of Aberdeen, the light from inside the house blocked by a very big man in the doorway. I stood behind the Irishmen as they introduced themselves, referencing relatives of the man they knew from a community back home, whom he recognized. He shook their hands and told them the corner where they should meet the bus in the morning to take them to the job.
“And we met this Yankee,” the most talkative of the three said, “who looks like he could work. Grew up on a farm he tells us.”
He stepped aside so the man could see me better. He looked me over without smiling, not saying a word. When he did speak he spoke to them not me.
“Well he’s big enough. Bring him along.”
That ended the shortest job interview in my life. There was an oil boom in the North Sea, labor was in short supply, and the man hiring us that night was there to deliver able bodies to work. He had just included mine.
I worked that job till the weather, mostly rain and mud, shut it down. At noon each Friday while it lasted the man that hired me came out to the job in the Scottish lowland countryside in a tweed sport coat, its pockets bulging with cash. His assistant, a fast talking little man with a squeaky voice, called out our names and the foreman in the field, consulting a dirty list he kept in his shirt pocket, confirmed how many days we worked that week. The man then counted out an appropriate wad of paper notes, each man stepped forward to take his pay, and we went back to work. They never called my name. When it came my turn the man with the squeaky voice simply yelled
“Yankee!”
After which I walked up and got my money. It was a simple arrangement. I did think from time to time that if the Caterpillar tractors with side mounted booms, while swinging the big pipes up onto the timbers we stacked as a platform in the mud on which they were welded, had hit me in the head and killed me they would never know who I was. Maybe my Irish friends would alert the people at the hostel where I lived and they would find my passport. Hard telling what would have happened. Needless worry. As you can tell I made it through that experience just fine.
As did my young friend, who successfully negotiated a similar but safer experience in America on his own. As far as I can tell that stands as one of the few successes of his life. But he finds himself today in a different time and place. Without ID in this century he is less than invisible, he’s suspect. So I set out to help him become authentic, a real person once again, with papers. At times he’s skeptical, but cooperative. His demeanor is of a person beaten down. Hope barely flickers in his eyes when he talks about the future. I tell him making himself legitimate is his only chance to enjoy a decent life. I’m not sure he sees it.
He started with absolutely nothing that would identify him. Our first step was to go on line with the county in which he was born to order up a birth certificate. Not hard. He knew his birthday, his full name, his parent’s full names (including his Mom’s maiden name) and that was all it took, plus twenty dollars. Did it all on line with a credit card (not his).
Next we ordered a transcript from the high school he attended, a document which would contain his social security number. He didn’t graduate from that school mind you. He later got a GED from another school. That wasn’t what we were after. We were after a piece of paper from a legitimate place (schools have a solid sort of standing) that confirmed he was who he said he was and contained his social security number. We got that one fairly easily as well, after they received a personal check (not his either). The only complicated part was the confirmation process. They required a phone number in order to talk personally with the former student and confirm it was truly him requesting the document. Phone numbers are a mess for the poor these days.
He’s only been in town since last fall but I have in my phone at least five numbers for this kid. I’ve taken to entering the number, his name, and the month in which it’s active. He loses phones, runs out of minutes, gets old phones from people buying new ones, calls on the phones of friends. It’s a jumbled communication mess. His numbers are fluid, from month to month, or week to week. He texts me, because it’s cheaper, from an unrecognizable number and starts his message with
“Hey Dave, it’s me. Here’s my new number.”
I used to know the phone numbers of my friends and relatives by heart. They were land lines and the numbers never changed. They were in the phone book. I can still recall them. That’s over. We had to give his old school district a number so they could talk directly to him to verify his request. We did so and hoped the current connection lasted until they processed the application. It did. He texted me one day to say he’s just talked to someone at the school district office who “asked him a bunch of stuff” and predicted the transcript would arrive within five days. It did, in my mailbox.
Armed with that and the birth certificate, along with some bills indicating his address, we went to the Secretary of State’s office in Ottawa, took a number, and after a very short wait were called to the counter. This young man grew up in an urban area. “Back home you would wait hours to get called,” he said. Almost everyone realizes enjoys that advantage of small town life, or should. We take so much for granted.
His documents proved not enough to get a photo ID. We were given a list that designated acceptable proof of identity in each of four sections, and delineated what was not acceptable for each section. The residency section requires two documents, neither of which we had. Common to all the sections save for residency was a social security card. So we got in my car and headed to Peru to the relatively new Social Security office on Wenzel Road.
There were three people waiting including us, a security guard, and a couple of staff behind the counter. I have a new appreciation for the Social Security system since they began to deposit money in my bank account. I thought to myself that working for them must be a good job, Federal, with pensions. That being said the staff didn’t look all that happy.
The security guard showed us to a touch screen computer for a little machine interview. The first question was “Do you have an appointment?” to which my young friend answered no. Given the lack of folks waiting it didn’t appear that would be a problem. The security guard directed us to take a seat until we were called.
As we waited an older man, perhaps a little younger than me, with a very long beard, worn out boots, and a folder full of papers approached the counter after his name was called. He, like my young friend, was trying to establish his identify and get a new social security card. He presented his stuff with the pronouncement “this is all I have.” The woman behind the desk, who was curt, shuffled though the documents and told him it wasn’t good enough. She gave him a list similar, I guessed, to the one we were given at the Secretary of State’s office, and pointed out what he lacked.
“But I know my social security number,” he said. “And I’ve paid into social security.”
“Yes but how do I know that you are the person associated with that number, sir? You have not proven your identity.”
“But these papers are all I have.”
“You’ve said that several times but what you have is not sufficient.”
“Is there someone else I can talk to?”
“No one else will tell you any different. We have strict rules. Now please step away from the counter. We’ll be glad to help you when you produce the documents required on this list.”
There was a long pause finally broken by the woman behind the counter. “You can stare me down all you want sir, but we’re done here. I can call the security guard and you can be escorted out the door.”
He didn’t move. “Jack?” she announced loudly. “Will you please show this gentleman the door?”
The guy stayed at the desk. The security guard came over and talked to him about the list, pointing out that he would be best served by getting a birth certificate.
“But I was adopted,” he said.
“Then you‘ll need your adoption papers. What you need to do is to contact some of these places on the list who have your records, get them, and bring them here. We don’t look them up for you.”
The security guard was more helpful than the woman behind the counter. The bearded man turned and walked quickly out the door. He looked absolutely disgusted. Or was it defeated? Those looks can be a lot alike.
It was my young friend’s turn next. He breezed through. We had a newly issued birth certificate, a school transcript with his social security number on it, and that was all we needed. The woman behind the counter, much more pleasant than before, promised to mail a replacement card to my young friend’s current address. I cringed at that. He lives in an apartment with a relative and I’m not sure how secure the mailboxes are in that building. But mailing to that address might help establish residency for him. I warned him to find out when the mailman came and to check every day close to that time. Whether he will is anyone’s guess. But he seemed encouraged at the ease of the transaction.
“It’s going well because you’re getting your shit together,” I said, borrowing an old phrase from the sixties. “Once we get all your shit in one bag you’ll be ready to get on with a real life.”
As I watched that bearded old guy walk out of the social security office I realized that I didn’t want my young friend to be him. I didn’t want his life, thirty five years from now, to be one of what I imagined was constant struggle, and finding yourself entering the last part of your life with nothing to show for it. I shouldn’t judge. The old bearded man may have had a lifetime of rich experience and only recently fell on hard times. But I don’t think that’s the case. I think I saw the struggle in his eyes. I see that same despair sometimes in the face of my young friend, during this cold Illinois winter when nothing good has happened for him. I know how that feels.
I have never lost my passport or had a driver’s license get away from me. But I have had times in my life when I had no idea what I was going to do next. No hint of a plan, and no ambition to put one together. In that way I understand my young friend. He won’t even talk about the future unless I make him because it scares him. I don’t think he’s convinced he has one.
Even when I felt most uncertain of my future, like standing in the mud as a Yankee laborer in Scotland, I always felt I had assets. I had caring parents and stable family, an education, a work history, and some confidence. I got a good part of that confidence from being successful in jobs. I worked hard, they kept me on, and I was paid for my efforts. In addition to that I always felt I had skills.
What I want for my young friend, in addition to establishing his identity on paper, is to find an identity within himself. He needs to be successful at something, anything, so that he develops confidence in his ability to make his own way. He doesn’t start with my assets. His life has not followed the same path as mine, but then we all come from different places. I believe it is too late for no one. Keep your fingers crossed for this young man, and so many others like him. We all need for them to succeed.
Friday, March 7, 2014
And I thought the snow was bad
I went to Springfield last week to attend a board meeting of our state association for youth service organizations. I’m starting my ninth month of retirement from a job in which I was closely linked to state budgets and funding for services for kids. The state was our biggest funder. Nearly every organization that serves abused, neglected, or troubled kids in a concrete and tangible way here in Illinois is in the same boat. I know it’s a perspective that will fade, that someday I will either forget or just stop feeling it. That being the perspective that makes you realize how important politics are to the community of not for profit agencies devoted by mission, rather than profit, to help communities stay whole and healthy. But I haven’t lost that perspective yet.
If you’re an agency exec or a board member responsible for a social service organization it’s easy, especially this year, to challenge those around you with these questions and this argument. “What do you want us to do? We don’t make the budgets. We don’t allocate the money. The legislators do. We do the best we can with what we’re given. We raise some money to put alongside the state funds, we do all we can with federal funds if we have them or can keep them, and we’re as efficient and as thrifty as we possibly can be. Isn’t that enough?”
The answer to that is, “No, it’s not.”
In the shadowy world of Illinois state government two powerful forces have combined to make the upcoming Fiscal Year 2015 budget (July 1, 2014-June 30, 2015) even more fictitious than normal. There’s an election cycle (a primary election in March and a general election in November) and a state income tax increase that goes away December 31, 2014 failing further legislative action. Read “go on record as voting for a tax increase.” It has everyone scurrying for cover.
Or simply not talking about it. At stake is about $4 billion dollars annually, but a mere $2 billion in next year’s budget because we have the benefit of the increase for half a year (July 1-December 31). It’s a lot of money. And it becomes a lot more when you try to figure out how to do without it.
But don’t expect to hear any straight talk about it. Who is now for extending that tax increase? Hard to tell. If they are not for it what will they cut to balance the budget without it? Given the large amount of Illinois’ budget that goes to education, health, and social services, which by necessity has to be subject to cuts in any significant budget cutting plan, what exactly gets whacked? What do the people of Illinois do without? Support for public schools, help for abused and neglected kids? Services for the mentally ill, which are already bare bones? Substance abuse services as heroin and prescription drug overdose deaths climb? What gets axed? Nobody’s talking.
Rumor has it the legislators will simply pass lump sum budgets for major departments and leave the decisions, and thus the blame, for the governor to shoulder. That will string it out to July, with no answers evident, and leave but four months and change until the election, after which we can finally settle this tax increase question once and for all in the lame duck session. That’s highly likely to happen.
What’s the problem you say? It leaves Illinois’ government, and the agencies and services it funds, twisting in the wind. That’s the problem. If you are a community agency trying to respond to problems in your area, trying to formulate your own budget, your own annual plan of how much capacity you will have to maintain programs, improve the help you offer to children and families, respond to emerging problems being faced by people in your community; what do you do? If you’re a volunteer board member of one of Illinois’ important children’s agencies how balance the importance of maintaining fiscal stability while at the same time providing quality services to the families that need your help? If you’re an agency executive what do you advise your board to do? And if you work for one of those agencies, or depend on them as a person receiving services, like a child in a foster home, what do you expect your future to be?
If a specific budget is not created that clearly shows what the spending priorities are for Illinois in the next twelve months we as advocates and concerned citizens should insist that vital programs and the contracts that sustain them continue at this year’s level for six months at a minimum until Illinois’ revenue, in regard to the tax extension, is decided. It is not ethical to dismantle important programs, lay off the staff, give up the offices, dismiss the clients, when they may indeed be continued, all in the name of a political bluff. Already Illinois waits in limbo. Will the pension reform deal hold? Will we achieve savings that can be reinvested? Will the tax increase be extended? In the best case we drift, as providers of services, as agencies working to make Illinois communities stronger. Let me give you an example.
DCFS lost its director to cancer after a turbulent year in which he fought off cuts to basic child welfare services. His successor, a man who had served in a longtime leadership role at DCFS and then headed the Department of Juvenile Justice for two years, was appointed DCFS director and then forced to resign a month later. The list of people equipped to handle that job, coupled with the list of those willing to take what could well be an interim appointment till Illinois has a new governor, gets shorter by the day. Meanwhile what happens at DCFS? Little or nothing. It’s amazing how quickly large organizations can deteriorate with weak or non-existent leadership. Multiply that kind of drift, that “waiting to see what happens” by a factor of who knows how much and you have a pretty good picture of Illinois in 2014.
We should be figuring out how to reduce the number of juveniles and adults now expensively incarcerated by funding services that follow them back to their home communities and serve them where they live both before and after they enter that system. How’s that going?
We should be far down the road of determining what among state funded services will fit into services covered by the Affordable Care Act, what the managed care companies now emerging might find worthy of funding (Even if they are not reimbursed for delivering them? How likely is that? It’s a head scratcher.) Which among those services will Illinois continue to support? Drug Abuse Prevention? Community organizing? Outreach to the elderly? Do child care subsidies go on as always? What about pre-school education? Unless I’m wrong, Illinois has hardly a clue. So far the answer seems to be “Let’s put that off and see how the budget develops.”
Abused and neglected kids, the mentally ill, the developmentally disabled, families living in poverty, individuals jailed for drug dependence which could be treated, troubled young people-they all deserve an organized response, an approach that allows for the planning and implementation of sustainable programs which truly help in a quantifiable way. What do they get? They get wait and see. Let’s see how the election turns out first. We’ll get to you later. Illinois deserves better. We should all help those that need us most find an answer to their obvious question “What about us?”
If you’re an agency exec or a board member responsible for a social service organization it’s easy, especially this year, to challenge those around you with these questions and this argument. “What do you want us to do? We don’t make the budgets. We don’t allocate the money. The legislators do. We do the best we can with what we’re given. We raise some money to put alongside the state funds, we do all we can with federal funds if we have them or can keep them, and we’re as efficient and as thrifty as we possibly can be. Isn’t that enough?”
The answer to that is, “No, it’s not.”
In the shadowy world of Illinois state government two powerful forces have combined to make the upcoming Fiscal Year 2015 budget (July 1, 2014-June 30, 2015) even more fictitious than normal. There’s an election cycle (a primary election in March and a general election in November) and a state income tax increase that goes away December 31, 2014 failing further legislative action. Read “go on record as voting for a tax increase.” It has everyone scurrying for cover.
Or simply not talking about it. At stake is about $4 billion dollars annually, but a mere $2 billion in next year’s budget because we have the benefit of the increase for half a year (July 1-December 31). It’s a lot of money. And it becomes a lot more when you try to figure out how to do without it.
But don’t expect to hear any straight talk about it. Who is now for extending that tax increase? Hard to tell. If they are not for it what will they cut to balance the budget without it? Given the large amount of Illinois’ budget that goes to education, health, and social services, which by necessity has to be subject to cuts in any significant budget cutting plan, what exactly gets whacked? What do the people of Illinois do without? Support for public schools, help for abused and neglected kids? Services for the mentally ill, which are already bare bones? Substance abuse services as heroin and prescription drug overdose deaths climb? What gets axed? Nobody’s talking.
Rumor has it the legislators will simply pass lump sum budgets for major departments and leave the decisions, and thus the blame, for the governor to shoulder. That will string it out to July, with no answers evident, and leave but four months and change until the election, after which we can finally settle this tax increase question once and for all in the lame duck session. That’s highly likely to happen.
What’s the problem you say? It leaves Illinois’ government, and the agencies and services it funds, twisting in the wind. That’s the problem. If you are a community agency trying to respond to problems in your area, trying to formulate your own budget, your own annual plan of how much capacity you will have to maintain programs, improve the help you offer to children and families, respond to emerging problems being faced by people in your community; what do you do? If you’re a volunteer board member of one of Illinois’ important children’s agencies how balance the importance of maintaining fiscal stability while at the same time providing quality services to the families that need your help? If you’re an agency executive what do you advise your board to do? And if you work for one of those agencies, or depend on them as a person receiving services, like a child in a foster home, what do you expect your future to be?
If a specific budget is not created that clearly shows what the spending priorities are for Illinois in the next twelve months we as advocates and concerned citizens should insist that vital programs and the contracts that sustain them continue at this year’s level for six months at a minimum until Illinois’ revenue, in regard to the tax extension, is decided. It is not ethical to dismantle important programs, lay off the staff, give up the offices, dismiss the clients, when they may indeed be continued, all in the name of a political bluff. Already Illinois waits in limbo. Will the pension reform deal hold? Will we achieve savings that can be reinvested? Will the tax increase be extended? In the best case we drift, as providers of services, as agencies working to make Illinois communities stronger. Let me give you an example.
DCFS lost its director to cancer after a turbulent year in which he fought off cuts to basic child welfare services. His successor, a man who had served in a longtime leadership role at DCFS and then headed the Department of Juvenile Justice for two years, was appointed DCFS director and then forced to resign a month later. The list of people equipped to handle that job, coupled with the list of those willing to take what could well be an interim appointment till Illinois has a new governor, gets shorter by the day. Meanwhile what happens at DCFS? Little or nothing. It’s amazing how quickly large organizations can deteriorate with weak or non-existent leadership. Multiply that kind of drift, that “waiting to see what happens” by a factor of who knows how much and you have a pretty good picture of Illinois in 2014.
We should be figuring out how to reduce the number of juveniles and adults now expensively incarcerated by funding services that follow them back to their home communities and serve them where they live both before and after they enter that system. How’s that going?
We should be far down the road of determining what among state funded services will fit into services covered by the Affordable Care Act, what the managed care companies now emerging might find worthy of funding (Even if they are not reimbursed for delivering them? How likely is that? It’s a head scratcher.) Which among those services will Illinois continue to support? Drug Abuse Prevention? Community organizing? Outreach to the elderly? Do child care subsidies go on as always? What about pre-school education? Unless I’m wrong, Illinois has hardly a clue. So far the answer seems to be “Let’s put that off and see how the budget develops.”
Abused and neglected kids, the mentally ill, the developmentally disabled, families living in poverty, individuals jailed for drug dependence which could be treated, troubled young people-they all deserve an organized response, an approach that allows for the planning and implementation of sustainable programs which truly help in a quantifiable way. What do they get? They get wait and see. Let’s see how the election turns out first. We’ll get to you later. Illinois deserves better. We should all help those that need us most find an answer to their obvious question “What about us?”
Thursday, February 27, 2014
Astronomy
The National Science Foundation polled 2,200 random Americans in 2012 and found that 26% of those polled believed the sun revolved around the earth. It didn’t seem like a trick question. They asked, “Does the Earth go around the Sun or does the Sun go around the Earth.” Our collective failure to do better as Americans alarms me. The American Association for the Advancement of Science was talking about that poll at their annual meeting not long ago in Chicago. Sounds like they have their work cut out for them, advancing science that is, especially when it comes to astronomy.
Not that we’re doing that bad compared to the rest of the world. The European Union asked the same question in 2005 and 33% of their polling sample answered it incorrectly. So we have no corner on the “stupid when it comes to the solar system” market. I can’t believe the Europeans would have gotten a whole lot smarter than us in the past nine years. Really do you find yourself talking about or reading anything to speak of about planets and all these days? I don’t. Most of what I learned about astronomy I learned a long time ago. So I guess even more European grade school kids than Americans missed that movie in Science class where a model of the Sun was sitting, big as life and not moving an inch, in the middle of the screen while Mercury raced around and around it, the Earth sort of jogged, and Neptune seemed to hardly move at all. If you saw that movie and remembered any part of it could you have forgotten the Earth went around the sun? Apparently so.
What we do talk about, almost incessantly, is the weather. You can hardly get away from weather talk. Especially now. Especially this winter. We talk about weather forecasts, wind chill calculations, snowfall records, and last but not least the newly discovered polar vortex. It’s getting a little old actually, all this weather chat. I’m ready to move on.
Actually, astronomy has a lot to do with weather, although we don’t often link the two. In addition to distance from the sun and orbital path there are three basic things that determine weather on a given planet; length of time to orbit the sun (year), how often a planet spins completely around (day), and how much it wobbles (axial tilt). Orbit, spin, and wobble.
Mercury, which goes around the sun once every 88 days (Earth days that is, all these days I’m talking about are Earth days) has an 88 day year, but surprisingly it only spins around completely only every 60 Earth days, which means a day on Mercury lasts damn near two thirds of a year. And there is no axial tilt on Mercury. 0 degrees. No wobble at all. That means you’re always the same distance from the sun no matter what time of the year. There would be no seasons as we know it on Mercury. Everybody agrees, I think, that it would be way hot on Mercury. The only saving grace could be some very long nights, thirty day conceivably, matched with equally killer long days. I imagine it would take quite a while for Earthlings to get used to life on Mercury. That weather there could mess up your biorhythms in a big way, to say nothing of the risk of skin cancer. Imagine the SPF numbers.
Venus would get you closer to normal in terms of its length of year at 224 days, but a day on Venus, believe it or not, lasts longer than its year. A day on Venus, the amount of time it takes for the planet to spin completely around, is equal to 243 Earth days. Talk about your adjustments. Sunsets, I figure, would last weeks. Maybe that’s why Venus is considered so romantic; long sunsets followed by even longer nights. And Saturday, if they wanted it to, could last 35 days or so. I’m guessing if life on Venus resembled ours even at all they would have worked out a completely different schedule by now. Axial tilt on Venus? The thing that decides it’s seasons? Confusing. It is either 177.4 or 2.6 degrees, depending on your definition of the "north pole." I can’t figure that out. Even though I like to dabble in other fields from time to time I am, after all, an English major. Maybe someone else can tell us what that’s all about.
Mars, on the other hand, has the sort of set up your can get your head around. It spins completely around every 24.3 hours, just about like us, and has a 25.2 degree tilt to it, which would give it more or less our schedule of seasons. The Earth’s tilt is 23.5 degrees. The only kicker about Mars is that it’s year is 687 days. So the seasons, as similar as they might be, would last a lot longer than ours, like about five months rather than our three. You could go to Mars and all things being equal get with the celestial program fairly quickly. Plus the Cubs would have a much longer spring in order to train for the season. Maybe the Ricketts family should consider Mars if the city and the fans don’t cozy up to their demands for Wrigley field.
I hesitate to talk about the other four planets; Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. They’re just out there. Their days have reasonable lengths, the amount of time it takes for the planet to spin completely around, in fact all are shorter than the Earth’s. But the farther out you go, the longer their years get. A year on Jupiter is 4,331 days while a year on Neptune is 60,190 days. You think this winter is long here on Earth, think of getting through winter on Neptune. You could be 41 years old before you saw your first crocus bloom. All of them have seasons, though very slow developing, except for Uranus which has an axial tilt of 98 degrees and spins like a ball rolling down a sidewalk rather than a top. I can’t even start to figure out what that would do to your weather map on the evening news.
Be that as it may, that’s ends my lesson on planets going around our sun. Maybe we’ll do better on the next survey. And I remind you again that all the time the planets are spinning and orbiting and tilting this way and that the sun is just sitting there, shining away, being a star. That’s how it works here in our solar system.
And while I have you here, I want to point out that all of us here on Earth are 59 days into our calendar year, and 69 days past the winter solstice, that day when we in the Northern hemisphere were tilted, because of our axial wobble, farthest from the sun, experienced our shortest day, and received the least amount of sunshine. On that day, December 21st 2013, the sun rose on the shack at 7:16 in the morning and set at 4:20 for only 9 hours and 16 minutes of sunshine. Let me correct that. The sun just appeared to rise. That’s just the way we say it. Actually the earth turned the place where you live toward the sun, which stayed in one place as the Earth spun and moved around it. Today, seventy days since the winter solstice, “sunrise” was at 6:27 and “sunset” at 5:38. That’s 12 hours and 5 minutes of sunshine. We received two minutes more sunshine than the day before. March 1 gets us four more minutes. It’s happening folks.
Each day we get more sunshine and the angle of the sun makes the sunshine stronger and hotter. You can feel it. That snow you see today will be gone soon, I guarantee. The ground will thaw. Grass in your yard will turn green faster than you can imagine. You might see green on St. Patrick’s Day, 17 days from now. Four days later, on March 21st, day will equal night and by June 21st, 113 days from today, you’ll be sitting on your patio, perhaps having a beer, considering what you’re going to do on the 4th of July, and complaining about the heat. On that day we will have 15 hours and 27 minutes of sunshine. It will be summer. You will have forgotten, by and large, what it feels like to be cold. It happens every year. You can count on it, all because the Earth travels around the sun and tilts on its axis.
The sun has winter on the run. Start planning your garden. We’ll be planting potatoes on Good Friday.
Not that we’re doing that bad compared to the rest of the world. The European Union asked the same question in 2005 and 33% of their polling sample answered it incorrectly. So we have no corner on the “stupid when it comes to the solar system” market. I can’t believe the Europeans would have gotten a whole lot smarter than us in the past nine years. Really do you find yourself talking about or reading anything to speak of about planets and all these days? I don’t. Most of what I learned about astronomy I learned a long time ago. So I guess even more European grade school kids than Americans missed that movie in Science class where a model of the Sun was sitting, big as life and not moving an inch, in the middle of the screen while Mercury raced around and around it, the Earth sort of jogged, and Neptune seemed to hardly move at all. If you saw that movie and remembered any part of it could you have forgotten the Earth went around the sun? Apparently so.
What we do talk about, almost incessantly, is the weather. You can hardly get away from weather talk. Especially now. Especially this winter. We talk about weather forecasts, wind chill calculations, snowfall records, and last but not least the newly discovered polar vortex. It’s getting a little old actually, all this weather chat. I’m ready to move on.
Actually, astronomy has a lot to do with weather, although we don’t often link the two. In addition to distance from the sun and orbital path there are three basic things that determine weather on a given planet; length of time to orbit the sun (year), how often a planet spins completely around (day), and how much it wobbles (axial tilt). Orbit, spin, and wobble.
Mercury, which goes around the sun once every 88 days (Earth days that is, all these days I’m talking about are Earth days) has an 88 day year, but surprisingly it only spins around completely only every 60 Earth days, which means a day on Mercury lasts damn near two thirds of a year. And there is no axial tilt on Mercury. 0 degrees. No wobble at all. That means you’re always the same distance from the sun no matter what time of the year. There would be no seasons as we know it on Mercury. Everybody agrees, I think, that it would be way hot on Mercury. The only saving grace could be some very long nights, thirty day conceivably, matched with equally killer long days. I imagine it would take quite a while for Earthlings to get used to life on Mercury. That weather there could mess up your biorhythms in a big way, to say nothing of the risk of skin cancer. Imagine the SPF numbers.
Venus would get you closer to normal in terms of its length of year at 224 days, but a day on Venus, believe it or not, lasts longer than its year. A day on Venus, the amount of time it takes for the planet to spin completely around, is equal to 243 Earth days. Talk about your adjustments. Sunsets, I figure, would last weeks. Maybe that’s why Venus is considered so romantic; long sunsets followed by even longer nights. And Saturday, if they wanted it to, could last 35 days or so. I’m guessing if life on Venus resembled ours even at all they would have worked out a completely different schedule by now. Axial tilt on Venus? The thing that decides it’s seasons? Confusing. It is either 177.4 or 2.6 degrees, depending on your definition of the "north pole." I can’t figure that out. Even though I like to dabble in other fields from time to time I am, after all, an English major. Maybe someone else can tell us what that’s all about.
Mars, on the other hand, has the sort of set up your can get your head around. It spins completely around every 24.3 hours, just about like us, and has a 25.2 degree tilt to it, which would give it more or less our schedule of seasons. The Earth’s tilt is 23.5 degrees. The only kicker about Mars is that it’s year is 687 days. So the seasons, as similar as they might be, would last a lot longer than ours, like about five months rather than our three. You could go to Mars and all things being equal get with the celestial program fairly quickly. Plus the Cubs would have a much longer spring in order to train for the season. Maybe the Ricketts family should consider Mars if the city and the fans don’t cozy up to their demands for Wrigley field.
I hesitate to talk about the other four planets; Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. They’re just out there. Their days have reasonable lengths, the amount of time it takes for the planet to spin completely around, in fact all are shorter than the Earth’s. But the farther out you go, the longer their years get. A year on Jupiter is 4,331 days while a year on Neptune is 60,190 days. You think this winter is long here on Earth, think of getting through winter on Neptune. You could be 41 years old before you saw your first crocus bloom. All of them have seasons, though very slow developing, except for Uranus which has an axial tilt of 98 degrees and spins like a ball rolling down a sidewalk rather than a top. I can’t even start to figure out what that would do to your weather map on the evening news.
Be that as it may, that’s ends my lesson on planets going around our sun. Maybe we’ll do better on the next survey. And I remind you again that all the time the planets are spinning and orbiting and tilting this way and that the sun is just sitting there, shining away, being a star. That’s how it works here in our solar system.
And while I have you here, I want to point out that all of us here on Earth are 59 days into our calendar year, and 69 days past the winter solstice, that day when we in the Northern hemisphere were tilted, because of our axial wobble, farthest from the sun, experienced our shortest day, and received the least amount of sunshine. On that day, December 21st 2013, the sun rose on the shack at 7:16 in the morning and set at 4:20 for only 9 hours and 16 minutes of sunshine. Let me correct that. The sun just appeared to rise. That’s just the way we say it. Actually the earth turned the place where you live toward the sun, which stayed in one place as the Earth spun and moved around it. Today, seventy days since the winter solstice, “sunrise” was at 6:27 and “sunset” at 5:38. That’s 12 hours and 5 minutes of sunshine. We received two minutes more sunshine than the day before. March 1 gets us four more minutes. It’s happening folks.
Each day we get more sunshine and the angle of the sun makes the sunshine stronger and hotter. You can feel it. That snow you see today will be gone soon, I guarantee. The ground will thaw. Grass in your yard will turn green faster than you can imagine. You might see green on St. Patrick’s Day, 17 days from now. Four days later, on March 21st, day will equal night and by June 21st, 113 days from today, you’ll be sitting on your patio, perhaps having a beer, considering what you’re going to do on the 4th of July, and complaining about the heat. On that day we will have 15 hours and 27 minutes of sunshine. It will be summer. You will have forgotten, by and large, what it feels like to be cold. It happens every year. You can count on it, all because the Earth travels around the sun and tilts on its axis.
The sun has winter on the run. Start planning your garden. We’ll be planting potatoes on Good Friday.
Saturday, February 22, 2014
Trujillo Honduras
I Care International, a volunteer organization that brings large scale vision clinics to parts of the world where eye care is desperately needed, went back to Trujillo, Honduras for the second year in a row. We just returned from a ten day trip in the early last Sunday, February 16th. I’m just now rested up and reflecting on our experience.
It was our third recent mission to Honduras. In 2011 we operated in a large urban city in the north, San Pedro Sula, and after encountering crushing numbers of citizens seeking care, asked our Honduran hosts to find a more rural community on our return. In 2013 we were asked to serve Trujillo, the last large town on the Honduras’ Caribbean shore before the relatively unpopulated Miskitia coast sets in. Trujillo is seven hours of bad road by bus from San Pedro Sula and a far different community; smaller, poorer, with less access to eye care. There are no eye care professionals in Trujillo. After our experience there last year we added a team of surgeons equipped to perform cataract and other basic vision saving procedures during our clinic.
There’s risk in traveling to Central America, particularly Honduras. If you’re prone to worry, you’ll find plenty to occupy your time. There’s the State Department warnings for one thing, which are in effect virtually all the time and change little, relating the troubles encountered by Americans travelling in the area. Then there’s the murder rate. In 2012 the murder rate in Honduras was 86 murders reported for every 1,000 citizens. That made Honduras the murder capital of the world that year. One disturbing trend is the growing number of murders among journalists reporting criminal activity. Not that we collectively take much notice. You have to go looking for that story in the media. We’re much more alarmed about politics in the Middle East than the woes of our neighbors in Central America. Most in the know, including Jesuits who live and work in Honduras, attribute the violence mainly to drug trafficking and the cartels that control it, along with an underfunded and ill equipped army and police presence. That’s the national back drop.
What we encountered as volunteers in Honduras on a personal level was far different. We were invited to the community by the city, its Rotary Club, and the Catholic Church. We worked in the local hospital and municipal facilities. I Care is a non denominational, non political organization with a single focus, providing eye care to those who need it. And despite a few individual experiences that ranged from sketchy to alarming, the forty six I Care volunteers who made the trip were free to do just that throughout their stay in Honduras.
Not that it was easy. Finding a suitable place to work was our first problem. Large building space is at a premium in Trujillo. After placing our surgical team at last year’s clinic site in the hospital, we rejected their first location, a public building in the town square that was too small, as well as a second, a church facility that was too disjointed. We eventually set up our six station optometry clinic in city hall. On Thursday and Friday, the first two days of our four day clinic, visitors to the mayor’s office walked right through our dispensary, located just outside his office, to keep their appointments. Other staff relocated to give the doctors a room with less light and air conditioning. They mayor gave us that great Spanish line “Mi casa es su casa.” He also gave us most of his bi lingual staff, who helped as interpreters.
The local private bi lingual school, as they did last year, sent their ninth grade students to help translate and they worked tirelessly, even on Saturday and Sunday when school was out. Lois, their principal, an American woman who has been part of the Trujillo community for seventeen years, came with them and was our go to person for community information. Across the board the community provided great support and did all they could to accommodate us.
We saw 1,188 persons in four days in our clinic. Most of those people received glasses which improved their vision greatly. And while we do not have an exact number, upwards of 55 persons were the recipients of vision saving surgical procedures, mostly cataract operations. For a person living in poverty to walk into a free clinic in a third world country, have a serious eye condition diagnosed, and emerge the next day with clear vision following the removal, for example, of a dense cataract, is amazing. Their efforts, and the efforts of the optometrists and third year optometry students working with them to identify those individuals, made this mission nothing short of miraculous.
Speaking of those students, we were fortunate enough to have four third year students and one fourth year student from the University of Missouri at St. Louis accompany us to Trujillo. They worked hard. I Care operates on something of a triage model. When we encounter persons with healthy eyes and relatively normal vision problems our docs quickly write a prescription that allows those dispensing glasses to match them with the best used glasses possible and move on to the next patient. That flies in the face of all the students' training in America which demands they be as thorough as possible with each and every person they see. Students in an I Care clinic struggle to reconcile the conflict inherent to those two approaches. They have to trust their instincts, maybe develop them along the way, ask for help only when it is needed, and spend their limited time on those patients who need further care. This group of students did that extremely well. And they did it with great care. I look for kindness and compassion in persons new to an I Care clinic. These five women topped the charts in that regard. Let me give you an example.
After clinic was over the students stayed in Trujillo while some of us left town on side trips. After paying a visit to their translators at their bi lingual school, the student docs made their way about the city and discovered an orphanage we were not aware of with seventy children in residence. As they visited the facility they asked those in charge if they could bring equipment in and test the children’s vision. The next day they set up a mini clinic, tested every child’s vision, discovered seventeen children who needed glasses, and went back to our stock of glasses and filled their needs. They didn’t have to do that. Clinic was over. That’s the kind of volunteers they were.
That’s the way it works on these trips. You start out wary of the environment, worried about the politics, and perhaps apprehensive for your safety. Then you find yourself face to face, nose to nose, or knees to knees, depending on your function in the clinic, with real people. You get caught up in them, their fears, their questions, their concerns. What starts out as a trip to a third world country with a questionable record on human rights turns into an encounter with a community of individual people. Pretty soon the local volunteers are introducing you to their families, you are seeing familiar faces not only every day in the clinic but on the streets in town in the evening. Some of them are wearing the glasses you gave them. They see you and wave. You wave back and smile. You forget the murder rate.
Am I painting the experience as all goodness and light? That’s not right. To illustrate another side of life in Trujillo let me tell you about two women who came to the clinic, which could have taken place in any town, really, in rural Central America. Americans take so much for granted.
We were crammed for space. Each station had people waiting to be seen. Doorways became logjams. Achieving a smooth flow of patients through the clinic was nearly impossible. One of our veteran eye docs who practices in Illinois set up her exam station in the corner of the dispensary. She carved out a dark corner, spread out her equipment, and began her hectic four day schedule of helping the students and examining patients herself in a space that was at best 6 x 6’. She had an especially bright and hard working translator, a ninth grade student from the bi lingual school, who helped her each of the four days.
I dispense glasses. I know enough Spanish to work on my own and I have done enough missions that I know how to make glasses fit a face. My office, as it were consisted of two folding chairs and a piece of newspaper. Four fitters worked side by side on eight chairs. I balanced glasses on my lap, or the patient did, and together we found the glasses that helped him or her see the best, both up close and far away. I was a knees to knees guy. When I needed to adjust the glasses to fit there was a folding table of tools. Pretty simple deal. While I worked I often listened to the doc in the corner. She explained in English, plainly and compassionately, what was happening with her patients’ eyes and her young translator did the same in Spanish. This doc also knew enough Spanish to understand some of their questions and concerns. Here’s one conversation.
“How long ago did you lose vision in your right eye?” The doctor was addressing her question to an older woman whose daughter led her into the clinic. Our vision tests, the acuity chart and the auto refractor, revealed she was seeing little or nothing, distinguishing only fingers at two feet in her left eye, and no light perception in the right. Her right eye was obviously long gone, most likely due to trauma.
Her daughter answered. “It happened when she was a girl, chopping wood. A machete accident. But the left eye, it has a cataract. And you have doctors here who can remove it correct? My mother is so excited. With the cataract gone she will be able to see again, yes?” The woman’s left eye had the tell tale milky appearance of a dense cataract.
The doctor turned her attention, and her hand held instrument, to the left eye. She leaned in to the woman, nose to nose, and looked for a long time, then turned and took a few steps away, towards me.
“Something wrong?” I asked.
“Yeah. This woman does have a cataract. But in addition she has severe glaucoma. Even if the cataract were removed, her optic nerve is shot. Had she had even the simplest eye care during her life they would have diagnosed the glaucoma and with proper medication and treatment, preserved her ability to see. Now it’s too late. She’s gone blind.”
“Optic nerve?” I asked.
“Yeah. Think of a camera. The cornea is the lens cover protecting the lens itself, where cataracts develop. The retina has the pixels that hold the image, and the optic nerve is the computer cord you use to download the pictures to your laptop. In the eye the optic nerve connects the eye to the brain. Without that connection, the optic nerve, nothing happens, no matter how good the rest of the equipment. This woman will never see again. One eye lost to a random accident, the other to a completely treatable condition. Didn’t have to happen.”
She turned back to the woman and her daughter, and with the help of her young translator, gave them the bad news that she had just discovered. Our clinic did not produce the result these Honduran women had anticipated. There was nothing more to be done. Before leaving both mother and daughter thanked the doctor repeatedly. They left the clinic, walking arm and arm, one blind and one leading, through the mean streets of Honduras.
Later that day, another similar conversation took place.
“Ask her what caused this injury to her eye,” the doctor told the young Honduran translator after peering into the patient’s eye with her instrument. The patient hesitated. She looked down. We both heard and understood her response in Spanish.
“Mi Esposito me dio un punetazo.” (I was punched by my husband.)
It was an angry looking eye, red and scarred.
“How long ago?”
“Tres mes.” (Three months.)
The doctor turned away. She is a young woman herself. Sometime pain, reflected in the face of one who suddenly imagines and then understands the experience of another, can be just as great as the victim’s pain. She looked at me.
“Did you hear that?” she asked.
“Yes.” We looked at each other. “Will her eye be all right?”
“No. The retina is completely detached. If not completely, bad enough that it can’t be repaired. Our surgeons can’t do retinas here. The nearest retina guy is in Tegucigalpa. But that retina won’t recover. It’s been too long. Her eye is lost. And I have to tell her.”
She turned to her interpreter and they talked quietly. The interpreter took a deep breath and began to speak to the patient in Spanish. The patient began to cry. Then the interpreter cried, and last the doctor. They put their hands on the young woman’s shoulders to comfort her. I went straight to Lois the school principal.
“Lois, who helps abused women in this community?”
“No one.”
“There’s no agency? No shelter?”
“No.”
“How about the church?”
“The church? What would the church do? What do churches do in the states?”
“They offer support. They connect people to someone who can help them.”
“But there is no one to help them.”
“What about the police? Can’t a battered woman file a report and get a restraining order?”
“People don’t go to the police with those problems here. You can’t predict the result. It matters who her husband is, what kind of standing his family has in the community. And a restraining order? That could take months. You have to appear before a judge and no one appears before a judge without a lawyer, and that costs money. The system is too unpredictable. It’s corrupt.”
“So women are beaten by their husbands, injured, and have no recourse.”
“You’re being a naïve American. This woman’s only hope is to leave this situation and hope her family takes her in. If she has children she risks losing them. If her family protects her, she has a chance. If she has no family support, and reports the crime, she could well find herself homeless, or beaten more badly, or killed.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Well there is his help too of course. You have to understand, these problems between families often get worse. They result in retaliation. Vengeance is strong in these communities. You have no idea.”
“I’m sure I don’t.” Sometimes the world hits you right between the eyes.
I went back to the corner where the young woman continued to cry and our volunteers continued to help her. Another woman had joined them. I took the doc aside.
“Urge her to tell her family what has happened if she hasn’t already. Tell her she does not have to stay in that situation and continue to be beaten.”
“I’ve done that already. Her sister is with her now. She left her husband and is living with her family.”
“That’s good. I’m glad it was you that was here to help her.”
I Care International and its volunteers invest their time and their dollars to go where they can help others see more clearly. In the process a world we didn’t or couldn’t imagine often comes into focus. It works both ways. These trips are not for the faint of heart. I can’t wait till next year.
It was our third recent mission to Honduras. In 2011 we operated in a large urban city in the north, San Pedro Sula, and after encountering crushing numbers of citizens seeking care, asked our Honduran hosts to find a more rural community on our return. In 2013 we were asked to serve Trujillo, the last large town on the Honduras’ Caribbean shore before the relatively unpopulated Miskitia coast sets in. Trujillo is seven hours of bad road by bus from San Pedro Sula and a far different community; smaller, poorer, with less access to eye care. There are no eye care professionals in Trujillo. After our experience there last year we added a team of surgeons equipped to perform cataract and other basic vision saving procedures during our clinic.
There’s risk in traveling to Central America, particularly Honduras. If you’re prone to worry, you’ll find plenty to occupy your time. There’s the State Department warnings for one thing, which are in effect virtually all the time and change little, relating the troubles encountered by Americans travelling in the area. Then there’s the murder rate. In 2012 the murder rate in Honduras was 86 murders reported for every 1,000 citizens. That made Honduras the murder capital of the world that year. One disturbing trend is the growing number of murders among journalists reporting criminal activity. Not that we collectively take much notice. You have to go looking for that story in the media. We’re much more alarmed about politics in the Middle East than the woes of our neighbors in Central America. Most in the know, including Jesuits who live and work in Honduras, attribute the violence mainly to drug trafficking and the cartels that control it, along with an underfunded and ill equipped army and police presence. That’s the national back drop.
What we encountered as volunteers in Honduras on a personal level was far different. We were invited to the community by the city, its Rotary Club, and the Catholic Church. We worked in the local hospital and municipal facilities. I Care is a non denominational, non political organization with a single focus, providing eye care to those who need it. And despite a few individual experiences that ranged from sketchy to alarming, the forty six I Care volunteers who made the trip were free to do just that throughout their stay in Honduras.
Not that it was easy. Finding a suitable place to work was our first problem. Large building space is at a premium in Trujillo. After placing our surgical team at last year’s clinic site in the hospital, we rejected their first location, a public building in the town square that was too small, as well as a second, a church facility that was too disjointed. We eventually set up our six station optometry clinic in city hall. On Thursday and Friday, the first two days of our four day clinic, visitors to the mayor’s office walked right through our dispensary, located just outside his office, to keep their appointments. Other staff relocated to give the doctors a room with less light and air conditioning. They mayor gave us that great Spanish line “Mi casa es su casa.” He also gave us most of his bi lingual staff, who helped as interpreters.
The local private bi lingual school, as they did last year, sent their ninth grade students to help translate and they worked tirelessly, even on Saturday and Sunday when school was out. Lois, their principal, an American woman who has been part of the Trujillo community for seventeen years, came with them and was our go to person for community information. Across the board the community provided great support and did all they could to accommodate us.
We saw 1,188 persons in four days in our clinic. Most of those people received glasses which improved their vision greatly. And while we do not have an exact number, upwards of 55 persons were the recipients of vision saving surgical procedures, mostly cataract operations. For a person living in poverty to walk into a free clinic in a third world country, have a serious eye condition diagnosed, and emerge the next day with clear vision following the removal, for example, of a dense cataract, is amazing. Their efforts, and the efforts of the optometrists and third year optometry students working with them to identify those individuals, made this mission nothing short of miraculous.
Speaking of those students, we were fortunate enough to have four third year students and one fourth year student from the University of Missouri at St. Louis accompany us to Trujillo. They worked hard. I Care operates on something of a triage model. When we encounter persons with healthy eyes and relatively normal vision problems our docs quickly write a prescription that allows those dispensing glasses to match them with the best used glasses possible and move on to the next patient. That flies in the face of all the students' training in America which demands they be as thorough as possible with each and every person they see. Students in an I Care clinic struggle to reconcile the conflict inherent to those two approaches. They have to trust their instincts, maybe develop them along the way, ask for help only when it is needed, and spend their limited time on those patients who need further care. This group of students did that extremely well. And they did it with great care. I look for kindness and compassion in persons new to an I Care clinic. These five women topped the charts in that regard. Let me give you an example.
After clinic was over the students stayed in Trujillo while some of us left town on side trips. After paying a visit to their translators at their bi lingual school, the student docs made their way about the city and discovered an orphanage we were not aware of with seventy children in residence. As they visited the facility they asked those in charge if they could bring equipment in and test the children’s vision. The next day they set up a mini clinic, tested every child’s vision, discovered seventeen children who needed glasses, and went back to our stock of glasses and filled their needs. They didn’t have to do that. Clinic was over. That’s the kind of volunteers they were.
That’s the way it works on these trips. You start out wary of the environment, worried about the politics, and perhaps apprehensive for your safety. Then you find yourself face to face, nose to nose, or knees to knees, depending on your function in the clinic, with real people. You get caught up in them, their fears, their questions, their concerns. What starts out as a trip to a third world country with a questionable record on human rights turns into an encounter with a community of individual people. Pretty soon the local volunteers are introducing you to their families, you are seeing familiar faces not only every day in the clinic but on the streets in town in the evening. Some of them are wearing the glasses you gave them. They see you and wave. You wave back and smile. You forget the murder rate.
Am I painting the experience as all goodness and light? That’s not right. To illustrate another side of life in Trujillo let me tell you about two women who came to the clinic, which could have taken place in any town, really, in rural Central America. Americans take so much for granted.
We were crammed for space. Each station had people waiting to be seen. Doorways became logjams. Achieving a smooth flow of patients through the clinic was nearly impossible. One of our veteran eye docs who practices in Illinois set up her exam station in the corner of the dispensary. She carved out a dark corner, spread out her equipment, and began her hectic four day schedule of helping the students and examining patients herself in a space that was at best 6 x 6’. She had an especially bright and hard working translator, a ninth grade student from the bi lingual school, who helped her each of the four days.
I dispense glasses. I know enough Spanish to work on my own and I have done enough missions that I know how to make glasses fit a face. My office, as it were consisted of two folding chairs and a piece of newspaper. Four fitters worked side by side on eight chairs. I balanced glasses on my lap, or the patient did, and together we found the glasses that helped him or her see the best, both up close and far away. I was a knees to knees guy. When I needed to adjust the glasses to fit there was a folding table of tools. Pretty simple deal. While I worked I often listened to the doc in the corner. She explained in English, plainly and compassionately, what was happening with her patients’ eyes and her young translator did the same in Spanish. This doc also knew enough Spanish to understand some of their questions and concerns. Here’s one conversation.
“How long ago did you lose vision in your right eye?” The doctor was addressing her question to an older woman whose daughter led her into the clinic. Our vision tests, the acuity chart and the auto refractor, revealed she was seeing little or nothing, distinguishing only fingers at two feet in her left eye, and no light perception in the right. Her right eye was obviously long gone, most likely due to trauma.
Her daughter answered. “It happened when she was a girl, chopping wood. A machete accident. But the left eye, it has a cataract. And you have doctors here who can remove it correct? My mother is so excited. With the cataract gone she will be able to see again, yes?” The woman’s left eye had the tell tale milky appearance of a dense cataract.
The doctor turned her attention, and her hand held instrument, to the left eye. She leaned in to the woman, nose to nose, and looked for a long time, then turned and took a few steps away, towards me.
“Something wrong?” I asked.
“Yeah. This woman does have a cataract. But in addition she has severe glaucoma. Even if the cataract were removed, her optic nerve is shot. Had she had even the simplest eye care during her life they would have diagnosed the glaucoma and with proper medication and treatment, preserved her ability to see. Now it’s too late. She’s gone blind.”
“Optic nerve?” I asked.
“Yeah. Think of a camera. The cornea is the lens cover protecting the lens itself, where cataracts develop. The retina has the pixels that hold the image, and the optic nerve is the computer cord you use to download the pictures to your laptop. In the eye the optic nerve connects the eye to the brain. Without that connection, the optic nerve, nothing happens, no matter how good the rest of the equipment. This woman will never see again. One eye lost to a random accident, the other to a completely treatable condition. Didn’t have to happen.”
She turned back to the woman and her daughter, and with the help of her young translator, gave them the bad news that she had just discovered. Our clinic did not produce the result these Honduran women had anticipated. There was nothing more to be done. Before leaving both mother and daughter thanked the doctor repeatedly. They left the clinic, walking arm and arm, one blind and one leading, through the mean streets of Honduras.
Later that day, another similar conversation took place.
“Ask her what caused this injury to her eye,” the doctor told the young Honduran translator after peering into the patient’s eye with her instrument. The patient hesitated. She looked down. We both heard and understood her response in Spanish.
“Mi Esposito me dio un punetazo.” (I was punched by my husband.)
It was an angry looking eye, red and scarred.
“How long ago?”
“Tres mes.” (Three months.)
The doctor turned away. She is a young woman herself. Sometime pain, reflected in the face of one who suddenly imagines and then understands the experience of another, can be just as great as the victim’s pain. She looked at me.
“Did you hear that?” she asked.
“Yes.” We looked at each other. “Will her eye be all right?”
“No. The retina is completely detached. If not completely, bad enough that it can’t be repaired. Our surgeons can’t do retinas here. The nearest retina guy is in Tegucigalpa. But that retina won’t recover. It’s been too long. Her eye is lost. And I have to tell her.”
She turned to her interpreter and they talked quietly. The interpreter took a deep breath and began to speak to the patient in Spanish. The patient began to cry. Then the interpreter cried, and last the doctor. They put their hands on the young woman’s shoulders to comfort her. I went straight to Lois the school principal.
“Lois, who helps abused women in this community?”
“No one.”
“There’s no agency? No shelter?”
“No.”
“How about the church?”
“The church? What would the church do? What do churches do in the states?”
“They offer support. They connect people to someone who can help them.”
“But there is no one to help them.”
“What about the police? Can’t a battered woman file a report and get a restraining order?”
“People don’t go to the police with those problems here. You can’t predict the result. It matters who her husband is, what kind of standing his family has in the community. And a restraining order? That could take months. You have to appear before a judge and no one appears before a judge without a lawyer, and that costs money. The system is too unpredictable. It’s corrupt.”
“So women are beaten by their husbands, injured, and have no recourse.”
“You’re being a naïve American. This woman’s only hope is to leave this situation and hope her family takes her in. If she has children she risks losing them. If her family protects her, she has a chance. If she has no family support, and reports the crime, she could well find herself homeless, or beaten more badly, or killed.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Well there is his help too of course. You have to understand, these problems between families often get worse. They result in retaliation. Vengeance is strong in these communities. You have no idea.”
“I’m sure I don’t.” Sometimes the world hits you right between the eyes.
I went back to the corner where the young woman continued to cry and our volunteers continued to help her. Another woman had joined them. I took the doc aside.
“Urge her to tell her family what has happened if she hasn’t already. Tell her she does not have to stay in that situation and continue to be beaten.”
“I’ve done that already. Her sister is with her now. She left her husband and is living with her family.”
“That’s good. I’m glad it was you that was here to help her.”
I Care International and its volunteers invest their time and their dollars to go where they can help others see more clearly. In the process a world we didn’t or couldn’t imagine often comes into focus. It works both ways. These trips are not for the faint of heart. I can’t wait till next year.
Saturday, February 1, 2014
Chopper Mittens
I will be out of the country for much of the next two weeks and will not publish another update from the shack until I return. That’s a first. I’ve given you a long post, or a short story, about the farm to make up for my absence. Hope you like it.
I don’t know why I think of my parents now, or what triggers those thoughts. My Dad would be 105 this December and passed away in 1988. My Mom would have turned 103 this past New Year’s Day, having lived till 1996. It’s been a long time. I think of them often yet. Sometimes every day.
Monday afternoon I was scooping the driveway, again, bundled up in many layers of clothing. I refused to start until I found my mittens, which disappeared over the weekend. Turns out I left them at my local grocery store. I recovered them from their lost and found. These are double mittens my Dad called choppers. You can find them on line marketed as such. Choppers are a thick wool inner mitten which slips into a soft leather mitten, usually deer or elk hide. Mittens alone are so much warmer than gloves, and these double mittens are the absolute warmest. My Dad was wearing choppers on the day when he told me this story.
We were standing in his little shop, crammed with tools from throughout the life of our old farm. One wall, up to the roof peak, was a sort of history of local farming from God knows when; leather pads with a metal hook you strapped to your palm to shuck corn by hand, lanterns, buggy wrenches, sickle bar guards, planter plates, calf weaners, hand scythes, untold contraptions and tools. The longer you looked at the wall the more you saw. It was a terribly cold day. Wind was rattling the windows. We could see our breath.
“Did I tell you about your grandfather falling into the pond when they were chopping ice?” My father’s father, another grandfather I never met, was the son of the Irishman who came over on the boat from Antrim and managed to buy land.
“He was twelve years old when his father let him work at the pond for the first time. It was dangerous work. In weather like this, when it was the coldest in January and the ice was frozen the thickest, the farmers in the neighborhood would work together to cut and store ice for the summer. They had an ice house they shared, stacked blocks of ice there and covered them with sawdust. You’d be amazed how long it lasted.”
“There was a spring fed pond that produced nice clear ice two miles from their farm where they gathered with their horses and hand saws. Hard work. And in taking the ice, they created an open pool of freezing water. It was easy to slip and slide into the hole. If you went in and got under the ice, and couldn’t find your way back up, you could die quickly. Most those people didn’t know how to swim then. To let a kid work the ice cutting meant he was grown up. As he talked I was looking at the wall of tools.
“Is that one of those ice saws Dad?” I pointed to a curbed serrated blade with a stub handle on one side and a handle at the rear.
“No, that’s a hay knife. We used that to parcel out hay when we put it up loose in the mow, before there were hay balers.” He scanned the wall.
“I don’t think we have any of those saws anymore. No one has cut ice for forty years.”
“So what happened?”
“My grandpa the Irishman sent my Dad Willie up to the pond with the hired man. They took off with the team and wagon. All the farmers put their teams and wagons together to get it done as quickly as possible. It was a day like this. Windy and terribly cold. Grandpa, as Dad tells it, was helping a cow deliver a calf that was breach. He came later on his little gelding named Jack.. They used that gelding mostly for a small buggy but the Irishman loved to ride him single with a saddle. The Irishman was amazed he was able to even own horses, what with being so poor back in the old country. To have a good fast horse to ride to saddle, that was for rich men in Ireland. So anyway, my Dad and the hired man got to the pond and had been working about an hour when the Irishman rides up on his gelding. Called him Jack. Tied him to a fence post, put a blanket over him, and pitched in with the rest.”
“When you cut ice you started in the middle of the pond and worked back to shore till it was shallow. Trouble was the ice blocks were slippery. You could shove them to the edge of the pond all right, push them on the ice, but when you carried them up out of the pond they were damned heavy. You used two sets of tongs to balance yourself out, one in each hand, and carried two blocks up and heaved them on a wagon, where they stacked them. So there were cutters at the edge of the hole, those who pulled the blocks out of the water and slid them to the edge of the pond, those that lugged them up the bank to the wagons, and those that stacked them. Plus men drove teams of horses, hauling wagons full of blocks to the ice house, where other men were packing them away with the sawdust. When the roads were snow packed they put the box wagons on runners, making sledges. It took a lot of men. Hard work.” My Dad smoked Camels, short with no filters. He took off his mittens, lit a cigarette with a wooden match he struck by dragging it quickly on the leg of his overalls, and paused, blowing out smoke and the match as he scanned the wall of tools, one eye squinted shut.
“Look there,” he said walking to the wall and standing on the carpenter’s chest to reach up and remove a set of iron tongs. “Here are the ice tongs we used to use.” He spread out the tongs. As the jaws got wider the handles at the top got closer together. “They cut the blocks just the right size so when you got these jaws on either side you could grip the handle and swing that ice block up and tote it. Like I said, you put one in each hand for balance.” He looked around and put the jaws on a metal milk crate filled with scrap iron. As he lifted up the jaws closed around the crate and he lifted it off the ground.
“Try that,” he said, handing it to me. It was heavy. “The ice blocks were every bit that heavy. After a day cutting ice you know you’d worked a full day.”
“So what happened to Grandpa?”
“The Irishman hadn’t been there but an hour. He was sawing blocks. My Dad was working beside him, hauling the blocks out of the water and sliding them to the pond’s edge. It’s where most boys started. He was proud to be there, working beside his Dad and all. The Irishman had a block floating and had moved down to make another cut. Willie reached down to get his tongs around the block and his feet just went out from under him. He pitched forward head first. He tried to break his fall on the block just cut but it just went down under his weight and he went with it. The ice block bobbed back to the surface but my Dad didn’t. He was gone.”
“The Irishman ran to where the block was, pushed it into open water, reached down and swept his arm back and forth feeling for his son but there was nothing but water. He started to yell and the other men came running to his side.”
“Geeminy,” I said.
“How old are you David?”
“I’m twelve.”
“Can you imagine taking a swim in icy pond water on a day like this with all your clothes on? He didn’t know how to swim. Can you imagine how scared he would have been, my Dad? He was your age.”
“No I can’t.” I looked down at the floor, then back up at my Dad. “What happened then?”
“According to my Dad, Willie, he opened his eyes and the water looked brighter than he imagined. He could see sun shining through the ice and it looked beautiful. He continued to go down and thought he would just sink away, and he wasn’t scared. It was quiet and he thought he was going to die. But then he slowly stopped and ever so slow he started back up, floating to the surface. He said it took a long, long time and he wasn’t scared. His head hit the ice. And as it did, he felt a strong hand, the strongest hand he’d ever felt, on his arm. It was his Dad’s hand. The Irishman pulled him out from under the ice and put him on his back, back into the air of the world above, but not before Willie had swallowed a hatful of water.”
“I bet his Dad was so relieved.”
“Nope. As my Dad told it he was mad as hell. Willie looked up at the men around him but he couldn’t breathe and the Irishman pounded hard on his chest and said ‘Breathe god damn you. No son of mine is going to die.’ And Willie coughed up a bunch of water and breathed. And then he started crying. And the Irishman was still mad and said ‘There's no time for crying Willie’ and took him in his arms to where Jack the gelding was tied. He whipped the blanket off the horse, threw his son into the saddle, wrapped the blanket around him and said this to my Dad Willie, who was just a little boy after all.”
“He said, ‘Willie, you’ve got to make the ride of your life. You got to get warm fast or you’ll die, and the very fastest way for you get into warmth is to ride Jack here as fast as he can go, by yourself, to the home place. Jack wants to be back in his stall and he knows the way so all you got to do is hang on and kick him, he’ll do the rest. Don’t let him take you to the barn though. Make sure you pull the reins and bring him to the back door where you can yell for your mother. Your sister can put Jack in his stall and I’ll take care of him when I get home. I’m telling you don’t let him take you to the barn because you could be too cold to get from the barn to the house. Pull Jack up to the back door, yell for your mother, and she’ll take care of you from there. I follow soon enough.’
Willie said “Dad I’m scared.”
" 'You can do it Willie, I know you can,' the Irishman said."
"And with that he slapped Jack on the hind quarters and he and his son Willie went galloping down the road.”
Back in the shop I said “Why didn’t he go with him Dad?”
“Because Jack could ride faster with just a boy on his back than if he was carrying two people. He was a little gelding. With Willie on his back Jack would be faster than ever, like a racehorse with a little jockey. And the Irishman knew he had to get his son warm quick. He trusted both the horse and his son to make that ride.”
“So he really made him go alone?”
“Yes he did. He followed to make sure he didn’t fall off. They unhitched one of his draft horses from the team, the Irishman got on him bareback, and he headed off behind Willie. But he knew his son on that galloping gelding would be way ahead of him, and the faster he got to warmth the better chance he had of not freezing to death, or freezing his feet, losing his toes, whatever. I don’t know how much they knew about hypothermia and such back then, but they knew by god he was in big trouble. Let me finish the story David.”
“So as my Dad Willie tells it he hung on to the reins, kicked Jack in the withers like he was wearing spurs, and they flew down the road. Straight shot to their farm. He had to ride down the east side of the section, past a crossroads and another mile to their farm at the end of the next section. A two mile dash down a frozen dirt road. The Irishman had never let him gallop Jack before and he went like the wind. Only the faster they went the colder he got. He began to cry and his tears froze his eyelashes near shut. As he tells it, and he told this story over and over, he had lost his hat in the pond and was bare headed. His ears and his nose hurt terrible and he thought he would surely be frostbit. The blanket his Dad gave him flew out behind him like a cape and he couldn’t keep it on. Somewhere on the road he lost it. He just crouched up against Jack’s neck and hung on.”
“He’d never rode a galloping horse that long. He said that Jack got low to the ground, stretched out, took long strides, and settled into a rhythm of breathing in time with his stride. As he did plumes of white puffed sideways out his nostrils. My Dad said he felt so close to that horse, like the horse knew how important this ride was and wanted to help him get home fast. My Dad loved that horse ever since that day.”
Willie was scared he wasn’t going to make it. He could barely feel his feet. But he was wearing chopper mittens, the same kind I wear still, and said his hands were the only thing stayed warm. Did you know good wool keeps you warm even when it’s wet? It does.”
“By the time he got to the house, Willie said, he was shivering so bad he could barely yell out. Jack tried to go to the barn but he pulled him up to the back door like his Dad told him. His mother and sister finally heard him and came out, and when they saw him in the saddle, all covered with ice, they screamed and went to pull him off the horse, but his feet were frozen to the stirrups. Story goes that his Mom, my grandma, ran into her kitchen and fetched a kettle and poured boiling water on his boots, freeing them up, and that way got him down and in the house. In ten minutes or so the Irishman rode up on the draft horse, with the horse blanket he’d picked up along the way, and busted into the house. He was plenty wet himself, and still mad at Willie for being careless and falling in the pond. Grandma called her husband foolish, about the worst thing she ever said about him. And as soon as they got Willie warm again he was fine. Anyway, that’s the story.”
I remember the way I felt when my Dad was done with the story and how it made me feel. Emotional I guess. I could imagine how scared my grandpa must have been riding that horse in the freezing cold and it scared me all over again. I felt lucky not to live in those times, but at the same time had a strange yearning to be there with them all. A cold winter day, racing for your life down a snowy road on a fast horse, escaping death. What a story.
Years later I was sitting with my Dad at the kitchen table when he was old and I was in college. His chopper mittens were lying on the table. He had just returned from spreading manure, a daily chore on the dairy farm. It was another bitterly cold day and nothing was much colder than riding one of those Minneapolis Moline tractors with no cab and a steel seat down the road and spreading a load of cow shit on a cornfield. Dad had just come in, poured himself a cup of coffee, and added a small pour of Old Grand Dad whiskey. It was the sixties and our family had graduated from being one of the farmhouses that never kept liquor to one that at least had mixed drinks on Christmas Eve. Dad kept a bottle in the lower cupboard behind the shoe shine kit and Mom allowed it. She didn’t like it, but she allowed it. I guess it was the choppers that reminded me.
“Remember that story you told me about Great Grandpa and Grandpa cutting ice, and Grandpa fell in, and he rode a horse two miles home by himself to keep from freezing to death?”
“Yeah,” my Dad replied, taking a sip of coffee. When he added the whiskey he called it ‘coffee royale.’
“Do you suppose it is true?”
“I suppose it is as true as it can be. That story was told over and over. The Irishman told it for years, and your Grandpa Willie, who got his own farm and bought a threshing machine, he told that story at threshing dinners in the summer from here to damn near Iowa. Those threshing dinners were big to dos. And every day you got a new audience. After dinner it was all the talk to tell stories of things that happened on the farm. And they were Irishmen after all, like you and me, and they loved to spin a yarn. I mean no one’s ever written it down, so as you told it you could exaggerate one part, or downplay another, and no one would know the difference.”
“But is it true you ask? I think so. I know they cut ice, and I know it was dangerous, and from time to time people fell in the pond. Now did your Grandpa Willie go clear under the ice, and look up and see the sunlight, and think he was going to die? Well that’s hard to tell. He might have just fell in and got fished right out. And did the Irishman, your great grandpa, yell out that no son of his was going to die and pound him on the chest? Maybe so and maybe not. But does that really matter? Because they told that story we know what happened one day on a pond near Danvers, nearly a hundred years ago. By their ages I got that day pegged as happening about 1886. How many days do we have in our memory from that far back? Could be its not completely true. I mean it’s a story. But I’m figuring it is. And as an Irishman who likes a story that captures your heart, I’m damn glad we have it.”
“So did you add anything to the story Dad? Something you know is not exactly true?”
Dad paused before answering. He took a deep drag on his Camel, the cigarettes that would later give him emphysema.
“Yeah, to tell the truth I’m not sure my Dad loved that horse Jack. I’m not sure he didn’t feel about his farm animals like we feel about our tractors now, like they’re tools. But I was lucky enough to farm with horses, and I loved it. I loved them. Those draft horses would pull till their heart broke if you’d let them. Pull so hard they could hardly stand. And a galloping horse on a two mile run? There’s no reason a horse would run that hard that far if he didn’t sense you needed him to. So yeah, I guess I added that. I gave my own feelings to my Dad. But it helps the story.”
“You know the great thing about that story? When you’re a kid you identify with Willie, being put in a situation that scares the hell out of you. And when you’re a father you identify with the Irishman, being stern with your child for his own good and wondering if you’re doing right. It’s a story with heart for people of all ages. Try not to forget it.”
With that he drained his coffee royale, stubbed his Camel out in the ashtray on the table, and looked in my eyes as he put on his hat and stuffed his ears under the ear flaps.
“You know, if Willie would have drowned in that pond that day, or the Irishman would have made the wrong decision and let him die from the cold, we wouldn’t be here to talk about it. But because Willie lived and had me, and I had you, that’s the way our life has gone.”
He pulled on his chopper mittens and poked me softly in the chest. “So out of respect for your ancestors how about putting on some coveralls and boots and coming out to the barn to help your old man milk the cows?”
I don’t know why I think of my parents now, or what triggers those thoughts. My Dad would be 105 this December and passed away in 1988. My Mom would have turned 103 this past New Year’s Day, having lived till 1996. It’s been a long time. I think of them often yet. Sometimes every day.
Monday afternoon I was scooping the driveway, again, bundled up in many layers of clothing. I refused to start until I found my mittens, which disappeared over the weekend. Turns out I left them at my local grocery store. I recovered them from their lost and found. These are double mittens my Dad called choppers. You can find them on line marketed as such. Choppers are a thick wool inner mitten which slips into a soft leather mitten, usually deer or elk hide. Mittens alone are so much warmer than gloves, and these double mittens are the absolute warmest. My Dad was wearing choppers on the day when he told me this story.
We were standing in his little shop, crammed with tools from throughout the life of our old farm. One wall, up to the roof peak, was a sort of history of local farming from God knows when; leather pads with a metal hook you strapped to your palm to shuck corn by hand, lanterns, buggy wrenches, sickle bar guards, planter plates, calf weaners, hand scythes, untold contraptions and tools. The longer you looked at the wall the more you saw. It was a terribly cold day. Wind was rattling the windows. We could see our breath.
“Did I tell you about your grandfather falling into the pond when they were chopping ice?” My father’s father, another grandfather I never met, was the son of the Irishman who came over on the boat from Antrim and managed to buy land.
“He was twelve years old when his father let him work at the pond for the first time. It was dangerous work. In weather like this, when it was the coldest in January and the ice was frozen the thickest, the farmers in the neighborhood would work together to cut and store ice for the summer. They had an ice house they shared, stacked blocks of ice there and covered them with sawdust. You’d be amazed how long it lasted.”
“There was a spring fed pond that produced nice clear ice two miles from their farm where they gathered with their horses and hand saws. Hard work. And in taking the ice, they created an open pool of freezing water. It was easy to slip and slide into the hole. If you went in and got under the ice, and couldn’t find your way back up, you could die quickly. Most those people didn’t know how to swim then. To let a kid work the ice cutting meant he was grown up. As he talked I was looking at the wall of tools.
“Is that one of those ice saws Dad?” I pointed to a curbed serrated blade with a stub handle on one side and a handle at the rear.
“No, that’s a hay knife. We used that to parcel out hay when we put it up loose in the mow, before there were hay balers.” He scanned the wall.
“I don’t think we have any of those saws anymore. No one has cut ice for forty years.”
“So what happened?”
“My grandpa the Irishman sent my Dad Willie up to the pond with the hired man. They took off with the team and wagon. All the farmers put their teams and wagons together to get it done as quickly as possible. It was a day like this. Windy and terribly cold. Grandpa, as Dad tells it, was helping a cow deliver a calf that was breach. He came later on his little gelding named Jack.. They used that gelding mostly for a small buggy but the Irishman loved to ride him single with a saddle. The Irishman was amazed he was able to even own horses, what with being so poor back in the old country. To have a good fast horse to ride to saddle, that was for rich men in Ireland. So anyway, my Dad and the hired man got to the pond and had been working about an hour when the Irishman rides up on his gelding. Called him Jack. Tied him to a fence post, put a blanket over him, and pitched in with the rest.”
“When you cut ice you started in the middle of the pond and worked back to shore till it was shallow. Trouble was the ice blocks were slippery. You could shove them to the edge of the pond all right, push them on the ice, but when you carried them up out of the pond they were damned heavy. You used two sets of tongs to balance yourself out, one in each hand, and carried two blocks up and heaved them on a wagon, where they stacked them. So there were cutters at the edge of the hole, those who pulled the blocks out of the water and slid them to the edge of the pond, those that lugged them up the bank to the wagons, and those that stacked them. Plus men drove teams of horses, hauling wagons full of blocks to the ice house, where other men were packing them away with the sawdust. When the roads were snow packed they put the box wagons on runners, making sledges. It took a lot of men. Hard work.” My Dad smoked Camels, short with no filters. He took off his mittens, lit a cigarette with a wooden match he struck by dragging it quickly on the leg of his overalls, and paused, blowing out smoke and the match as he scanned the wall of tools, one eye squinted shut.
“Look there,” he said walking to the wall and standing on the carpenter’s chest to reach up and remove a set of iron tongs. “Here are the ice tongs we used to use.” He spread out the tongs. As the jaws got wider the handles at the top got closer together. “They cut the blocks just the right size so when you got these jaws on either side you could grip the handle and swing that ice block up and tote it. Like I said, you put one in each hand for balance.” He looked around and put the jaws on a metal milk crate filled with scrap iron. As he lifted up the jaws closed around the crate and he lifted it off the ground.
“Try that,” he said, handing it to me. It was heavy. “The ice blocks were every bit that heavy. After a day cutting ice you know you’d worked a full day.”
“So what happened to Grandpa?”
“The Irishman hadn’t been there but an hour. He was sawing blocks. My Dad was working beside him, hauling the blocks out of the water and sliding them to the pond’s edge. It’s where most boys started. He was proud to be there, working beside his Dad and all. The Irishman had a block floating and had moved down to make another cut. Willie reached down to get his tongs around the block and his feet just went out from under him. He pitched forward head first. He tried to break his fall on the block just cut but it just went down under his weight and he went with it. The ice block bobbed back to the surface but my Dad didn’t. He was gone.”
“The Irishman ran to where the block was, pushed it into open water, reached down and swept his arm back and forth feeling for his son but there was nothing but water. He started to yell and the other men came running to his side.”
“Geeminy,” I said.
“How old are you David?”
“I’m twelve.”
“Can you imagine taking a swim in icy pond water on a day like this with all your clothes on? He didn’t know how to swim. Can you imagine how scared he would have been, my Dad? He was your age.”
“No I can’t.” I looked down at the floor, then back up at my Dad. “What happened then?”
“According to my Dad, Willie, he opened his eyes and the water looked brighter than he imagined. He could see sun shining through the ice and it looked beautiful. He continued to go down and thought he would just sink away, and he wasn’t scared. It was quiet and he thought he was going to die. But then he slowly stopped and ever so slow he started back up, floating to the surface. He said it took a long, long time and he wasn’t scared. His head hit the ice. And as it did, he felt a strong hand, the strongest hand he’d ever felt, on his arm. It was his Dad’s hand. The Irishman pulled him out from under the ice and put him on his back, back into the air of the world above, but not before Willie had swallowed a hatful of water.”
“I bet his Dad was so relieved.”
“Nope. As my Dad told it he was mad as hell. Willie looked up at the men around him but he couldn’t breathe and the Irishman pounded hard on his chest and said ‘Breathe god damn you. No son of mine is going to die.’ And Willie coughed up a bunch of water and breathed. And then he started crying. And the Irishman was still mad and said ‘There's no time for crying Willie’ and took him in his arms to where Jack the gelding was tied. He whipped the blanket off the horse, threw his son into the saddle, wrapped the blanket around him and said this to my Dad Willie, who was just a little boy after all.”
“He said, ‘Willie, you’ve got to make the ride of your life. You got to get warm fast or you’ll die, and the very fastest way for you get into warmth is to ride Jack here as fast as he can go, by yourself, to the home place. Jack wants to be back in his stall and he knows the way so all you got to do is hang on and kick him, he’ll do the rest. Don’t let him take you to the barn though. Make sure you pull the reins and bring him to the back door where you can yell for your mother. Your sister can put Jack in his stall and I’ll take care of him when I get home. I’m telling you don’t let him take you to the barn because you could be too cold to get from the barn to the house. Pull Jack up to the back door, yell for your mother, and she’ll take care of you from there. I follow soon enough.’
Willie said “Dad I’m scared.”
" 'You can do it Willie, I know you can,' the Irishman said."
"And with that he slapped Jack on the hind quarters and he and his son Willie went galloping down the road.”
Back in the shop I said “Why didn’t he go with him Dad?”
“Because Jack could ride faster with just a boy on his back than if he was carrying two people. He was a little gelding. With Willie on his back Jack would be faster than ever, like a racehorse with a little jockey. And the Irishman knew he had to get his son warm quick. He trusted both the horse and his son to make that ride.”
“So he really made him go alone?”
“Yes he did. He followed to make sure he didn’t fall off. They unhitched one of his draft horses from the team, the Irishman got on him bareback, and he headed off behind Willie. But he knew his son on that galloping gelding would be way ahead of him, and the faster he got to warmth the better chance he had of not freezing to death, or freezing his feet, losing his toes, whatever. I don’t know how much they knew about hypothermia and such back then, but they knew by god he was in big trouble. Let me finish the story David.”
“So as my Dad Willie tells it he hung on to the reins, kicked Jack in the withers like he was wearing spurs, and they flew down the road. Straight shot to their farm. He had to ride down the east side of the section, past a crossroads and another mile to their farm at the end of the next section. A two mile dash down a frozen dirt road. The Irishman had never let him gallop Jack before and he went like the wind. Only the faster they went the colder he got. He began to cry and his tears froze his eyelashes near shut. As he tells it, and he told this story over and over, he had lost his hat in the pond and was bare headed. His ears and his nose hurt terrible and he thought he would surely be frostbit. The blanket his Dad gave him flew out behind him like a cape and he couldn’t keep it on. Somewhere on the road he lost it. He just crouched up against Jack’s neck and hung on.”
“He’d never rode a galloping horse that long. He said that Jack got low to the ground, stretched out, took long strides, and settled into a rhythm of breathing in time with his stride. As he did plumes of white puffed sideways out his nostrils. My Dad said he felt so close to that horse, like the horse knew how important this ride was and wanted to help him get home fast. My Dad loved that horse ever since that day.”
Willie was scared he wasn’t going to make it. He could barely feel his feet. But he was wearing chopper mittens, the same kind I wear still, and said his hands were the only thing stayed warm. Did you know good wool keeps you warm even when it’s wet? It does.”
“By the time he got to the house, Willie said, he was shivering so bad he could barely yell out. Jack tried to go to the barn but he pulled him up to the back door like his Dad told him. His mother and sister finally heard him and came out, and when they saw him in the saddle, all covered with ice, they screamed and went to pull him off the horse, but his feet were frozen to the stirrups. Story goes that his Mom, my grandma, ran into her kitchen and fetched a kettle and poured boiling water on his boots, freeing them up, and that way got him down and in the house. In ten minutes or so the Irishman rode up on the draft horse, with the horse blanket he’d picked up along the way, and busted into the house. He was plenty wet himself, and still mad at Willie for being careless and falling in the pond. Grandma called her husband foolish, about the worst thing she ever said about him. And as soon as they got Willie warm again he was fine. Anyway, that’s the story.”
I remember the way I felt when my Dad was done with the story and how it made me feel. Emotional I guess. I could imagine how scared my grandpa must have been riding that horse in the freezing cold and it scared me all over again. I felt lucky not to live in those times, but at the same time had a strange yearning to be there with them all. A cold winter day, racing for your life down a snowy road on a fast horse, escaping death. What a story.
Years later I was sitting with my Dad at the kitchen table when he was old and I was in college. His chopper mittens were lying on the table. He had just returned from spreading manure, a daily chore on the dairy farm. It was another bitterly cold day and nothing was much colder than riding one of those Minneapolis Moline tractors with no cab and a steel seat down the road and spreading a load of cow shit on a cornfield. Dad had just come in, poured himself a cup of coffee, and added a small pour of Old Grand Dad whiskey. It was the sixties and our family had graduated from being one of the farmhouses that never kept liquor to one that at least had mixed drinks on Christmas Eve. Dad kept a bottle in the lower cupboard behind the shoe shine kit and Mom allowed it. She didn’t like it, but she allowed it. I guess it was the choppers that reminded me.
“Remember that story you told me about Great Grandpa and Grandpa cutting ice, and Grandpa fell in, and he rode a horse two miles home by himself to keep from freezing to death?”
“Yeah,” my Dad replied, taking a sip of coffee. When he added the whiskey he called it ‘coffee royale.’
“Do you suppose it is true?”
“I suppose it is as true as it can be. That story was told over and over. The Irishman told it for years, and your Grandpa Willie, who got his own farm and bought a threshing machine, he told that story at threshing dinners in the summer from here to damn near Iowa. Those threshing dinners were big to dos. And every day you got a new audience. After dinner it was all the talk to tell stories of things that happened on the farm. And they were Irishmen after all, like you and me, and they loved to spin a yarn. I mean no one’s ever written it down, so as you told it you could exaggerate one part, or downplay another, and no one would know the difference.”
“But is it true you ask? I think so. I know they cut ice, and I know it was dangerous, and from time to time people fell in the pond. Now did your Grandpa Willie go clear under the ice, and look up and see the sunlight, and think he was going to die? Well that’s hard to tell. He might have just fell in and got fished right out. And did the Irishman, your great grandpa, yell out that no son of his was going to die and pound him on the chest? Maybe so and maybe not. But does that really matter? Because they told that story we know what happened one day on a pond near Danvers, nearly a hundred years ago. By their ages I got that day pegged as happening about 1886. How many days do we have in our memory from that far back? Could be its not completely true. I mean it’s a story. But I’m figuring it is. And as an Irishman who likes a story that captures your heart, I’m damn glad we have it.”
“So did you add anything to the story Dad? Something you know is not exactly true?”
Dad paused before answering. He took a deep drag on his Camel, the cigarettes that would later give him emphysema.
“Yeah, to tell the truth I’m not sure my Dad loved that horse Jack. I’m not sure he didn’t feel about his farm animals like we feel about our tractors now, like they’re tools. But I was lucky enough to farm with horses, and I loved it. I loved them. Those draft horses would pull till their heart broke if you’d let them. Pull so hard they could hardly stand. And a galloping horse on a two mile run? There’s no reason a horse would run that hard that far if he didn’t sense you needed him to. So yeah, I guess I added that. I gave my own feelings to my Dad. But it helps the story.”
“You know the great thing about that story? When you’re a kid you identify with Willie, being put in a situation that scares the hell out of you. And when you’re a father you identify with the Irishman, being stern with your child for his own good and wondering if you’re doing right. It’s a story with heart for people of all ages. Try not to forget it.”
With that he drained his coffee royale, stubbed his Camel out in the ashtray on the table, and looked in my eyes as he put on his hat and stuffed his ears under the ear flaps.
“You know, if Willie would have drowned in that pond that day, or the Irishman would have made the wrong decision and let him die from the cold, we wouldn’t be here to talk about it. But because Willie lived and had me, and I had you, that’s the way our life has gone.”
He pulled on his chopper mittens and poked me softly in the chest. “So out of respect for your ancestors how about putting on some coveralls and boots and coming out to the barn to help your old man milk the cows?”
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