Our friend The Goldfish writes with dignity about the pervasive and daily effects of ill health. Lots of us with disabilities as they’re collectively known are the people or persons of The Goldfish Tribe. I have a friend and colleague here in the creative nonfiction writing program at the U of Iowa who has a serious chronic illness and she’s often exhausted and unable to leave her house. I told her how blindness leaves me wiped out and that sometimes I feel like one of Mario Puzo’s characters in The Godfather who has gone into hiding by “going to the mattresses”.
We Pwds “go to the mattresses” and we rise from them again with a helluva lot of brio and steadfastness. We raise kids and attend meetings and we take longer to clean the house but we feel the drifting and incandescent seconds as joys without easy analogies and we get on with our business.
This is the irony of disability: the ableists imagine Pwds as being child-like when in fact we’re the older people, the ones who still remember that hourly or minute by minute steepness remain central parts of life.
I was talking in my writing class on Thursday about Thomas Jefferson who as a comparatively young man fell and broke his wrist while traveling in France. The crude local doctor made the break even worse and in turn Jefferson never regained full use of his hand. And we know that the hand never stopped hurting. And we know that Jefferson never spoke of the matter. He gave up his beloved violin and that was that. Stoicism vanishes with the commercial advent of aspirin in the 20th century. People seem to think that a 0 degree of pain is what its all about.
Well you can’t fool the People of The Goldfish Tribe. We have night sweats; aching joints; asthma; burning eyes; dizzy spells; skull ripping headaches; jitters; snapped bones; paralysis; Rococo fatigues; grasshoppers in our pillows; crickets in our milk.
Sometimes we just sneak away from the party, the dinner, the convocation, the whole damned dog show and we go to the mattresses.
SK
Planet of the Blind 