Month: June 2013

Quiet late afternoon first day of summer, blond half-life of the mind decaying in the soft minutes, smooth electrolysis of easy thoughts. My twin brother died at birth and sometimes I swear he’s with me, breathing perhaps inside me. We are alive like no one who’s lived before. “If you are afraid you’re not living,” he tells me. Solstice, bees at our trellis, and the house so quiet now.

By Andrea Scarpino

 

When food is poetry : vegetables carefully grown, prepared, pickled in glass jars. Sauces whisked from impossible ingredients. Flavors paired perfectly. Textures carefully matched : some crunch, some soft, some tender yield.

 

Poetry : The French Laundry with Zac and our dear friend Courtney. Even food as simple as carrots and peas—the carrots sliced exactly the same size as the peas, all cooked perfectly, all dressed in the perfect lush sauce. Even the butter perfectly churned, salted, served at the perfect temperature in perfectly chosen small bowls. Even the salt—a different salt for different courses.

 

And beet essence : a swirl of red on a crisp white plate. Its luxury.

 

And wine pairings, a carefully chosen compliment to each bite of food.

 

We sat and ate and talked about the food and shared bites from each of our plates. Hours and hours, we sat and ate. We each cried at some point in the night, the tastes so wonderful, the meal so thoughtfully prepared. The care in each knife cut. The care our servers showed us.

 

The French Laundry : three years ago, now, and still, I feel like I can remember every course, every sip of wine. The best that food has to offer. The best of art on the plate.

 

Last weekend, Zac and I visited Courtney in Ann Arbor. Each meal we shared, a kind of poetry, each bite discussed, savored, shared. No bite wasted. Our conversation frequently halted to fully appreciate a taste. Frequently, my hand moved to my chest in awe. Tables around us filled and emptied, turned over quickly. And still we sat. Ordered another course.

 

The first question Courtney’s sister asked us when we met her one afternoon: ‘What have you eaten so far?’ Courtney’s response when a server suggested we order less than we planned, ‘She has no idea what we’re capable of.’

 

At its best, poetry means deep attention to words, sounds, rhythms, to the movement of a story across the page. To image. To seeing the world in new and unexpected ways.

 

Food, too, can be unexpected, wonder-filled—if we prepare it with care, if we value it, give it an important place in our lives. If we slow down, pay attention, really taste, savor : a new world opens up.

When the GOP torpedoed ratification of the UN Charter on the rights of people with disabilities last spring it was easy to evince disgust for their arguments as they were tricked out with the paranoia of Rick Santorum. Briefly (incredibly) Santorum argued that by affirming the rights of people with disabilities around the world, rights which include access to public education, the United States would relinquish the rights of parents to home school their disabled children. Forget for a moment there’s nothing about a UN treaty that in any way affects the rights of Americans to home school children or to twirl spaghetti counter-clockwise. Santorum knows his people: they’re the ones who believe if a butterfly wiggles its wings in (insert foreign place name here) then without delay black helicopters will arrive and troops will leap out and take their automatic weapons. Weapons are the controlling signifiers behind all right wing suspicions about the UN and it was rather quaint, nay cunning, to see Santorum substitute books in the parlor for Uzis. But semiotic subterfuge ruled the day. All of this is old news to people with disabilities and their supporters but its worth noting that in right wing circles imperialism is internalization–ignorance and want are acceptable everywhere in the world as long as we can hide in our homes or domestic compounds. The great folk singer Christine Lavin has a song about people who are “prisoners of their hairdos” and we might easily write a similar ditty about prisoners of ingrown imperialism though it won’t be catchy.

 

Ingrown imperialism (the paranoiac backwash of human rights violations as a matter of American foreign policy) has always flourished in the US. The poet Allen Ginsburg brilliantly parodied its stream of consciousness in his poem “America”:

 

America it’s them bad Russians.

Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.

The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia’s power mad. She wants to take

our cars from out our garages.

Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader’s Digest. her wants our

auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.

That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers.

Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.

America this is quite serious.

America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.

America is this correct?

 

Of course Ginsburg’s rhetorical question is metonymic–almost helpless with its squeak of common sense. Ingrown imperialism always demands the suborning of rationality because there are terrifying foreigners in the hedges.

 

From a disability rights perspective my poor brothers and sisters around the globe who are blind, deaf, paralyzed, disfigured, learning impaired, or who have HIV–just to name the most common conditions–are denied access to public spaces, books, homes, medicines, and prosthetics. Against this worldwide calamity stands the rightward bench of the GOP saying (with apologies to Ginsburg):

 

America the cripples are coming in their special cripple spaceships,

The cripples them want to steal our Fox News, steal our bullets and bibles,

Ruin our high school proms…

 

 At dusk the lights in the country houses were yellow as the eyes of lions. My mother was the last empress of Russia, doomed and captive in her palace, and she moved from mirror to mirror striking poses of tragic beauty. 

 

Outside in the darkness cars roared past, and maybe a driver saw those glittering windows beyond the oaks and thought to himself, “there’s a lovely house, how happy they must be,” not sensing my mother was there, sewing her up her dress with a diamond sliver. 

 

Occasionally I break my heart on daylight–do you know how that goes?

A wishful half-mind desire for my parents, my personal ghosts, old friends

 

Gone, comes like a minnow’s glint and so easily, it was just a walk

Under trees and then, blue bottle there’s my mother, blue as always 

 

Still wrapped in her life–she too seeing colors, nursing grievances

As she did in life. Blue as a cricket’s back, blue as old bindings 

 

In the library of lonely childhood. Daylight, what have you done?

 

The streets shed their light, like strange movies. Corky and I walked around New York like actors in a technicolor pageant, sweetly in tandem. Walk, walk fast, sing. Our lives were going to be a kind of logorhythmic performance. How do you become a guide dog team? You dance and sing the darkness and light, make it do your bidding. 

 

Back at the guide dog school they would say in class, “follow your dog” which, in the early days of training meant that you shouldn’t lag back or drag your feet. Follow your dog meant trust her. Go with her. Let her make decisions. On the first day of class at Guiding Eyes I remember a student saying to me, “Man that felt like I was walking on an airplane wing.” He meant that it felt both light and dangerous. It would take him more than a few ways to turn over to his dog’s steadfast intelligence and follow her freely. Once you follow a dog you really are in a dance. Fred Astaire said: “Dancing is a sweat job.” He also said: “I just put my feet in the air and move them around.” Dancing is hard work until the music gets inside you. 

On that same first day Corky and I descended under the streets into the subway. I stopped with the “Mairzy Doats” and just talked to gently to her. A little baritonal whispering. “My dear Girl, we are in the new darkness, and it’s going to be okay. What a good good Girl you are!” We were floating then.  

  

 

How do you become a guide dog team? First there’s a month of classes, lectures, and training walks. But if you’re a serious guide dog user you sing to your dog. It doesn’t matter what you sing. It could be “Mairzy Doats” or “Yellow Submarine”. On my first solo walk with Corky in New York City, squeezing through the half assed construction sites and rude throngs I sang softly:

 

Mairzy doats and dozy doats

And liddle lamzy divey

A kiddley divey too,

Wouldn’t you?

 

If the words sound queer and funny to your ear,

A little bit jumbled and jivey,

Sing “Mares eat oats and does eat oats

And little lambs eat ivy.”

 

Oh mairzy doats and dozy doats

And liddle lamzy divey

A kiddley divey too,

Wouldn’t you?

 

 

Leadbelly on the hifi–

Good morning blues

Clean nowhere in mind–death after death

And all before breakfast. Didn’t I love enough Lord

To have an ounce of hope? The old singer had

Grasshoppers in his pillow, crickets in

His milk. One drinks his hope that way

Eh Meester Jesus? Just push the bugs around

With your tongue.

 

Now a team we had to learn how to talk to each other. Pet owners think you talk to dogs like they’re small humans. And in truth dogs do like to be praised. But when a dog is your team mate you talk to her in a different way.  This talking is an acquired art; a whole body art. In an odd way, this communication between blind handler and guide dog is akin to what some of my autistic friends have experienced. Words are visceral, tremble in air, have colors in your mind, are influenced by instincts. I thought “left” and Corky turned left and I never said the word. Did I turn ever so slightly? Was my girl able to detect the slightest postural shift in me? Maybe? Maybe. But sometimes there was no shift at all. I practiced this. I thought left and made no apparent movement and Corky without a hitch, smooth as an automatic transmission, shifted. We were talking with our respective nervous systems. Even now, ten years after her passing we are still talking. I don’t feel the need to explain this. You’ll have to trust me about the matter. Left. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about team work lately. When I was a child they wouldn’t let me play sports owing to my blindness. This made sense when the only games for kids were baseball and basketball. But somehow the physical education instructors believed it would be good for me to sit on the sidelines and so I’d daydream to the sounds of sneakers on wood floors or the vaguely pastoral whispers of baseball. I did a lot of daydreaming. It was easy because no one talked to me. Talking was reserved for those who were in the game and I was for all intents and purposes in Valhalla. The truth is I never had a team experience, never had camaraderie, reliance, the sense that somehow someone had my back. Never had someone who made me better because he or she was there. This quality of unsporting isolation in childhood was the most painful thing about being blind. When I recollect the isolation and enforced solitudes of boyhood I see how my first guide dog not only gave me confidence in traffic–she also gave me the first sense of being on a team. We might only have been a team of two, but we were a powerful and mobile team and yes, we had each other’s backs. Corky dog brought me this spirited physical and emotional bond that had always been missing from my life. Dogs are teamsters through and through. 

 

Everyone knows that in a team sport you can’t win without others. I saw this for the first time when Corky and I were crossing Columbus Circle in Manhattan. From a traffic standpoint the area is a nightmare. It’s a lethal circus of combined avenues and cross streets, the traffic moving so fast it makes a zithing sound. We plunged together into the maelstrom with her good judgment and my faith in her. I once tried to describe the moment when we left the sidewalk’s safety there on the upper westside of Manhattan as embracing the emptiness between stars. Now that’s teamwork. “Who is your team mate?” “Blaise Pascal.”