Catching Air and Almost Dying

Would you look at this! Two days in a row with a new post. I haven't done that since I posted twice in one day last September (2015). Well, this piece is based on something I've never told my mother, a topic I have taken from Jack Prelutsky’s “A Day at the Zoo” found in Guys Write for Guys Read on many occasions. I’ve been using this prompt so long now that it’s getting harder and harder to come up with ideas that Mom doesn’t know about. I’m sure if I could spend a few minutes with my brothers, though, something will spark a memory.
                  My students had been asking about near-death experiences lately, so here's another one...that I don't think Mom knows about unless she's reading this right now.

                  The first time I ever actually thought I was going to die in a car was late one Friday night when I lived on Scott AFB in Illinois. Jon, Steve, and I were driving away from the base, probably headed back to The Coop via Rally’s or Taco Bell or somewhere else for a midnight snack run. I think we had dropped off Josh at his house, or maybe he was with us. I don’t remember. It’s possible Rob or someone else might have been in the back seat, too, but that doesn’t really matter. For some reason, though, we decided to take the back road that ran parallel to the railroad tracks, a route we normally didn’t take that late at night because there were very few lights, or more importantly, no girls cruising up and down like there would have been on the main roads.

                  About a third of the way down that stretch of lonely road, there was a small rise, a short hill or a bump if you will, not quite as steep as a speed bump like you find in a parking lot or highfalutin gated community, but steep nevertheless. Some of you might see where this is going by now.

                  Jon was driving his little Plymouth Sundance, I was riding shotgun, and Steve was spread out in the back seat. Naturally, the tunes were cranked, back left speaker already fuzzing.

                  I’m not sure if Jon meant to hit the bump that fast, or if he just forgot it was there, but at sixty-five miles per hour, there’s not much you can do after impact.

                  We hit. The Sundance launched. Snowboarders would have been awed at the air we caught. And that’s when time slowed down and eyes bulged in their sockets.

                  Sparks flew upon landing, the underside scraping the hard pot hole riddled asphalt. We jolted twice. Then spun. Counter-clockwise. Once, twice, three, four times. We jerked to a stop in a ditch. The seatbelts had held fast.

                  Tightness in my chest. Breathing suspended. I looked out the window to my right. A cement power pole stood a literal inch on the other side of the glass.

                  The CD must have ended because I only remember silence. The only noise came from my heart trying to thump through my rib cage. Breathing resumed. The three of us looked at each other. Jon put the car in reverse and backed out. We stopped again on the road and jumped out. We circled the car wordlessly, inspecting for crumpled metal or jacked-up fenders. No damage—a miracle—just a little mud and grass clumped into the tire treads.

                  Still without speaking, we climbed back in, I turned back on the music, and we drove silently on. I don’t even think we stopped for food. It wasn’t until later that night that any of us dared speak about what had just almost happened. And being the intelligent teenage morons we were, we later went looking for safer places to jump the car.

P.S. If anyone reading this has a picture of this car, I'd like to have a copy. I can't find any in my stash despite how much we lived in it (and a few choice others).

Taking Down Superman

                I looked down at the Hawaiian Teriyaki chicken surrounded by twenty-seven types of salad situated on my sagging Chinet.  Yuck!  What would have been a typical neighborhood Labor Day feast, didn’t even appeal to my appetite.  Mr. Stomach Knot made sure of that.  I mean, I couldn’t even force myself to try the Italian marinated pheasant or the barbecued elk steaks.  Something was definitely wrong with me, and it wasn’t just indigestion or heartburn.

                My stomach started hurting Sunday afternoon, but at the time I thought it was just hunger pains. For dinner I pounded more than I should have; I had been fasting after all. Then at the Labor Day breakfast that morning, I inhaled enough for three people my size—not bad, but the hash browns tasted like cardboard. I assumed that my pain was an exorbitant amount of carbs nestled in my belly, so I tried everything I could think of to rid myself of that burden, but it refused to budge.

                You can ask anyone who knows me: my pain tolerance is pretty high; but this was an ache like nothing I had ever experienced. It was as if someone was literally grabbing my guts and wringing them from the inside. And although I hurt, I didn’t feel extremely sick, though I tried to force my body to give up whatever remained on the inside. As I knelt on the cold tile of the bathroom floor my geeky English teacher nature cringed even more because I couldn’t come up with one single simile or metaphor to accurately describe my anguish. All that came out, literally, had been hyperbole.

                Bent double over the porcelain at my parents’ house, I hid from the overloaded smorgasbord outside and the curious, well-intending neighbors asking if I felt all right. I didn’t want to see anyone let alone strike up a superficial conversation.

Alone for the moment, I mused: a new thought burrowed into my thick skull and nestled into my brain: where I had previously thought that nothing could stop me, this Superman just got hit by a truckload of Kryptonite; some extraterrestrial substance had brought me to my knees. I’m not sure if you want to call on Karma, hubris, or just gold ol’ irony, but just the previous week I had bragged to my students that I never missed school. I had only missed one day of work due to illness in my life, and that had been in college when I commanded the back of the house at Brick Oven. I only missed eight days of school (from illness) from Kindergarten all the way through graduation. I did not want to get a sub, especially since missing a day as a teacher requires more effort to prepare for and clean up after a substitute, no matter how good she is. So I tried to walk it off, rub some dirt on it, take two Tylenol, and see what the morning would bring.

Sometime between two and three o’clock the next morning, my body popped itself out of bed, not even my usual sloth-like roll out. It was toaster-action popping.

“My appendix,” my brain tried to tell me. I don’t know where the thought materialized from, but immediately I knew that that spindly, superfluous organ was the cause of all my pain. I trudged downstairs to the almighty Internet to confirm my suspicions. Yep. Well…maybe. There were about 47 different possible prognoses with my symptoms according to Web MD. But somehow I knew it was my appendix. Just to be sure I wasn’t fooling myself, I read Amy’s big, thick, how-to-treat-yourself/ home remedy thingy book.  It said to go to the hospital.  Duh!  I already figured that out.

So I typed up some simple lesson plans—students were to read “The Most Dangerous Game” by Richard Connell—and emailed them to a colleague, knowing I was not showing up that Tuesday morning.

I then showered and got dressed before I woke up my wife. When she saw me standing there, she knew something was wrong.

“Provo or Payson?” she asked simply, knowing that when I request to go to the emergency room, something was seriously wrong.

We quickly bundled the kids into the car and headed north. She drove me to UVRMC, where she dropped me off so she could take the kids to Carol’s while I was examined and such.

                The triage nurse was unbusy, so it took no time at all to get me in. The actual nurse was pretty ditsy, and I remember thinking, “Great! I’m stuck with her?” She flirted with just about every male nurse or doctor in the joint.  I was placed in an isolated part of the ER where they were making a few renovations.  I don’t think they were staffed properly; it took a little while for anyone to even remember that I was there. Then Ditsy nurse led me to a room the size of a cubicle and gave me a hospital gown, something I had never put on my body before then, so it took me a while to figure out. And when I finally did, the faded pastel print cotton was almost long enough to cover my nether regions, so she had to bring another—an actual adult size.

                Somewhere between thirty and three hundred minutes later Ditsy brought me this sick, chalky, supposedly mint flavored milky garbage to drink.  I think the thick, white goo was supposed to act as a painkiller and check for ulcers or something like that, but I’m not entirely sure. Maybe it was a SuperTums! All I know is that it was like trying to gag down liquid Styrofoam or coagulated Elmer’s glue.

At this point, I guess the insurance finally cleared or maybe an actual non-flirty, non-ditsy nurse came on shift and paid attention to her patients, but I was able to get an x-ray. I was CT-scanned, too.  All the preliminary tests came back negative; finally a think tank of eleven or so medical personnel decided that my appendix was about to rupture. Duh. I could have told them that when I first arrived, but what does the patient know?

Surgery was imminent.

“I guess I’ll need a sub for tomorrow, too,” I joked with my wife and dad, who had sat with me for an hour or six.

The rest of that day was a blur except one distinct memory. I was shuffled onto an icy metal table-bed thing after I had taken out my contacts before being wheeled into the OR. Once through the doors, a hive of green-scrubbed surgeons and assistants teemed about, prepping instruments, reading charts; a couple even jammed to the radio. I knew that they weren’t going to do much slicing, that my appendectomy was going to be performed laparoscopically, but my mortality, the frailness of my flesh, began to make itself manifest in my mind. I was no longer invincible. Superman had met his match. Tuesday, September 7, 2004, would go down in infamy as the first surgery I remember, my first hospital stay since infancy. A small, pencil-shaped blob that had swelled to the diameter of a toilet paper tube had called out my invincibility.

With these thoughts swimming, a trio of nondescript masks surrounded my head, and one doctor slipped the anesthesia mask over my mouth and nose. Another had me start counting backwards. I knew I would never make it to zero, but as I started sliding into La-La Land, one of the assistants from across the room shouted, “Hey, Boss, listen to this.”

I heard Nickelback wail from the crackling speakers, “Something’s gotta go wrong ‘cause I’m feelin’ way too damn good!”

Like I said, I don’t remember conking out, but I do remember chuckling to myself and contemplating the irony of the lyrics.

Things We Live For

                Over the past decade or so there has been a giant push in the S.T.E.M. subjects in schools. Having moved into the 21st century for a good 16 years now, the American public as a whole seems to believe that this is where our future lies. So naturally, legislatures and others with power and money are emphasizing STEM subjects in schools. Most of the grants offered appear to be directed toward those in STEM fields. Government programs forgave loans for teachers going in to STEM subjects. Large corporations made donations in the name of almighty STEM advancement. For those of you are unaware, or ignorant, or both, the acronym includes Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. I’m not here to judge, and I acknowledge that these are indeed vital to our lives and the progress of the world, but I think that something is missing from this unprecedented weight appointed to the hard sciences: art.

                And when I talk of art, I mean all the “softer” sciences: music, sculpture, drawing, dance, athletics, drama, reading, writing, philosophy, geography, and history.

                No, I am not blind to the fact that students still receive many of these subjects in schools. There are thousands of successful programs out there.

                Yes, I know that a primary focus in elementary schools is literacy, and we have spent millions of dollars to become literate human beings, but this literary emphasis sometimes gets set aside when students move into their secondary education years for subjects that “really matter” or will provide a better salary. Good for us. But it seems that when push comes to shove, and the almighty dollar is in question, art and music programs are the first to be axed in the name of progress or “saving failing schools.” They are often not rediscovered until after high school graduation and post-secondary work has commenced.

                Please don’t think I do not deem STEM subjects irrelevant or unnecessary. I know they are important, and I believe that we need to explore them in more depth as society moves forward, but in and of themselves, I view them as hollow shells—a framework of a building if you will. What gives life to a building, though, are the people, the lives that inhabit it.

                I understand that there is a “S.T.E.A.M.” movement to bring Art back into the middle of this 21st century education, but from what I have seen, it is small. So I want to add my two cents. First, I want to share an excerpt from Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society:

                “This is a battle, a war, and the casualties could be your hearts and souls…Armies of academics going forward, measuring poetry. No! We will not have that here. No more Mr. J. Evans Pritchard. In my class you will learn to think for yourselves again. You will learn to savor words and language.

                “No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world. I see that look in Mr. Pitts’s eye, like nineteenth century literature has nothing to do with going to business school or medical school, right? Maybe. Mr. Hopkins, you may agree with him, thinking, ‘Yes, we should simply study our Mr. Pritchard and learn our rhyme and meter and go quietly about the business of achieving other ambitions’. I have a little secret for you. Huddle up. Huddle up!

                “We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race and the human race is filled with passion. Medicine, law, business, engineering—these are all noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love—these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman: ‘O me! O life! Of the questions of these recurring; Of the endless train of the faithless—of cities filled with the foolish; What good amid these, O me, O life? Answer: That you are here—that life exists, and identity; That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse.’ That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?”

                Like Mr. Keating, I allow that there are other pursuits in life, but I also question why life is worth living if not to enjoy the stories, the experiences, the ideas of others. It is the small, simple pleasures that bring meaning to life. When we share our emotions with the human family, we make connections, we find purpose in life. (I discussed this briefly this in a previous blog post.)

                In his book, The Arts and the Creation of Mind, Elliot W. Eisner discusses ten lessons the arts teach. I think they are poignant and worthy of sharing with you.

1.       Arts help us learn to make good judgments about qualitative relationships.

2.       Problems can have more than one answer.

3.       Problems can be solved by changing circumstances and opportunities.

4.       It is important to see and celebrate multiple perspectives.

5.       The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.

6.       Small differences can have large effects.

7.       Arts help us experience the world in different ways.

8.       Arts give us ways to express what can’t be said.

9.       Arts give us opportunities to think through and within a material.

10.   If the school (or parent) values art, the child values art.

                By sharing these tenets, I don’t mean to start an argument; they’ve just been on my mind since I encountered them in an article written by Shauna Valentine for McKay Today Magazine (“The Artist in All of Us,” Fall 2016). Art is everywhere; it is the craft, the thought, the passion behind the necessary elements of life. It is what we live for. There are so many more people who can express this better than I can, but oh, well. They either are better artists or wordsmiths than I am, or they have taken the time to craft their arguments. I am just rambling today.

                However, I don’t think anyone will argue that art and all of the threads it weaves into the fabrics of our lives are not essential for enjoying life. Gordon B. Hinckley once said, “Life is to be enjoyed, not just endured” (“Standing True and Faithful,” 1996). Art brings joy; it is indispensable for living happily on this planet and being productive members of society in the 21st century. STEM is important, yes, but I think even more important is teaching each other how to find beauty and joy as we incorporate science, technology, engineering, art, and math into every aspect of our lives and we share our experiences, our emotions, our creations, and our dreams.

                Even though I lack skill with the pencil, the brush, or the clay, my spirit concurs with the words Vincent van Gogh penned to his brother Theo in a letter in January 1874: “…I also have nature and art and poetry, and if that isn’t enough, what is?”

Once a Narrator, Always a Narrator

                Since I was young, people have told me I had a good reading voice. Not deep or soothing like James Earl Jones, Morgan Freeman, or Christopher Lee, but I frequently landed the part of the narrator in church or school productions. I got to know the second chapter of the Book of Luke extremely well. One notable narrating role I had was for the 6^th grade play, The Nutcracker. I was the nutcracker. No, there were no tights involved, nor was there any ballet or any type of dancing for this guy. Get that image out of your heads. Besides, back then I was a scrawny 98-pound weakling with thick glasses and dark, wavy hair. I was simply the voice that told the story while other students awkwardly pranced about to excerpts of Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece and parents videotaped the low-budget performance. Perhaps the most amusing part of these narrating roles, though, was that I was always appointed to these parts; I never auditioned or sought them out due to my natural introverted tendencies. However, despite my quiet nature, I guess others, namely teachers, saw something in the way I could tell a story.

                The first “major” role I landed, though, was that of the narrator in my first grade class’s production of Where the Wild Things Are. I must stress that this role was unexpected and the cause of great stress to this shy first grader. Mrs. Latch had written an adaptation of my favorite story and cast parts for the 20 or so of us. I remember anticipating the casting call at the end of one day. I wanted to be a wild thing—a cool part but one that also could be done as part of a group…without a spotlight! My buddy Jeremy was cast as Max, and Jill was to be Max’s mother. Those were the only solo speaking parts that I remembered from the book, so my timid self felt safe. That was until Mrs. Latch had cast all the other students as monsters, bushes, trees, vines, and the rest of the Max’s made-up world. I alone remained without a part. Panic hit me in the face. Having to speak would have been horrible for the emotional six-year-old me, but being left out of the cast entirely was worse than being picked last for kickball at recess. My face flushed, and I could feel the red rise in my cheeks, tears peeking at the surface. Then gray-haired, good-natured Mrs. Latch, larger than life itself, smiled softly and pulled me aside. She handed me what appeared to be a ream of paper, although in reality it was only about six or seven pages of hand-written material.

                “I want you to be the narrator,” she said, an unnerving twinkle dancing in her eye.

                I probably gasped, blinked, blanked, or something along those lines. That meant I had to talk. In front of people. Lots of people!

                Needless to say, I didn’t want to do it. But because this reserved people-pleaser couldn’t speak up for himself, I ended up nodding my head. We practiced. And practiced. The others danced around, and I stood alone behind a podium. I stuttered, stammered, and stumbled my way through it, but after hours of practice (mostly with Mom), I got to a point where I had the whole thing memorized. I said it as I went to sleep, wishing that I, too, had my own wolf suit—not that I would ever have dared tell my mother I would eat her up.

                And when the performance night came, and I saw that all my friends (except Jeremy) were wearing tights—yes, even the wild things—I was relieved that I was not one of them. I just wore a white dress shirt and a maroon vest with some Sunday slacks, garb I was already resigned to donning once a week. One more time wasn’t too bad. Plus, if I forgot what I was doing, before, during, or after the wild rumpus, the podium hid my papers. But I didn’t even have to use them once.

                I remember starting a little shakily, but then, as I got into the performance, I noticed the crowd watching me, hanging on to what I was saying—parents and siblings alike—and I thought to myself, “Hey, I’m pretty good at this narrating stuff,” and the rest of the words flowed out of my first grade mouth like the ocean that Max sailed through night and day and in and out of weeks and almost over a year, or at least until the performance ended.

                Being a narrator gave me the confidence I needed to volunteer to read aloud in class or raise my hand when I knew an answer. Following the play, it seemed like whenever we did a readers’ theater in school or when we read verses in Sunday school, I always got the longer parts. Narrating Where the Wild Things Are was a gateway experience which started me on the path of oral performance and public speaking and brought me to where I am now—still a bit introverted and shy, but ready to present to a crowd, give a speech to a large congregation, or even teach a room full of junior high wild things voluntarily. On occasion I even get invited to do a poetry reading or perform “The Tell-tale Heart” on Halloween for other classes. I guess once a narrator…