Hoagie's Gifted October 2019: If you[th] but knew/Michaelmas Term Reflections

In July 1995, on a doctor's visit, I read an alphabet which said I for if only in reference to learning differences like reading and writing disorder [known as dyslexia and dysgraphia] - 'If only' are the saddest words in the English language.

It was in a women's magazine/general interest magazine - probably something like Better Homes and Gardens.

Now we are in October 2019 and Hoagie's Gifted have done a blog hop known as If you only knew. I only got into Hoagie's Gifted again after a long break in May 2019 when I was really starting to explore Mix.

Thank you Pamela and Caroline for what you do.

It was super good to read Gail, Teresa and Linda in Living with Geniuses; Help My Children Thrive and Gifted Challenges.

Pamela and Caroline? Aren't those names familiar?

And alphabetisation and literacy? Aren't those going to be important in some way?

There is a wonderful book called If youth but knew which I picked up one day some time between 2009 and 2014 and finally had myself read in 2014. It seems to be a romance of multigenerations and I hope it introduced healthy communication among the generations and within generations.

I am thinking too of Yom Kippur, and the terrible thing which happened in Halle, Germany. Two people were killed because of anti-Semitism [and this article shows us how Germany is trying to deal with it]. The suspect did confess; according to Deutsche Welle.

And I know who won the Nobel Literature Prize in 2019! I read Olga Tokarczuk this year [had to check twice to get it right - I had only just read her Flights over Christmas and again a few months later] and I do not know if I have read Peter Handke. He seems like a film person.

Narrative power and linguistic integrity - these are big things, and things that I have "pleased to strive" over my whole literary life.

This Monday Michaelmas Term began - it is supposed to begin around the end of September of any year and it is after St Michael and all the Angels.

For me Yom Kippur is all about repentance and confession - something that I understand both in the religious and the mental health worlds.

I explored repentance a lot in Rivals of the Collegiate through the actions and words of a sensitive young woman who is Gifted and has many Gifted friends. She is moderately gifted [or only just over bright] - her friend is profoundly gifted.

They do this over the spring term [March-June].

The students - like Holly McCutcheon - explore repentance too.

During Michaelmas Term there are a lot of set pieces and people get to know one another, or know one another again. There is always - always - hope!

This is the first thing I want to concentrate on in this If youth but knew post.

A lot of people do not feel hope in the first place; or have it taken away or stolen from them for some reason.

Or they invest a lot of hope in things which may or may not happen.

It is all a matter of probabilities and of trust.

The thing I wanted to repent hardest during this Yom Kippur season was intellectual arrogance.

Over this season I had said some hard and harsh things to Astrid and some flippant things to Emma in the This is the very definition of rain.

Relaxing or slacking with our fellows means so much. Especially if we have to maintain high standards in public life and we hold ourselves to high expectations. We can forget that not everybody does this; nor desires to do this; nor has to do this.

We think misleadingly that society is so much more cruel than we could ever be individually and we forget to #choosekind.

Or we believe that humility is a form of oppression and we tend to believe our own publicity.

And we forget that we too are vulnerable. Or we are too/overly conscious of our vulnerability in the face of audiences real and imaginary.

At the Ray Chen performance I had the opportunity to meet a lot of gifted youth and youth with all sorts of gifts.

I remember too how I studied intellectual virtue.

In the Funk and Wagnalls 1997 year book [events of 1996] which did not come to me until the early 2010s as the result of the death of a grandparent there is a reference to Bennett's The book of virtues.

Midgley and Murdoch [Iris] did a lot to teach me about virtue too.

And there was Stephanie Tolan and a great website about intellectual virtues, which I was able to explore through a case study of Justin Chapman.

The story of Chapman is a very tragic one at least as I perceived it in early December 2001.

There were strong implications of fraud and imposture.

Eighteen years later I hope Justin is being good and doing good for his own values of good and finding harmony and decency and dignity.

The way gifted people live is not always very pretty - especially scrabbling along with the 99%.

One thing that really helps me is that three times as many people measure as intellectually disabled as do within the range of the gifted.

This keeps me more focused on grit than on glamour.

Grit is a very good thing and a very undervalued thing - especially if one is intolerant; impatient and used to quick results.

The consequences grind more slowly in relationship than in behaviourism or some other ideology.

My own intellectual virtues are curiosity and openness - those are the two I achieve consistently.

The others are spottier.

One of the others is intellectual courage. I consider it to be one which is not so spotty.

I thought courage to be a big virtue - and I was able to read a wonderful article on a trip about physical courage and moral courage. This was some time in October 1995.

In my own life I find they are intertwined. I can show moral courage by physical courage and vice versa.

That whole keeping on keeping on - intellectual persistence.

Here is some of the work of Leia Zhu who lives in the United Kingdom. She is a violinist and I discovered her through Ray Chen and his performances of Waltzing Matilda and Paganini. Zhu has some wonderful things to say about her craft which developed over her European trip with a friend.

I had first thought of contributing to Hoagie's Gifted seriously in September 2019 when the topic was Anxiety and Perfectionism and using Natalie Portman's BLACK SWAN - Darren Aronofsky is a legendary director who gets a lot into and out of his women. The things Ms Portman's character puts into Swan Lake being Giselle. I had also read Meredith Danman's biography of Margot Fonteyn.

Australian Ballet is really good too. McAllister is leaving.

Love Zhu's spiritual and wise words here. And the glowing purple.

There is Wiesnaski also.

Two years ago of course there was the mainstreaming of #metoo / #balancetonporc [Bring your pig/abuser to account]. In 1996 Tamika had a young lady at camp who testified against her abuser and Tamika felt she wasn't doing enough.

I think too we can often feel like we are not doing enough.

Or we have done too much too wrong at the wrong time.

I keep a Kim Wilde song for times like this. It is called You'll never be so wrong.

When YouTube and Quora and Twitter are not behaving themselves it can make my work and play very difficult!

Two lovers in a city cafe - what a great beginning.

In late 1999-early 2000 I wrote a scene which was set in Portsmouth, Hampshire. I reflected last Tuesday that these are some of the scenes I am proud of as a writer - yes, among the overall text. And to think that five years before at the earliest I had barely started my writing life.

School stories were only supposed to be a side hustle and amusement. I am sorry, but it is true. This was a fairly recent reflection.

Some final notes on courage from We bought a zoo:

B Mee says "You need twenty seconds of courage" to his son Dylan.

I believe - every twenty seconds there is a moment or ounce of courage. And if you find that at least once you are doing pretty well.

Chloe Gillmere and Elena are looking for new wheelchairs and new controls. I remembered a Bangalore gentleman who wrote to me this May.

"The joy of professional exchange is a curiously unsung hymn"...

"For great practitioners of the art, whose lives are at the mercy of a vocation" ...

"Such people are wedded to the endless rigor of the search and perhaps the most ultimate union an artist can ever forge will be with someone who shares not his bed, but his dreams". [Daneman 2004].

Margot Fonteyn would be 100 years old if she were still alive.

And the Rugby World Cup is going well. Still in the second half 10-3 Australia - Georgia.

Abiy Ahmad won the Nobel Peace Prize! Yes!

So I wanted to say something about my literary godfathers - Jeffrey Archer; Ian Serralier and Miroslav Sasek. And there was this Latvian guy who wrote Little Bibie the Turtle.

#31for21 Why #cultureisnotacostume; finding your role in the team and why co-curricular clubbing rocks [especially in maths; geography and history]

I'd like to talk about another holiday. Some of you call it Harvest Home; some of you call it All Hallows Eve [and 1 November is All Hallows] and many of you call it Hallowe'en. And some of you will know about Hallows from the last Harry Potter book - there must have been so many parties from the movies.

At the moment I am reading The portrait of a lady and chapter 6 is about how smart and well-equipped Isabel Archer is.

When it comes to #cultureisnotacostume, I like to make it personal. The young ladies on Mustang FC - Marnie specifically - tried to attract one of their players back on the grounds that these experiences - aka parties - mean fun, friendship and fitness.

Ruby actually said [in the narrative] When will someone tell Marnie that culture is not a costume?

Culture of course is many things, as I learnt when I was reading Critical terrorism studies and Third world - the latter is the journal which printed and then retracted The case for colonialism.

I think people who do not know about "Culture is not a costume" frequently make their own cases - small and large - for imperalism and colonialism.

I have also been reading Debbie Reese's blog about The secret project which is a book about the Manhattan Project. The book begins with this empty [!] desert [!!].

If someone tried to write about the Maralinga that way, or about the Rainbow Warrior and previous and subsequent French nuclear testing in the 1980s and 1990s [chapter 13-14 of Third-formers at the Remedial School expresses my sorrow and shame - and my obliviousness; as does A mother lost a Chaser found - the latter is very litterature verite or actual/contemporaneous - you know, written at the time it was set unlike some of my later excursions into the past or the future] I would try to kick up a big stink about it.

And of course Trident which often appears on Fearless and when I read about in Spiked when James Woydhausen and Rob Lyons write about it.

When you have children and their illustrative desires to consider ...

The book I have just finished reading to read Portrait of a lady is Emily Ballou's Father lands. It was published in 2007 and shows a young girl - Cherry Laurel - and her sisters going to an integrated school in Wisconsin, Milwaukee. This is 1977.

16 March 1977 was the day that changed Cherry's whole life.

She creates this paracosm called Father Land where her father Jackson is. One of my favourite parts of the book is where Jackson and the sisters - Cherry; Ivy; Holly [ "The holly and the ivy when they are both full grown - of all the trees that are in the wood" ] work in the circus with Jackson's new partner Sabine. It is so good. Cherry seems to have a fear of - or prejudice against - clowns.

And so many people do have a fear of clowns. It became really big for me in the early 2000s when a Belgian woman called Florence had her avatar as a classic clown. And several people were afeared of it. A lot of people don't like masks - even of the Venetian and Florentian sort Isabel might have experienced as a kid when she was travelling with her Dad and sisters.

Three 2017 videos on #cultureisnotacostume from three different perspectives.

One of my favourite people to follow is "Safety Pat the clown" - otherwise known as David Alteri. Reward and Consent is the place to look.

In Kick meanwhile, there was a great quote about finding your role in the team and in the teams that you have been and will be part of and are part of right now. It's especially good for us who have not felt like or been team players up to now. And the 12s got to go to Coffs Harbour - they're playing really hard opponents like New South Wales and Queensland.

And Danny was really great when he finally talked to Ruby and told her you can't change teams mid-season in this league. So it was virtually a fait accompli when she stayed with the Mustangs FC.

Ruby is a very focused soccer player. She came from the US and her Mum is a very intense sports coach. She and Ruby practise together in the boxing ring and there are 50 punches with the punching bag. Some good cross-training and fitness involved.

And the part about squeezing avocados and treating them like hoon's cars. When the smashed versions cost so much - Danny has a point here too.

There were sensitive scenes about Anusha and the reader of Wuthering Heights. Would Heathcliff have helped Cathy shop for a bra? I think Earnshaw might have or Linton - getting my Wuthering generations right. The Wuthering Heights reader has blue hair and lives with Marnie for a few days in the week - so does Isabella.

And the party is super awkward because of the cultural appropriation and the diversity involved.

I will admit that I used to love parties like that, especially if they were out of our usual cultural comfort zone. Being complicit; actively participating. Of course the 1990s and 2000s were the time when I was establishing my reputation as an anti-racist or contre-racist [and maybe even a retro-racist].

So many good Hallowe'en memories. For example: bringing a massive pumpkin which had been grown in the allotment and brought to the festival for a pumpkin competition. And Halloween Light Shows are big! I picked the Lee London shows and the Tokyo Disneyland one.

In the early 2000s I would entertain with a weird and wacky record which had a green cover, and in 2001 I had my own record player until the first half of 2006. Now a gramophone is in the main house. There were always about six or seven songs which would be played.

After-school clubs focusing on subjects are brilliant. Or the general GATE lot. The ones I saw in So awkward were for maths [M and C ran that one] - geography and history. It turned out that History Club was watching movies like 10,000 years BC.

And Miss Briggs doing her predictive listening? Oh - the sacredness of listening is that you are in the moment with the interlocutor. She got Jes right - she and Alfie were working on their bucket list. Alfie's goals - a lot of them involve Martha Fitzgerald - and he does get on to the maths club.

Alfie's big talent and passion is cooking. He even thinks about food during the Maths Competition. He would be good for a Functional Maths or Consumer Maths mindset.

And they try to recruit a soccer player who really knows the angles and the physics of it all. Spatial relations.

Hope you use your spatial relations skills and your mathematical reasoning skills as you learn about the history and geography of Hallowe'en.

And remember:

There are lots of good and serious games as well. I am thinking of all those months I spent on SimFarm, as well as the one about the Haitian family and the Darfur is dying game and Third World Farmer.

Three months before Band Aid 30 I downloaded Real lives 2010 on my previous computer. And it was so good to create characters, play with randomised ones and put myself into their places. I kept playing it up until February 2016.

Perhaps there are good ones on your smartphone. And someone from the Majority World can share their games with you.

#31for21 - Poetry and Connections

In 1992, I had an iron and gold standard:

Think about how it would be if Princess Dani read it.

That may have saved me from some of my more egregious errors. I was going to make others of them regardless.

Because once you realise people who rock the 21st chromosome can read and write - you have a responsibility.

And once you ask - "Why in the hell don't we read and write their poetry"? - there's a connection.

Five years later - 1997 - Rosemary Crossley wrote a chapter in Speechless called What is the product of 3 times 21?

Because I was a lightning mathematician and had other STEM interests at that time - my heroes included people like Albert Einstein and Henry Cavendish - I would have said, "That's easy. It's 63, like 7 times 9".

And the Nobel Prizes for Physiology and Medicine; Physics and Chemistry are out. And Literature tonight. We have to wait another month for Peace.




In that eighth chapter, there are three young ladies - Jan; Heather and Fiona.

Jan is the one who writes poetry.

Her family come from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds and their general and academic English did not then extend to poetry.

In fact people with Trisomy 21 have been writing - and publishing - poetry for at least 60 years, even before Lejeune put out his genetic discovery to the world.

It's hard to read a poem to yourself -
You cannot hear the words.
You have to imagine the sound, the rhythm. The sense is there, the feeling lost.
Imagine writing a poem without being able to read it aloud. It's like playing a record in a soundproof room -
It's going round, but no-one on the outside can hear.
If I was deaf, would it be the same or different?

[Jan, Speechless, page 132].

"Pretty; shy; slightly built". So far; so wonderful and even enviable and highly valued.

She studied at a special school for the intellectually impaired - the type that Princess Dani eventually went to in two or three years from the time I studied with her.

[...]Jan was very interested in DEAL's communication equipment. She went to the typewriter of her own accord and began typing quickly without assistance. Like most people with Down syndrome she had low muscle tone, but despite this she appeared to have few problems with her fine motor skills - she looked at what she was doing and she was able to use her hands and fingers well. All that came out, however, was a few words she'd practised typing a lot previously - mum, dad, Jan.
I wanted to see what she would do if she was slowed down, but for a shy girl Jan was surprisingly determined about her independence. I finally got her to accept some help - I held on to one end of a rod, she held the other with her left and best hand and typed with one finger. The resistance I provided slowed her down very substantially, and the quality of her output increased as her speed fell. I gave Jan a picture of a cow and asked her to write me a sentence about it. Instead she typed THIS TYPING IS HARD. I HAVE TO THINK. That was, of course, the aim of the exercise. Previously Jan had simply been repeating some overlearnt motor patterns, virtually without conscious thought.
Jan was one of those unlucky children in whom shyness and fear of failure combine to give the appearance of stubbornness and stupidity. She was so afraid of getting things wrong - afraid with good reason - that she preferred not to try them at all, so afraid of giving the wrong answer that she preferred not to speak at all. This got her in trouble constantly. Unfortunately, Jan had severe word- finding problems which limited her ability to get her meaning across and restricted her to very simple utterances.[...[

Yes. People who look stubborn and stupid are not stubborn and stupid. And Jan showed a lot of determination about her independence and autonomy. The rod might have been helpful. And what did she type about the cow?

"While I was talking to her mother Jan spontaneously and independently typed MUM DAD COW DAD IS COW. We both laughed, and I said "No, dad is a bull.", whereupon Jan spontaneously typed MUM IS COW. She then typed DAD IS and went for the B, stopped short and typed JAN, her most fluent word - the word that was most likely to come out in typing, though not in speech, any time her concentration lapsed or she hesitated. I held out the stick, she took it and typed DAD IS BOOL. It was almost like aphasia of the fingers. Gradually Jan relaxed and became more willing to work with me, and more willing to allow me to hold on to the end of the rod and slow her down.
Five months after her first visit Jan came in carrying a copy of Peacock Pie, a collection of Walter De la Mare's poetry. A number of the poems are old favorites of mine, so I read them aloud to her:
‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller, Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses Of the forest’s ferny floor; ...
‘Tell them I came, and no one answered, That I kept my word,’ he said.

Jan's parents were limited in their ability to read to her because they were not native English speakers. Laura said Peacock Pie was Jan's favorite book, she'd bought it herself. Jan wanted to type out a poem from it, and while she was doing this I got some other anthologies out." 

I was discovering a lot of poetry anthologies myself, mostly gifted me from family members. The first one I sought out for myself was in 1990 during August of that year - Fairy tales and nursery crimes by Michael Rosen. Christmas 1991 I was reading The Penguin anthology of children's poems which I had bent the spine by that time.

I also was under the reputation as the form poet [and storyteller and playwright.

In the early 1990s I was the technology pioneer or one of them. With the IT facilitator's son and others.

"By now Jan no longer needed to hold on to the rod to slow down, and could type short messages with just my hand on her shoulder. When she finished copy-typing her favourite poem she typed I LIKE POETRY CAN I WRITE
"A poem?" I hazarded. Yes. And she typed
Better a mother who cannot love 
Better a car that cannot move
Better a boy who cannot walk
Than to have a voice that cannot talk.

Jan's parents were quite pleased with the poem, but I don't think they realized that Jan had written it. "

A voice that cannot talk? Yes, this is a central theme of Speechless, and of Jan's later poetry, as we will see in pages 136-139.

"Jan’s next visit was her last for the year. Again she brought in an anthology, this time one of her brother's old English textbooks, and again I went through several poems at her request. She had some poems she particularly wanted me to read aloud - she showed them to me in the index - and some difficult poems that she wanted me to explicate. One was The Ballad of Patrick Spens which has a lot of dialect words in it:

O laith, laith were our gude Scots lords To wet their cork-heel'd shoon; But lang or a' the play was play'd They wat their hats aboon.
And mony was the feather bed That flatter'd on the faem; And mony was the gude lord's son That never mair cam hame.

I could understand her wanting help!
By this stage Jan could type original sentences without physical contact, but that was sitting next to me with my reminders exerting a brake and Jan using one finger. When she typed by herself she liked to use two hands in imitation of regular typists, and as she found it difficult to control one hand it was impossible for her at this stage to control two.
She wanted to write another poem and again did so on the word processor, a machine which had plainly inspired her at her last visit.

Using a computer to write poetry is like using

Hand-made writing paper for the grocery list -

It is more sophisticated than the message.

SPEECHLESS

137

Whatever happened to pens? No-one will ever be sold a manuscript of my work. Can I ever go back to my first ideas?
Quality presentation may hide poor content. Does the software live up to the hardware In poet as in computer?

She tired quickly, and I held her sleeve for most of the poem.
One of the more creative explanations offered by my critics for the unexpected output of people who type with facilitation is automatic writing. It is suggested that people like Jan type one or two letters at random and then their partners ‘automatically’ make these letters into a word. Having got one or two words by this procedure, the partner then ‘automatically’ completes a sentence. It’s an interesting notion, and may even be correct in some cases, but among the questions it doesn’t answer is the question of individuality. Jan regularly wrote poetry. Of the hundreds of communication aid users I have partnered over the years, perhaps a dozen have written poems while I was their partner. These have all been of varying styles and standards. Anne, required to write a poem for an English assignment, found the task extremely difficult and struggled for days to produce some passable doggerel. (On the other hand, some reviewers of Annie’s Coming Out were unkind enough to point out that Anne’s sections were better written than mine.) Why do my automatic completions produce poetry when I sit next to Jan and not when I sit next to Anne?
Because her parents thought that Jan did not fall into the category of someone who needs to work with a communication aid this was the last time they brought her to DEAL. During the next year I visited Jan twice at her special school. In June she used a communicator well, joining in a discussion involving her teachers. What the teachers said, however, wasn't encouraging. Being her own worst enemy, Jan was said to have rejected any slowing of her typing (as she had initially with me) and because of this her production at special school had been little more than her usual stereotyped utterances. She was doing some original typing, but not very much. Jan just hadn't had enough practice at independent keyboard use, and the self-monitoring techniques that I'd been teaching her hadn't been practised enough to become ingrained. The only positive news was that Jan’s teacher reported that her speech was more fluent in everyday situations

SPEECHLESS

138 When I came back again in November I was shown into a meeting with Jan, her special
school teacher, and her parents. Her parents made it clear that they didn't think Jan should use any form of augmentation for her speech because "She can say everything that she needs to say." Her teacher went along with them. And Jan sat there mute throughout. She wouldn’t or couldn't speak, and we were sitting in such a position that I couldn't just bring out a Communicator and give it to her.
I argued as best I could. I told her parents truthfully that Jan was as talented with language as any child I'd ever taught. I told them that her poetry was exceptional for a student of her age, that she had a real talent that she could use only if we gave her the equipment and the skills she needed. Nobody (Jan aside) believed a word I was saying. Her father, her mother, and her teacher saw the person that they have always seen, the person that the textbooks told them that they should see. They saw a girl who was doing well for someone with Down syndrome. I was saying that Jan was not just doing well for someone with Down syndrome but that her writing was exceptional for any child, and that was not believable. Her parents thought I was sincere, but they didn't think that our "great work” could possibly extend to their own daughter. Their daughter has an extra chromosome.

I hope Jan's story has a 'to be continued', but at the moment there's no sign of it. I haven’t seen her for years. What has happened to her talent? Is her head full of poems that she can't tell anyone, that she can't type because the stereotyped words get in the way? "

Other people have developed their writing skills and identities as authors, like Peter Rowe and the Brotherhood of the Wordless in Queensland. One of their "sisters" is Lucy Blackman, whose Talking of Macbeth and Carrying autism feeling language I have enjoyed in the last five years - and in November 1997 - the correspondence with John Marsden.

 http://peter-rowe.info/content/poetry/

The Bush Christmas poem is wonderful.

And there is Nathan Basha too.

I have seen various works on Quora.com.

Wherever poetry is, people with Down syndrome are.

And I am really bad at dedications, because in 1992 I had written a story called Camping Out which I really did not want to write. I paid more attention to the publicity than the dedications. The story was about two Ladybird characters called Peter and Jane and it was written in four frames.

To Maureen and Danielle, who inspired me.

That word - in the past tense - is like a stopped breath.

The Words are Sticky …they stick to my tongue, they stick to my teeth,
they stick to my voice and it’s hard to speak;
they tangle me up and make me choke,
I so want to speak and that’s no joke.
I try and I try, I push and I push,
but the words come out all jumbled and rushed.
I choke on my tongue and sometimes I spit;
I’m trying a word, but that’s just not it.
They’re cheeky and sticky, they just won’t come out,
but they seem much easier to speak when I shout.
I’ll catch them one day, when they all run by,
and then on that day my speaking will fly.
I want you to know I think, just like you,
but my words are all stuck in my mouth, just like glue.
So where is the way to unstick all these thoughts?
I hope that it’s in the Speech Therapy I bought!

[Rowe 2003] accessed 5 October 2017

THINGS THAT HURT US
There are many things that hurt us,
but most of them come from ourselves
The things that hurt us the most,
usually come from fear.
We can work against the fear,
but most people choose not to.
Most people see it as their companion and they can’t let go.
Nevertheless, it is this idea that stops us from succeeding.
The idea that we have to hold onto stuff that hurts us is crazy.
Getting rid of it is hard, though,
and most people never do in their lives.
This is because most people are afraid of facing their fears:
afraid of life, without the fear.
This includes me.
I have trouble shaking things off too,
and this is because I need to hold on to something …
and I do not yet have a tight enough hold on hope.
Good things will come though.
I am waiting!
That day is coming soon
when I will run with hope
instead of shaking with fear!

[Rowe: http://peter-rowe.info/content/poetry/things-that-hurt-us/]

How A Bush Christmas Should Be
The sun is beating down on the hottest day of the year, the branches breaking and falling from the heat. The flies are buzzing and the dogs are panting in the shade: The Bush Christmas has come again.
We sit on the verandah, under the iron roof, and listen to the cracking and expanding of the roof in the heat. The dry ground is screaming for rain and the little lambs are bouncing around not knowing, and not caring, that it is too hot to play.
The old dog is sitting under the gum tree where he has been since last night, with his tongue hanging out and his breath hot and short. He flicks away the flies with his tail and goes about sleeping and waking and sleeping and waking all morning.
The cat has found a place under the roof and on top of the water tank at the side of the house. He is all curled up and completely unaware of things happening around him.
The children have been helping mum decorate the Christmas tree and get the house ready for the next couple of days. The uncle from out west and the auntie from down south are coming up for Christmas. The house has a bright and cheery feeling about it again.
Dad is sitting on the verandah and he is thinking how good it is to have family to share this day with him.
“I wonder if the rains will come soon?” he mutters, loud enough for mum to hear through the open windows.
“The report says it could be a couple of weeks yet, dear,” mum replies.
Dad mumbles something about the weatherman and pulls his hat down over his face. He rests his feet on the dog at the base of his chair.
A light has been making its way up the dusty road from the highway for about an hour or so. It is uncle with his wife coming to stay. He’s been singing to the country radio station the whole time – much to auntie’s dismay.
The girls have joined mum in the kitchen now and the eldest son has come out to dad on the veranda.
“Dad, do you think the lambs will be okay without water for the next couple of weeks?” the boy asks.
“Son, I think the ewes will drop their lambs under a tree and walk off if we don’t get rain soon,” he replies. “I think we need to pray a bit harder this year.” Together they ask God to send the rains soon.
Aunty has caught the train up to the nearest city and hired a car, with very cold air- conditioning, for the drive up this year. It is going to be the hottest place she’s been to for a while, that’s for sure. The flies at the train station stay well away from her because she smells like perfune and new clothes; a successful lawyer type.
The weatherman’s report didn’t count on the prayers of the bush folk this year. No weatherman could know just how many prayers have gone into this year’s rain.
Auntie’s car has pulled in just behind her brother’s Ute as they fly up the dusty road. Her city life forgotten for the moment, she drives like a real bush kid coming back to the family homestead.
They don’t see the clouds in the background through the haze that they are pushing in front of them. Dad hasn’t seen it from the verandah yet either.
The haze just looks like another heatwave haze. The clouds build and build with great speed and the cars race on toward the house, unaware of the growing shadow behind them.
Dad sees the lightning now and hears the thunder just as a cloud of dust comes up from the road and the bull bar from the Ute comes first around the corner.
“Mum, come quick and bring the girls. Look what uncle and aunty have brought with them.” Mum rushes to the front door just as the cars pull up and the clouds come over. The rain bursts out of them like stuffing from a pillow.
They all step down into the rain, not caring that their clothes are soaked just hugging their family and everyone is laughing and crying at the same time.
“This is the best Christmas present ever,” says Dad.
“Dad, I told God he could have my best slingshot if he brought the rain,” the boy says. “I guess I better go give it to him.”
They all stand there for the longest time laughing. This is how a bush Christmas should be.

[Rowe 2002] 

The Lifetime Work
The people I see are walking through life with eyes closed.
They want to make everything different,
but they do not know where to begin.
How can they change the world and make it a better place,
without changing themselves?
The things in my life are changing all the time:
I am not the same person I was a year ago.
The loves and hates I had a year ago are different to the ones I have now.
There is no other way to go without making changes,
because there have to be changes with everything
for life to get better.
I want to grow into something beautiful
and I have to change for this to happen.
It is the same for everyone:
There is not one person who does not have to change
in order to get stronger, better and smarter
than they already are.
Can we all give each other some patience while each one of us grows?
It is going to take each of us a lifetime to get where we need to go.
© Peter Rowe 2003
Written with Ryan O’Connor, August 2003

[Rowe/O'Connor 2003]

Back to Speechless and Bolt.

There is also Nigel Hunt and his diary. It would be a good one for a young Adrian Mole or Anne Frank fan to read. It is now about 50 years old as it was published first in 1967.

Hunt was 20 years old when The world of Nigel Hunt was published.

Amazon link to THE WORLD OF NIGEL HUNT from 1967

Of course you can read modern-day writings in blogs. Over the past 25 years there has been a lot of lifestory work - some of which I've recommended to Camille de Fleurville who writes at Sketches and vignettes from la Dordogne and Lights and shades.

Nigel Hunt is mentioned in "The Individual and Social Education".

This is chapter 5 of "Humanistic Perspective" by Shunit Raiter from 2008.

We meet Hunt again in Alison C. Carey's chapter in Disability Histories - a good quote from pages 53-57

Finally for #31for21 - in the last academic year [2016-17] Kayla released her poetry collection with her class:

Life Is A Mountain
Life is a mountain
high in the sky
It makes me tired
to climb up the mountain
The mountain is big
with pretty things to see

Haiku
In the sky birds fly
High above the waves they fly
the birds are seeing

A Happy Birthday
Lucas, Happy Birthday!
You're nine years old today
You are a nice brother
I don't want any other
You are sleepy today
But with you I love to play

The Dolphin
The dolphin is swimming in the sea
The dolphin likes singing and dancing in the sea
The dolphin is swimming in the sea
Just like me

This time last year Camille de Fleurville and the Elder Sister had strokes and epilepsy to contend with.

By the end of October 2016 the de Fleurvilles were "in need of a word of comfort".

 

For Nisha of South Africa, clean water for all means all!

On the 28th May 2011, I was surfing on the #cerebralpalsy hashtag of Twitter when I caught Nisha of South Africa's eye. I was very impressed with her 360-degree commitment to turn things around for herself and for the world. Clean water is one of the planet's biggest needs. As of the 2nd June 2011, she is 59% on the way to her campaign goal of $6500, with nine months to go. (The campaign was anticipated to take two years).

I leave you now to allow Nisha to tell her story:

WHO I AM

1st August 2010

My name is Nisha, I am a twenty-year-old from South Africa and this is the story of how I became who I am. WARNING: My life has more twists in it than a rollercoaster.

At six months I was diagnosed with Cerebral Palsy (CP) - an umbrella term encompassing a group of non-progressive, non-contagious motor conditions that cause physical disability in human development, chiefly in the various areas of body movement. As a result of having Cerebral Palsy I am unable to walk and my right-arm has reduced functionality. Growing up I used to watch other kids playing on the playground I used to be so envious and as I grew so did my anger towards God.

When I was 13 I was diagnosed with advanced Scoliosis – a medical condition in which a person’s spine is curved from side to side – and within weeks I was on the operating table undergoing surgery in which a metal rod was placed between my vertebrae to keep them from fusing together and was subsequently bedridden for a year after that. As you can imagine being bedridden wasn’t exactly fun - I got into a mini-depression and put on a bit of weight – until a family friend of ours – who is now passed on God bless his heart – came to visit and told me I looked a little ‘plumpy’ – at first I was really hurt and then I took a good look in the mirror and realized that there might have been some truth in what he was saying and I made some changes in my life.

The year flew by in the blink of an eye and it was time for me to go back to school. I went for about a week before I realized that my body was never going to be as it was before the surgery – just sitting in class for eight hours was difficult – so my parents pulled me out of the public school system and made alternative arrangements.

At that point in my life everything was going according to plan school was going great and everybody was healthy and ‘happy’ but, I still felt as though something was missing – like everything in my life was mediocre. I had no clue what I wanted but, I did know that I did not want to lead a mediocre life. A few weeks after I had had this profound realization I was watching The Oprah Winfrey Show – as I always did – but this particular episode featured a young woman by the name of Kendall Ciesemier -one day after watching an Oprah Winfrey special: on the AIDS epidemic in Africa she took all the money that she had, put it in and envelope and sent to WorldVision to ‘adopt’ an orphan and in 2007 Kendall founded an organization called Kids Caring 4 Kids – an organization which aims to raise awareness and money for AIDS orphans and other highly venerable kids in Africa and to inspire kids to care for others in need. My mouth literally fell open when I heard Kendall’s story but, after watching the show I switched off the TV and went on with my normal life convinced that I could never do something so spectacular.

A few weeks later, I found myself laying on my bed crying because my back was hurting and all my muscles were stiff I remember asking God: Do you love me? Do you hate me? Do you even know I exist? Why me? A gentle voice replied: Why not you? That was like a slap in the face because I always thought that God had it in for me and that response made me realize that the world didn’t revolve around me. I paused for a moment before I asked: Why am I here? The gentle voice again replied: To show the world that anybody can make a difference and change the world. I remember thinking to myself: I can’t even go the bathroom by myself how in the hell does he expect me to change the worldand then as if on cue I had a flashback to Kendall’s story and what Oprah said to one of her other guest’s once Kendall left the stage: Kendall is proof of what people can do from their hospital beds even – Kendall had just undergone a liver transplant and she asked her visitors to ‘adopt’ an orphan instead of bringing her flowers and candy. Watching that show and hearing Kendall’s story taught me that to change your reality all you have to do is shift your perception and that is something I will carry with me for the rest of my life.

A few months later I tried to raise $1 000 for a well -known organization called UNICEF - long story short I only raised $5 for the most part because I was naive an didn’t know what the hell I was doing. However, that experience did teach me what not to do and on March 5th 2010 I started my Clean Water for All Campaign. The objectives of the campaign are as follows:

• To raise $6 500 for The Water Project, Inc – an organization that provides clean water to communities all over the world who suffer needlessly without it – by March 5^th 2012 and build a well somewhere in the world.

• To highlight the plight of those who don’t have easy access to clean water.

• To prove to the world that anybody can make a difference and change the world – even me: a twenty-year-old girl in a wheelchair.

Log onto http://www.firstgiving.com/nishavarghese, make a contribution to my Clean Water for All Campaign and be the change you want to see. I’ve raised $3 855.85 so far

And I hope you have a watery day, with outflows of one kind or another.

Hope you find it within you to support Nisha's campaign. She is spiky, ambitious and a change agent!