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Awake/Asleep Game

Details: Category: Writing

AWAKE/ASLEEP Game

The board is either paper with various randomly place objects and things drawn on it, or else a room itself with diversely placed objects. Provide rules for each object, that they can reach out, touch, to a set distance (5 inches, 5 feet, etc), that what is within an object’s touch or reach perceives that object as awake, but those things not within its touch perceives it as asleep. The particular distance can be changed arbitrarily—important that it is. Different object are given different reaches.

Ask the children, does object so and so perceive thing this and that to be asleep or awake? What about thing this and that, how does it perceive object so and so? At least, by its definition.

Some object might be allowed to perceive directly with their own senses while other objects can only percieve things which perceive them. The idea is that children learn to see things from multiple perspectives, rules, definitions, simultaneously. It is important to play this game in various manifestations, changed rules, etc. The children themselves, seated or standing about the room, can pretend to be the various awake/asleep objects, and even move about the room to determine what changes.

Clay's Death

Details: Parent Category: Autobiography; Category: Death

I'm not sure I will ever fully get over the loss of Craig (my younger brother) and Clay. Craig was always very strong and healthy, and suddenly last summer he had leukemia. The kind he got was called Acute Lymphoblastic leukemia, which a bone marrow transplant often cures. The doctors tried the transplant in October (I was the donor) but in the end he just didn't survive it.

It is still something that I can't believe happened. I can't believe that he is still not here and that I can't go visit him.

Clay was born on his due date in August of last year, and no one, doctors, nurse-midwives or us had any reason to believe anything would be wrong with him. The labor went almost perfectly, with no sign of any distress, yet when Clay came out he could not breathe properly. I'll never forget the look on his face when he was born (I caught him), looking up a me while struggling to breathe. His look had a sense of pleading for me to save him, but also also a sense of accusation that I had made him leave the womb and caused this to happen.

Fortunately we were in a birthing room at a major hospital, and they whisked him to intensive care and put him on a ventilator. A few hours later, they moved him to Egleston Children's hopital where he was put on ECMO, a drastic procedure which essentially substitutes a machine for the baby's lungs.

Oddly, Clay's heart and lungs were themselves fine. But he had lots of lymph fluid in his lungs and chest which made it almost impossible for him to breathe normally. The doctors thought that there were holes in his lymph vessels, which were responsible for his problem, and they hoped that with time those vessels might grow together and heal up.

What followed was weeks of an emotional roller coaster in which Clay would show great improvement one day and be much worse the next.

He came off ECMO after 8 days; at one point he even came off the ventilator for a day.

Anyway, he lived for two and a half months, and even though he was tied down with all kinds of tubes and wires, he was conscious, alert, and intelligent, and was able to respond to us and his nurses in an almost normal way, given the circumstances. We even got to hold him and rock him, tubes wires and all, on several occasions.

At the end, though, he became extremely sick. His kidneys, liver, and other organs began to shut down. The doctors had to give him drugs to paralyze him just to keep him alive. We decided, together with the doctors, that it was time to take him off life support and let him die. At this point, Clay was in a private room, and some close family friends, Clay's primary nurses, and his doctors joined us in saying goodbye to him. We all took turns holding him and crying (even the doctors showed genuine emotion), and then I held Clay while the ventilator was turned off. He died very peacefully and quickly.

The doctors were never able to identify what Clay's problem was. The autopsy showed that his heart, lungs and lymph system were themselves fine when he was born. What killed him in the end was a CMV (cytomeglovirus) infection, but he was tested for CMV three times when he was first admitted to Egleston and all three tests came back negative. Yet nothing else really can explain why he couldn't breathe at birth.

The odd thing about this experience is that as terrible as it seemed at the time, I really feel as if experiencing and interacting with Clay enriched my life, and this feeling seems to be getting stronger and stronger as time pushes me farther away from the event of his dying. Maybe in the end I will remember his living far more than his dying.

The background of this period of my life seems to be speckled with other deaths as well. One of my best friends from college was lost at sea last September along with three of his brothers. My grandmother died in early January, and last weekend, the two year old son of someone I have worked with for a long time died (like Clay, he was never healthy). I worry about the stress of all this on me and my family.

Kip's Funeral

Details: Parent Category: Autobiography; Category: Death

Damn funerals. Damn ceremonies. Damn the preacher or whatever he was. He did not feel anything—he only wanted to get across his message about the wonderfulness of God to all the sad people at the funeral. He sounded like a commercial for some big company.

Damn. How can people see life in such an all-or-nothing way, see God as some sort of being, call him wise, and then pass off death by saying he has a plan or that he dearly loves the Ayers? How can he talk about "coming from dust" and "going to dust" and praise his God at the same time. I think his God is as big a fool as he is. Why did it seem like the preacher was trying to torture us with all his calls to "Jesus Christ" and the wisdom of his God? Why especially torture that family so?

And why must those four—Mr. and Mrs. Ayers and that sister and that brother, all trying so hard to be brave and not cry before the people—why must they listen to well-wishers immediately after in that building there? And why did those people take all those pictures of the casket and flowers immediately after? And why did, even before, those two men start folding up the chairs as soon as the ceremony ended? Damn; at least I understood those people who stood around looking shocked a while, after most had started talking or left to wish well to the family.

But can't people see that death is no time to talk about God. I want to damn God if he had anything to do with it—or any knowledge like what that preacher said.

No, I can't look at life their way or death their damn way. I could never be pagan enough to think of God as some kind of being—or even qualities.

No, just understand life—that life is not an all or nothing thing—that time is a mental non-entity—that being alive has nothing to do with length or time. It is insane to look at life in such an objective fashion—life is subjective; it has always been subjective; it is made up of moments—really feelings expressed into objects and occurances, thoughts and emotions--and these feelings and the moments they translate into, have no time. What was that saying? —"Eternity is the opposite of time."

From Journal, August 6, 1974

The Meadow, the Path, and the Cave

Details: Parent Category: Writing; Category: For Children

Gwen was the first to wake. Before dressing she went and zipped open the tent flap and pushed her head outside. There was a small glow down the valley past the creek that curved and tumbled like dark silver before disappearing into the forest. The sun was still an ember embedded behind the mountain that stood across the valley.
“Good,” she thought to herself. Neither her brother in the small tent nor her mother and father in the big tent were awake yet. Quickly Gwen threw on her clothes—an old pair of blue jeans with a hole beginning to form in the right knee, and a baggy cordoroy shirt that seemed ideal for hiking. She stepped outside through the tent opening. She heard Alan inside turn with a muffled stretch in his sleeping bag, so she zipped the flap closed behind her as gently as she could.

Man from Botan

Details: Parent Category: Writing; Category: Prose

UFO's and aliens, it would seem, have got popular. Especially saucers that come leaping down to pre-appointed spots, removing the small band of faithful off to the appointed stars.
This alien visitors business has been all through the movies, of course, from Close Encounters down to Alien itself. A week doesn't go by but some friend of mine (usually an intellectual I thought quite “safe”) suddenly drops a hint that, oh yes, he too is a “believer”.
Or I discover grown girls (can't call them women) up in strange states like Illinois who eschew sexual relationships with men, saving themselves instead for their future alien abductors who, in a detail apparently so much more sexual than any man could possibly hope to match, look an awful lot like amphibians or big-toed reptiles.

Forbidden Apples

Details: Parent Category: Writing; Category: Prose

“See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” is not God’s way. We learn this from Genesis. We learn it as we observe naked Eve and Adam wandering about blissfully in God’s garden of Eden. In that self-same garden God placed the serpent, and allowed it not just to be seen but to be heard as it spoke its words of deception. God never warned Adam and Eve about the snake. Never told them not to associate with it. Never prepared them for the ideas the snake might present. Not a bit of “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” in God’s garden. Nada.
God was quite willing to let the snake have its say: its beguiling promise that Adam and Eve could become god-like. God didn’t even offer a rebuttal. He let evil have its say without response.
Not surprising, therefore, that two innocents like our naked Eve and Adam fell head first for the serpents’s guile.
We call it guile, evil. But in fact the serpent did not lie.

Dark Sea

Details: Parent Category: Writing; Category: Prose

Another sweep of cloud over the moon, and the darkness starts again.

I climb the promontory and hug my Buddha, and sit and face the darkness of the sea. Dark, peaceful, quiet and only the wave in my ear.
A few shore lights lean across the bay. Torches line the lagoon in front of the resort.
People, buildings, trees are stilled. Caught motionless in time while beyond the real world churns.
Yet here by the statue of Buddha the wind and water are alive.
Buddha looks seaward.
And I, facing the sea, meet the delicious darkness.