We Go With Him

Why I Teach Greek

My student, a senior pre-med biology major, finished translating the 10th sentence of the exercises for lesson 50 of our ancient Greek textbook and I told him, congratulations, he was my fourth student at the school I've taught to complete all of the grammar.

Then I pulled up Plato's Apology of Socrates on the internet and we translated the first sentence. I told him, we'll be spending the remaining two weeks of class and next spring semester translating all of it and if we finish, there's plenty of Plato. And Greek literature.

I also told him, I appreciated him sticking with the Greek through all the years. I had first taught him Latin when he was a freshman (he had studied it for four years at a Catholic school near Yankee Stadium in the Bronx and was the only student who showed up consistently for class) and then elementary Greek last year and then we were able to have the Dean approve intermediate Greek though it is a very, very tiny enrollment.

'I like Greek,' he said. Then he told me that his parasitology test involved identifying the eggs for six different types of tapeworms and they all looked alike, after hours and afternoons of him and his lab partner staring at them through the microscope.

Then he asked about what Greek dictionary he might get?

 

Flannery O'Connor, You Made the Best Titles

So I prefer not to get too political on this blog but I just want to say (for it must be acknoledged, while Charlie alternated between extremes of nerves and grins on Wednesday while Jim taught late and at last decided the best thing to do was to sit on his bed with a blanket and stare at the timer rolling the seconds by on his iPad, and for I am writing elsewise about, Good Gawd, this) that a good boy is hard to find.  

Charlie, as Jim has been known to put it, has got the good goods.

It's In (Certain of) the Details

With just three weeks to go of the fall semester on Tuesday, I launched my students into the events of the Peloponnesian War and Pericles' speeches and Thucydides' account of the plague that beset Athens in 430 BCE in particular. Careful analysis of rhetorical devices has limited appeal but just the word plague got everyone's attention.

i was fighting a mighty urge to explain how Thucydides' description of the pestilence that may have killed a third of the Athenian population (at the start of a decades-long war at that) was the literary model for Virgil's long passage on the plague (pestis) at the end of Book 3 of the Georgics. I was in full digression mode due to being awake from 2-5am when a combination of an oncoming snowstorm that whiten there sky and felled the barometric pressure, a full moon shedding lots of light, and congested sinuses woke up Charlie and kept him pacing, standing, tapping and not sleeping. Eventually he hunkered down on the blue couch with a blue sleeping bag and had a great day at school and home, even without a bike ride (because of the snow and slush).

But the digression was avoided and I reflected later on how, whether or not I show pictures and maps, what catches my students' attention about the ancient world is learning about certain kinds of concrete actualities. It's not necessarily the minutiae of 'everyday life in ancient Athens' that you can find plenty of books about but certain details that somehow seem tied to their day-to-day, like coins and money (mention of that a few weeks ago led to a discussion of how they all prefer not to use or have credit cards: 'you've got to stick to cash, Dr. Chew,' they said and I expressed a like sentiment).

It's all about finding the right details.

Thanksgiving Weekend Summed Up

 

At zero degrees Celsius (after which, post spring rolls and lasagne, both riders needed to hibernate a bit and I was pleased to find, in PDF, the very commentary on Plato's Apology of Socrates I myself worked my way through under a tutor's encouraging tutelage some 30 years ago).

 

Vignette

On a Sunday morning walk (I lost count of how many we've done; there were 3 Saturday with the last at a powerfully fast pace, very fine as it is getting around the zero Celsius mark and of course several bike rides), Charlie and I were walking at a steady clip on the block that intersects with our street. A lycra-and-fleece-clad woman passed us at an energetic pace and said hello.

We kept walking and then Charlie paused to check for traffic, stamped his feet a bit on a crack in the pavement. Still paused, whereas he usually speeds right across the street to our house.

I went to stand by him. He turned his head and I saw a little smile.

Then he sprinted in full glory across the street and I followed (less gloriously but non-pantingly -- Charlie is a great trainer).

He knows when to hold 'em.

 

Exercise is Our Family Thing

 

My grandfather, my mother's father, was quite the athlete. He played tennis and rode his bike into, I think, his seventies (unfortunately, he got into a car accident in Golden Gate Park and that ended his bike riding days; he lived into his nineties). My mom has been occasionally riding an old yellow bike of Charlie's; she's got a kind of natural coordination some of which I've inherited and Charlie too.

So you're going to ask, why don't I get on the yellow bike at other times and ride!

I have been known to take a little spin around the block; it's definitely fun and takes me back to my grad student days when I rode a bike all over New Haven and its environs. At the moment, Jim and I continue to divvy up our energies: He does the bikes (over 23 miles on Friday including a Jersey horse country bike path ride) and I'm on the ground control (mileage from two race-walk pace jaunts -- Charlie doesn't stroll, he does a very accelerated walk-pace, enabling me to run at a decent pace up a hill, with four books and two coffee thermoses, at work to be on time for 8am Latin class).

 

How a Boy of His Own Rituals Managed on a Day of National Ritual

 

Until about 5.30 pm-ish, Charlie handled the holiday and the inevitable disruptions its traditions and rituals impose on his routines and ritualistic nature. He actually smiled in the late morning as we drove up to the burrito place with the 'closed' sign in the window (we proceeded to a nearby McDonald's that was open only to be told we had to wait all of three minutes to get Charlie a hamburger as it wasn't yet 11 am) and was game when we sought out a far less-preferred, non-Jersey City Vietnamese restaurant. He had displayed his anxiety about the day by being in 'hurry up please it's time mode.' waking early and launching immediately into a walk then a bike ride then a bike ride then a walk.

He asked for a third bike ride around 3 pm and waited well with a timer only to say 'no' to the ride and thence followed some hours of mounting uneasiness (connected in part to eating about two dozen pieces of paper-wrapped chicken and about two dozen prawns in the space of an hour -- I did make sure Charlie drank a lot of water amid it all; he has no sense of 'portion control' or 'if I eat all that my stomach will feel bad afterwards'). He sat for perhaps five minutes on the couch and a certain flat affect in his face led Jim and me to take some precautions.

Charlie's mien eased up a bit and, foregoing any of the Thanksgiving meal -- that ritualistic food not being part of his ritualistic-ness-- he spent over an hour upstairs with the shower turned on and the ocean waves playing on his iPad, in a routine he occasionally embarks on when his stomach is not cooperating.

I do think he is setting up some kind of sensory re-memory of being at the ocean with such. If not being in the waves, being in the outdoor shower (that every beach house has) -- Charlie used to love to take endless 'hot showers.'

Afterwards, he went to bed after I had helped him put his room back to rights, just as he likes it: Wednesday might, he had wanted to sleep in the room where my parent usually do. They had switched all their things into Charlie's room as a result and changed the bedding and Charlie was especially insistent that I do 'green pillows' -- put certain green pillowcases back on the pillows on his bed. We couldn't find these initially, only to find them in the closet and then Charlie was relieved.

O! Bessed rage for order, pale Ramon, / The maker's rage to order words of the sea...

 

Gratitude

Ever grateful that we're all still together (and taking so many 'family portraits' like these!). Wishing you a lovely Thanksgiving!

 

In Which We Have a Good Time At the Neurologist's and In Traffic

Despite the fact that it was early Tuesday morning with Thanksgiving on the horizon, I taught both my Latin and ancient Greek students a host of pronouns (after getting silence to the question 'what is a pronoun'), translated some of Euclid's theorems with the three students who had come to Greek class and had a senior math major 'translate' them into math language, then went great guns to discuss radical democracy in 5th century Athens in another class so we can dive right into the Peloponnesian War next Tuesday.

Then I drove home; met Jim; we picked up Charlie at the BAC and drove through the town where Jim's parents lived for thirty-plus years and we lived for three years (some very aggravating) and tallied the trees that had been uprooted by the hurricane; proceeded to one of the many extremely congested parts of New Jersey to the new, north Jersey office, of Charlie's based-in-south-Jersey neurologist.

We didn't actually see the neurologist as I think he was doing intake with some new, young, patients. Charlie was eager to get out and get a burrito at the place down the state road (we had discovered it thanks to the hurricane) but sat good-naturedly in the waiting room while being stared at by a woman in a sari with a stack of child development books and by the black slip-on shoe-wearing father of a girl who was about 3 or 4, in diapers, drinking from a bottle, not saying any (to us) comprehensible words, climbing all over the furniture and not responding to the two adults' requests.

Charlie also sat and responded in his usual echolalic way (remember, in our household, echolalia is progress) to the nurse practitioner's and the (new) neurologist's questions.

The new regimen of over-the-counter stomach remedies (antiacids, psyllium fiber, probiotics, a few other things and lot of water) appears to be helping Charlie's thymic distress. I will allow that the recent incident of the Swedish fish only confirmed, there is a correlation for our boy between SIBs, biting, grabbing, throwing items, etc. and 'the c word' (echoed a bit in 'stipulation'). I noted that Charlie's diet contains what, when explained, appears to be an abhorrent amount of rice (unless you're Asian) but that:

1) I'm no longer giving him sushi which is made of glutinous rice, which makes it Swedish-fish-like in a sticky sense. I have been thinking, giving Charlie sushi could be compared to giving him gluey hockey pucks.

2) The rice he has been eating a lot of is the sort I was none too happy about in my childhood. It's plain ol' long-grain rice cooked in a lot of water. I've been serving it up with a bit of chicken or fish in Charlie's lunch and I think he may be eating the protein too.

It is true, the results of having Charlie, he of the intensely engrained habits, on the gluten-free casein-free when he was toddler and till he was about 10-ish, have been that he has never eaten a sandwich, he's not used to spreading butter on anything, he eats no candy (a lot of the commerical stuff containing milk product sort of ingredients).

(Mention of this latter Charlie-ness had brought, earlier in the day, more silence from my students. I had set a big bag of all the Halloween candy we had left (a lot, as we got nary a trick or treater) this year on the table at the start of Latin class and most of it was summarily taken.)

These details of Charlie's diet and some others regarding less than fun-to-deal-with-behaviors were all discussed by me, the doctor and the nurse while Jim and Charlie waited (very peacefully) in the white car. Charlie does still have scabs and bumps on his forehead -- some of the bump is permanent, along with the scars over his nose -- from the Sandy/Swedish fish-related incidents. When mention was made in front of him that he still had some 'self-destructive' behaviors, Jim and I were quick to change the subject to topics more 'posautive.' Who wants to hear their difficult stuff talked about in front of them?

Lest the neurology's offices staff seem insensitive, I am going to underscore they were totally in-tune and attentive. Mmost medical personnel, behaviorists and certainly most people we've encountered need cheery reminders about Jim's and my policy of not bringing up the negative (including complaints about NJ's governor, the GOP in general, 'religion,' etc.) in front of our very sensitive, hyper-auditory, boy.

Actually, the neurologist said she likes Mexican food too and certainly Charlie was glad to get his before we had a long-in-traffic (such is the norm when you're on the Garden State Parkway going through Newark and its environs) ride home.  He was peaceable easy feeling on that, too, and through the evening.

And he did keep grinning through what Jim and I later agreed were the understandable stares in the waiting room. We did wonder their thoughts: Worry that the little girl would 'only' be able to talk in Charlie's very limited, repetitive, echoing fashion? Edginess on seeing more of her -- perhaps she was not yet diagnosed? -- in Charlie than they might wish? Puzzlement that we were all cheery, singing and call-and-responding to Charlie's few phrases?

When you've sat in as many doctor's offices' waiting rooms as us 3 (and as many long car rides), you just have to enjoy that you're still together and (a bonus) peaceably. 

The Dao

I find it increasingly amusing that, while once Charlie so resembled me (black hair, brown hair, facial features) I'd tell people we had a baby who was 'me as a boy,' he now very clearly takes after his dad.

Jim still has an inch or so on Charlie whom we once thought might be over six feet, but maybe not.

We are in a parking lot just over the Bayonne border. Liberty State Park got smashed (/other words that end in '-ashed') in the hurricane so there will be some improvising on Hudson County rides.

Charlie likes to get off to a walking start.

Usually he follow the path but in this instance, he made his own path (leading me to reminisce about what a professor, in a Chinese intellectual history class years ago, said about the Dao, 道, that it is the way, the path, people take cutting a bit though the grass as they are inclined to rather than walking as the concrete indicates).

Charlie's talent is to take the Dao and just stay on it. For truly, he never falls for anyone's trend or fad or style: Madison Avenue has no sway on him, the boy who does not want gifts, who does not ask for any.

Our task it is, to stick with his pace.