We Go With Him

Why and How I Teach Greek

Rather ironically, I finished this Guardian piece on the value of face-to-face interactions in college teaching typing on my laptop across from a student (our one Classical Civilization major graduating this year) who was also typing away on his laptop to finish a history paper (he'd almost finished it the night before but his computer choked, so to speak, and he lost the whole thing). He asked me a few questions and I had some for him (including the name of one of the video games herein referenced, as another student had done a presentation on it in Mythology class two years ago).

Earlier, I had given a book (an interlinear Greek-English New Testament) to another of his friends (he wants to be a minister).

I obviously and absolutely value the Internet as a teaching and communication (and more) tool, know that online education has been a godsend for many and that just because you have a real live teacher in the classrom, she or he is not always being so lively. I've been lucky to have quite a few great teachers and to have seen what more than a few have done for Charlie. Online education is improtant for some kids on the spectrum, but, for sure, not for Charlie. If anyone ever needed a real live human being as a teacher, whose expressions and movements and presence make all the difference, it is him.

(In the photo, Charlie himself is putting away bike gear after a Saturday evening ride in Jersey City, a few miles from where I teach.)

Crisis and Catastrophe and Telos

 

The landscape has become a maze of unexpectedness, trees on their sides, power lines pinned by branches and telephone poles, darkness without the traffic signals and neon-lit signs that are ubiquitous in New Jersey when there isn't a natural disaster.

On Friday in the week of Superstorm Sandy, the power was out across Jersey horse country. Jim and Charlie found trees strewn all across the bike trail and every bridge washed out, so they rode on the road.

Other road ways, like the Garden State Parkway and various state roads, have been host to standstill traffic as long and longer lines of cars wait for gas. New Jersey's governor has decreed that, starting at noon on Saturday, gas is to be rationed. Even numbers on your license plate mean you can get gas on even-numbered days and vice versa for odd numbers.

Even and odd: The 70s and the gas crisis all over and due to our peregrinations throughout New Jersey to keep Charlie going, we will need to refuel on the next even day, Sunday.

Most people would probably not have done so much driving at a time of fuel shortages. But our priority is to take care of our boy throughout a week bereft of any familiarity.

It takes a lot of energy to be free-floating in such disarray, especially if you're a boy who is reliant on a tightly wound routine. After a second bike ride and black car ride with Jim and a Bill Evans CD to see if his favorite burrito place was open (it wasn't), Charlie fell asleep at 7pm.

At 8pm, the Big Autism Center called: It will be open Monday.

Charlie woke at midnight and we gave him the news and he's talked some after a lot of quiet these past few days, smiled some and ran his paces in the L through the kitchen, dining room and living room. 'School Monday' means there is a telos.

Jim urged Charlie to sit in his brown chair.

Amid reminders of how fabulously he has endured the past week, I started to read Thucydides' account of the Peloponnesian War.

After 15 minutes, Charlie said 'bedtime' and went back to his room.

I actually rather dread to read about the Peloponnesian War knowing the defeats and deaths and plague Athens will suffer, of Thucydides' own 20-year exile from Athens after losing the city of Amphipolis to the Spartan general Brasidas.

But then, if I've learned anything from the past decade and a half, it is that you can live on the brink of catastrophe every day, you can fall into it more than you like, you can survive things you would rather have not had to have known and navigate the next new day.

 

Advance and Retreat

 

It's been a great week at school for Charlie plus good afternoons and full nights of sleep Tuesday and Wednesday. Tonight, Thursday, he is just falling asleep with 2am approaching. I sense he is feeling the coming of Hurricane Sandy.

I've been reading book 8 of Herodotus and the Persians have gotten up to the temple of Athena Pronaos (in the photo) in Delphi before being warded off and have burnt their way through Attica and destroyed Athens all the way up the Acropolis and been defeated at sea in the battle of Salamis and withdrawn via Thessaly and Thrace and should I visit again I think I will be aware of a lot more ghosts.

That Here We Pace

 

Jim was not due home till 8pm again on Wednesday and I anticipated a more nervous than on Tuesday Charlie, his pattern being (exemplified by the results of my three successive trips to Greece) to be less able to deal with things (well, some things, like Mom In a Foreign Country Time Zones Away) over time. But Wednesday afternoon passed indeed without incident and without extra just-in-case security measures involving pharmaceuticals.

For the better part of two hours, Charlie and I (said meds in pocket) walked in circles on our front lawn with a long sing-songy chant of 'Daddy Daddy Daddy' / 'Daddy coming' at the end (on Tuesday, we had started the Daddy-kenning just around 6pm). Various individuals, dogs, bike riders and cars passed us by.

Next Wednesday is due to be more challenging as, while Jim will only be working late one night (the usual Wednesday) -- he can't change his teaching schedule till next year; scheduling at universities is like that, a bit 'set in stone' and thou shalt not ask Registrar nor the Deanery to change nary a thing within the academic year -- it will not be until 10.30pm and there will not be a night ride as Charlie and Jim enjoyed very much last night.

I had memorized Simonides' epitaph for the 300 Spartans who died at Thermopylae -- I read it first the year I learned Ancient Greek when I was 14 (it's at Herodotus 7.28) -- and it has echoed in my head ever since.

ὦ ξεῖν᾽, ἀγγέλλειν Λακεδαιμονίοις ὅτι τῇδε / o stranger, tell the Lakedaimonians that here

κείμεθα τοῖς κείνων ῥήμασι πειθόμενοι. / we lie, their orders obeying.

('The Charge of the Light Brigade' about the 600 started to seep into my thinking too.)

Elegiac couplets are well to recite as one goes through one's paces.

 

Feast and Famine

On an evening Wednesday walk with Charlie, I realized I was wearing exactly the same clothes I had on when I traveled last to Greece in March of 2011 with nine students.

Aside from screaming 'NO WITE' and being intensely tense for 30 minutes in the last hour of waiting for Jim to return, Charlie handled the evening well, though he clearly was not thrilled to be dadless.

Well, there was also the return of the brownie obsession, a demand to find brownie mix in the dishwasher where we used to hide it and then to go to the convenience store for packaged brownies like the one he by change ate on Monday. Charlie is still having trouble with his stomach what with the antibiotic and his anxiety and it all often manifests itself via food, especially virulently requesting it (he asked for McDonalds as we drove home after getting him a burrito) or eating for reasons other than being hungry (after Jim came back, Charlie had a mega-midnight-snack and then couldn't sleep till past 2am).

Granted, quite a few of members of both sides of our combined family tree have anxiety disorders both actually diagnosed and not. I had something of one when I was Charlie's age myself and have learned (therapy is a great thing, if you're in the right mindset for it) to manage it. Jim, living in a perpetual ADHD state where he can never (as this morning) remember where his keys last ended up, handles anxiety fairly well (also because his mother had a diagnosed anxiety disorder and he was very practiced at allaying her stresses -- I'll always remember her fretting and sitting in her kitchen with the morning show or the evening news playing in the background on the TV and Jim beside her reading whatever newspaper was on the table and laughing and talking -- well, trying to -- her out of things).

And I'm from a Chinese family, how can there not be a food obsession? Like many Asian families, my family is very food-centric, something that was quite apparent when I really got to know my in-laws whose relatives had emigrated from Ireland after the famine and then grown up in the Depression.

Feasting fest or famine culture.

These kind of summarizes two of the extremes in Charlie, and why he more and more seems to so clearly reflect so many aspects of his dual heritage.

But Nauplion. It's Mycenean Greek territory with a medieval era fortress too and I had never been to it on the previous first two trips to Greece and, as it was March in Greece, the air had a chill but was warm just as it was last evening on Charlie's and my walk as global warming has made this a queerly damp, hottish October. While Charlie was having that late large snack I discovered that the travel agency that had set up our trips has gone bankrupt but you know, I could set it up myself now. The travel that I've done has helped me to know who to ask for help, and where and how. Of course now I'm not actually going anywhere anymore that would take me far from Charlie (let's not even imagine the anxiety he would manifest at that!) but in reality, I feel, I know, we're always in a state of travel and transit, always ready in our traveling clothes.

 

 

Fragmentary History

 

So, Charlie got on the bus Monday morning with no issue and had a good day at school, a great bike ride, a last minute refusal to go into the grocery store (so I did in search of lunch items for him), a cool evening walk and then snacking, music-listening-to, running the small L of our first floor, an 11pm request for McDonald's, shuffling through a stack of old photos, and, at half-past midnight, a determined wish for talking with me about his childhood as signified by numerous utterances of 'Rocco Portia' and 'Grandma Grandpa ladder to the attic,' references to Jim's brother-in-law and dog and a certain feature of my in-laws split-level house. One can never turn down talking with Charlie and I interfaced it with study of the rise of the πόλις, the emergence of the hoplites and the tyrants in the Aegean Sea city-states, all while wishing I had taken that Greek history class with Bill Connor back at Princeton. All the names from poems by Sappho and Tyrtaeus and Archilochus are taking their place now in the story on what could be a long night with a boy kept awake by, possibly, his own rememberings.

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View Through a Window High Up

While sitting, as I rarely do, in the black chair by Charlie's bed as he tossed and turned, I kept thinking I was on the third floor of the Acropolis Museum in Athens. It is directly across from the Acropolis, which you can see fully through all the windows. A replica of the frieze on the Parthenon that Elgin took to Britain is mounted on walls running all around the middle and you get a very strong sense of what was once over there on the Acropolis and why it belongs in Athens.

Looking out through Charlie's window onto the street, I felt as I did looking towards the Acropolis, as if it were behind the pulled-down shade.

Charlie did not sleep all Friday night. Positive feedback, turning off the iPad, gentle urging to 'sleep and then we can walk' all were fruitless. He had slept a lot the previous two nights and we are having a spell of wet air, grey sky, rain, warmish temperatures and sogginess that is perfect for irking Charlie in inexpressible ways. He had more than the usual amount of fiercely repetitive speech, sometimes shouting about Rocco Portia, Gong Gong Po Po, Julie, fries, McDonald's, burritos, grandma grandpa ladder to the attic. He moved a stool and tray table into the bathroom, unearthed a beat-up copy of The Littlest Angel and listened to me read a few words, ran back and forth, turned on the shower. At 3.45 am I turned the iPad back on as keeping it off seemed to be causing only more distress. Charlie had a snack and kept going up and down the stairs and lying on his bed and getting up and sitting in the chair and getting up and wanting socks and shoes and we told him, sleep first then a walk. He fell asleep in the brown chair around 8am and dragged himself up to his bedroom after 90 minutes of sleeping so bent over his head was parallel with his lap.

Some kind of manicness is really running through him. One of the medications he takes addresses this but have to wonder if he might need an increase of something ? We're wary of adding more meds and not a sleep one as that could give him a fuzzy head that has sometimes been a predecessor for behavior storms.

Yes, Charlie is a 'complex' child!

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Orality and Literacy and the Homeric Question

This is really more of a note to myself. In the midst of routine posting about disablity rights, IDEA, the aftermath of the Arab Spring protests, Charlie's and Jim's bike-capades and running reasonably fast for a 43-year-old mother down the street after our boy (not because, as some people think, he is running away, but because he has a beautiful bow-legged stride and Jim and are sending repeated requests to Special Olympics and Charlie is learning the joy of running as I did at his age) -- I think, after many years and abstracts for panel presentations that never became papers and lesson-planning about Latin declensions and Greek participles and grading papers and quizzes, that I have found a research focus. 

The Homeric Question and orality and literacy, informed by research about the communication and language of individuals with speech disabilities -- who are non- are minimally verbal -- who do not read (in our text-based society) -- and how music and metaphorical language and memory play a part.

I'm refining this focus and also starting to read the mountain of scholarship -- Milman Parry, Albert Lord, Greg Nagy, Adam Parry, Nietsche -- on this huge topic. 

The Riddle of the Sphinx, Charlie-style

Who swims in the morning at school,

rides bikes in the afternoon,

 

and runs in the evening?

Yes, it's Charlie.

(Who, despite his full share of exercise, is quite wide awake at 1am tonight and bursting with energy.)

 

Spring Break Day iv Date Lunch

Jim and I had lunch Thursday at a hamburger stand we used often to eat at with Charlie. For whatever reason -- noise, smells, his changing eating habits -- he says a definite 'no' now when we ask about going. But we still wanted the grilled cheese and chicken parm; a nice unhealthy lunch it was.

Charlie hadn't gone to sleep Wednesday night till 2am, if not later. After mid-70s and up temperatures, the weather turned cold and damp, so yellow jackets were in order for a bike ride and Charlie's green parka for an evening walk. I think he has been looking a bit wistful at not having to wear these this week, somewhat (perhaps) the way I miss wearing wool cardigans in the summer (though I do find ways to wear them -- air conditioning and all that -- and a sweater is not a parka).

Thursday would have been our last day in Greece had we gone, and it would have been spent in Athens, visiting the Acropolis, the wonderful new Acropolis museum, roaming around the streets a last time, and visiting with my friend Emma.

While there is no question that I miss going (I know I have mentioned it several times), I have to say, Charlie has been a content and often-smiling child not just this past week, but in the time before. He got up groggily but on time for the bus, had a fine day, waited very patiently while I changed the music on his iPad. Some stomach distress has not (so far) seemed overly to bother him. I've been reading about Homer, and reading Homer himself.

And that grilled cheese was really good.