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    Writing This Ability: Parables and True Stories
    Writing This Ability: Parables and True Stories
    Writing This Ability: Parables and True Stories
    Ebook183 pages2 hours

    Writing This Ability: Parables and True Stories

    By Barry Pomeroy

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    We use the expression scattered skills a lot of the time when talking about disability, and I have come to embrace that idea. Some people are good at math. I am not. I have a good spatial sense. Others do not. I have begun to think about this spectrum of human skills, all the way from Kim Peek to the dullness we call normality as the true range of human ability. In our technological future we will perhaps ameliorate this somewhat with electronic fixes, but in the meantime we are left with the delightful variation that is humanity, the confines of our biology and the cultural attempts to constrain our minds.
    The stories in this collection represent more than just tear-jerking accounts of overcoming adversity, although I’ve told a few of those too. I’m more interested in exploring the potential of what we consider to be dis and ability through characters who are constrained by circumstance and societal expectation even as they fight against those limits.
    Rather than use this description to label these characters further, I would say instead that the reach of the human intellect, the intransigence of human dignity, the rough multiplicity of circumstances with which we are confronted, are no match for the fortitude and insight of the one who wants to escape.
    No hardened criminal fought harder to carve a prison wall than someone trapped by a story about their abilities and no escapee on a welcoming shore felt more a sense of achievement than one whose diagnosis was stretched and then broken.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBarry Pomeroy
    Release dateMar 1, 2015
    ISBN9781987922134
    Writing This Ability: Parables and True Stories
    Author

    Barry Pomeroy

    Barry Pomeroy is a Canadian novelist, short story writer, academic, essayist, travel writer, and editor. He is primarily interested in science fiction, speculative science fiction, dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction, although he has also written travelogues, poetry, book-length academic treatments, and more literary novels. His other interests range from astrophysics to materials science, from child-rearing to construction, from cognitive therapy to paleoanthropology.

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      Book preview

      Writing This Ability - Barry Pomeroy

      Writing This Ability

      Parables and True Stories

      by

      Barry Pomeroy

      © 2015 by Barry Pomeroy

      All rights reserved. Copyright under Berne Copyright Convention, Universal Copyright Convention, and Pan-American Copyright Convention. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the author, although people generally do what they please.

      For more information about my books, go to barrypomeroy.com

      ISBN 13: 9781987922134

      ISBN 10: 1987922134

      Table of Contents

      Introduction

      Asterisk Populations

      Burning Richard

      Don’t Step on the Rocks

      A Bag Full of Blond Hair

      A Mouthful of Teeth

      A Man Without a Brain

      Clark’s New Girlfriend

      The Long Drive

      The Three Sisters

      Renters, Stewards and Salesmen

      Killing Around the Farm

      Breaking Out of Sleep

      Bruce’s Diffusion Theory

      Larry

      The Rogers Boy

      Water Tower Man

      Introduction

      I first began to think about disability and how it is described and then follows a person when my friends had premature twins. The different skills of the brothers, coupled with issues that made their care a challenge gave me my first entrance into the disability community. I then returned to reflect on the children who’d been excised from the classroom in junior high and made to sit in a room at the end of the hall where to all accounts they had no demands placed upon them.

      As my friends’ boys grew older and their needs became diverse, I was introduced to speech therapists and educational plans and slowly recognized there were a largely unsung army of workers and parents labouring in the background of every child who has assistance and that they are at least partially responsible for ensuring the child’s success.

      Later, teaching at a mid-size university I dealt with students with a wide range of needs. The first student who was registered with the Disability Resource Centre (DRC)—they later changed their name to Accessibility Resource Centre (ARC) and then trimmed that Accessibility Services—approached me with a letter which outlined some accommodations. I’d not been told anything about how I was to approach that eventuality, so I went to the Centre and asked about my responsibilities and what the Centre did for my student. They outlined the use of scribes for exams and separate rooms and extra exam time for any student whose assessment showed a need. They were focused on appropriate accommodation in order for the student to succeed.

      Once I was aware of my responsibilities, and in subsequent years they shifted with each student who approached me, I informed myself more and more about my students’ needs. My friends with twins worked in the disability community and likely we talked about need and accommodation more than most. With this sensibility, I began to think of the abilities that I had observed not only in my friend’s children, but also in the students I had taught. People with difficulty concentrating wrote A papers and students with dyslexia received equal grades although their editing would sometimes miss a fell where they meant a fall and a were when they were aiming for a where.

      They could, it seemed to me, with their native intelligence and sheer determination and perhaps also as a result of their disability, outperform many around them. I typically read very quickly, but once, when an image was flashed on the screen in which the letters were separated by too much detail, what we might call noise, the dyslexic person beside me read it much more quickly. Their reading speed was typically much slower than mine, but they were able to cope with the noise in a way that I couldn’t in my attempt to see the whole phrases. Likewise, the clever mistakes of my friend’s child were delightfully intuitive and creative, and his brother’s memory is phenomenal.

      We use the expression scattered skills a lot of the time when talking about disability, and I have come to embrace that idea. Some people are good at math. I am not. I have a good spatial sense. Others do not. I have begun to think about this spectrum of human skills, all the way from Kim Peek to the dullness we call normality as the true range of human ability. In our technological future we will perhaps ameliorate this somewhat with electronic fixes, but in the meantime we are left with the delightful variation that is humanity, the confines of our biology and the cultural attempts to constrain our minds.

      The stories in this collection represent more than just tear-jerking accounts of overcoming adversity, although I’ve told a few of those too. I’m more interested in exploring the potential of what we consider to be dis and ability through characters who are constrained by circumstance and societal expectation even as they fight against those limits.

      I constantly come back to a scene from Ricky Gervais’ controversial show Derek when thinking about labeling. In the show, a government authority wanting to make some cuts to staff considers if he can come up with a reason to fire Derek who works in an home for the aged.

      Is he ah . . . is he handicapped? the government flunky asks.

      Yeah. He’s too nice for his own good. Deliberately refuting the validity of the question, Hannah, another staff person in the home and a Derek supporter answers.

      I meant, could he be autistic? the flunky persists. When Derek enters the room, he asks him directly. Have you ever been tested for autism?

      I’m no good at tests, Derek quips.

      Would you mind seeing someone?

      Who?

      Well an expert, a doctor, his true intentions at war with his dialogue, the flunky answers.

      You don’t have to, Hannah breaks in.

      Derek asks the pertinent question. If I am ’tistic, will I die?

      "No. But at least we’d know," the flunky says in an aside to Hannah.

      Will I have to go into hospital and they do experiments on me?

      No.

      So will it change me in any way? Will I be the same person? Derek asks more pertinent questions.

      Yes

      Don’t worry about it then.

      In this witty reply, the singular question about labeling comes to the fore. If it is not to assist the person labeled, then what use is it to them?

      Rather than use this description to label these characters further, I would say instead that the reach of the human intellect, the intransigence of human dignity, the rough multiplicity of circumstances with which we are confronted, are no match for the fortitude and insight of the one who wants to escape.

      No hardened criminal fought harder to carve a prison wall than someone trapped by a story about their abilities and no escapee on a welcoming shore felt more a sense of achievement than one whose diagnosis was stretched and then broken.

      Asterisk Populations

      I was told I was as much at fault as anyone else that I never tried to listen better, or hear better what was said to me. I needed to try harder. But I can’t really be blamed for the confusion. The two expressions, at-risk and asterisk sound too much the same, and their vague meanings hover too close to one another.

      I guess I’ve been a member of an asterisk population my whole life. For me, I never really noticed until I was forced to stand outside the classroom for hours while inside the other kids sang and stamped their way through our lessons. Later I was sent to the principal’s office. There I was told I’d end up just like my brother Blake who’d been sent to the farm a year earlier. Looking back at it now, knowing that the farm was a reform school, and that my brother was likely also an active member of the asterisks, I can see the import of these threats. I knew that Blake had been bad in some way, and that he’d been sent away because of behaviour, but all I’d really identified was that he would pull out his hair and eyebrows. I began to check my eyebrows in the mirror, and would howl bloody murder when my hair was cut by the neighbour, whose archaic clippers tended to pull. I didn’t want to end up like Blake, my hair missing and my hands blunted by the work on the farm.

      I muddled through school somehow, my hair carefully intact, if poorly cut. My marks were low enough in grade six that I was put into what they called the special class. There I sat with Cindy, who had fallen from the stairs when she was a child, and Randy, who burned the Shaw barn. Pam was a migraine-ridden stutterer and Genie’s father was a grave digger. They sat with Malcolm, who was deaf, although we weren’t told that until the end of the year and Jimmy, who was made to eat rat poison every day to get rid of his brain tumour. Across from me was Chris, whose behaviour was so unpredictable that he would even strike himself, Holly who was bad at math, and Danny, who was fat. I knew I was amongst the misfits, although I was uncertain about the extent of my problems, if even I had them.

      I had somehow ended up amongst the asterisks although I had no idea how I fit in. I could do the math that Holly couldn’t, I could sit still unlike Chris, and I wasn’t fat like Danny. I usually explained the problems on the board to Cindy, who had difficulty understanding the logic of long sentences, and Randy I knew enough to avoid.

      I’m not pretending I was perfectly normal. I didn’t have a mother I could point to in pictures like the other regular kids. My mother had been institutionalized since I was very young and I’d been brought up in a foster home. My father I knew to be a drunk, but that could hardly gain me credence with the Leave it to Beaver families I was surrounded by in the regular classroom. Also, and I am perhaps most reluctant to admit this, I never really looked at people. I found a direct stare uncomfortable. Their eyes were cataracted with asterisks and all they saw when they looked at me was that shape, too regular and symmetrical to be me and too convincing to ignore. Now that that’s out, I might as well admit that I never talked in class either. I was shy. That’s what the principal called it when he waited until I wasn’t in school and then sat in my class and told them I had issues.

      I heard all about it the next day. Everyone was wondering if they were going to be singled out for hitting me, and they listened closely when he described certain ill-treatment I’d endured in the classroom and on the school grounds. What happened at home he didn’t worry about. He told them I’d had something happen to me when I was born that meant I was damaged. That’s the word he used: damaged. I’d never thought of myself that way, and I spent the next three years trying to understand that word, to understand how an educator could use it to describe a child like me, to say it to a group of sadists in training.

      The beatings that followed, when I objected violently to the use of that word, brought me into the special class, which everyone else called the Crazy Crab Class. There I coloured, watched movies, and did math and science so simple I was constantly irritated with unresolved frustration. I helped Cindy with her work, and Holly with her math, but most of the time I spent looking out the windows at the birds flying south in the fall. My marks plummeted, as much as that was possible, until I was getting zero on math tests that a bird could pass by pecking at a birdfeeder.

      I’m not sure what would have happened to me if I’d stayed in that situation. Would I have joined forces with Randy, who had no intellectual difficulty at all and burned mailboxes and garages, culminating finally in the Shaw barn and a trip to the reform school? Or would I have married the first semi-normal person who would have me, like Cindy? She married an ape in a human suit who was constantly derisive of her abilities until he was found with his hand in his daughter’s underwear. Chris was institutionalized when his parents were too old to take care of him, and Holly went to a factory job in Ontario and never came back. Danny got skinny and passed as normal, and his intelligence was suddenly not in question.

      I was rescued, strangely, by my brother Blake. Blake came back from reform school hardened, in some ways, and also much more protective. He was taller and more assertive. He picked up a job at the gas station and an apartment only a few miles from where I laboured on the foster farm. Don’t get the impression that Blake tutored me. Far from it. Likely Blake’s intellectual level was below mine, as such things are measured. But what Blake taught me was much more valuable. Stand up, Blake would demand. Don’t take any shit. Look at me. I ain’t over there.

      In much the same manner that Blake had taught me to ride a bicycle by putting me on one and pushing me down a hill, he taught me to pass as normal. Once I had fallen off the bicycle at the bottom of the slope, I began to cry, but Blake insisted. Get back on or I’ll kick the shit out of you. I thought you wanted to learn. On the second try, I fell again, crying even louder. By the third attempt I realized that Blake wasn’t going to give up. I would be covered in bruises unless I paid more attention. My third attempt was a success. I stayed on all the way to the bottom of the slope and then fell in the soft grass. I still remember that moment, Blake standing at the top of the hill and grinning, and me yelling, Did you see that? I did it, Blake. I did it.

      Perhaps because the normal lessons I received from Blake, my older

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