Demand More Science

I've been on a bit of a mini-crusade recently.

It centers on the manufactured controversy around childhood vaccination and vaccines in general.

I say "centers on" because it encompasses a lot more: climate change, evolution, GMOs, the teaching of science in schools, fracking, mining, etc.

The crusade is for science literacy.

I'm not the poster boy for this topic. Let me tell you a true story.

When I was in 10th grade, I had a great biology teacher named Karen Emery. She was a very hands-on teacher and I had a great time. The thing was, I wasn't a "science kid." I was a "music kid," which, you know, is supposed to be the opposite. Anyway, I was dicking around in class one day and got called out to answer a question regarding eurkaryotes and prokaryotes. I hadn't really been paying attention, but instead of just admitting that, I did what any 15-year-old dickhead does to save face in class. I said, "Why do I need to learn this? I will never use this information for the rest of my life."

But I took it a step further.

That night, I found two poems — Walt Whitman's "When I Heard the Learned Astronomer" and Poe's "Ode to Science" — and typed them out. Both are Romantic reactions to reason and the Enlightenment, decrying the lack of poetry in science and the loss of wonder. Then the next morning, I placed the poems on Ms. Emery's desk. She came and found them. I watched with glee while she read them. Then I saw her eyes getting wet.

She regained her composure then and tacked the poems on her bulletin board. She carried on with class and said nothing more about them.

Yeah. I know. I was a major asshole.

Fast forward about ten years.

I'm teaching music at a middle school and this student asks me if she can go to the library. She has a report she must complete for science class. I allow her to go and am shocked when she returns in five minutes.

"You're finished?" I asked.

"Yeah."

"Let me see."

I looked to see that her "report" is simply copied and pasted web pages.

"There's no way you know what any of this means! You haven't even read it! Like this word here — what does that mean?"

She read. "Eukaryotic." Then, "I dunno. What's it mean?"

Boom.

I wrote a letter of apology to Ms. Emery that night.

But I grew up thinking that science wasn't important. At least, not to me. I was artsy, you know, not concerned about all those facts and rational thinking. That stuff was for other people.

Besides, I was an evangelical Christian in an evangelical Christian community in an evangelical Christian state. We knew that scientists were liars.

I remember the "Chick tracts" we got at church. There was one about evolution that I loved. It was like a little mini-comic featuring a college student who calls out his godless college professor on evolution and convinces everyone that the Bible is right — the heavens and the earth were created in seven days.

I memorized those talking points and had them ready any time evolution was discussed.

The thing was, it wasn't really discussed all that much. I had science teachers in junior high and high school that went to my church or other churches like it, and they didn't believe in evolution either. They certainly didn't think the universe was billions of years old. Well, maybe Ms. Emery did, but she was probably bullied into going light on the topic.

The only time I ever heard these things — the age of the universe, human evolution, all of these wondrous discoveries — was from my friend Rebecca. And she was a Unitarian, so I wasn't about to trust her.

And this is the way I grew up.

As I got older, I mostly just ignored science. It wasn't my field, so I wasn't interested. And I was still an evangelical Christian, so I knew that science was wrong on many, many things. I had the Bible and the Bible was God's word — inspired, infallible, and profitable for doctrine, reproof, correction, and instruction in righteousness.

And then I lost my faith.

That's a subject for another time, but I lost it hard. All of it. It was gone, leaving a big God-shaped hole in me.

I'm not sure when, but I decided to re-visit the whole "Science Isn't Important to Me" thing. Because, you know, I had a lot of free time on Sunday mornings.

I "discovered" Neil Degrasse Tyson. And Bill Nye. And Stephen Hawking. And Lawrence Krauss. And Brian Greene. And Richard Dawkins.

You know what else I discovered? I discovered that Whitman and Poe were wrong: science is full of wonder.

Consider this: all matter that exists in our universe was once contained within a dense ball about the size of a softball.

Or this: scientists may be on the verge of discovering why anything exists at all. It takes math. Lots of it.

Or this: all the elements in your body — the oxygen, the carbon, the nitrogen — were forged in stars. AND the elements in your right hand were probably forged in a different star than the ones in your left, perhaps separated by billions of light years. We are made of star dust.

How's that for inspiring wonder?

Beyond that though, I live in a world made possible by science.

We wouldn't have DVDs and CDs if it weren't for quantum mechanics. We would have no understanding of DNA — which has led to breakthroughs in medicine, criminal science, and history — without understanding human evolution. And my children and I enjoy a life relatively free from diseases that two generations ago crippled and killed thousands of people a year in this country.

Science matters. So does science literacy.

Here in this state and others like it, we are battling against regulation of the fossil fuel industry. This is because those interests own our state government. Luckily for them, they have a ready audience of climate-change deniers in people who are like I once was: scientifically illiterate or otherwise indifferent.

Our state and federal government actively fight against student learning standards that require critical thinking, partly, I am convinced, because students who are able to evaluate claims and evidence will begin to make better-informed decisions about global warming and other hot topics. Those decisions may result in a shift of power in this country.

The current of anti-intellectualism in this country is profound and disturbing. The chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee said that global warming has to be a hoax, because the Bible promises seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, as long as the earth continues. Fox News host Bill O'Reilly has said repeatedly that no one knows what causes the tides. Georgia Republican Paul Broun, a member of the House Science Committee, said, "All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell." California Congressman Dana Rohrabacher opined that dinosaur flatulence is what most likely contributed to past changes in global temperatures.

That's right: dinosaur farts.

The thing is, we need science desperately if we are to survive as a species. This world was not created for us and in fact, 99% of the species who have ever lived on this planet have gone extinct. We have an advantage, though. We have an advanced brain, one that has given us survival skills and tool-making abilities and the ability to reason. One that has given us science.

Those who have known me for a while know that my mantra for many years was "Demand More Art." I've not abandoned that cause, to be sure. I regularly advocate for the importance of the arts in the lives of people young and old, and I make my living in the arts. But we need to demand more science, too, and more scientific thinking among every day people.

If we do not, we may be beating the drum for a return to the dark forests of an age long past, back to the gloom of superstition and a time when we lived in ignorance and fear, praying and offering sacrifice to mute gods against the perils of the elements and disease. This is a future I do not wish for your children or mine.

Throw Out the Baby Jesus; Keep the Bath Water (Part One)

I am not a Christian.

I used to be. God-the-father-almighty-maker-of-heaven-and-earth and all the rest.

I wasn't casual about it either. I don't mean to imply that I was particularly moral or good. I wasn't. But I thought a lot about the things I believed. I read the Bible — several times. I went to church two or three times a week. I studied Christian writings, everything from the church fathers to the Puritans to contemporary authors.

I think I have a pretty decent grasp of Christian theology, too, especially the branch I most recently belonged to. (Reformed Baptist, if you are curious.) I can recite a bunch of scripture or the catechism to you, or distinguish for you the major differences between the 1644 London Baptist Confession of Faith, the Westminster Confession of Faith, and the 1689 2nd London Baptist Confession of Faith. I can even tell you why it's called the 1689 Confession when it was written in 1677.  I can talk to you about the distinguishing characteristics of the first and second "great awakenings" and why the second is not highly regarded among some.

Vanity of vanities, all is vanity and vexation of spirit. It's not much use to me now.

If people ask me "what I believe" now, my answer usually depends on who I am talking to. Sometimes I say, "I'm not a religious person." If I want to be cheeky, I tell them I believe in John Coltrane. I like the word "agnostic," I suppose, although that has to do with what you know rather than what you believe. The word atheist might fit, but it has so much baggage, I don't know if it's worth it.

Besides, it doesn't capture the way I process my life or the narrative I impose on it. 

I am a rationalist and a skeptic when it comes to the natural world. I believe that the universe is 13.8 billion years old, that the earth is 4.5 billion years old, and that we evolved from lower life forms. I believe in the scientific method, in secular government, and in a "wall of separation" between church and state.

Yet I have these words and stories bouncing around in my brain. And I don't mind them. Staves turning to snakes. Widows mites. Buried talents.

At some point I was introduced to Joseph Campbell. If you haven't been, I cannot recommend highly enough his Hero with a Thousand Faces. I don't agree with him categorically, but I do find that he understood our need for myth, much similar to (and related to) our need for art. Campbell sent me to Jung, and while I haven't figured anything out just yet, I'm more comfortable than I used to be with all that stuff I used to take literally.

It's a common thing among evangelicals of a certain stripe to say that "Christianity is not a religion, it is a relationship." I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm in need of a religion, but no thanks on the relationship. I need psalm and prayer and communion and celebration and the word (lower case "w" will do just fine). I need a pause at the end-beginning of my week to say, "Life is not merely matter, energy, and time." I need sacred moments and sacred spaces, made sacred not by the presence of the spirit of God, but the presence of my own spirit — me, fearfully and wonderfully made, the product of untold eons and made from the dust of stars. I need the mythology of the Bible without the disproven cosmology and barbaric ethics. 

I don't exactly think that there is anything special about Christian mythology, it's just that it happens to be the one I grew up with. As Campbell wrote, it is one of many examples of the monomyth found throughout mythology and art. But there are some things in the Christian story that seem unique, or at least emphasized more strongly that seem special to me.

These are the things I think about, the things that still color the way I see the world. I am deeply grateful (in whatever sense you can understand that in a non-theistic way) for that.

So, I thought I'd do a series of posts about this topic, namely, what about my religion is still meaningful and relevant to me in a post-supernaturalist context.

# # #

All of that was by way of preface, but I thought I'd go ahead and talk about the thing that still means the most to me in the Christian religion. And in a weird way, it's the thing that's central to what I do and don't believe any more.

I'll start with a story. It's one of my favorites and I've mentioned it in a prior post. Perhaps you already know it.

The king of Aram was at war with Israel. And God had given the prophet Elisha knowledge about the king's comings and going so that whenever he would encamp, Elisha would send message to the king of Israel and say, "Don't go to such-and-such a place. The king of Aram waits to attack you there."

So the king of Aram asked his courtiers, "How is it that the king of Israel always knows where I am about to attack?"

And they answered him, "The prophet Elisha knows and tells him."

So the king of Aram sent his army to Dothan, where the prophet Elisha had pitched his tent. And Elisha stayed there with only his servant.

So the servant rose up early in the morning and left the tent, and he saw hundreds and thousands of horses and chariots and soldiers of Aram. So he went to the prophet and said, "Alas! What shall we do, master?"

Elisha answered, "Do not be afraid, for we are greater than they are." Then he knelt and prayed, "Lord, open the eyes of my servant."

Then the servant looked again and saw the army of Aram, and encircled around them were the hosts of heaven riding horses and mounted on chariots of fire.

The story goes on from there. God makes the army blind and Elisha leads them to Samaria, where their sight is restored and they realize they are in an enemy city. Then the Israelites give them bread and send them back to Syria.

I love, love, love, love, love this story.

It comes to me when I am at my lowest. It renews my spirit. There is real power in this story.

If someone asked me what I take from the story, I would say it is this: things are not as they seem.

There is more than meets the eye. Like Harry Potter in a world full of muggles, we are surrounded by wonder and what passes as magic.

In many ways, it is one of the central themes of Judeo-Christian scripture. As I've written before, the Bible is filled with these unexpected twists. Boys slay giants with slingshots. A man kills a crowd with the jawbone of a donkey. And right there at the climax of the whole story, we see the most divine, powerful thing in the universe made weak. But the secret is this: we are made strong in weakness. The first will be last and the last will be first. And that man who is now naked and despised and bleeding on a cross before a pitiless crowd is winning the battle over death.

How can this possibly appeal to the rational mind?

Because it's true, in a sense.

We've learned that the smallest things in the universe — particles so small that we cannot see them — have unimaginable power, power to level cities and nations.

We look at a diamond and at plant life and imagine they are different, but they are not. Time does its thing and one transforms into the other.

All matter that ever was or will be in this universe began as a small ball — about the size of a softball, if Neil Degrasse-Tyson is to be believed — and has grown to an expanse past human calculation.

Each of us — kings and queens as well as washerwomen and chimney sweeps — are made of the same matter that makes up the furthest star.

We look up at the night sky and see ghosts — stars that have passed out of our universe ages ago, whose light is just now reaching us.

Each of us is covered by billions of micro-organisms who depend on us for survival and who, if scaled to our size, would seem like the stuff of nightmares.

And we can look at a single-cell organism and see something like our most distant ancestor.

Things are not as they seem.

It could pass for magic. But it is real.

How marvelous. What a wondrous world we live in.

A number of very virulent atheists like to refer to the Bible as a book of fairy tales. I would agree with that assessment, but I celebrate it. It is a book that has prepared me to look at the world in wonder and expect the unexpected.

Laughing at Death

My family has a dark sense of humor.

I think that is typical in families that have had a high level of dysfunction. It's kind of a coping mechanism.

My father was the model for us in this, even though he was also the source of much of the dysfunction.

The last time I went to see him in hospital, he wore an oxygen mask and I had trouble understanding him. So he had my brother Mark relay a joke he'd heard:

A nurse walks into a patient's room at the hospital. He's wearing an oxygen mask and she's having trouble understanding him but finally makes out, "Nurse, are my testicles black?"

 She tries to ignore him, but he persists his questioning through his oxygen mask, "Nurse, are my testicles black?" 

"Mr. Smith," she says, "that is really not a polite question." The man looks puzzled.

"Nurse, are my testicles black?" he asks again, gasping for air through the oxygen mask.

Finally she walks over to him, lifts the cover and answers, "Mr. Smith, your testicles are fine."

He looks at the nurse very strangely and then takes off the mask. "Nurse, are my test results back?" he enunciates clearly.

My dad couldn't stop laughing at that joke, in the face of the pain he was in, or perhaps because of the pain he was in.

Or maybe it was the fear.

I've had some experience with fear in the last few years. I can say, without a moment's hesitation, that fear is the worst emotion there is. It is crippling. When you are in the grips of fear, there is virtually nothing else you can do.

Except laugh, strangely.

When you are standing toe-to-toe with the unknown, the Big Bad that's finally come knocking at the door, laughter is the only life-affirming response. All of the "focus on the positives" and "all things work together for good" and all the rest don't amount to a hill of beans from a practical standpoint, not for me at least. They give no comfort against the evidences you've witnessed of the indifference of the universe toward your own pain.

Therein must be the origin of gallows humor. It probably also explains why horror-comedy is such a popular genre.

My mother was the ultimate straight man. It wasn't that she didn't have a sense of humor. She did, she just also said some ridiculously funny things without realizing it, often at what others might judge to be very inappropriate times.

I went with my mother and brother to the funeral home after my dad died last January. When it came time to discuss the obituary, she said that she wanted donations made to Hospice of Southern West Virginia, because they'd been so good to my father. Then she says, "Of course, Don's brother Eldon didn't care for them. He wasn't expected to live long but finally sent them home after eight months because he said they kept getting in the way. Of course, I guess that's what happens when you don't die on time." She delivered that last line as straight-faced as Bob Newhart.

When she died, just ten days ago, it was harder to find laughter. We didn't make pancreatic cancer jokes. We were too much in the grip of absolute fear. Instead we became centers of activity, taking care of things, making arrangements, making lists, moving things around, doing something — anything — to keep ourselves from imagining our lives without her.

It was the trip to the funeral home that finally changed that for me. If you've never had the chance to sit in the mourner's chair at a funeral home and gotten the sales pitch, you don't know how ridiculous human beings are. They sell thumbprint jewelry. Like, they take a thumbprint from the corpse and then you can buy cuff links or whatever. And pendants made from your loved one's ashes. I am not making this up.

I started to lose it over a mix-up with the disposition of her body.

We were brought a form that bore a notice across the top: "CREMATION IS IRREVERSIBLE AND FINAL."

I got the giggles. We questioned this clause with the funeral director, who sought to explain it in hushed, soothing tones. Apparently there is no process for the reversal of cremation. Who knew? I couldn't stop giggling.

My mom had specified in her will that she was to be cremated, but according to the good folks at Blue Ridge Funeral Home, West Virginia code does not allow an individual to select cremation: it is done only upon agreement of all next of kin. This simultaneously sounds like something they just made up and something dumb enough for the West Virginia Legislature to have enacted, so I'm not sure where I am with that.

My initial thought was, "Just leave her then. You guys can decide what to do." It's hard to explain why this made me laugh, but it did. I was just imagining the mortuary stuck with this body and no way to get rid of it, just moving it from room to room to accommodate new arrivals, it becoming a fixture there in a sort of Weekend at Bernie's way. Maybe they'd dress her up for the office Christmas party or the funeral director would find himself talking to her about problems at home.

I just heard you cringe.

Yeah, I know: it's my mother. How can I, blah, blah, blah . . .

But fuck you if you think that means I don't love my mother enough or don't love her the right way. For all of the mistakes they might have made, my parents didn't raise me to cower in reverential fear when Death entered the room. We never whispered the word "cancer," or used florid euphemisms to avoid speaking Death's name.

There at the funeral home, I had to call up my siblings and ask all of them to come sign the release form. They arrived about twenty minutes later.

It was just the five of us us there and it was probably then that I realized that this might be the last time we would all be in a room together.

We were making jokes and laughing. Some of us took photos. Sarah had noticed a Keurig and began dispensing coffee like a barrista trying to set a record.

I did not witness my mother's passing. Sarah did, and told me about it. I will admit: it sounds frightening to me, standing there at the abyss, looking into the blackness and wondering what, if anything, is beyond.

How can we possibly face moments like that?

I promised my mom I wouldn't tell a dick joke at her memorial service. I suppose I will keep that promise, but I will laugh. It's the only thing I can think to do.

Let It Bleed

My mother, Dora Leigh Deskins, died last night, December 7, 2014, after discovering last month that she had pancreatic cancer.

There was a book that came out several years back called On Death and Dying. The author offered that there were five distinct stages of grief. There hasn't been much research since that time to support that assertion. My own experience seems to indicate that grief can vary widely.

My father died on January 27 of this year. I grieved for him, but I can tell you already that the quality of that grief was very different. He had lived a very hard life — drinking, smoking, generally being a rough character. He'd had three heart attacks and quadruple by-pass surgery. I had been anticipating his death for many years.

I had never even considered the fact that my mother would die.

Her death was very sudden. She was 75, but she never seemed elderly. She never drank a drop and smoked only briefly in young adulthood.

I'm feeling and thinking so many things at once that it is hard to even notice each one.

I'm struck by how casual death is. She sat in hospitals, talking to doctors about dying and now she is dead. It seems like it should be more elaborate, accompanied by more pomp and circumstance.

Death is dehumanizing, in the most literal sense. When someone is sick, you watch them gradually lose those things that attach them to their humanity. It robs us of our dignity.

I'm confused. It seems like this is all a terrible mistake, as if someone else was supposed to die. She was supposed to retire. Her paperwork got mixed up with someone else's. She paid her fees, she talked to the guy. We need this corrected, as soon as possible. This cannot be right.

If I think about her voice, it is almost more than I can bear. I cannot believe that I won't ever talk to her again. It's only been a day and I miss it more than I can stand.

I spent today at her house with my siblings and some of our families. We walked around this house where we all once lived, but now the owners are gone. It's not our house. It felt weirdly like we were trespassing. When I think of all the times I walked through that door and heard Mother or Daddy call me from another room, happy to see me, glad I was there . . . that is gone. The house is nothing now. There is no more warmth or love to be had in it, and it will be sold and others will live there or maybe even tear it down.

What do I do now? What do I do now that I don't have parents? Who do I go to when I fuck up?

Death Without God

I write this at my mother's bedside. She is at the Bowers' Hospice House in Beckley, West Virginia. She came here after being diagnosed just last month with pancreatic cancer and spending the last few weeks in and out of hospitals. Her last words to me were yesterday afternoon, whispered "I love yous" to me and to my infant son. She has been mostly unresponsive since then. Her family is now relegated mostly to watching her die.

My mother is a deeply religious person, with a belief in a personal God, the reality of the devil, and an afterlife spent in the eternal peace of Heaven or the eternal torment of Hell. I shared those beliefs until about seven years ago. Mine has been a gradual process of losing faith, part of what could be called a midlife crisis, I suppose.

I haven't discussed this very much with my mother. I think it would cause her too much distress. That is, after all, one of the things that makes religion so very successful. It is near torture to imagine yourself and your loved ones facing eternity separated from all comfort, your bodies being burned with a "fire that is not quenched," and subjected to unspeakable torments for eons. The alternative, by contrast, is a promise of life eternal, a life without pain or even emotional distress, where God Himself "wipes every tear" from your eye. The only price to be paid? Believe. It is that simple, we are told. The price of Heaven has been paid for us by another if we only believe.

That sounds like a good deal, doesn't it?

Only it isn't. Not really. Because belief in this instance means subjugating one's mind to the teachings of others, abandoning critical thought, waiving one's right to question. It means accepting as truth that which goes against reason and to do so without evidence at all, because "faith is the evidence of things not seen." It is to completely surrender one's life, the only one we are certain exists, for the promise of another that no one has seen.

It took me some time to reach this point in my own thinking and I'm well aware that most of you reading this will disagree quite sharply. As I was relaying to someone today, the question turned for me on a spiritual level, not on matters of science, as is the case with so many. It's a topic for another post, but suffice it to say that it did not happen overnight.

To have won the right again to question all received wisdom, to reject anything that comes without evidence, to organize your morality on human reasoning rather than 3000-year-old tribal ethics, to marvel at science and human understanding, and to again be humbled at how little we truly know − well, that is liberty. As was said, "The truth will set you free."

Yet I have expressed to many my reticence to abandon all that I once knew. For all they lack if understood literally, Christian scriptures are rich with metaphor for shaping life's meaning. Eating forbidden fruit does bring knowledge of good and evil, a loss of innocence but growth in wisdom. We have witnessed our own Davids slay mocking Goliaths. We know the power of grace in our lives and that forgiveness exceeds vengeance in every way.

I still think in those terms and truly long for the experience of the "holy," not something supernatural but the setting apart of times and spaces as sacred to the human spirit. I relish Christian mythology without being beholden to its cosmology or ethics.

It is at times like right now that I long for it the most. I'm at my dying mother's bedside, the scene of dozens of bluegrass songs, where those old-time mothers say, "I've just seen the Rock of Ages − Jacob's ladder coming down!" I want something of that experience, without needing to abandon reason. I long for this to be a sacred time, a time to reflect on a life well-spent, a time to ponder life's hardest questions and construct meaning for the dying and those that remain.

A few short years ago, it would have been impossible for me to imagine meaning apart from God. "Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever," I would have told you. To reject Yaweh, whose very name suggests that He is the ground of all being, is to have no meaning at all.

It's not like that for me any more.

I suppose I'm "apostate," to use the old-fashioned term. Even as I type that, I realize it is likely to land me on more than one church prayer list. That's okay.

The meaning I make at this passing is one that acknowledges what we know of this cosmos and re-imagines those tropes that served to comfort me in the past.

I look at my mother and I hear the Apostle's words, that hers is a body "sown in corruption, but raised in incorruption; sown in mortality, but raised in immortality." Then I think about what might become of her body after her death. It will be returned to the earth, sown in one sense, and provide life again to plants and animals and again to generations after us. And her DNA we now know was sown in the five children she bore and again in her grandchildren, and will continue on as long as her progeny continue to reproduce. The words she spoke, at home and in the classroom where she taught, were sown in the minds of her children and students, and will bear fruit long after she has perished. This, then, is true immortality. This is immortality rooted in the cosmos as we know it.

I look at my mother and I hear the words of the Preacher: "As one dies, so dies the other . . . All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return." Then my mind turns to what astrophysicists tell us of our origins some 13.8 billion years ago, and the fate that awaits us many eons from now. Because every atom that is in us − every bit of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon − was there at the big bang. "We are made of star dust." And when the cosmos cools, all that is shall return to star dust, including those atoms in her body now.

It is a triumph of the human spirit that we even know this, that great women and men asked questions and questioned assumptions and made these discoveries.

So as I sit with her here, in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, these things are a great comfort to me. They are the meaning I make in the face of death.

I meditate on them in the knowledge that my mother does not share my beliefs. That is okay, too, because there is no Hell for the unbeliever in a world of reason. There is only love for her and a great sadness, knowing how much I will miss her.

Nana

Dear Monkey,

I took you today to see your Nana. That's my mom. We saw her in Beckley, where your old man is from and close to Nana's house. We didn't go to her house, though. We went to a place called the Hospice house. We went there because your Nana is dying.

I really never imagined having to write this. I always thought you'd grow up knowing Nana and spending lots of time with her. In the one year you've been on this earth, she has loved you very much. You spent a few days with her just a week before she went into the hospital. She told me that you've brought enormous joy to her life. It causes me more pain than I really thought was imaginable to know that you will grow up without her.

Here's what's happened. Nana hasn't felt well since your Grandaddy died, about 10 months ago. She's a teacher. She's 75-years-old, way past the time most people retire from teaching, but she started the school year just the same as she has the last 25 or so. You see, Nana didn't start teaching school until she was 50. Anyway, she called me about a month ago to tell me that she was quitting. She was going to take a leave of absence for some minor medical problems and then retire.

That was on a Monday. That Thursday or Friday she went into her doctor for some tests. She told me that next Monday that she had to go to the emergency room because there were some irregularities in her blood. At the hospital, they discovered a growth on her liver and pancreas. It was something called pancreatic cancer.

I'm not as knowledgeable about medical science as a lot of people, but a cancer is a type of growth that sort of takes over your body. It wants to reproduce itself just like all living things do, and pancreatic cancer is really good at that. Unfortunately for us, it uses our bodies the same way we use food and land and all sorts of things to stay alive and grow.

Nana went to a lot of hospitals, but there wasn't much they could do for her. By the time you are her age, they may have found a way to fight that type of cancer more effectively. I sure hope so.

So I guess I'm writing this letter to you so that you will know and remember what your Nana was like after she is gone.

First of all, she is really beautiful. She's an old lady now, of course, but I remember when I was just three and four years old thinking my mother was the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen. She used to wear kind of bright red lipstick when she got dressed up and she put something called Oil of Olay on her skin every day. She never looked her age. Even looking at her now in her bed, she doesn't look 75. She had almost no gray hair till she was about 60, I think. She smiled a lot, too. I suppose if you remember anything about her, that will be it, because she always smiled when she saw you.

She is also really smart. She was voted "Most Studious" in high school (Man High School, Class of 1956) and she always read. When I think about the number of books she devoured, it's almost unreal. That was her real passion in life and it's something she passed along to me. She read everything, too. She read the Bible regularly, of course. She read history books and historical fiction. She liked novels, too. I remember her telling me that she read Song of the Lark by Willa Cather almost entirely by flashlight under her blanket when she was young. When I was a child she read trashy romance novels, but she gave that up eventually.

She loved learning, which I guess comes along with the love of reading. She'd gotten married when she was 17 and had to quit college when she got pregnant with your Uncle Don. But the entire time we were growing up she concerned herself more with our education than anything else, I think.

She took us to the library all the time. I remember once that the librarian at the Raleigh County Public Library refused to check out more than three books to me. Well, your Nana got so angry that she marched herself up to the desk and told that woman that unless there was some formal policy that applied to all library patrons that I was allowed to check out as many books as I wished.

She went back to college herself when she was 45. She got a degree in library science, because she thought she wanted to be a school librarian. She got her masters in special education with an emphasis on gifted education and became a gifted teacher instead.

She always talked to us like adults. This is something I remember from my earliest childhood, and I hope I have the good sense to do the same with you. She insisted on using an intelligent vocabulary and correct English grammar all of the time.

Oh, and she hated obscene language, which is really pretty funny considering she married Don Deskins. Once when I was in 8th grade, I was playing music with some friends at the Ghent Fair. Just as we were about to take the stage, I discovered that I'd left my sheet music at home, which was some 15 minutes away. I let loose repeating a single expletive ("shit") about 50 times in a row. I didn't know she was standing behind me. Oh, goodness. That was one of the few times I think your Grandaddy saved me from your Nana, instead of the other way around.

She and I happened to teach at the same school for a few years. It was called Beckley-Stratton Middle School and she taught gifted and I taught music. One time a group of students who had both of us in class told on me to her because I'd used the word "crap" in class. They told me that my mother said that was the sign of a limited vocabulary.

You know, when we worked and taught at that school those years, she ate lunch with me almost every single day. I say this because it wasn't like a chore for me. (I hope it wasn't for her.) It wasn't a case of feeling obligated to spend time with her because she was my mother. She was a really interesting person to talk to. She talked about politics and religion and education and the books she was reading.

She is a good cook, too. She grew up in that generation where the mother did all the cooking in the family and your Nana had to cook for five children, her husband, and herself. Every meal was a big meal. Her style was a blend of what I guess could be called traditional mountain cooking, 1950s housewifery, and experimental cuisine.

Sometimes we ate beans and cornbread; in fact, we ate cornbread almost every meal it seemed, and hers was the best. She made cornbread dressing for Thanksgiving, which is the best kind of dressing. But she also made really great lasagna, even though we aren't Italian. Every Christmas Eve, we ate fried fish, fried oysters, shrimp, and scallops. Potato soup, chili, chicken and dumplings, fried chicken, lima beans, deviled eggs, pork roast, peas, corn, mashed potatoes, cheeseburgers on grilled bread, homemade "pronto pups," hot dogs with her own chili, pepperoni rolls . . . it was all so good. And chicken chow mein, which while not tasting very Chinese still was very good. Oh, and cherry pie. I make cherry pie like she did, or at least I try.

You Nana is very devout, after her own fashion. She grew up a good Methodist but became a Baptist sometime after the family moved to Raleigh County. She went to church regularly for many years, without your Grandaddy. She was probably less regular in that as time went on, but she still read her Bible, read theology, and listened to preachers on TV. (Not the holy rollers, but the ones that had lots of notes with their sermons.) We always said "grace" before every meal, but I wanted to hear her pray: she sounded more sincere than everyone else.

That didn't mean she believed every thing she was told by preachers hook, line, and sinker. She didn't see anything wrong with rock and roll music, so we played it at home, in spite of what the preacher and the holy joes down at Daniels Missionary Baptist thought.

She played piano at the church, for the choir and for services. She loved to play hymns in the evening, too, and she made sure we all had music in our life. She had played soprano saxophone in the Man High School Band. (It was a Selmer they had bought used from "someone in New York City" for $125 in the early 1950s. It kind of makes me nuts to think what it might be worth if she had kept it.) She made sure we had piano lessons (and saxophone lessons and guitar lessons and flute lessons and voice lessons and anything else any of us ever wanted to do).

Nana and Grandaddy liked to listen to music a lot when I was younger. She liked a lot of Glen Miller and pop singers from the 1940s and 50s. I don't know what her favorite song was, unless it was "Too Young," by Nat "King" Cole. She and Grandaddy both sang that one a lot.

She thought a lot about the "extras" in life, things other parents might not bother with. Your Aunt Sarah and I took watercolor painting lessons for several years from Chris DellaMea's mom because Nana thought we should expand ourselves that way.

Nana did most of the day-to-day discipline at home, with Grandaddy brought in for the bigger jobs. If you got in trouble with her, she'd make you go cut your own switch in the woods. If she didn't like the one you brought back, she'd send one of your brothers or sisters to get one. You did not want that to happen.

Once she was whipping me for something in the kitchen and your Aunt Sandy Jo (who was an older teenager at the time) began laughing at my tears. You know what Nana did? She turned right around and whipped Sandy Jo, quite against her loud protests, for being so mean.

She had this kung fu move, too, that she used in the car. If you were sitting in the passenger seat while she was driving and you said something smart aleck, she'd flick the back of her hand lightning fast and smack you in the mouth without even looking. It was pretty impressive.

But really, she didn't spank us very much. In fact, she was the first to take your part against a teacher or bully at school, sometimes to a fault. I once called the gym teacher at school "stupid" (I wrote it actually) and she defended me because she thought he was. She'd never let the preacher or another parent or anyone correct us: that was her bailiwick.

She defended me against others clear on into my adulthood. I think her love for me sometimes blurred her realization of just how much I screwed up sometimes. As a grown-up I found myself confessing horrible sins to her, over the phone or sitting on her couch back in Daniels, only to have her assure me that what I did was perfectly understandable and no one should fault me for it. She thought I set the moon.

When I was about seven or eight-years-old, I got ahold of a book of poetry that belonged to Nana. It was called The Best Loved Poems of the American People. It had all kinds of stuff in it like "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere" and "Song of Hiawatha," and it was divided into sections with titles like "Home," "Faith," and "Humor." I think one section was called "Family," and I read a bunch of those poems. A lot of it was maudlin stuff. There was one poem that I liked though, and I memorized it. It was really saccharine and sentimental and silly in a lot of ways, but it was sentiment I finally loved, I guess. The final stanza went:

My friends be yours a life of toil or undiluted joy,  

You can learn a wholesome lesson from this small, untutored boy.  

Don't aim to be an earthly saint with eyes fixed on a star,  

Just try to be the fellow that your mother thinks you are. 

I don't know how I'd ever live up to that, because she loved me, loved all of us, so unconditionally.

And she loves you, very, very much. She told me you were the prettiest baby she'd ever seen. (Don't tell your cousins.)

But now I sit here with you in this room and her in a bed just a few feet away, you at the start of this whole journey and she at the very end of hers. It makes my heart hurt. A lot. And it hurts even more when I think of your brother that she will never meet.

I'll tell you this monkey: it goes real fast. Before you turn your head, the ones you thought would be there forever are gone from you. Try to live your life with that knowledge. Love your own mother as much as I love mine, because yours is beautiful and brilliant, too. Read and learn about everything you can, and you will honor her memory. When you eat the cherry pie we make or a piece of cornbread, know that those are tastes that have been brought to you through generations. And sing your song, because you have a song for this world.

I love you very, very much.

Daddy

Pontypool Changes the Way I Think About Horror

Being both a horror fan and a list maker, I get really sucked in when people begin talking about their favorite horror movies of all time. Inevitably, I suggest one that very few people have seen and when they do see it, they are much less enthusiastic about it than I am. I wanted to write about that movie to maybe explain my great enthusiasm for it.

The movie I am thinking about is Pontypool, based on Tony Burgess' novel, Pontypool Changes Everything, and directed by Bruce McDonald. It's from a few years back, but I know very few who have seen it. (There are lots of spoilers ahead.)

Pontypool is essentially a zombie movie. Some of the most used zombie tropes don't really apply in the movie (the "zombies" aren't actually dead and you don't have to be bitten to be turned, among others), but it follows the now-familiar story arch of a single victim infecting others until the central characters are left hiding from the zombie hoard. 

What makes Pontypool different is the central conceit of the movie, which centers around the way the infection spreads.

From the outset, it's obvious that the movie will be centered around language. We hear Grant Mazzy, a talk radio host and protagonist of the story, telling a curious story about the name "Pontypool," the town that is the setting of the film. He quotes Norman Mailer about the power of certain coincidences before major events and we know that "something big is about to happen."

I think it is safe to say that if you are not drawn in by that opening monologue, this movie is probably not for you. It's not artsy or intentionally snobby in any way, but it's smart, really smart, in the way that very few horror films are.

Any horror story worth it's salt addresses important themes, and zombie films are some of the most conspicuous examples. In my opinion at least, zombie films tackle the question of what it means to be a human being, and when are we least in touch with our humanity. Two of the most notable examples of this are from George Romero, the grandfather of zombie flicks. 

The original Night of the Living Dead was set in 1968 at the height of civil unrest in this country. The climax of the film comes when the hero, Ben, the sole African-American character, is gunned down by the police who have mistaken him for a zombie. The police officers are immediately transformed into the movie's villains, with almost as little to redeem them as monsters they were hunting.

Romero's sequel, Dawn of the Dead, dealt similarly with the mindless consumerism that was fast becoming the norm in the mid-70s. The film's zombies return to a shopping mall where they had spent senseless hours when they were living, only to continue their old habits. 

Pontypool likewise engages us through metaphor about the way we use words in our culture. AM radio — that bastion of shock jocks, right-wing fear mongers, and conspiracy theorists — serves as the backdrop of a world gone mad with language. Words have lost their meaning, they are tossed about carelessly, and used thoughtlessly. Language, which is at the core of our humanity and separates us from much of the other life on the planet, has become the vehicle of dehumanization. The virus isn't passed through biting, it's passed through words.

Like I said, it's smart stuff.

The film's climactic scene occurs when the station manager, Sydney Briar (Lisa Houle), becomes convinced Mazzy is about to kill her and becomes fixated on the word "kill," indicating she is becoming infected. Mazzy saves her by telling her, "Kill means kiss," (yeah, do your own armchair psychology on that one) and they do kiss. Once they've discovered the tool to save others — talking nonsense on purpose, turning the meaning of words upside down — they go to the airwaves to help save the town. They are halted by a voice from outside (presumably police or national guard) demanding they stop broadcasting. There is a countdown and the screen goes black, leading us to believe the pair have been killed as the town is razed.

The epilogue features news broadcasts from around Canada (Pontypool is a real Canadian town) indicating the infection has spread.

The movie is a slow burn, with most of it taking place in the radio station studios, located in a church basement. So much of it takes place there, in fact, that I think it could be adapted quite successfully for the stage. There are only eight actors in the film, including those who are heard on the radio but never seen. The strongest performance is by Stephen McHattie (Watchmen, A History of Violence) as Mazzy, as boozy and washed-up of an anti-hero as you could want.


Pontypool does not shy away from the blood, but it is used only at critical points in the movie. The gore is truly disturbing, as McDonald uses it to show the victims' gradual deterioration into sub-human existence. The scares are more centered around mood, although there are a few jump-out moments. The true horror, however, is existential.

So much of the film is on-the-nose in terms of social critique, especially as regards the manner in which large groups of people become infected by words — words that have become stripped of their actual meaning and now just serve infect our minds. Dozens of these words and phrases come to my mind — "national security," "job creators," "family values" — words that are used to obfuscate rather than illuminate, words used to convey the very opposite of what their plain meaning might suggest. The mobs infected with these words are a cannibalistic horde, seeking to either infect others or destroy those who offer resistance.

Pontypool will not appeal to those groups, because it requires the viewer to engage with complex ideas. I don't mean to suggest that you are an idiot if you don't enjoy the movie; it will be too slow for many horror fans. But I think it's appeal lies in the way it stays with you and rolls around in your brain, long after you've seen it. You can't ask for much more than that in a movie.