Category: Children

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Iditarod Trail, 1925: The Serum Run (Part III)

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Leonhard Seppala and His Lead Dog, Togo

Getting the diphtheria antitoxin to Nome the fastest way possible was paramount. The lives of scores of people, if not the whole town, depended on it.

The original plan for dog sleds was for two teams to meet in the middle. One team would set out from the end of the railroad at Nenana, and the other would set out from Nome. They would meet in the middle, at Nulato, and the Nome team would return with the serum.

The logical choice for the team to make the round trip between Nome and the halfway point was Leonhard Seppala and his team of Siberian Huskies, led by Togo. Togo was 12 years old, which was somewhat elderly, but he had been Seppala’s lead dog for tens of thousands of miles across the Alaskan Interior. Seppala himself held records for races like the All-Alaska Sweepstakes. He had trusted Togo with his life more than once.

Togo had not originally seemed like lead-dog material. In fact, Seppala tried to sell him twice, but Togo kept finding his way back to Seppala’s kennels. When he was just eight months old, Togo had escaped the kennel and followed Seppala. Seppala couldn’t turn back to return Togo, so he let the pup run with the team. Togo finished that trip in the harness next to the lead dog, and Seppala realized that Togo had great potential.

Alaska’s territorial governor was familiar with Seppala’s speed records across the frozen expanse of Northern Alaska’s interior, but thought that the fastest way to get the serum to Nome was by a relay involving more teams – thus, no team would be driving exhausted, the dogs would at their fastest and freshest, and the serum would get to Nome where it was desperately needed that much faster. The governor sent a telegram to the US Postal Inspector in Nenana, who would have the closest official contact with the mushers. The Postal Inspector contacted the Northern Commercial Company, which actually hired the drivers of the dog sleds. The company notified drivers all along the route to be ready for a relay. They wouldn’t be getting paid for this run. It was a mission of mercy.

Twenty teams of men and dogs took part in the relay. Athabaskan Indians (native to the Alaskan interior), Eskimos (native to the Alaskan coasts), and US Postal Service mushers all participated.

Dogs and men are believed to have arrived in Alaska together, walking across the Bering Land Bridge. Although the people native to Alaska hunted other animals, the dog was their only domesticated species. Dog fur kept Eskimos warm, dog meat filled their bellies when there was no other source of food. Dogs were used for hunting, as beasts of burden, and as guides through the confusing white terrain. It is believed that the Eskimos first came up with the idea of hitching dogs to sleds. The Athabaskans of the interior did not use sled dogs until after white men came to Alaska.

Twenty-four hours after the crate of diphtheria antitoxin serum left Anchorage, Alaska, the temperature in Nenana, Alaska, at the end of the railroad, was fifty degrees below zero. Traditionally, when the temperature reached -38 degrees Fahrenheit, so cold that mercury froze in thermometers, neither man nor beast went out. Wild Bill Shannon set out from Nenana with his team of Malamutes in that searing cold for a fifty-two mile run over very rough terrain. Normally the 52 miles between Nenana and Tolovana, where the next team in the relay waited, took two days with an overnight stop in Minto.

The train from Anchorage arrived at 9:00 p.m. January 27, 1925. Despite being cautioned by the Nenana Postal Inspector to wait until morning to start the run to Tovolo, Shannon insisted upon leaving immediately. “People are dying,” he said. His attitude was the attitude of every driver in the relay.

The trail normally used by the dog sleds had been churned up by horses in the days before, so Shannon turned his team to run on the frozen surface of the Tanana River. The air over the river was even colder, and the danger of water breaking through the ice was ever-present. As time wore on, Shannon had a harder time warming his feet and hands. He began losing his focus. Suddenly Blackie, his lead Malamute, swerved, taking the sled in a new direction. Shannon nearly lost his grip on the sled and looked around in surprise at Blackie’s move. He saw a black hole in the ice – an area of open water that the team had narrowly missed. Thanks to Blackie’s canine perceptions and quick thinking, disaster had been averted. It would not be the only time along this relay that the serum was nearly lost. But for the wit and courage of the lead dogs, the serum would never make it to Nome.

The temperature continued to drop through the Arctic night. Shannon felt his extremities freezing and knew he had to take steps to get the blood circulating in his body. So, he took steps. He got off the sled and literally ran alongside the team. This helped for only a short time, and soon Shannon realized he was in real danger of hypothermia. By the time he reached Minto, the halfway point between Nenana and Tolovana, the outside temperature was -62 degrees. Four dogs had bloody muzzles from breathing the icy air, and Shannon’s face was black with frostbite.

After four hours of warming himself by the stove in Minto, Shannon set out for the remaining 22 miles of the run to Tolovana. He had to leave three of his dogs behind because they were too weakened by pulmonary hemorrhaging caused by the cold to continue. A fourth dog looked questionable, but Shannon decided to take him. If necessary, that dog could be unhitched from the team and ride the rest of the way to Tolovana. Shannon made it to Tolovana by 11:00 a.m. on January 28. It was -56 degrees Farhenheit when he turned the precious cargo over to Edgar Kallands, the next driver in the relay.

In Nome that same morning, Leonhard Seppala set out. He had 315 miles to travel to get to the halfway point at Nulato, then 315 miles back to Nome with the serum. On the way he had to traverse the questionable pack ice of Norton Sound. The Sound might be completely frozen or it might have ice floes that would kill him and his team. the shortest distance between Nulato and Nome lay directly across the Sound, though.

In the meantime, the number of confirmed cases of diphtheria in Nome were increasing by the hour. Although both the white and native populations obeyed the quarantine, the strain was extremely virulent and and probably infected the population well before the quarantine had been ordered. The diphtheria bacterium could live for weeks outside its human host on something as benign as a toy. The children of the area had all attended Christmas celebrations and had been in school and church prior to the quarantine.

Nome’s mayor contacted the territorial governor again, begging for relief by airplane. A little more serum, enough to treat perhaps five people, had been located in Juneau and was being sent by rail to Nenana to await the next mail run. It wouldn’t be enough.

Next: more dogs, and a nation holds its collective breath …

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Iditarod Trail, 1925: The Serum Run (Part II)

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Diphtheria has now been largely eradicated in developed countries. In the US, for example, preschool children typically receive multiple doses of the DPT vaccine, which immunizes them against diphtheria, pertussis (whooping cough), and tetanus. Children who are not immunized, especially those who are in close proximity to other non-immunized children, are most prone to the disease, even in places where it was previously under control. For example, after the fall of the Soviet Union a lapse in enforcement of the immunization programs resulted in outbreaks in several its former states. In 1924, though, the children of Nome had not been immunized against diphtheria. Indeed, the vaccine had only been successfully tested the previous year for the first time. Antibiotics were not available to treat the disease until after World War II.

Prior to 1891, a child with diphtheria could be expected to die within a few days of falling ill. Diphtheria was a dreadful disease, highly contagious and had a mortality rate of nearly one hundred percent. Children are the most vulnerable targets of this bacterium, although it can infect and kill adults, too. In a single outbreak between 1735 and 1740 diphtheria killed as many as 80% of the children under 10 years of age in some New England towns.

In the 1880s a method of intubation was discovered that prevented victims from suffocating, but this method did not stop the toxic effects of the bacteria. The mortality rate fell to 75%, which was small comfort when the disease attacked a community.

In the 1890s, however, a Prussian physician, Emil von Behring, developed an antitoxin that did not kill the bacteria, but neutralized the toxic poisons that the bacteria releases into the body. The first Nobel Prize in Medicine went to Dr. von Behring for this discovery and the development of this serum therapy for diphtheria. It was this serum Nome so desperately needed.

Six of Nome’s children had died of diphtheria by January 22, 1925, the day the telegram was sent pleading for serum. Two days later, two more children had died, Welch had confirmed diphtheria in 20 children, and 50 more were at risk of contracting the disease because of exposure to sick siblings.

The only ground-based link to the rest of the world during the winter is the Iditarod Trail, an established mail route used by the mushers and their teams of dogs. The trail stretches 938 miles from Seward on the southern coast of Alaska, across several mountain ranges and the vast tundra of the Alaskan interior before reaching Nome, situated on an icy port just two degrees south of the Arctic Circle. Because the cockpits of airplanes were open in 1925, the only way mail and supplies could get to Nome was the dog sled.

Nome, Alaska, sits at the top of the world. In January, the coldest month of the year, temperatures hover in single digits much of the time. In late January 1925, though, a series of winter storms were blasting across northern Alaska, pushing temperatures 30, 40 and 50 degrees below zero. It was through these strong winds and driving snows, and through the perpetual twilight of the Arctic winter, that the dogs and their mushers would have to transport the serum.

It was decided that the serum would travel by train to Nenana, as far as the tracks could take it. A teams of dogs would meet the train and take the serum to Nulato, approximately half the distance between Nenana and Nome. Leonhard Seppala, a Norwegian musher based in Nome, would take delivery of the serum and transport it back to Nome. Seppala and his dogs were famous for having won races across the Alaskan interior, and it seemed logical that he should hurry the serum to Nome.

Now that there was a plan for transporting the serum, Dr. Welch waited to hear that sufficient serum had been located and could be sent to Nome. In the meantime, as more children and adults developed the gray membrane of diphtheria, Dr. Welch began administering the expired serum that he had on hand. Possibly the confirmed case that worried Dr. Welch the most was that of Nome’s school superintendent, who was also a teacher. Every child in the Nome area would have been exposed to diphtheria through him. Dr. Welch hoped that the million units of serum he had requested would be enough to treat the entire population.

News finally came that 1.1 million units of the serum had been located at hospitals along the west coast of the US, but it would take until January 31 for the serum to arrive in Seattle to begin the trek to Nome. The serum was gathered and began its trek north. Having confirmed diphtheria on January 20, Dr. Welch knew that if no serum arrived until well into February, it would be too late for many of the children of Nome.

A few days later, 300,000 units of serum were located at a railway hospital in Anchorage. It wasn’t enough to save the town, but it was a start. Anchorage’s supply of serum would reach Nome long before the serum being sent from Seattle. The serum was packed in as much cushioning as possible to protect it from the jarring of the sled. The doctor in Anchorage pinned a note to the blanket surrounding the crate of serum instructing the mushers to warm the serum for fifteen minutes at each stop along the trail. He delivered the crate to the railroad and sent it north to Nenana. The serum would arrive in Nenana on January 27, a week after little Billy Barnett had died of diphtheria.

Next: the dogs…..

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Iditarod Trail, 1925: The Serum Run

It’s almost August in Arkansas. That means it’s hot and the air is so heavy and stands so still I can lift a chunk of it in one hand and cut it with a knife.

How can someone who hates hot weather keep cool? She gets creative. In addition to tall glasses of sweet iced tea, sun dresses, and air conditioning cranked so low you could hang meat from my ceiling, I decided to pull out an old favorite: a book about dog sledding that I read a few years ago. There’s nothing like the thought of the Iditarod to put ice in one’s blood, now is there?

This isn’t a book review, although if you want to read more about the serum run the book I read is an excellent choice.

Pull up your chairs and settle in. Let me tell you a story about what really, truly happened one long wintry night in Alaska – where winter nights last for months.

Map of the Serum Run, January 1925, from The Cruelest Miles
Map of the January 1925 Serum Run along the Iditarod Trail from The Cruelest Miles

Prior to reading The Cruelest Miles, a fabulous book by Gay Salisbury and Laney Salisbury about the legendary inspiration for the annual Iditarod dog sled race, my own knowledge of the historic Serum Run was sparse. What little I knew came from modern-day news reports of the Iditarod race, most of which I ignored, and my son’s old videotape of the animated feature, Balto, which I watched and listened to ad nauseum when he was a little guy. Although I suspected that the children’s movie had taken liberties with the facts, I was compelled to buy the book because of that movie as much as by the chance to read another vignette from American history. And yes, the movie did take generous liberties with the facts. Apparently, so did the creators of the statue of Balto that sits at the Children’s Zoo in Central Park in New York City.

The 674-mile trek was endured by brave Alaskan dog-sledders to stop the Nome diphtheria outbreak in the dead of winter, 1925. The Salisburys’ book is altogether readable and informative not only about the desperate race against the disease, but also about dog-sledding, Alaskan topography and climate, and the personalities and temperaments of the sled dogs themselves.  The characters who I most admired, though, were the score of determined men who accepted the challenge to risk their own lives to save a town full of dying children at the top of the world almost 100 years ago.

News reports of the day breathlessly followed the unfolding tragedy. As the men and dogs ran hundreds of miles in searing cold, suspense gripped the entire world. Reporters worldwide wrote about each leg of the desperate race to get the diphtheria anti-toxin to Nome in time to save the town. The book intersperses fascinating facts and asides which leave the reader hungry for more, but not impatient with the interruptions of the dramatic unfolding of events. The story has great flavor because of the fullness of its telling. As each team of dauntless dogs is hitched to their sled, the antitoxin’s epic journey is punctuated with the unfolding crisis back in Nome.

When an Eskimo family brought one of their four children to him in the fall of 1925, Nome’s local doctor, Curtis Welch, did not immediately suspect diphtheria, nor did he realize that he was seeing an epidemic in its infancy. He believed at first that he was dealing with tonsillitis, which is an inflammation of the tonsils and throat caused by a virus or bacteria. None of the other children in the family were ill, and the parents reported no other instances of sore throats back in their village, which was close to Nome. Since diphtheria is highly contagious, it was unlikely that only one child would be affected, and in the decades he had been practicing medicine in Alaska’s northwest, no cases of diphtheria had been diagnosed – at all. But the Eskimo child died the next morning. Welch first concluded the cause of death to be from tonsillitis, which was rare. After the cases of diphtheria began making themselves known, though, Welch changed the child’s death certificate to reflect diphtheria as the cause of death.

That fall and winter, Welch noticed an unusually high frequency of tonsillitis and sore throats. On Christmas Eve, he saw a seven-year-old girl with a severely sore throat. Her Eskimo mother would not permit him to examine her fully without the child’s Norwegian father present, and the father had left the area on business. The little girl died four days later. This was now the second death from tonsillitis. Deaths from tonsillitis do occur, but even in the days before antibiotics they were extremely rare. When news came that four other native children had died after suffering from sore throats, Welch began to suspect that something was seriously amiss.

Diphtheria is an airborne bacteria that thrives in the moist membranes of the throat and nose and releases a powerful toxin that makes its victims tired and apathetic. In two to five days, other, more deadly symptoms would appear: a slight fever and red ulcers at the back of the throat and in the mouth. As the bacteria multiplied and more of the toxin was released, the ulcers thickened and expanded, forming a tough, crusty, almost leathery membrane made up of dead cells, blood clots, and dead skin. The membrane colonized ever larger portions of the mouth and the throat, until it had nowhere left to go and advanced down the windpipe, slowly suffocating the victim. [The Cruelest Miles, p. 36]

On January 20, a three-year-old boy from Nome, Billy Barnett, displayed the characteristic gray membrane of diphtheria. Dr. Welch was no longer just guessing. Since the diphtheria antitoxin his hospital had on hand had expired, and the fresh antitoxin he had ordered during the summer of 1924 did not arrive before the Bering Sea froze completely that fall, Dr. Welch had no choice but to watch the tiny boy die. Then the day after Billy Barnett’s death, an Eskimo girl with obvious diphtheria died.

Dr. Welch understood the significance of the problem. During the influenza pandemic of 1918, the native population had attempted to flee the disease and instead spread it further. If a panic occurred, the disease would not be limited just to Nome’s population of about 1500. Diphtheria is highly contagious and the bacterium was capable of living for weeks outside a human host. Panicked flight from Nome would guarantee the spread of the epidemic faster and farther. Containing it, especially during northwest Alaska’s brutal winter, would be impossible.

The town council met and was informed of the dire circumstances. Nome had been devastated by the flu pandemic six years before, losing more than half its population. Of 300 orphans created by the flu pandemic in all of Alaska, 90 of them were in Nome. The men were well aware of the seriousness of the situation.

The decision was made to quarantine the town and to prohibit any group gatherings. Children, the ones most likely to be affected by the disease, would not be permitted to leave their homes at all. Two urgent telegraphs were sent. One went to the US Public Health Service in Washington, DC. The other was an all-points bulletin for the entirety of Alaska.

Nome’s medical care team was quickly overwhelmed by sick children exhibiting the same symptoms. Not only was a deadly epidemic spreading rapidly through the town and neighboring villages, but Dr. Welch’s medical facility, the best in the region, was cut off from the rest of the world by pack ice and the harsh arctic winter. While this might be good inasmuch as quarantine was concerned, no one would survive the epidemic to tell about it unless antitoxin got to Nome fast.

Keep in mind, now: it’s the dead of winter two degrees below the arctic circle. The sea is frozen. There is no rail service within 700 miles of Nome. Even today there are no roads in or out of Nome, and in 1925 truck transport over such a distance, without roads, was completely out of the question. The only available airplane was a World War I model with an open cockpit – this was 1925 – which would have been almost certain suicide for the pilot in the dead of the North Alaskan winter.

The only way to get the serum to Nome was by dog sled – if serum could even be found.

To be continued…

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Pay It Forward

Am I conservative in my world views? Am I liberal? I am conservative when it comes to my money and what I think taxes ought to pay for. I also believe that society tends to take care of its own. That makes me more libertarian, I suppose.

I have a fairly liberal way of looking at the world in a lot of situations. I believe some of my attitudes could be considered progressive. I’m compassionate to the disadvantaged and I take social issues to heart. I value equality and appreciate diversity.

I believe each of us has a moral obligation to aid someone else who needs it. I subscribe to the “Pay it Forward” philosophy. Karma comes around for us all, and our “savings” of good deeds will make us more likely to benefit from someone else’s good act as well. Luck is a state of mind as much as it is effort. When I see someone who makes an effort but can’t quite get to her goal, I’m more inclined than not to give her a boost over that last hurdle if I can. And I will go out of my way to do it – especially if going out of my way isn’t a big deal.

Look at the couple who had no children, but with the help of a friend or even a stranger was able to adopt. If we could help the girl who, before she was 18, was kicked out of the house by her mother’s boyfriend, will we miss the money? Will we regret the hours spent on the telephone listening to a teenager cry as yet another foster mother tells her she has to leave?

The common thread here is family, and children. A teenage mother, thrust into the foster care system and astounded that anyone could buy groceries without food stamps; an abused and neglected child who only wants to be accepted for who she is; a loving couple with more love to give than they are allowed by nature to share. These are the people who make up our world. These are the people who shape the present and the future, and the present and future of every single person who comes into contact with them. And each one of them is worth the extra effort.

I wish more people would subscribe to the “pay it forward” mentality. The world would be a better place.

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Pieces of Eight – YARRRRR!

Since we’re at the beach, topics related to the beach are naturally the topics of discussion. (Imagine that!)

Jack and I are here with friends. Three adults, a couple of teenagers, a toddler, and a newly minted first-grader. Guess who dominates the TV? SpongeBob SquarePants. Yup. More beach stuff. Hey, it’s a theme vacation.

In keeping with the theme, the conversation over breakfast turned to buried treasure (whether or not a 6-year-old was likely to find any) and Spanish doubloons (the popular piratical medium of exchange due to the fragile and somewhat messy nature of sand dollars).

“What, exactly, were ‘pieces of eight?’ Gold doubloons?” wondered the father of the rugrats (another cartoon sure to be on the TV at some point during this vacation, but not beach-themed, so irrelevant).

“Spanish money, cut into eight pieces,” supplied my kid, who does his best to flunk out of school but whose mind is otherwise a steel trap for useless information. (If only his diligence in remembering things extended to remembering to do and turn in his homework, we wouldn’t be so worried about whether he’d actually make it to college. But I digress.)

“They actually cut their coins?” asked our 17-year-old friend.

“Yeah. It was before they minted coins worth less than a full unit of their money.” Where does Jack come up with this stuff? Since I was sitting in front of my laptop feeding my Yahoo 360 addiction, I flipped over to Google and looked it up.

The phrase “pieces of eight” did indeed refer to the fact that the Spanish dollar (yes, in the Americas it was called a “dollar”) was cut into eight pieces. Why eight pieces? Other than the relative ease of dividing the coin into eight pieces, the coin itself was worth eight reales, or royals. So calling it a “piece of eight” is similar to referring to the American gold coin as a “twenty-dollar gold piece.”

The Spanish real was minted in different denominations, though. There were 2, 4, and 8 real pieces. The coins were cut in half or quarters, or even into eighths to make smaller change.

Reales were always silver. The Spanish gold coin was called the escudo. The coin worth eight escudos was the famous Spanish gold doubloon, which was 22 carats pure. It was also cut into eighths, for the same reason as the silver real: to make change.

The Spanish reales and escudos were the first world currency. The purity of the gold and silver were dictated by Spanish law, and because of its colonial expansion in the Americas gold and silver were plentiful for the Spanish government. Even China, which had never been keen on accepting anything other than gold, was willing to accept reales. Sometimes the Chinese placed impressions of their own on the Spanish coins to indicate that their own tests had been conducted as to the purity of the silver.

Have you ever wondered why a quarter is referred to as “two bits?” It goes back to the divisions of the Spanish 8 real coin. This coin and its pieces were legal currency in the US until 1857, and it’s why the American stock exchanges valued stocks in increments of one-eighth of a dollar until 1997.

More reading for those two or three of you who wish I’d spent more time on this blog instead of rushing out into the sun and sand:

The University of Notre Dame Library information on Coins, including Spanish silver and Spanish gold
Pirates of the Caribbean (not the movie, but a site full of nifty pirate information)
Wikipedia’s article on the Spanish dollar
Answers.com’s entries on Pieces of Eight and on the Spanish Real

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Jack and the Garage

So we’re leaving on another trip.

Tomorrow: Destin’s white sand beaches and clear emerald waters.

The last time we went out of town for a week there was an accident of rather unsettling proportions just four days before our departure. I’ve held my breath this time. So far, so good. With less than 24 hours to go, no unscheduled holes have appeared in my house. You have no idea what a relief that is.

The Sunday before we left for England over Spring Break, Jack was pulling my car out of the garage when disaster struck. Well, the car struck and disaster resulted. Now I have a better understanding, though, as to why this child with such a high IQ has such terrible grades. It seems that he has a reading disorder that had been undiagnosed all these years. As often as the kid has his nose in a book, I was completely fooled. I learned about the reading disorder at the scene of the accident.OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

My driveway has stone walls on either side. Backing out of the two-car garage can be something of a trick, especially as big as my car is. Jack calls my car “The Mother Ship,” a name that’s actually pretty accurately descriptive. A fleet of Mini-Coopers and Smart Cars escape every time the pod bay doors are opened.

On this particularly auspicious day, Jack was at the helm of The Mother Ship when he came out of the garage just a tiny bit crooked. That meant he was very close to the tall stone wall on the driver’s side of the car, and dangerously close to scraping paint.

He pulled forward in an effort to get away from the stone wall. Then he needed to back up again to get out of the driveway.

In addition to stone walls on either side, my driveway is also a steep slope down from the street to the garage. So, naturally, when he went to reverse and hit the gas, and the car rolled forward, he hit the brake.

“Jack, whoa,” I said. I was calm. I knew that yelling at him would only make him mad.OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

He ignored me and immediately gave The Mother Ship a tad more gas. Again, the car went forward.

“Jack, whoa,” I said, this time more forcefully.

He gave me a look of exasperation. “I know what I’m doing, Mom,” he snapped, hitting the gas again. The car rolled forward a few more inches before he stepped on the brake.

“Whoa, Jack!” I said, very strongly.

He hit the gas again. When the car rolled forward, he knew it had to be the steep slope behind him, so he gave the car a lot more juice. This time the car shot through the wall dividing the two doors of the double garage.

Yes.

THROUGH the wall.OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

“WHOA!” I yelled.

The car came to a halt about four feet inside the garage. I reached down, shifted the car into reverse, then said, “Okay, NOW back up.”

My son looked at me. He gave The Mother Ship some gas. Magically, it backed up.

Once the hood of the car cleared the former wall of the garage, Jack shifted into park. He lowered his head to the steering wheel, banging it a few times for good measure.

“Oh, god,” he moaned.

“Um, Jack, when I kept saying ‘Whoa,’ that meant you should stop,” I offered hesitantly. It was probably my word choice that had confused him, right? My fault. All my fault.

He banged his head a few more times on the steering wheel, then hid his face deeply in the crook of his folded arms.OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

“Mom, I broke the fucking HOUSE,” he informed me in a shaky voice.

I started to laugh. I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t even be upset at his word choice.

“Well, son, I now understand why your grades suck.”

“What are you talking about?” he asked, not raising his head.

“You can’t read. You don’t know your D’s from your R’s.”

His shoulders started to shake. I couldn’t tell if he was laughing or crying. I think maybe it was a little of both.

My insurance agent is my brother’s best friend. Within 24 hours, I had a new wall where one of my garage doors used to be, and within a couple of weeks of our return from England I had a brand new garage door that stretched across where both old doors and the wall between them used to be. Having one door rather than two makes it MUCH easier to negotiate The Mother Ship out of the garage.

I’ve included a few pictures of the scene. The picture at the top of the blog? That’s the sum total of the damage to The Mother Ship: two scratches. Oh, and the “bonnet leaper” was twisted.

 

 

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

 

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Catholicism – WOW!

Jack, my 15 year old son, and I were watching Dogma the other day. You know, the Kevin Smith classic where George Carlin, as Cardinal Glick, rolls out a kinder, gentler Catholicism and its new front man, “Buddy Christ.” Naturally it made me think about other changes the Catholic Church has made recently. I initiated yet another theological conversation with my favorite Scion.

“Did you hear, Jack? Limbo’s gone.”

“What do you mean, gone? What happened to it?”

“The Vatican abolished it.”

“Abolished it? Just like that? How? I mean, I thought it was, like, dogma!”

“It says in this article that ‘Limbo has never been defined as church dogma and is not mentioned in the current Catechism of the Catholic Church, which states simply that unbaptized infants are entrusted to God’s mercy.’ So I guess Limbo was just policy.”

“So how does the Church have the authority to abolish Limbo? That would seem to be under the jurisdiction of God to do.”

“Well, according to the articles I read, it seems that the Church was really just wrong about Limbo existing in the first place. It never really was there.”

“I thought the Church was infallible.”

“The Pope is infallible. The Church, well, like the Muse and the Apostle say here in Dogma, there was the silent consent to the slave trade, and the Church’s platform of non-involvement during the Holocaust. Protestants were condemned to Hell until the 1960’s when the Church made an exception to heresy. And there’s the whole usury thing, too. Mistakes have been made.”

“Other than the unbaptized babies, who was in Limbo?”

“Um, I think anyone who would have gone to Heaven but wasn’t baptized. You know, the people who qualified except for the technicalities. Pre-Christian Jews. Pagans. Good Buddhists.”

“Does that mean that if I live a good life and do right, but don’t go to Church or anything, that I still go to Heaven?”

I rolled my eyes. “The notion was that only those who didn’t get the chance to know about Christianity would go to Limbo. It wasn’t fair to send them to Hell since they didn’t know, but they can’t get to Heaven except through Christian beliefs. So you have to toe the line.”

“Okay, so, now that Limbo doesn’t exist, and apparently never did, what happened to the souls the Chruch thought were warehoused there?”

I checked the article I had seen on the internet. “Hmmm. I’m not sure, and evidently the Church isn’t, either. It says here that ‘the carefully worded document from the Vatican’s International Theological Commission stops short of certainty in this regard, arguing only that there are “serious theological and liturgical grounds for hope,” rather than “sure knowledge.”‘ That really doesn’t say much, now does it?”

“So what about all the souls in Limbo?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they can go to Heaven now. And the good news is that from now on there’s no waiting. Unbaptized babies who die can go straight to heaven.”

“Man, I bet the people who had to spend all that time there are pissed about that.”

“Why?”

“It’s like doing time. Paying dues. They had to do their time in Limbo with no hope of ever getting out, and now the new guys get to go straight to Heaven. They get a free ride, without the Guantanamo-like experience the old guys had.”

“Guantanamo?”

“Yeah. You know, those guys in Guantanamo have no idea when or if they’ll ever get out. So if we have another war and suddenly they are freed and the new POWs we get are repatriated without the wait as soon as the President announces ‘Mission Accomplished’ – and are designated POWs without the ‘enemy combatant’ BS – the Guantanamo guys will be pissed off.”

“I hadn’t thought about it in quite those terms.”

“And Mom, what if the Church is wrong about this, too? They abolish Limbo but God still won’t let the innocents into Heaven since they weren’t baptized? I mean, what if the policy really isn’t changed and the Church didn’t get the right memo?”

“Well, son, I guess those souls will have to go somewhere. I just don’t know where.”

“You know, the government still has a lot of empty FEMA trailers… I bet souls don’t take up too much room.”

“How many souls do you think would fit in a single trailer?”

“I don’t know. Is it anything like how many angels fit on the head of a pin? I mean, they aren’t, like, substantial or anything.”

“Hmmm. And I suppose they won’t exactly eat a lot, either. Jack, I think you’re on to something.”

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One of My Old Cases

 

A few people have asked me to tell “war stories” from my law practice. Obviously I can’t violate any client confidentialities, but I can talk about my cases.

I have worked in the juvenile justice system for over 18 years now. I’ve worked as a lawyer for abused and neglected children, I’ve represented the parents who wanted to get custody of those children back from the state’s foster care system, I’ve represented the young juvenile delinquents who have charges ranging from rape to truancy, I’ve represented parents who were at their wit’s end and needed to institutionalize their children so that the children’s behavior could be addressed in a therapeutic setting. I’ve worked with the worst of the worst when it comes to child rearing.

I’ll tell you about the one that was the beginning of the end for me. I was already pretty burned out on child abuse cases by the time this client came along, but this case was the tipping point for me not wanting to take any other clients like this one on. It’s not a current case. It’s one I had several years ago. It is over, at least as far as I’m concerned. I got disgusted with my client and I asked the judge to let me out of the case. Fortunately, the judge saw things my way.

My client’s name was Diane. She was a single mother of three. Her son Joey was 13 when he raped his 9 year old sister, Karen. It was believed that he molested his 4 year old sister, Jenna, but Jenna couldn’t describe what had happened well enough for authorities to determine what if anything had actually happened to her. The medical evidence was inconclusive.

No criminal charges were filed for several reasons. First was Joey’s age. At 13 he was on the young side of even juvenile culpability for criminal conduct. His emotional and mental immaturity made him even younger. When the facts surrounding his own sexual abuse came to light, the decision not to charge him was easy. Joey needed treatment for his own victimization as much as he needed treatment for perpetrating against his sisters.

Joey was taken out of the home and put in a special psychiatric facility for boys who are sexual offenders. Joey completed the program. He worked through his own issues of abuse and became able to articulate the situation which led him to act out with Karen and Jenna. All that remained was for him to have series of reconciliation sessions with his sisters, and start home visits to prepare the family for his transition back into the home. It was at this point, fourteen months after Joey went into residential treatment, that things fell apart.

Joey’s therapist asked for contact information for the girls’ therapist so that joint sessions could be held. Diane had no name to give him. More than a year had passed since the abuse, but Diane had never put her sexually abused daughters in counseling. In the interest of trying to help Joey go home, the residential treatment facility offered to work with the girls in a limited number of sessions.

At the first session, Karen refused to enter the room if Joey was there. When Joey was brought into the room where Karen was, she became hysterical. The therapist separated the children and interviewed Karen separately. The therapist learned from Karen that neither of the girls was going to school. Karen, who was now 11, was skipping classes to have sex with boys for money. Jenna, who was now 6, refused to go to school at all and had to be physically carried into the building kicking and screaming. When she would be put down she would run from the building, still screaming. Diane was exhausted from dealing with her daughters’ behaviors. She had given up requiring them to go to school. Some days the girls stayed home alone. Other days they would go to work with their mother at the fried chicken place in the mall. There was no place for the children to sit while their mother worked. Karen might read a book or draw, but 6-year-old Jenna was more outgoing. She would skip off “to look around” and on more than one occasion was returned to her mother by mall security because she was begging money from shoppers.

Before the second session, Joey’s treatment team concluded that there was no way he could go back home. There were just too many unresolved issues relating to the sexual misconduct and Diane seemed unable to handle basic parenting and discipline. No friends were willing to take Joey into their home, and there were no relatives. The only option was for Joey to go into foster care.

The facility reported the situation to the state child protective services agency. A case was opened in juvenile court. Because Diane faced losing custody of one of her children to the state, Arkansas law said she was entitled to the services of a lawyer. Just like in criminal cases, if she couldn’t afford a lawyer one would be appointed for her. The judge called and asked me to take the case.

I’m used to tough child sexual abuse cases. I can’t count the number of them I’ve had. Every single one was heartbreaking. In every single one there are children whose lives have become hell. In most of them at least one parent has to make a choice between victim and perpetrator. Often the mother is abused even more than the children are. But as similar as this case was to all the others, it was also radically different.

The socioeconomic status of the typical family I’m appointed to represent usually means that the mother had her first child before reaching the age of 18, was raised in poverty by a single parent, has no friends or family in a supportive network to help her, is chronically unemployed and may be surviving on social security or welfare payments, knows very little about basic personal hygiene or housecleaning, and probably drifts from man to abusive man to make ends meet, having a child or two with each.

Diane had a college degree. Her first child was born when she was in her mid-20’s. Her parents, who were deceased, had been comfortably middle class. Her father had been a Methodist minister. She had one brother who was much older and from whom she was estranged. He was an accountant in another state. Diane was a manager at a fast food restaurant. She and the children were always clean and neat. She did not have a boyfriend. She had been divorced for about three years. Her ex-husband was the father of all three children. The social services workers had no complaints about the condition of her home.

How had such a woman come to this? Abuse knows no social or economic constraints, but people with Diane’s socioeconomic history generally take advantage of resources and social networks. Diane had not.

More of the story was revealed in Joey and Karen’s testimony and in the therapy sessions that followed. The children’s father had been arrested for molesting a niece and nephew about the time Diane had became pregnant with Jenna. She had never worked, so Diane had no idea how to support herself and two children, especially with a third on the way. When her husband pled guilty and went to jail, another man came to her rescue. He moved into her home. Diane had apparently installed him as a substitute for her absent husband. Diane was bedridden in the final stage of her pregnancy with Jenna. Her boyfriend found sexual gratification with her children, occasionally in the same bed where Diane was. Diane said she didn’t remember that actually happening, but if the children said it happened then it was probably true. I was astounded. If someone had molested my kid in the same bed I was in, I think I’d damn sure remember it. Coincidentally, the boyfriend vaporized when Joey’s sexual misconduct came to the attention of the authorities.

After I came on board, the case went from bad to worse.

Both girls were admitted into acute care residential treatment facilities – read: psychiatric hospitals – and both were eventually returned there for long term care lasting several months. Diane never understood that the children needed to be told no. If one of her children wanted to do something, the answer was always yes. She had no respect from them and no control over them. She also had no empathy with them or even a basic understanding of why they behaved the way they did.

The kicker came when Diane found herself another man. A man from Mexico was hired at the fast food restaurant. Although he did not speak English and Diane did not speak Spanish, they evidently found a way to communicate in the international language of love. Once again, Diane allowed a man to move into her home.

The judge ordered Diane to move the man out. No men were to be around the girls at all when they were home, and this included Diane’s boyfriend. Diane protested with the same outraged mantra all women use in such situations: “You’re telling me I can’t have a life of my own?” Certainly she could. But not if she wanted her children to be at home with her.

Diane complained bitterly about the fact that her boyfriend couldn’t be around her daughters. At this point the girls were coming home only for weekend passes from their residential treatment, but the hospital believed the girls had reached maximum therapeutic benefit (in other words, Medicaid was refusing to pay for a longer stay) and they needed to be released.

“You have to choose,” I told her. “Which is more important, your children or some man whom you can’t even talk with?” While she struggled with that decision, she told me that the weekend before Jenna had thrown a fit because she wanted to keep riding her bicycle after dark one night. She said she just couldn’t do anything about that sort of misbehavior, and she expected Jenna would do the same thing the next time.

I was incredulous. “Who’s the adult?” I asked. The words were out of my mouth before I even thought about them.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, take the bike away from her. Ground her from it if she doesn’t mind when you tell her to come inside.”

“But she’ll get mad at me!”

“So? You’ll be setting a limit on her behavior. You’ll be giving her consequences. Diane, this is elementary parenting. Surely you can do this.”

“But when she gets upset she gets so angry.”

“Send her to her room and make her stay there until she calms down, then.”

“What if she won’t stay there?”

“Turn her around and walk her back, sit her on the bed, walk out, and close the door. Take control. This is what the therapists and the judge have been telling you to do. It’s what parents have to do.”

“Maybe I can get Pedro to do that.”

“No, Diane, not only is he unable to communicate with the children effectively, you can’t have him there. And even once he is allowed there you have to do the parenting, not him. You have to start parenting your kids yourself.”

“Are saying I’m not a good parent?” She was seriously shocked. I heard it in her voice.

“Yes,” I answered. That’s exactly what I’m saying. It’s also what child protective services, the court, and the therapists have been telling you.”

“I don’t believe you just said that to me,” she said, stunned. Sadly, she wasn’t kidding.

The next day she called to let me know that Pedro was staying so the girls would need to go live in a foster home. She had made her choice.

I was burned out on clients like Diane. I’d had all I could take. I just didn’t care anymore about trying to put their families back together. I had other parents who cared just as little for their children’s welfare, but rarely had one displayed that indifference more bluntly. I stopped taking abuse cases.

I wound up my last child abuse case about the time I started blogging here on Yahoo 360. I don’t want to take any more. I’ve turned down judges who have called asking me to take cases. I have no heart for it any more.

I don’t know why Diane and her kids were on my mind today. Sometimes, though, I think of some of the things that happened in those child abuse cases and I am still amazed that such things actually happened. It amazes me how a parent can bring a life into the world and then be so completely uninterested in its development.

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London (Mis)Adventures

It’s Monday, and here we are in London.

Whose bright idea was it to take an overnight flight, anyway? What idiot thought we could sleep on the plane? In COACH no less? By the way, in case anyone is curious, those seats in coach in even the largest of airplanes are meant for people who are smaller than I am. A five-year-old might be able to sleep in them. When Jack was 10 we flew to Ireland in the back of a plane. I suppose five years is enough to make the memory fade. I do recall that after that trip I swore I’d never again fly across any body of water wider than the Mississippi River in steerage class. Like labor pains though, the memory must have faded. When business class seats weren’t available, I didn’t postpone the trip until summer. No, I bravely (read: foolishly) decided that the agony of sleeping sitting up wasn’t all that bad and we could fly in the main cabin of the plane.

On the trip to and from Ireland in 2002, my ten-year-old son slept in my lap for the most part. He sprawled across his seat and my own. No, I did not get a wink of sleep heading either direction. But at 15 Jack was unlikely to want to cuddle with Mommy on a long flight, so I figured the comfort level would be better. For someone with an IQ as high as the experts claim mine is, sometimes I can be downright DUMB.

Jack folded his long, skinny 15-year-old body in half and put his head down on the tray table, and slept for about four hours. Jealously, covetously, I glared at him the entire time. What evil gods have played such a trick on me that I am not only wider but rounder than I used to be? I’m not that big, really. I’m downright short, when it comes to that. But the circumference thing (not to mention the fact that I’m old and I just don’t bend that way anymore) made it impossible for me to mimic the origami of my son’s body. I leaned my seat back as far as it would go. I dozed. I awoke within 15 minutes, my head lolling steeply to one side and the muscles in my neck screaming for relief. In the interest of keeping with the laws of physics, I allowed my head to loll steeply to the other side. Equal and opposite reactions should have nullified the screaming muscles, right? Wrong. It meant that the muscles on the other side of my neck kicked up a major ruckus within the next 15 minutes.

This went on for a couple of hours as my resentment escalated toward my peacefully sleeping offspring in the next seat. Then I gave up and watched Walk the Line. I listened to my iPod. I tracked the plane’s progress across the Atlantic. I watched Dreamgirls. I finished my book. I wrote in my journal. I listened to the man seated next to me snored. I wished someone tall, dark, handsome, and accommodating was sitting next to me so I could put my head on his shoulder and sleep. Yes, I was fantasizing.

We arrived Saturday morning and fell gratefully into our beds in our hotel room by noon. I slept a couple of hours then started trying to wake Jack. I thought we could go to Piccadilly and wander around. Jack loves Times Square in NYC, so I thought he’d feel comfortable there for his first night in port.

I couldn’t wake him. This child of mine, who selfishly slept most of the way across The Pond, refused to rouse himself no matter how I begged, pleaded, threatened, or bribed him. “Can’t we just get room service, Mom?” I’m so glad we traveled 4500 miles to eat in bed.

So Sunday dawned early. The UK went on Summer Time (The equivalent of Daylight Savings) while we slept, so we were an hour late getting started. We made our way to Victoria Station where we met our bus tour and climbed aboard the double-decker. Two stops later was the Hard Rock Cafe, so we were forced to disembark.

I guess I should explain that compulsion. You see, Jack has an uncle who lives in Southeast Asia. Ever since Jack was a very little guy, his uncle Matt has made sure Jack has Hard Rock Cafe t-shirts from every place Matt’s been. Jakarta, Taipei, Beijing, Tokyo, Singapore, Manila, Bangkok… the list goes on. It also means that now Jack has to hit the Hard Rock whenever we travel. It’s a requirement. We might as well set it early in the itinerary because if we don’t Jack will agitate about it until we get there. Even if we go to Memphis, which is just two hours away from home, we can’t leave without stopping by the Hard Rock on Beale Street. London was the site of the original Hard Rock Cafe, so we make sure to see the guitars Eric Clapton and Roger Daltry donated to start the collection. It feels like a pilgrimage every time we go to one of these restaurants, but this one, the original one, felt like arriving in Mecca itself.

So we ate and bought a couple of t-shirts and a pin then climbed back aboard the tour bus to see the rest of the main sights without debarking. “We’ll come back and see the real sights tomorrow,” we agreed. Upon arriving back at the hotel after the day on the bus, we both took a nap. A couple of hours later I was once again trying to rouse my son and failing miserably. Finally, I gave up. At midnight Jack woke up and was ready to go. I laughed at him. “Go to sleep,” I said. He did. Can any creature sleep more than a teenage boy?

Now Day Three of our trip has unfolded as the day in which Murphy’s Law has reared its ugly Irish mug and interfered with us. I woke with a migraine and had to take a shot of Imitrex to banish it. I also had to nap a bit after taking the shot to make sure it worked. I wasn’t able to go anywhere until I did. What did Jack do while I was recovering?

Guess.

Uh-huh.

He slept.

At noon I roused him and we headed to the Tower of London. It’s the one place Jack knows he wants to see other than the British Museum. While we waited for the bus, we went into a Starbucks near St. Paul’s Cathedral to get nourishment. Outside again at the bus stop, Jack looked at me strangely. “Mom, I don’t feel so good,” he said.

He sat on the sidewalk against a wall. His face was ghastly white and dark circles appeared under his eyes.

“I’m going to get sick,” he said.

Hoping his nausea would pass with a little nourishment, I encouraged him to eat the cinnamon roll and drink the white mocha he got at Starbucks. We boarded the bus headed for the Tower and had a wonderful conversation with a gentleman Londoner about politics, imperialist world dominion (both British and American), terrorism, and tourism, then received an admonishment not to miss the Crown Jewels at the Tower. I love talking with natives!

Once off the bus, Jack’s nausea had not dissipated. He threw away what remained of his coffee. We found a bottle of water and a quiet corner where we sat for about an hour hoping his nausea would pass. He finally asked if we could please get a cab back to the hotel. I felt terrible for him. As often as I get migraines, I know what it’s like to have wonderfully exciting plans interrupted by headaches and nausea. What was touchingly sweet was how he kept apologizing for feeling bad. I do the same thing whenever my migraines interfere with plans I have with someone, so I know where he got the notion that he had to. He didn’t have to apologize to me, though. If anyone can empathize with how powerless he felt over his traitorous body his mother can.

Thankfully we found a cab very quickly and are at this moment back in our hotel room where Jack is (guess what) sleeping peacefully. If he feels better later we’ll try for Piccadilly Circus again. For now, I’ll just watch him sleep. I won’t try to rouse him. Not yet, anyway.

There’s a Virgin Megastore at Piccadilly. Evidently, I’m not the only one in the world who sells Virgins. I can’t wait to see the selection! I hope it’s better than the one I went to in Orlando a couple of years ago. Despite the name, all that Virgin Megastore had to offer were books and music. What a disappointing bait and switch operation!

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True Story

I wonder if things like this happen to people who don’t have dirty minds. If they do, is it possible that those people can overlook the obvious and be completely oblivious to what is so hysterically funny in a sick, twisted sort of way?

I went to my sister’s for Christmas dinner Monday. When Jack and I got there, she put a pork tenderloin in the oven and we gathered around the tree to open gifts. Sis’s two boys, ages 15 and 13, were there, as was my mother. We spent a lovely hour ooohing and ahhhhing over what everyone got and gave. It was a very nice time.

We were almost through opening gifts when Sis got up to go check the tenderloin. She was gone for a few minutes. The rest of us waited to open any more gifts until she returned. We were chatting and laughing in typical Aramink family fashion.

Sis tip-toed into the living room and tapped me on the shoulder. “Come here,” she whispered.

I got to my feet and followed her into the kitchen.

“Have you ever cooked a pork tenderloin?” she asked.

“Yes,” I told her. “Lots of times.”

“Good. I have something I need to ask you then,” she explained and opened the oven door. She reached in and pulled out the roasting pan holding the meat.

“Is it supposed to look like this?” she asked.

I gaped. I blinked.

Sis put the pan down on the counter and grinned at me real big. “Shhhh,” she said.

We walked back into the living room, and Sis beckoned to Mom. I couldn’t help it. I was about to die laughing. When Gran headed into the kitchen, I did my best to keep three large teenage boys at bay, thinking they were too young and … ahem… tender… to witness what their mother had prepared for Christmas dinner.

I was unsuccessful. The boys barreled into the kitchen just as their grandmother was in the act of looking perplexed at the slab of meat that faced her. Gran glanced up with a quizzical look. For a second I thought she didn’t get it.

Then she burst out laughing.

The boys crowded around. “What is it? What’s so funny?” they demanded. Their mothers and grandmother were laughing too hard to tell them.

Sis headed down the hall to the bathroom before she wet her pants. When she came back, she suggested that a creamy Bearnaise sauce would be a lovely accompaniment.


That set us off again. Sis headed back to the bathroom.

We females of the family enjoyed every bite. “Mmmmmm.” “Yummy.” “This is delightful,” we said.

The boys, for some reason, opted for a meatless Christmas dinner.

And now, for the crucial question:
If a pork tenderloin is circumcised, does that make it kosher?

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