Two years without a long trailer drive to help sort out the questions of the universe

Dear Linda,

I’ve been meaning to send you a note for quite some time, of course, to ask you if you have ever heard of behavioral optometry.  This is definitely a long distance drive topic of interest to you, perhaps, because of your interest in how brains function, but to boil it down there is a difference between sight and vision – sight is based on the ability to see/identify something clearly at certain distances; vision requires your brain to see, identify, and process properly that something.  A person can have perfect sight, but vision can still be impaired and then this can lead to a host of problems: difficulty in reading and comprehension, personality disorders, some studies found that in juvenile deliquints, like 90% or something all had serious vision problems (this makes sense, though, if behavior problems can be linked to difficulty in school from an early age, acting out, and so on…).  So then a behavioral optometrist would diagnose a problem and then treat the problem with all sorts of different exercises and therapies aimed to strengthen and improve vision.  Also of interest is that at one time (the booklet from which I was reading all of this was published in 1992) anyway, the Chicago Blackhawks had all of their players doing these vision exercises in an attempt to improve their response speed to the puck.  So, very interesting, somewhat disputed ideas to add to the questions about the brain.

I was reading all about this (last January, when I meant to send you this letter)  because my second cousin asked me to start tutoring her third grade son for his problems in math and reading.  In addition to time spent with me, she was also taking him to eye therapy in the suburbs each week.  Brandi swears by the eye therapy program, specifically as it applied to one of her other sons – he was diagnosed as a having ADHD and was prescribed Ritalin, after one week she threw it away because she was so appalled at his listless change in behavior.  She researched other options and after a year of the behavioral optometry his teachers were no longer concerned about his behavior in class and he has been a straight A student ever since.  Okay – so I’m now tutoring her youngest son, who has completed his eye therapy program and is now reading at grade level (with great help from an extraordinary reading teacher – not me, Mrs. Doetch), and once a week we try to grind some more multiplication facts into his head.  At the end of the day, I really like him, I hope that I’m helping him, sometimes he surprises me with his confidence in his 7s – but I’ve learned that you simply cannot tie your self esteem to the behavior and successes of a fourth grader. 

Another area of my life in which I am failing is this: I am helping to teach the high school Sunday School class.  This has mostly served as an illustration of the extraordinary speed at which time passes.  Five years ago, after I graduated from college, I also did this, and the kids loved me.  Loved me.  They wanted to go to camp outs with me.  They wanted to go to haunted houses with me.  They wanted to play basketball with me.  Now I am horribly unpopular.  And it’s not my son, because a lot of their peers have kids.  It’s me.  A little anecdote for your amusement: last week, Pastor Mike (who is the head teacher, but who is leaving after this week to take a call in a new church, leaving me to run the Sunday School program – the enrollment of which, I fear, will promptly drop to zero…) wanted to talk about the devil, and corresponding worship of, (he had just returned from Michigan…), and as we talked the question that formed in my mind was whether bad things should be attributed to God, to the devil, or simply to the sinful nature of humans.  (I’m still not clear on the answer, a different drive I suppose would hash it out…) But, of humor to you, perhaps, is that the reason this was on my mind was that, when leafing through the Bible, I came across a chapter in the book of Joshua, maybe, where Moses is talking to the Israelites as they wander around in the desert.  To roughly paraphrase – he is prophesying about the terrible behavior in which the Israelites will later partake and then he tells them about how God will punish them for this behavior by sending plagues and invading armies and locusts and droughts and floods and how there won’t be any food and so on.  So, to set the scene, I’m asking this question in the midst of these skeptical high school students – okay, so how do you know…God, devil, human nature?  Mike seems confused by my question – well, you’ll have to find that verse so I can know exactly what Moses is saying.   What he’s saying is that God is going to send these plagues and armies, people won’t have any food, they’ll have to eat their children… I turn to the students and, exact quote “which brings up the obvious question – oldest to youngest or youngest to oldest?” 

I’m certain that no one will show up next week.  But perhaps no one was listening to me speak and there is no reason to worry.  (This brings to my mind another long truck drive, back from Princeton where we had feasted in the Douglas home on giant marshmallows, roasted chicken parts, and jalapeno corn bread.  At dinner I had made a comment about how I always felt anxious when large pieces of bone-in chicken was served, as the serving size was mandated and if you didn’t like the chicken well enough to finish the whole piece, well, what would people think?  The next afternoon, leaving Princeton, you addressed this – “and you think that others are so concerned with you as to judge how you eat a piece of chicken?”  “oh no,” I assured you, “it’s more that I would hate to seem offensive to the cook, as it would be so obvious that I didn’t like the chicken.”  But, without being too egotistical, when the aforementioned non-sequiturs fall out of my mouth, do people notice?  Do they go home and think to themselves –what is her deal?  Are they appalled?  Do they give my social functioning abilities second thought?  Maybe, hopefully, they actually think of me so little that there is no reason to worry – they’ll be back. 

So, to further two truck conversations – another reason why I find a piece of bone-in roasted chicken stressful is that if you don’t finish it, it pretty much has to be thrown away.  What a shameful end to the great sacrifice of that chicken!  And, as I recollect on this unmentionable question, it occurs to me that one thing we missed entirely was gender and aptitude for mathematics.