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Adding Dimension

  “Bella was blind, ya know,” my grandmother said.  I knew Bella was blind.  In fact, I was pretty sure I knew every Fred-and-Bella story there was to know.  But who was I to stop a ninety-four year old from reminiscing about her younger years and the people in them?  Here she was, mostly wheelchair bound in a nursing home with her wits fully intact surrounded by very few other intact wits.  She could retell any story she pleased.  She leaned back in her chair, folding her shaky hands in her lap.  Her hair had just been permed, and the curls were the same short style they’d been when I was a child.  Except for the fact that it was now white, her hair looked exactly the same in the forty-year-old picture of her and my grandfather that hung on the wall behind her.  I sat on her low bed, facing her, and scanned the other family pictures she’d hung. Children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren; her whole life in just a few square feet, frozen paper images held to the wall with tacks and ta
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Normal Schizophrenic

 Yesterday I called my son John while I was on my way home from work.  He's in his senior year of nursing school, and he'd recently started his new round of clinical work at a group home for psychiatric patients. "How was your first day?" I asked.  "Actually," he started. I could hear the enthusiasm in his voice. "It was very cool."  He explained that as a student nurse, he and his classmates weren't really allowed to do all that much with the patients.  They couldn't touch them or give them medication, so they spent most of their clinical hours hanging out and talking with them.   "Today Bree and I watched Maury Povich  with a schizophrenic woman, and then we played Scrabble  with another guy who just got up in the middle and said 'I'm done!'" John shared that he was fascinated by the control the human mind had over these people.  It overpowered them to the point of debilitation, and since he was freed up from the dut
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Persistent Dust

     "I like the idea of all ," Melody, our company's information analyst said to the group during our first team meeting of the year. "But, I just don't see myself included there in the list." Her eyes shifted to the screen where our team's mission statement was displayed, the words "for all" highlighted with a list underneath:  Students Teachers Leaders  Community     The director, who'd been leading the meeting, was quiet for a moment. "I see what you're saying," she said finally, with a slight touch of impatience in her tone. "But when we wrote this together, that's why we added the word community ."      Melody, not one to end an argument after just one rebuke, seemed to be calculating whether or not a lengthy dissertation was worth the effort to change the already-agreed-upon mission statement. Before she could decide, another hand raised. It was Kashif, a new member of the team who'd just been introduc
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The Gift of Not Scratching Itches

 It's awfully cliche to say "find the gift in everything," but what if cliches weren't so . . . cliche? What if we thought of them as a kind of reminder that are repeated so much because they matter so much?   I've been working on following, what I like to call, my "pings" lately; those little bursts of intuitive insights that I've pretty much ignored my whole life.  It's a little twinge in my gut and subtle mental whisper that I should take a different street home today rather than my usual route, or that I should take a moment to call my 94-year-old grandma.  Sometimes it's even an internal nudge to wear this shirt instead of that one.  Something is trying to guide me.   I figure I should listen.  Today I got a ping to email a teacher who attended a recent PD session I and two colleagues offered. In the session, this teacher was particularly cranky.  Not cranky in the sense that she was having a bad day, but in the sense that she had an itc
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