Ben and Me

Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

Good news: this week I found out I have something in common with Benjamin Franklin. Bad news: it’s GOUT! When the swelling and pain in my right foot came on virtually overnight (I’m guessing my body revolted when it realized I was even older this month than I was last month!), I finally went to the urgent care place and explained my symptoms to the doc. She thought a minute, examined my foot, read a bit about my health history, and exhaled a long, slow breath. “Well,” she said, “you don’t fit the typical pattern, but I think you have gout.”

“What’s the pattern?” I asked.

She grinned. “Male, middle-aged, heavy red meat-eater, and serious beer drinker.”

Hmmmm. She was right about that. Not one of those applied to me. Not even the middle-aged category.

I’ve read Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography. But GOUT? Couldn’t we have brilliant and original thinking in common instead? Apparently not.

The doc gave me some meds, told me I should probably expect I’d have another attack at some point in the future, and sent me on my way. Literally by the next day, thank goodness, the pain began to ease.

I thought about Franklin–sitting in his chair with his foot elevated–tasked with helping create a new nation, pain flashing through his brain at every twist of his foot. And I felt a slight unease of conscience at the enormity of my own inability to function past the pain.

Last year one of my former students posted a message to me on my blog in response to something I said–at the moment I don’t even remember what prompted her comment. She mentioned that she and her best friend were in my junior honors English class upwards of twenty years ago. I had told the students they could choose their seats as soon as I learned all their names. A week or two into the semester, these two girls chose to sit on the floor near the back of the room next to each other. She reminded me that I just let them—no grief about their choice at all. (Though I remembered the girls, I have no memory of their seating choice.)

Now an adult, she revealed that both she and her friend had come from very unstable family lives, and the fact that they were empowered to pick their seat in class gave them a sense of freedom they’d never had before. (She said she was reminded of this incident when her friend died recently of cancer.) At the time I had no idea. Truth is I was probably caught up in so much chaos from the beginning of a new school year and the onslaught of essays that is often the hallmark of an advanced English class, I didn’t even stop to consider why they might have chosen to sit on the floor. I was just grateful they turned out to be very good students.

Robin Williams is famous for saying, “Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Be kind. Always.” In my experience pain, or distress, or anger, or injury, or poverty, or any one of the many negative interruptions in the flow of life tends to not only make me oblivious to the situations of the people I know—and sometimes people I don’t know but whose burdens I might have the power to ease in some way–but I use my own troubles as an excuse to short-circuit my responsibility (at least from a hopeful follower of Christ standpoint) to ease the burdens of the people around me where I can. I become so wrapped up in my own troubles that the pain of others becomes almost invisible to me.

I think about my dad’s mother, in her 80’s and widowed twice before she was 40, still watering her prized rose bushes at six in the morning to protect them from the Nevada heat, then going in the house to write checks for $25 dollars a month to send to each of her grandchildren on missions or in college—and for years there were always at least a dozen at a time. One of those checks bought me one of the only two new dresses I could afford during my collegiate years.  And I remember my student who had a traumatic brain injury from a horrific auto accident when he was 12 years old. He lost the ability to translate his ideas into written language, so his essays were jumbled and confusing. But four years after he left my class, I received announcement from him for his graduation from the University of Utah!

Now that I’m paying attention, I know lots of people who have something in common with Benjamin Franklin–not the kite-flying-or-the-writing-of-the Declaration of Independence-and-the Articles of Confederation-to-form-a-new-nation part, but the self-will-to-keep-moving-in spite-of-the-interference-of-health-or-difficulty part. I may be old, but I can do better. And Mr. Franklin, I’m going to try. Then perhaps you and I can have something in common that is worth celebrating.