DAVID BLUNKETT

There can be few, if any, disabled people who can put their hand on their heart and say that they have never faced or experienced discrimination throughout their lives. The real issue is how we deal with it and above all the influence we bring to bear to ensure that fear, uncertainty, or downright prejudice, are swept away.

There are those who think that the Secretary of State for Education and Employment - who also happens to hold responsibility for disability rights and equal opportunities - is immune from the same experiences as others. This is not true.

When I was young I experienced exactly the same hurt, the same screwed up feeling inside, and the same anger, which other young men and women are feeling at this very moment. I say "young men and women" because time heals, rough corners are rubbed off, and whilst the urge to bring about change does not die away the ability to deal with the problem improves with time.

This is not about "accommodating" prejudice, but about recognising some of the causes.

Some of it is ignorance. When a mother and her child crossed the road and I heard them say "Don�t go near him you might catch it", I felt nothing but blinding anger. At the age of 13 it hurt deeply and it was difficult to cope with. Equally, as people literally picked me up by the elbow to carry me across a road when I wasn�t intending to do so, the tendency to lash out verbally and to abuse them was overwhelming.

It is only a little later that you reflect on why people are taking such steps and why they make such remarks or inappropriate and clumsy actions. The truth is that very often they don�t know what they are doing. They have literally no experience of people with disabilities.

This is why integration as often and as appropriately as possible for youngsters in these early years is so important. Wherever it is appropriate, for the youngster themselves this means schooling. Where it isn�t, then every effort should be made to ensure that the specialist setting has good connections with mainstream schooling, and above all that leisure and social activities are organised in a way that doesn�t separate people off from their peers.

But of course it is not just ignorance. It is often a fear of the unknown. Ensuring that people understand that people with disabilities are "normal", but have a particular "challenge", is the first critical step to ensuring that attitudes change, that true integration can be achieved, and that the next generation do not have to put up with the inappropriate actions and approaches of others. Actually, being nice to someone who makes a mistake, finding some form of words which help them out of their problem, and even gently putting them straight, can help.

I can probably do more by doing my job well, by working on equal terms and not being seen as the representative of disabled people, than I could ever do in any other way. Just doing the job and convincing people that it can be done well is critical. Often I overdo it. I never want anyone to say "He did that badly because he couldn�t see". But I can get across a change in attitude. I can tell people that they should always approach others in exactly the same way that they would expect to be approached themselves. If in doubt "reverse positions, think of yourself as the person you are approaching", seems to me to be good advice.

So, those who have a challenge to overcome or an obstacle to set aside, have an obligation as well. That is to understand why people are making the mistakes they are and how best we can ensure that they get it right in future. If they stomp off saying "All blind people seem to me to be extremely ignorant and bad tempered", we have not done a great deal of good. Equally, those who are deeply offensive in the way they may approach someone in a wheelchair or who has a physical deformity will only do the same again unless we somehow get a message across to them that here is a person just like themselves who does not want to be patronised, and who finds the paternalistic and sympathetic approach deeply hurtful. This takes some thinking through. Often you don�t have time to do it, the circumstances have come and gone and you are left simply seething.

I am lucky. I accept that I am. It rarely happens to me now, although on occasions people do think that there is something wrong with my hearing or that my legs don�t work - I imagine that for those whose legs don�t work, people often presume that they can�t see or hear properly! The lift doors clank to and some well meaning soul next to me says "The lift doors have closed". What do I say? "Yes thank you very much, my hearing is perfectly OK"? Perhaps not. But "Yes those doors do make a real clank when they close don�t they?" might just get through to them.

So now here I am, Secretary of State for Education and Employment, with responsibility for special educational needs, for disability rights, and for the introduction not only of part three of the Disability Discrimination Act but also the setting up of the Disability Rights Commission from this April. I also have responsibility for implementing the recommendations of the Disability Rights Task Force - we will do this for the education elements later this year in a Special Educational Needs and Disability Rights Bill.

But legislation is only part of the task. Changing hearts and minds (the See the Person Campaign) is another key element. So is the work we are doing with employers. Someone who is bright and intelligent, well educated and socially adjusted but who can�t get a job, is a person who is discriminated against. Equal opportunities has to be in practice and not simply in theory.

When I met Hero in my office last year I was deeply impressed with the message that she had been putting across - literally putting across the world. The message of equal approach, of equal opportunity, but also of equal exposure to all the normal influences. In fact I remember saying to her just how important it is that I could be robust with her, just as she would expect to be robust with those whose behaviour, actions, or attitudes, drive her insane.

And yes, not just robust, forthright, and equal in opportunity to speak one�s mind, but also equal in toleration as well. To tolerate the failings of others, but to ensure that all we do prevents the next generation from having to be so tolerant, as the cause and not just the symptoms are swept away.

That is why everyone who experiences prejudice or discrimination in one form or another can themselves become an evangelist for change. Just a small drop of water on the stone that changes the face of those who live and work around us, making the world a better place in which to live, work, and have our pleasure.

I was born in 1947 in Sheffield. My mother and father were Doris and Arthur Blunkett. At the age of four I attended Manchester Road School for the Blind, a boarding school, the only option at the time for blind or partially sighted children in the region. At the beginning of 1960, at the age of twelve, I moved away from Sheffield to start secondary school at the Royal Normal College in Shropshire.

At 16 I transferred to the further education branch of the College at Albrighton Hall. It was also the year I joined the Labour Party. There was no provision for sitting O and A levels because the Principal at that time did not �believe� in them and the curriculum was not geared to them. That was tantamount to a challenge to me and five of my classmates - we enrolled for evening classes at the local Technical College in Shrewsbury.

In 1967 I joined the East Midlands Gas Board in Sheffield as a clerk-typist. Once safely installed, I became shop steward and I also persuaded them to let me have day-release to attend the local further education college. Each week I spent a day and an evening studying for the National Certificate in Business Studies. I spent a second evening studying A level Economic History. Having passed that, I re-sat A level Economics (which I had studied at night school whilst at Albrighton) to gain a higher grade. I then took A level law.

I read Politics and Modern History at Sheffield University. During the course of my first year as a student at Sheffield University, early in 1970, I was elected to Sheffield City Council

I was first elected to Parliament in June 1987, representing Sheffield Brightside. I was Opposition spokesman on Environment (Local Government) from 1988 to 1992, then Shadow Secretary of State for Health from 1992 to 1994, and Shadow Secretary of State for Education and Employment from 1994 to 1997. When the Labour Government was elected on 1 May 1997 I was appointed Secretary of State for Education and Employment.

I have three sons, Alistair, Hugh, and Andrew. Apart from my interests in education and employment, and local government, I enjoy walking, sailing, music and poetry (although I have little time at the moment to indulge in these pastimes).

In Mag 1, I described the pain of being so disabled I am "locked-in" and the realisation as a young child that it is a permanent state. In Mag 2, I waxed lyrical upon the elemental joys that buoy me up, and in Mag 3 I wrote about Oxford Envy. In mag 4 and 5, I just got too busy.

In Mag 8, I promised to write an essay on fear, but lo! some eagle-eyed avid readers spotted an omission - no essay. I'm plastering it in now.

A Particular Sort of Pain

It takes an effort to be brave. Sometimes I am not brave. Sometimes I am too scared by life to do anything. I hide. I waste my precious hours trying to forget what scares me, trying to blot out the reality of my life. I flop in front of the tv and escape into a fantasy world of soaps and zero stress. I feel guilty when I emerge at bedtime because I haven't enjoyed myself and I haven't done anything I wanted to do and I haven't built a path out of my fear. I land up loathing myself for my weakness.

I go up to my delightful, beautiful tiny cluttered bedroom with its art books, its knick knack mementos of people and places, Grandpa's music cabinet where my scores are kept, my pink satin ballet shoes, my treasures from my journey around the globe - a mozzie net, a water pot and a wooden African chair. My United Nations tee-shirt hangs next to Mozart and Van Gogh, my icons remind me of another way of being, the plants and the lamps soothe, the rug on the floor dances warmth into me, my ted is there on the bed to comfort me. This is me, this is me. This self.

What comes over me that I cannot keep powering forwards being me? Who is this horrible self? This despicable horrible me who's turned to fat, apathy and self-pity? Is this adolescence? Yuck, no I don't think so, it's worse than it used to be but it's not a new feeling. I feel as if my confidence just erodes a little bit every day, my sadness grows till I am consumed by weepiness. My childish dreams won't turn into exciting realities however hard I try. What dreams? What dreams are shattered such that I weep? What sadness overwhelms me? And why does it leave me so scared?

The young me set forth with a skip. I feel skipping is central to my personality, a natural gait, a tendency to be brash not sensitive, a cheerful sunnyness, a zest for life, a bag of energy, a gamboling foal. A gait suggestive of naivity, idealism and rather old-fashioned not a trendy way of being, an outdoor sort of pace, impatient with constraint. There's nothing to stop a skipping child from being considerate of other users of the path even as they seem wrapped up in their own world. People smile at the child as she skips by. People smiled at me and I was happy.

It was a long time ago. I lived then in a world of certainty. I was disabled. I was certain of that. I couldn't walk, talk or use my hands by myself. I knew it was permanent. I knew therapy exacerbated my problems rather than alleviated them. I had a different sort of disability. That too was certain. Consultants and other professionals would take one look at me and declare it to be the case. Noone knew how to cope with me. That was certain too. It was a question of inventing and improvising as one went along. I was in a world of one.

It upset me that I couldn't actually skip, couldn't kick up those wonderful rustling leaves, couldn't hop and skip about the house doing chores - for some reason I longed to make custard, all that wonderful mixing and stirring and pouring. I was helped to make custard but it wasn't the same. It wasn't me doing something for someone else. It was the someone else still being there, considering me, on duty not relaxed. I wanted to make my mum a bowl of bananas and custard. I wanted her to smile at me as I brought it to the table. I wanted her to say "thank you darling". Was this a first crack in the happy child's being? No, this was a normal sort of frustration. I've cried so many tears because I can't draw, because I can't play piano and cello, but they're just normal tears because of my situation. They're the rage that's part of being me.

The problem with my horrible self, the one I am now, the scared one hiding from reality is that it's somehow not me. It's like something's got in and taken hold and grown till I am ill and misshapen with it. It needs a cure. It needs to be stamped out, eliminated. I need rid of it. It is not me. It is a blind alley. I've taken the wrong turn somewhere. I've lost my way. I have to unravel something and confront my fear.

Long ago I dreamed dreams of growing up. I dreamed dreams of making exciting new friends. I dreamed of a career. I dreamed of leaving home. It never occurred to me that I might lead out my life in my parents' house, stuck with them as they grow old. I always knew it would be challenging to grow myself into independence. Naive fool that I was, I thought the statutory agencies would help. I thought that with a personality like mine, with a talent like mine, they'd support my ambition. I thought I'd romp off to university, I thought I'd have a gang of pals, I thought I might find a loving partner, I thought I'd find groups to join and like-minded souls. I thought I'd find a niche and one thing would follow another and I'd go a long way. I'd have my own home, with my own things around me, employ my own staff to care for me, and most days I'd see my mum. She'd maybe pop in to take the dog a walk - a golden retriever, very well behaved - and stay to tea. She'd check everything was OK. It would be a comfortable friendship. But largely irrelevant. My brother off being a burgeoning architect somewhere with a globalised firm would jet in from Chicago or Melbourne or Hong Kong to stay for a few days and laugh at my quaint ways - a sis still stuck in a provincial backwater not far from home, writing music. Eventually he'd marry and I'd be terrified I wouldn't like her but she'd be bubbly and easy to get on with and I'd love their kids to bits and give them cranky presents that would make my brother smile and reminisce about our childhood together. He'd say I was like my mum after all, filling the house with seashells and photographs and always yearning for fresh air.

So went the fantasy future I strove towards. It wasn't secret, it was shared with anyone who'd listen. For money, I'd start a business - my two favourites were non-disability related. One was a seaside hotel in Whitstable a quaint small town 5 miles from home, where I could live in the hotel penthouse and enjoy room service and a piano bar in the evenings, where I could easily put up friends, expect the cleaning done, but with a manager running things day to day, there'd be time enough to write music. London was but a train ride away, Whitstable a level amble to the shops, the views stunning out the windows of a wide sweep of estuary and sky. Herring gulls would yell on the chimney pots beside me, geraniums and jasmine would twine around the sunny back wall. It would be a splendid place for breaks from the city and attract a very nice class of clientele, people who liked to stroll on the beach, enjoy the live music, the clean white linen in the dining room, the log fire in the sitting room.

The alternative was an inland farm in a quiet valley in the Kentish Downs, rolling green hills that are forever England. There to have horses running free, their tails cropped for cello bow hair, competing with the best imported from the former Soviet Union, an uncertain supply with the changed circumstances there. There'd be a small factory workshop where cello bows would be built by craftsman who appreciated the idyllic surroundings to work in. Professional string players will often pay more for their bow than for their instrument. It's an excitingly specialised world. I'd have clients wanting my cello bows, noone else's. I'd acquire a reputation far and wide. And on selected days I'd open up the farm to visitors, allow school kids to see what we did. The rambling old buildings would be sufficiently extensive for me to have a fitness pool in the barn, staff accommodation and a quiet place with beautiful views for me to work in at my compositions.

My world was full of music. My horizons limited to music. I'd already taken a deliberate decision to turn from my love of science and languages, to accept I could not be a polymath. I was however a bit hazy about where the capital might come from to inject into a new business. That would get sorted and become clearer as I grew up and learned more about how to set up and run a business. I didn't feel I ignored my disability. I felt I took it into account in making my plans and that my plans were reasonable plans for a super-bright child.

I'm sure we all do it as children don't we? We dream of being the mega pop star or film star, the millionaire businessman, the footballer on the winning team in the world cup scoring a hat-trick like Geoff Hurst. We dream our foolish dreams of success. I watched my brother going through these stages. I thought he was childish and I was more mature and utterly realistic. I'd trained people to look after me before. I'd spent a year in school with no mother there and not choked to death or died and I'd been able to convey my intellect even within the constraints imposed by a school schedule. I'd trained several people in my communication methods. There was no need to think of a future with my mother at my side. No need at all. So she wasn't put there in my dreams. She was left behind at home. My music was taken seriously and resourced by the authorities: I was being supported towards my dreams, being helped to develop my talent. It appeared on neatly printed scores with dotted i's and crossed t's, as it were. It seemed quite a safe dream to dream. I dreamed it in spite of not fitting in at school. In spite, or because of, being lonely. But I wasn't scared of being alone.

But it's a well known cliche isn't it that life gets more complicated. And as my frustrations with the authorities grew my disability turned nastier. I developed epilepsy (and would fit for half an hour most days) and with it the nasty fear that I might get worse. Epileptics sometimes die. I might die, prematurely before I got to my dream. I became a little bit scared of my disability. What else might happen to me? Noone could say.

The quiet floppy child became more and more disarrayed. The tremoring increased. Limbs just got longer and stronger making control of my retained infantile reflexes more and more difficult for carer, for me. I acquired a violent shaking of my head. I let out screams and shrieks when I didn't want to, my limbs flailed restlessly. My fingers got trapped in anything and everything. My feet got trapped and my ankles sprained. I couldn't straighten my legs any longer and was supplied with splints to be worn daily. At night I slept on my back in a lotus position spontaneously and apparently voluntarily got into but one I couldn't myself get out of.

I started wearing nappies so I didn't have to think of my bladder all the time. I started having problems doing my poos and could no longer do it in a sitting position. Sometimes my right arm would stick out wildly and stiffly and did not want to bend so that I could communicate. Sometimes my eyes would seize up and would not move. Often I could not open my mouth to drink. I hyperventilated for no apparent reason and with no apparent ill-effect for an hour at a time. I had days of hiccups. I fell asleep inopportunely and against my will. I found it increasingly difficult to sit unaided. I wanted just as much contact time as a baby, my limbs quieting when I felt empowered and not frustrated, when I was in touch with my enabler. I stuck my toes in my mouth, I chewed my hands till they were sore. I acquired insatiable thirst, I got inexplicable fevers. Both had to be fruitlessly investigated.

I compulsively blow raspberries for protracted periods of time. I thrash and lunge my whole self forwards and backwards in my chair. I giggle at the slightest sound. I pick at things with my fingers unable to stop fiddling with my seatbelt or my skirt. I tug my hair and stick my fingers in my ears. I eat paper. Sometimes I forget how to close my mouth and I dribble. Mostly my muscles are tight and active. I grind my teeth very loudly and to the irritation of a lot of people. Sometimes I hold my breath, sometimes my legs dither and jitter, sometimes I go white as a sheet and my eyes glaze over, sometimes I gasp in terror at the reality of too much imagination, the internal realer than the external (is this a dagger), sometimes I throw up unexpectedly and dramatically without being ill, sometimes my nose starts bleeding gushy red blood.

My hole in the heart failed to close up spontaneously, a toe on each foot became almost overnight seriously deformed in a curious way, I became more and more jumpy at noises and vibrations (I rarely complained of pain except from vibrations), my left arm didn't want to rotate and straighten sometimes. These are the changes in me between three and thirteen. These became the new realities I now live with, though I have left the worst and the newest two till last.

Last year I developed hysties (my name). I get to a stage of some fragility in my resilience and coping, a physical sensation of hovering on a brink, of being over-tense. It's not necessarily related to circumstances any more than my other excessive movements are. The trigger seems to be external but curiously insignificant in the big scheme of things. It's most embarrassing when it's triggered by a person's presence. I've met 3 persons who do this to my body as if they're giving off some vibe that just clashes with my own and it's nothing to do with how nice they are and what they are saying. It's something else. A more normal trigger is a slight unexpected noise like the cutlery rattling in the drawer, a chair being pushed back quickly and squeaking on the floor, a person fiddling with a couple of cassette cases as they speak. In other words the sorts of things one can't eliminate from life if one is trying to lead a quasi-normal mainstream existence.

What happens? I giggle in a reflex-driven way and I then cannot stop. It becomes half-giggle, half-sob and involves the whole of my body and a great deal of noise. I can't hear anything for the noise I am making, the awful, awful noise. It's outrageously intrusive for anyone around me. It makes me feel entirely unacceptable. It makes me look entirely un-human. It goes on and on till I am sweating and exhausted and it still persists. No intervention seems to reach me.

People suggest I should be whacked across the face. My mother once in desperation flicked a sheet of A4 paper across my face which could scarce be said to be a whack. I stopped. I hated her. I wanted to be loved and comforted: I felt despised. I started again shortly afterwards. It didn't take away that brink feeling of fragility and so the first sound I heard, off I went again. What works best is an enveloping hug, as much of me in contact as possible with a caring loving person, and as quickly as possible before the hystie can take hold. My mother also does a reward and relaxation technique that sometimes helps to talk me down, to break the pattern, first to a count of 2 then to a count of 5, eventually to 20 and at 60 to be distractible into something else.

Most of the time these small noises - the top of a pepsi bottle being unscrewed, someone sneezing, an envelope being opened - just stir one small reaction in me, a jump, a gasp or a giggle, a reflection of my hypersensitivity to sound and touch. Why occasionally must it be so much worse? Don't I have enough to deal with? Where do these episodes come from? Thankfully I don't have many of them but there's a fear to fight too of acceptability. When I was in New York last year I was having such a horrible spate of hysties I was afraid of going out and ate in every night when I was tired instead of risking being stuck in a restaurant unable to shut up my horribly voluble noises. You have no idea what it is like to be a composer who hears beautiful music in my head, music that has been performed publicly by professional musicians and yet on the odd occasion when I make a real actual noise it is terrifyingly un-human...

The second new and awful development happened just a month before Christmas when I woke with a wrist gone tight. It could be relaxed but it kept going tight, another of these spontaneous episodes that grip my body and require hands-on help to rescue me back to comfort. Splinting made it worse. It was very very uncomfortable and made me want to scream. Maybe that's what some people would call pain. To me it wasn't sharp enough to be called pain but it occupied the whole of my mind. The tightness meant I could not move my arm and hand to communicate except in a minimal yes/no sort of way. I was freaked out with panic. Communication is everything to me, a habit and something I've taken for granted as speedy and efficient for 9 years nearly. Any interruption in my ability to "speak" is intolerable. It's bad enough that I can only speak when I have a trained carer at my side. It's completely unacceptable to have a body that seizes up in that quarter. I don't give a damn if you lose your voices when you get colds and sore throats. It's not the same thing. You know what the problem is and you know it's temporary. To wake up with an unexpected, devastating problem that won't go away was almost more than I could bear. My consultant saw me very promptly as an emergency and put me on a low-dose anti-epileptic to release the tension. I slept my way through the Christmas period and the millennium in a sad miserable bundle of unrecognisable me. Thereafter, my mum stopped the medication. The episode was past, driven out by time or pharmaceuticals. There has been no recurrence, but there quite possibly will be. My disability is cruel. It is not just that I cannot do things like walking and talking. It is all the things that happen to me in these bursts of what one can only describe as neurological disorder that burden me. When my consultant describes me as having a neurological disorder it's very literally true.

So my disability's got decidedly nastier, it's decidedly more complicated to look after me. It burdens me more. It raises all these frightful questions of acceptable behaviour. Whilst I was quiet and floppy, people smiled on me. I was a beautiful child. I may still be beautiful in spite of being fatter but I'm now rather more obviously peculiar and unpredictable. I think this is the "ordinary" tough bit about being an adolescent: I wanted to be as near normal as possible, I wanted it to be possible to overlook my disability, I wanted people to look past it and relate to me. I thought this would get easier as I got older and my precocious intellect grew more into line with those around me, and it hasn't damn well happened. My disability dominates to a greater extent than I could have believed possible at 5 or 6. People no longer smile as I skip by.

But I'm not skipping much now and all this developing complexity is not the reason why I'm not skipping. I'm quite bloody-minded enough to find ways past and through all that, to brave it out, even to pretend I don't mind when I do, very very much. I want to be loveable and I don't feel I am. I want to have friends who are both able-bodied and disabled. I want almost exactly what I wanted 7 years or so ago. I want my independence. I said the authorities grew more frustrating. I said I thought I was a naive fool for thinking they would help me to grow towards my dreams. The fear I can scarce face, the fear that I run from is fear grown because of their behaviour. I am scared of my dependence upon my beloved mother. I am so so scared of what will become of me should something happen to her. I can't see how to be independent of her any longer. I can't see how I can live without her. The independence I have been striving for is not merely not on the horizon, it is lost sight of. I'm a foolish, clingy, unbrave person who is afraid of being hurt, specifically by being wrenched from her.

I have become dependent on my mother all the time for everything. She knows how to deal with all my care needs. Noone else does. Noone else does because noone else bothers to learn. She is trapped in the relationship through her love for me. Love makes the world go round. In my dreams I was surrounded by people who chose to be with me, who were my friends, who were my colleagues through performing my music or who were part of my working life where I had control, where I hired and fired. The team of enablers who helped me cope with my disability and empowered my quasi-normal life were personally selected by me and in my mind were dedicated friends who loved and understood me although it was their job. The paid companion of yesteryear. The Annie Sullivan figure. The world was not a horrible evil place where people got ripped off and the disabled were neglected or abused. Everyone was basically nice.

My fear now is of the world. I am a cynic, my optimism choked off even as I try to rescue it as a lifeline. I've had too many encounters with too many people who do not share my values and who do not nurture my needs, heed professional advice on how to avoid harming me. I feel damaged by my encounters with authority, too damaged and hurt to allow them close to me again. I want to do a Rip Van Winkle until a solution is found and I can escape dependence upon them. I know there are loads of wonderful people in the world. I get e-mails from them, I meet them. I know there are plenty of people I can't be bothered with or actively dislike and on the whole one avoids them, ignores them or is distantly polite with them. That's the same with everyone. That's mainstream existence, that I can handle. I can handle the disappointment of rejection, I can cope with everyday scepticism, I can extend myself out and meet people in the world of the arts, in the field of disability activism, I can break new ground and make demands for inclusion even though all this is tough, as long as I have support. And I have always had support. People who work closely with me do understand and support me, will explain and be my advocate, ensuring that I am taken seriously. But the people who hold the purse strings and take decisions work to their own rules when it comes to my case. That's what frightens me.

Even the law of the land does not apply to me. The law states that all children with special needs must have those needs met. Those with a complex or profound disability have their needs identified through a formal multi-agency assessment which leads to a contract being drawn up (a Statement of Special Educational Needs) stating what the child's needs are (each and every one of them) and identifying how the local education authority (and perhaps the other agencies - health and social services) are going to meet each and every one of those identified needs. The provision should be quantified and specific, eg what qualifications an assistant should have, how many hours they should work. Monitoring and evaluation processes are part of it and should again be specified. The contract is legally binding on the LEA and its contents can be contested in an SEN Tribunal if parents don't like it, ie if they think it does not adequately describe little Johnny's needs or the provision is in some way inadequate or inappropriate. The Statement is based upon the appended advice to the authority and it has in law to be reviewed annually through a formal process which has its own timeframe and meetings and reports and so on.

The LEA started the process of assessing me when I was three years old. I was nearly 10 before my Statement was drawn up, agreed and issued. It was not reviewed for 3 years and the only decision at Review was to reassess. I have therefore been assessed by my local education authority for, now, 10 years of my life but my SEN have been met for only one of those years. I have been paid compensation for 4 years of injustice when I received no education or care support. The derisory sum of �2,000 could scarcely be said to be punitive. It's obviously a lot cheaper for the authorities to flout the law than comply with it. But then they were told they didn't have to comply even. A second complaint that they were still not providing according to the law led to an un-appealable decision against us, notwithstanding the LEA refusing to implement my Statement, notwithstanding them refusing to heed the professional advice they had sought, notwithstanding their decision-making was based on no advice that could support it and that the LEA admitted that they had no evidence to support their decision-making, notwithstanding the fact that the Statement was not reviewed as the law requires to see what progress I had made and to adjust targets and provisions to suit changed circumstances, notwithstanding all of this and that I was without education and care support, it was the view of the Ombudsman that there was no maladministration by the people responsible for making and paying for the non-existent provision, and that no injustice had been done to me. In other words I am beyond the law. We have sought at various points the advice of a specialist lawyer of national reputation who has each time said that we cannot even go for a Judicial Review in the High Court because the LEA is always promising things around the corner and we would therefore not even get past the hurdle of securing legal aid for a case to be brought. The state is not my side. The state is happy not to provide for me. Nothing can persuade me otherwise. My formative years have gone by growing bitterness into solid form. Who am I that they need not enact the law when it comes to me? I am flesh blood and human. I have normal chromosomes, a normal brain scan, normal nerve and muscle function. Noone's ever found anything the matter with me, although something obviously is.

I have now been seven and a half years without provision. At a time when my contemporaries are dropping subjects to specialise for exams I have yet to be taught any English, science, maths, French, German, history, geography, PSD, RE, C/DT et al. I am not a part of anything. I am kept separate and isolated. I am left in my mother's hands. Before I explain the size of the fear I am having difficulty confronting, I must describe a few little incidents because in all fairness the authorities have sometimes resourced me.

They sent me to school a year late. At 5 I went into a class who had been in school 3 terms. I'd been at playgroup with them but I wasn't allowed to start school with them. The bureaucracy wasn't sorted for that. I had to stay behind in playgroup. When I started, it was on a year's trial. There was no certainty about my being allowed to be there. I had to prove I was good enough to be among the able-bodied. I had to not be a burden upon the school too.

I was provided with a 1-1 assistant. I was soon labelled gifted. I did OK. They assessed me musically in a special assessment. They assessed the impact of my being at the school on the school in another assessment. They tried to help me to fit in. For a couple of terms I felt happy, included and taking it for granted. Then came the summer holidays. The music cavorted around in my head incessantly. My mind raced around numbers. When I returned to school nothing seemed to have changed with me: the class was still doing babyish things. I didn't fit in at all. There was no scope for the things I was doing, writing ballets, eg. I withdrew into my head, into my imagination and got lost there in my first clinical depression. I was referred to a psychologist because I wasn't "speaking" any longer and I was losing weight through not eating too. I was 6 years old. I wanted to be like the other children. I was aghast, broken and at a standstill because I was discovering greater difference than I could bear. The psychologist was not helpful. He would not talk to me even to say hello. He asked my parents why it was a problem for them that he ignored me. My heart shrivelled up at the callousness. I never saw him again.

My assistant left for another job. I had to remain at home all the time with my mother while the LEA sought a tutor, a new assistant and a grammar school willing to let me be a part of them. No grammar school wanted a 6 year old mute wheelchair user. Grammar schools were for the high-flying 20% of able-bodied 12-18 year olds. I visited them, saw how fine they were but they put barriers up when it came to including me.

After quite a lot of months, the LEA provided a man to help me get down the music in my head. I worked with him for 20 hours a week for 2 years. He stuffed all the notes I wrote into a DOS programme on a computer and the computer would not extract the parts. It printed the full score out neatly but the music in this form is not playable. This became more and more of a problem because I could not hear my music performed. I became more and more het up at writing music that wasn't being written down in playable form. I had a totally totally wonderful relationship with Colin. I was so young and naive I didn't know how special he was. I thought I'd find other people like him and I never have. I've never trusted anyone and felt more loved by anyone before or since. And yet he was professional. He never forgot why he was there. He never forgot my age or my disability. He related to me as the whole me. But eventually egged on by the RAM I said I couldn't write more music if he just stuffed it into the old DOS programme and it remained unplayable. He was taken off the job. I never saw him again, though we did exchange a bitter-sweet letter or two. He died a premature death two years ago. Noone bothered to tell me. I didn't get to go to his funeral. He'll never sit in the audience and hear the music played that he with such great patience note by careful note hour after hour took from my dictation. I live with his photo propped up in front of me, a reminder of what can be, and a reminder of what must not be lost when found, a reminder of youthful naivity.

In the summer of 1993, 5 months after my assistant resigned a new one was appointed. At the time I had to sit on my enabler/carer's lap in order to communicate, eat, drink and participate in any activity. I am right-handed. They decided to join together all the roles and have one person to be my Director of Studies, tutor and enabler. They selected a left-handed man and expected me to sit on his lap throughout the school day while he had sole and solitary charge of me. I found this distasteful and inappropriate and decidedly odd in an era when newspapers are full of cases of abuse perpetrated on vulnerable children by those in a position of responsibility for them. I did not feel I was being treated fairly and accorded the same respect as an able-bodied child. My feelings and fears were ignored. The man was not un-amiable or unintelligent. But he was a man and I couldn't learn to trust him. I learned to fear him when he gave me an essay to research, my very first essay. He wanted me to research concentration camps and the holocaust. I was 6 years old. I didn't want to know about those horrific things. I didn't understand why that was the first and most important thing for me to learn: the killing of disabled children by the state. He was too much a teacher to discuss it with me. After marking my essay, he moved on to Saturn's moons and wanted me to learn to play chess. None of it seemed to be preparing me for entry into my grammar school that I thought was around the corner. I ran away in fear and buried myself further in my music.

The images don't disappear. The fear doesn't dissipate. I became afraid of who I am because I became afraid of what people might do to me. I lost too much naivity in one fell swoop. I wasn't sure I understood what the LEA were trying to achieve, I didn't like being different from other children, I couldn't hide my distinctness and fit in, I became afraid of who might look after me, I became afraid of what society does to the disabled. I became less miserable because I was feeling more fulfilled but I wasn't agitating to get away from my mum, even though this was the spell in my life when I really quite heartily disliked her. I resented the fact she knew nothing about music. I resented the fact she couldn't speak foreign languages and knew absolutely nothing about maths. I hated the way she dressed. I hated her voice. I was hugely intolerant of her own needs even though I had only a couple of years earlier seen her succumb to pneumonia and crawl helplessly across the floor to get me to bed when dad was in the Gulf and war was imminent. I think my brother grew his fear from then because he had a sick mum and a helpless sis and was only 6 but I sailed through it, minding but not traumatised. It's not forgettable but it's not a nightmare memory. It doesn't re-visit me as I sit in the car hurtling along motorways like the images of the holocaust does when my own vulnerability lies exposed and raw. I wanted my mother to empower me every single moment and felt like screaming even if she went to the loo. She knew little about it. I kept it more or less to myself because deep down I loved her and appreciated what she did for me and I didn't like the feelings I felt. I called her the baglady quite openly and ignored her a great deal. I thought her awfully incompetent as time went by and no new assistant or tuition materialised. Why could she not make the LEA provide things? I complained to the ombudsman. I organised hydrotherapy for myself.

It took the ombudsman two and a half years to decide that I wasn't receiving care support and education and that this was unjust, two and a half years in which he sat and watched as nothing progressed and he no more than anyone else did anything about it. My file filled up with letters from me and my parents to the LEA. My anger grew. I always kept myself ready for being resourced. I made an action plan each term based on what the LEA had said at the last meeting would happen. After a while I'd revise my action plan and make a plan of what I wanted to do or hoped to achieve during the next few months, trying to press forward on my own singular path.

In the summer of 1994 my mother collapsed with exhaustion. I could no longer write my music. After a while Social Services supplied agency workers to come in and look after me. They hadn't any idea about empowering me. They took me to watch diggers, they stuffed me full of chocolate bars and ice cream, they wouldn't exercise me, they let me sit doing nothing. They didn't show me books or play me CDs. Astonishingly they didn't even sit me in front of the tv. I liked quiet times in the garden but I didn't like quiet times in the garden with them. One time one of them refused to pick me up off the floor and left me there while she went out to get my brother from school. Mum sat with me unable to move me, crying. Feeling helpless. One of them lied about my communication. She waggled my left hand around to show off her capacity to communicate with me to a visiting fruit-cake from Social Services. One terrible day I was left to fry in the sun. The helper sat in the shade with her sun specs on and watched me squirm. She put me in the middle of the lawn where there was no shade, she turned me towards the sun. Then she walked over to her shady chair and watched as I got overheated. It doesn't take long when you're in a plastic nappy sitting on a plastic chair. I cannot cry out in distress or thrash my limbs about to gesticulate. It is a defining characteristic of my "locked-in syndrome". I screamed and screamed but nothing came out. I sobbed, I raged, but it wasn't visible. Would she have done anything if it were? Was she enjoying watching me like this? In my imagination I leapt up and killed this "carer", this peculiar callous woman. Eventually, my mother saw out of the upstairs window that something was wrong and telephoned the agency. She came downstairs and sent the woman away. She dragged me out of my chair and into the shade where we sat for a lot of hours on the cool grass until someone came from Social Services to see if we were all right. I wouldn't let her touch me. I felt abused. She wasn't allowed to lift me anyway, so my brother had to when he came home from school. I couldn't even depend upon kindliness.

Before my mother had become ill she had asked for regular help from Social Services but they only provided services that removed me from my family and that was unacceptable to my parents (and to me). My mother had pointed out that this was not in accordance with the Children's Act which promotes the upbringing of disabled children by their families and makes mention of support such as domestic support and help to have a holiday. She was scoffed at. I can remember a social worker laughing at the idea that we should receive help. I was out of school and at home all day long. I needed attention at night as well. My mother was told that there were a lot of children with a lot worse disability than mine and the state couldn't be expected to provide any domestic help to us. After my mother became ill, they complained that the house was dirty. They still didn't provide any domestic help.

It never occurred to me that they might force their ideas upon us. My incompetent parents were in charge of me. I knew abused kids were re-homed away from their parents, I knew a lot of disabled kids went away to residential schools. Neither seemed to have anything to do with me and my life. I'd just been awarded a place at the Junior Department of the Royal College of Music in London and was going to start attending on Saturdays from the following September with able young musicians up to the age of 18. The LEA had sought the place and were funding it. The LEA had bought me GCSE textbooks on science and maths. The small scared ever so bright child that was me aged 7 thought that when mum was better on my life would go. That's more or less what happened but there was an emotional blip.

First a social worker had a horrid confrontation with mum in the garden in front of me and involving me. She said mum couldn't be trusted to choose my reading material. She said I wasn't to be allowed to read my LEA supplied books. She said she would select what I could read in spite of the fact we'd never ever met her before. She said she would decide how long each day I was going to be allowed to read for. I had never encountered an attitude like it, the open contempt for my mother, the open flaunting of authority, the open disregard for me and my feelings. Even schools with their antiquated authoritarian structures do not behave as this woman behaved. My individuality had no meaning to her. My humanity therefore was invisible. I was some sort of pawn in some sort of trip I didn't understand and didn't want to. I cannot control my emotional reactions. All books have felt dangerous since then, have felt not forbidden but too hot to handle. It was always difficult to read. Sometimes I'd look at a page and everything would leap into my mind that was set out upon it, sometimes I'd look at a page and see nothing that made sense. Always I could not scan methodically because of my motor difficulties (let alone hold a book or turn a page). Almost noone has helped me to read and it has become much harder as I've become older and less used to hand-eye coordination. It worked much better when I was little and did lots of writing and drawing on paper. Maybe it just helps my eyes to read if my hand is on the page but now I just tear and crumple the page in my chaos, now it just seems an effort not worth making. If you can't stand the heat, you get out of the kitchen. There were plenty more fishes to fish for, plenty more opportunities to keep busy. Self-expression is more important to me than reading. It's just that I hate the feeling, the hot fear that surrounds books. They did a secret psychiatric report on us that the ombudsman told us about and it concluded that we should be resourced in accordance with the advice to the authority and in line with the action plan that gave me a team of enablers, working both inside and outside school and weekday hours. That was 1994. Six years later, I'm still waiting.

There have been many promises, many meetings. The authority has received advice with great regularity about how to provide for me written by people with long and close knowledge of me and good professional qualifications, people whom the state pays to work with me. And yet I am not resourced. I cannot find the solid ground on which I can rely. I cannot build on my achievements. It still hurts too much to discuss the RAM, my beloved academy where I thought I had lifelong friends, another initiative funded by the LEA. The goodwill evaporated in the middle of a lesson there when my mother was frogmarched out and things were thrust into my face for me to "read. read anything." The page was about 4 inches from my nose. My wits flew out and ran down the street. I don't think they came home to my body for a year. My home from home did not accept me! After a year in which I was allowed to attend classes with undergrads and postgrads, use the library, mooch around the canteen with pals from my classes, camp at a midsummer festival in my tutor's back garden in a little flock of tents, have an ID card, have ramps made for me, be given first refusal on the overnight flat in central London where professors could stay for a mere �7, where students performed my work and included me, where I was reported to be up to undergraduate standard at this centre of excellence though only a miniscule 8 years old, where other teachers talked to me, showed me stuff like Cage's piece for a prepared piano in a private rehearsal, where postgrads were choosing to rehearse my music to play at their final performance concert instead of the more conventional Bach or Stravinsky, where my tutor said that my interpretation of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition was so revelatory I should publish a book on the subject, where I sat in seminars in my leg splints on the floor learning how to organise my life, build a career, where I was quite a go-getting little brash kid unafraid to leap in to debates and encouraged to do so, where I felt included and amongst my peers for the first and only time in my life, where I danced dreams of a lifetime association and felt safe for a while, this place turned Brutus.

They questioned my integrity out of the blue in the middle of a lesson on score-reading and without admitting that was their intention, without consulting parents or LEA about their doubts and without admitting them ever. Even now they tell my psychologist they never doubted my ability. They did. They sneered at me. They rejected me and cast me aside, they told me not to come back. They did it all most unkindly and in the middle of a lesson. They sneered at my mother. My world fell apart. My mother cried and screamed her protest. I was inaccessible, terrorised by the betrayal. I have not learned how to trust again. I have not learned how to laugh again. I am said to be quiet where once I was boisterous. My friends turned out to be fair-weather friends. I lost everything. The LEA wrote letters to the RAM that weren't answered. I couldn't stop crying. I didn't fit in. They didn't want me. That was more than I could cope with. The manner of it being conveyed to me, the sneering tones of the head of department, the brutality of their turncoat behaviour was way beyond what I could assimilate. The denial of my individuality, the denial of compassion, the denial of honesty, the conspiracy that set up that day. Take the wind out of my sails, why don't you, take my breath away, break my heart, promise me every week for 52 weeks that I am wanted and accepted, that I do not have hurdles and am being nurtured that I may blossom "all you have to do is grow" and steal it away in a moment, render it worthless.

I spent a year awash in an unknown place a different sort of place from my lost depressions. I was not alone and lost, I was crowded, hemmed in by baying hounds, batty foxes and foxy bats, alician critters that transmogrified into jeering human faces, silverback males with their dominant nonchalance scratching their arses, vultures sailing down to gobble flesh, the mermaid Jane of my first ballet metamorphosed into a handless pianist, the internal music never-ending in its wail, the choral accompaniment too loud and strident to bear, the clashing chords of disharmony and chaos resolving into sleep perchance to dream. Elision, conflation, derision. The ground swallowed me whole suffocating me, sand stuffed in every orifice. Rip Van Winkle danced like Fagin, benign portrayals of vile wickedness. The ostrich child spluttered but would not die. Small chickens clucked. There was a great deal of cackling and hissing. Beautiful swans spat at me. The music formed into an operatic ballet, a funeral pyre burned, it had nothing of subtlety about it, raucous, cacophonic, polyrhythms and multiphonics, bagpipes and African drums, mandarins, marmosets, illogicality and weirdness, a feast of surreality, a drenching in extreme emotion that there was nobody to help me out of. Everything was orange, al the time everything was orange. I glowed in the dark, I was sure I glowed in the dark. I couldn't hide anywhere from the baying hounds with the pudgy human faces. The child was not at home. The child had gone awol. There could be wrestling with the images and the feelings and it wasn't normal: I wasn't within or external to the view, I was helterskeltering lurching and swinging in ceaseless motion from inside sweaty gasping fear to far distant physical shrivelling. My flesh crawled and shrank constricting a nut hard me into a pea-sized person. There was no BFG here, the giants wore white coats. My spirit remained huge, it sailed the world like a cloud unattached, devoid of feeling, passive. Sometimes I was inside out. I had a hard core and no bones and I could see my vital organs. I could see my heart beating and I could watch as it was stabbed. I could see my brain picked over as if being filleted for someone's fish supper, I could hear low voices discussing me. There was no peace no quiet, an ocean relentlessly pounding me, a corpse in the sand not waving but drowning, a lame duck that wanted to fly like a herring gull, scream like a herring gull, throwing head back and yelling, soaring on the last streams of daytime sun far above the rabble, clacking with the jackdaws, sturdier always sturdier than the fragile martins of old, resident, not going anywhere, not going anywhere, braving out the cold storms, not going gentle into the good night, not dissipating crimson into death but burgeoning burnished gold from the flotsam of shipwrecked self. This bird dream grew into a harbour where I could hide safe while the traffic roared by me. Lorry after lorry, train after train, cattle truck after cattle truck bleaker and bleaker greyer and greyer : Dorothea Lange's faces strung across an endless prairie tossed in white flour that poisons slowly but looks pretty as a dusting of snow on a Christmas card. Candles flicker. Knives glint. A vast squid the colour of fat pink earthworms stings my bruised face and threatens to spread repulsive tentacles round my thrashing limbs. A hoard of locusts block off the light which was only a single bare lightbulb anyway and the earth is hot and damp. There is nothing safe, nothing beautiful, nothing that seems to be what it appears. There is no certainty and no way out. This is my future and this is my present. The whole world has disintegrated into nightmare. My mind spins relentless tortured uncontrollable visions for want of a better word, daytime nightmares that distract me into a quiet non-action. I am disturbed. I am distressed. It occurs to me that I am mad, but detached observation of this sort does not stop the damaged child from bleeding on in freestyle.

The Health service referred me to a centre of excellence for psychotherapy. They said I was traumatised. They said I'd had a bewildering range of experiences of acceptance and non-acceptance culminating in my rejection by trusted tutors after a year.... It meant a journey up to London and past the Academy once a fortnight. To rub the salt further in they wanted to separate me from my means of normal communication. They wanted me to sit in a room by myself and be experimented upon. They wanted to outnumber me. They wanted to listen to my music but they were deaf (hearing incapacitated) and couldn't. They could not grasp how tired of sitting in my wheelchair I got after a journey there of two and a half hours. They could not see a child. How could they see a crying child? I was a non-person reinforced. My disability cast me beyond humanity. It meant I was not treated as other children. Not even when my health authority asked a centre of excellence to help me acquire "emotional strategies to deal with my unique personality, disability and gifts". I could be poked prodded discussed assessed. It seemed to give strangers rights over me, strangers who thought nothing but that their power was right. Take a human being you have never seen, take that human being the likes of whom you have never seen, decide her fate in twenty minutes. Do not involve her, do not involve those that know her, do not pass go but do not forget to collect your salary. There are rich pickings for professionals but these strangers do not relate to me as a person. They have a different voice when they speak to me. They don't speak matter-of-factly. They don't try to help me. They don't explain me to me. They don't try to make my life easier. They don't have advice on how to manage my disability. They don't share, they're not partners. They are another species. I want nothing further to do with them.

My mother knew I wanted company. I wanted to share my experiences with other disabled people. She persuaded the LEA to get me internet facilities. It took a long time before it actually arrived (by which I mean 9 months) but they provided me with training as well as the modem etc. I reached out and found people to talk to, I hit on the idea of my webzine FROM THE WINDOW and got that sorted to happen. Real life after a year of crying leapt back into perspective. There were again things I wanted to do. I couldn't bear to think about music but here was something to be getting on with that was fun. The LEA printed out hardcopies of my first edition, one for me and one for my patron John Tavener. They helped to organise it being published on the net because I hadn't got the software. The LEA seemed to be on my side in life even though they didn't resource me in sensible ways - didn't provide tuition, didn't provide enablers. They had tried to push through a statement that was quirky and unrelated to advice but when we went to tribunal they drew up a good one to avoid the court. That is the statement I still have. My mother whom I clung to rebuilt me as best she could. She pointed out that my achievements could not be undone. I returned again and again to my beloved Hebridean island to bathe in the harmonies there and soothe my sorrows away in the songful breezes by the ocean's edge.

My mother became exhausted again. The LEA would not help us get help from the SS. There was a nice domestic helper by now. She came in for 3 hours a day five days a week. But she wasn't allowed to help in my care. Mum had to do that all by herself. When she became too ill to manage the helper still wouldn't help. It was not her job to help either an ill mother or a helpless crip child. She carried on dusting. My brother was off school 3 weeks despite protests from the education welfare officers before the SS changed the helper's role and allowed her to give "personal care" to me. Any goodwill seeping back into me eroded rapidly. The authorities were not working to help me. They were quite satisfied with pigeonholes that divided me into a multitude of budgets rather than a whole human child within a loving family overburdened with my extra-ordinariness that the state was supposed to support them with.

(The state is even more peculiar then even you might think having read thus far. When I was smaller they refused to pay benefits to me that are due to a disabled child. They decided that at night-time I was less at risk of harm and less in need of attention than a normal able-bodied child. They decided that despite my MP, consultant etc etc etc writing to point out that I needed to be turned at night, that I couldn't call out for assistance and yet was frequently sick and had violent nosebleeds, that I got chilled and couldn't pull the covers around me if I kicked them off, that I didn't need any attention during 12 hours of the day over and above what was accorded to a normal vocal and mobile child. It took a very long number of months to get them to review the case and twice upon review they decided their original view was correct: I was not eligible for benefits. Doctors conduct the review, not administrators. My mother refused to accept the adjudication. She wrote letter after letter. Social Services wrote a letter saying that in a residential situation I'd need waking staff checking me every twenty minutes or so. My senior registrar wrote to say that in nineteen years of paediatric work specialising with children with developmental delay I was one of the most seriously disabled children she'd ever seen. My consultant pointed out I was in danger of choking because I was prone to reflux (which is what made me sick so often) because I couldn't sit up or call out and I had to be closely supervised all night. They still turned me down for benefits routinely paid eg to a child with Down's syndrome. My mother wrote a very fiery letter to the head of the service demanding to know what he'd feel if his own child were thus treated. Amazingly they again reviewed the case, granted me lifelong highest level benefits and 3 years of backdated payments.)

My mother grew stronger again after about 3 months. Through my new LEA keyworker's introductions, I was offered an exhibition space for my placetics - large room-sized installations that had occupied my mind and awaited opportunity to build them. On the strength of a person's word, the LEA sought me an art tutor part of whose job description was to help me actualise this exhibition. For the first time the LEA followed through with their own plan and four and a half years after leaving my infants' school, I got a tutor. He's still in post. The exhibition didn't happen. The definite promise turned to downright refusal to countenance it. I bled from re-opened scars. They couldn't be persuaded to change their tune. I was as unacceptable as ever, forever outside, beyond rules, in a world where things are negotiated on an individual level and there's no seeming right to anything, in spite of disability, in spite of talent. No grammar school, no music college, no art exhibition.

This was the time when I received my apology and compensation for 4 years of injustice and the promise that things would be sorted out now that I explained about earlier. 3 weeks later they decided not to enact my Statement of SEN. When my computer broke down they refused to replace it ever and they never have. The LEA manager who had ineptly floundered from unorthodox provision to unorthodox provision without ever sorting the key issues and ensuring solidity and continuity took early retirement and was gone. New brooms swept in with a reign of terror. They proposed to amend my statement and proposed to send me to a residential special school hundreds of miles away for children whose max age was 15. At 6 they wanted to put me in with 12 and 13 year olds of high intellectual ability. At 8 they resourced me to study with 18 to 23 year olds of exceptional ability. At 11 I was to be with the mentally incapacitated. What had changed? Upon ewhat sort of advice coyuld they base this u-turn?

I would have no one-to-one assistant. I would not be allowed home even at weekends. There were two classes at the school. One was the exam stream and one was for those with mental impairments. The Head told my mother I would have to attend the latter as I had not been following the National Curriculum and would not fit into the exam stream. He also said that he would not normally take a child whose parents were opposed to the placement. My consultant advised my parents not to tell me because I would be emotionally damaged and he wrote to the LEA to protest at the unsuitability of their proposal. He said it risked causing profound emotional damage to me. The LEA ploughed on regardless.

Legal processes ground along too. It was September when I received my compensation. It was July before my parents could present their submissions against the proposal. Another school year gone by, and a year when I crossed a line of no return. I found out about the proposal. I found out that there was a definite determination on the part of the authorities to disregard all, and I mean all, the professional advice to them regarding my educational, social, emotional, technological and physical needs, a determination to disregard advice and to hurt me. I don't care if this sounds paranoid. How else can you construe it?

They admitted they had no advice to support their proposal. On the contrary besides what my consultant had said about serious emotional damage, my OT told them it would be dangerous for me to be looked after by those trained in other disabilities as they were likely to make wrong assumptions and not appreciate my very particular vulnerabilities: it would take any one person a very long time to learn the individual characteristics of my singular disability and during that time I would be physically at risk.

The LEA ploughed on with their neat bureaucratic decision to get me off their desk, out of their hair and into another county. I had been led up a garden path by promises of enablers and mainstream life for 5 years or more, promises that hadn't materialised and had left me dependent upon my mother. Now they wanted to wrench me away for their own convenience. My parents submitted their representations against the proposal. The LEA withdrew their proposal when we produced a fat file of evidence to support NOT sending me away. It included letters from all manner of well qualified people who know me either professionally or socially. I felt surrounded by my supporters and full of spunky fight.

Spunky maybe, but inside was a great cold hulk that had shipped itself inside me and frozen my optimism forever into a fear that paralyses. They wanted to forcibly take me from my home and incarcerate me in a building with no means of communicating pain, no means of preventing damage to my self. They wanted to surround me with the physically sensorily and mentally incapacitated and call it educating me. They even had the nerve to say that my parents were ignoring my spiritual development, my parents who took me to the windswept shores of Iona, the quiet hilltop of Ronchamps, the golden gloom of St Marks, the cathedrals of Lincoln, Canterbury, Notre Dame and who encourage my connection to the orthodox church which is my chosen home. My spirit dances in harmony with a thousand others and needs no statutory agency of the government to help it along. I have Sir John Tavener as my godfather.

So here chill fear lies, a cramping inside me that chokes off my breath if I should pause to look at it. I cannot believe the authorities mean me well. I believe they are vicious and deliberately so. I cannot cooperate. I crumble into stiffness and sit immobile. I am no longer eager to be helped towards my dreams. I cannot trust these people who are decision-makers in my life. I know they will hurt me, again and again and again. The LEA decided they didn't have enough information about me and would conduct a re-assessment of my needs. They were advised that this would harm me, that they had been collecting information for 8 years and had plenty of advice on what my needs were. There would be no new advice my psychologist said. Naive fool: you have to take account of the fact they will make it up.

The LEA's reassessment took 18 months. During that time I had to travel one day 120 miles to a national centre of excellence in augmentative communication in Oxford. My team came too and two people from the LEA who didn't know me, although I'd met one of them when I was 4. They put me in a room with mum and the head of the centre and filmed everything I did. Everyone else watched on the tv screen. I sat frozen all morning apart from drinking several pints of milk. I lunched with my psychologist, my mum, my dad and my brother. My tutor was there and my OT. The LEA paid for everyone to be there. Same procedure in the afternoon, except that I answered two yes/no questions in my habitual way.

The report from this national centre of excellence said that noone had ever learnt to communicate with me as my mother does. They asserted this in spite of being advised to the contrary by the OT. They said that noone ever would learn it. They asserted this in spite of not having seen it for themselves. They asserted that anyone could learn to communicate with me if I changed my habitual means of communication. They asserted that I had use of my left arm because they had seen it. They recommended I learn to use a system of communication with my left hand. Four members of staff signed this report, including the Director of the Centre, who had herself conducted the assessment. Now the LEA had what they wanted: a nice cheap option. Any old bloggs could communicate with me although it would be slow and would not allow me to say what I was thinking. It did not require that anyone trained to meet my needs. I should be the one who trains myself in a strange chequer board of letters that I had to remember the sequence of in order to answer the communication assistant's question with my o so wonderful left arm.

Now I wonder if you can guess what my o so delightful supportive LEA did. It issued a new draft statement of SEN stating that I had use of my left hand. They had been advised for 10 years by people who knew me, by people who worked hands-on with me that I could not develop an independent means of communication and this was related to the unique nature of my disability. This advice is worth nothing to the LEA. They have a centre of excellence telling them I can use my left hand. They have paid this centre of excellence hundreds and hundreds of pounds for this advice.

We asked for the videotape evidence to support their claim. My OT viewed it with me. They sent only the clips in question. It showed me using my enabled yes/no with my right hand. The OT pointed out to them this simple plain truth. O they said, we've made a mistake. And so another year in my life goes by, another year in which I become further habituated to my mother and more scared and cynical about the authorities. That's been this year.

The National Health Service provided a new consultant clinical psychologist to help me deal with my fears a couple of years ago. I got on well with this psychologist, I don't know why, I didn't mean to but he wheedled his way in and befriended me. Then one day after more than a year (ie last September) a letter arrived saying he'd been taken off the job. My new consultant paediatrician wrote to protest saying I had a clinical need for continuity. The MP got involved. My mother wrote letters. She involved the Community Health Council. Eventually the powers that be decided I needed a complete new psychological assessment (this in addition to the LEA's reassessment which had stopped collecting information 12 months earlier but was still awaiting some reports). Interestingly this new psychological assessment was conducted without my presence. My mother was grilled but luckily she took a witness. The man in charge would not explain to her procedure or who was involved. She was very upset indeed. It therefore came as a surprise when the psychological reassessment concluded that my existing psychologist be re-employed and should work with me indefinitely and the funding would be in place for as long as he and I felt it necessary, though having said this I now only see him monthly instead of weekly because of constraints on his time. It took 7 months to get my psychologist re-instated.

Also during this last year, I have attended a series of meetings at which we were assured by the senior LEA manager that they were now going to resource me, that they were really trying to meet my needs. But in almost the same breath he said that he was minded to withdraw my hydrotherapy provision with immediate effect. In my existing statement, my hydrotherapy is a section 3 provision and the LEA have legally to provide it. In the new scheme of things proposed, the LEA have decided they don't want to pay for it any longer and since Health won't, I'd have to go without. My psychologist had long before advised them of its essential nature to my psychological and physical health. He's been there with me, knows what I do in the water and the dangers lurking of heart problems and deformity and intellectual lethargy if I am "confined " to a wheelchair. During the last 3 years the LEA have provided 2 things for me - 3 hours a week with my art tutor and 2 hours a week hydrotherapy (most of that's spent changing not in the pool). Now I was supposed to believe they were moving into gear to resource me in compliance with the law and meet each and every one of my special needs - my physical needs, my emotional needs, my social, my intellectual etc - but they were cutting out one of my two successful stuffs for financial reasons. They must have saved so much money by not resourcing me for 8 years that one would have thought they could afford a bit of swimming in a warm pond.

But that is not the point. The point is that they are still ignoring the advice to them by those who know me and whose advice they ought to be heeding, they are still playing a nasty Tom & Jerry game, they are still ignoring the rules which say that needs have to be met and it's a needs-led not budget-led system. And the point is that I cannot cope with it. I cannot cooperate with it because I am too overwhelmed by fear. The tension does not leave me, it's there haunting me and jeering at me through nightmare after nightmare at night. I run but I'm going backwards. This year's been spent trying to retain the paucity I have. My father's retreated in workaholism, my brother has succumbed to stress horribly scarily and violently in ways he doesn't want me to discuss but the violence is not directed at others, my mother is overburdened and at the end of her tether, begging for pills to restore her resilience. The entire family is at a standstill now.

I want to be independent of my mother because it is so counter-productive to be dependent upon an ageing person whom I shall outlive given half a chance, it is counter-productive to be dependent upon just one person. And yet I am now so buckled by fear of anything to do with those people who can afford to resource me that I am hiding. I face an enormous challenge to rescue myself from this predicament. It would not be scary if I was in control, if I had the funds that a birth accident child has or a road traffic accident victim, if I could dream dreams of financial independence, an ending of this dependence upon decision makers who thwart me and hurt me. Maybe to you I sound mad. Maybe you have a built-in belief that those in power make wise and just decisions, that there must be more to this than meets the eye. I cannot persuade everyone everywhere to take me seriously. I can only hope that enough do to help me become safer.

My OT and my psychologist are setting up an independence fund for me and are willing to act as legal trustees. They do not believe I will be resourced by the state in accordance with my desserts. They have watched for too long to be optimistic. Now they advise a different course of action. There's quite enough stress to cope with being me trying to get on and lead a life. I just can't cope any longer with the added burden of mean, petty and vicious state bureaucracy.

If you want to contribute to my fund please e-mail NedMueller@email.msn.com and he will tell you how you can. There will be a website up shortly at www.hojoy.com

I am a thirteen year old girl with a locked-in syndrome caused by a profound apraxia of all my muscles and the retention of dominant babyish reflexes. I am a wheelchair user and need complete care. I cannot make voluntary sounds and therefore cannot speak. Spelling is my greatest delight as it affords me the freedom to direct the course of my life. I crave acceptance as a really quite ordinary person, with an artistic temperament and a nice enough personality. On the whole I prefer adult company to kids', and my own company to 'most any other. I am bloody-mindedly independent and rarely acknowledge the wisdom of my mother's grey years.

I live in England, in the same town as I was born in but I love my mother's native land of Scotland even more. I also find Venice hard to eradicate from my mind, it swims like a tantalising mirage on my horizon informing my tastes and swelling my longing need to be truly me. I used to say that "I yearn to visit with people beyond Europe but have not a lot of dosh available for such sojourns". Last year I raised the money for my first big journey and changed my life immensely.

I need quiet. I hear music in my head a great deal of the time in a way I have come to accept is unusual. I was a composition student on a part-time Intermediate place at the Royal Academy of Music in London, participating alongside the undergraduate and graduate students when I was 9 years old, but they abruptly terminated my place and thrust me into a terrible depression.

Since then, I have veered more towards writing and journalism, by inventing FTW and becoming a BBC Video Nation correspondent and some other initiatives, but I also have leanings towards the visual arts. I am currently building an ambitious installation, am continuing to develop my photography, and if I could find more time, would out the visual aspects of the two autobiographical ballet scores I have completed and organise some performances of my poetry.

I am slowly building my way towards a book. I have not lost sight of the Third World even for a moment, or of my responsibilities. More info in cv. 

RAYMOND BETTS

SUICIDE

They have that room here.

Perhaps they have that room everywhere.

But, they have that room

Here. In that room is nothing.

Nothing but you and a mattress

Stained and pitted and torn and scarred,

The lights overhead very bright,

The outlets covered with silver plates,

The floor spotted linoleum

Beneath a window with venetian blinds

That open and close, open and close

As they look into that room.

There should be nothing in that room

But it is crowded. There are scents.

There is the essence of someone's darkness.

There is the darkness of essence.

There is nothing there

but you.

___________________________

Ignoring Richard

It might not be a sin, it might

be something worse, another significant echo

like the ghost of a secret child

a reflection of hurt too close to home

to be acknowledged, or discussed. She

is so forceful, after all, and ours', and seems

so sure and strong minding their money doling

out bus fare (and working

two jobs tolerating in-laws balancing

checkbooks and jobs and shopping and cooking and

maybe she is in charge and should be and it is

not only to be desired, but desired, but ...) -- still, Richard's

habitual reticence

could be more than resignation, could be fire

smoldering under wet tinder or a rattler's winter hibernation

or only constant pain stoically contained, lonely ego satisfied

through silent suffering ... How perverse that is I know

so more so now I let fly what I never

would have even given wings before, another phenomenal echo

except it echoes here, this fading place I fought to make

our home, so it cannot be discussed, or often

acknowledged ... How sad that is, and all of it, all

of this moment for almost every good person

I know, the perverse and twisted cruel prospering

like there's no tomorrow ... How easy for each of us

to crawl inside and hunker down behind barricades

defended at the least provocation, and utterly, lines

we let the world draw defining how far anyone

(ourselves included) is allowed to go, how near

the world can approach before our panic takes control

and our hands

thrash out, tongues spasming words venomous

as our love isn't, echoing the intensity of our fear

and our terror at our fear as overwhelmed we relinquish

what should be while embracing the artifice of static tableaux

of words not only unspoken but unknown while

unrighted wrongs everyone recognizes cannot be

acknowledged, or discussed. Or, so it must be or

we would not assume control or accept appearances

of control, rather each accept and open love

all others bailing out this boat like there is

no tomorrow, bringing out ourselves allowing space

for others to pass through so they too may be

acknowledged and included as members of the ever-lasting

conversation equal as each other there, counted-in

and recognized, drawn-out with humor, coerced

with care, fearless, and avidly loved.

Raymond Betts resides in his hometown of Lubbock, TX with his wife, Linda, and a shitload of cats. Father of four and the son of a career soldier, he served honorably as a medic in Germany and Vietnam, and has held the usual wide array of jobs poets and authors who don't teach fall into. He is working to finish his novel and complete a collection of his poetry. He can be contacted at dreamrayven@hotmail.com.

SHERRI BROWN

Lots of people complain about life, but what are they complaining about? They have too much work to do, they need an extra hand to get everything done. Have you ever thought about those that only have one? Life is very hard for those that are "different". Have you ever put yourself in the position of someone who is different? Have you ever sat in a wheelchair and watch people stare? Do you know what it feels like to be different? Do you even know what different means: "Are they normal? Can they swim? Can they eat? Can they talk? Can they draw? Can they see what I see?"

I am talking about people with disabilities. I have a sister who is 18 years old, who has Cerebellar Hypoplasia, or simply, an underdeveloped cerebellum. The cerebellum is a part in the brain that controls muscles and balance. When someone is said to have an underdeveloped cerebellum this person has weak muscles, and does not have very good sitting or standing balance. My sister, Alyssa, was diagnosed with this disorder when she was a baby. She was born this way, but doctors did not know what was wrong with her until they saw that she was not sitting or crawling at a normal age. Alyssa's speech is not as clear as mine because she has weak muscles. She is also learning disabled, which means that she has trouble reading and writing.

As her younger sister, I have learned a lot from her. I learned that you never judge people by how they look, how they talk, how they walk or that they use a wheelchair. I am very close to Alyssa; we do just about everything together. I can't say that it's just like having a "normal" brother or sister, because she is my only sibling. There are things that I can do that she can't. For example, I can walk, and I can run. I don't have any trouble speaking. It's very hard for her to see me going in and out of stores when she can't because they are too small for her wheelchair. Alyssa can walk with crutches or a walker for a short period of time. Still she will not ever be able to walk without them, no matter how much therapy she gets. Not every store is handicapped accessible. Some stores are too small for Alyssa to get in and out of. It's very hard because some people don't care to make changes for the "different" people.

Alyssa and I are the best of friends. She is friends with my friends, just as I am friends with her friends. She means everything to me. From Alyssa's point of view, she realizes that she is disabled and is different, and can't do everything a "normal" kid can. I am Alyssa's best friend. I am like her extra hand that everyone needs. I am always there to watch her do anything she has accomplished. For example, she participates in the Empire State Games for the Physically Challenged. She does many events, and I am always there to cheer her on. I also go to all of her school basketball tournaments because Alyssa is a cheerleader.

Sometimes its nice to get away from her, just like everyone who wants to get away from their brother or sister. She can be very annoying, just like everyone else. She loves to shop, and spend money. Her favorite things are boys, pocketbooks, and makeup.

Alyssa goes to a special school for the disabled. She has great friends who I am also close to. I am a freshman in high school and if Alyssa went to the same school as me she would be a senior. At times I wish that she did because when I started high school I was scared and all my friends had older brothers or sisters to show them around the school.

Alyssa gets physical therapy, speech, and occupational therapy. She has therapists come to the house to work with her to build her up. I see everything that these therapists do. I decided that occupational therapy was a great career and I want to pursue that as a career. Everything Alyssa does has an influence on me.

I once went to the mall with Alyssa and she said that she wanted to walk, so I sat in her wheelchair, and went for a ride. No one at the mall knew who I was, but they saw that I was in a wheelchair. People stared, little kids asked their parents what it was, why I was in it, and others just smiled feeling sorry. You don't know what it feels like to be "different", even though you may sit in that chair for a few minutes. I got just a small feeling of what it is like. You can never know what it feels like even if you sit in the wheelchair for days because you're not the one living that way.

Alyssa's friends are my friends. I talk to her friends on the telephone and on the Internet. Some of her friends have brothers my age so it's nice because we can all get together. At times it's very hard for Alyssa to watch me leave the house with all my friends because she knows that she can't go. Although she does come along sometimes, I need the break.

Having a sister with a disability gives me more responsibility. It's worse than being an only child. I have to do more chores around the house because she can't. I always have something to do; my life is never calm. Sometimes my mother asks me to help her with her bath because she can't do it on her own. I have double the responsibility than a "normal" child would. Sometimes my parents will run out and I have to stay home and keep her company. Occasionally I have to alter my plans to stay home with her. It's like having a little sister that will never grow up. Alyssa has an aide to come and help her, but sometimes Alyssa complains that she does not need the extra help, that she can do everything herself even though she can't. Alyssa tries to be independent. She tries to get herself ready in the morning and do her own makeup.

Everything that I do has an influence on her. For example, I had gotten my ear pierced for the 3rd time. Alyssa had always told me that she would never do that, and two were enough. Once she saw that I had gotten it done, she went to the mall the next day to get her 3rd piercing. I am her role model.

I babysit every week and Alyssa knows that she can't do that. She gets very mad sometimes when she sees that I can go out and get a job, while there are very few jobs out there for the disabled.

I have gotten very involved in working with the disabled. I enjoy it very much. I have volunteered at United Cerebral Palsy (UCP), as well as at a sleep-away camp for the disabled, and the Empire State Games. For two years in a row I volunteered at Alyssa's sleep away camp. I spent 9 days for two summers working with the disabled. It was very rewarding, and makes you feel better about yourself. I also met a lot people and learned about the different disabilities. It was a lot of fun and it was a great learning experience.

I have thought about life and what it would be like if Alyssa were able bodied. Sometimes I sit in bed just think about how my life would be different. Everything would be different. I cannot change the way Alyssa was born, but I can help her to feel good about herself, and tell her that she is perfect the way she is.

Our house is accessible for Alyssa. We have a stair glide that she sits on to go up the steps, we have a ramp in front, we have handlebars in the bathroom, and a special lift for the car. To me my house is normal, but that's because I live in it. When Alyssa and I go to someone else's house and she calls because she needs help in the bathroom, I ask why, forgetting that my house is "different". To get around in our house she crawls or uses her walker. Her room is decorated in her favorite colors- pink and purple. She has a low bed so she can get on and off easily. She has a low nightstand where we keep her telephone so she can reach without a problem.

I love Alyssa very much. I love her for who she is. My life as her sister is very different from a "normal" kid my age. I believe in her and believe that she can do anything she wants to even if her problems get in the way. Alyssa is "different" but is a very "normal" teenager. I will always be there to help her with whatever she may need. I am her sister and her best friend for life.

SASHA CAMACLANG

"The Child�s foot doesn�t know yet that it�s a foot, and wants to be a butterfly or an apple."

These were the thoughts in my head a long, long time ago. What does a child know of life? Of perfection? That the human body is a place that can never fully be discovered and understood. I had a congenital hip dislocation, my left leg is shorter by a couple of inches. I had gone through one major operation and two other treatments that until now I failed to understand, in between were therapies that started and abruptly ended, unfinished. It is a slight matter I tell you. And it embarrasses me to talk about this. I come from a third world country struggling for so long to alleviate itself of corruption, poverty, and ignorance. These are issues that I consider important to talk about.

I have italicized the first paragraph because this was a very important period in my life. As I write this down, it amazes me that I am writing something so personal. I remember that day well. More than myself, I was worried for my parents. How much trouble I was causing them. I had made a decision. Enough I said, I don�t want to see doctors anymore, breathe antiseptic air, and feel cold steel as I support myself at the balance bars. I wanted to live a normal life. I want to be at the company of children my own age not sick and bedridden, but robust with color on their cheeks.

During school hours we were herded about by teachers like cattle in a farm. I went to a Catholic school. There was absolute order in things wherein every moment is punctuated by a prayer. The teachers led and we followed. After class everything was different. We were left to our own devices until our parents would pick us up from work. The classrooms were empty. A heightened sense of chaotic smell surrounded me. Children zigzagging on school grounds in a game of cops and robbers. A mixture of baby powder and perspiration. Corridors littered by half-eaten sandwiches and junk food wrappers. Rotting vegetable, bread, and cheese. Hospitals rob you of this sense, I learned. They wipe out and spray over any source of smell that a patient produces. It placates patients, that their sickness is concealed through antiseptic. It is in this fake comfort that we live through our stay in hospitals. I followed them breathlessly, tripping along the concrete pebble wash out corridor, slow in my unsteady gait. I carefully observed which group might be willing to take me in. There are the boys and the girls who roughly played together in a game of cops and robbers. The athletically built girls who leaps and bound to a game of Chinese garter. I went with a group of girls who chose to amuse themselves by picking on the makahiya. A plant that shied away from our touch, folding its tiny leaves. I was happy to be finally part of something of the moment. My new friends clasped my hand firmly, and led me to their fine dance of play. They brought me to their secret grounds at the back of the school chapel. Sat on the curb, and picked on the flowers that had fallen from the bougainvillea. We giggled a lot. Our voices concealed by the wide bows of the bougainvillea plant overhead that embraced us. We would lay down on a field of grass, the earth on our backs warm and comforting. Sometimes our eyes would be closed, each of us in the privacy of our own thoughts. Sometimes they were open and alert. Staring intently amongst the blades of overgrown grass in anticipation of a dragonfly�s presence. We would clip its wings and marvel at its colorful netting. God is fair, we decide pontifically. He, who made the fly that spits on our food, also gave us this beautiful bejeweled insect. We would sun ourselves below the blue afternoon sky, shadows of clouds would pass through our bodies like a benediction from God. I felt for once blessed. It was unforgettable.

From this point in my childhood I stop this narrative. Other events that followed seemed to be less memorable and more painful. It�s one of those memories that had pushed me to pursue any goal that comes into mind when everything and everyone seems to stop me.

KEVIN CHILDS

>You ran away from home when?

I first ran away at 12, but was returned home by police 3 days later. The second time I ran away from home was at 14 and spent the next 23 years living on the streets, sleeping where I could and going in and out of jail. I also attempted suicide numerous times.

>Can you remember your first night on the street?

The first night was scary. It was very cold. I ended up sleeping at the top of the hallway stairs, near the roof, in an apartment building. The sense of aloneness was the most difficult aspect of my experience. The fear I felt was terrifying.

>Were you street-wise or doing something out of desparation?

I was street-wise, but in retrospect; I was pretty naïve and foolish. I ran away because my mother was going to sign the papers so that a neurosurgeon could perform experimental surgery on me to stop the seizures I was having from my epilepsy. I was scared of the thought of someone cutting my skull open and messing around with my brain by using laser surgery.

>What was the matter with home?

The matter with home was my mother trying to protect me from the world after the first gran mal seizure. The seizures were not controlled by anticonvulsant medications. Plus, I never fit in with my family anyway -guess you could say I was a bad fit (I am a shoe ;).

>What was the worst thing that ever happened to you?

I have been shot at, stabbed, but the worst thing that happened to me was picking up drugs at 12. I would never have attempted suicide so many times were it not for the drugs.

>How did people treat you?

People treated me like the punk I was. I thought I was tough and didn�t need anyone or anything, but by 17 found myself hooked on drugs and unable to get off them. Needless to say, parents hated me because they all knew I was dealing drugs - to their children.

I also had seizures in the streets and people would walk right by me and go on their merry way.

Some people would rifle through my pockets and rob me. Once, someone took a 14 karat gold plated medical emergency necklace.

>How did you live - what was a typical day like?

A typical day would consist of waking up cold and very lonely, having a seizure, and then I would steal some rolls and juice from outside a grocery store to eat for breakfast. Then I would begin by getting high, selling drugs and/or hustling to get money for drugs. By 22, I was no longer selling drugs, and was stealing to get money for drugs.

>What got you off the streets?

I was 34, in jail with 8 felony charges and facing 8-10 years in prison. The court appointed lawyer failed to show up for the 27th time I went to court, so by then, the judge and I had pretty much become friendly towards one another and he cut me a break and gave me a sentence of time served and 5 years probation. I was released from jail on 28th November 1989, and entered a self-help program and have been drug-free for 10 years, 5 months and 20 days.

>Do you like sleeping rough still? has it attractions?

Yes. Even when I have an apartment, I do not feel quite at home inside it. I guess you can say that there is a "call of the wild" in me from the years I spent camping out in New York City.

Yes. The attraction is being able to go wherever you want, sleep where you want. Sort of like people lived in past centuries - exploring.

>Have you reconciled your differences with your family?

Yes and no. I have reconciled my differences with my Mom, but not with my sisters or brother, or son, hence, I feel like my actions hurt them, and deep down, I have to accept that no matter how alone in the world I feel - it was my doing.

>Thanks for the e-mail interview. Got a few more questions:

Your Welcome HoJoy!

>When you first ran away, did you expect the police to come and find you again? Did you want to be found and everything to be made all right?

No, I thought I would be able to live a carefree adolescent life, but the police soon ended that. No, I wanted to be a runaway and get away from everyone, Mother and the various societal systems which suddenly began dictating what I could or could not do - heck, I was the first midfielder for the soccer team which scored more goals in half a season than anyone ever did in an entire season, I also quarterbacked the football team to a league championship, and our school�s baseball and track team were all-city!

The school, the doctor and my Mom made sure I was unable to play sports of any kind. What hurt so much was I had finally felt like I found my place or niche in society and in school. I had dreams of playing soccer abroad (as they did not have professional teams in the states then), and had also passed the test for a high school with a good football team, but all my dreams were soon turned into a fantasy, never to be fulfilled.

This hurt me very much. To this day, I do not think I have ever come to terms with the oppression against me just because the medical doctors thought that epileptics could not participate in sports. Hence, I believe this to be a major reason as to why I picked up drugs.

>Were you from New York and living in your own city or were you from elsewhere running away to New York City?

I was from Brooklyn, New York. I spent my life on the streets in Brooklyn. The only times I went to Manhattan were to buy heroin and cocaine.

>If the former, did you hang around near home or steer well clear?

I stayed in the neighbour-hood but steered well clear of home and relatives.

>Did you get in touch at all with your family or cut loose?

I cut my family loose and they also cut me loose. I was a shame, you know, black sheep of the family and all that.

>Did they know about your dealing drugs, going to jail, attempting suicide, etc?

Yes. My family knew what was going on with me. I sold drugs about 5 blocks from where they lived. I had attempted suicide the first time only 3 months after I got the epilepsy.

I saved up 3 months of medication that is a barbiturate and took 90 tablets. My sister found me. Then I was off to get my stomach pumped at the hospital.

>What, if anything, did the authorities do to rehabiliate you, support and develop the wild young thug rather than punish you? What was your response?

The authorities kept sending me to Alcoholics Anonymous, but I was 17 and could not identify with what the old people were saying at the meetings. The authorities did absolutely nothing to rehabilitate me, as a matter of fact, I attempted to enter a therapeutic community but was denied because I was honest about my suicide attempts. My response was to keep getting high, then I enlisted in the army in 1973, but had seizures inm front of everyone, so they said I could stay on as a secretary, or leave and foolish me, I chose to leave - just think of how much I could have learned about the internet when it was in it�s infancy!

>Do you with hindsight know how you would have liked the world to have been?

>How should society treat the teenager you were?

I would have liked to be treated equal in all respects to the other kids without disabilities. I see no reason why Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Conduct Disorder, Oppositional Defiant Disorder and a Seizure Disorder should have prevented me from participating fully in all aspects of life!

HoJoy, these labels made me feel as if I was a disorder! Meanwhile, I was acing school with 97�s acroos the board and I never studied. I had all my homework done by the time classes were finished. Tests were a breeze, and as it turned out, this disorder (me) had the highest IQ amongst my classmates.

>Given the fear, the cold, the mean toughness of street living, given also the freedoms eg to roam, what was it like being cooped up in jail?

Being cooped up in jail was a nightmare. I would pace in the cell all the time, like a lion at the zoo. That is why I always plead guilty in court, because it, plea-bargaining was the fastest way to get released and I wanted to be outside getting high, nor cooped up in a jail cell.

>Did you get less lonely after that first night / over time? did you find mates? Join a gang? Did you get less scared?

Yes. Soon the loneliness became my friend. It was a very peaceful experience sleeping on the streets once I got used to it. That took all of 2 weeks.

The one constant was fear. It will always be there. However, I believe the fear is what kept me alive.

Yes. I found a bunch of mates my age and older who were also runaways. We did a lot of drinking, drugging and stealing. Regrettably, we also hurt many innocent people because we wanted money for drugs. Most of my mates died young.

I did not join a gang, but instead was one of the founding members. I quit hanging around with the gang after 1 year. I was tired of the gang, like school, it became boring real fast.

>How did you get shot? I assume you wound up in hospital? And stabbed?

I got shot at, but was never hit. Bullets whizzed by my head fired from only 2 or 3 feet away on one occasion. The other shots missed me because the people were afraid of coming too close to us, or were fired from cars, and rooftops. I guess I am lucky because someone has been looking out for me, all my life! J

I was stabbed in the hand once, tearing the ligaments on my right hand and had to have surgery. My cousin also sliced me in the stomach, but it was more of a scratch than a stab, so it was nothing. One guy put a butcher knife to my neck, and I lifted my left arm and got the knife stabbed straight through my arm, in one side and out the other.

>What do you feel about those of us who lead comfortable middle calss lives for whom this world is just a tv fiction?

I resent kids who grow well to do, and have parents that will get them everything they want or need. I think that it is just part of the experience of growing up poor.

>Did you care whom you stole from? Did you draw any lines? Or did you not stop to think?

At first, I just stole. As a matter of fact, the first time I mugged someone I stabbed him because he didn�t give me the money fast enough. I regret it very much. Some older guys convinced me to mug him just because we wanted to get a few more beers.

I soon began caring whom I stole from. I focused on stealing from companies who would not miss the money. Then, to my astonishment, I found out that the people doing deliveries were working for themselves, not some company, so I stopped stealing from them, and started hustling to make money by collecting copper, aluminium and brass and then taking the metals to the scrap-yard.

>Did you encounter do-gooders? church soup kitchens etc. People with voices who make one cringe they are so "worthy" and "nice" and seriously unable to understand where you're at?

Not really. There were good people occasionally, but not many do-gooders who do good because it is their job and they get paid. I am not against people getting paid for doing good, but most do-gooders do more harm than good.

I avoided the soup kitchens and fended for myself. I stayed very far away from places like that. Most of the time, I could manage to get what I needed to see me through the day. Today, I now know that it was God�s grace that got me through the day!

>You must have seemed to many people unredeemable, a no-hoper, dross. Was it a struggle to get out of that lifestyle? What help did you get and from whom?

It was a very big struggle to get out of that lifestyle. I got help from people who used to be just like me. Sort of like, the sick helping the sick, or the sinners helping the sinners.

First, I was mandated to a outpatient drug program started by a former prisoner. He discovered the connection between his drugging and ending up in jail for committing crimes related to getting money for drugs, or getting busted while buying drugs.

A few of the counsellors were former prisoners, and addicts themselves.

>Do you feel most kids like you were can turn their lives around? (given the right attitude or opportunity)

Yes, very much so. However, there were very limited opportunities for kids my age back then. Even when I got older, there was very little opportunity for people to get help. Frankly HoJoy, most do-gooders do not give a damn!

That is not to say that there are do-gooders who do care very much and want to change the system which oppress people with disabilities and would rather hold us down, spend so much on disability checks - which barely cover our rent, but these people are far too rare. Most do-gooders are bogged down in paperwork. This prevents them from helping people the way they intended too when they first became a do-gooder.

>Does it begin to seem a long time ago, another you, another time, another place? or do you feel connected still to that person?

I am very connected to that person, but am afraid to let him emerge. He is a good person, but is much to quick to use physical force. I do not want to hurt me or anyone else any more.

>You've told me in our previous exchange of e-mails about quite a few acts of kindnesses you've extended to others. Can you elaborate for a sentence or two on either / or the principles by which you lead your life, the lifestyle you now have.

The lifestyle I live now is pale into comparison to my former lifestyle. I miss the excitement of the streets. I cannot pin it down, but the streets were fun to be on - something was always happening that got one�s adrenalin pumping.

The acts of kindness that I consider worthwhile were the 7 times I took complete strangers into my apartment after I was off drugs. It was nice to see six of them get drug-free and move on with their lives. Unfortunately, one decided to keep using, so I had to ask the person to leave.

I have a link with homeless people that can never be broken. Yet, I do not give to those who beg. Instead, I choose to give to those who do not ask for money.

I have also done a lot of information research for people over the internet whom I have never met. A few times I have been fortunate enough to meet people in person that I have met through the internet. That is always nice to meet someone and put a face to the words you read on the monitor.

The principles by which I lead my life today are always evolving. As a matter of fact, I have met people at a crisis house, called "Anam Cara" which means "Soul Friend" in Birimingham, UK. The healing and personal growth that occurs there is beyond anything I have ever seen. The approach is simple: " allow other people to make their own decisions and pay the consequences or reap the rewards!

Fortunately, the majority of people who pass through this place of learning take responsibility for themselves simply because they are given the opportunity! Psychiatry has a lot to learn from Anam Cara. I know I have learned much, and more importantly, Anam Cara has been a very healing experience for me!

>You've got family in Ireland you visit with. Are they ignorant of or accepting of your past? Do you find people as inquisitive and interested as I am in your past? do you get fed up with dragging it out and isplaying it?

Yes. I visit my relatives in Goath Dobhair, Donegal. They know all about my past and are very accepting of it, because I am off drugs now and as one relative said: " life is too short to live in the past" - enjoy it while you can, because you never know when it will end.

>Thank you very very much for allowing me to prod around into all these personal memories.

You are welcome very very much HoJoy!

>Sorry you don't want to supply any biographical paragraph. Would you prefer this to be published under a pseudonym? eg Kit Cochrane, Kenneth Cockburn, Karl Chubb (all of these come up with no results on the Excite search engine.)

No. Publish it under my name. Kevin Childs.

Check out the following links for more information on Kevin:
http://www.tiua.edu/American_Studies/Fall_98_Classes/adv_eng4/class_sessions/session2.html
http://www.cyber24.com/htm1/1_13.htm
http://home.att.net/~kcisfree/

MICHAEL COHEN

THE EPIDEMIC OF MIDDLE CLASS SCHOOL VIOLENCE

The scene has become all to familiar in American homes. We turn on the evening news as dinner time approaches and as the picture comes into focus, we feel a sickness as we see the solemn face of a newscaster, with the large, bold letters "SHOOTING" and the icon of a school bus in the background. Another of our public schools, once sanctuaries of learning and innocence of our children, has become the scene of a tragedy.

We see the scenes as if part of a recurring nightmare�the yellow police "crime scene" tape, the paramedics with stretchers rushing young victims to waiting ambulances, the hysterical cries of distraught parents clutching each other. For a moment we pray that no lives have been lost, then we feel that despair and find our own vision blurred by uncontrollable tears as the backdrop behind the newscaster shows pictures and names of children and teachers who will never come home.

While the phenomenon of murder on school grounds is not a new one, the manner in which these tragedies have taken place over the past decade is alarming. While we all still feel tremendous sorrow over the loss of tiny lives at Dunblane, Scotland, and similar shootings in the US by adults, there is the minor consolation that we can never predict the actions of a madman or know when a seemingly normal adult will turn irrational. We may console ourselves that no one is to blame for having failed to prevent the horror.

The alarming nature of the latest trend, however, is that children are being murdered by their peers with increasing frequency. Prior to the late 1980�s, such incidents seemed confined to urban schools where broken homes, gang activity, drug dealing, and other sources of violence proliferated. Over the last decade or so, however, several dozen children have fallen victim to other children of middle class families, children who would seemingly have no motive for such unspeakably heinous behavior. It is thus not only the fact that we have children killing children, but the fact that socioeconomic factors no longer seem to play a role that is so frightening.

My personal interest in this issue came in the nature of what some might describe as a calling. My parents lived in Jonesboro, Arkansas for 13 years, and although they had moved away when four middle school girls and their teacher were killed by two boys who were also students at the school, something else died that day � the belief that prepubescent children were incapable of perpetrating such horror.

I watched the scene unfold on March 24, 1998 as I walked into my barber shop to find my barber, Shirley, in tears in front of the shop�s television. In a split second I realized that this marked the second time in my life that my attention had been drawn to Jonesboro by a senseless murder. In 1988, approximately one year after my parents moved away from that small southern US city, they were forced to return by the news that their best friends� home had been invaded by serial killers, and that the wife had been shot for no apparent reason.

The following Saturday morning, March 28, 1998, I was teaching an engineering class at Old Dominion University. It was a bright spring day and the college was having an open house for the local public schools, so there were children of all ages wandering over the campus. I was in the middle of a lecture on reactor physics, walking in front of the chalkboard toward an open window, when I heard the sound of children laughing from outside. Suddenly the innocent little faces from that CNN broadcast a few nights before came into my mind and I realized that I could not see through my tears. I barely held my composure long enough to tell my class to go on a break�

It was then that I knew I had to do something to help the families and prevent further violence. That afternoon I wrote a poem and the following Monday I found a memorial website that had already been set up by Jim Welch, a local contractor in Jonesboro. He was glad to add my poem, and accepted my offer to help edit the website. That site can be found at http://www.fastdata.net/~nebulus/memorial.html and my poem can be found by clicking on the "Poems" link. The site also contains a condolence message board. Through which I have since come to know many families and friends of victims from school shootings elsewhere in the country.

I have also since set up a special web page on the Cyberangels site to unite the different communities, http://www.cyberangels..org/schoolviolence, and with several other volunteers, I am helping to organize a national gathering in Ontario, California, USA, later this year. The website for that gathering is at http://www.geocities.com/the_gathering_in_ca.

I will not bore the reader with a detailed analysis of every shooting here; a brief news search will produce reams of accounts, and all are variations on the same horribly predictable theme. The real tragedy in all of this is that every one of the perpetrators had parents, and at other times were under the supervision of responsible adults. In every case, they made blatant threats. In every case, an adult either provided the perpetrator with a firearm or by irresponsible actions allowed firearms to fall into young hands. IN EVERY CASE, RESPONSIBLE ADULT BEHAVIOR COULD HAVE PREVENTED THE UNTHINKABLE.

It is human nature to want to find a culprit and to bring that culprit to swift justice. What investigation after investigation, and the use of a little simple logic, have proven, however, is that several factors in our modern society have contributed to the lethal mix. Children are being influenced by more than just their disputes with other children.

While one might argue that the easy availability of firearms in the US is a huge factor, and the American sportsman is always an opportune scapegoat, it must be observed that shootings have also happened in countries with far stricter laws and few firearms in the hands of the population.

While we definitely could save some lives if firearms laws resulted in any decrease in the availability of weapons (which has never been demonstrable), the real problem is the loss of self discipline that inevitably happens in a free society.

When parents bring a child into the world, they bear responsibility for that child�s upbringing and actions until he or she reaches legal age. Paraphrasing a past US President, the buck stops there. Other adults such as school officials have a responsibility to act when they observe threatening behavior in a child. In every one of the shootings, there was not just one failure, but a series of failures by responsible adults in the perpetrator�s life.

In the US, these issues are being dealt with in legislatures at both the federal and state level. In the opinion of this writer, however, no law at any level will make a difference unless the responsible adults themselves decide to make a difference. For the sake of our children and grandchildren, I hope to God that they do.

MICHAEL COHEN

Mike is the editor-in-chief of the newsletter for Cyberangels, the Internet branch of the Guardian Angels and the world�s largest Internet safety organization.
Mike is also a political satirist and poet, and has written several pieces for co-workers and Cyberangels members as well as two on the Cyberangels website.
Mike has taken a strong interest in helping the families and friends of victims of the tragic school shootings that have happened across the U.S., and has constructed a page on the Cyberangels website honoring the victims and linking the support groups from the various communities affected.

Mike wrote about submarines in Mag 8. HJN.

GLEN J DETTON Jr

Lemon Place was a small dead end street just east of West Temple, between eighth and night south. About four houses down was where I lived, Number 57. My room was down in the basement of this green stucco two story boarding home. It was owned, and ran by La Von Hales.

She was a round-bottomed heavy-breasted business like gray haired woman that once was quite beautiful when she was young. She had very long hair that was salty gray and would touch the very edge of her hips when it was not woven into a bun. She was always very busy around the home cooking serving meals, shopping, coming and going.

Some afternoons I would sit on Lavon's porch in the cool shade that hid the hot Utah summer sun, while my father was looking for work in the big city of Salt Lake. There was a man that lived two houses down that played catch baseball with his son. He had only one arm and would catch the ball bear handed.

This man and his son were very close, always together and in a hurry when they would pass by number 57. Sometimes this man's son played ball alone throwing his baseball against a long gray cinderblock wall that ran parallel to Lemon Place. One day the boy and I spoke and he told me that he wanted to be a baseball player in the big leagues, I was not shure what I wanted to be.

About six o'clock every evening a black 1949 four door Chrysler would turn down Lemon Place and stop at Number 57. It was Glen Heiner coming home for supper. He lived somewhere else in the city, and came here for dinner in payment for driving LaVon Hales around Salt Lake in his black 49 Chrysler.

Each night he would come in without a knock, and sit in his favorite chair, Slip on his black horn rimmed glasses up over his ears, cough, and begin to read the Desseret news. He was a big-bellied, bald headed, slow moving man that did not look very clean. I found him easy to like, and we would talk about current events and the Vietnam War.

LaVon was a wonderful cook, and refused to let anyone into her kitchen when she was preparing dinner. I once tried to come in while she was cooking and she chased me out with a broom-taking swipe at me as I ran out laughing. The aromas that came from her kitchen were wonderful apple pie, and stew.

After dinner was over the front room of this boarding house became like a large family reunion with all of the different people that lived in the home. Jennie was tall, and thin with a very sweet voice, and personality; she loved to share her photo album. This is me back when I was a young girl, can you believe it!

One day, while I was working, at Smedleys Fruit Company sorting through fruits and vegetables, the good from the bad, I heard someone yelling on the the back loading dock. I thought it was a fight and went to see what was going on. I heard "get the hell out of here or I am going to call the police."

As I walked on to the dock, I saw Jerry my boss standing standing in front of LaVon Hales, Glen Heiner and the black 1949 Chrysler was parked down below. Jerry was saying: "go on now get the hell out of here I mean it!" I'll take care of this. Jerry said what? " I'll take care of these people, I know them."

He shook his head from side to side and began to walk away saying: Get them out of here! Glen and LaVon were just standing there on the dock, they each held several bags filled with rotting apples, oranges, lemons, lettuce, onions, and wilted parsley. I Steped forward a little closer to LaVon and Glen touching their shoulders with my hands. Their faces began to wither, looking at me and then at the ground. "Why are you doing this?"

There was no reply. "I don't understand " LaVon and Glen stepped farther away from me and then La Von stopped and looked into my eyes. "We've got to eat!" Glen was silent; his light blue eyes focused on mine, and my eyes focused on his. I knew at this very moment that all of the apple pies and salads I had eaten in LaVon's boarding home came from places like this.

I said with immense sadness that she could not do this here and to please go, please. LaVon and Glen turned; headed down to his black 1949 Chrysler and got in with their sacks of fruits and vegetables gleaned from the garbage can started the car and drove down the alley, tires splashing in mud puddles as they drove out of sight. Back I suppose to Number 57 Lemon Place.

LaVon died on a cold November night baking apple pie, Glen a few months later, pneumonia and two years later Number 57 Lemon Place was torn down and replaced by a brand spanking new car lot that now sells import cars from Japan. Growers Market and Smedleys Fruit Company where I once worked is also gone. The cucumbers, lettuce, bananas, oranges, lemons, and apples have all faded away. Replaced by the multistory Little America hotel.

I have often wondered about all the changes that life brings, the happiness, sadness, fathers, sons, baseball, and apple pies.

GLEN J DETTON

----------

Subject: autobiography

Dear Hero,

I hope this is what you are looking for. Thank you

Glen.

DEBORAH FINDLEY

The Way Things Were

I was born in 1955 in East London, a coastal town in the Eastern Cape Province. When I was five, we moved to a small town in the Natal midlands. My father ran a business, and my mother was a radiographer. I was the eldest of two, my sibling being a brother fourteen months younger.

When I was born, South Africa was not a republic, but was the Union of South Africa. My grandmother told me all about the royal visit where she was one of the ladies who served tea to the queen. My grandmother had been born in South Africa, but all my other grandparents and great-grandparents were Russian, Lithuanian or German Jews.

I remember when we had pounds shillings and pence and I remember when we became a republic and had rands and cents, (and very little sense.) Remember, there were people of Dutch descent, the Afrikaners, and people of English descent in the country-remember the Anglo-Boer war- people have long memories this side of the equator�) Our system of government was the Westminster system. The Nationalists indulged in some manouvres in the battlefield of constitutional law, which resulted in the coloureds being removed from the voter�s roll. Later as an adult, when I studied Constitutional Law I reflected with hindsight that that was probably where all the heartache began, certainly in my generation. (This is not a treatise in Constitutional Law, and no, Hero, I am NOT going to write one for you!)

I attended a government school, which was segregated in terms of colour, (there were only white pupils) and also in terms of language, as English and Afrikaans speakers attended different classes.

It is no secret that the government of the day spent more money on white education than black. What is not generally known is that for years and years, and even now, the school fees of many black children, whose mothers worked as domestic workers, were often subsidised and/or provided by their parent�s employers.

Children brought up in towns did not get to meet many children of colour of their own ages. Kids brought up on farms, though, did, and learned African languages sometimes before they learned their own.

It was as if black people were "non-people". The post office had separate entrances for whites and blacks. I remember once, a clerk ignoring the presence of a black woman, standing ahead of my father in the queue, and my father telling the clerk to attend to the lady first.

There was a white hospital, and a non-white hospital. My mother worked at both. She was incensed that an Indian doctor was not allowed to sit and have tea with his white colleagues. She and some of the doctors used to leave the tearoom and go and have tea with him. She said she preferred his company. Another thing that outraged my mother was that a black person injured in an accident was not conveyed timeously to hospital because the ambulance that arrived on the scene of the accident, was a "white" ambulance and would not transport him.

I remember that park benches were segregated, swimming pools, public facilities, toilets, the beaches, and buses. People who were not white were treated as second class citizens. Children are impressionable. And I think that I would have accepted this state of affairs as normal if it had not been for the attitude of my parents, who tended to think for themselves.

Once, aged seven, I asked my father why "black children always had dirty clothes." He told me that when my clothes were dirty, they were taken and washed, and I had other clothes to wear. He said that some children did not have spare clothes, and had nothing to wear when their clothes were washed. Their clothes were not washed as often as mine as a result and that we had electricity and water and proper toilets in our homes, but that some people had none of those things, even though they worked hard.

I remember the smell of wood smoke in huts, when we visited farms. I remember my parents being upset by the poor condition of children and animals; the fact that dogs were tied up. I remember my mother talking to other people�s farm workers on the dangers of TB-still a major health problem here today.

I was fifteen the first time I left South Africa to travel overseas, to Israel where there was no "apartheid". I was in my twenties when I visited the UK for the first time. If one said that one was from South Africa, one was immediately a pariah.

I was not politically active as a student. I did not get involved in politics. The campus swarmed with informers. There were very heavy laws on detention without trial. My parents paid for my education and it was very clearly spelt out that I was at university to study and not get involved with politics.

When I went to university at the age of 18 white student were in the majority. We had a sociology lecturer who was Indian. I think she was the only person of colour on the campus teaching staff. When I went back to university age 40, it was completely different. I had the privilege of attending lectures given by a young man, who probably hadn�t even finished grade school when I was first at university, and who probably, because he was an Indian, would not have been lecturing at that university in the first place.

Things have certainly changed since I was a kid. I have friends whose political views range from right to left. I have friends of all ages, colours, shapes, sizes and religions. We listen to each other in this country now, and we care about each other a lot more. However, we still have major problems in respect of healthcare, education and crime.

DEBORAH FINDLAY

Debbie Findlay is forty-five years old. She is qualified as a teacher and an attorney and has a lesser qualification as a housewife, as her cooking skills are greatly lacking. She is owned by five cats, two dogs and two hamsters, and lives with her husband, and five children in Durban South Africa.)

HUNTER JAMES

CHURCH IN THE WILDWOOD

Not even the forced laughter of those who gathered at that hour on our front porch and pretended to look with scorn on "the nigger heaven and hell" could speak with ease of what was actually meant by those strange voices.

It was as if all of what they were hearing went back to ages now lost to memory, back to ages and eternities without light or laughter, a kind of doom that hung over them all, as if their own lives had been swallowed up and lost in the vast darkness of the summer evening, with only the sighs of men and women long dead and the cry of nightbirds far out in the pines to see them through the difficult hours till bedtime. I would often sit there and listen as the old people sat rocking and talking of a forgotten era when laughter and song came far more easily to their kind, his own father remembering and retelling all the stories once told by far more elderly men who seemed always to remember when life was good in America.

I was barely nine and my cousin Tess, who lived nearby and often came to sit with us on the porch, was not yet seven. In those days a Great Depression hung over the land, and a threat of war. Each year brought closer the dread that awaited us all. As children we listened closely to the grownups, talked gloomily of the coming hard days, and were soon back in a world of our own making; for, as children, we gave little thought to politics or to that "devil Roosevelt" who, as his mother always said, was "working night and day to draw us into a European war that is absolutely none of our business."

Often while the others talked of olden times when "life was good" we would wander off through the deepening dusk far down along the old, smoky trail that led past the pine and sweet gum thickets and on down across the open land to the timber where we had built a treehouse that summer and where some of the older boys came now and taught me how to smoke cigarettes. They liked both Tess and I, especially Tess, and they also liked the treehouse, which Father had helped build, and they would always look out for me at school if any of our class bullies ganged up on me. It had not always been like that.

Those early evening hours when Tess was with me were often the best times of the whole day, the scent of the honeysuckle intolerably sweet at that hour, mingling with the cry of the doves and whippoorwills. Once we did not stop at the tree-house to talk our own private talk away from the grownups. Some of the older boys would almost always be there, but on this evening my cousin and I were alone.

I could never remember exactly what it was on that July evening that led us away from the tree-house and on down through the big timber toward the old Negro hollow. As we drew closer, crossing the deep ravine, the moans and chants emerging from the Negro church that sat atop the little hill seemed almost to draw us on. How many times had we been warned never to go alone into that dark village!

Yet on we went, with hardly a thought of any danger that might intrude upon our path, unmindful that in some future age we would mock our innocence and curse those who made each day seem a simple and joyous thing, when life, as the grownups always said, was still good in America. When was that time? When was there ever true contentment in the lives of our parents or grandparents or even in the lives of all those old people, long dead, whose portraits hung on the walls of their houses? I never did find out; but on this evening we looked into a part of that life we had never seen and would never forget. We suddenly found ourelves far beyond the old hollow, beyond the pinewoods, with the dusk gathering fast and the tremulous voices of prayer-meeting night filling all the world with its ever-pervasive melodic and mournful chant. Just as they were about to turn away, fearful of our daring trespass, a big deacon late for the service snared us by the shoulders and dragged us up the steps of the decrepit, pine-boarded church, where now the chant grew more eerie and threatening still.

We stood in the door, my cousin and I, anguished and yet a little bewildered as the church momentarily fell silent. The deacon, his big hands almost touching the ceiling, held sway over the whole congregation, hushing the voices, hushing the preacher himself.

"Why," says he. "Dese hyah chilluns come all de way 'cross de big hollow, come all de way from whar de white folks lives. Deys all good folks, de chosen uv de Lawd, so de good book say."

All smiles, the good old preacher came down from the pulpit and led us to the place of honor: right up front onto the mourning bench where later all would come to pray, where now we were esteemed as guests more exalted than any who had ever dared cross their threshold, proud to have been chosen of "de Lawd." Esteemed as we were, we could not forget that now the full night had come, with only the light of a failing lantern to guide the preacher back up the steps to the pulpit.

The lantern failed at last, leaving them in a darkness relieved only by a faint light from the street. My cousin's cries went unheard as the tumult of the congregation rose higher still, and never once did the old preacher cease uttering his eerie chant, not even when he fell backwards upside down across the steps and lay as dead, eyes staring at the ceiling, sorrowfully repeating the frightful moan of which only these few words could I recognize:

Chosen uv de lawd

dat's whut de good book say;

O yea my brethren dat's whut

de good book say!

The good book also spoke of a time when there were giants in the earth, and I could not help thinking of that time, whenever it was, as I sat there in the seat where only the most worthy could sit, and found ourelves praised no less than those mighty men who first brought fire down from heaven, emissaries of a higher civilization, just as we ourselves were at this very moment, glorified and set on their throne of honor by the very black worshippers of whom they had heard so many tales of horror. At times, grinning and nodding, the old preacher would come down from the pulpit or rise from wherever he had stumbled and fallen and deliver his mysterious chant to us alone. Giants they may have been, but the hour had grown late, and now the congregation rose with a new voice of thunder and emitted another terrifying moan of good and evil, the same dark, mystifying cry we had so often heard from way across the hollow on Sunday mornings, the same also as on prayer-meeting nights or during their summer revivals. Honored, yes, we may have been-honored above all the rest, above all the white chilluns who had ever dared walk alone into that black community; but now we longed only to escape into the welcoming embrace of our own kind. He felt his cousin beginning to shiver and then heard her soft sobs as she seized my arm with new fright.

"H.L.," she said. "I want to go. When can we go? It's so dark and I'm so cold."

"It's summer. Must by one-hundred and fifty degrees in here. How can you be cold?"

"Don't know, H.L. I just know that I am terribly, terribly cold. Can we go now? Can we, hon?"

"Sure hope you aren't taking a fever."

"Something worse, H.L. I'm not sure I will ever be able to talk about this. Please, please! Can't we go now?"

"We'll have to wait a while longer, Tess. I think we're supposed to be honored guests, and it would look really bad if we just got up and walked out before the end of the service."

Her sobs had turned into real crying. "The germs, cuz. Don't you remember?"

"Germs?"

"You've heard what your mother says. How easy it is to catch their germs."

Now she was crying right out loud. It didn't matter; it was simply one more noise lost amid the thunderous moan that now pervaded the church and all the world outside.

"I can feel them, H.L. I tell you, I can feel them. On my skin. The germs. We don't know what they are. We don't know they'll do to us."

I couldn't say anything to get her mind off the "germs." I even imagined that I had begun to feel them myself. Like a thousand black ants crawling on the inside of your skin. The slow, insidious coming of the Black Death. Indeed, how many times had we been warned not to go over to the hollow alone? Tess was crying and shouting about the germs, and yelling for them to get out of there while there was still time; but the audience merely took it as her own hymn of thanksgiving, happy that she had suddenly been moved to join in their service.

"Those awful germs, H.L. I can feel them all over me. I just want to go."

"Stop it, Tess. Edna comes every day to cook and clean and nothing is every said about any 'germs.'

"That's different."

"How? They are the same people. There are no germs over here. I mean, no germs you couldn't get in your own back yard."

Even as I said it I could feel again the strange, creepy sensation beneath my flesh. I knew it was nothing. Yet I just plain couldn't stand it any longer; I had to stand up and scratch, bellowing out my own moan of fright and uncertainty.

"I feel them, cousin H.L. I tell you, I certainly feel them, and it's so dreadfully, deathly cold."

"It's nothing, Tess," I said as he sat back down. "I tell you it's nothing."

So I said no more, trying to convince myself in silence that there was really nothing to it at all. I knew we couldn't get up and walk out without any kind of explanation-we had come too far-and I knew I could never admit to Tess that I'd felt something crawling all over me as well, exactly as she had, and that it might be germs, or even the Black Death, or maybe ants that had come out of the dead wood, which was about the only kind of wood that kept the church still standing.

I could not let her know that I, too, had been thinking of nothing else but escape. I could not help feeling, even now, that I was being prepared for some primordial orgiastic rite. I couldn't help feeling uneasy even when the old preacher had led us to the seat of honor. In some such way were all those old Aztecs honored, I had always heard, down in old Mexico, before getting their heads chopped off.

Now I only wanted to get out, hoping to find the way, if indeed it could be found, that would lead us once more down through the old hollow and up the unseen woodland paths, back to the safety of our own front porches, where the old people would still be talking, as always, of a time when life was good in America.

-*-

We never went back to the old church after that. It was almost midnight before we found our way home, with only a half moon to light our way across the troublesome, rocky path down through the ravine to the tree house, where Tess could at last feel safe again. Or where I could feel safe anyway. Tess was still crying softly, certain that she had caught some "germ" or other and would be a long time getting her strength back. She had never gone with him alone to the old tree-house or to any other part of the property from which she could see the great hollow that lay between her and the most terrifying experience of her young life. I would always remember her almost hysterical cries even after the old deacon had come with his lantern to show them the way back to the footpath, even after they had met their own parents coming with flashlights from the other side of the hollow.

"What a shame that this had to happen," Mother said. "How could you do this, H.L, with none of us knowing where you were and what might have happened to you? Tess's parents are absolutely frantic. Did you not know that? How often have I told you never to cross into that village alone? And certainly I would never have expected you to do so when Tess was with you and looking to you for protection."

"Nobody needed any protecting."

"How can you know that, I? Tell me, how can you be sure? How can you know what might have happened in a place like that, when those people get to hooting and hollering and carrying on like the very devil himself?"

I explained that we had been honored guests at the First Baptist Church of Piney Grove and that we had fought off all the germs and disease and that just when we thought we were lost and doomed to be slaughtered as innocents the good old deacon who first led us there had come to show them the way back to our own part of the world.

"Shame, son! Shame!"

I did not tell her how frightened my cousin had been-the fright I myself had felt-before the old deacon had come with his lantern. I had tried to hide his feelings from Tess as well, not very successfully, because she knew, or guessed, that they were lost almost as soon as I knew it myself; and there really would have been a lot of explaining to do if the old deacon had not come to our rescue.

"Who was that man? Do you know his name? Never mind. It makes no difference. It changes nothing. The fact is that anything can happen in a place like that. Don't you know that? What on earth possessed you?"

I wasn't sure. When Tess's parents came to drive her home she was still shivering in spite of the hot August evening and beginning to cry again. I followed them out to the car. "She thinks she caught something-some kind of germ," I told her father."

"Who is to say that she did not? You should be very, very ashamed, young man. Taking our little girl into that filth. I'm afraid this will have to be the end of Tess's visits for a while. You need to understand that the colored are different. I don't know any other way to say it. They are different. And I cannot allow my daughter to risk another such encounter under any circumstances whatsoever. We thought you were older and would know better. You should feel very, very ashamed of yourself."

I felt ashamed all right. "Sure hope she won't be long getting her strength back. Them old germs ain't nothing to worry about anyhow."

"Shame, young man! Shame!" Her father stuck his head out of the window while backing out of the driveway. "I just hope you'll take this as fair warning, young fellow! A fair warning, I say, and a lesson that you won't soon forget!"

Shame, son! Shame!

I watched them turn up the hill toward home, thinking again about the church, the dark jasmine-scented hollow my cousin and I had crossed at great peril to our eternal souls-thinking about the germs, the old black deacon and the old preacher who could never keep his footing and could never stop chanting, about all the joyous cries and moans that resembled no kind of language I had ever heard, wondering gloomily how I would feel about it in some future age, when the time came for me to join all the other old men and women on their summer porches and to talk, as my father and grandfather had, as all my aunts and uncles had, of those long ago days when life was indeed good in America.

HUNTER L. JAMES
I came late to the craft of writing, just as I came late to the domain of books and ideas. Depression born and Depression bred, I came late to just about every endeavor that is supposed to give a man a certain amount of standing in the world, especially among his would-be peers-men and women who have embraced the intellectual life like lost souls grasping for salvation. Politics, social problems, art, music, anything that smacked of "culture" or "learning"-I was the last man on board.

Maybe that is why, at an age when waitresses in fast-food joints count me as a "senior citizen" (abominable phrase) and give me discounted coffee without bothering to check my credentials, I am working day and night to compensate for the follies of a misspent youth. Out of college, after four years of partying and developing only a nodding acquaintance with the world of ideas, I drifted into journalism mainly because, at its lower levels anyway, it was profession that did not demand a whole lot of its practitioners. Long hours and grubby assignments, but who cared if the prose was anything more than moderately adequate?

In the mid-fifties I left the eastern North Carolina weekly where I had got my start and wound up in Lynchburg, Virginia, just about the time Jerry Falwell was beginning to make his town famous as a center of conservative Southern Protestanism and himself even more famous as a maker and unmaker of presidents, as well as builder of a growing and well-endowed university and pastor of possibly the largest fundamentalist church in the world, with more than 22,000 members and still expanding. There we were, he on his way to fame and fortune, and me, a reporter on the Lynchburg News, on the way to . . . what?

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
Atlanta Journal and Constitution, Atlanta, Ga.
Regional correspondent and editorial writer, 1979-present.
Old Salem Inc., Winston-Salem, NC.
Developed bicentennial projects and wrote Old Salem Guidebook, 1975-77.
Baltimore Sun, editorial writer, 1966-1970.
Also: Winston-Salem Journal, Greensboro Record, Richmond-Times Dispatch.

AWARDS/HONORS
� Fellow for the National Endowment for the Humanities, 1977-78.
� Wrote editorials that led to the saving of North Carolina's scenic New River from a massive hydro-electric project and helped the Winston-Salem Journal win a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, 1970.
� Numerous awards for news and editorial writing.

PUBLICATIONS HISTORY
Free-lance
Free-lance work: Newsweek, Horizon, National Geographic (book division),
Colonial Williamsburg, Southern Review, Mt. Olive Review, Wachovia,
Historic Preservation, Roanoke Review, Oasis, Southern Magazine, many others.
Books
The Quiet People of the Land, a story of Moravian pietists during the American Revolution (1976), University of North Carolina Press.
Old Salem Guidebook, a guide to the history and architecture of Old Salem, N.C., 4th printing, (1977), Old Salem.
All the Forgotten Places, Alabama nostalgia, (1981), Peachtree
Publishers.
They Didn't Put That on the Huntley-Brinkley, a Vagabond Reporter Encounters the New South. (1993). University of Georgia Press.
Smile Pretty and Say Jesus, The Last Great Days of PTL (1993), University of Georgia Press.
Atlanta after Sherman (Poetry) (1993) St. Andrews Press.
Forthcoming, July 2000, The Rosary. Novel. Boson Books.

HunterJ@aol.com

DOUG MORAMARCO

Dear Hero,
I have been enjoying reading your magazine, so here is a contribution:

Knowledge

withered, gnarled, twisting arms and torso in

a field of a thousand crucifixions.

In spring the smallest of green buds break the

surface of the wood, re-igniting a

long slow soft explosion of shoots and leaves

and clinging tendrils reaching everywhere.

In summer the vine's mardi gras of green

gazebos down to the ground, its swelling

bunches of plump sticky sweetness, pale gold

or purple, shaded in cool abandon.

In fall the harvest robs the vines blind of

their reason to live, their leaves wither to

dry orange-brown and wind-scatter crackling

till pruning amputates the useless limbs.

In winter the grapevine is a gray corpse:

withered, gnarled, twisting arms and torso in

a field of a thousand crucifixions.

In spring the smallest of green buds break the

surface of the wood:

No one taught them why, when, how, or what for.

*

The genesis of this poem was that a couple of years ago I decided to try and sum up or express what, if anything, I had learned from having lived forty-odd years. Although I had once dreamed of being a writer when I grew up, I hadn't written anything in years, and since I had at one time worked in a vineyard for over a decade, and always enjoyed watching the cycle of the seasons, this is what came to mind. Although some of the imagery owes to my long ago Catholic upbringing, the outlook is actually more Buddhist .

I was born in 1954 and have lived all my life in southern California, growing up in Whittier and now residing in Rainbow Valley. I have five brothers and four sisters. I am currently unemployed, but have been taking classes at a local college to become a computer/multimedia artist.

hope you

are well,

Doug Moramarco

KARI ANN OWEN

DEDICATION:
to the victims of the Oklahoma City bombing and their families

In the past few years, almost as many people in my life have died or been assaulted as the remaining number of friends I still have. My heart burns as I sing the litany of names which will cry forever for justice and the peace of the Great Spirit which is serenity, completion and reconciliation:

Christopher Godden, murdered by the enraged ex-husband of his

girlfriend, May 1993...

Tony, mugged, San Francisco, September 1993...

John O., shot at, Richmond, CA, 1993...

Michael K., brutally mugged and beaten in San Francisco, 1993...

Don M., dead of a heart attack, 1993...

John T., stabbed, Oakland, CA, 1994...

Evelyn W., mugged, Oakland, CA 1994...

Scott, dead in a motorcycle accident, 1994...

Neil M., a suicide, 1994...

Robert, threatened by a drug-addicted room-mate, 1995...

The author, fondled against her will on a date in a public place in San

Francisco, 1995...

Dennis, a suicide, 1997...

Where are we? Who are we? Behold the thickening darkness, and the graffiti on the freeway signs all along Interstate 80, and the traffic that will not stop for pedestrians along San Pablo Avenue, where I go to the post office for mail every day because mail has been stolen from private, open mail boxes in this otherwise peaceful neighborhood.

Like a ghost, I stumble blindly under a winding sheet of nostalgic dreams. As a little girl, I rode horses in parks and bicycles in the streets of Brooklyn, New York. The most dangerous weapons in school were sarcasm and indifference. Gang violence was on the silver screen, accompanied by Leonard Bernstein and choreographed by Jerome Robbins. I wanted to be a writer, a singer, sometimes a dancer, and always ride horses and have a big dog. I wanted to be loved, but couldnít imagine such an impossible dream for a fat, hated, molested and spat upon child. Still, I dreamed of movie stars and horses and winning a Tony. We all had dreams like that. No one died.

Now the clouds of grief are so thick they seem like hands strangling my heart. Where are my loved ones, my friends, including the mugging and stabbing survivors? True, people tend to withdraw after having been victims of violence, for in this society it is more shameful to be victimized than to murder. If this were not true, the book contracts and talk show appearances, with overnight stays in the Chicago Hilton, would go to us, whose hearts are shrouded with a grief so thick it muffles feeling.

Yet, I feel. I feel rage. Why murder? Why, in fact, a propaganda of murder, the unasked, ubiquitous accompaniment of our public lives, which is the continuous media naming of unarmed men and women as appropriate targets of some apparently mad, sadistic but inevitably well-paid Hollywood screen-writer or publicist? I cannot open a newspaper (particularly the entertainment section) or visit a newsstand without seeing my face in the target, or the face of someone resembling me. I see at the center of the target my dead, and living but terrified, friends. I stare at the page or screen, feeling rageful and yet numb and lost and ghost-like, as might a Jew facing murderous anti-Semitic propaganda in Hitlerís Germany. Like the echo of jackboots and the "Horst Wessel" song, I hear the raging "music" crying for my rape and my death. The "music" calls me a "ho," meaning that in spite of my protests, I am really demanding to be used and discarded. I remember my fatherís hands thrust into me, shut my eyes to the memory of his face contorted with an Hitlerian rage, and, still numb, I continue to stare. My knees wish to buckle; my arms wish to cradle the adult children of death... Chris, still warm in his own blood, lying behind his living room door... John, running down a Richmond, California street away from his own business and the anonymous gunman... Tony, late for my singing performance because of a clever and malicious mugging at a Carlís, Jrís.... Michael, lead actor, who never made a performance of my play because of his muggingís blood and pain and terror.

One of my escapist fantasies as a child was a non-violent public world where the only terror was on the stage... perhaps Hamlet facing his fatherís ghost. In that world I would belong, that peaceful TV-inspired fantasy of a green, peaceful college campus and a humane and purposeful exchange of ideas. Like a compulsive weaver, I endlessly added more and more dreams to this tapestry of hope. Now, after three degrees and several re-traumatizations from sexual assaults as an adult and an onslaught of emotional assaults, I await a dispensation of my Social Security disability application. I live on less than $700 a month in the most expensive part of this country, in a neat though somewhat paper-littered concrete bungalow where I still spin dreams... plays, poems, essays and articles de profundis, songs.

But for whom? As a playwright, I notice the violence and perversity of what is acceptable, especially commercially acceptable. My audiences are nonetheless moved by my work, but such an audience is inevitably small and non-commercial, for I am still writing of the search for G-d in an evil world. Yet, until the last couple of years, I was never afraid to go to auditions and rehearsals in San Francisco, where I was last produced. Therefore, my dreams are harder to weave, for I do not know if the audience is there or if the physical risk is worth it. And my arms, like a mother deprived of her child, wrap around me to soothe the empty place which screams for food and warmth and breath.

Yet, I am not innocent, nor am I willing to be victimized. I am just scared and terribly alone, and part of my fear is recognition of how I used to be a little like the murderers and bombers and perpetually alienated losers. For I began life seemingly alone and unwanted: a sick baby whose care was given to a young woman from a foreign country who spoke no English, at least at first; who was so terrified of the hate of her father and sister that she would not, could not sleep, or be separated from her reluctant and impatient mother; who became fat, and felt a terrifying and implacable separation from a consumerís society which associates fat with ugliness and a kind of unmarket-ability as sexual/marriageable being. This alienation made almost every social encounter with other kids and even grown-ups an assurance of perpetual social failure which hammered me down like a psychological and social premature burial.

Because I am more passive than aggressive, I was violent against myself through self-mutilation and binge/starvation eating. My dreams of loving acceptance by a father and other family figures became imprisoned in masochistic fantasies of slavery, and proving myself worthy and lovable through James Bond-like adventures in which the hero earns the penurious approbation of his chief only after he, Bond, almost dies. I tried to die, too, at fourteen, with my parents� sleeping pills. A year later I became violent with my father and sister when the incest and emotional abuse wouldn't stop... in fact, became impossibly heightened beyind my ability to narcotize through fantasy, music, writing, drugs, overeating and self-starvaton.

Through all this, I held on in some small part to the fantasy that if I could only grow up, that TV-nurtured dream of the green and friendly campus would materialize. Even through brutal institutionalization and lonely and depressed college and graduate school years, I held on to many dreams like that. And some have come true. I have lost weight. After years of psychotherapy at the deepest and most painful levels, I have few if any master/slave fantasies. I have good friends who care about me, and a dog, and kittens, and I love my little concrete bungalow that is too hard to heat. And I have been able to fulfill some of my artistic and professional dreams... a Ph.D., some teaching, plays written and produced, public musical and dance performances, published poetry and articles and a little fiction.

And now that I have become that artist of conscience I wished to be, that public world of which I dreamed is no longer there. And like the bombers, murderers, muggers, I feel the same desperate desire for inclusion coupled with a rage to punish. Whom do I wish to punish?

Whoever made the rule which decided my father was entitled to molest me without interference or punishment, although his incest was noted in my hospital records.

Whoever made the rule that fat would be propagandized as ugly and therefore I would be verbally abused, spat on and deprived of food with impunity by both adults and children.

Whoever decided that my Ph.D. in religion and literature was unmarketable, and that for the rest of my life I would struggle along on food stamps, low fee therapy from interns and the reluctant charity of a mother who stood by while her husband and older daughter abused me with words and force.

Whoever made the rule that our economy would disgorge millions of people like myself, whose identity hinges on the fragile threads of just enough money for shelter and food, from either ill-paying jobs or welfare of one or another kind... people who have no protection against the rule -makers who none of us can even name, much less affect.

The consequences of these rule makers� decisions have made every foray I make to the grocery store, post office, dance class, rehearsal and performance a terrifying trial of nerves, much as growing up in my family was. Much as growing up in the 50�s was, when we didnít know if a diplomatic failure or "fail-safe" mechanical failure would not only mean the end of everyoneís dreams, but everyoneís world. Much as growing up in the 60�s meant the same thing, except then individuals as alienated as me, but more aggressive and able to cohere in groups, bombed universities like the one I was able to attend, my attendance itself being a miracle, considering my own rage at the incest and institutionalizations, and envy of my thin and "normal" peers who seemed from another planet, a television planet of secure families and suburbs and great grades in great schools... students who had never, I fantasized, been abstracted or removed from a normal life of love and remunerative work by incest, suicidal depression or violent self-defense against abusive family members and the resulting punishment.

If we students of the late 60�s and early 70�s seemed like cardboard cutouts to each other sometimes, itís because we didnít talk. Oh, we did, sometimes, about many important and meaningful things. But we rarely if ever talked about how scared to death we were of the university bombs. Or the muggers. Or the "white slavers" the Village Voice reported to be operating within a few blocks of our school. The public horrors which were the deepest influences on our world, on our conditions of immediate survival, were almost never acknowledged. Nor was the possibility that with a change in our economy, we, like the people we hoped one day to assist as doctors or teachers, might also be blown on the wind or tossed about in an incomprehensible ocean of numbers and hidden decisions... decisions made by the elected and unelected architects of both the economy and the war which was consuming millions of our American and Vietnamese peers like an Auschwitz oven. Those decision makers seemed, at the time, almost as unaffected by the resultant agony as the architects of the European Holocaust.

To you and to them I say this: I want to live. I want to live without hate. I want to live without this endless, endless fear and endless, endless grief over the losses of my friends and relatives and the demoralization of our public world, the world I was so desperate as a child to join and serve. Yet, as I contemplate the Oklahoma City bombing, the worst terrorist act in American history, I cry. I cry for the innocence and confidence so many of us never had, for the shadow of bombs has always caused so many of us, even the most aggressive and possibly unredeemable, to dread what could happen in the next moment, not only to ourselves and those close to us, but to the maddening, beautiful, world we all share.

All any of us can do, I suppose, is work for the light and pray. My job is to continually challenge lifelong disAbilities, particularly post-traumatic stress and suicidal depression. And I have yet to give in: this coming September, I will be celebrating 20 years of sobriety. I live amid the small points of light I create and re-create: service in sobriety, writing, dancing, singing and friendship. In spite of the growing violence of everyday life, from the murders and suicides of friends to the mad, chaotic, terrifying traffic, I continue to blow on small candles flickering within. How I wish my recovery could be an example to those with similar feelings of hate and alienation, so they might curse and forever forswear the bombs. How I wish the darkness would end... how I wish they could see that by asking for help and buryng their weapons, they could end a little of the darkness that is choking us.

Yet, the principal responsibility for ending that darkness lies with those who decide the conditions of our present and therefore our future. The violence of the terrorists often comes out of the same alienated powerlessness I have always felt, the same societal exclusion. Men whose usefulness, whose employability in society has been abolished at the stroke of some unreachable policy makerís pen will find, somewhere, a place. Unlike me, they will not live on a reluctant motherís or societyís charity, spinning powerful but unremunerative dreams. Lacking a secure sense of identity, something I have worked for years to nurture through therapy, sobriety and the arts, these men who have been discarded will offer combat to a society which needs and deserves protection from violent people as well as from violent change.

Please hear our cry. You might not like our words, our appearances or what we do, but we are here, and, like you, we need a place. No one begins their life wanting to hurt themselves or anyone else. No one begins by hating authority enough to kill governments and governmental symbols. Our cry is for love and honor. Our cry is for a sense of belonging, for usefulness, for belief and not contempt. As a sister of the gentle dreams of our most sensitive idealists and the savage dreams of our most alienated and vicious haters, I cry for the wounded and terrified to be loved before killing seems the only way to protest, to make a stand, to defend oneís lonely, unrecognized and seemingly meaningless life.

Many factors of American life separate us: economic status, race, appearance, gender. But feelings and needs unite us, or should. The ruthless downsizing; welfare entrapment coupled with lack of entry-level job development; the profiting from commercialized violence and commercialized perversion, and many other factors are producing a nation of random and planned terror. As someone who has emerged from a childhood and adolescense of pure terror, and is struggling to survive in the present American horror, I cry.

I cry for my losses. I cry for your losses. I cry for the restoration of a public world which includes us all.

Will my cry be heard?

Will there ever be light which can subsume the darkness?

*

Biographical note: Kari Ann Owen was married on March 23, 1996 to scientist Silas Warner, ending her poverty and dependence on her birth parents. Mr. Warner continues to be deeply supportive of his wife, including her artistic activities and academic speaking engagements. Both Kari Ann and Silas are now almost 25 years sober....a sobriety celebrated yearly in the community surrounding the Paiute reservation where Kari Ann was originally given her tribal name, Penomee ("she who rides the roads"). Kari Ann continues to participate in Native American life, and in January 1997 co-founded an Internet sobriety community serving Native American people around the world.

After many postponements, the trial of Christopher Goddenís murderer took place in March 1998 in the Superior Court of Alameda County, California. The murderer was convicted.

Kari Annís victim impact statement remains a permanent part of the trial record.

-=-

Biography of Kari Ann Owen (formerly Karen Iris Bogen)
933 Parkside Drive
El Sobrante, CA 94803
510-758-4507/penomee@value.net

Kari Ann Owen is a San Francisco Bay Area writer, singer, modern dancer and illustrator, and a scholar of Holocaust and genocide studies and tragic literature.

She is primarily a playwright whose subjects range from AIDS ("Terms of Surrender") to "Eagle to the Sun," which portrays a Native North American biker's struggle for sobriety. Her plays have been produced in staged readings and productions in Boston; New York; Boulder, Colorado and the San Francisco Bay Area. A short play on Vietnam, "An Exact Quality of Light," won the American Theatre Association's National Award in 1983, and was presented in Minneapolis at the ATA's annual conference there. An expanded version of this play was staged in San Francisco at both the Marsh Theatre in July 1993 and at the Potrero Hill Neighborhood House in April 1994.

In the Fall of 1996 and Winter of 1997, Kari Ann, with collaborator Susan Hart, completed three original screenplays, including one of "Eagle to the Sun." These screenplays are being marketed by agent Will Hart.

Kari Annís recent prose publications include an article on playwrighting and disability in the The Dramatists Guild Quarterly; recent poetry publications include "Tribal Fires," http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Studios/2594. Recent dance performances include a dance/spoken word interpretation of Chief Seattleís great oration on land, sovereignty and spirituality at the Berkeley, CA Unitarian Fellowship. Kari Ann has recently taught a pioneer modern dance workshop to women in wheelchairs and at various levels of size and mobility in Seattle, WA.

Current academic work comprises lectures on recently discovered historical material concerning transnational corporations and war finance. This lecture has been delivered at the First Unitarian Church of Berkeley, Kensington, CA; the Mt. Diablo Unitarian Church in Walnut Creek, CA and the San Francisco Jewish Community Center. A book proposal on sex and love addiction in society and the individual has been submitted to an agent in Washington, DC.

Kari Ann is married to Silas Warner, a scientist and science fiction writer. Kari Ann and Silas have a golden retriever who is a service dog and rides airplanes and trains, and a Newfoundland service dog in training who dances to Chuck Berryís "Roll Over, Beethoven".

PS: I am happy to report that my three most recent plays will be produced in Berkeley, CA this Fall. Two are set in Spain and Ottoman Turkey in 1492 and concern resistance to oppression.The third is set in the Presidential Palace in Santiago, Chile during Salvador Allende's final hours of resisting the American-sponsored coup d'état.

--

Please access my web site http://pwp.value.net/penomee/penomee.html for academic, creative, performing and fine arts resumés and work samples.

To learn about my assistance dog, Mischa, please access
http://www.golden-rescue.org/success/misha/misha.htm

For a self-portrait in charcoal, please access
http://www-members.adept.net/~mikeb/penomee.htm

An article I have written, "Size Acceptance at Fifty", is posted at
www.booksandbeyond.com

-=-

TONI PAYNE

I tread, softly,

as each footstep is absorbed by soft brown earth.

And I breathe, deeply,

As cool, crisp air fills my lungs with delight.

I observe, serenely,

the sway of the trees moving with the breeze.

And I listen, intently,

for the birds, calling to each other,

their joy at the morning sun.

I touch, briefly,

moist lichen, clinging to the bark of an ancient tree.

And I smell, receptively,

The freshness of the decaying leaves and life underfoot.

I watch, eagerly,

as a tiny caterpillar squirms across my path;

busy, busy in its daily activity.

And I stare, mesmerised,

at the majestic tree which once stood as a master;

now fallen, but giving life to the creatures that call it home.

I gulp, greedily,

the clear water that cascades over rock,

shaping its face for centuries to come.

And I gaze, marvelling,

at the rays of sunlight streaming down through the canopy

to fill this space with the very substance of life.

Here, in this special place,

I have never felt so alive.

Because "deep in the forest lives the spirit of life".

Toni Payne is a 33 year old Australian who has recently realised that writing is her calling in life. Having been published only a few times before, she hopes to establish herself as a writer in the new millenium. Toni brings an interest in nature, people and the spiritual journey to her writing. Her writing is also informed by her experiences in counselling, travel, living in foreign countries and various jobs.

KIRSTI REEVE

I can remember very clearly the first time I self injured. It was at Oxford, in February 1989. I was in my first year of a degree in French and Russian, and had been feeling as if I didn't deserve to be there, and was a total fraud. I'd taken refuge in the only thing I knew how to do - dieting. My six months of rigid control, 200 calorie a day starvation had just cracked. I'd experienced my first "binge". Desparate, I attempted to make myself vomit.. and failed. This was it, my life had completely collapsed. I took the only implement to hand, a small kitchen knife, and cut myself horizontally along my wrist.

I didn't die... in fact the blade did little more than scratch the surface... but I discovered that the scratching gave me a calmness, quietened the turmoil within. This then became my regular pattern: starve for as long as possible, binge eat, try and fail to vomit, so cut my arms instead. Within a week or so, I'd graduated from the kitchen knife to razor blades, and had realised that it was the bleeding that was important.

Watching the blood trickle down my arm, I could feel all the tension leaving me. Like the steam escape valve on a pressure cooker, letting the blood out would calm me, and help me get grounded once more. Then of course, there was the practical matter of cuts to blot (I used to use great wadges of tissues), sleeves to be pulled down, and "normal" life to be resumed.

Two or three weeks down the line, I discovered that I didn't need the pre-cutting binge ... in fact, that cutting alone could often prevent a binge. The choice was simple - cut my arms, or stuff my body with food, and get fat. So, the binges decreased in frequency, and the cutting increased. I really could not understand the people around me who were concerned by this - they seemed to much prefer that I would binge instead of cut, whereas for me, it was totally the other way around. Cut and scar this body I hate? Sure, no problem.

The self injury continued over the years. At one point, I carved the word "FAT" into my left arm, almost a brand. The psychiatrist I was seeing at the Maudsley hospital had already asked for one photo of my arms, and, when he saw this latest development, almost fell over himself. "I don't want to, you know, reinforce your behaviour at all.. but would you mind if we photographed this arm again please?". So I went across once more the the Institute of Psychiatry, where the same photographer as before had me stand with my arm out against a black background. And she laughed. Told me I was a "silly girl" to have done such a thing.

This kind of reaction was one I was to encounter again and again. Either total misunderstanding ("Oh, you must be suicidal, why can't you do it properly?") or disparaging dismissal. ("You silly girl. You only want attention.") Friends didn't know quite how to cope - some of them would think that I was trying to kill myself, and get upset and panic - others just struggled to understand why I'd want to do something like this. This was one of the main reasons why I decided to set up my own website on the issue: to educate as many people as possible about the truths surrounding self injury. (http://www.selfinjury.freeserve.co.uk)

I won't detail the years that followed. Wearing long sleeves in the summer, living in fear of anyone questioning me about my arms, not leaving the house without razor blades in my pocket, hiding in the toilets at college for a few slashes before the next class began... trying hard not to self harm, only to see the bingeing increase ... trying not to binge leading to me cutting more. At my worst, I would cut myself two or three times a day, usually on my right inner arm (I'm left handed), cutting over and inbetween other cuts, until today, my skin there is a pale mass of scars.

And always, always, feeling like I was totally abnormal. The only person who ever did this.

Things started to change when I discovered the internet in 1994. And found Deb's Self Injury site soon afterwards (http://www.palace..net/~llama/psych/injury.html). I joined the email list run from that page, and started realising that I wasn't a freak. And slowly, with the support and help of the therapist that I was seeing committed myself to stopping. Not because any doctor, or psychiatrist, or well meaning friend told me to. But for me.

There were ups and downs. I have a 'Ways to cope with the urge to self injury' page on my site, which details some of the distractions I found useful. Part of the process has been learning to see self injury not as something awful, or bad, but simply as a way of coping with feelings. No better or worse than, say, getting drunk. Or chain smoking. Or comfort eating. Letting go of the shame was the biggest step I ever took.

As for now... well, apart from a brief 'relapse' when a major depressive bout hit me in February, and I had a week or so in which I cut, I'd say that I'm pretty much over it. I have other ways to cope, which have become more common for me, and more helpful than hurting myself. I do still on my webpages, I still read just about everything I can find on the subject and do my best to reply to the email that I get. I'm a member of the National Self Harm Network, because I do believe that the biggest struggle is in getting this subject out of the shadows, into the open, and educating the population at large.

KIRSTI REEVE

MARGO ROSE

The Daily homestead was located in the north central portion of Kansas, in what was then rolling, treeless hills covered in the thick mats of blue stem and buffalo grass. This grass had fed the huge herds of bison for thousands of years and cattlemen were just beginning to appreciate when I was a girl although farming had nearly eradicated it. My grandfather, who had come to the homestead with his parents and brothers in a covered wagon from Indiana when he was just three, retained very sharp memories of the trip as well as events after they settled in the area. He often told me that they spent the last night before reaching the homestead beside a spring at a local landmark called Buffalo Mound some 10 miles to the east. Other stories were about how his parents, Charles Esock Daily and Margaret Inglis Daily, were afraid that he�d get lost in the tall grass so they wouldn�t let him walk alongside the wagon as they traveled. After they had settled, my grandfather and his brothers would try to trim up weeds in an effort to make them grow into trees and since there weren�t fences, my grandfather would have to ride bareback for miles across the prairie to bring home the family cow. If he fell off the horse, there wasn�t anything that he could climb on so it would mean a very long walk home after dark.

The tales have become a valuable portion of our family history and equally cherished are a cherry wood dresser, the kerosene lantern with the original glass globe and the heavy clay water jug that hung on the wagon tailgate during the trip. One of my grandfather�s most prized possessions, and one that I still have, is a small china dog that was given to him by a small friend just a few moments before the wagon left Indiana.

My great grandfather and great grandmother were among the thousands who took advantage of inexpensive land offered by the railroad companies as they swept across the continent, initially purchasing about 1,000 acres of prairie. The family occupied a cave some distance away from the home site while organizing the homestead. The old stone house that I grew up in was built in either 1874 or 1875. It originally had just one lower room, which had two �front doors�, and a room on the upper floor which was reached by a ladder while cooking was done in a small frame addition at the back. The house that I knew had undergone enormous changes through the generations. Interior partitions on the ground floor were added or removed, one front door was stoned in to make a window and a frame kitchen, bathroom and two bedrooms at the back of the house had been added. An oil painting of the house and stone outbuildings as they looked in the late 1800�s by the renowned Kansas artist, Maude Mitchell, is one of my prize possessions.

Later, when I was a girl, a new roof with two dormer windows replaced the old tin roof and another of my grandfather�s stories became very real to us. As other families with children settled in the area, a small schoolhouse had been built for the community about a quarter of a mile south of the old stone house. My grandfather and his brothers attended of course and at one point had a teacher who, in those lovely relaxed times, would take a nap in the afternoon and leave the children to tend themselves. It was her custom to pull some long, hand knitted stockings up over her feet for to protect her from the snow and one afternoon, feeling rather bored, my grandfather noted that one of the stockings was raveling. One thing led to another and by the time the teacher awoke, she was without socks and had no idea what had happened. Grandpa and his brothers of course had the ball of yarn and to get rid of the evidence, hid it on the stone ledge supporting the still unfinished roof of the house. We�d heard that story for years and discounted it but as the carpenters removed the old roof and leveled the stone wall for the new one, something fell out. It was a ball of woolen yarn, much shrunken by age and moisture, but still recognizable.

Life on the prairies could be harsh, but it also had a side to it that few people suspected. As the neighborhood grew in numbers, the young people organized outings of all sorts and in all seasons. The tiny �skating� lantern with it�s dark blue globe that my grandfather used then as well as scrapbooks compiled by my grandmother, Maud Forinash Daily show that the settlers had a rich and varied lifestyle with school plays, recitals, holiday celebrations and much more being enjoyed by the community. Much of the children�s education was then �by rote�, or memorization so that while I was growing up, I received much of their own education as well as my own. My grandmother, who also came from an early settler family, and her brothers and sisters would often recite long passages of "Hiawatha" by Longfellow and other renowned poets of their generation or quote extensive passages of "The Oddessy" and other classics, each trying to out do the others memory. Spelling bee�s had been a chief source of entertainment for them, one that I enjoyed as a child when the electricity would go out on the farm and we�d sit in the light of kerosene lamps and create our own entertainment. This �sibling rivalry� often extended into practical jokes as well, even when Grandma and her brothers and sisters were well into their 70�s. We still laugh at the story of when my Aunt Ruth and Uncle Jay came to visit one fall and how the two sisters and brother gathered walnuts, explored the countryside and at times caused mischief. One afternoon, Grandma found a very small snake and, wanting to keep it in a safe place to show my mother when she got home from town, put it in a large kettle with a tight fitting lid. She then went to take her afternoon nap. As soon as my mother got home, the kettle was produced and Grandma proudly lifted off the lid only to slam it back down in shock as a black snake nearly six feet in length shot up! All she could say for some minutes was, "But it was only 6 inches long this morning!" Uncle Jay and Aunt Ruth had gone out, found a large snake and exchanged them while she napped.

Even with practical jokes, I learned a great deal from my relatives. Practical lessons included how to judge if wild persimmons were ready for eating right off the tree, why you had to have two paw-paw (prairie banana) trees before they�d bear fruit, how to find wild onions, how to shoot a .22 gauge rifle and more. I heard stories of Indian raids and how my great grandmothers little rocking chair had been saved by lowering it by string into a well. How to prepare fruit leather (children today buy it as Fruit Roll Ups), how each lintel in the Forinash stone house had been carved by a different son or daughter, how my great grandfather Forinash built great grandmothers loom and much more.

Although some popular books seem to stress the lack of formal education in the �Wild West�, most children were schooled extensively by their parents if a school wasn�t available. Hinerville, as the community became known, very quickly built a school for the local children. The original school house was gone by the time I reached school age, but had been replaced by a stone structure a quarter of a mile to the north of the homestead. The building, which is now a museum, was always a source of pride to me as my great grandfather Forinash had cut the stone including the very thin and ornate plaque above the double doors. Rather than riding with a neighbor who served as a school bus driver, I would often walk to school, either on the side of the highway or along the edge of our northern field.

To children today, who attend school in large buildings in complexes and go from class to class at the sound of buzzers, going to a one room school house that held all eight elementary grades might seem rather restrictive however I never did. Before school, the �big boys�, the eighth graders, would pump water into our big stone jar for drinks and washing during the day (no, the school did not have indoor bathrooms) and then would help the teacher raise the flag. The big bell in the belfry would be run to signal the start of the day and we would commence by singing songs, usually ones that my grandparents were familiar with or the teacher would read aloud for a short while before we settled down and got to work. Each class would be called up in turn by the ringing of a hand bell that sat on the teachers desk to the front of the room to recite their lessons and one couldn�t help but listen and learn. One of my favorite pastimes then was to take the upper grades tests right along with them and thanks to my �home schooling� I could usually pass the test with higher scores than the older children. If one wasn�t busy with their own lessons, you could visit the �library� which was a huge cabinet filled with books of all sorts, read your own books, or �visit� with a neighbor by scooting your chair or desk beside your friends to work or play quietly. There would be a short recess both in the morning and the afternoon as well as a much longer lunch period where we ate the sandwiches, fruit and other goodies outside if the weather permitted and then played. On very rare occasions, such as when President Kennedy was assassinated, the telephone would ring and work would halt as the teacher went to answer the call because we all knew it was something very important if it interrupted school.

The telephone we had then was something that most people see only in museums and I remember very well standing tiptoe on a chair to lift the receiver then whirling the crank on the side of the wooden case madly to get a connection to "Central". There was no such thing as a dial or buttons to press and you used a series of long and short rings to signal to other people who you were calling. The one operator in the area would tell you or connect you if you didn�t know the other person�s �rings�. Our phone signal was four short �rings� and that would tell us someone was trying to reach us. This became a family signal in later years as my mother would honk the car horn four times when she wanted me to come to the house from the pasture or orchard. Telephones were something of a novelty still and one never, ever called �long distance� because of the cost involved. One also had to consider the fact that you were on a �party line�, a single telephone wire with several houses connected to it. If you were making a call and heard a click, you knew that someone else had lifted their telephone receiver and was listening in to what you were talking about. Things often happened to the phone line as well. I can remember incidents where a raccoon disrupted the phone lines as did cattle rubbing against the poles and on one notable occasion, a bob cat managed to climb up and become snarled thought the worst interruptions were caused by weather.

Kansas is known as the place where the book "The Wizard of Oz" starts with Dorothy riding a tornado into the magical land, but tornado�s, as I was growing up, were a genuine threat. We didn�t have radar then, or other means to predict when and where a storm would strike. A large �funnel� came through the area when I was about eight, and although it came during daylight and no one was seriously injured, it did destroy about a dozen homes and managed to produce some rather strange things. A man who had been out cutting wood saw the �twister� and knew it would hit his house where his wife and children were hiding in the basement. Racing to beat the storm, he found trees had been blown down to block the road so he got out to run. A short distance away, he saw a truck that had been left by a logging crew earlier in the week so he jumped in it and drove to where his house had been. His family was fine, but everything had been blown away and in the next few weeks, he forgot all about the truck as they tried to clean up. Finally one of the company men appeared to retrieve the truck and asked if the tornado had somehow dropped it there. When our neighbor said he�d driven it, the logger said that was impossible, went to the truck and opened the hood (bonnet). The truck didn�t have a battery in it and couldn�t have started!

By the time I arrived, my great grandparents were long gone, buried in the small cemetery under towering pines that can be seen from the windows of the old stone house. My grandfather had raised two families there but I was the only grandchild of his that lived at the farm so we were immediately �best buddies�. The homestead had survived through the Great Depression, two World Wars, the great Influenza Epidemic and other disasters, emerging much smaller but with a pasture, orchard and most of the original outbuildings that were wonderful places to explore and play in. "Grandpa" and I often roamed all over the farm and he indulged me in climbing all over the old horse drawn farming equipment, exploring the orchard and pasture, chasing chickens and not infrequently we�d get into trouble with Grandma.

Growing up miles from any type of store had made candy a rare treat for Grandpa, and in the early years at least, such things as pies and cakes were just as rare. One of his favorite treats however, was plain baked pie crust and grandma often made several �ahead� and stored them in the pantry until she was ready to fill them. Well, my favorite treat was lumps of brown sugar but I couldn�t reach the jar it was kept in and Grandpa didn�t know where the pie crusts were hidden. I told him where they were and he gave me the jar of brown sugar, which seemed quite a good exchange to both of us until grandma discovered what we�d done. We also nibbled quite freely in the garden and orchard, much to her dismay, as we�d show up not at all hungry for the lunch she had prepared and later she�d find all the new peas or ripe grapes had disappeared.

Even thought the farm was very small and most of the producing fields were leased to the neighbors to crop, summer was our busiest time. Not only were all the various sections of yard seeded and mowed, my mother began a rather ambitious campaign to remove old buildings that needed to be torn down � including the huge barn and hay loft. As I recall, the first building that she tackled was the old blacksmith shop that sat down below the stone smokehouse and arched roof root cellar. This was an integral part of any homestead as one couldn�t just go out and buy all the bits and pieces that a new home needed and most pioneers had at least a working knowledge of how to work metal. After nearly 100 years of accumulation, the ground was filled with square nails, bits of metal and other treasures that had been forgotten. One such item was the ox yoke that had traveled from Indiana in the covered wagon. We found it, half buried, there in the forge and it hung for many years in my mother�s home until it was given to another branch of the family. Next on the agenda was the �car shed� which had held an old auto along with all sorts of interesting things. Everything went fine until we three women were faced with the removal of the corner posts which happened to be exceptionally large osage orange hedge tree poles. Now, in our area, these were prizes. Hedge wood rarely gets as big as these four posts were and doesn�t rot when buried in the ground, in fact, it gets heavier and more dense. Mom had projects that could use those poles and she didn�t want to cut them but they resisted every effort we could muster to dislodge them out of the ground. Finally, I suggested (after many experiments with mud pies in my younger days), that we pour water into the holes around the posts and wiggle them until they came loose. This was done, but it must have been quite a sight to see the three of us standing around a pole and rocking it around and around. We got three of them out before dark fell, and left the other one for the next evening.

My mother went to work the next day and while there was approached by a neighbor who asked if Grandma was �all right�. Rather flustered, mom said she was. The man just kind of nodded and said, "Well, I went by the place a while ago and saw her down below the house dancing with a hedge pole and just kind of wondered." Grandma had decided to take out the post by herself and hadn�t thought of how it would look if someone saw her.

We lost grandpa just short of my tenth birthday, but he left me with a legacy of stories and knowledge that continued to grow. Our renovations of the house and out buildings enabled me to learn such diverse skills as tatting and how to shingle a roof, plaster and do simple electrical wiring, paint a house or sketch a flower. We built stone walls, canned fruits and vegetables, mowed what eventually became nearly 2 acres of fine lawn, trimmed trees and occasionally got ourselves into humorous scrapes. We worked hard, but had a great deal of fun doing it.

I have discovered that I use the knowledge passed on to me by my grandparents on a daily basis. In my home business, drafting quilting patterns, I find that I rely on the quilting traditions taught to me by my grandmother and that the blocks she used or created are full of historical significance to both me and other quilters. Our family �fun� of spelling bee�s and other �rote� lessons allow me to write about the designs quite easily and the memory of those long recitations of epic poems or classic tales have enabled me to enjoy reading the originals over and over again. Other needlework skills such as tatting, knitting, weaving, embroidery and more that were passed down to me through my grandparents are sometimes thought of as antique or dying crafts but I do teach them as well as quilting so that the knowledge will continue. Beyond that, I use the knowledge to create new items for my family to use in our home as well as well as use items made by my grandmother and great grandmother.

My education, in a one-room schoolhouse without running water or fancy electronic buzzers, has proven it�s worth as well. I learned to love learning and this has led me into self study of such diverse subjects as history, astronomy, archaeology, paleontology, veterinary medicine, creative writing, epigraphy, and of course, computer technology. Our family vacation trips, which were unique in our neighborhood, took me to museums, national parks, and historical areas which furthered my interest in other subjects. In fact, we went so many places with guided tours that it�s a family joke about how I once, as a young teenager, posed as a tour guide at the historic Kansas site, Fort Larned. Thanks to rather dim lighting, I carried the charade off, escorting groups of tourists through a tunnel, making up a different version of history about the area for each group. It wasn�t until my mother joined the tour that I got caught!

One of my fondest hopes is that I�ll be able to pass on the accumulated stories and family heirlooms to my grandson Robby, that he�ll learn and appreciate every bit of them as I have.

I was born in 1951 in the small community of Wamego, Kansas and grew up in the old stone house situated on the original Daily family homestead until a move to town when I was 15.

My education began when I attended a one room school house not far from my home for grades 1-7 and completed Grade 8 in the Wamego Elementary School as preparation for entrance into Wamego High School later. I graduated however, from Topeka High School and was married shortly thereafter. I later took college courses in various topics at several points in my life and have pursued several courses of self education in very diverse fields.

I�ve lived in many Western states in the U.S. including Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Colorado and I also lived in Kentucky for a short time. My family and I relocated to the Phoenix, Arizona area some 12 years ago and will probably continue to make our home here although I do still get homesick for Kansas. Our family includes; my mother (who still lives in Kansas), my husband Kenneth, our grandson Robby who lives with Ken and me, a son Mark, and two daughters Jennifer and Mary. Ken also has a daughter Julie and three grand daughters who live in Nebraska.

My main interests are (not necessarily in order): quilting, history, needle crafts of all styles, reading (all genres), paleontology, archaeology, astronomy, art, computer technology � well, there�s not a whole lot that I�m not interested in!

E-mail: mrosefutrhrlms@inficad.com

Future Heirlooms Web Site: http://www.inficad.com/~mrosefutrhrlms/index.html

ANANDA SEN

Whither, fleet footed youth?

Youth, ever fleet footed, so it is to the teeming millions of India. Like the sudden wisp of fleecy clouds it blossoms unknown, unheralded in a million lives, a million lives shiver and feel with wondered awe the unsung tune throbbing inward, an intense wave of passion spiralling up in undaunted spirit to throw down its gauntlet for the whole world to pick up. What an euphoria, what a joy there in the leaves of nature, in her brooks and rugged barren mountains, in her scorched earth and thundering drenching rains! Youth spills over and refuses all reasons, it spills over and throws all cautions to the wind.

Alas, for very very brief moments, in India. Moments as fleet footed as youth is! Staggering penury clamps down, mauling all the reason less joys, emotions, pathos.

Youth came to me in a totally different way, in a way not usual to millions of others. It came in a tornado, didn�t leave with the passing hell, lingered on and roped me to the threshold of a new entity.

I doubt how many in the West have heard of the Naxalbari movement in Bengal. A movement which died in its own myth, to resurface again and again in the remote corners of India, those corners where food remains scarce, where India�s age old feudalism reigns with unwavering dogma, where law takes the longest route to reach people in their exigencies.

However, that stir, that turbulence in the early seventies took West Bengal by the scruff of her neck and shook her with unbelievable ferocity. The days of staid, deep rooted values fell apart like sand-castles, all religions were equated to opium. China and her chairman became � our chairman, chairman of the mass.� Will I have to say it was Mao T�se Tung ( that was the spelling then )?

In my old orthodox city this great turbulence just threw us away from the old beaten tracks, those tracks of certitude treated with immense patience by our ancestors. We � about to enter our college � were doused with violent exposure to the raw rural India. We learned people rummage far and wide for shrubs and undergrowth unknown to us, to boil and eat them ( no fancy stuff, mind it)! That though the land wasn�t wanting, the landowners were few and the land less were countless. That untouchability � though unacceptable to the so called educated elite � was the rule of the day in the remote corners of our motherland. And; this was late and lethal a wisdom gained after days of senseless violence, the rural mass was unprepared to accept their self proclaimed liberators popping up from nowhere.

In this tide and ebb I floated rudderless for a brief spell, then got kicked back to the mundane banality. If nothing, I realized that arrows and crude bombs are no match to a mechanized army, and flaws and misinformation were ingrained in whatever was tried to be achieved.

What a great serenading to youth!

Each card has its two sides. If we lost faith in old values and staid beliefs, learned to scoff in secret at the kindly advice of our benevolent elders, we also learned to look around for fresh insights, for ideas and tunes capable of metamorphosing us into new beings. Italian and French new wave films ( not Bollywood trash bin ) started turning our eyes glassy, appreciating Western classical music ( not only Indian classical music ) came as freshness itself, looked with wonder at Cèzanne, Malevich; and heard the beckoning of American countryside in Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan. Really, the world had so many colours, so much to love and turn around!

Ah yeah, love � the dream world blossomed in its ever changing hues. Me � a boy and there is a girl. Ah ha, I fell in and fell out!

If Naxalbari movement took us by the scruff of our neck, no less bewitching was this inner awakening of a wider world. Looking back after aeons makes me crave for those nauseating days, those hazy twilight moments of joy, sorrow, passion, lost innocence!

Now I know those were the days when I began to drift. The firm anchor of the family tree looked termite eaten, the bond becoming more and more anæmic, the hot sun of future challenge fiercer, me beneath its merciless fire.

In the Calcutta of my youth not many people changed their residences. An inertia concomitant to the city�s immobility. Like accumulating refuse people were happy to stick to their old mansions or pigeonholes. The old lot of us found it hard to believe leaving the old brown Ganga and drifting somewhere else.

But we moved, the nuclear family of ours migrated from the north of the city to its southern edge. My parents, my elder brother � that was us. Leaving our ol� ol� house, our memories of childhood innocence, our unspoiled wonders we began the strive to be more pragmatic, more hepped up for a pot bellied jazzy world. With the family house gone were the days of puzzling arrivals of string of relatives, pet pigeons crooning from the cornices and eaves, knowing our locality as an extension of the family ring, and occasional dips in the old brown Ganga.

If I look back now, I see that was the eventuality laid out for our generation. The tone was frantic and the pace wobbling. We: on the brink of a rapidly changing world with our ancestors prepared in no way to guide us, country in an uncertain flux, yet overwhelmingly orthodox and puritanical. So some went for conventional hunts, i.e. jobs and career. For some it was the love of uncertainty and its challenge, running after cameras and movies and literary ground breaking efforts. Alas, I doubt how much ground was broken, if at all. But that was it, undeniable. Me hobbling around with movie scripts, still shots, again all to break fresh grounds!

The boy came down the clay-embankment of the canal, he was a small boy in the backyards of India, name of the place � Bhabar, in the region flanking the Himalayan foothills. He didn�t carry any flute, as is often written in poems. He carried nothing. His gingerly steps took him to the point where the canal was quite narrow, then he took a leap and went away to a wheat field nearby. On the other side of the canal I stood, beyond me stood a fast disappearing forest with its great bounty of species and subspecies, and far on the horizon stood the blue hills of Kumayoon, a district of U.P.

Later, I visited the boy�s home. A thatched roof on clay walls, a very small yard, couple of cocks and hens fluttering around, perhaps two cows tied to the staff. They, the boy�s adult relatives, were in favour of expanding the wheat and bean fields. A good majority of the villagers had the same opinion. Forest and her species were fancied stuff to them. " With growing heads we need to grow more food," was the cry. And who can deny that?

Those were the days when I stayed in Jim Corbett�s forest(how many now know his name?), part of an environmental aware raising campaign. Would they, those people as dated as earth, understand the necessity of green? Would they realize that green is necessary to bring rains, to grow their crops, to retain the fertility of soil and purity of air? would they? I found they would, given some alternative resources of livelihood, some exposure to the basic facts of Life Science. But it would take years. Perhaps longer than the time needed to remove country�s horrendous red tapes, who knows. Would the country�s arable land run out by then? who to answer?

So, mind it, nothing ground breaking. If that was a phase, so have been the efforts at writing poems, stories, changing professions to carry light weight and devote maximum time after creative oddities. The chase have taken me to Africa, its wilderness and raw strength, to Thailand with her booty of exportable exotics, India�s endless diversity and raggedness remaining a memorabilia. The world is not very small, contrary to the present buzz word.

And after years of tossing from shore to shore, from India to Africa to Thailand, now I�m really growing old. I soon hope to sport an unfashionable balding pate with wrinkles on the face and belly hanging out. If I ever see any grandchildren(a grand idea?), perhaps I could talk a little to them about strange things in life. Perhaps I could describe the great Songkran festival in Thailand, the festival of pouring perfumed and stinking canal water indiscriminately on each other, that too for days on! I can tell them that I had been to a Masai settlement in Africa and rejoiced over their hospitality, that life is ever mysterious and inexplicable. I know a grand finale is always round the corner.

******************

ANANDA SEN

I can't remember what I wrote to you in my first letter. Here's what comes to my mind. I'm an Indian, staying in Thailand for couple of years, in teaching profession. I'm forty seven, in the habit of writing articles, poems and stories; either in my native language(Bengali) or in English. Some of them have been published, in Bengali and English. Very fond of travelling, travelogues came to my pen(not an w.processor!) naturally and got sent to dailies. Great! Yes, I'm not a gung ho grunt. For pleasure I write and enjoy. A relaxed reader. Isn't it enough?

DONNA SKINNER

Remembering the Children

Large families are great, Dad had 6 brothers and there were 13 children in my mother's family. Together, my parents had 4 boys and four girls. I suppose the bigger the family, the more likely you are to lose a loved one at a young age. My family has certainly lost a lot.

My mom's brother died back in the 1920's, when was 18. He was with a few friends, on their way to swim in the river. They would hop a train in this boyhood hometown of Mark Twain, just like Tom & Huck must have done. The train provided a free ride to the river, a favorite summer attraction. On this particular day, Henry hopped on just as the train rounded a curve. He was still hanging on the train as it passed a train signal. He hit the signal and died immediately.

This tragedy happened many years before I was born, and more would follow. Mom also lost a son at the age of 18, my brother Darrell. He drowned in Salt River, Just a few miles from Hannibal, Missouri where we live. I was 10 years old but I remember it like it was yesterday.

One of Mom's sisters also lost a son, he was killed when he was only 14 years old. He and his best friend had gone hunting. Billy Gene was struck in the head by a bullet that had been meant for a rabbit. My cousin's body could not be viewed.

Another of Mom's siblings, a brother, lost his only daughter, Rita, at the age of 18. She was killed by a drunk driver years before drinking and driving was considered a crime. She was not the only fatality. It was nearly impossible to recognize what was left of her body.

Another one of Mom's brothers, had a son that used a gun to take his own. I don't remember much about Bobby, and I don't ask.

One of Mom's brothers was fortunate not to lose any of his children, although his grandson Gabe, who lived next door to him, was only about 11 when he died. He accidentally hanged himself in his bedroom.

Another cousin had a son who was killed at his place of employment. His head was crushed in a machine. I don't think they ever found out what happened to cause the accident.

For years I remembered the children and secretly worried that something would happen to one of my kids. How in the world did my relatives live through the loss of their children. My son was 13 when his school principal called and told me he was unconscious, an ambulance was on the way. Mike had been hit in the head with a ball and later had a seizure. I thought of all the children that had died and feared the worst. But we were lucky. I am so glad my boys are both past 20 year old.

DONNA SKINNER

Donna Treaster Skinner has lived her entire life in the Boyhood Hometown of Mark Twain. She is the Code Enforcement Officer for this town rich in history. Hannibal, Missouri is also the birthplace of the Titanic's Molly Brown, who was raised in Hannibal as well as Becky Thatcher and other characters you have probably read about.

After raising two sons of her own, Donna feels a special kinship with Tom and Huck. She invites everyone to visit America's Favorite Hometown and tour the childhood homes and museums of these famous people.

JIM TIFFANY

In Every Sense

Matty sat, appreciating the greenness. He was in his garden, his very private garden, set within another that kept him perfectly safe. To a bystander it would have appeared that there was nothing at all behind the vacant, unmoving stare but this was not so. Green filled Matty�s senses to a point where he could almost taste it. Sometimes he would feel the different hues and tones, contrasting one against the other. Or sometimes he would simply wallow in the pleasure of one particular shade of green.

He had been on green for a couple of months now. For a long time before that it had been blue and for two golden weeks during the previous summer yellow had entranced him and filled him to overflowing with its dazzling, sparkling delights.

His mother alone of all who knew him had suspected something was going on in that mind which, to others, appeared so dull. He did not communicate easily, took little interest in the things that should interest a boy of nine and had not responded, so far, to any of the several attempts that had been made to educate him either formally or otherwise.

For the most part, Matty sat, immersed in his vast, insular wilderness, obsessed by whichever of his senses was most alive at the time. He comprehended from time to time that one particular sense would take precedence over all the others. When his hearing dominated, all forms of music made him angry and upset as he struggled to separate and make sense of the cacophony of sounds that assailed and battered his eardrums. The noise of the vacuum cleaner had made him cry, as a much younger child and it still made him uneasy. Now that he knew what caused it, that it was necessary and that it would be done whatever his reaction, he simply moved to another place until it was over. That was how he had discovered the garden. There was nowhere in the house he could go to where the volume lessened to any bearable degree so he sat in the garden and was subjected instead to the incessant hum of insect noise and birdsong which was better but still not perfect.

When his sense of taste came to prominence he would be less aware of all the other distractions and would sit, sucking boiled sweets. He always chose the same flavour and always chose the same brand. Even then he would notice the differences between batches and even which individual sweets had picked up more or less of each flavouring.

At these times his eating would become very faddy, reflecting his obsessions with each individual taste. He would notice with disgust how adults would put several different foods together on each forkful while he himself worked his way through first carrots, then potatoes, then broccoli, then the meat, always in the same order but never with gravy.

For the present, however, colour had seized him and full though he was with green in its myriad shades, a sea change was about to take place.

Little did he know it but the sliver of glass buried towards the base of an old shrub in the herbaceous border of the garden was to affect him beyond change, holding, as it did, the key to his future. Sharp and shiny it waited there for Matty, a long, pointed fragment, strangely colourless, transparently charming but savage beyond belief.

As he thrust deeply into the soft, green foliage the sudden pain made him cry out and withdraw his hand to examine it. And the seeping redness that turned to a trickle captivated his whole being. Nothing resembling the deep crimson could be seen anywhere else in house or garden. Yet how quickly it dried and was gone. And how much he needed to see again that dark redness; so different was it, so opposite to his former passion for green. Green was over now and redness filled his senses.

And the ending was final, like all endings. A tale of how he searched for and found again that bright sliver of glass. Of how he found his pain threshold and, with satisfaction, discovered it was above his need to see that glorious colour once more and then some more. Of how, when they found him it was all over. In every sense.

JIM TIFFANY

Should you be so inclined, you can contact him at jim.tiffany@totalise.co.uk

CHERYL MARIE WADE

reprinted with permission from The Ragged Edge, March/April 1997.
web edition, Electric Edge, can be found at www.ragged-edge-mag.com

Thoughts on the 'Right to Die with Dignity'

Whenever I hear the phrases "right to die with dignity" and "quality of life" I think, uh oh. I know once again the A.B.s are having a conversation about me, without me. I watch the news shows, waiting for one Crip activist to have her say, one Gimp, whose wholeness is in question, to be given an opportunity to offer some real expert information. I wait through several incarnations.

The grand debaters bandy many precious words. They call on some of my personal fave raves like "freedom of choice" and "dignity". Who, they ask, could be against these things? Who, they ask, would deny these things to their fellow citizens? No one who believes in the great principles upon which this great democracy was founded, right?

Unh uh. I'm not buying it. As an aging, female Cripple who lives with pain and in poverty, I know too well the value society places on me. Every day I am assaulted by images that degrade me, that deem me a burden, a tragedy, that question the quality of my life and the worthiness of my existence. I live in a society that more and more forces me to fight for basic health care, that forces me to put the majority of my limited physical resources into securing my survival. I live in a society that in every way imaginable tells me I should not want to live. And now they want to offer me the dignity of having the right to choose to be put out of my misery by a licensed physician. At the risk of sounding paranoid, I suspect my best interests do not reside at the heart of this matter.

One of the things that disturbs me most deeply, besides my exclusion from the so-called debate regarding "assisted suicide", is the fact that rarely are the underlying values and assumptions fueling this quest ever examined or even questioned. The desire to establish a constitutional right to die is built upon a foundation of belief that the damaged/difficult and/or dying body is worthless, that the experiences of living with the damaged/difficult and/or dying body are undignified. Dignity. That word.

To me, what it all gets down to is bodily fluids. Okay, that's a tad flippant, but I really do think it's an important part of the story. Nature at its most unruly. Our very human essence is so damned undignified. And so uncontrollable. We spend most of our life working like fiends to maintain the illusion that we are in control, that we can tame and tidy nature. Let's face it: nature always has the last laugh. Nowhere does the old girl laugh louder than with disability and death.

God forbid we human beings should ever have to get up close and personal with our unwieldy, messy, smelly humanness. In every way possible, this culture's rules and values distance us from the realities of our own bodies in all their glorious imperfection. Just flick on the TV any time of the day or night and you'll be bombarded with messages about the necessity of looking perfect and smelling better. It's presented not as an option, but an obligation. Of course we want to hasten death; of course we want to make it easier for Cripples to die. Out damn spot. Out.

I don't think it's just coincidence that this urgent, zealous drive to give us more ways to opt out of life comes at a time when more and more of us are visible, living in community, being "in the face", so to speak, of able-bodied assumptions about normal. And not just the us that can almost pass as AB, but those of us whose bodies are wildly uncontrollable, we of the drooling, spazzing, claw-handed variety of Cripple. And instead of trying to fade into the nooks and crannies as good Cripples of the past were taught to do, we blast down the main streets in full view, we sit slobbering at the table of your favorite restaurant, we insist on sharing your classroom, your workplace, your theater, your everything.The comfort of keeping us out of sight and out of mind behind institutional walls is being taken away. And because there is no way for good people to admit just how bloody uncomfortable they are with us, they distance themselves from their fears by devising new ways to erase us from the human landscape, all the while deluding themselves that it is for our benefit.

And of course these fears that fuel the right-to-die movement are fed by economics. The high cost of Cripple maintenance and slow death. Limited resources and yada yada. Limited resources? As a society, we seem to have no problem paying for what we want; there are no limited resources when it comes to those things we deem of value. Unfortunately, our society's priorities are out of whack. America belches out billions for stealth bombers and rations health care; America pours its financial resources down the drain of bigger prisons while cutting hot lunch programs for hungry children. We shouldn't be surprised that we're on the hit list. All in keeping with the good ole American love affair with the quick fix. So much easier to kill something than to care for it.

As someone who's spent most of my life on the receiving end of one kind of medical treatment or another, who's been probed and pried by more doctors than I can count, I can say from sad experience that when it comes to disability the medical profession ain't got a clue. Doctors are the last folks, as a group, I think oughta have more power to do me harm. It's not that I think docs are, by nature, a particularly vicious breed; it's just their training. What should we expect from folks who are taught that to heal means to fix or eradicate? If you can't cure it, bury it. Chronic illness, disability, the slow train of dying just don't make for a comfortable fit.

My wariness about granting doctors more power over life and death isn't just because of the raw deal I've had personally. I know history. The 200,000+ disabled people killed in Germany as prologue to the Holocaust weren't slaughtered by goose-stepping brownshirts. Unh uh. They were starved to death and lethally injected out of their misery by nice professional men in clean white coats, men who'd sworn to uphold the Hippocratic oath, that same oath about healing that the doctors pushing for assisted suicide in 1997 USA have sworn to uphold. Even with the glaring spotlight of historical perspective, the murder of our ancestors is held separate and unequal to the murder of the six million that followed. Not one of those doctors has been called a war criminal. We were and still are, after all "special circumstances."

If only Americans weren't so confident "it couldn't happen here," maybe we'd be safer. There are few things more dangerous than the arrogance of assuming you're incapable of behaving inhumanely. Decent people don't commit inhumane acts in good conscience, so in order to maintain the myth of enlightenment, those acts must be recast in a positive light. Dropping the H-bomb on the civilian population of Hiroshima moves from atrocity to "life-saving necessity"; killing those we deem a burden becomes euthansia, mercy killing, the relieving of undue suffering.

I have to admit I feel inadequate to express in a rational, reasoned way what I understand in the deepest cell of my marrow to be a movement toward genocide. But no matter how awkward or inarticulate we feel, no matter how difficult it is to peel away the layers to get deep inside the truth of this movement, we must do it. It is our obligation as the ancestors of this country's future victims of the right to die.

Copyright 1997 by Cheryl Marie Wade. Cheryl Marie Wade is an activist and award-winning writer-performer. Her videos include Vital Signs: Crip Culture Talks Back, Self-Advocacy: Freedom, Equality and Justice for All and Here: A Poetry Perfomance. You can contact her at 1613 Fifth Street, Berkeley, CA 94710-1714 or send email to: GnarlyBone@aol.com

CHERYL MARIE WADE

Cheryl Marie Wade is a writer-activist and performer. Her latest work is the SUPERFEST International Media Festival Best of Festival award-winning video, "Disability Culture Rap", which she wrote, performed in and co=produced for Advocating Change Together as part of their Tools for Change Project (http://www.selfadvocacy.com). For video info, contact ACT at act@selfadvocacy.org. You can reach Cheryl at Gnarlybone@aol.com

KIRBY WRIGHT

Moloka'i's first ever East End Rodeo was held on the Fourth of July at a working ranch in Kamalo. The ranch was "working" in the sense that cattle and pigs were raised on it and slaughtered. Kualapuu Suprette sent a meat truck twice a month from the west end of the island.

My grandmother wanted to go to the rodeo not so much to watch the paniolas ride and rope, but because she'd seen an ad in the Molokai Dispatch saying there'd be a Greased Pig Contest for children. My big brother Ben and I were visiting from Honolulu. We called our grandmother "Gramma," a term of endearment that had survived from small kid time.

"Ya boys are fast," Gramma told Ben and me.

"We're fast," my big brother Ben said. He had the blond hair and green eyes of our Irish mother. I took after our hapa haole father.

"Fast 'nough ta catch a greasy pig?" she asked. She told us about the contest and how it would make her proud if one of us would catch that pig.

"If Ben doesn't catch it," I said, "I will."

"That's what I like ta hea', Peanut," Gramma told me.

"Easier than picking pineapples," Ben said.

"Like taking candy from a baby," I added.

"Good boys."

We drove west for Kamalo the day of the rodeo. I was full of anticipation and dread, the same way I'd felt before games in Little League back home in Honolulu. Ben didn't talk much on the drive. Neither did I. It was like Gramma was driving us to the doctor or the dentist. She was wearing her usual ranch clothes: blue jeans, palaka blouse, and a lauhala hat with a wide brim. She had white skin but her eyes slanted. Her mother had danced the hula on the court of Queen Emma and King Kamehameha IV.

When we reached the outskirts of Kamalo, we drove beside the ocean. The beach was a mixture of sand and mud. The water was murky and locals waded out with suji nets. The island of Lanai was a brown hump on the horizon. We slowed when Ben spotted a cardboard sign taped to a bamboo stick. The sign advertised "East End Rodeo" in black crayon. There was a long driveway across from the beach. We took the driveway and drove between two rows of sturdy posts and glistening wire. The Seven Sisters, a mountain range to the north, rolled up to the sky. The mountains were joined by shallow gulches that looked like steps. Four of the Seven Sisters were part of the ranch. If you looked hard you could see cows grazing halfway up the nearest Sister. The peaks of all of the Sisters were shrouded in clouds.

"What a spread," said Gramma.

The posts in the fence lines were redwood, not cheap kiawe like ours. The wire was strung tight, not full of loops. Their horses were lean, not fat with barley bellies.

We parked between some horse trailers and a barn. Paniolas on horseback were whistling as they herded cows inside.

"Bet I know what goes on in there," Ben said, pointing to the barn.

"What?" I asked.

He dragged a finger over his throat.

"Ya kids cut it out," Gramma said.

We walked over to the main gate. Families were filing in. Everyone was excited because nothing like this had ever happened on our end of the island. Gramma paid our dollar admissions. I could tell by the way she opened her purse and slowly counted out the bills that she considered this a necessary investment, but an investment that would reap great rewards. There were stands on one side of the corral and we found seats in the middle.

"How ya boys feel?" Gramma asked.

"Like a million bucks," Ben said.

"How 'bout li'l Peanut?"

"I'm fine."

"I'm countin' on ya boys ta bring home the bacon."

Before the rodeo began, a man wearing an Aloha shirt carried something from the barn into the corral. It was black and white and it looked like a little dog.

"I want that piglet," Gramma said.

"You want that?" Ben asked.

"It's so tiny," I said.

"We'll have a big luau," she promised.

We watched the man bend down and open a can of oil. A paniola held the pig while the man poured. It squealed and struggled so the paniola pinned it against the ground. "Rope 'em, cowboy!" somebody said from the stands and everyone laughed. When the can was empty the paniola let the pig go. It ran to the far corner of the corral and tried shaking off the oil the way a dog shakes off water.

The man in the Aloha shirt wiped his hands on his pants. Then he grabbed a microphone and welcomed us to the First Annual East End Rodeo, an event he said they'd have on Independence Day from now on. He introduced himself as Sam Foster and talked about the ranch being a smaller yet more efficient version of the Parker Ranch on The Big Island. Then he invited the children to come down for the Greased Pig Contest. "Doesn't cost a thing," he said.

"Shoot yo' pickle!" Gramma told us.

Ben led the way down to the corral. All the parents around us were trying to coax their children into entering. "No be shy," I heard a father tell his daughter. "Be brave," said her mother.

Ben and I waited outside the corral with the other children. Then a paniola told us all to duck under the wire. We gathered in front of the gates for the bucking broncos. Ben and I were about the oldest, except for the two Ciaccis. The Ciaccis were a brother team like us. They were Portuguese and about our ages. We'd see them every Sunday at Father Damien's Church because they were altar boys. "Holy mahus," Ben had called them. Somehow, we never got to be friends. I think part of the problem was the Ciaccis knew we only visited Moloka'i in the summer, and they'd probably decided we were spoiled kids from Honolulu. When the Ciaccis saw us they started whispering plans.

"Huddle," Ben said. He turned his back to the Ciaccis and placed his hands on my shoulders. He said he'd trip both Ciaccis to give me a clear shot at the pig.

"Don't do it," I said.

"Why not?"

"We'll start fighting. Then another weeny'll catch the pig."

Ben considered the point for a moment. "Okay," he said. "Then let's spread out. We have a better chance if we spread out."

"How do you catch it?" I asked.

"Pretend it's a football." He walked off and took a spot next to the fence. His head towered above the others, except for the older Ciacci boy. I could see Gramma in the stands talking to Mr. Ah Ping, the man who owned the only store on the east end. She pointed us out and Ah Ping stroked his jaw. She saw me looking and waved. I gave her a halfhearted wave back. One of the paniolas carried the pig over to the children. He crouched down in the middle of the mob with the pig. The little feet kicked but the paniola had both hands around its throat.

Sam Foster patted a Hawaiian girl on the head and welcomed the children to the East End Rodeo. Parents came down for a closer look and shouted encouraging words. The more they shouted the more my stomach churned. None of the children smiled�instead, they scrunched their faces while parents fought for views along the fence. Ben hunched down and took a sprinter's stance. The older Ciacci copied. A few parents stood on the bottom strand of wire.

"We're just about ready," Sam Foster said over the microphone.

The paniola who'd helped oil the pig entered the corral with a revolver. He pointed it up at the sky and fired.

"Go!" Sam Foster said.

The pig charged toward the far side of the corral and the children started running. Ben sprinted along the fence line and took the lead, with the older Ciacci right behind him. The younger Ciacci ran in the middle of the pack next to me. I tried sprinting but my legs resisted. It felt like I was running in place.

Ben caught up to the pig, jumped, and landed with his arms around the legs. The pig squealed and kicked away. The crowd roared. Then the older Ciacci had his chance but a Japanese boy ran into him and they both fell. The pig veered suddenly and ran along the fence line. The children cornered it but the pig turned around and got out of the corner. It ran back and the slower children tried grabbing it as it passed. Someone got the pig by the ear and it squealed as if it was being murdered. Finally the pig collapsed belly-up in the center of the corral and shot out a stream of pee. I ran over but the younger Ciacci was already picking it up. The pig kept peeing. Ciacci's shirt was drenched and his arms glistened.

"We have a winner!" Sam Foster said over the microphone and the pig was awarded to the Ciacci boy. The paniola who'd fired the gun brought out a rag and wiped oil off the pig. The Ciacci boy peeled off his wet shirt. Everyone cheered when Sam Foster raised Ciacci's hand like he'd won a fight.

The riding and roping that followed was fun, but I could tell Gramma was in a foul mood the way that she chain-smoked and criticized all the riders. "Call themselves paniolas?" Gramma asked. She never laughed once at the clowns. She refused to buy candy apples when the vendor walked through the stand. "Not payin' fo' any o' that crap," she said.

Ah Ping was eating a bag of peanuts one row back. "Ciacci boy not fast," Ah Ping decided, "but plenny akami." He tapped a finger against his temple.

"Fasta than these damn kids," Gramma said.

On the ride home Gramma doubled the speed limit. She was all over the road. She was acting as though she'd made a bet on a sure thing and the sure thing lost.

"Ya kids are slow as molasses," Gramma said when we got home. She shook her head and frowned. "Those Ciaccis put ya ta shame."

"Ben did good," I said.

"Call that good?"

"He had the pig, for a second."

"At least Mista Ben tried," she told me. "Ya did nothin' but watch."

"Who wants that poor little pig anyway," I said.

"I do, that's who."

"It was just for fun," said Ben.

"Fun, nothin'."

"You act like it's the end of the world," Ben said.

"Ya kids get your own dinna tonight."

"Huh?" I asked.

"Ya heard me, Peanut," Gramma said. "Eat coconuts."

* * *

The day after the rodeo, Gramma told her ranchhand Valdez to start replacing fence posts. "Everythin's busticated," she decided. She ordered wire pullers from a hardware store so Valdez could pull the loops out of the fence line. She told us to stop feeding the horses barley.

Then she received an invitation from the Ciaccis. I saw her read and

re-read that invitation for days. Finally, she asked Ben and me if one of us would escort her to the luau.

"No way," Ben said.

"Not in a zillion years," I said.

"And why not?" she asked. "Half the damn island'll be thea."

"Because," Ben said.

"Because yo' poor losers," she said.

Gramma spent days deciding what to wear. She took her suitcases out of the closet and tried on her "Honolulu clothes." She made a special trip to Moloka'i Drugs to buy a facial cream. She even had a transvestite drop by to style her wig.

"Sure ya don't wanna go?" Gramma asked us when the big day came. "Should be a big crowd." She wore red lipstick, Oil of Olay on her cheeks, and a salt-and-pepper wig. She looked like someone else. "How does yo' Gramma look?" she asked.

"Like one of the Beatles," I said.

"Like who!"

Ben laughed. "Feed your face," he told her.

"Ya puhi'us can fend fo' yo' bloody selves," Gramma said. She climbed into the Scout and slammed the door. Then she pulled out of the garage and sped away. We ran down the driveway and watched her turn left on the public road. I was relieved when I heard her engine fade away.

"Thank God she's gone," Ben said.

"Now what do we do?"

"I found this secret spot for papio," he said. "Guaranteed."

We walked past the point with our poles. I couldn't understand how Gramma would want to go to the luau after seeing the main course being chased down in the corral. I was glad our place wasn't a "working ranch."

I started reeling in the line when my lure hit the water between two coral heads. I hoped Ben was right and that we wouldn't have to eat coconuts again for dinner. I could see my lure cutting through the water and I wondered how the luau meat would taste to the Ciacci boy, the one who'd caught and held the pig.

KIRBY WRIGHT

I looked up my own name on a search engine and found an article in German about myself. There was an option to click on an English translation, so I clicked it and found myself described thus. My mother is interestingly described as a nut mother. I find it hootingly funny and hope readers will too. HJN.

09.11.1999 Boundaries of the handicap blown up 13-jaehrige Britin publishes Internet magazine - " writing is everything for me "

Of AP correspondent Mara Bellaby

Canterbury (AP)

Hero Joy Nightingale can speak, not go and not provide not for itself. But what has to say her, wants to do it to the whole world kund. The 13-jaehrige girl from the southEnglish city Canterbury suffers from a heavy neurological muscle disturbance and says of itself: " my handicap controls my life and determines, what I can achieve. " Internet however blew up these boundaries: Hero publishes since two years the on-line magazine " >From the Window ", readers in 77 countries has and in the Gastkommentatoren such as UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, which Canadian authoress Margaret Atwood or the anglikanische archbishop George Carey writes.

In the recent output of " From The Window " (http://atschool.eduweb.co.uk/hojoy) reports Hero on its journey to New York and Australia, where it received a price for its Web magazine. " I achieved, write almost all my targets " her and add directly that she cannot seize that yet. " I am nevertheless in such a way accustomed at disappointments, so much accustom to the obligations of the handicap. " Hundreds of humans would have helped her however from frustration and to make their dreams true.

The success of the young Internet lady journalist borders also for others on a miracle. " I cannot find a superlative, around to describe ", say Wendy Clarke, chief of a center for occupation therapy in Canterbury, which already worried about the two-year Hero. " that opened the whole world for it. "

In order to communicate with their external world, Hero needs an aid, that supports it the lever, while she krakelt him with the finger a letter into the palm. The assistant must detect these movements and note the letters. That is word for word a laborious, nerve-racking process.

" writing is everything for me ", explains Hero, which does not spend most day in the wheelchair and since seven years any more the school visited. " without writing are I nothing, because everything that I feel, think and need, must be transmitted by my spelling. " This love for writing, for the language - and to meetings with other humans - made that for Internet a so important constituent of its life.

List with desire authors for guest contributions

In their by books scattered rooms Hero sits almost all day long with its nut/mother before a PC display. There it looks interesting writers up, reads received contributions for its magazine and records its thoughts. That is almost a Full time job - for Hero as for its nut/mother, that lets itself be dictated the thoughts of their daughter to a certain extent and notes. Hero Joy Nightingale leads a list of persons, from whom she would have gladly a contribution in her magazine. She can understand only with difficulty, why some from them you write to answer and a small section of these also for it. " however it is very beautiful, if occurs. "

**time-out** in age of two year detect Hero, that they never so like other be will. That was, when its older brother stormed in the room, in order to wake her like each morning. When you became clear their difference, then it remembers, wanted to cry it - however even tears belong to the bodily functions, which them cannot control.

Hero wants not to be able to be reduced to its handicap, even if she experienced this repeated in the public: " these people are unable to look behind the handicap. " Which will overlook everything with such an attitude, " From shows the Window ", the " world-wide magazine for journalism, Lyrik, travel descriptions and experimental writing ".

wait and see

stuff already in: living with manic depression; surfing; a father with Alzheimer's, Amazon river dolphins; life in China; on being a cartoonist; Hawaiian childhood, part 2

Please keep the articles rolling in. I love hearing from any and all of you.

There'll be an essay on friendship.

It may help our circulation if you were to print a hard copy of this mag and make it available to colleagues, family and friends. Please publicise it any way you can. I am always looking for unsolicited contributions.

For submissions, just write to the editor at hojoy@herojoynightingale.me.uk either with your ideas or with a completed article. Articles can be of any length up to 3,500 words but must be experiential or first person accounts (or poetry - but be warned that far more poetry is received than is published) and should be accompanied by an autobiographical note of whatever length and style seems to the author appropriate. The editor likes detail and welcomes long articles. Articles are never edited: they are either selected or not. Contributors speak with their authentic voices. This is why you will see typos, quirky grammar, blunt vocabulary, etc. This is a deliberate editorial policy because the mag is a celebration of individuality. The editor is far more interested in content, style and emotion than supposed correctness.

We are seeking contacts to act as correspondents in UK Oz USA SA or indeed any elsewheres: I reiterate that I am as ever desirous of this magazine becoming less lamentably ethnocentric and reflecting a broader range of lifestyles, backgrounds and experiences. Eager beaver students (eg on creative writing courses) may wish to submit suggestions as to how they could participate on the Editorial Committee (do some legwork for me). I am anxious to obtain more oral history and some stuffs from 1st class sports-people, for example, and as you may have noticed am desperate for eminent writers, having set precedents that are hard to follow.

The Editor would like to thank Canterbury Christ Church University College, and Kent Education Authority for providing resources in the past that enabled this magazine to be launched. I continue to be extraordinarily dependent upon my dear Mama who is a most excellent slave. My friend Chris Young continues to be on hand to help with the IT telephonically, and my bro has leapt into being principal webmaster.

I am often asked about the design of the mag by people who would rather see the page divided into boxes and sophisticated graphics, and the content delivered via a plethora of chunks and hits. I prefer the convention of a mag that can be easily printed and is conceptually simple. This is my idea of both elegance and efficiency and I therefore continue this house-style even in the face of offers of free web design by well-meaning professionals.

David Blunkett has been kind enough to refer my mag to a reputable organisation for the blind to have it assessed for user-friendliness and I've been advised that my format is highly accessible for this group because of these elements which are so reviled by mainstream net.

Technical q's and probs should be addressed to my bro, Alaric. He talks techno-whizz-speak and I don't.

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