Make a New Road

Why should we call

these accidental furrows roads?

Everyone who moves on

walks like Jesus, on the sea

       ~ Antonio Machado (from “I Never wanted Fame”)

Lt. Stamets and Dr. Culber
from the Star Trek Discovery series

Those words by the Spanish poet, Antonio Machado, were echoed in a new episode of  Star Trek Discovery on CBS All Access last week. One of the characters, Dr.Hugh Culber (played by Wilson Cruz) was killed last season in an alternate universe and this season has been “resurrected” through a process of having his being reconstructed by some previously unknown life forms existing in a band of space fabric between our universe and the alternate universe. He is having difficulty adjusting to his new-found existence, with his former life seeming as a memory to which he cannot fully connect. As a result, he no longer feels a connection with his life partner, Lt. Stamets. 

Love is a Choice

In the most recent episode, "The Red Angel," Hugh goes to one of the Star Fleet officers who is also a therapist. He is troubled because he knows that he has loved his partner in the past and does not want to hurt him, yet he cannot just pick up where things were before. As he talks through his personal dilemma, she tells him, “Your experience transcends everything we know about identity.” The officer, in her therapist mode goes on to say, “Love is a choice and one doesn’t make that choice just once. One makes it again and again.” As Hugh is about to leave, she tells him, “The only way to make a new road is to walk it.”

One reason I am highlighting words from a poet today is that next week I will begin celebrating the month of April as Poetry Month. It will be a time to think of ways that poetry enlightens and enlivens us. Antonio Machado is a poet I discovered several years ago when reading some of Robert Bly’s translations of Spanish poetry. I was so taken by his poem, “I Never wanted Fame,” that I quoted it in one of my personal essays, “Form and Substance: How a Sonnet Saved My Life.”

 Make the Road by Walking

A few years ago, I had the good fortune of meeting Brian McClaren who had just written a new book, We Make the Road by Walking (any time you look up Brian McClaren he has just written a new book). I was intrigued by the title and asked him, “Did you get that title from Antonio Machado’s poem?” He gave a big smile and said that indeed he did. McClaren has some fluency in Spanish, so he was able to appreciate the poem in its original version.

I am thankful today for the insight of Antonio Machado. I am also thankful for the way that poetry cascades into our lives in the stories we tell and in the people we encounter. May you choose love today, and may you find a way to make your road by walking it – like Jesus, on the sea.

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Wednesdays with Dorothy: Finding Domestic Harmony

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When I was in graduate school in California, one night I happened to see the TV movie, “Like Normal People.” It was a true story based on the book by the same title by Robert Meyers. Meyers tells about his brother, Roger, who is mildly retarded and who falls in love and marries Virginia who also has metal disabilities.  The movie portrays the struggles faced by Roger and his family as they try to deal with his disabilities and it highlights attitudes that existed in society back in the 1970s about romance in regard to people with developmental disabilities. (You can view a scene from the movie that presents this romantic struggle here. A newspaper article about the real life couple can be found here).

I was very moved by the cinematic portrayal that I saw, having no idea that five years down the road I would be working with people with developmental disabilities.  At the St. Andrew’s Foundation, we based our habilitation programs on Wolf Wolfensberger’s concept of normalization, meaning that we tried to allow each resident to live as independently as possible and to enjoy the normal routines and rhythms of life. Forming romantic relationships and domestic partnerships is part of the normal rhythm of life.  Dorothy, by the time I came to know her, had settled into what seemed to be a happy routine living by herself in her apartment. When we had discussed her life at Partlow, I had asked her if she had any boyfriends there.  Later when we were talking about her life in the community, I asked her if she had ever considered getting married once she had left the institution. The story she told had all the drama and humor one would expect when recounting a romantic relationship.

Dorothy sitting on her front porch

“There was a time when I thought about getting married.  When I met up with Elmus, I thought he was a real distinguished gentleman. I come to find out a couple of years later what kind of distinguished gentleman he was. He wasn’t nothin’ but a drunk, and all he wanted was money and whiskey and whatever. He stayed with me one night. He slept in the other room [when I was still at the group home]. They found out about it and told him he couldn’t stay there, that that was under the Mental Health Authority.

He said he had been at Bryce Hospital. I met him when I was at ORC (Occupational Rehabilitation Center).”

“I thought about getting married and then I thought, well fitter, if I wound up marrying somebody and they care nothing more for you than anything, what good would that do?  So Elmus, he got mad and broke up with me. I wouldn’t let him have a twenty dollar bill. He ended up marrying Rebecca.  Later on, he claimed that him and Rebecca didn’t have no place to stay. They came down here and wanted to stay with me and I wouldn’t let ‘em. He and Rebecca got married and had their wedding reception at the old parish hall.  Rebecca wanted Elmus to tote her across the floor [threshold], and he couldn’t even hardly pick her up. One of her shoes fell off her foot. They had got married down at the courthouse. He was in his old work clothes and she got married in an old sweatshirt and a pair of blue jeans. I didn’t go to their wedding, but I went to the reception.

“Later on Elmus told me, 'I married Rebecca and she don’t even know how to cook or clean or nothing else.'  I told him well he made his own bed, now sleep in it. And I couldn’t marry him no how, if I had they would’ve stopped my check, I reckon. Later on, I was glad and thankful that I wasn’t the one that married him.” 

~   ~   ~

Dorothy had talked before about preferring to live by herself rather than sharing space with a roommate. She seemed to be one who had discovered that her own domestic happiness came with being single.  Next week we will hear Dorothy talk about some of the frustrations she encountered living on Birmingham's Southside.

Inside her apartment on her way to a party

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