First We Read It, Then We Live It
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Minneapolis, Minnesota
The setting: Seventh grade English class. It was towards the end of the week, perhaps. Instead of learning how to diagram sentences, it was a day for story telling.
That is not always easy in a seventh grade class. We figited, as seventh grade boys are apt do, astonished at the beauty of the girl just behind us, or yes, over to the side too. But no it was time to pay attention and so we settled in.
Within a few minutes of Mrs. Hewitt’s reading Flowers for Algernon, we were all entranced by the story and the emotion conveyed in a voice that cared. Algernon was a mouse. And not a very good mouse at that. Put him in a maze and he’d miss his turn time after time, as lab mice are apt to do. Charlie was his keeper. Charlie was slow-witted. Feeding a mouse was all he could do. When the quick-witted co-workers at the lab encountered Charlie they laughed at him, tricked him think mopping the bathroom floor was a big deal. Our hearts broke when Charlie laughed along with them. Teasing, something seventh graders know a lot about, can be cruel. The story wasn’t just about Charlie. It was about us too.
But then, one day things changed. The scientests gave Algernon a new drug. First thing you know Algernon wasn’t missing the turns in his maze. Day by day he got better, and better, faster and faster. The ordinary mousehad turned into a genius. If it worked for Algernon, wouldn’t it work for Charlie as well? Why not try? What’s to be lost? And so Charlie took the dose. He too began solving problems he could never have solved before. And he began understanding how he had been abused. He now knew what we knew.
One day, however, Algernon began missing turns again. It was nothing, at first, just a mistake. But then there were two. Then six. Inexorably, the genius became nothing more than a mouse with a two-bit name. We knew what would happen. If Algernon deterioirated, so would Charlie. And, sure enough, that’s what happened. Mrs. Hewitt could scarcely finish the story without holding back the tears that were also in our eyes on that September afternoon. When Algernon died, Charlie brought a boquet of flowers.
The story spoke of life. It was the rise and fall of humanity, of individuals, of science itself, of life. We would never forget that afternoon. In the fifty years that followed, we would discover for ourselves. Literature is always prelude to what we will one day perceive.
After my second stroke, the rehab center tried to restore my cognative capacity. The therapist set a simple subtraction problem on the table before me. It should have been easy. All I had to do was borrow and subtract. I’d learned how to do that in the third grade. I stared at the numbers, and realized I had absolutely no idea how to subtract. I stared at them again. Nothing happened. Nothing.
Algernon, and the truths of a September afternoon, flooded through me. ”I’m Algernon,” I said to myself. I should know how to do this, but I have no idea where to even start. For the first time in four months, I began to weep. The therapist put her hand on my shoulder and said, “That’s okay, we’ll get it later.”
In literature, as in life, there is comedy and tragedy, both of them true. Knowing, and loving, Flowers for Algernon revealed the power and depth of both. I emerge in the light of two afternoons . . . with a single story of life.
Tomorrow . . . an amazing post script to this story. I promise.
Until then,
Soft walking,
Larry