Chuck (Yeager) and Jeneva

Chuck Yeager

My friend and fellow parent of a child with disabilities, Jeneva of Busily Seeking...Continual Change is really one of the best, if not the best writer out there in the big, wide world. She's wickedly clever, a poet and essayist in a grand tradition. Recently back from a prestigious writer colony where she worked on an upcoming book, she has begun blogging again, and I'm just riveted, as usual, to what she's writing about and how she does it. Here's a snippet to whet your appetite:

I remember writing last year about the Blackbird, the plane built to fly three times the speed of sound, the plane whose turns had to be planned 200-300 miles in advance. And how that made me think of Phoebe Snow and her disabled daughter and the risks we're forced to take, the flights we buckle ourselves in for without understanding how powerful the ride will be.

That is life with Robert, flying faster than my skills allow, hoping I can make the machine accomplish what it was meant to do: fly faster than the insurance companies can head us off, out-race ungenerous predictions of Robert's future, outrun this insane political climate in which ingratiating smiling jackasses simultaneously invoke American exceptionalism and poor-mouth the possibility of a shared effort and responsibility in accomplishing what this nation needs to do for us all--to prove the point, that is, that we are an exceptional and unique people (if that is indeed, the hegemonic and ultimately obnoxious point we'd like to make). I am, frankly, worried that under either a Romney or an Obama administration we will see Medicare vouchers tossed casually to people like my son. Because asking Romney to fly this sleek beautiful craft we call the United State of America is like strapping a black lab on top of the cockpit and Obama doesn't seem to want to get into the cockpit at all right now (hey, what gives with his no-show in Wisconsin?).

Is your appetite whetted? Go read the rest of that and more.