How We Do It, Part ?

Girl in wheelchair in sunlight, bookshelves, a wide ocean-green tile table with a pitcher of lilacs

I'm reading Molly McCully Brown's new book of poetry. It's called The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded, and I'm waiting to spoon oatmeal into Sophie's mouth as she seizes in the sun. We're in our dining room, and everything is beautiful. These are partial seizures. Her eyes are wide open with a look of surprise. Her arms fly out every ten seconds or so, her hands cupped. Her hum is a beat longer right before the spasm. I am patient, reading and glancing, glancing and reading. I look into her eyes in between glances. They are glassy, my own (eyes and glasses) stare out, not her. I tell her it's okay.

The Central Virginia Training Center
formerly The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded

Whatever it is—
home or hospital,
graveyard or asylum,
government facility or great
tract of land slowly ceding
itself back to dust—

its church is a low-slung brick box
with a single window,
a white piece of plywood
labeled chapel, and a locked door.

Whatever it is,
my mother and I ride along
its red roads in February
with the windows down:
this place looks lived in,
that one has stiff, gray curtains
in the window, a roof caving in.

We see a small group moving
in the channel between one building
and the next, bowing in an absent wind.

He is in a wheelchair, she is stumbling,
pushing a pram from decades ago,
coal black and wrong. There is no way
it holds a baby. Behind them,
a few more shuffling bodies in coats

I am my own kind of damaged there,
looking out the right-hand window.
Spastic, palsied and off-balance,
I'm taking crooked notes about this place.

It is the land where he is buried, the place
she spent her whole life, the room
where they made it impossible
for her to have children.

It is the colony where he did not learn to read,
but did paint every single slat of fence
you see that shade of yellow.

The place she didn't want to leave
when she finally could,
because she'd lived there fifty years,
and couldn't drive a car, or remember
the outside, or trust anyone
to touch her gently.

And, by some accident of luck or grace,
some window less than half a century wide,
it is my backyard but not what happened
to my body—


Some of you will think, why would you read such a book? Sophie is seizing in the sun as I read. As she seizes in the sun, her eyes glassy, I know she has visions. There is an angel in the tree just outside the window and in her eyes, some bit of glitter. The word glint.  I know she sees something more than I, I who see only purple lilacs in her eyes. In some far-off time or long ago, she might be have been a saint. She might have had visions, cured the sick, seen Mary in the garden, been Joan of Arc leading men into right. If she'd been allowed to be an epileptic, if there had been no fixing. No drugs. She might have lived not terribly but terrible (formidable in nature). She might have been burned, though, alive. We've had advancements, they say. There have been great advancements in the field of neurology, a medical paper insists. The word insist. I think of those saints with their hands held up and toward the sky. Appeal or protest or insist. Mary's hands lie crossed over her stomach when the Angel Gabriel visits, as he tells her the terrible news. Formidable in nature.

These are the thoughts that come to me as I sit waiting for Sophie to stop seizing. I am reading this book of poems about a terrible place where epileptics and the feeble-minded (Sophie) were locked up and hidden away, sterilized. This happened even into the late twentieth century. The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded. Sophie's spasms stop with a sigh and release. If she had wings, they would rustle as she settled. I can feed her the oatmeal now.


You see where I'm going. Instead of terror, dyskinesia, paranoid delusions, suffering, it is visions, divinity, miracle, the heady scent of lilacs.

Sophie and Me in Blue

When I was a small Catholic girl like most small Catholic girls I was enamored of the saints. I knelt in church (and sat and stood and sat and kneeled and stood and sat and kneeled) and stood and saw spots or tiny lights and then I'd blink, sweat would bead, roll down the nape of my neck, the priest's voice a drone, I think I'm going to faint, I'd think and blink, my hands smooth and brown on the pew in front of me. Helen who carried the cross will be my name, I said when I was twelve. Twelve! I'd kneel then and think of the saints. Yesterday afternoon, I was drifting, I was angry, I was drifting and angry about the day, the day after the show about weed and seizures, the day that began, again, with seizures. I was angry about my cousin, my age, dying of cancer far away, a cousin who I loved in my childhood, who loved to read like me, who wrote me letters sealed with a kiss. Her name is Maria. I drove my car to the bank in the little village just down from the church where I used to go (to stand, to kneel, to sit, to stand, to kneel) and I was angry when I got out of the car and walked, a beautiful day, it's always, always a beautiful day, and four beautiful people sat in front of a restaurant and spoke what was that? Italian? Yes, Italian. Italian rolling off their tongues like saints. Jesus Christ, I thought, this town is impossible. I walked into the bank and then out and the Italians were getting up from their table and walking, walking in front of me, two women and two men, all beautiful, the Italian still rolling off their tongues like saints, one woman had a band of smooth brown skin, naked above her ass, and I was still drifting, angry, when I got into my car and drove back home. At a stoplight, I looked over into the car next to me, a woman in full Muslim garb, her head covered, sat at the wheel, her daughter in the back seat covered as well. The light was still red and I was still angry, and the daughter was young but not young enough to sit in a booster seat. She looked ridiculous in the booster seat, stupid in her veil. Take off your bullshit cloak of modesty, I might have hissed, your daughter is too big for that car seat. The light turned green, I looked away, I drove away. When I got home I sat with Sophie, I stood with Sophie, I stood and sat and kneeled. I blinked, a bead of sweat rolled down the nape of my neck and down my back, I was wearing a blue dress. I am not a saint.

Giveaway Winner and other stuff

Drum roll, please.....

Unlike some other possibly shady special needs stuff goings-on in the blog world (ahem), this blog is awarding one lucky winner a copy of Mothers of Intention, edited by PunditMom's Joanne Bamberger that includes some punditry of mine.

And the winner is:

KARIO of The Writing Life who, I believe, is having a serendipitous week! Congratulations, Kario. Please email me your mailing address at elsophie at gmail dot com.

The other stuff is this interesting article about nuns and brains and Alzheimers and the ability to create long, complicated, complex sentences in a constant, concerted effort to maintain your linguistic skills, because such maintenance is associated with a lack of dementia.

Veddy, veddy interesting.

Speaking of brains -- and nuns -- about twenty-five years ago, I read a really interesting book about anorexia and the female saints of old -- how their fasting and self-flagellation and deprivations were perhaps the exact manifestations of the modern disease of anorexia except directed toward "God." Anorexia mirabilis literally means miraculous lack of appetite. Scary stuff.

Catherine of Siena -- saint/mystic or anorexic?

I read another book, too, that spoke of some of the famous female saints as being epileptic -- that their visions and hallucinations were of the temporal lobe variety. Fascinating stuff --

Jules Bastien le Page's Joan of Arc