Saturday, April 29, 2006
"People didn't do that when I was teaching."
I'm sure you'd assume, upon hearing my mother say this, that we were either discussing or watching something about some aspect of education.
Try again.
Last night previous to Mom's retiring (which has been recorded over at The Dailies as "0045" this morning but, after that, included three separate up-and-downs, each of which started in the bathroom and reconvened for a half hour or so in the living room) we were scrounging the TV schedule for something to watch. She didn't want us to read aloud last night, wasn't interested in watching one of our movies. I suggested several and whether she actually did remember seeing them, she said she did and didn't want to repeat them last night, she wanted something "new"). I ran across a show beginning at 2300, one we've never watched but which MCS recommended to me some time ago, Monk. I hadn't remembered that the main character has OCD, although I did after the show started. Needless to say, Mom was hooked. It will probably become one of our regular shows, assuming that we're not doing something else when it airs.
This particular show featured a scene in which Mr. Monk decides that he is finally "getting better" and can probably be trusted to attend a work related back yard barbeque, during which he judges the appropriateness of the hamburgers as they come off the grill, throwing one away that isn't shaped right. He goes on to comment on the placement of a bun top on one of the guests hamburgers. It was during this scene when Mom said the title sentence above.
"You mean barbeques?" I asked.
"No. What that man is doing. His nervous behavior."
I was stunned. All I could think of to say was, "Really."
The more I thought about it, the deeper went the mystery. Obviously, people did, indeed, display OCD when she was teaching. This isn't a new disorder. I'm not surprised that she can't remember ever meeting anyone who did, of course. This disorder is probably fairly invisible to others in most of its manifestations. What I couldn't quite get a hold of was that she mentioned, specifically, that "people didn't do that when [she] was teaching."
So, of course, I've been pondering this. I've come up with a possibility. It seems likely that most of the times in Mom's adult life when she felt most herself and most alive were when she was teaching. This is probably also when she was most acutely aware of her environment and practiced automatically deep notation of the people in her environment and their habits, since she was the, hmmm, environment leader, so to speak. Thus, when she notices some type of behavior that is "new" to her, in order to determine it's novelty she, now, flashes back to those times to see if she has a referent.
It's funny because whenever we talk about her life I am always aware that her head is full of constantly running personal videos of the thousands, perhaps millions, of incidents in her life. As you know, I haven't yet discovered a way to encourage her detailed description of these videos. I hope I'll manage to achieve this, some day, but she's not a woman given to talking much about herself and life, as a rule. In the meantime, my guess is that most of her "most popular" personal videos involve her teaching days.
Try again.
Last night previous to Mom's retiring (which has been recorded over at The Dailies as "0045" this morning but, after that, included three separate up-and-downs, each of which started in the bathroom and reconvened for a half hour or so in the living room) we were scrounging the TV schedule for something to watch. She didn't want us to read aloud last night, wasn't interested in watching one of our movies. I suggested several and whether she actually did remember seeing them, she said she did and didn't want to repeat them last night, she wanted something "new"). I ran across a show beginning at 2300, one we've never watched but which MCS recommended to me some time ago, Monk. I hadn't remembered that the main character has OCD, although I did after the show started. Needless to say, Mom was hooked. It will probably become one of our regular shows, assuming that we're not doing something else when it airs.
This particular show featured a scene in which Mr. Monk decides that he is finally "getting better" and can probably be trusted to attend a work related back yard barbeque, during which he judges the appropriateness of the hamburgers as they come off the grill, throwing one away that isn't shaped right. He goes on to comment on the placement of a bun top on one of the guests hamburgers. It was during this scene when Mom said the title sentence above.
"You mean barbeques?" I asked.
"No. What that man is doing. His nervous behavior."
I was stunned. All I could think of to say was, "Really."
The more I thought about it, the deeper went the mystery. Obviously, people did, indeed, display OCD when she was teaching. This isn't a new disorder. I'm not surprised that she can't remember ever meeting anyone who did, of course. This disorder is probably fairly invisible to others in most of its manifestations. What I couldn't quite get a hold of was that she mentioned, specifically, that "people didn't do that when [she] was teaching."
So, of course, I've been pondering this. I've come up with a possibility. It seems likely that most of the times in Mom's adult life when she felt most herself and most alive were when she was teaching. This is probably also when she was most acutely aware of her environment and practiced automatically deep notation of the people in her environment and their habits, since she was the, hmmm, environment leader, so to speak. Thus, when she notices some type of behavior that is "new" to her, in order to determine it's novelty she, now, flashes back to those times to see if she has a referent.
It's funny because whenever we talk about her life I am always aware that her head is full of constantly running personal videos of the thousands, perhaps millions, of incidents in her life. As you know, I haven't yet discovered a way to encourage her detailed description of these videos. I hope I'll manage to achieve this, some day, but she's not a woman given to talking much about herself and life, as a rule. In the meantime, my guess is that most of her "most popular" personal videos involve her teaching days.
