July 4th, US Independence Day 2022, our posts become more complex.
We continue sharing the back-and-forth of the Covid pandemic while also focusing on a new aspect of the ongoing degradation of our planet: toxic contamination. Specifically, we follow the effect of toxic contamination on one human being.
To back up: Regular readers understand this blog’s fundamental assertion about the Covid pandemic: shrinking wilderness and environmental destruction equate with increasing risks of pathogenic spillover from animals to people >>
Introduction
But what of other contaminants around us?
What of the companies that know/knew their products are/were toxic, yet continue to pedal those products to unwary customers?
I was totally out of my element.
An English teacher assigned a project to search our poetry book, Inscapes, for a poem that best described a classmate.
I forget the poem I found, nor whom it described.
I still clearly recall the poem a girl named Mary – one of the class “brain boxes” – read to describe me.
How did she know that I regularly “slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings”?
Did she know that I did that to avoid the reality of my family life?
Indeed, “slipping the surly bonds of Earth” was a life-saver for this young girl who regularly inserted her skinny body between fighting parents. This, you understand, to prevent them physically injuring one another.
Did Mary know this?
If so, how?
I wish I could say Mary and I were inseparable from that day onwards.
We weren’t.
Mary, a gentle, quiet, observant intellectual, came from an intellectual family.
I came from an under-educated, intellectually pretentious, quick-to-anger, slow-to-listen family.
Quiet at school, I was too worried and watchful to afford the luxury of developing my intellect. Once the school day was over, however, I’d disappear into the countryside on horseback, and “dance the skies on laughter-silvered wings”.
After that life-affirming interlude on “my” piece of heaven, it was back to the chaos of my family.
During our five years of high school, Mary and I remained aware of one another although we seldom socialized. As young adults, we separately departed South Africa, her into university, me into marriage. Miraculously we re-discovered one another living in California. Indeed, we live in the same condo complex on the beach, Mary on floor 3, me on floor 1.
Mary pursued a disciplined intellectual life while I pursued an undisciplined quasi-intellectual artistic path. These days, our friendship is deep and honest, and we enjoy lovingly challenging one another.
Now, through some quirk of environment, her lungs are contaminated with asbestos.
Her surgery, pleurocentesis and decortication – P&D – is scheduled for 15 July.
Meet Meso Mary
I met Mary S. my first year of high school in Kwa Zulu Natal, South Africa. I’d transferred from a country grammar school with a student body of fewer than 80 students – from 5-year-olds in Class One to 11-year-olds in Standard Five - to a high school with more than 1,000 girls, from 12 to 17 years old.I was totally out of my element.
An English teacher assigned a project to search our poetry book, Inscapes, for a poem that best described a classmate.
I forget the poem I found, nor whom it described.
I still clearly recall the poem a girl named Mary – one of the class “brain boxes” – read to describe me.
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of EarthThe poem, the situation – a stranger my own age associating anonymous me with such beautiful words - blew my mind.
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air ....
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark nor ever eagle flew—
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
- “High Flight”, JOHN GILLESPIE MAGEE JR.
How did she know that I regularly “slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings”?
Did she know that I did that to avoid the reality of my family life?
Indeed, “slipping the surly bonds of Earth” was a life-saver for this young girl who regularly inserted her skinny body between fighting parents. This, you understand, to prevent them physically injuring one another.
Did Mary know this?
If so, how?
I wish I could say Mary and I were inseparable from that day onwards.
We weren’t.
Mary, a gentle, quiet, observant intellectual, came from an intellectual family.
I came from an under-educated, intellectually pretentious, quick-to-anger, slow-to-listen family.
Quiet at school, I was too worried and watchful to afford the luxury of developing my intellect. Once the school day was over, however, I’d disappear into the countryside on horseback, and “dance the skies on laughter-silvered wings”.
After that life-affirming interlude on “my” piece of heaven, it was back to the chaos of my family.
During our five years of high school, Mary and I remained aware of one another although we seldom socialized. As young adults, we separately departed South Africa, her into university, me into marriage. Miraculously we re-discovered one another living in California. Indeed, we live in the same condo complex on the beach, Mary on floor 3, me on floor 1.
Mary pursued a disciplined intellectual life while I pursued an undisciplined quasi-intellectual artistic path. These days, our friendship is deep and honest, and we enjoy lovingly challenging one another.
Now, through some quirk of environment, her lungs are contaminated with asbestos.
Her surgery, pleurocentesis and decortication – P&D – is scheduled for 15 July.
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