Dispatch #12
Thursday, September 5
St. Anthony (Minneapolis) Minnesota

There are 506 miles on the bike, now--though most of that was added by my trip from Chetek to this place on Labor Day.

Last night, here at the rally in Nativity Lutheran Church, some of my former Valparaiso students showed up--Sharin' and Jamie and Lee Ann--absolutely thrilling me because that teacher/student relationship can be as tough and tight as a braid, and it should, after all, last. In most cultures, classical and aboriginal, it was this relationship which received its own peculiar honor; it was this by which the culture and those elements which maintain culture are passed down from generation to generation. And that quality of teacher/student relationship should be as intimate and shaping as it is, say, between musicians at the highest level of skill. Remember Socrates, the peripatetic teachers in Greece; remember the Pharisees, John the Baptist, Jesus; look to the far east as well as to native Americans to find this relationship to be the very bolts of culture's foundation; now, look to teaching in this society and the attitudes the common folk have for it, and ask whether we have honored to the same level the relationship which preserves our best, our ascendant qualities.

Well, but it does still take place, both in high school and in college. For I have enjoyed the relationship among some students which makes my very life and being the pattern my students do shrug into as into a coat--to test it a while, before weaving their own cloaks and clothes hereafter.

+ + +

I have been sick for the last five/six days. A throat savagely sore, only growing the sorer as the days went on, until my inner ears were involved, and swelling encroached on the airways, and swallowing became impossible. This is one of the reasons for the break in these my regular dispatches: yesterday we finally had to seek serious medical help.

In another place I will describe the frustration of being a stranger in a large city seeking to see a doctor. It feels like climbing some castle wall, under the battlements--and you are yourself distracted by your sickness while you climb.

And in another place altogether I will describe some of the best attention I have ever received, once I found "The People's Clinic," a teaching institution whose pay scales are low, inviting folks of limited means. I was met first by a medical student of a gentle, watchful character, who asked so many more questions than did the physician I had already seen at an urgent care clinic late Labor Day. He, when I mentioned the swellings both inside and outside my neck, blandly said, "You'll be fine, fine, healthy man like you. Nodes swell." And then declined even to touch them, sending me home with the assurance that the throat would clear in several days. Several days later, then, unable to swallow, I sat with this medical student, named Rachel (pronounced Rah-el, with a slight aspiration on the "h") who was asking questions, listening to answers, examining the swollen glands under by jaw, painful to the touch. Next, when the teaching doctor came in, he spent at least twenty minutes allowing his every thought expression: why it might only be viral, why it could be bacterial; he spoke of the way the soreness spread from one tight location on my right side over to the left, involving the whole: "Likeliest a bacterial infection." The swab showed negative for strep: "But the infection may be underneath the skin and therefore would not be gathered by the swab of the skin."

Enough.

Though the throat remains sore this morning, the pain diminished sufficiently yesterday afternoon to allow me a full night's speaking at the rally.

It is in the crisis that institutions do often frustrate us by defining to a fare-thee-well what and who and how you must be to be acknowledged by them and received. Only stars go into star-holes; pegs, if you please, must go elsewhere. On the other hand, humans at the level of one-to-one may embrace a hundred shapes, make broader, more merciful, the definitions we must fit in order to be served. If you can get past the structures (faceless and certainly without soul) to the people busy within the structures, its likelier you will receive more than the precise response to your malady: you may be granted your humanity back again and the wholeness of conversation with another human whole before you.

Witness, for example, the pharmacist who pursued for me a prescription which had not been called in (despite the assurances of the doctor's office that it would contact the pharmacy directly). He allowed relationship with his customer. We became sudden allies contra the institutional visage and, in consequence, friends. And, in consequence to that, the exchange of names so kindly that I can post with gratitude his name in this more public place: Brian Romanjuk (stress the second syllable and pronounce the last: yook) at the Walgreens at 3207 Lake in Minneapolis.

Walt