(This story may seem tragic or disturbing, but please know everyone involved speaks of it fondly. It’s just one of those things.)
A long-distance runner, my dad used to get up at 4:30 every morning to run 17 miles. Then he’d shower, make coffee, eat his two bran muffins and wake me up for school.
More than a bit Type A, my dad.
His running route would bring him by our new neighbors. He’d pass by their house a few times as he ran his circuit. Never once did he see them stir. During more regular hours, they never came out, never introduced themselves, never so much as waved over the fence.
Then my dad makes his coffee one morning, and everything that follows he remembers forever.
He sips his cup by the kitchen window, then dazes out onto the street and Aaron North’s woods beyond it. He then sees something come up the hill to his left. It’s someone from the neighbor’s house. A late teen or early twenties kid with no shirt on. Well actually, he’s using an inverted t-shirt as a kind of hair-tie and he’s doing this kind of slow-motion exaggerated run up the hill. Very Chariots of Fire. In his right hand is a samurai sword.
The kid runs over to our next-door neighbor’s house. My dad moves over to the living room windows to watch him scale our neighbor’s deck, assess the bay windows, then slash them into glitterdust. He then crosses the threshold of the window, cuts himself quite bad but doesn’t so much as flinch, and then collapses on our neighbor’s living room couch.
Our neighbors had a son with Schizophrenia. He was off his meds but no one knew it. The theory was that our neighbors were keeping to themselves out of some combination of fear and shame.
They were understandably mortified to learn what happened. My dad and our neighbor were just glad no one got permanently hurt, and the whole thing got our neighbors out of hiding. We never became close, but they started waving to us from their front lawn after that.
The language surrounding folks like my neighbor may make it sound as if ours is a culture of compassion, inclusivity and understanding. But I’d politely point to our daytime clubhouses for those with cognitive impairments—always in rusted out industrial parks, never near the center of town. Our nursing homes and their epidemic of neglect and loneliness. Our neighbors, who were so cagey about telling us about their son. It’s all downstream from a modern cultural blind spot.
Ours is a society always looking toward Winter North. You’re only as valuable as your output. Non-producers are a bit of a burden, a bit of an eyesore.
That’s why I dislike the term “special needs.” It frames people in terms of the liabilities they impose, not their value.
In older Celtic folk cultures, they would sometimes use terms that meant something like “touched.” As in touched by The Gentry, the People of the Hill. The connotation was fuller and more complicated than our own. To be touched was mostly a curse to be pitied, but not entirely. After all, things happen during encounters with the Fair Folk. Those involved are never quite the same. They carry a bit of the Otherworld about them, so it’d be to your detriment to dismiss them entirely. The Welsh knew all about Myrddin, the battle-mad Man of the Wood who divulged prophecies to apple trees. Best not dismiss what can’t be immediately understood.
Older folklore used terms like “touched” or “away with the fairies.” In Christian Ireland, another euphemism started cropping up: duine le Dia. Person of God. Call them superstitious if you like, but for my druthers, I prefer their starting point to our own.
As for Lomna’s story, I have a hard time with parts of it—especially the events at Coirpre’s camp. I can’t say that I know exactly what it means to feed a severed head some of your fish, but to do so would require giving time and attention to something that made me uncomfortable. Something possibly difficult to look at if I wasn’t used to it.
Over the weekend, I was lamenting the state of my voice at length to my wife. I mean, c’mon, it’s been four weeks at this point. I’ve never heard of anyone with a permanently altered voice after a minor cold. My wife said that unfortunately, it’s been known to happen. I asked her if this was likely the case with me. She said she didn’t know.
I nodded, then stepped outside to take the trash out. The clouds in the west were darkening and coming in fast. My own next-door neighbor caught me looking at them. He was a good kid who’s had to overcome a couple traumatic brain injuries. (I don’t know the nature of them; this is just what he told me the first time we met.)
I pointed at the clouds. “Think it’ll rain soon?”
He didn’t follow my finger. Just stared straight at me and said, “Momma says it’s on God’s time. Why try to hurry it along? It’ll come when it comes.”
It no longer sounded like we were merely talking about the weather.
“Your momma’s a smart lady,” I said. “This is just a shot in the dark, but you don’t know the significance of a speckled white-bellied salmon by any chance, do you?”
