Introduction
Posted April 7, 2017
By Glenn Ward
Welcome to my blog.
What you should know if you’re thinking about spending any time reading this blog is that I digress. If you were ever one of my students, you’ll remember how much I would digress in class (and there must be thousands of you out there, so it’s conceivable that a few of you may come across this site). I’d like to say that I was able to learn to digress less often over the years but, as fate would have it, I’m worse now than ever before, probably because of the meds I’m taking, even though there seems to be some debate as to whether my meds can account for all of my cognitive changes of the past few years. In any event, I’m becoming that scattered kid again whose mind would wander all over the place like a stream finding its way around tree roots and between boulders as it seeks the deepest point. In my defense, though, I would remind you that streams must meander as they must reach the deepest point before they can rest. It’s unavoidable for streams just as it’s unavoidable for my thoughts. My wife often tells me that Ritalin would have helped me to become successful in life had it been dispensed as generously to the underachievers of the 1960s as it is for those unfortunate enough to be young adults today. Then I remind her that, if I’d become successful, I wouldn’t have what I have today, and she puts on that look of a woman biting her tongue. I know that look well.
So, how do I begin? Norman Maclean wrote that stories of life are often more like rivers than books. If this blog is going to be about my life, it will be a meandering stream: not a river. Forget rivers for now. There won’t be any majesty in this life story, nothing to make the reader confront his or her own insignificance in the face of nature’s power and glory, but simply a fleeting little meandering stream of a single life, flowing ever downward, seeking the deepest level of existence where the water no longer flows but lies calm.
My wife giving me "the look".
Let me begin by summarizing my life. I’ll skip my childhood, since it was happy and therefore boring. I started my working life after high school as an apprentice plumber, and then I was a university student, and then a scientist, and then an academic for the last couple of decades until, as has happened often, I lost my job. Since I was only 57, I worried about how I was going to search for another job. However, that was before the fever and before I began to take the meds and I now can’t hold a thought for more than a brief moment and I realize that the last job I had was likely the last real job I’ll ever have. That’s the basic outline of my life up to now.
Here’s a detail about me: I’ve always been a nail-biter. Where I grew up, as in the Bruce Springsteen song, you do just like your daddy done and so, when my father got me an apprenticeship at the local pulp and paper mill, he swore to me that, after the first day of plumbing, I’d never chew my fingernails again. He was wrong about that although I now realize that he was right about many other things I used to argue with him about. Other than that, there won’t be much about plumbing on this site, so we can skip that part and move on to the part where I was a scientist, which comprised the largest phase – about 25 years – of my life. During this time, I was what I call a measurer. I measured blood pressure, levels of blood alcohol, levels of corticosterone, phospholipids, free fatty acids and many other substances that I once found interesting and informative. However, due to some power that I’ve never quite understood, I spent an inordinate amount of my time counting. What my life as a scientist encompassed most was endless hours of counting. I counted the number of times monkeys would press a bar for food. I counted the number of rat and mouse pups in a litter, and counted how many times they did things like sleep, eat and defecate (you’d be surprised what that can tell you). I counted the number of times rats and mice entered a particular part of the cage or what we called an activity arena. I counted the number of times Betta fish (with the lovely name Betta splendens, a fish doomed by it’s beauty to a lifetime of captivity in small jars) flashed their gills and fins and entered particular parts of their aquarium. I counted, or rather used a machine programmed to count, the neurons in a particular part of a cat’s brain that would fire in response to various visual stimuli. I counted neurons of various types, neural fibers, dendrites and, on occasion, glial cells. We often used little mechanical counters that would show the number of times we “clicked “ the button and, one time, while counting Purkinje cells in the cerebellum, I noticed that the counter I was using wasn’t advancing every time I pressed the button, even though I heard the corresponding click, so I did what any scientist would do. I gathered together all the counters in the lab as if they were my research subjects, and counted how many of them didn’t give accurate counts and, if they didn’t give accurate counts, I counted how inaccurate they were. So, for a period of time back in the 1980s, I was a counter of counts made by numerous counters. In case you didn’t guess this already, my universe is schemed toward absurdism, rendering its corrective judgment upon those poor souls like me who believe, or once believed, in life’s apparent order.
My career as a scientist didn’t actually end but fizzled out. I was used to working from 8:00 AM until 11:00 PM and spending much of my weekends either at the lab or on my office computer which had fast internet, something I didn’t have at home then. However, after my kids began to arrive in my life, my daughters kept me busy and left me feeling guilty when I wasn’t with them, and so I made a conscious choice to spend more time at home in the evenings. As I became more familiar with my infant daughters, I began to notice parallels between them and the infant rats I was using in my research and, for the first time, I realized that the rat pups were genuinely glad to see me in the morning and seemed excited and pleased whenever I picked them up, just as my daughters did. I’d removed the infant rats from their mothers when they were only a few days old and raised them in an incubator and fed them via gastrostomy tube so, as far as they knew, I was their mother. As they got older (at least the ones I didn’t kill for their tissues when they were still young), they would greet me by rising on their hind legs and reaching up with their little human-like forepaws to pull my fingers down to them. They would then gently nibble on my fingertips in an affectionate greeting while I picked them up and held them and stroked their soft white fur. Once you start to believe that your research subjects have a rich emotional life, including attachment to you, you’re pretty much finished doing research that requires harvesting tissue from them unless you’re a mean unfeeling bastard which I’m pleased to say that I’m not, at least not anymore.
So I managed to arrange to increase my meager teaching load and entered the next phase of my life as a part-time university lecturer. I taught a wide variety of courses and, although I often complained about some parts of the job, I loved doing it. If my time as a scientist involved mainly counting, my time as a lecturer involved mainly story-telling. I told the students all sorts of stories. I told the story of evolution and the story of evolutionary theory and the story of Evo-Devo. I told them the story of meiosis and the story of embryonic and fetal development. I told the story of how a human life begins and I told the story of how humans die and the story of what happens in between. I told stories of how diseases begin and develop and how the threat of new diseases has come about and the story of how some diseases have been defeated, at least for now, always for now. Sometimes, I would tell them the beginnings of The Big Story, about how the human species has learned to defeat disease and early death, if not the fear of disease and early death, but it is too early in that story to know yet how it ends and I expect that it will end as both tragedy, given its history of failure, and farce, given it's unintended consequences. I told stories about how scientists know what they know and, more importantly, what they don’t know and why they don’t know it and I felt that I had the duty to tell them about the failures especially, as I knew failure well. Failure molded this clay, for better or for worse.
Eventually, after a decade as a lecturer and academic, I lost my job. Universities today embrace the New enthusiastically, and I wasn’t new anymore, so my bosses politely presented me with a generous offering if I left but I knew that what they meant is that the generous offering was mine if I left quietly. When your universe is schemed in the absurd, you generally see much of your teaching as a Sisyphean task but, as Camus concluded, all was well after all, and I was surprisingly happy to take the offering. When I meet with old colleagues and they tell me about what has happened in my old department, I feel that they are describing a foreign place I’ve never seen, and I realize that, while I am grateful for the years I spent story-telling, those years are in the past and won’t be repeated in the future. Others, who grew up in a different, more recent world than I did are the story-tellers now.
My wife is much better at doing what is required to be successful, whatever that is (it's always escaped me), so she earns enough money to keep us both comfortable. Therefore, I found myself with plenty of time to put together new stories, in the hope of coming up with a story that people might find informative and valuable. After all, since I was in my late 50s, and my brain at that time still seemed relatively intact and functional, I believed I had a lifetime of stories to tell, and people will usually enjoy a story they haven’t heard before.
But if my life consists of stories, then what kind of stories are they? Are there different types of stories? Tolstoy said that all stories are of two types: either a stranger comes to town or someone departs on a journey. Margaret Atwood suggested that all stories are basically stories about wolves. To me, a separate category of story is that of sea monsters lurking beneath the surface. Sea monster stories must be as old as human history, or at least as long as humans have watched the sea at sunrise or sunset and wondered what horrors lay in the vast depths beneath that glimmering, alluring surface.
Okay, let me tell you one short story: a year after I lost my job, I had a pain in my side (just like Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich but, since my universe is schemed in absurdity, I didn't fall off a step ladder, or even a chair, but rather carried a chair), and it became so severe that I couldn’t sleep and so, on a sunny Monday morning in May of 2014, my wife drove me to the emergency department of our local hospital to have it checked out, and I was admitted to a ward while various tests and scans were conducted. The good doctors fixed what we all agreed had been the problem, and I went back to my life. However, as happens in many of the better stories, what seemed like an ending was, in
reality, a false ending and so, a few months later, on a sunny Saturday
morning in August, my wife drove me back to emerg and I was admitted to the hospital again. A few days after admission, a surgeon came into my room to tell me a new story. The story was about a large tumour in my colon, so large in fact that it had ruptured the colon wall. The story the surgeon told me was a good one, as stories go, and included such phrases as “advanced stage III colon cancer” and “lymph node involvement” and “have to treat it aggressively”, and I knew other stories of cancer well enough to catch the real meaning of this story. The doctor didn’t provide an ending to his story although all stories about cancer do have endings, but we both knew that the ending would be revealed to me at a later time. After all, the best stories don’t reveal their endings too soon.
A stranger had arrived. I was about to embark on a journey. A wolf was at the door. A sea monster was stalking me from the depths and it was ready to surface...
I now have a story to tell after all ...
