The boy raised by a bird

 

This young man in the picture moved into our daughter's house next to ours about a year ago. Recently our family celebrated his graduation from high school, and from Montana Youth Challenge Academy (MYCA). This is a summary of the true story I related there.

The "banty" hen he is holding was hatched by her mother very late in the summer, risking survival into the coming winter. Last October her clutch of chicks were barely strong enough to fly up to roost beside their mother. They still lacked normal winter feather protection. We were hit with sudden record cold. Her chicks struggled to stay under her wings on their roost.  But they suffered frost bite on feet and legs. We found them frozen on the frosty grass in the morning. This was the only one to survive, because of this young man.

He happened to be outdoors, and saw the little birds. He picked up the one chick with signs of life, with curled feet from freeze damage so could not walk.  My daughter helped him get anti-infection medicine. He built a snug little nest for her in a cardboard box lined with soft grass. His gentle hands and voice were answered with contented chick chirps. The bird stayed with him in his bedroom through December, where the long winter's cold could not reach. With food, water, and surrogate bird mothering, the chick grew. The family took over when he won a scholarship to attend a semester of Montana Youth Challenge Academy. I took the picture the day of our celebration of his graduation, just after he was reunited with his little lame bird.

I first met the boy in early elementary school, in my music classroom. I remember him as one his teacher said would certainly cause trouble if allowed to be with the other children. Normally I encouraged such a "discipline problem" to sit by me in the music circle. He remembered my class as one where he felt safe while with the other children, with whom he usually felt unsafe.

He was born into a troubled family. Near the time he first came to the school where I taught,  his parents were both killed in an auto crash. He was taken in by a grandparent, and then by an uncle, all of whom died prior to my family deciding to give him a place. He is now our informally adopted grandson, graduated from high school and has job interviews in Billings this week. But we didn't heal him.

In an environment with many risks for children in our county, and for chicks on our farm land, it's good to see good happening with empowerment from unexpected weak resources. Sometimes the best discipline and growth is learned when those of us older and wiser exercise nothing more than our presence.

 

Dave Drove in the Ditch

 

Restoring the foundation of academic excellence in US schools

 

Of all the components of the executive function of the mind, one stands out crucial for children to learn: self-regulation. This is built primarily by imitation in trusted relationships, where emotional control and collective action are learned in meeting a common need. Since creation, this mental function built strong families, tribes, and nations. High rates of incarceration in the United States today reflects children's growth with deficiencies in this essential brain function. It’s at the core of brain development needed for academics, and for human life itself.

 

In the early 40’s, military psychologists were concerned about this capacity among recruits. They designed a simple test of self-regulation to be given children, to predict fitness for platoon loyalty. The test was repeated a few years ago, and researchers compared the results with those of the 1940’s. They found that 5-year-olds today are about where 3-year-olds were in the 40’s, in self-regulation.

 

It’s remarkable that this function among our young has been declining in our nation. Why? Is it that we have progressively dismantled engagement with real life risks among our youth since the last century? Ask any old farmer around in the 4-score age range if he remembers riding a bus to high school. Were students driving his bus then? I can testify, that was the dominant practice in rural America in the 50’s (look up The Mountaineer, “Student Bus Drivers”). 

 

After school, in a rainstorm April of 1960, mud splattered my windshield from the vehicle ahead as the rain joined in with wipers opening a smeared patch to see the mud on the road ahead. Visibility opened just enough to cause me panic. Looming at me and my bus, a cement truck was taking the middle of the road. I slowed and moved as near the grass ditch as I dared. The truck passed within inches. I took a breath and set the steering wheel to aim back to the solid crown of slick mud in the center. I slowly engaged the clutch. What I dreaded happened. Instead of moving forward, all six wheels slid for the ditch. I clutched, the rear wheels stopped turning, but it was too late. The entire bus lazily tipped at a crazy angle, and gently stopped.  I’m sure I joined in with the screams of some thirty high school students behind my driver’s seat.

 

The screams morphed into teasing as it was clear the only outcome was the crazy angle of the bus the cradled in the grassy shallow ditch: “Dave drove in the ditch, Dave drove in the ditch!” The chant rose from the back of the bus and quickly became hilarious.  I don’t remember who said it first, might have been me. “Well, come on, lets push it out!” Everyone clambered out the rear door of the bus, since the front door was jammed against the grass. We took off our shoes, dug our toenails into the grass for grip, and started a rhythmic rocking of the whole huge bus. We could rock it! “If we can rock it, we can move it,” was my thought, as driverless, the bus started creeping. I was just about to jump back in the driver’s seat and start it up….

 

It was a November day in 1959 that our student bus driver, Rich, got a citation driving his car. He could no longer legally drive the route. My dad reminded me that we lived at the end of the route, and I might be appointed to drive. I was. In a week I passed the test for a chauffer’s license (no CDL then), and began driving the bus to school every day, arriving home in time for chores. There was no “adult” on the bus, ever that I remember. We were expected to self-regulate, and generally did well. This was an exception.

 

He was on the bus, probably started the chant to embarrass me. I know he joined in rocking the bus. As it became clear we could actually push the bus, either me or another student shouted, “Let Rich drive it out.” Anyway, he was the one who got under the wheel, started it creeping forward as our rocking kept rear wheels alternately gripping the grass and the strip of gravel at the road edge as the bus started in motion.

 

Rich drove it back onto the road, and teasingly took off, but stopped so we could climb in.   I was back in the driver’s seat less than 15 minutes after we hit the ditch, and we were on the road home. I don’t remember telling anyone about this until writing it this week. The remarkable thing then was not that high school upper class students drove bus routes in rural America then. No, that was normal, as far as I know. The remarkable thing was that we, all the students on that bus when the need was obvious, jumped out into the mud to rock it into motion and get it back on the road.

 

When will we return to seeking mutual benefit with teenagers in useful risk-taking, and transcend the litigious culture that has arisen around our schooling in Montana and America?

Disposable human beings

 Disposable human beings:

How politics of pro-life turned against the American family

 

I, along with nearly every American citizen, am against abortion. But we need a different kind of talk. Recent political debates regarding whose lives are disposable and whose lives are to be more valued have been raging. The abortion issue in our nation and right here in Montana remains prominent. Government biases prioritizing some human lives over others is against our Constitution and our common sense. Yet the value of respect for life for human beings from conception to 3-score-and-10 is Constitutional and Biblical. look up “neither Jew nor Greek,” or “all nations.”

 

Some of us opposed to abortion want protection for the totality of human life regardless of political differences. Others of us, and many in Southern Montana, want to parse this out and end up exacerbating illicit demand for abortions. Recent nation-wide legislation banning abortion further removes families’ power, endowed by the Creator, to protect their own. This writing is in support of those who take seriously the Bible’s respect for family relationships over government intervention to protect the unborn. 

 

I remember well a scene in my childhood when I threw a fit. I was outraged because all my childhood senses were obsessed with the immediate scene.

 

My grandmother picked me up and stood me on a stool beside her at a table in the barn. I was to help scrape sheep guts clean. Being a kid in a sheep-shearing family, I already had nasal passage revulsion fits if detecting sheep odors. I saw, smelled and felt the slick slimy goo my grandmother was removing and washing from each length of sheep gut. She forced into my hand a table knife, not too sharp so I wouldn’t easily nick the gut skin. She placed my hand with hers on a length of gut to press against the board, and told me to hold it down. Then she moved my knife hand to scrape the gut clean. I revolted, and cried for my mother. Mother told me to do what Grandma says. I was abandoned. I protested that I was going to puke. Grandmother brought the slop bucket of entrail washings and set it beside my stool for me to puke in if I needed. I ended up obedient. I watched my fingers push the goo oozing from the edge of my knife blade while holding the stretched out gut over the table board, and getting something done. I did not puke. I did not hear grandmother say, “there you got it,” but I’m confident she did.  

 

Later that day I recovered enough to gather with my cousins to watch “the sausage snake.” Uncle Willis ladled spiced, good-smelling ground meat into the press cylinder, clamped the screw motor over the piston, started it turning and smashing down the sausage grindings. We watched transfixed as a snake of ground sausage pushed into a tube fastened to the output at the bottom of the press. The motor chugged, the tube of sausage casing grew longer, and Uncle Willis struggled to keep the snake from kinking.

 

He missed a kink. The casing burst. He quickly stopped the motor, made a snide comment about dapich (clumsy) kids cutting holes in the casing. He carefully gathered up each tiny morsel of the spilled ground meat. He reached into a tub for something familiar to me: sheep gut like I had been cleaning. He cut two short lengths, twisted each of them into a twine, and used it to tie each of the two ends of broken casing.  In no time he started the motor. He then kept filling a series of tubs, one for a year’s supply of sausage for each of ten households in my extended family.

 

Maybe it’s time now to back up from asking big government protection of one unborn child at a time. Maybe it’s better to look at the larger picture God designed for us in families, clans, tribes and nations. We need to see with our eyes, hear with our ears, touch with our hands, and even maybe smell, in order to imagine a better way. I don’t remember anyone telling me I had a role to play in my family’s needs for food. It was there, and respected. In time, a long time, I became aware of the value of the connections my traditions built.  At the time, I had no idea each November family butchering event was in itself sacred. Our religion supported us with thanksgiving for divine blessing, and generosity to share. I didn’t get the bigger picture.

 

Government take-over of the protective function God ordained for the family has left us in the United States with a mess of more abortions, more dysfunction and early death. Children suffer trauma born into households where government anti-abortion is just one way parents are branded disposable or unfit to protect their own. The consequences are huge in schools, prisons, crime rates, policing practices, illness, and early death.

 

THIS ENDING?

We in the United States did that in past generations.  In fact, most of our nation’s existence provided legal protection for slavery.  Are we still in mental slavery? My grandmother didn’t intend this, but was she, and was my experience as a child, part of our American culture of slavery blocking me from seeing and her from saying I belonged? Or was my fogged vision, not seeing my importance to what my family needed, simply an aversion to smelling and handling sheep guts?

 

OR THIS ENDING?

We might agree that even just one child growing up marginalized for interventionist profit, prison profit, and any consequence like suspension and expulsion is too many. Our sense of what’s good for our families and neighbors of any race, age, or gender was not meant to be taken over and protected by judicial force outside the family, neither in our Constitution, nor in our Bible, nor in any of the heritages of family life and languages here in Southern Montana. This writing is an invitation for an evidence-based conversation on better roles for judicial processes affecting those leading our families, schools, county, state, and leaders of our great nation. What might it mean to return to the Biblical basics of family? Let’s talk about it.