Let me see what this is.
Just a couple more things here, what time do we have?
22 minutes.
We have time.
I'm going to go to a poem here.
And it's called "Some Worry."
There's a reference to the kid whose arm traveled
both ways in the ringer washer.
But somehow that was some like always
happened like in the 50s.
You sit there and this thing that was automatic,
didn't turn off, so your arm would go in there
and go out again.
So there's another kid here.
There was Alex and there was someone else whose arm
went through the ringer washer.
"In second grade--" Oh, no, no, no, no,
that's not the poem I want to read.
No, I'll read this one.
I like this one too.
They're pretty good.
"In second grade, I still had to stand far away from the urinal
to get my pee in.
This made me nervous.
I opened myself up to bacteria that
floated in the air, bacteria and dust
and the shafts of sunlight.
I worried more and more about disease.
I was still looking at the medical dictionary
and staring at the Chinese boy in the iron lung."
This is just a reference to another poem,
my mom only had two books in the house.
One was the Catholic dictionary, the other one
was the medical dictionary.
And so if you're very keen, you're
looking through the medical dictionary like a cold,
sort of seems like the end of the world.
And they're always magnified.
Looks really bad.
And there was a kid in the iron lung
and he was always looking at me.
"I was still looking at the medical dictionary
and staring the Chinese boy in his iron lung.
Well, we almost became friends.
I would open the dictionary.
By habit, the book fell open to his face.
I looked at him, and more than once I
grew scared because I thought it was my face in the iron lung
picture and if I close the book, I might go away.
I also worried about not feeling enough.
Sometimes when I prayed, my shoulders tangled
and other times I felt nothing.
Sister Mary said glorious things happen when
boys and girls were sincere.
I thought maybe I had forgotten to confess all my sins
and thought maybe because some of my pee fell on the ground,
God was keeping me from feeling.
This scared me.
Feeling was one of the five senses.
And if you didn't feel that meant
you only had four other senses and there was no telling when
you might go blind or one of your best friends
might shoot a cap gun in both of your ears.
Of course, I could cry, what I wanted to return
was a tingle in my shoulders.
For about eight years, I didn't feel
too much and worried a lot.
My eyesight was failing and sometimes I
had a difficult time hearing the teacher talk
about the Euphrates.
But one summer when I was 16 years old, feeling slowly
came back to my shoulders and my face began to turn red
when relatives said, Gary, you have grown tall.
At first, I thought I was getting sick
and became very suspicious of people
who didn't wash their hands.
Then I realized I was becoming more in tune with people.
I got to thinking that maybe this is
how what a saint feels when he's about to do something really
nice.
By this time, I had stopped praying
and the Christ in our bedroom began to glow later and later.
But my feelings returned.
I got in the habit of walking around and singing
made up prayers.
The trees seemed special.
The old Armenian neighbor took a long time to wave,
but eventually he stopped his raking to raise a hand.
At school, my grades improved.
I was startled when I recognized a verb in a sentence
and began to think that maybe teachers were on to something
after all.
I would read the Euphrates, a mighty river that
replenished the Persian empire time and time again,
is a mile wide and more than 20 junctions.
Always when I got to the verb is my face burned a little
and I became happy.
I realized learning was also a bodily thing.
That you could read a really important book and knowledge
would spread into your face and to your chest.
And I began to walk slower in the hallways,
no longer embarrassed about poor grades.
I began to recognize the smart kids because none of them
rushed about a lot.
Since I was now among them, this made me feel OK about myself.
My shoulders tingle, my face turned red
for every class except algebra, which was still--"
and then there's an algebra problem here in this text.
"But by my senior year, these feelings left me.
And when I looked at a verb, my face didn't respond.
The words to prayer seemed silly and the trees
that were once special didn't move as much.
Once in an abandoned house, I almost
cried because the wallpaper was peeling.
And a really sad orange, blue from being forgotten,
was on the floor and not even the ants bothered with it.
And that the Venetian blinds with the kind that hung
in our house in Bradley street.
And no matter how I pulled on the chain,
I couldn't straighten them.
The rooms were crooked with shadows.
The refrigerator blazed with flies and the festering
mold of peaches crawled a cardboard box.
I went room to room, strangling wire coat hangers.
Something was wrong.
On my way back home, I realized for the first time
that the Chinese boy in the iron lung was dead.
His lungs, vests of sorrow, were gone in the black earth."