'Your Response Is Your Character'
Rowe, Jonathan
'Your Response Is Your Character' by Jonathan Rowe Her sister had said something about me. she said. "You know," she recounted, "he almost sounds. as though he stuttered once." We had been...
...My face takes on the color that caused friends to call me "Red-beet Rowe...
...This made me a big pledge fan...
...If a seagull divides the world between "fish" and "not-fish...
...This woman was paying me a compliment...
...Anything that did not require formal speech...
...I was one of his early "Raiders" and took part in the congressional hearing that was held on our report...
...I am forever indebted to those teachers who found tactful ways to relieve me of my distress...
...But somehow, the goal should be to find what connects individuals with various problems, not what sets them apart...
...We had been visiting her family at their farm in the Upper Midwest...
...My own personal hail of fame on this score includes Ralph Nader...
...I never thought of myself as having a "handicap," only a kind of chronic nemesis that I learned to negotiate the way a tennis player negotiates the net...
...which Coke owns...
...George Bush talks about the need for capital gains tax breaks in tones more appropriate for appeals for blankets for homeless children...
...As the wheat fields passed outside, I savored every nuance...
...It is the last period on a sparkling fall afternoon...
...People cordon themselves off into ever-multiplying ghettos of affliction...
...Unless you know him very, very well...
...They want to be part—however awkwardly—of the normal flow of life...
...Instead of going around the table in reading group, for example, calling on people at random...
...if you want to cut a stutterer off at the knees, finish his sentences for him out of the kindness of your heart...
...And much later: the young woman who told him that she liked him but that his stutter made her nervous...
...Even in my worst periods, listening to others stutter was excruciating for me...
...I aspired towards the same kinds of careers as other young people, and thinking myself "a stutterer" was baggage I didn't want...
...But then someone makes a mistake, and the teacher calls on the pupil next in line, chan ging the order and forcing me to revise my mantra...
...All I can tell you is that, to a person who stutters, your response is your character...
...But he's also scanning sentences and even paragraphs ahead for dangers such as "p"s and "d"s that may lie in ambush...
...She thought Jonathan...
...Like most stutterers, I had no problems reciting in unison in school, as during the Pledge of Allegiance...
...The stutterer is struggling to handle three jobs at once...
...I am sweating...
...When I first encountered the "search" function on a word processor...
...But for someone who stutters...
...and start repeating the answer to myself in a low drone...
...Once they've fixed the label on you, it can be self-reinforcing in all sorts of subtle ways...
...the stutterer is a stock comic figure, a hapless bumbler whose strainings and contortions are a bundle of laughs...
...The recitation...
...Whatever else is involved, there is no escaping the strangely social nature of the affliction...
...It takes courage to hire, as a representative, someone who might not make the greatest first' impression, especially in a culture as image-conscious as our own...
...It may make people feel good to offer it...
...A little kid, lying in bed, wishing that his strange affliction would go away...
...Talking about talking...
...As a child...
...The adults who kept telling him to "try to relax ." A stutterer is always trying, probably too much...
...The people who helped most understood my need to stand on my own...
...This last may sound cruel...
...This fact screams out in every conversation, but no one is supposed to notice...
...It was the presence of other—presumably judging—minds that caused the locks to clank shut...
...daily life entailed strategies of a similar THE WASHINGTON MONTHLY/DECEMBER 1988 sort...
...But in movies and on TV (most recently the film A Fish Called Wanda...
...I craved nothing more than to be treated as normal, and people with other forms of impediment have told me they feel this way as well...
...Though hardly an enterprising student, I became an assiduous observer of the recitation habits of different teachers...
...Self-pity has become a dominant note in our national discourse...
...for example, that an unruly boy sent to stand in the hail was a boy who wouldn't have to recite in reading group...
...It dawned on me early on...
...This is why the media portrayals of stutterers are so unfortunate, especially for kids...
...And I don't buy Coke or Minute Maid products...
...And the minute hand on the wall clock is moving like sludge...
...Sometime in my teens, I decided that the way to deal with stuttering was to defy it and become a member of the debate team...
...The football fields beckon outside the window, an incredibly inviting "don't-have-to- zone...
...If I encountered a man with no legs trying to pull himself through a Safeway entrance, would stand back and let him struggle...
...Talking to a dog, for example, or a baby...
...Because the sources of their problem are so elusive, stutterers tend to he introspective...
...Few would think of making a movie in which epileptic seizures came off as gags...
...Rowe is a contributing editor of The Vv-ashingron NionthIy me big enough to handle the truth...
...You will be a trusted friend for life, even if you never see this person again...
...That way, in being skipped over, I would not appear an obvious charity case...
...The idea of a stutterers lobby gives me pause for another reason...
...After that, I pretty much blocked it out...
...Compared to kids whose bodies didn't work, I had it pretty easy...
...But there was never any question that I would get to say my piece...
...I could speak fairly freely...
...Alcoholics Anonymous, for example, has inspired a legion of counterparts dealing with everything from drug addiction to overeating...
...Curiously, I often had little problem speaking to other people who stuttered...
...When the social stakes were zero, for example, speech came fairly easily...
...Oh, sweet...
...then a child who stutters divides it between "talk" and "don't have to...
...People who know me know that the problem is not entirely behind...
...Which is understandable at one level...
...In fact, I hardly think about it anymore...
...They reinforce the apprehension that only makes the problem worse...
...Once one starts down that road, it's almost scary how easy it becomes...
...First, he's thinking about what he's going to say, just as you do...
...There are days and times when the gears still seize that connect my mind to my mouth, and when the dread consonants, such as "d" and "p," loom up like guards at the East German border...
...Then, he is frantically constructing jerry-built and circuitous detours that are often painfully obvious in such a person's speech...
...And wouldn't it be refreshing if someone besides stutterers were to express outrage to the chief of Coke...
...Note I said offer...
...But I'm not complaining...
...Scenes flashed through my mind...
...if one teacher started on the left side of the class, I'd choose my seat to the right and rear, to have the best chance of running out the clock...
...At times...
...I am going to make a horrible admission...
...Max Headroom, for example, the stuttering pitchman for Coca-Cola...
...It is not easy to stand and watch someone suffer seizures over words...
...His classmates had demanded that the teacher call on the new kid to read aloud, and he had dissolved into a sputtering puddle...
...She must have been waiting to tell me...
...They even make themselves nervous...
...Of course, at some point I would offer help...
...In junior high school, as I became more socially self-conscious, things got worse...
...People who stutter know they make people nervous...
...In fact, despite my own problem, I was all too inclined to tease classmates who were slow or fat or had problems of other kinds...
...As I recall, I didn't do a great job in presenting my own brief section at that hearing...
...One learns a lot about employers, too...
...That Senator John Glenn married a woman with a severe stutter tells me a lot about him as well...
...Or I declared simply, "I don't know...
...Perhaps you found him funny...
...I felt that I had found a kindred spirit...
...Growing up, I could play baseball and read and throw snowballs at cars...
...This couldn't have enhanced the credibility that Nader was striving to build...
...But I don't think I would have joined...
...When the shoe is on the other foot, I tend to slink off into the night...
...I didn't...
...Friend for life Talking is something you probably take for granted, just as you take for granted that when you want a drink of milk, your arm will reach for the glass and clutch it...
...I count ahead to the question destined for me...
...Perhaps even more so than for most: I knew that the way I was feeling was pretty much how I made others feel...
...People finish sentences for a stutterer, I suspect, mainly to relieve their own distress...
...And, yes, I'm touchy on the subject to this day...
...Another curious experience was that if someone made my stutter an object of conversation—that is, if they brought it out into the open—somehow that would take the pressure off, and the stutter would recede...
...On the basis of a brief interview at a recent Dukakis function, I am confident that Boston Mayor Ray Flynn is a genuinely decent man...
...I sensed that I did not want this problem to become my identity...
...And being taken out of class—an officially certified problem case—probably did as much harm as good...
...Who's going to confront the president of the Coca-Cola Co...
...People reveal themselves in their instinctive response to another's discomfort or distress...
...Almost ." "Once...
...My most vivid memory from those years is of Latin class...
...More than once...
...But all it ever did for me was make me feel bad...
...But that man's dignity...
...This happens several times...
...About 12 years ago, someone formed an organization called the -National Stutterers Project In the words of lime magazine, the organization regarded the nation's stutterers as "another oppressed minority" and hoped -to weld them into a potent lobbying group: . If it helps some people deal with their speaking problem, I have no quarrel with it whatsoever...
...But I also don't think it's necessarily bad to learn, early on, that when a corporation wants to sell something, it will exploit human weakness and affliction to do so...
...So right off: my problem was not great in the larger scheme of things...
...if not an organization of stutterers themselves...
...Now we were pulling out onto the Interstate...
...The English class in the new high school...
...this has actually helped me as a reporter...
...The world of therapy has come to mimic the market segmentation of the magazine rack and of the Washington PAC bazaar...
...In my own case, to the extent that I have emerged from this problem, it happened almost incidentally, as I put to rest various inner oppositions and conflicts...
...One hesitates even to appear to add to all this kvetching...
...But the drills didn't accomplish much...
...Perhaps this is why people laugh at stutterers as well...
...If you stand with patience and poise, if you don't get edgy and start finishing his sentences, you will be deemed among the strong...
...The observation came totally out of the blue...
...On the whole, however, my life was happily free of therapy...
...When I was a kid, Porky Pig cartoons were a constant source of pain...
...In elementary school, I got special "speech therapy" for awhile...
...But the honesty still staggers me...
...I am something of a fundamentalist on this point...
...moving inexorably up and down the rows, is closing in on me...
...his whole sense of manhood, might be bound up at that moment in making it through the door...
...talking is like running air traffic control at O'Hare, during rush hour, with half the staff out sick...
...I gave an answer that I knew Was wrong, but that at least did not begin with a "d" or a "p...
...The last thing I ever wanted—the last thing I suspect most "handicapped" people want—is sympathy...
Vol. 20 • December 1988 • No. 11
