Living Differently
Edith Cook
Hello, Friends and Readers!
Hello, Friends and Readers!
My partner has been dyslexic all his life, and this column (with his help) tells what it’s like growing up when teachers and friends knew nothing about this neurologic condition, and family members could only guess about it.
The piece begins with comments on autism, a neurologic condition misunderstood, just like dyslexia has been. My example is Dr. Temple Grandin, who may be the most well-known autist in this country.
I've included a snapshot of my partner and me.
Miss Edith
(Dr. Edith Cook)
Published October 11, 2024. Editor’s Headline: “Living Differently.”
When my son and his family still lived in Wyoming, Walter once took me to a U of Wyoming Temple Grandin lecture. Grandin is a professor of animal science at Colorado State University and a top scientist in the humane treatment of food animals—hogs, cattle, and chickens. She is also severely autistic. As a child she couldn’t abide the human touch, Grandin said in her lecture. Her “odd” affliction was diagnosed early in childhood.
Grandin has spent much time and effort to render autism understandable to the general public. “I think in pictures,” she said. Like many an autist, she is sensitive to domestic animals. By redesigning the corridors leading to the slaughterhouse, Grandin has devised ways of eliminating the panic of cattle as they walk toward death. Most of us, when we buy ground beef or a cut of steak, never think about how it got to the grocery store. Grandin does.
When she observed that cows and calves calm down in the squeeze chute, Grandin designed and made a chute like it for the times when anxiety overwhelmed her in college. In 2024, Dr. Grandin was awarded The Lifetime Achievement Award by the Denver Business Journal.
An altogether different neurodivergence has been the lifelong fate of my partner, Ronald Garver. When he was in school, no teacher had heard of neurodivergent learning styles; indeed, his school years were marred by the ideology, “Spare the rod, spoil the child.” Teachers tried hard to beat reading and writing into him. At the conclusion of his eighth grade, he’d had enough of the abuse and ran off to become first a stable boy and, later, a horse groom in stables that housed horseracing equines. He came into his own among the horses he cared for. In the stables, he slept in an unused stall on hay bales and horse blankets.
“Do you think your work with horses rendered you fully human?” I asked him while reading him passages of Grandin’s book “Animals Make Us Human.”
“Absolutely,” he answered. Nonetheless, his life with horses was a lonely one. “I talked to the horses. I had no one else to talk to.” At home were siblings and parents—but it was his dad’s early disability that forced Garver to emulate his brother, one year older than he, to leave home to earn his keep. “None of my siblings finished high school,” he said. “The money wasn’t there.”
For decades he only knew he was “different,” having no idea that he was experiencing dyslexia. People thought him odd.
Garver’s years in the army were good for him, he says. He completed munitions school with flying colors, and so, he ventured to work toward his GED, in which he was ultimately successful. Soon an Army pastor appointed him his assistant which, along with his sweetheart’s faith in him, shaped the positive aspect of his self-image.
“I realized I wasn’t the dumbest ox in the stable,” he said.
Garver recalls that, as a boy, he did excel in one history class. “My dad loved history. Laid up at home, he read my history book out loud to me,” he said. The classroom tests consisted of true-or-false or multiple-choice questions and did not require essay answers. “I got 100 on every test.” Sadly his dad, like Garver’s youngest brother, died an untimely death. The three-year-old developed kidney cancer which, like the dad’s disability, may have been related to local pollution.
Garver says he sat at his brother’s bedside for hours. “I talked to him. I sang songs. I wanted so much for him to get well.” The child died at age five.
The differences between autism and dyslexia are as diverse as humanity itself. Neurologist Oliver Sacks once asked Grandin in a televised interview if she’d ever experienced sexual relations. She answered with an emphatic “No,” adding in nervous explication, “The wiring isn’t there.”
Unlike Temple Grandin, Garver says he was happiest during his years of married life, when children were growing and the parents took them to swim meets and on camping trips. On concluding his Army service he settled in Nebraska, married his sweetheart, and helped raise four children. He cared for his family by providing an income via thirty-five years as a welder in a farm machinery company. He taught himself to read articles in Scientific American that interested him.
After retiring, with children grown and gone, he convinced his wife to relocate to Saratoga, Wyoming, which he loves for its nearness to the Snowy Range. When, after nearly sixty years of marriage, his wife perished of leukemia, he entered into profound grief and depression, alleviated only by telephone calls and frequent visits to his adult children and their families in Nebraska.
“Albert Einstein was dyslexic,” he told me. “I already knew, but didn’t make the connection, that Einstein suffered delayed speech and didn’t speak fluently until he was six. Like me, he had problems getting his thoughts down, retrieving language, and reading out loud.”
In the news and entertainment industry, Anderson Cooper, Robin Williams, Cher, and Keira Knightley share the trait of dyslexia. So do many others we often consider “odd.” Friends have told me of dyslexic family members who serve as physicians and math teachers.
At Fisk University, an HBCU—Historically Black College or University—in Nashville, Tenn., where I taught, a woman student was desperate to conceal her dyslexia. I tried to convince her that her condition was nothing to be ashamed of and urged her to see a professional at the Student Health Center. As a white “professor,” I was at a disadvantage. True, I was addressed with “Professor Cook” by students and faculty, but the distinction was in name only. I was hired as lecturer with no influence on policy. Of course, students didn't know this. but in California, I knew a young man, now an architect, who solved his educational dilemma by first enrolling in a two-year college that furnished him with books on tape instead of hard-copy volumes. So, too, my friend and Johnny-come-lately partner enjoyed virtual books his daughters checked out for him at the library. Negotiating the long drives to the Nebraska lake where he fishes with his sons, he listened to the virtual books for hours on end.
“When grandchildren visited us in Wyoming,” says Garver, “I took them hiking and skiing in the Snowies.” Yet when I asked if he explained dyslexia to his children and grandchildren, he said, “Not so much.” His answer struck me as reminiscent of Grandin’s uncomfortable “No” in the televised interview. We tend to feel embarrassed over our struggles and challenges, as well I know from my own life.
Over the years Garver has acquired—and stored in his brain—a formidable amount of information. He’ll identify every bird on the wing in Wyoming and Nebraska. He holds a knowledge of trees that borders on reverence. He is fond of the Nebraska sandhills that, covered with sparse grasses, stretch for hundreds of miles from the state’s north to eastern Nebraska. The sandhills are America’s largest dunes, he says; when it rains, the water seeps right through the sand and replenishes the Ogallala Aquifer. “If we lose just three inches of annual precipitation,” he points out, “the sandhills lose their grass cover and turn into shifting dunes.” I imagine that would cause sandstorms comparable to those in the Sahara.
He looks askance at Nebraska’s tremendous corn crops, used primarily to produce ethanol, a wasteful, expensive addition to gasoline. So much corn is produced in his home state, the massive sprinklers that water the crops trigger “corn sweats” of humidity when the corn matures in the fall.
Like Grandin, Garver finds writing extraordinarily difficult. Having to write a check drives him to fits of distraction. “My wife took care of all this,” he says of his finances. “My daughters helped after her death.” The collaboration strikes me like that of Co-Writer Catherine Johnson, who unfailingly works with Grandin in the writing of books and scientific articles they have produced together.
Neurodivergence doesn’t care about skin color. You may be Asian, Black, of European ancestry, or Indigenous. If you’re autistic, dyslexic, or think of yourself as a visual learner, you may want to join a free autism summit here: https://autismparentingsummit.com/. Information on dyslexia can be gathered from the National Institute of Mental Health, which hosts Disability and Mental Health webinars to improve the equity of individuals with neurodevelopmental conditions. In a webinar slated for later this month, speakers will examine ways to reduce health disparities and the intersection of disability, family adversity, and mental health.
P.S. I read this article aloud to my partner, who clarified some points.
Sally Hagemeister
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