Book Review: Tears for My Father

Title: Tears for My Father

Author: Tom Fugate

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Publisher: Amazon

ISBN:

Length:

Illustrations: black-and-white photographs

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This is the blog of a dutiful son of a senile father, printed as a book. Tom Fugate invited comments from the older baby-boomers in Scott County, Virginia, who remember Principal Freddie Fugate. When I was in school he’d been promoted to Superintendent of Schools, succeeding a Mr. Elliott, whom I don’t remember personally either; children don’t spend much time with the Superintendent of Schools. I heard of both superintendents as just more of the bores who didn’t believe children ought to be able to work ahead of grade level, so I didn’t want to meet either of them and, so far as I remember, never had to do.

But when my natural sister was homeschooled her progress tests were administered by Superintendent Fugate. Not inclined to work ahead of grade level in any subject, she grumbled in a letter that public school students didn’t have to pass those tests to stay in public school. I remember sending her a new paper doll book (about the only thing she and I did together was dress paper dolls) with a letter from the dolls, stipulating that they wanted to be study mascots. “We like to study. We like to get those lessons DONE! We hear that some sort of Superintendent of Fudge, or something like that, does not think you are a good enough student to learn things on your own. We think that Superintendent of Fudge is full of walnuts.” It got the intended laugh, and may have helped the child pass the tests. Homeschooling was new and threatening for the older public school staff, but Superintendent Fugate was, as his son says in this book, a law-abiding man, and my natural sister was able to get through her homeschool and private school years, even a term in college, without having her hearing loss built up into a disability.

Tom Fugate deplores the loss of some of the local history in which his family figure. I can’t add much to that either; his ancestors didn’t live near enough to mine for the family stories to overlap. In the strict sense of the term they were indeed gentlemen and –women.

One thing Tom Fugate does explain is that his father’s name was originally “Feddie” Jackson Fugate. People “corrected” this unusual name to the more common name, Freddie, and Mr. Fugate let them.

For those who don’t remember Superintendent Fugate at all this book is just another sad little testimony to the misery of Alzheimer’s Disease. The stereotype of the patient who is glad to see a relative, then asks a few minutes later who the person is, acquires additional poignancy from the detail that such a patient may forget how to turn over in bed. It would be nice if memoirs of this disease could tell us how it might be prevented. So far they do not. It’s only by comparing what this book and similar ones tell me about people who develop Alzheimer’s Disease, and what I’ve read in, e.g., Prevention and The Washington Post about people who don’t, that I come away with an insight—for whatever it may turn out to be worth. But here it is.

For me, empathy is checked, early in the book, by the indirect but unmistakable statements that I’m not reading about fellow HSPs. Everyone is supposed to think and feel the same way. Any alternative is "not normal" and no alternative to "normal" is an improvement. I’ve heard things like this spoken in real life, and I’ve learned. They can reflect a deliberate blunting of perceptivity, a sort of emotional self-mutilation. More usually they reflect a lack of perceptivity. I prefer not to talk about anything at all personal or emotional with people who think this way, because, although many of them make it an article of faith that everybody has similar “feelings,” in fact whatever emotional reactions they have seem closer to what I've observed in cows and chickens than to what I've felt or observed among friends and family. Grief, among my kind of people, can draw people together in an agreement to treat each other’s grieving process as “special.” Grief, among this kind of people, is a trigger for their master emotion of hostility. No useful purpose is served by activating hostility. Anything at all is likely to set them off so it’s better to avoid speaking to them or looking at them than to try to compromise with the ones who also suffer from extroversion by participating in their “greeting” displays. This is the case in all situations, not only those that involve grieving. 

It’s ironic for me to note that although my elders, each in their own way, deplored the snobbery of the old feudal system, I grew up thinking of people who recognized the “specialness” of the raw emotions of grief as “gentle” people, and of those who did not as “churlish” or “common.” And to some extent there does still seem to be a socioeconomic class marker, although bourgeois types (the type who become social workers) who emote about emotions don’t show much more understanding of complex emotions, or much less underlying hostility, than Fugate here blurts out. But, as the social workers show, you can put emotionally underdeveloped people through “sensitivity training” but you can’t make them perceive or feel much beyond that default-to-hostility. People develop High Sensory Perceptivity or else they do not; people who do are in some ways an elite minority, Real Princesses or Princes. It has nothing to do with money. Many HSPs' only wealth is their neurological development.

As Fugate observes, one reason why Alzheimer’s Disease is poorly understood is that medicine has only recently advanced to a level that keeps people who develop this disease alive long enough to observe how they suffer from it. But if there is a way to avert or avoid this disease, it may be this: HSPs seldom seem to get Alzheimer’s Disease. (Brain damage, yes.) Alzheimer’s Disease seems, according to recent studies—which are new and inconclusive and very much a way of whistling in the dark—to develop in the brains of people who grunt and snarl and become hostile when confronted with new information (“Huh, if that were true I would have known about it already”) or with other people’s feelings (“Huh! They think that makes them special? I’ve (been ill/disabled, bereaved, rejected, frustrated) too!”). HSP brains consider new information, recognize the subtleties of emotions, and otherwise remain more flexible (“plastic”) than the brains of the non-HSPs who show that surly, churlish reaction. This makes it seem to some researchers that HSP brains age like non-HSP brains, albeit more slowly, but—theoretically at least—work around the physical damage ssociated with Alzheimer’s Disease in non-HSPs.

Did Superintendent Fugate believe that all children ought to fit one “norm” because he was genetically doomed not to develop the plasticity of a brain that becomes "wise” in old age, or did he become senile in old age because he believed in “normality”? Perhaps some day we’ll know. His generation were known as the Silent Generation because they were conditioned to fear all imagination, all complex (individual) emotion, all quirkiness of any kind. McCarthyism was only the tip of an iceberg. They suppressed memories and nuances and speculations in the name of maintaining complete and constant “contact with reality” and, later on, they lost all contact with reality altogether.

Whether people can stop the grunting and snarling, or the mindless grinning and chattering, and train themselves to think and feel and imagine, remains to be learned. In any case we can at least be aware, when we see that mental short-circuiting that blocks out new information or complex emotion: this is the behavior of a brain that’s predisposed to rot.

One can understand why someone who was christened “Feddie” might prefer “Freddie,” but perhaps, if the Feddies and Thurleys (not Shirleys) and Li-pings (not Lees) of this world insist on using their unusual given names or perhaps taking new ones, that’s a sign that they’ll become wise elders rather than senile ones. Long convoluted thoughts may seem to have more in common with “crazy” artistic styles than truncated, repetitious, stereotyped thoughts have, but long convoluted thoughts are in fact characteristic of healthy, long-lived brains. It is actually safer to keep learning and thinking of new possibilities than it is to lock down into efforts to think only "normal" thoughts.

What else can be learned from this book, besides the sad fact that Superintendent Fugate developed Alzheimer's Disease? It could very easily have been a longer book. While working to meet a minimum word count for this expression of grief, Tom Fugate forgot to add the formal biography taken from the public record. Principals' and school superintendents' work is administrative; they advise teachers, mediate between teachers and parents, but don't directly teach the children. Nevertheless, during the Fugate administration, our schools moved away from ranking students' progress relative to others and toward simple percentage scoring. If ten students answer ten out of ten questions right, then even if there are only ten students in the class, all ten scored 100% and are A students. 

This policy served us well; it shaped then-new Gate City High School, especially, into "State Trophy High." In academic as well as athletic competitions, we traditionally outscore bigger, richer, better funded schools. (It's not true that "Blue Devils" who fail to bring home a trophy are dropped into the Devil's Bathtub. I would know. Anyway, despite the chill and current, most people who dive into the Devil's Bathtub pop out alive.) You don't expect that in a town that has two business streets, each less than a half-mile long, students who take "preppy" courses are going to be prepared for Ivy League universities, students will be selected to attend international conferences, students will regularly be invited to spend a week in Washington--that it will be considered necessary to drill middle school students on what to say if they meet the First Family, because that might happen. During Freddie Fugate's administration, that sort of thing was normal at Gate City. There was no drug problem, either, and though there were students who got married while in high school (to classmates, or to older people who were not yet considered pedophiles), very few students became single parents while in high school. The discipline and determination observed at all the county's schools were known all across the State. There is always controversy about individual administrative decisions but, on the whole, the Fugate administration presided over some extraordinarily good, small, low-funded schools.

Men of Superintendent Fugate's age expected history to judge them by their job performance. So let it be remembered that, whatever that generation got wrong, Freddie Fugate worked his way up to a responsible, high-profile job, and he did that job well.