Who could do better than Joan Dideon on the topic of migraine?

Nobody.

​And yet here I am, sharing my thoughts.

First, migraine. It's a headache, yes, but it encompasses a largish category of neurological symptoms and takes a variety of devilishly unpleasant forms. 

"That no one dies of migraine seems,
to someone deep into an attack,
an ambiguous blessing."
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– Joan Dideon

It starts, often, with a visual disturbance.  Flashes or jaggedy streaks of light, tunnel vision, or small blind spots.  

​Followed by perhaps a period of violent sensitivity to light or sound or smell. 

Alarming stroke-like symptoms sometimes show up: surred speech, vomiting, dizziness, for instance. Or weakness or tingling on one side of the whole body. 

My father and his mother and her grandmother all suffered from migraines. My first came to me as yet another unwelcome side-effect of being a girl.

Age 13: here you go, missy, a bouquet of body changes that usher in decades of unwelcome public commentary and oh, bonus!  a debilitating headache on either side of this other physical indignity that seems like an illness. 

​Gah.

For years, medical consultation usually ended with, "Well, you can look forward to having them diminish as you get older."

At the risk of insulting our collective historical memory, let me review the Blitz.  

In around 1939, the Nazis were marching pretty handily across Europe, invading Czechoslovakia, Austria, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, the Channel Islands, toppling governments and sending whole populations of people to work camps.

Basically setting the platinum standard for European evil.

The British kept fighting (on the beaches, on the landing fields, etc., etc...) and in the late summer of 1940, Hitler sent a bomber to  London.  

It might be that the pilots got a bit turned around and only accidentally dropped a cartload of bombs on London's East End. It might be that the Germans were retaliating for a British raid that killed German non-combatants.  

In any case, the German bombs landed in the heart of the city, destroying houses and killing civilians.  Churchill responded by sending a fleet of bombers to hit Berlin. The British succeeded, and then did it a second and third time –– to the disbelief of the Germans, who thought nobody could get to Berlin.  

Naturally, the Germans were outraged. Hitler vowed that if the British wanted to drop bombs on German cities, well by gum, the Germans would drop ten times as many on British cities.

So then began the Blitz –– the German bombers targeted civilian sites, landmarks, population centers, night after night. Tens of thousands of civilians died. Hundreds of thousands were hurt.  

​The bombardment went on without much stop until the following May, when thankfully, Hitler was distracted by the sparkly-sparkly toy that was Russia.

The Blitz was meant to terrorize the British, but instead of losing heart, the Brits dug in their heels. They sent their kids to the countryside, hunkered down in Tube stations,  and continued to do business in a bombed-out city.

​It was "Britain's finest hour," not the least because with the Germans focused on civilian targets, the Royal Air Force caught a break to rebuild their fleet.

Talk about stiff upper lip. 

In Sarah Waters' The Night Watch, the Blitz is the catalyst for the heartbreaking love affair at center stage.

The novel begins in a grey and tired 1948 and runs backward, tracing the fates of four Londoners to the flash-lit beginning in 1941.

Amazing period detail, wrenching emotion, and astonishing characterization makes me wish I'd written this novel.


From Connie Willis, a pair of double-decker novels called Blackout and All Clear are set in the Blitz and focuses on how ordinary people survived it.

In Blackout, historians from Oxford in 2060 travel back in time to observe the Blitz firsthand. As one might expect, their expedition into the past goes awry and they are unable to return home.

All Clear continues the story to its suspenseful conclusion. It's not for everyone, this cement block's worth of story, but it's among my favorites. It juggles multiple storylines with humor, pathos, and a dollop of historical facts for a long immersive experience.  
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Everyone Brave is Forgiven by Chris Cleave turns out to be an examination of the variations of bravery –– from the courage of battle, to the strength to simply keep carrying on –– shown by a handful of Londoners.

Based loosely on the story of the author's own grandparents, the novel is engaging and bittersweet.  I gobbled it up over a weekend.

I mention the Pflugheber’s place, where my mom and I and the horse and the dog lived for a time.

Why, the husband knows Ed Pflugheber! The husband retired from the Watertown Daily Times. 

Why then he must know my cousin Scott Smith, who works at the Times.

Indeed he does. He knows Toots Carbone, too, my buddy Care's Dad, our next-door neighbor on the Point. 

We talk about the St. Lawrence River, and my sister points to her tee-shirt, which features a snap from our family history: Herbie Ward and Daddo with a string of fish on the dock at Fisher’s Landing.
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Well, wouldn't you know the husband knows Herbie Ward.

Small world!

Each kid was required to perform a series of timed exercises, record a score (we used a buddy system, fraught with danger of corruption and kickback), and then compare ourselves to the ideal and our pals.

As I remember, it was sit-ups, 100-yard dash, chin-ups for the boys, overhand hang for the girls, push-ups, plus maybe something ridiculous like squat-thrusts.

​Oooh, and a weird skipping agility thing...*

According to cheerful old Plato, an ideal world exists beyond our senses. 

​Everything we see in the "sensible" world is simply an approximation of the ideal. Just shadows on the wall of a cave.  

One of those plastic stacking chairs, a schools teacher's perch, that Frank Lloyd Wright piece, a Heppelwhite seat, Arthur's siege parlous, all are –– according to this argument –– mere reflections of the ideal chair. Imperfect interpretations, shadows, approximations.

Anyhoo. That's one way to look around at the world, perhaps more than a little reductio ad absurdum.  But it does somehow lead me to thinking about what makes a shelter.

We humans can live in any manner of places: tents, caves, castles, huts, boats, vans. Even homeless, we have our preferred spots. What's the common denominator?
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