Typos
It’s late and everyone but me is fast asleep—my wife Tracey, our girls, three dogs, and a bird. It’s quiet, dark, and calm. A peaceful February cold surrounds our warm home. Having fallen asleep a couple of hours earlier, I am wide awake now and trying to make peace with an all too familiar experience that having Parkinson’s provides.
Insomnia.
I decide I’ll look through the page proofs for my new book, Counseling Persons with Parkinson’s Disease, which will be released in just a few weeks. Each book I’ve written has a special place in my heart—after all, I write to know what I think—but none has been more meaningful than this book. From working with my editor and friend, Dana Bliss, to having my friend Elizabeth Gaucher and several close colleagues read the manuscript and give me feedback, to hoping it will help those who offer counsel to those of us living with an insidious disease—all of that makes this book particularly special and makes me eager to hold it in my hands.
Preparing to scroll through the pages, an incorrectly-placed apostrophe catches my eye. In fact, atop the book’s very first page, right there in front of God and everybody, it reads, Counseling Person’s with Parkinson’s Disease.
Person’s!
I have a flashback to the third-grade in Richardson, Texas, and to my teacher, Ms. Ora Lamb, whose expectations for proper spelling, not to mention grammar, have kept a hold on me for 45 years.
For about 48 years, my age when diagnosed with Parkinson’s, I would have lost even more sleep over this presumed error. I would have stewed over it and beat myself up for not catching it sooner when there was still time to make changes. I’d probably also have had a few choice words to say about the copyeditor at my publisher, whose job it is to catch these errors and correct them before going to press. As Tracey pointed out three decades ago, not long after we met, “Allan likes things at 90-degree angles.”
But that was before Parkinson’s put lots of angles with differing degrees in my life. So I calmly wrote an email to Fabian, the production manager at the publisher, told her what I had discovered, and asked if she could let me know whether someone had seen it and made the change before putting the book into production.
Then, I went to bed in hopes that I’d sleep through the night.
Imperfections
In my mid-20s, the summer before my last year of seminary, I had the opportunity to take Hebrew at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. Those ten weeks remain some of the more interesting ones of my life, not because I became fluent in Hebrew (far from it), but because I learned so much about Judaism and its rich practices. One of them is the tradition when building a home of leaving a portion of it unfinished, a symbol of life’s imperfections and unfinished state.[1] Years later, I’d learn of a similar tradition among the Navajo, who intentionally weave a “flaw” into their rugs—a spirit-line they call it—which reminds all who see it that life is never perfect.[2]
Parkinson’s feels like living in this kind of unfinished state and having this type of flaw, both of which can serve to remind us that nothing is perfect—not health, nor relationships, nor jobs, nor plans we make, nor our possessions—nothing.
Life gets a lot easier and less stressful when we stop expecting otherwise. As Tolstoy put it, if you look for perfection, you’ll never be content.
More Angles
When I check my email the next morning, Fabian has written me back. All is well. A final copyedit flagged the typo and corrected it. My title was as it should be.
Part of me wishes it had remained imperfect, just as I am; just as we all are. There is beauty to be found there, after all, and authenticity as well, both of which we see in unfinished homes or deliberately imperfect rugs that point us to what matters more in life than perfection: family, pets, friends, colleagues, meaningful work, books, those who live in solidarity when facing illness, and so much more.
Having Parkinson’s has helped me see all of it more clearly.
The other part of me, the one schooled by Ms. Lamb and calmed by 90-degree angles, is glad the errant apostrophe was caught and removed. Dana will be, too, and so will Elizabeth.
After all, it was on the first page!
__________
[1] https://templebethel.org/perfect-imperfections-by-rabbi-judith-schindler/
[2] https://michellealexander.in/blogs/news/navajos
Photo by Olya Kobruseva from Pexels
Allan Cole is a professor in The Steve Hicks School of Social Work at The University of Texas at Austin and, by courtesy, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Dell Medical School. Diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2016, at the age of 48, he serves on the Board of Directors at Power for Parkinson’s, a non-profit organization that provides free exercise, dance, and singing classes for people living with Parkinson’s disease in Central Texas, and globally via instructional videos. He also serves as a Community Advocate for ParkinsonsDisease.net, and as a regular guest contributor to the Michael J. Fox Foundation’s Team Fox Blog, writing columns about living well with Parkinson’s. He is the author or editor of 10 books on a range of topics related to bereavement, anxiety, and spirituality. His latest books, Counseling Persons with Parkinson’s Disease (Oxford University Press) and Discerning the Way: Lessons from Parkinson’s Disease (Cascade), will be published in 2021. He is also working on a book of poetry titled In the Care of Plenty: Poems (Resource Publications), which will be published in 2022. Follow him on Twitter @PDWise.