Last spring, during a period when I was dealing with several stressful events, I suddenly developed Bell's Palsy. My doctor immediately put me on Prednisone and an anti-viral medication (they also tested me for exposure to Lyme's Disease--negative), I had to use eye drops and tape my eye shut at night so it wouldn't dry out or get scratched, and it was a royal pain. I'm a public speaker, and I had a gig the very next day after developing Bell's--I had to figure out quickly how to deal with it so I wouldn't scare my audience. Fortunately, I talk about birds and except at the beginning and end they were mostly focused on my PowerPoint pictures and videos.

Ironically, considering how much I hate Dick Cheney, my mirror made it pretty clear that I'd developed a Dick Cheney smile. It was ugly to look at and frustrating to think about. But that also allowed me to use the line, when explaining the situation, that "Yes, I look like Dick Cheney. But don't worry--I won't shoot you in the face. Or, if I do shoot you in the face, I won't make you apologize to me for it."

Being 55, I've rather come to expect myself to look like one particular person in the mirror, and although it was jarring to suddenly be seeing Dick Cheney instead, I quickly got into the fun of this bizarre face, though I was pretty happy that my case only lasted 2 weeks. Just 5 months later it's so fully healed that no one can tell I'd ever had it.

Why did it happen to me? Well, I have an alcoholic mother and my father was a philanderer, too. We could do a study to see if this is a common thread, but I think Bell's Palsy, like shit and everything else, just happens. Why did my case go away so quickly when it lasts much longer for some people? Well, in 1961 I cleaned the erasers every day for my fifth grade teacher, Mr. Borkowski. That must be the reason.

Perhaps what the LW might take away from this Letters Section is:

1) there are specific treatments for Bell's Palsy that can at least minimize how long it lasts, and specific things you should do to protect your eye for the duration.

2) Many people have had worse things happen to them.

3) Many people have not had worse things happen to them. So far.

4) Sometimes people feel resentful and angry when someone complains about a problem that seems, relative to a great many problems, rather minor.

5) Sometimes people are nurturing and sympathetic when they learn of another's misfortune, major or minor.

6) Even very sympathetic people will quickly grow less so if you don't get past your self pity.

7) Someday your baby is going to have a problem. Maybe an illness. Maybe someone picking on him/her at school. Maybe disfiguring acne, maybe a sore toe. Since you are such a good problem-solving person, not at all like your mother or father (his comment was pretty callous if you aren't at a point to take your situation lightly!), you will need an answer to the child's inevitable "Why me?" This situation should be a good start in finding it.

It's interesting to me that both Garrison Keillor's commentary and Lynne Cheney's new book are filled with nostalgia about an "idyllic" past world. At least GK has spent his career bringing that idyllic place into people's cars and living rooms and kitchens via his radio program, and at least he knows that its real name is Lake Wobegon, a fiction. At the very heart of his idyllic world, fiction or non-fiction, are human beings. Individual, flawed, flesh-and-blood people struggling to live their lives with some sort of integrity, whether they're flannel-wearing Iowans or when they're characters whose names we won't find in government records, living in a place not on a map.

Lynne Cheney dismisses the rest of the country, in her book and in her TV interviews, as somehow so much less than that perfect Wyoming where she grew up. But her Wyoming, unlike Keillor's Lake Wobegon or Iowa, isn't peopled with human beings who struggle and go through life trying to hold onto some integrity and who are born and live and die as members of a larger community. Her Wyoming is peopled with a tiny little insular group of people who cocoon themselves from the rest of the world, human and natural, holding shotguns out against potential invaders. Her daughter leads her lesbian life cocooned from attacks by the media and by right-wing bigots, while the rest of the nation's lesbians face the barrel of those shotguns facing out from the cocoon.

And like her, her husband, perhaps the most powerful man in the world right now, makes his decisions in that tiny microcosm--that strange world where when you shoot someone in the face, even a friend, he must apologize to you. New Yorkers, Chicagoans, Iowans--almost 300 million Americans--have no meaning for them except as a means by which to profit, and as pawns in their games. GK's essay reminds us that EACH American has meaning. And those who still remember this, who debate issues in their driveways (and also on the Internet--Iowa is one of the rare states that offer free wireless at their interstate rest areas!) as if their opinions still matter, are worth reckoning with, and worth emulating.