The Card Table
Measel, David

DAVID: My father was an English and History teacher in the Pulaski County School District; his name was Michael Measel. Personally he dealt more into literature than he did in history but he was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease when he was, I think, forty or forty-one. Even though he was always completely aware of his imminent death and his mortality and how he wasn't going to live for more than like two years at most. When he was bound to his wheelchair and he couldn't work anymore he would sit at a card table in our living room and he would pour over these books. Most of it was all nonfiction stuff, I remember the last thing that he was reading that I saw when I was a kid, I was nine when he died, I was probably eight when I saw this, it was just called "The Occult" and I looked at it later and actually got in trouble for having it at school which was just ridiculous. But it had these stories of different people's account of metaphysical experiences, like a camping experience that was so vivid to them that they were like completely in another time and place altogether; it was sort of like an out of body experience, like a waking dream. He would take notes and he would highlight things in these books but really toward the end he didn't even have anybody to discuss all this stuff with so it was almost like he understood this concept that there was like a faculty by which he could take knowledge into his own mind and it would benefit the great, I don't know what to call it, the greater source of human knowledge even though he didn't have a way to communicate that and he knew he was going to die. That was one of the most inspirational things that I've ever seen in my life and I'll never forget about it. Literature just goes and goes and goes, there is an end to it but it's like the universe, it's just constantly expanding and it's just - I don't know what to say other than that.