Bill McCann - Yearnings: A Memoir In Prose and Poetry

The Cove Schools was the first of its kind in the nation—a school for those who (in 1948) were referred to as brain-injured children. My own difficulties are a pretty good cluster of the issues many Cove students were dealing with: low IQ, poor coordination, medical conditions, hyperactivity, distractibility, behavioral issues, and learning disabilities. There were no programs, much less schools, for such students in Kentucky in the spring of 1962. Yet by the fall of 1962 such children were enrolled in special education classes throughout the Fayette County Public Schools system..  Consequently, it is important to point out that since this school was unique—the only school of its type in the United States—the school was performing a service by training both teachers how to teach and parents how to nurture their children. The first half of this memoir, "Yearnings," was written primarily in the form of a Japanese haibun—a form that utilizes a combination of prose and poetry. So clearly this is not an attempt at writing a traditional memoir. Neither is it a traditional haibun, particularly since it contains poems beyond just haiku. Even elephant jokes are included here, as are some family photographs. Yet I wrote this part of the book largely in the haibun form because it is best able to tell the story.  Finally, this memoir is built around many documents from the period 1948-1966. Some 'errors' are due to the fact that some spelling conventions (class room, work books, etc.) and grammar conventions have changed over time. In other instances, the spelling errors are due to the author's misspelling of words (Sonday instead of Sunday) in letters home (ages 7-11). And in both instances corrections have not been made and there are neither in-text recognition of those errors nor footnotes. Please assume errors in this text exist for one of those reasons.