'Your response is your character.' (response to stuttering)

• Author: Rowe, Jonathan

Johnathan Rowe is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly.

Her sister had said something about me, she said.

"You know," she recounted, "he almost sounds as though he stuttered once."

We had been visiting her family at their farm in the Upper Midwest. Now we were pulling out onto the Interstate. The observation came totally out of the blue. She must have been waiting to tell me.

As the wheat fields passed outside, I savored every nuance. "Almost." "once." Oh, sweet.

Scenes flashed through my mind. A little kid, lying in bed, wishing that his strange affliction would go away. The adults who kept telling him to "try to relax." A stutterer is always trying, probably too much. The English class in the new high school. His classmates had demanded that the teacher call on the new kid to read aloud, and he had dissolved into a sputtering puddle. And much later: the young woman who told him that she liked him but that his stutter made her nervous.

This last may sound cruel. But the honesty still staggers me. (When the shoe is on the other foot, I tend to slink off into the night.) People who stutter know they make people nervous. They even make themselves nervous. This fact screams out in every conversation, but no one is supposed to notice. This woman was paying me a compliment. She thought me big enough to handle the truth.

People who know me know that the problem is not entirely behind. There are days and times when the gears still seize that connect my mind to my mouth, and when the dread consonants, such as "d" and "p," loom up like guards at the East German border But I'm not complaining. In fact, I hardly think about it anymore.

Self-pity has become a dominant note in our national discourse. George Bush talks about the need for capital gains tax breaks in tones more appropriate for appeals for blankets for homeless children. One hesitates even to appear to add to all this kvetching.

So right off: my problem was not great in the larger scheme of things. Growing up, I could play baseball and read and throw snowballs at cars. Anything that did not require formal speech. Compared to kids whose bodies didn't work, I had it pretty easy. In fact, despite my own problem, I was all too inclined to tease classmates who were slow or fat or had problems of other kinds. I never thought of myself as having "handicap," only a kind of chronic nemesis that I learned to negotiate the way a tennis player negotiates the net.

The last thing I ever...