When my parents got divorced, they did not tell us kids. My folks were weird. They filed for divorce, life went on the same until their divorce hearing. After the hearing, mom showed up with a truck and movers to take the stuff she was going to take and then she disappeared, taking my baby sister and baby brother. They disappeared.
Mom had dropped out of college when she married Dad. When she decided to divorce him, she decided she would first finish college. Her credits were so dated that she pretty much had to redo all college creditds. She went to college full time while I was in high school. She worked part time to pay her tuition. And she was able to pull this hard work off, even though she had six kids, because she used me as her slave. But I was happy to be her slave. I loved my baby brother and baby sister. I rushed home from school to be with them. Caring for them, fixing dinner for the whole family, doing the whole family's laundry and even doing the grocery shopping with a double stroller and groceries stuffed all over that stroller -- a kid shopping for a family of 8 with two babies in tow, hauling those babies and those groceries with a stroller. I had to grocery shop nearly every day because I could not bring home a whole week of groceries with the babies.
My sis had been born the week I had graduated grade school. I literally spent more time with her during my high school years, which were also the first four years of her life, than our mom. Mom was at college full time, and spent her evenings working in a department store. Mom admitted she liked the calm of the department store, that she preferred it to running her household in the evenings. My dad worked long hours, was not usually home in the evenings. The other boys (I have four brothers in total) would hole up in their room with tv and I hung out with 'the babies'.
I loved those babies as if they were my kids. I am now a mother. I know what it feels like to love babies like your own babies.
When my mom took off with most of the furniture in the house, leaving behind four children and her ex-husband -- she even took some of our beds, she left us with no living room furniture cause, she said years later, she needed it.
What about us? Didn't we, like, matter at all? I get that she was scared. But she was, like, the mom?
During the time that I did not know where my babies were, I was in hell. I had never thought about things like therapy or depression so it did not occur to me that I was depressed or grieving. But I spent my freshman year of college in grief over my babies. And I don't remember anyone around me understanding my sorrow cause to my college pals, I was just talking about little brothers and sisters. Big deal, right? All my friends had brothers and sisters back home.
But I had lost mine.
How strange is my karma, huh? Later, I had my daughter and lost her too.
Then, I found out that my mom had remarried the day she was legally able to do so. That she had divorced my dad because she had a new husband all lined up. That she had been secretive with her children about the divorce cause she wanted to keep the new husband a secret. She swore under oath at the divorce hearing that she would not remove the babies from Illinois.
Then, about a year later, my dad hired a detective and found her living in eastern Ohio. My babies lived ten hours away from me.
I am an idiot. Just like a little kid goes on loving their abusers because babies come programmed to be loving, I went right on loving my mom. I forgot all about how I had keened over the loss of my babies. I even managed to skip over the pain of realizing my babies were going to grow up in a whole world apart from me, that I would not really get to see them grow up, as I had always assumed I would. (Just as I always assumed I would know my daughter as she emerged into an adult. I last saw her when she was 19. Now she is 28. Does she look different, ya think? What kind of a person has she turned out to be, other than the person who can callously cut her mother out of her heart? Is she kind to children? Does she still like to dance? Does she still care about fashion? Is she a liberal? . . what the fuck. Why do I torment myself with such thoughts.
I completely forgave my mom. As soon as I heard where my family was, I rushed to visit them. And while I was there, I swear to god, mom had me shampoo all her carpets and, and I still find this hard to believe but it is also true, she had me wash all the walls in the house. She bought murphy's wall cleaner, a couple buckets of it. She wanted all the walls scrubbed down cause her new man was a heavy smoker and she thought all the walls and ceilings were filthy with years of smoke and she put her slave to work. I mean, why not? I had been her slave for years. And I did it. I scrubbed every inch of every wall and every ceiling of that dark, dreary house.
Then came Mother's Day, the first one after my mom had left. I saved up. I never had much spending money in college. I had a very part time job on campus, as part of my financial aid and that was all the spending money I ever had. I worked about 8 hours a week for minimum wage. I saved up enough money to order a dozen yellow long stem roses for my mom for that Mother's Day. I did careful research and learned that I could avoid the FTD fee, the service in those days where you could pay a premium fee to have flowers delivered anywhere. Cleverly, I thought, I called the phone company and chose a flower shop in mom's new town and paid for those long stemmed yellow roses. I got long stemmed yellow ones because I knew they were my mom's favorite.
So Mother's Day comes. I expected mom to call me and thank me profusely, to shower me with loving gratitude. But she did not call. Fair enough, I reasoned, I should call her to wish her Happy Mother's Day. So I called her. And she did not mention my wildly extravagant gesture.
After we had chatted a while, and in those days, most people did not talk long distance very long, most folks mindful that it was expensive to talk long distance, I asked her if she had gotten my flowers. And this is what she said. I wish I were making this up.
She sighed dramatically, kind of a whoop. My mom does this dramatic whoop a lot. She say "Whoo boy, I got them. It was such a disappointment."
I waited. Stung. WTF? I was so proud of my gesture. I guess I was a very immature nineteen year old. I had given those long stem yellow roses magical power. I thought my mom would open the door, see them and rejoice. I thought those yellow roses would signal what I wanted to be true, that we were still a family, that she still loved me and I loved her and I was going to be all right. Because it is unsettling to have your parents divorce, your mom disappear and have your babies disappear with her and I still had goofy ideas related to moms. I thought my mom was suppose to, like, take care of me.
"Why were my flowers a disappointment, Mom?"
"When I saw the flower truck pull up, naturally I assumed that Ron had given me flowers. Or else Ron's girls. I thought they were honoring me on this first mother's day in our new marriage, and I was so flattered that Ron was recognizing me on Mother's Day. I thought they were from Ron until I saw the card. When I saw they were from you, I realized Ron had not recognized me on Mother's Day. It was such a disappointment."
She never thanked me. Well, she did after I prodded her. It was clear that she didn't give a crap about the flowers or the fact that I had basically sacrificed an entire semester's worth of pocket money to pay for them. They cost $36 in 1972. A ton of money to me. We had ten-week trimesters and it really was about all my spending fun money for a trimester. No cokes in the student union. No french fries after an evening studying. All my money that spring had gone into the yellow roses.
Friday, May 06, 2011
Saturday, April 16, 2011
hummingbirds
In the spring of 2008, I had several experiences with hummingbirds.
Back in the eighties, married, pregnant, then a mother, domiciled in suburban red state America, my next door neighbors had several hummingbird feeders. The whole neighborhood talked about the hummingbirds and how those particular neighbors were like hummingbird whispereres. You are so lucky, my neighborhood told me, you will see hummingbirds all the time living next to those eople. They have magic ability to attract hummingbirds.
I only lived in that house a few years but I gardened a lot, sent a lot of time in the yard, a few feet from the hummingbird feeders. I never saw one. I thought hummingbirds were unreal maybe, a myth and they are very rare and if the folks next door really had hummingbird magic, then they got one sighting every few years and it was such a rarity that everyone turned it into a bullshit myth.
Then, in the spring 2008, three times hummingbirds came to me and, I swear, sent me messages. I don't know the messages but they were, I am sure, telling me something.
The first time, there were three. As I walked up to the gate of my pool, arriving a few minutes before it would open, seeing a couple regular guys from the pool standing by to witness what hapened, three humingbirds swooped over to me and all three of them flew close to me, doing thier hummingbird sizzling sarkling humming sparking thing.
If you have never seen a hummingbird up close doing its amazing think, know that it is amazing. It seems sacred and magical.
Three. Jack, a gruff conservative red neck who often bored all us blue neck liberals with his bombast cause he knew it grated on us but he counted on our manners. .. he would say racist things and then pause, make sure he had shocked us, and with timing that suggested he had practiced his act, he would mince a bit (and he is bit and fat and the mincing prance was very funny) he would say, 'there I said it, you know you were thinking it" but we weren't. None of us were sitting there thinking the racist things he said. Typically he made cracks about East Palo Alto, which is where the nearest enclave to our pool was of poor blacks. Mountain View, where I lived and swam in 2008, had plenty of ethnic poor but they are mostly Hispanic. And sure there are blacks of all economic brackets all over Silicon valley. But it seems like there are more poor blacks in East Palo Alto. EPA is a pocket of our racist culture. The rich folks of Silicon Valley and respected Stanford do a good job of keeping poor blacks out of Palo Alto.
Jack was often a jerk, often spouting very ugly Repugnant thinking. I have not directly interacted with many people who think like he does. Well, there is my brother chuck the fuck. He talks ike that. Chuck the fuck used to be a judge, even1 But I have not talked to him since our father's funeral in 1988. C-the-F worshipped Rush Limbaugh.
As a public employee (well, now retired) I wonder how Chuck's conservative politics is working out these days as Ohio tries to eliminate benefits for public employees? I wonder if he still worships all things Repuglican?
whatever.
I'm sick of me. I wish I were traveling. I long for exotic travel, like a trip down the Nile on a barge or building a library in the Niger Delta of Nigeria or building a house in Burundi. But today I wish I were in a European city, with lots of spending money, staying in the kind of hotel I have never really stayed in unless my rich mom was paying. Paris would work. Barcelona would work. Portugal. What the heck, a european tour this summer with lots of money, expensive hotels and good company.
Or Eat Pray Love, a swing to Europe, then India then Bali.
give me two weeks on the beach in Goa India would work. It would seem exotic but it's actually major tourist spot.
Or China. When my sister lived in Korea, she and her family took a tour trip to China. Meals included with the trip price. They toured some remote areas of china on a bus, ate at remote places. China's economy is on the rise but, like everywhere including America, there is poverty and shysters taking money from tourists on travel packages. One evening, in a dumpy hostel with the only available meal the hostel dinner that came with the tour package, dinner was three kinds of rice. That was it. Nothing else. Three kinds of rice. the host, the paid food purveyor was so poor and all he had on hand was three kinds of rice. But that made the tour a real tour of the real China, the tour guide said. In China, a little bit of rice if often all there is for dinner. Nobody had, um, signed up for a slice of real poverty living in rural china. This three-rice dinner feast was presented in a place where there was no choice, no where else to go. My sis said they couldn't go out and just spend more money and buy a restaurant meal. That three kinds of rice dinner was the only option.
I guess it was a memorable meal. Not the rice. The memorable part was that it happened, that the tour guide kept a straight, serious composure as he describe the evening's repast, lovingly describing the feast they were about to experience, lovingly describing each kind of rice and telling the suckers, er, the tourists, what to savor to fully appreciate this special meal. It was like he was coaching at a wine tasting. Sis and her French artist deadbeat husband who freeloads off her still (you have to be pretty desparate if you freeload off a single mom school teacher, am I right? it's not like my sis, who earned fourteen grand a year in Korea -- but you can live well in Korea, she was assured, when she took the gig and my jerk brother in law . .
this post sucks. Once my brother in law hit me. I had a bruise later. I was standing outside their house, waiting for a cab, my suitcase on the public sidewalk in front of their house but on public property. Being a foreigner, an immigrant, I guess he thought he owned the sidewalk. He told me to get my suitcase off his property while I waited for the cab. I told him to fuck himself, that it was public property and, I swear, he lifted my large suitcase and threw it into the street. He didn't hurt anything. He was just being an asshole. And, yes, I had said some ugly things to him but I had never imagined he would hit me. When I tried to stop him from throwing my suitcase, which was deifnitely not his property and I cried and talked about how he couldn't throw me off the public sidewalk, he hit me. Just one pop on my left arm. But it was an assault.
If he hits his sister in law that he has only seen twice in public in front of the neighbors, geez, the asshole must hit people in private. That's how cowards and bullies tend to work, right?
My ex hit me, was physically abusive with some regularity and I did live in a battered women's shelter when I left him, but he controlled himself enough to hit in private.
If a man who beats on women does it in the street, either the French have standards about public violence much different than ours in America or Fred is a way out of control abuser. Since he is adoptive father to my niece and bio dad to my nephew and freeloader to my sister, I would like to believe he has his drinking under control. I bet not.
Once when he was blind drunk, he hit on my gay brother in my sister's basement with sis upstairs waiting for her husband to come to bed.
Back in the eighties, married, pregnant, then a mother, domiciled in suburban red state America, my next door neighbors had several hummingbird feeders. The whole neighborhood talked about the hummingbirds and how those particular neighbors were like hummingbird whispereres. You are so lucky, my neighborhood told me, you will see hummingbirds all the time living next to those eople. They have magic ability to attract hummingbirds.
I only lived in that house a few years but I gardened a lot, sent a lot of time in the yard, a few feet from the hummingbird feeders. I never saw one. I thought hummingbirds were unreal maybe, a myth and they are very rare and if the folks next door really had hummingbird magic, then they got one sighting every few years and it was such a rarity that everyone turned it into a bullshit myth.
Then, in the spring 2008, three times hummingbirds came to me and, I swear, sent me messages. I don't know the messages but they were, I am sure, telling me something.
The first time, there were three. As I walked up to the gate of my pool, arriving a few minutes before it would open, seeing a couple regular guys from the pool standing by to witness what hapened, three humingbirds swooped over to me and all three of them flew close to me, doing thier hummingbird sizzling sarkling humming sparking thing.
If you have never seen a hummingbird up close doing its amazing think, know that it is amazing. It seems sacred and magical.
Three. Jack, a gruff conservative red neck who often bored all us blue neck liberals with his bombast cause he knew it grated on us but he counted on our manners. .. he would say racist things and then pause, make sure he had shocked us, and with timing that suggested he had practiced his act, he would mince a bit (and he is bit and fat and the mincing prance was very funny) he would say, 'there I said it, you know you were thinking it" but we weren't. None of us were sitting there thinking the racist things he said. Typically he made cracks about East Palo Alto, which is where the nearest enclave to our pool was of poor blacks. Mountain View, where I lived and swam in 2008, had plenty of ethnic poor but they are mostly Hispanic. And sure there are blacks of all economic brackets all over Silicon valley. But it seems like there are more poor blacks in East Palo Alto. EPA is a pocket of our racist culture. The rich folks of Silicon Valley and respected Stanford do a good job of keeping poor blacks out of Palo Alto.
Jack was often a jerk, often spouting very ugly Repugnant thinking. I have not directly interacted with many people who think like he does. Well, there is my brother chuck the fuck. He talks ike that. Chuck the fuck used to be a judge, even1 But I have not talked to him since our father's funeral in 1988. C-the-F worshipped Rush Limbaugh.
As a public employee (well, now retired) I wonder how Chuck's conservative politics is working out these days as Ohio tries to eliminate benefits for public employees? I wonder if he still worships all things Repuglican?
whatever.
I'm sick of me. I wish I were traveling. I long for exotic travel, like a trip down the Nile on a barge or building a library in the Niger Delta of Nigeria or building a house in Burundi. But today I wish I were in a European city, with lots of spending money, staying in the kind of hotel I have never really stayed in unless my rich mom was paying. Paris would work. Barcelona would work. Portugal. What the heck, a european tour this summer with lots of money, expensive hotels and good company.
Or Eat Pray Love, a swing to Europe, then India then Bali.
give me two weeks on the beach in Goa India would work. It would seem exotic but it's actually major tourist spot.
Or China. When my sister lived in Korea, she and her family took a tour trip to China. Meals included with the trip price. They toured some remote areas of china on a bus, ate at remote places. China's economy is on the rise but, like everywhere including America, there is poverty and shysters taking money from tourists on travel packages. One evening, in a dumpy hostel with the only available meal the hostel dinner that came with the tour package, dinner was three kinds of rice. That was it. Nothing else. Three kinds of rice. the host, the paid food purveyor was so poor and all he had on hand was three kinds of rice. But that made the tour a real tour of the real China, the tour guide said. In China, a little bit of rice if often all there is for dinner. Nobody had, um, signed up for a slice of real poverty living in rural china. This three-rice dinner feast was presented in a place where there was no choice, no where else to go. My sis said they couldn't go out and just spend more money and buy a restaurant meal. That three kinds of rice dinner was the only option.
I guess it was a memorable meal. Not the rice. The memorable part was that it happened, that the tour guide kept a straight, serious composure as he describe the evening's repast, lovingly describing the feast they were about to experience, lovingly describing each kind of rice and telling the suckers, er, the tourists, what to savor to fully appreciate this special meal. It was like he was coaching at a wine tasting. Sis and her French artist deadbeat husband who freeloads off her still (you have to be pretty desparate if you freeload off a single mom school teacher, am I right? it's not like my sis, who earned fourteen grand a year in Korea -- but you can live well in Korea, she was assured, when she took the gig and my jerk brother in law . .
this post sucks. Once my brother in law hit me. I had a bruise later. I was standing outside their house, waiting for a cab, my suitcase on the public sidewalk in front of their house but on public property. Being a foreigner, an immigrant, I guess he thought he owned the sidewalk. He told me to get my suitcase off his property while I waited for the cab. I told him to fuck himself, that it was public property and, I swear, he lifted my large suitcase and threw it into the street. He didn't hurt anything. He was just being an asshole. And, yes, I had said some ugly things to him but I had never imagined he would hit me. When I tried to stop him from throwing my suitcase, which was deifnitely not his property and I cried and talked about how he couldn't throw me off the public sidewalk, he hit me. Just one pop on my left arm. But it was an assault.
If he hits his sister in law that he has only seen twice in public in front of the neighbors, geez, the asshole must hit people in private. That's how cowards and bullies tend to work, right?
My ex hit me, was physically abusive with some regularity and I did live in a battered women's shelter when I left him, but he controlled himself enough to hit in private.
If a man who beats on women does it in the street, either the French have standards about public violence much different than ours in America or Fred is a way out of control abuser. Since he is adoptive father to my niece and bio dad to my nephew and freeloader to my sister, I would like to believe he has his drinking under control. I bet not.
Once when he was blind drunk, he hit on my gay brother in my sister's basement with sis upstairs waiting for her husband to come to bed.
let the more loving one be me
it sounds so great, to aspire to be the more loving one. It is such hard work.
poem by W.H. Auden, whose work I deeply appreciate.
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total darkness sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
poem by W.H. Auden, whose work I deeply appreciate.
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total darkness sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
Friday, April 15, 2011
Thursday, April 14, 2011
something new to love
I moved into my building about two years ago. It was brand new!! All the dirt came from me me me and my world.
I love every inch of my sunny, top-floor home. I didn't get to choose the apartment but the universe made sure I got the best one. Best for me. Across from my front door, I can see San Francisco and the Golden Gate and Alcatraz and Marin and Mount Tamalpais. And the bay. I live here. This Midwesterner from the South Side of Chicago can see Alcatraz out her front door. Me?! and outside the windows inside the apartment I see some Berkeley hills, the horizon, the sky, the building next door and my building.
My building has 97 apartments on five floors, with a first floor of retail, and parking below all. So I am perched in the sky. Outside my windows, I see the rounded tower-end of my building, I see glimpses of the rooftop, the photovoltaics, the gardens, the climbing wall on the roof for very little children.
And I see the windows, the lines, the fence on the roof, the gate-y thing on the perimeter of the roof which seems to be part design, part safety. The windows have a faint tint that changes as the sun moves. The building's walls are buff, a neutral, maybe tan. Sometimes the windows are only reflected sunshine, sometimes I see the white blinds inside or people moving but mostly all my neighbors, and this amazes me, keep the blinds closed. I have never closed my blinds except when I have overnight guests who don't like the sun in their eyes in the morning or worry needlessly about privacy. There is no one up here, the building is well designed so people don't easily see into neighbors homes plus all the neighbors close their blinds. I won't give up a single moment of sunshine or shadow or sky but I do close the blinds when guests ask. Not many guests, few such requests.
I decided, as soon as I moved in, that I would begin each day pausing to love a detail in my view. I am not limited to one detail. Often I love many. The tower across the courtyard (my place does not overlook the street, but the interior courtyard and if I weren't on the top, I would not see sky as I lay in bed, sigh I am blessed, aren't I?) . . the tower is a sundial. Each morning, I look at the tower, note where the shadow is, which tells me where the sun is, which tells me the time. I love the clean lines everywhere. There are lines along the building's surfaced lined up with the window frames, up and down. Not very noticeable. I bet most folks don't see them but I am loving this view forever. I love the lines of the windows, and, of course, there are several shapes of windows. Mine are the best but they are all lovely. I never imagined I would fall in love with lines. Sometimes I 'see' these lines as they extent into perpetuity, as sacred geometry. Lines do extend, always, into infinity. It behooves us to note it now and then. We are a bunch of points on a gagillion lines.
Lots of lines.
Oh, the buildilng next door has cooler lines. Their photovotaics are not just on their rooftop: the architect of that building incorporated the photovoltaics so they look like an awning: an awning of photovoltaics. The photovoltaics have many lines. I study them. I want to, over time, to have seen every one, loved each one. Plus lines in all the windows and nowadays in buildings, architects put line-y things as decoration. You don't see gargoyles anymore. You see metal lines evoking faint memories of building art that has, in a very minimalist way, become decoration.
But last week, after over two years of loving the lines -- I am not mentioning all of the lines. There are lines on the courtyard cement, of course, and on the furniture downthere. Blinds are lines. -- but last week, I saw the shadow of the five-line railing that is on the edge of the roof above me. I can't see this rialing from my place but late in the afternoon, before the sun goes below the other side of the building, these lines are cast in shadow on my tower.
They were always here. I only began to love them last week. I felt startled, surprised, in the discovery. Oh, so there they are. I knew they were there but never saw them until now. Well, until then. Then. It is dark in this present now: I only see my bedroom reflected in my windows. I don't see outside now. But I did then.
I know this is a dull essay but the moment when I began to love these newly discovered shadows -- are the real lines if they are only shadow? Of course they are real and of course they do not exist.
These are the best lines yet.
I love them.
I have to actually go up on the roof, look more closely. I don't understand why there are five lines. I think there is a repetition in the shadows, I think the actual railing only has three lines.
These are beautiful lines. They curve around the tower, fading as the tower turns.
I am in love.
I love every inch of my sunny, top-floor home. I didn't get to choose the apartment but the universe made sure I got the best one. Best for me. Across from my front door, I can see San Francisco and the Golden Gate and Alcatraz and Marin and Mount Tamalpais. And the bay. I live here. This Midwesterner from the South Side of Chicago can see Alcatraz out her front door. Me?! and outside the windows inside the apartment I see some Berkeley hills, the horizon, the sky, the building next door and my building.
My building has 97 apartments on five floors, with a first floor of retail, and parking below all. So I am perched in the sky. Outside my windows, I see the rounded tower-end of my building, I see glimpses of the rooftop, the photovoltaics, the gardens, the climbing wall on the roof for very little children.
And I see the windows, the lines, the fence on the roof, the gate-y thing on the perimeter of the roof which seems to be part design, part safety. The windows have a faint tint that changes as the sun moves. The building's walls are buff, a neutral, maybe tan. Sometimes the windows are only reflected sunshine, sometimes I see the white blinds inside or people moving but mostly all my neighbors, and this amazes me, keep the blinds closed. I have never closed my blinds except when I have overnight guests who don't like the sun in their eyes in the morning or worry needlessly about privacy. There is no one up here, the building is well designed so people don't easily see into neighbors homes plus all the neighbors close their blinds. I won't give up a single moment of sunshine or shadow or sky but I do close the blinds when guests ask. Not many guests, few such requests.
I decided, as soon as I moved in, that I would begin each day pausing to love a detail in my view. I am not limited to one detail. Often I love many. The tower across the courtyard (my place does not overlook the street, but the interior courtyard and if I weren't on the top, I would not see sky as I lay in bed, sigh I am blessed, aren't I?) . . the tower is a sundial. Each morning, I look at the tower, note where the shadow is, which tells me where the sun is, which tells me the time. I love the clean lines everywhere. There are lines along the building's surfaced lined up with the window frames, up and down. Not very noticeable. I bet most folks don't see them but I am loving this view forever. I love the lines of the windows, and, of course, there are several shapes of windows. Mine are the best but they are all lovely. I never imagined I would fall in love with lines. Sometimes I 'see' these lines as they extent into perpetuity, as sacred geometry. Lines do extend, always, into infinity. It behooves us to note it now and then. We are a bunch of points on a gagillion lines.
Lots of lines.
Oh, the buildilng next door has cooler lines. Their photovotaics are not just on their rooftop: the architect of that building incorporated the photovoltaics so they look like an awning: an awning of photovoltaics. The photovoltaics have many lines. I study them. I want to, over time, to have seen every one, loved each one. Plus lines in all the windows and nowadays in buildings, architects put line-y things as decoration. You don't see gargoyles anymore. You see metal lines evoking faint memories of building art that has, in a very minimalist way, become decoration.
But last week, after over two years of loving the lines -- I am not mentioning all of the lines. There are lines on the courtyard cement, of course, and on the furniture downthere. Blinds are lines. -- but last week, I saw the shadow of the five-line railing that is on the edge of the roof above me. I can't see this rialing from my place but late in the afternoon, before the sun goes below the other side of the building, these lines are cast in shadow on my tower.
They were always here. I only began to love them last week. I felt startled, surprised, in the discovery. Oh, so there they are. I knew they were there but never saw them until now. Well, until then. Then. It is dark in this present now: I only see my bedroom reflected in my windows. I don't see outside now. But I did then.
I know this is a dull essay but the moment when I began to love these newly discovered shadows -- are the real lines if they are only shadow? Of course they are real and of course they do not exist.
These are the best lines yet.
I love them.
I have to actually go up on the roof, look more closely. I don't understand why there are five lines. I think there is a repetition in the shadows, I think the actual railing only has three lines.
These are beautiful lines. They curve around the tower, fading as the tower turns.
I am in love.
making bacon for my ex
I am never going to use my ex-husband's name on my blog cause he's a prick lawyer and although I doubt that he would spend money to sue me, he might threaten to do so and frighten me. So I am going to give him a fake name. I will call him Dick, short for dickhead. How's that?
Dick, like many humans, male and female, loves fried, crisp bacon. Not the kind that is sold precooked, zapped to flatness by machine and then just reheated in some restaurants. He likes the kind that is fried in bacon grease, moved and tended so it comes out flat and perfectly, evenly cooked, end to end, with little bulges of where the fat stayed a little fatty and crispy spots where the meaty part fried up.
As any real cook knows, it is easy to cook this perfect bacon. I acknowledge that there might be more than one definition of perfectly fried bacon. For purposes of this essay, let's go with this one, narrow description: evenly cooked strips of bacon, fried in its own fat, turned over and over, tended while frying so it cooks evently. And then when you drain the slices on paper towels, they ended up straight with little bulges of fatty part that are delicious. The whole slice is perfection.
But Dick's mom had taught him how to cook and she was a lousy cook. She just threw a bunch of bacon in a pan and did other stuff while it fried and carelessly tended it and bacon came out overcooked, undercooked, sometimes burned. Once in awhile, with her approach, you got perfect bacon but too often you got a little burned, a little raw, and a lot of imperfection.
I was taught how to cook bacon and everything else by my dad. Cooking was one of the ways my dad showed his kids he loved them. He loved us through perfect bacon, among many other things.
You cook perfect bacon by putting it in a heavy skillet, starting slow, and as the bacon grease slips off the bacon into the pan and that grease begins to cook the bacon, you tend the bacon, moving it around so it keeps cooking evenly and flatly and perfect. It is very simple and yet not: you have to pay attention. It is very simple if you pay attention and move the bacon as needed. Lots of things in life work this way: if you tend it, it goes better.
I struggled with this bacon thing. A newly graduated lawyer in the early days of my brief marriage to Dick, I wanted to be feminist in all things. I wanted my new husband to share home duties so I didn't get stuck doing all the house stuff and him just watching ball games while I worked in the evenings and weekends. Guess how that turned out?
Once in a great while, like Mother's Day or my birthday, he would start breakfast and then burn the bacon.
Was he being intentionally manipulative? Maybe. But I don't think so. I think he was a garden variety entitled male who had grown up in a world where women cooked, men partook and that was how it was supposed to be. I don't think he intentionally fucked up bacon. I think he just didn't get it: that paying attention matters. Which is almost funny when you consider that he was the general counsel of a gigantic agribusiness that did billions in sales each year. His work life was all about paying attention to detail. You don't handle the closing documents on the sale of endless ranchland, involving millions and millions of dollars without tending to the details. But the guy could not focus long enough to fry one decent piece of bacon.
I also liked good bacon so I surrenderd on the bacon thing. I cooked all the bacon.
Most men, if not all, are like Dick. They don't pay attention to the same things that women do. If they did, there would be no war.
I have a male 'friend' (he ended our friendship a few months ago but just this week, he just happened to run into me at a public event, imagine that, and asked me to join him to talk over coffee, which I did and he told me that ending our friendship had been a stroke of genius on his part and that since he broke my heart by ending our friendship, he had finally gotten from me what he had wanted all along? What did he get? I have hidden my pain from him. I have affirmed my very sincere good wishes for his happiness and success. That's what he wanted? Stilted courtesy hiding my pain? That's what he wanted all along: a veneer of friendship with no messy feelings? I wonder if he can fry bacon. I doubt it. He doesn't pay attention to the details. I bet he plops several slices of bacon in the pan, then he starts the coffee, burns toast, overcooks the eggs and wonder why the bacon is burnt in spots and undercooked in others. Like our "friendship".
Dick, like many humans, male and female, loves fried, crisp bacon. Not the kind that is sold precooked, zapped to flatness by machine and then just reheated in some restaurants. He likes the kind that is fried in bacon grease, moved and tended so it comes out flat and perfectly, evenly cooked, end to end, with little bulges of where the fat stayed a little fatty and crispy spots where the meaty part fried up.
As any real cook knows, it is easy to cook this perfect bacon. I acknowledge that there might be more than one definition of perfectly fried bacon. For purposes of this essay, let's go with this one, narrow description: evenly cooked strips of bacon, fried in its own fat, turned over and over, tended while frying so it cooks evently. And then when you drain the slices on paper towels, they ended up straight with little bulges of fatty part that are delicious. The whole slice is perfection.
But Dick's mom had taught him how to cook and she was a lousy cook. She just threw a bunch of bacon in a pan and did other stuff while it fried and carelessly tended it and bacon came out overcooked, undercooked, sometimes burned. Once in awhile, with her approach, you got perfect bacon but too often you got a little burned, a little raw, and a lot of imperfection.
I was taught how to cook bacon and everything else by my dad. Cooking was one of the ways my dad showed his kids he loved them. He loved us through perfect bacon, among many other things.
You cook perfect bacon by putting it in a heavy skillet, starting slow, and as the bacon grease slips off the bacon into the pan and that grease begins to cook the bacon, you tend the bacon, moving it around so it keeps cooking evenly and flatly and perfect. It is very simple and yet not: you have to pay attention. It is very simple if you pay attention and move the bacon as needed. Lots of things in life work this way: if you tend it, it goes better.
I struggled with this bacon thing. A newly graduated lawyer in the early days of my brief marriage to Dick, I wanted to be feminist in all things. I wanted my new husband to share home duties so I didn't get stuck doing all the house stuff and him just watching ball games while I worked in the evenings and weekends. Guess how that turned out?
Once in a great while, like Mother's Day or my birthday, he would start breakfast and then burn the bacon.
Was he being intentionally manipulative? Maybe. But I don't think so. I think he was a garden variety entitled male who had grown up in a world where women cooked, men partook and that was how it was supposed to be. I don't think he intentionally fucked up bacon. I think he just didn't get it: that paying attention matters. Which is almost funny when you consider that he was the general counsel of a gigantic agribusiness that did billions in sales each year. His work life was all about paying attention to detail. You don't handle the closing documents on the sale of endless ranchland, involving millions and millions of dollars without tending to the details. But the guy could not focus long enough to fry one decent piece of bacon.
I also liked good bacon so I surrenderd on the bacon thing. I cooked all the bacon.
Most men, if not all, are like Dick. They don't pay attention to the same things that women do. If they did, there would be no war.
I have a male 'friend' (he ended our friendship a few months ago but just this week, he just happened to run into me at a public event, imagine that, and asked me to join him to talk over coffee, which I did and he told me that ending our friendship had been a stroke of genius on his part and that since he broke my heart by ending our friendship, he had finally gotten from me what he had wanted all along? What did he get? I have hidden my pain from him. I have affirmed my very sincere good wishes for his happiness and success. That's what he wanted? Stilted courtesy hiding my pain? That's what he wanted all along: a veneer of friendship with no messy feelings? I wonder if he can fry bacon. I doubt it. He doesn't pay attention to the details. I bet he plops several slices of bacon in the pan, then he starts the coffee, burns toast, overcooks the eggs and wonder why the bacon is burnt in spots and undercooked in others. Like our "friendship".
Saturday, April 09, 2011
shoots & ladder, portals in the closet, through the lookingglass
I am straddling a wrinkle in time. Maybe it's a wrinkle of energy instead of time but time is probably energy. A crinkle in perception?
I have been thinking, a lot, and especially lately, about myth, fairy tale, science fiction, spirituality, physics, science and love. Love captures all the things I just listed and more, I guess. What I keep reflecting on is how I dissociate from the powers we see in myths and fairy tales. I tend to tell myself that the characters in fairy tales see some of their life problems solved by magic but, in 'reality' (whatever the fuck that is) I think magic is real and always present. And what about the iChing? I have not studied it but once, in a weekend qigong class, the qigong master talked about the iChing. My friend Peggy gave me a new translation of the iChing as a birthday gift a few years ago. So, emphasizing that I know nothing about it, I think the iChing tells us that everything we 'see' is a symbol, a communication form the universe, goddess, love, guiding us to make the right choices in each moment. The more we lived integrated, grounded lives, the better able we discern this guidance and act within it. If we see a hummingbird, it is just a clearly a message to us as a telegram contains a message. But life is so tricky. Even when you spot the message, it is easy to get it wrong. And then there is the imperfect implementation that comes with the territory of being human.
How the frak do you know what is right? And all the time?
I see why millions prefer to imbue religion or politicians or kings with the power to know on our behalf. Self responsibility can take its toll. It is tempting to surrender, to find a church you can stand and just follow that church's rules. Or, in some cultures, you land into a religion and you have no choice.
How to know anything?
Something happened to me. I fell down a rabbit hole, stepped through a lookingglass. I am not seeing the world or my experience being human in the lifetime of Tree Fitzpatrick the same as I did before. Everything is different. I feel ummoored. I feel like I was in a space ship and I put on a suit to go outside the ship and explore but when I got outside, I became disconnected from my ship and it was not possible to reattached.
I have come undone. I am in a lot of pain. And I know where the portal is to return to right. I have been denied entry.
WTF?
I have been thinking, a lot, and especially lately, about myth, fairy tale, science fiction, spirituality, physics, science and love. Love captures all the things I just listed and more, I guess. What I keep reflecting on is how I dissociate from the powers we see in myths and fairy tales. I tend to tell myself that the characters in fairy tales see some of their life problems solved by magic but, in 'reality' (whatever the fuck that is) I think magic is real and always present. And what about the iChing? I have not studied it but once, in a weekend qigong class, the qigong master talked about the iChing. My friend Peggy gave me a new translation of the iChing as a birthday gift a few years ago. So, emphasizing that I know nothing about it, I think the iChing tells us that everything we 'see' is a symbol, a communication form the universe, goddess, love, guiding us to make the right choices in each moment. The more we lived integrated, grounded lives, the better able we discern this guidance and act within it. If we see a hummingbird, it is just a clearly a message to us as a telegram contains a message. But life is so tricky. Even when you spot the message, it is easy to get it wrong. And then there is the imperfect implementation that comes with the territory of being human.
How the frak do you know what is right? And all the time?
I see why millions prefer to imbue religion or politicians or kings with the power to know on our behalf. Self responsibility can take its toll. It is tempting to surrender, to find a church you can stand and just follow that church's rules. Or, in some cultures, you land into a religion and you have no choice.
How to know anything?
Something happened to me. I fell down a rabbit hole, stepped through a lookingglass. I am not seeing the world or my experience being human in the lifetime of Tree Fitzpatrick the same as I did before. Everything is different. I feel ummoored. I feel like I was in a space ship and I put on a suit to go outside the ship and explore but when I got outside, I became disconnected from my ship and it was not possible to reattached.
I have come undone. I am in a lot of pain. And I know where the portal is to return to right. I have been denied entry.
WTF?
shoes for a dance
For my daughter's first high school fancy-go-with-a-date dance, she went to homecoming. She was a freshman. He was a sophomore. I had bought a custom couture off-white (winter white) sleeveless shift at a garage sale next door. It was a very classy, Princess-Grace dress that was fancy even though it was simple clean lines. And it fit her like it had been made for her, emphasizing her emerging hips and bosom. She looked smoking hot. And I had only paid one dollar for the dress and none of the kids at her prep school ever knew it was not a hot, expensive dress.
The dress, as I wrote, was couture. It had the designer's label sewn on. I forget the designer's name but it was a name designer. I want to say it was John Galliano; it was most definitely 'couture'. Someone had gone to a very high end designer and ordered a customized dress for herself. It was gorgeous, inside and outside. All the seams had been covered in stretchy lace,as if to make the inside of the dress just as perfect appearing as the inside. The fabric was a bit puffy, with little 'bubbles' of lacey-like fabric. It was a lacey texture that appeared delicate but it was a sturdy, thick fabric. This was a solid, winter-white, post-Labor Day cocktail dress for fall or winter. There was one tiny spot where a few shreds in one of the little bubbles had come unwoven but not noticeable. I am still amazed she agreed to wear it because it was imperfect.Since she was not with me when I bought it, I did not know it would fit her as if it had been made for her. Rosie resisted touching used things. She hated to use library books, for example, because she did not know who had touched them. Yeah, she's got OCD issues.
I had the also good idea to buy, if we could find them, over-the-sleeve, off-white gloves. It was hard to find those gloves. We scored them at one of those cheap accessory stores. The fabric gave her a rash but she wore them anyway. It looked so Audrey Hepburn at Tiffany's. For cheap gloves, they still cost something but the dress bargain emboldened me to spend.
And then there was the matter of shoes. In October in Minnesota, you don't find a lot of shoes that match a winter- white fancy-dress. We went shopping for shoes for that dance, without exaggerating, at least eight times. And when my kid went shoe shopping, I discovered, one trip could take up an entire day and involve trying on a dozen pairs of heels. She could spend an hour with one pair even when it was instantly obvious to me and the sales person that the shoe wouldn't work. I remember feeling a lot of frustration over how long she took shopping for the perfect shoe. I had the impression she thought if we looked long enough, we'd find a pair of shoes that were also winter white. I had the good idea of asking shoe clerks if they thought we could find winter white shoes. After many shoe clerks told us "No way", Rosie e opened up to other possibilities.
Very shiny silver shoes would not have fit the look. We did find a nearly perfect pair so if looking perfect matters, all those hours shopping paid off. Sometimes I think of those shoes and the endless shopping to find them and I think that for that reason alone, Rosie should never have left me. I don't think many moms I have ever known would have been so doggedly patient or shopped so long for just a pair of shoes for a not very important dance. Love drove me.
She bought a pair of shoes the salesperson called 'pewter' but they weren't pewter. They were not gray, not gold, not silver but they had a shimmer, a muted shimmery tone. They were muted enough that you didn't really notice them, which, we decided, was as close as we were going to find to go with that dress. Note that the dress had probably been made in the fifties when pointed off-white heels would have been routinely sold after Labor Day each year and it would have been easy to find a perfect match. Altho the shoes were called pewter, I thought they were almost no color with some shimmer, a hint of glitz. Perfect for a h.s. dance. I remember that those shoes cost $60. A $1 garage sale dress, sixty dollar shoes which, in 1996, was a lot more money then than now, right?
I guess her OCD came out on that shoe expedition. For awhile, I felt like I had entered a rabbity hell-hole of endless shoe shopping in the Mall of America. If we couldn't find the right pair at the Mall of America, with Nordstrom's, Bloomingdale's, Dayton's (now Macy's but then, still Dayton's), plus the endless shoe stores in the endless mall, we would not find any. We covered shoes stores in the Uptown area, also downtown. Shoes.
I never questioned investing all that time on a quest for something that held virtually no personal value for me I recall a few moments of inner despair that I hid from her. In those moments, I felt like we were never going to find a pair of shoes she would accept. Rosie mattered to me. Dresses and shoes have never mattered to me. As a teen, I imitated my friends' interest in clothes but not since then. As a mother, however, I combed through every sale rack looking for bargains to please my fashion conscious child.
She went with a shimmering, metallic pair that weren't really any color. A neutral shimmer with a glitzy buckle on the closed toe. The shoes cost sixty bucks in 1996, which sounds cheap now but it was a lot to pay for shoes she was going to wear once. By the time she settled on this pair -- and we visited that pair several times before the decision was made -- she had tried them at least five times.
And we talked about this purchase ad nauseum during these weeks of shoe shop hell. It started out as fun mom-daughter shopping but by the end, it was hell. For me. I think she loved all that shopping. Looking back, I feel sorry that I treated myself as I did. And her. I should have set more limits. I should have told her that if she wanted to shop endlessly for shoes, she could but she would have to do it alone, or with girlfriends. The shoe search became nauseating for me and yet I did not let on, not wishing to make the shoe search even more stressful.
An easy part of the shop was buying a cheap pair of long, above the elbows, off-white satin-like gloves. The gloves were my idea and it really set off the whole look. At later dances, some of her girlfriends wore gloves in imitation, as teens imitate one another. But when other girls added gloves, they didn't pull it off. Long, above-the-elbow gloves at a spring dance with a floor-length ballgown just doesn't look the same as a light mini dress with very lightweight, satin-appearing over-the-elblow gloves. Plus the other girls did not have Rosie's elegant, Princess Grace lightness. The gloves were super cheap, at one of those super cheap accessory shops. The gloves gave her hives on her arms but she kept them on, the look irresistible even to her itching self. As soon as she said good bye to her date and stepped into our home, she pulled them off. Her arms where the gloves had been were covered in allergy hives. She said it was worth the itching. That everyone at the dance had noticed her and her date had said he was with the hottest girl in the school. She liked me then. She didn't even know formal gloves existed until I suggested them. As I grew up, it was common for girls to wear white gloves for going to church and especially for fancy events, like weddings. When I suggested gloves to Rosie, she had never heard of dress gloves as a fancy-dress accessory.
When I first met her dad, he was newly graduated from law school, with a lawyer job. He bought several business suits and we went shopping together. Men's suit pants are custom hemmed for each men. You can choose (at least back then) a plain hem or a cuff. If you go with a cuff, you choose the height of the cuff. One and three quarter inch cuff? Two inch cuff? And where did you want the slacks to break, at the knee, just below the knee and how did the cuff fall on his shoes. I was just dating the guy but being a good girlfriend, I helped him shop. Shopping with him was nearly identical to shopping with Rosie. He would takes ages to choose a suit, then ages to agonize over the length of the pants, the break at the knee, the height of the cuff or even whether there should be a cuff. And shirts to match. Ties to match. What is wrong with me that I went along on what were, for me, such stresfully boring outings, spending my weekends shopping obsessively for perfection when I never really cared much about clothes. I am an idiot. I did all that endless shopping because I loved them. I am a chump.
He would call me about the cuffs. For his first suit, and I don't think I am exaggerating, I think he called me fifty times about 'to-cuff-or-not-to-cuff' and 'one and three quarter inch versus two inches'. He would call at 12:04 a.m. and ask 'cuff or not cuff, tell me what you really think'. At first, I could debate the pros and cons of the choices he presented. He would call at 12:22 a.m., then at 12:25, then at 12:42 and 12:51. Et ce tera. Etcetera. Etcetera.
After awhile, I would beg him to stop asking me. And eventually I had to unplug the phone if I wanted to end the calls for the day. And then they started up. We actually had a joint session with his therapist about the cuff calls. The therapist said it was okay for me to refuse to take a dozen calls a day about the same damned pair of cuffs. The therapist suggested I say "It is only one pair of pants, one set of cuffs, the height doesn't matter. One and three quarter inch or two inch. It doesn't matter. I'm hanging up now."And I did say those things and the cuff calls stopped. But there were other situations just like that. Endlessly.
And I married him.
I don't remember if he respected the agreement.
But when our daughter obsessed about finding the perfect pair of shoes for that dance, and I went along with her crazy obsessive shoe search, I felt very much as I had felt with the cuff debate. And I always assumed her OCD stuff came from him.
I went along with the behavior. Does that mean I was also OCD, just OCD about different things?
What should I have done? People tell you not to indulge the obsessions of your obsessive child but for the child, it is a very painful, real struggle. It wasn't really her 'fault' that she got snagged by the shoe shop. Was I supposed to amp up the stress by arbitrarily refusing to shop or just buying any old pair of shoes?
I probably made all wrong choices. But I spent a whole lot of my real life shopping for those shoes. And she still abandoned me once she got into the Ivy League. She waived around that campus and said "Now that I am here, I don't want anything to do with you" and I have not seen her since.
One time, I sat in one dressing room at a downtown Minneapolis Dayton's dressing room in the junior jeans section for 6 hours. It was a Sunday. We got there when the store opened at noon. We were there until the store closed at six p.m. She tried on many dozens of pairs of jeans. And I went on other crazy jean shops. Buying jeans brought out lots of stress.
I think she should still love me, for the shoes and the jean shopping and all the love I poured.
The dress, as I wrote, was couture. It had the designer's label sewn on. I forget the designer's name but it was a name designer. I want to say it was John Galliano; it was most definitely 'couture'. Someone had gone to a very high end designer and ordered a customized dress for herself. It was gorgeous, inside and outside. All the seams had been covered in stretchy lace,as if to make the inside of the dress just as perfect appearing as the inside. The fabric was a bit puffy, with little 'bubbles' of lacey-like fabric. It was a lacey texture that appeared delicate but it was a sturdy, thick fabric. This was a solid, winter-white, post-Labor Day cocktail dress for fall or winter. There was one tiny spot where a few shreds in one of the little bubbles had come unwoven but not noticeable. I am still amazed she agreed to wear it because it was imperfect.Since she was not with me when I bought it, I did not know it would fit her as if it had been made for her. Rosie resisted touching used things. She hated to use library books, for example, because she did not know who had touched them. Yeah, she's got OCD issues.
I had the also good idea to buy, if we could find them, over-the-sleeve, off-white gloves. It was hard to find those gloves. We scored them at one of those cheap accessory stores. The fabric gave her a rash but she wore them anyway. It looked so Audrey Hepburn at Tiffany's. For cheap gloves, they still cost something but the dress bargain emboldened me to spend.
And then there was the matter of shoes. In October in Minnesota, you don't find a lot of shoes that match a winter- white fancy-dress. We went shopping for shoes for that dance, without exaggerating, at least eight times. And when my kid went shoe shopping, I discovered, one trip could take up an entire day and involve trying on a dozen pairs of heels. She could spend an hour with one pair even when it was instantly obvious to me and the sales person that the shoe wouldn't work. I remember feeling a lot of frustration over how long she took shopping for the perfect shoe. I had the impression she thought if we looked long enough, we'd find a pair of shoes that were also winter white. I had the good idea of asking shoe clerks if they thought we could find winter white shoes. After many shoe clerks told us "No way", Rosie e opened up to other possibilities.
Very shiny silver shoes would not have fit the look. We did find a nearly perfect pair so if looking perfect matters, all those hours shopping paid off. Sometimes I think of those shoes and the endless shopping to find them and I think that for that reason alone, Rosie should never have left me. I don't think many moms I have ever known would have been so doggedly patient or shopped so long for just a pair of shoes for a not very important dance. Love drove me.
She bought a pair of shoes the salesperson called 'pewter' but they weren't pewter. They were not gray, not gold, not silver but they had a shimmer, a muted shimmery tone. They were muted enough that you didn't really notice them, which, we decided, was as close as we were going to find to go with that dress. Note that the dress had probably been made in the fifties when pointed off-white heels would have been routinely sold after Labor Day each year and it would have been easy to find a perfect match. Altho the shoes were called pewter, I thought they were almost no color with some shimmer, a hint of glitz. Perfect for a h.s. dance. I remember that those shoes cost $60. A $1 garage sale dress, sixty dollar shoes which, in 1996, was a lot more money then than now, right?
I guess her OCD came out on that shoe expedition. For awhile, I felt like I had entered a rabbity hell-hole of endless shoe shopping in the Mall of America. If we couldn't find the right pair at the Mall of America, with Nordstrom's, Bloomingdale's, Dayton's (now Macy's but then, still Dayton's), plus the endless shoe stores in the endless mall, we would not find any. We covered shoes stores in the Uptown area, also downtown. Shoes.
I never questioned investing all that time on a quest for something that held virtually no personal value for me I recall a few moments of inner despair that I hid from her. In those moments, I felt like we were never going to find a pair of shoes she would accept. Rosie mattered to me. Dresses and shoes have never mattered to me. As a teen, I imitated my friends' interest in clothes but not since then. As a mother, however, I combed through every sale rack looking for bargains to please my fashion conscious child.
She went with a shimmering, metallic pair that weren't really any color. A neutral shimmer with a glitzy buckle on the closed toe. The shoes cost sixty bucks in 1996, which sounds cheap now but it was a lot to pay for shoes she was going to wear once. By the time she settled on this pair -- and we visited that pair several times before the decision was made -- she had tried them at least five times.
And we talked about this purchase ad nauseum during these weeks of shoe shop hell. It started out as fun mom-daughter shopping but by the end, it was hell. For me. I think she loved all that shopping. Looking back, I feel sorry that I treated myself as I did. And her. I should have set more limits. I should have told her that if she wanted to shop endlessly for shoes, she could but she would have to do it alone, or with girlfriends. The shoe search became nauseating for me and yet I did not let on, not wishing to make the shoe search even more stressful.
An easy part of the shop was buying a cheap pair of long, above the elbows, off-white satin-like gloves. The gloves were my idea and it really set off the whole look. At later dances, some of her girlfriends wore gloves in imitation, as teens imitate one another. But when other girls added gloves, they didn't pull it off. Long, above-the-elbow gloves at a spring dance with a floor-length ballgown just doesn't look the same as a light mini dress with very lightweight, satin-appearing over-the-elblow gloves. Plus the other girls did not have Rosie's elegant, Princess Grace lightness. The gloves were super cheap, at one of those super cheap accessory shops. The gloves gave her hives on her arms but she kept them on, the look irresistible even to her itching self. As soon as she said good bye to her date and stepped into our home, she pulled them off. Her arms where the gloves had been were covered in allergy hives. She said it was worth the itching. That everyone at the dance had noticed her and her date had said he was with the hottest girl in the school. She liked me then. She didn't even know formal gloves existed until I suggested them. As I grew up, it was common for girls to wear white gloves for going to church and especially for fancy events, like weddings. When I suggested gloves to Rosie, she had never heard of dress gloves as a fancy-dress accessory.
When I first met her dad, he was newly graduated from law school, with a lawyer job. He bought several business suits and we went shopping together. Men's suit pants are custom hemmed for each men. You can choose (at least back then) a plain hem or a cuff. If you go with a cuff, you choose the height of the cuff. One and three quarter inch cuff? Two inch cuff? And where did you want the slacks to break, at the knee, just below the knee and how did the cuff fall on his shoes. I was just dating the guy but being a good girlfriend, I helped him shop. Shopping with him was nearly identical to shopping with Rosie. He would takes ages to choose a suit, then ages to agonize over the length of the pants, the break at the knee, the height of the cuff or even whether there should be a cuff. And shirts to match. Ties to match. What is wrong with me that I went along on what were, for me, such stresfully boring outings, spending my weekends shopping obsessively for perfection when I never really cared much about clothes. I am an idiot. I did all that endless shopping because I loved them. I am a chump.
He would call me about the cuffs. For his first suit, and I don't think I am exaggerating, I think he called me fifty times about 'to-cuff-or-not-to-cuff' and 'one and three quarter inch versus two inches'. He would call at 12:04 a.m. and ask 'cuff or not cuff, tell me what you really think'. At first, I could debate the pros and cons of the choices he presented. He would call at 12:22 a.m., then at 12:25, then at 12:42 and 12:51. Et ce tera. Etcetera. Etcetera.
After awhile, I would beg him to stop asking me. And eventually I had to unplug the phone if I wanted to end the calls for the day. And then they started up. We actually had a joint session with his therapist about the cuff calls. The therapist said it was okay for me to refuse to take a dozen calls a day about the same damned pair of cuffs. The therapist suggested I say "It is only one pair of pants, one set of cuffs, the height doesn't matter. One and three quarter inch or two inch. It doesn't matter. I'm hanging up now."And I did say those things and the cuff calls stopped. But there were other situations just like that. Endlessly.
And I married him.
I don't remember if he respected the agreement.
But when our daughter obsessed about finding the perfect pair of shoes for that dance, and I went along with her crazy obsessive shoe search, I felt very much as I had felt with the cuff debate. And I always assumed her OCD stuff came from him.
I went along with the behavior. Does that mean I was also OCD, just OCD about different things?
What should I have done? People tell you not to indulge the obsessions of your obsessive child but for the child, it is a very painful, real struggle. It wasn't really her 'fault' that she got snagged by the shoe shop. Was I supposed to amp up the stress by arbitrarily refusing to shop or just buying any old pair of shoes?
I probably made all wrong choices. But I spent a whole lot of my real life shopping for those shoes. And she still abandoned me once she got into the Ivy League. She waived around that campus and said "Now that I am here, I don't want anything to do with you" and I have not seen her since.
One time, I sat in one dressing room at a downtown Minneapolis Dayton's dressing room in the junior jeans section for 6 hours. It was a Sunday. We got there when the store opened at noon. We were there until the store closed at six p.m. She tried on many dozens of pairs of jeans. And I went on other crazy jean shops. Buying jeans brought out lots of stress.
I think she should still love me, for the shoes and the jean shopping and all the love I poured.
Friday, April 08, 2011
beggars, panhandlers and me, oh my
I wonder what kind of money beggars in downtown Berkeley receive. I am wondering, in particular, about the regulars. I don't think the regulars in my neighborhood are homeless. I think there are a couple beggars in my neighborhood who beg as their hobby, it is how they hang out.
There is one woman who begs throughout the day most days near the intersection of Kittredge and Shattuck, which is where the downtown public library is. I am curious: why has she chosen this intersection? She moves from bench to bench and I don't know where she is when she isn't at this intersection but I think this is her begging corner.
Once I got on a bus, in another part of Berkeley, and she was already seated on the bus, near the front. She asked every single person that got on the bus and then passed her "Can you spare some change?" I was startled. For some reason, I thought asking every single person that passes was limited to the street. It seems more invasive to do this on the bus. Esp. this woman, who has a shrill, whining voice that is comparable to listening to cats fighting in your back ally in the middle of the night. Meow, shriek, whine. She was whining and shrieking just as loudly on the bus, in the exact same tone. She never changes what she says, except gender. "Mister, can you spare some change?" or "Miss, can you spare some change?"
When she first appeared -- she was not here when I first moved here -- she asked me each time I passed. I cross her intersection several times every day so I pass her a lot. Now she just hits me once a day. I have never given her money and I never will. I am absolutely sure she is not homeless. On the bus, she had a purse and a destination and she was coming from somewhere. Since her 'work' is begging at Kittredge and Shattuck and she was coming from somewhere and going somewhere,
There is one woman who begs throughout the day most days near the intersection of Kittredge and Shattuck, which is where the downtown public library is. I am curious: why has she chosen this intersection? She moves from bench to bench and I don't know where she is when she isn't at this intersection but I think this is her begging corner.
Once I got on a bus, in another part of Berkeley, and she was already seated on the bus, near the front. She asked every single person that got on the bus and then passed her "Can you spare some change?" I was startled. For some reason, I thought asking every single person that passes was limited to the street. It seems more invasive to do this on the bus. Esp. this woman, who has a shrill, whining voice that is comparable to listening to cats fighting in your back ally in the middle of the night. Meow, shriek, whine. She was whining and shrieking just as loudly on the bus, in the exact same tone. She never changes what she says, except gender. "Mister, can you spare some change?" or "Miss, can you spare some change?"
When she first appeared -- she was not here when I first moved here -- she asked me each time I passed. I cross her intersection several times every day so I pass her a lot. Now she just hits me once a day. I have never given her money and I never will. I am absolutely sure she is not homeless. On the bus, she had a purse and a destination and she was coming from somewhere. Since her 'work' is begging at Kittredge and Shattuck and she was coming from somewhere and going somewhere,
Wednesday, April 06, 2011
Tuesday, April 05, 2011
flahoolick, seanahai, Gaelic, Traeloch
There is a story in the San Francisco Chronicle today about Irish coffee, which SF, I just learned, considers a San Francisco treat. The article references the word flahoolick as an Irish word. I have always thought the language spoken by fewer and fewer Irishmen was Gaelic, although the words Irish and Gaelic might be interchangeable.
A few years ago, I had some dental surgery done by an hot young Irish dentist who was training in America to do implants. There was no place in Ireland to learn implants and Traeloch, the first name of my cute studmuffin dentist, said that the future was implants. I kept hearing the businessman in the movie 'The Graduate' telling the Dustin Hoffman character that the future was in plastics.
Traeloch went to dental school straight out of high school. That's how it goes there. Kids choose professions around age 18. Then he worked in his dad's dental practice a few years until he bit the bullet and came to America to learn implants. His ma was worried that an American gal would scoop him up and he would not return home but he loved Ireland, he told me, in his lilting, sexy broque, and how could he be living his life anywhere else? American girls were fine lasses, but he would not allow himself to fall in love until he had returned home. I didn't say what I was thinking, that love can sometimes come upon us without our planning or choice.
Traeloch told me that his first language was Gaelic. And he very graciously accepted me into the tribe of being Irish.
My point: Traeloch was adamant: his first language was not Irish. It was Gaelic.
I just read, maybe on Wikipedia, that only 72,000 Irish folks speak Gaelic in their daily langauge transactions. Traeloch must be one of them. He told me he speaks Gaelic at home, always had but, of course, he spoke English with me.
The Chron informs us that flahoolick is Gaelic for generous. My da was flahoolick. I received my gifts from my dad. I think his generosity was one of his finest. One of my favorite stories about my da is what he said when I told him had become engaged. He said "I learned a long time ago that you can't tell your kids what to do, they are going to do what they want, and I have tried not to talk about any of the people my kids have dated, but this guy, Tree, are you sure about him? The one thing I'll say against him is that he is cheap. I could say more but let's just leave it at cheap. I'd hate to see you going through life with a guy who is going to make you pinch every nickel before you spend it."
That's the only time I have ever heard someone characterize the trait of being cheap by saying the cheap person pinches every nickel. I still hear my father's Irish milieu as a young man, when he would have interacted almost exclusively with other first generation Irish American men. If they were me dad's pals, they were gamblers, too. Gamblers aren't cheap, not my dad's kind. And my ex-husband was cheap. He never made me pinch a nickel but he did seem to hate spending every cent he ever spent and he was sure that whatever he spent could have bought more.
Contrast this story about my ex with the above story about my long gone father, who was very flawed and abused me in many ways, but, like all humans, he has lots of good streams in him. My dad's finest stream was his love for his children.
The ex-husband story. Once, when we were still dating, not yet engaged, the ex and I met at a restaurant downtown, during happy hour, of course, for the cheap drinks. We got there at the beginning of happy hour, we drank a lot cause he always drank a lot. And he was sure to order a last round during the last minute of happy hour for that last extra bargain. And then we ordered food. We sat at that table for at least three hours. He paid the bill. This was the seventies, what can I say. The guy paid on dates, esp. my guy. Even if I covered my part of the bill, or even if I paid the whole thing, he insisted on making a show of paying, being the guy paying. So he pays the bill and we leave. This was a very early date. This also tells you something about me cause I kept on dating him. As we walked to our car, nearly a block from the restaurant, the waiter caught up with us, his face red with anger, but, I sensed, his anger warming him in the winter cold. He waived his fist as he spoke. He said "I can't believe you completely stiffed me. You sat at my table for three hours and you don't leave me anything?" My ex, dressed in his first-lawyer-job suit was probably embarassed but I didn't know him well then and did not yet know that when he became embarrassed, he got angry and then abusive. Not that knowing this would make it more acceptable. I just observe how naive I was. He shook his fist back at the waiter and said "I venture to guess that your manager will be disappointed to hear that you have come out here to yell at his customers. You are out of place. I am going to report you."
All these years later, I still remember that phrase, 'I venture to guess'. He used that phrase whenever he was feeling pompous. And dang if the asshole didn't march up to the payphone at the parking lot entrance (pre-cell phone life!) and call the restaurant to complain. And, I am sorry to say, the manager made the waiter call the ex later to apologize.
I longed to go back to that restaurant and leave the guy some money and apologize. I remember considering doing that. And a part of me wants to turn that longing into the memory of having actuall done that, having actually made some amends.
After that, I always hung back after the bill was paid when I was out with my ex and snuck tips on the table.
Not long after, maybe at his graduation weekend (he had graduated a semester early so he didn't walk n his gown until he had been working six months as a lawyer), we went out with his mom and sister. They chose one of those food buffets, all you can eat. At one point when my ex had gone to the men's room, I told them the story about the waiter angry with no tip. Get this. While I recounted the story, my ex-mother-in-law and ex-sister-in-law, who was a surgery resident and is now, of course, a surgeon who owns several clinics and makes millions annually, they were stuffing their purses with fried chicken so my ex could eat off the all-you-can-eat-buffet after they had gone home to Hicksville. I should have put the purloined chicken together with the no tip. My ex-mother-in-law, who was just my boyfriend's mother at the time, said, in her bad grammar English that still makes me winces when I just hear it in memories, said "I tell you what, hon, I say anyone stupid enough to work for a dollar an hour deserves a dollar an hour. If the best job they can get is waiter, they must be no good. They don't deserve more. I aint gonna pay someone to do their job. That's their problem, not mine." I actually pointed out that prices in restaurants were based on the fact that the restaurant's overhead did not include the full salary of the waitstaff, that the price of restaurant meals should always be assumed to include a freely given payment for the service. Those women laughed at me. They also concluded that I was not a good match for their boy. They were right, of course, but I did not admit that defeat for several years and one baby later.
Fast forward a couple years to the birth of our daughter. My dad came to visit, go to the races at Aksarben Race Track and see the College World Series. He insisted on taking us all out for a fancy Sunday brunch at a fancy downtown hotel but then my husband, Mr. Bigshot, insisted on paying, which was okay with my dad. He would have been happy to pay and he was also happy to accept my husband's gift. My dad was always generous when he had any ready, and always ashamed when he didn't. Dad didn't mind being broke. He minded being unable to be generous. . He also knew that my husband had an overdeveloped self-conscious pride in what defined his manhood and he knew that my husband needed to pay that brunch bill to show off. A little bit of a manly pissing match only my husband didn't realize he was the only one competing.
So dad let him pay. Then, as usual, I excused myself to go to the restroom but my real agenda was to sneak back to the table to leave a tip. My dad also excused himself to use the restroom. The womans room was around one side, the men's room around the other and behind them both was the dining room. So my dad and I saw one another as we both approached the table with our tip. We laughed and left both our tips, leaving the waiter a lot of tip money cause me and dad were both always big tippers. My best brother is a waiter and my dad had always been very insistent on tipping well. Sometimes he would just get coffee in a shop but leave several dollars in tips when coffee cost a quarter cause he knew his time at the counter cost the waitress other men's tips. I loved my dad so much for leaving that tip. And I loved us both for leaving that double tip. How much did you leave, I asked him, laughing, as we walked back to the husband. How much did you leave, he laughed, as we realized we had both overcompensated a lot. Then we settled down, hiding our laugh so the husband wouldn't demand to know what we were laughing about.
My dad had a hole in him. He didn't get something he needed as a child, I think, and that wound drifted with him through life. The only real happiness he ever had was loving his kids. And my mom. He lived twenty years after she left him. He never got over it. My mom loved my dad. I think she left him because she wanted to leave the life she was living, with too many kids, not enough money. She chose just as wrongly as I did. She never really wanted to have kids but in nineteen fifties small town South Dakota, especially if you were Catholic, about all you could do was get married and have kids. She wanted to be an artist but this culture discourages most young people with such an impractical ambition. Artists starve. Writers starve.
Now I am feeling sad again. It was more fun thinking about Traeloch and Gaelic coffee.
Oh, I almost forgot. Senahai is Gaelic for storyteller. I am a seanahai. I am not sure how to spell it.
A few years ago, I had some dental surgery done by an hot young Irish dentist who was training in America to do implants. There was no place in Ireland to learn implants and Traeloch, the first name of my cute studmuffin dentist, said that the future was implants. I kept hearing the businessman in the movie 'The Graduate' telling the Dustin Hoffman character that the future was in plastics.
Traeloch went to dental school straight out of high school. That's how it goes there. Kids choose professions around age 18. Then he worked in his dad's dental practice a few years until he bit the bullet and came to America to learn implants. His ma was worried that an American gal would scoop him up and he would not return home but he loved Ireland, he told me, in his lilting, sexy broque, and how could he be living his life anywhere else? American girls were fine lasses, but he would not allow himself to fall in love until he had returned home. I didn't say what I was thinking, that love can sometimes come upon us without our planning or choice.
Traeloch told me that his first language was Gaelic. And he very graciously accepted me into the tribe of being Irish.
My point: Traeloch was adamant: his first language was not Irish. It was Gaelic.
I just read, maybe on Wikipedia, that only 72,000 Irish folks speak Gaelic in their daily langauge transactions. Traeloch must be one of them. He told me he speaks Gaelic at home, always had but, of course, he spoke English with me.
The Chron informs us that flahoolick is Gaelic for generous. My da was flahoolick. I received my gifts from my dad. I think his generosity was one of his finest. One of my favorite stories about my da is what he said when I told him had become engaged. He said "I learned a long time ago that you can't tell your kids what to do, they are going to do what they want, and I have tried not to talk about any of the people my kids have dated, but this guy, Tree, are you sure about him? The one thing I'll say against him is that he is cheap. I could say more but let's just leave it at cheap. I'd hate to see you going through life with a guy who is going to make you pinch every nickel before you spend it."
That's the only time I have ever heard someone characterize the trait of being cheap by saying the cheap person pinches every nickel. I still hear my father's Irish milieu as a young man, when he would have interacted almost exclusively with other first generation Irish American men. If they were me dad's pals, they were gamblers, too. Gamblers aren't cheap, not my dad's kind. And my ex-husband was cheap. He never made me pinch a nickel but he did seem to hate spending every cent he ever spent and he was sure that whatever he spent could have bought more.
Contrast this story about my ex with the above story about my long gone father, who was very flawed and abused me in many ways, but, like all humans, he has lots of good streams in him. My dad's finest stream was his love for his children.
The ex-husband story. Once, when we were still dating, not yet engaged, the ex and I met at a restaurant downtown, during happy hour, of course, for the cheap drinks. We got there at the beginning of happy hour, we drank a lot cause he always drank a lot. And he was sure to order a last round during the last minute of happy hour for that last extra bargain. And then we ordered food. We sat at that table for at least three hours. He paid the bill. This was the seventies, what can I say. The guy paid on dates, esp. my guy. Even if I covered my part of the bill, or even if I paid the whole thing, he insisted on making a show of paying, being the guy paying. So he pays the bill and we leave. This was a very early date. This also tells you something about me cause I kept on dating him. As we walked to our car, nearly a block from the restaurant, the waiter caught up with us, his face red with anger, but, I sensed, his anger warming him in the winter cold. He waived his fist as he spoke. He said "I can't believe you completely stiffed me. You sat at my table for three hours and you don't leave me anything?" My ex, dressed in his first-lawyer-job suit was probably embarassed but I didn't know him well then and did not yet know that when he became embarrassed, he got angry and then abusive. Not that knowing this would make it more acceptable. I just observe how naive I was. He shook his fist back at the waiter and said "I venture to guess that your manager will be disappointed to hear that you have come out here to yell at his customers. You are out of place. I am going to report you."
All these years later, I still remember that phrase, 'I venture to guess'. He used that phrase whenever he was feeling pompous. And dang if the asshole didn't march up to the payphone at the parking lot entrance (pre-cell phone life!) and call the restaurant to complain. And, I am sorry to say, the manager made the waiter call the ex later to apologize.
I longed to go back to that restaurant and leave the guy some money and apologize. I remember considering doing that. And a part of me wants to turn that longing into the memory of having actuall done that, having actually made some amends.
After that, I always hung back after the bill was paid when I was out with my ex and snuck tips on the table.
Not long after, maybe at his graduation weekend (he had graduated a semester early so he didn't walk n his gown until he had been working six months as a lawyer), we went out with his mom and sister. They chose one of those food buffets, all you can eat. At one point when my ex had gone to the men's room, I told them the story about the waiter angry with no tip. Get this. While I recounted the story, my ex-mother-in-law and ex-sister-in-law, who was a surgery resident and is now, of course, a surgeon who owns several clinics and makes millions annually, they were stuffing their purses with fried chicken so my ex could eat off the all-you-can-eat-buffet after they had gone home to Hicksville. I should have put the purloined chicken together with the no tip. My ex-mother-in-law, who was just my boyfriend's mother at the time, said, in her bad grammar English that still makes me winces when I just hear it in memories, said "I tell you what, hon, I say anyone stupid enough to work for a dollar an hour deserves a dollar an hour. If the best job they can get is waiter, they must be no good. They don't deserve more. I aint gonna pay someone to do their job. That's their problem, not mine." I actually pointed out that prices in restaurants were based on the fact that the restaurant's overhead did not include the full salary of the waitstaff, that the price of restaurant meals should always be assumed to include a freely given payment for the service. Those women laughed at me. They also concluded that I was not a good match for their boy. They were right, of course, but I did not admit that defeat for several years and one baby later.
Fast forward a couple years to the birth of our daughter. My dad came to visit, go to the races at Aksarben Race Track and see the College World Series. He insisted on taking us all out for a fancy Sunday brunch at a fancy downtown hotel but then my husband, Mr. Bigshot, insisted on paying, which was okay with my dad. He would have been happy to pay and he was also happy to accept my husband's gift. My dad was always generous when he had any ready, and always ashamed when he didn't. Dad didn't mind being broke. He minded being unable to be generous. . He also knew that my husband had an overdeveloped self-conscious pride in what defined his manhood and he knew that my husband needed to pay that brunch bill to show off. A little bit of a manly pissing match only my husband didn't realize he was the only one competing.
So dad let him pay. Then, as usual, I excused myself to go to the restroom but my real agenda was to sneak back to the table to leave a tip. My dad also excused himself to use the restroom. The womans room was around one side, the men's room around the other and behind them both was the dining room. So my dad and I saw one another as we both approached the table with our tip. We laughed and left both our tips, leaving the waiter a lot of tip money cause me and dad were both always big tippers. My best brother is a waiter and my dad had always been very insistent on tipping well. Sometimes he would just get coffee in a shop but leave several dollars in tips when coffee cost a quarter cause he knew his time at the counter cost the waitress other men's tips. I loved my dad so much for leaving that tip. And I loved us both for leaving that double tip. How much did you leave, I asked him, laughing, as we walked back to the husband. How much did you leave, he laughed, as we realized we had both overcompensated a lot. Then we settled down, hiding our laugh so the husband wouldn't demand to know what we were laughing about.
My dad had a hole in him. He didn't get something he needed as a child, I think, and that wound drifted with him through life. The only real happiness he ever had was loving his kids. And my mom. He lived twenty years after she left him. He never got over it. My mom loved my dad. I think she left him because she wanted to leave the life she was living, with too many kids, not enough money. She chose just as wrongly as I did. She never really wanted to have kids but in nineteen fifties small town South Dakota, especially if you were Catholic, about all you could do was get married and have kids. She wanted to be an artist but this culture discourages most young people with such an impractical ambition. Artists starve. Writers starve.
Now I am feeling sad again. It was more fun thinking about Traeloch and Gaelic coffee.
Oh, I almost forgot. Senahai is Gaelic for storyteller. I am a seanahai. I am not sure how to spell it.
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Katie: I love you
Katie, after almost ten years of refusing to see me, yes, it would be hard to reconnect. But worth it. I love you. You love me. Yes, it will be hard. Come back. You can give me contact info in the comments on my blog. Kiss kiss. Life can be hard. You suck it up and get over it and then life is happy again. Come back.
geek but not in a good way
I sometimes fantasize that I would like to be a tech geek, and when I say 'tech geek' I mean someone that knows about software coding, like maybe a software engineer or someone would could be involved in creating very cool online games, not so much the visual coding but the strategy coding, which, for all I know, might be the same kind of thinking.
But I have to settle for feeling like a savant when I do something like I did today: I set up my Airport Express wifi connection in my apartment. And then, in the same time frame in which I was tinkering with the wifi toy, I got another delivery from apple: a new battery for the laptop.
Basically, you plug in the wifi gizmo, pop in the CD with the software, hit install, then continue continue continue until the wifi is turned on in your laptop. For the battery, you open the laptop, pop out the old, slide in the new, walk around the corner to FedEx to send the old one back so apple doesn't gouge me $129. My old battery under warranty but they will charge me if I don't turn it around fast enough. Technically I had ten days from the day it shipped but the turnaround mailer said I had one day so I got all obsessive compulsive and I had to march down to FedEx asap (as soon as possible). I kinda hate it when I get obsessive like that about a very teeny tiny unimportant thing. If I had waited a few hours, or a few days Apple would not have cheated me. But, whew, it's over. I sent it back.
I bought a refurbished laptop. I wonder what happened to my machine before it came to live with me. The battery never worked right. The big buzz with macbook pro lithium batteries was six to eight hours of battery life but I never got more than an hour or so. It didn't matter much cause I haven't been traveling and I always take my plug. But it matters. It was defective. I called about the battery once, when the machine was new, and the service guy cajoled me into giving it time. As if the battery would what, fix itself? I get it time. I gave it a year and a half and lately the battery life was, no kidding, about ten minutes. Unacceptable, even in a 1.5 year old battery.
So I talked to apple a few times. A guy told me how to recalibrate the battery. Basically, you charge it to the max, then you let it go to sleep on its own once you unplug the power cord and then you let it sleep at least five hours. In other words, I had recalibrated that frakking battery daily for months cause I charge it daily, snuff it out daily, and then let it recharge overnight. But the guy promised me that if I did it one more time and the battery still didn't work, I'd get a new one. So I obeyed him. Then I called, using the work order reference number Apple gave me, and the new guy starts analyzing the problem all over. The new guy didn't even bother to check the old work order. The new guy had me turning the machine off and on, holding down many buttons, opening and shutting. Pissing me off. He even made me repeate my home phone. I said "If you have the work order from the last time I spent an hour on the phone with an apple service tech, why do you need to ask for my phone number again? It has not changed since two days ago?" And I said "The last guy said if the recalibration didn't work, apple would send me a new battery. How long do I have to play with you to get you to do what the last guy promised? Do we have to do all the same stuff again first?" And then amazingly, tech guy #2 said "Okay, I'll send you a battery." And he did.
This battery has always been hinky. I hope the new one works. But if it doesn't, then it is the machine.
This machine must have had some initial malfunction, something to cause it to be refurbished. I have already gotten a new motherboard, which is like a whole new computer, right? And then the dvd/cd drive had to be replaced. It would not play music. So maybe something is wrong with the on-off-power something. So far, the new battery acting strange. When I first plugged it in, my computer indicated it would take 1.17 hours to recharge it. Now, two hours later, the computer indicates it will take 1.25 hours to fully recharge. What is wrong with that picture?
Anyway. I feel like a tech smartie just cause I hooked up the airport express and popped in the new battery. Woo-whee, look at me. Geek grandma. I should be a grandma. I covered that the other day.
But I have to settle for feeling like a savant when I do something like I did today: I set up my Airport Express wifi connection in my apartment. And then, in the same time frame in which I was tinkering with the wifi toy, I got another delivery from apple: a new battery for the laptop.
Basically, you plug in the wifi gizmo, pop in the CD with the software, hit install, then continue continue continue until the wifi is turned on in your laptop. For the battery, you open the laptop, pop out the old, slide in the new, walk around the corner to FedEx to send the old one back so apple doesn't gouge me $129. My old battery under warranty but they will charge me if I don't turn it around fast enough. Technically I had ten days from the day it shipped but the turnaround mailer said I had one day so I got all obsessive compulsive and I had to march down to FedEx asap (as soon as possible). I kinda hate it when I get obsessive like that about a very teeny tiny unimportant thing. If I had waited a few hours, or a few days Apple would not have cheated me. But, whew, it's over. I sent it back.
I bought a refurbished laptop. I wonder what happened to my machine before it came to live with me. The battery never worked right. The big buzz with macbook pro lithium batteries was six to eight hours of battery life but I never got more than an hour or so. It didn't matter much cause I haven't been traveling and I always take my plug. But it matters. It was defective. I called about the battery once, when the machine was new, and the service guy cajoled me into giving it time. As if the battery would what, fix itself? I get it time. I gave it a year and a half and lately the battery life was, no kidding, about ten minutes. Unacceptable, even in a 1.5 year old battery.
So I talked to apple a few times. A guy told me how to recalibrate the battery. Basically, you charge it to the max, then you let it go to sleep on its own once you unplug the power cord and then you let it sleep at least five hours. In other words, I had recalibrated that frakking battery daily for months cause I charge it daily, snuff it out daily, and then let it recharge overnight. But the guy promised me that if I did it one more time and the battery still didn't work, I'd get a new one. So I obeyed him. Then I called, using the work order reference number Apple gave me, and the new guy starts analyzing the problem all over. The new guy didn't even bother to check the old work order. The new guy had me turning the machine off and on, holding down many buttons, opening and shutting. Pissing me off. He even made me repeate my home phone. I said "If you have the work order from the last time I spent an hour on the phone with an apple service tech, why do you need to ask for my phone number again? It has not changed since two days ago?" And I said "The last guy said if the recalibration didn't work, apple would send me a new battery. How long do I have to play with you to get you to do what the last guy promised? Do we have to do all the same stuff again first?" And then amazingly, tech guy #2 said "Okay, I'll send you a battery." And he did.
This battery has always been hinky. I hope the new one works. But if it doesn't, then it is the machine.
This machine must have had some initial malfunction, something to cause it to be refurbished. I have already gotten a new motherboard, which is like a whole new computer, right? And then the dvd/cd drive had to be replaced. It would not play music. So maybe something is wrong with the on-off-power something. So far, the new battery acting strange. When I first plugged it in, my computer indicated it would take 1.17 hours to recharge it. Now, two hours later, the computer indicates it will take 1.25 hours to fully recharge. What is wrong with that picture?
Anyway. I feel like a tech smartie just cause I hooked up the airport express and popped in the new battery. Woo-whee, look at me. Geek grandma. I should be a grandma. I covered that the other day.
Sunday, March 27, 2011
I should be a grandma
In a way, me being a mother was all about being a grandma. I was born to be a grandma. I bring many qualifications to the table, of course, but I think I would make a super stellar long-distance grandma. I totally rock the whole concept of gift boxes.
If I had a grandbaby right now, for example, I would be sending the Rosemary Wells boxed-set of stories called "Voyage to the Bunny Planet". This was originally a set of three tiny books about bunnies, which came in a box. It has since been published as one book, with three stories, but the tiny box with three tiny books is best. Clearly, Wells is riffing off the Peter Rabbit stories, which also have a history of being published in teeny, tiny books with beautiful illustrations. Bunnies are adorable. The Peter Rabbit tales do other adorable animals, like Jemima Puddleduck. And cats are involved. But bunnies are probably the cutest of cute animals. And bunnies are all about Easter, although sure, chicks are also cute.
Bunnies. Spring time cometh. Easter is next month. It is time to be reading about bunnies to children you love.
But I aint got any babies or bunnies, no anywhere there. Come to think of it, this would be a perfectly good time to get into Winnie the Pooh. A.A. Milne did a couple books of children's poems that rocked my childhood. One of Milne's kid poetry books was "When We Were Very Young" and the other one "Now We Are Six". Both books are awesome. At the end of one of those books, the kid in the poem wants a rabbit but there weren't rabbits anywhere. So, moping, he goes for a walk to the end of the town and there are rabbits everywhere.
Blah blah blah.
Rosemary Wells does a contemporary spin. Her bunnies are just as adorable as Beatrix Potter's rabbits but the stories are more contemporary. Potter started out, I think, as a nature illustrator. Wells is also a gifted illustrator but her stories have more lightness for me.
And when you have a dumpling toddler you love sitting on your lap and you read First Tomato, life is perfect. And you might as well talk to the plumpling about growing tomatoes and talk about the garden. It is time to be planting tomatoes, at least where I live. Where I raised my dumpling, it is too soon to plant tomatoes but not too soon to begin imagining the garden for the year.
There are many fun aspects to growing tomatoes. What is the most important? Hard to choose, but in this moment, I wish I had a toddler on my lap. I would talk to him about the magic of planting a microscopic seed (maybe explain that word: it is so much fun to explain everything to a smart child), put it under the top of the ground, cover it, water it. And then ask the child to imagine what the seed will do. Does it get wet? How does the seed respond to the wet, to the soil, the dark? Does the seed feel itself changing? What would change first?
At some point, we know, a tomato seed responds to its environment. It changes. How do such changes begin? What happens first? And then what happens next? How does a seed grow? How does a seed change from being a seed to being a tiny plant, to rising up in the soil into the sun? Does the plant long to feel the sunlight, is that what makes it grow out of the dirt? How does the urge to feel sunlight get put in the seed? Magic? Love? Spirit? Think about it honey, for this is the story of life.
These are the kinds of things I would natter about to any grandbabies on my lap.
I am not lonely for grown ups. I am lonely for children. I have a lot to tell some lucky kids. Kids would be lucky to know me. And if we found ourselves talking tomatoes early enough in the day, we might go out and buy some and make something with tomatoes. I am thinking I'd like to make tomato soup from scratch and have grilled cheese sandwiches. What would we have to buy? The child (or children) and I would work this out.
What a great day that would be.
An old friend just visited. She has two granddaughters, age two and four. I am not exactly jealous. I am glad my friend has those girls in her life. Where am I going to get a grandbaby? I'd even take a boy.
If I had a grandbaby right now, for example, I would be sending the Rosemary Wells boxed-set of stories called "Voyage to the Bunny Planet". This was originally a set of three tiny books about bunnies, which came in a box. It has since been published as one book, with three stories, but the tiny box with three tiny books is best. Clearly, Wells is riffing off the Peter Rabbit stories, which also have a history of being published in teeny, tiny books with beautiful illustrations. Bunnies are adorable. The Peter Rabbit tales do other adorable animals, like Jemima Puddleduck. And cats are involved. But bunnies are probably the cutest of cute animals. And bunnies are all about Easter, although sure, chicks are also cute.
Bunnies. Spring time cometh. Easter is next month. It is time to be reading about bunnies to children you love.
But I aint got any babies or bunnies, no anywhere there. Come to think of it, this would be a perfectly good time to get into Winnie the Pooh. A.A. Milne did a couple books of children's poems that rocked my childhood. One of Milne's kid poetry books was "When We Were Very Young" and the other one "Now We Are Six". Both books are awesome. At the end of one of those books, the kid in the poem wants a rabbit but there weren't rabbits anywhere. So, moping, he goes for a walk to the end of the town and there are rabbits everywhere.
Blah blah blah.
Rosemary Wells does a contemporary spin. Her bunnies are just as adorable as Beatrix Potter's rabbits but the stories are more contemporary. Potter started out, I think, as a nature illustrator. Wells is also a gifted illustrator but her stories have more lightness for me.
And when you have a dumpling toddler you love sitting on your lap and you read First Tomato, life is perfect. And you might as well talk to the plumpling about growing tomatoes and talk about the garden. It is time to be planting tomatoes, at least where I live. Where I raised my dumpling, it is too soon to plant tomatoes but not too soon to begin imagining the garden for the year.
There are many fun aspects to growing tomatoes. What is the most important? Hard to choose, but in this moment, I wish I had a toddler on my lap. I would talk to him about the magic of planting a microscopic seed (maybe explain that word: it is so much fun to explain everything to a smart child), put it under the top of the ground, cover it, water it. And then ask the child to imagine what the seed will do. Does it get wet? How does the seed respond to the wet, to the soil, the dark? Does the seed feel itself changing? What would change first?
At some point, we know, a tomato seed responds to its environment. It changes. How do such changes begin? What happens first? And then what happens next? How does a seed grow? How does a seed change from being a seed to being a tiny plant, to rising up in the soil into the sun? Does the plant long to feel the sunlight, is that what makes it grow out of the dirt? How does the urge to feel sunlight get put in the seed? Magic? Love? Spirit? Think about it honey, for this is the story of life.
These are the kinds of things I would natter about to any grandbabies on my lap.
I am not lonely for grown ups. I am lonely for children. I have a lot to tell some lucky kids. Kids would be lucky to know me. And if we found ourselves talking tomatoes early enough in the day, we might go out and buy some and make something with tomatoes. I am thinking I'd like to make tomato soup from scratch and have grilled cheese sandwiches. What would we have to buy? The child (or children) and I would work this out.
What a great day that would be.
An old friend just visited. She has two granddaughters, age two and four. I am not exactly jealous. I am glad my friend has those girls in her life. Where am I going to get a grandbaby? I'd even take a boy.
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
leftovers
I had some leftover spinach paneer, some yummily creamy spinach with yellow lentils, from a takeout order. And I had some not-bad frozen falafel from Trader Joe's. Neither was enough for dinner but together, wow. I just had one of the most satisfying leftover dinners of my life. Was I unusually hungry? Is my body signaling to me that she craves more vegies? I placed it all in one large shallow bowl, positioned falafel patties all around the spinach goop and lightly zapped. Then I mashed the falafel. Yeah, boring blog post but oh my gosh this was tasty. The spinach thing was very spicy. The falafel was a little dry and more texture than flavor. Mush them together and you had a frakking great casserole-y thing. Upper Midwest Lutheran potluck with Indian and Middle East seasoning.
I want more but it's all gone and it is two a.m. I do have some frozen spinach stuff, also TJ, but I'm not hungry.
I am boring but, trust me, this was a very tasty meal. I want more right now.
I want more but it's all gone and it is two a.m. I do have some frozen spinach stuff, also TJ, but I'm not hungry.
I am boring but, trust me, this was a very tasty meal. I want more right now.
Saturday, March 19, 2011
Chuck-the-fuck
I have a brother that I reference as Chuck-the-fuck. Chuck was (and, I am sure, still is) a bully when we were kids. The oldest child of what eventually became six siblings (with two preemie babies that did not survive infancy so those little girls never experienced Chuck's bullying), my parents seemed to feel helpless to do anything about Chuck. Boys will be boys.
I have four brothers. I was the second kid after Chuck-the-fuck. I didn't start calling him Chuck-the-fuck back in my childhood. I don't think I ever said the word fuck out loud until I had left home and even then, never at home. Good Catholic girls don't use profanity and I was a good one. Except for profanity, I still score as a good Catholic girl, in the sense that I actually follow all the rules. Well, I don't go to church or confession, those are still mortal sins, I guess. Never mind. If I edited myself, I'd delete this paragraph because I have digressed. This essay is about Chuck-the-fuck.
In our grammar school, an 8th grade rite of passage required every 8th grader to give a speech about the person they most admired in history. I graduated the 8th grade in 1967. Chuck in 1966. I suppose it was a sign of the times, pre-feminist consciousness in my life, because it never occurred to me to choose a woman. I can remember reflecting on what seemed, at the time, to be a portentous, meaningful choice. Which figure in history would I pick?! I never considered that there were any meaningful female history figures. That's sad, eh? And later, at my all girls' high school from 1967 to 1971, I don't remember any introductions from the nuns to the possibility that women had ever done anything important. The contemporary female issues that roiled our school was the new birth control pill, which the nuns seemed determined to keep all of us Catholic girls from using. Ever. We also debated the Vietnam War. I confess, with chagrin, that I happily advocated for the war. I remember talking, in my history class debate my sophomore year, about how we had some kind of commitment to support the French in Vietnam, so we had to fight there. I never gave a thought to the slaughter. I only analyzed the war in terms of the treaties my history book presented. I don't remember doing any other research, other than Encyclopedia Britannica. And EB talked about our treaty with the French.
When my kid was in high school and had to write papers, I took her to the library. Gosh, I worked in a library all through high school. I knew how to do research. I always loved libraries. But I have always had a black and white tendency to do things in rigid form. If my teacher had assigned us to do research at the library, I would have, but that was not assigned. I don't remember being encouraged, ever, to think independently. As a black and white thinker, I needed someone to tell me to be flexible. Maybe? Maybe I am manufacturing retroactive justification for what I readily concede was my considerable naivete in my teen years. I also acknowledge that I went to a mediocre high school. I don't think my school expected its graduates to go to college. I know that most of my friends only saw college as something to do until they married. None of my closest friends expected to finish college. My best friend and I had a bet, as we graduated, about who would drop out first. I can honestly report that I bet twenty bucks that I would graduate in four years and would not consider marriage until beyond college. My best friend bet against herself, at least I thought she did. She bet that she would drop out after one year, having landed her man. She and I lost touch. I don't know if she graduated. I remember her declared major, that she chose as soon as she got on campus. She announced that she was majoring in something related to fashion design. I don't remember how I might have responded to her announcement to her but I remember being appalled. First, she had never voiced any interest in fashion or design in four years of being best friends in high school. Where did she come up with that? I asked her that, I think. She said her advisor had asked her to talk about what she liked to do and then the advisor had suggested fashion design as a major and that sounded right to her. I hope I didn't say to her, but maybe I did, maybe this is why we lost touch with one another, but I remember being shocked. I was at a liberal arts college, looking forward to studying art, philosophy, literature, culture and history. I gave no thought whatsoever to tying my studies to a job. Such an approached offended something in my beliefs about a college education. What was she going to do with a year of fashion design? Remember, she expected to drop out of college after no more than two years to marry and have babies. I have dreamt about this friend countless times. I have a recurring dream about her. In this dream, I learn that her parents were secretly very wealthy and she never had to earn money and that was why she didn't care about finishing college. In this dream, she leads a mysteriously prosperous life, traveling a lot, free of all financial cares. Over and over, she and I, in these dreams, try to reconnect but we never do.
Gosh. I digress.
So. When my brother Chuck-the-fuck was in the 8th grade, he chose Adolf Hitler as the man he most admired in history. I found out about this because one of my girlfriends who lived next door was in the 8th grade. Ellen. I was buddies with both Ellen and her sister Nancy who was my age. Ellen told her mother about Chuck's speech choice when I was in their kitchen. I was instantly mortified, but tried to hide my uneasiness. I mentioned it to my folks, but if they ever discussed it with my brother, I never heard about it. Which means they probably didn't because Chuck would have punished me for interfering in his life. So I concluded that my folks ignored that choice. And Chuck gave that speech.
Chuck was that he admired Hitler because Hitler favored the Aryan race and our Celtic ancestry made us Aryan. Chuck's teacher must have known, in advance, that Chuck was going to talk about Hitler. This was not long after WWII. We, obviously, didn't have any Jews in our Catholic grammar school. But we had lots of refugees from Eastern Europe in our neighborhood, like Poles. Lots of Poles and immigrants from Slavic countries. Not many of them came to our school. I assumed, at the time, that the waves of immigrants that moved into our neighborhood weren't Catholic, because even poor kids could go to our school. This was in a heydey of Catholic schools in Chicago. Our school was stuffed to the fills with post-war baby boomers. Every grade had three classes and each class had, no kidding, fifty or sixty kids. Virtually all the kids in our neighborhood that were Catholic, even the poorest ones living in then-quite-rare single mother households, divorce being very rare, esp. for Catholics in the fifties and even the early sixties, went to Catholic school. Only one family on our block, and nearly every house on the block had kids, went to public school. That mom was a widow with 10 kids. They were very poor, that family, but that's not why they didn't go to Catholic school. The reason they didn't go to Catholic school was much, much odder than poverty: they weren't Catholic! They were the only non-Catholics I personally knew in my grammar school era. Now I am wondering if the Polish kids on nearby blocks might have been Jewish? I don't know anything about Polish history emigrating to America. I have a vague understanding that Hitler slaughtered a lot of Jews in Poland. Or did he just slaughter Poles in general? I don't know.
I don't remember hearing anti-semitism in my household growing up. I heard plenty of casual racist talk about blacks. Gosh, in those days, most white people referred to blacks as niggers and it was not really seen, in my white world, as a racist way to refer to African Americans. That was the vocabulary. But in my household, my mother forbid us to say nigger and she constantly complained when my dad used the word. My dad was an average civil-service (equivalent, in Chicago, to being a good union man) precinct captain whose livelihood was dependent on the Chicago political machine: dad delivered Democratic votes on election days and dad got his kids pleasant summer jobs at public libraries and dad got maximum promotions in his civil service career. He also had to pass exams to advance but once you made the list, your connects greatly influenced the jobs you scored. There were good locations for his work and bad ones. Dad got the good gigs. A very long battle with my parents revolved around dad's civil service politicking. Dad's connects were only good in certain strata of the city. My dad deliberately failed some civil service exams to avoid a promotion because there were no jobs at the higher grade where he already worked. My dad loved where he already worked. That first place was filled with guys from his old neighborhood, like his home town. If he got promoted, he would have to move to a facility with all unfamiliar co-workers, including more black civil engineers. My dad was a civil engineer for Chicago. He had the same job, I think, that Michelle Obama's dad had with the city, actually. I actually bet that my dad new her dad, because when mom won this fight and dad passed the test and got promoted, I am pretty sure he was transferred to the same plant where Obama's dad worked. Gosh, the things I remember. If I were to tell this stuff to my sister, who was born the week I graduated from the 8th grade, she would say "How come you remember all this family history and I don't?" Um gee, maybe cause you weren't born for some of it. We actually moved away from that parish the year my sister was born. My dad resisted that move, too. He loved our old neighborhood. But my mom prevailed. And then we all found out, part of mom's motivation had been to engineer her escape from the marriage. She knew she wanted out. She anticipated only taking the three youngest lids with her into her new life. She bought a house that she thought would be easier for her to take care of when she got it in the divorce. Our old house was a gigantic barn, with a rental apartment.
I am way off course. I was writing about Chuck the fuck.
Chuck worshipped Hitler. And I don't think he was faking to be outlandish, although at the time, I remember trying to convince myself that he had chosen Hitler just to be obnoxious. I didn't know much about Hitler. My Catholic grammar school and high school never discussed the Holocaust. Ever. I got lots of Holocaust at college. My undergraduate program had a much-touted Freshman Humanities requirement: all freshman took these classes and studied the same books, heard the same lectures and then met in small groups for discussion and paper writing. And the Holocaust was a big part of that. We watched the films showing what American soldiers found when they got to the death camps, seeing endless mounds of human skeletons, seeing the ovens, seeing the endless hovels that housed endless streams of innocently slaughtered humans just because they were Jewish.
My dad fought in WWII. My parents both followed the course of the war along with the rest of America. They had to have known that Hitler slaughtered millions of Jews. How could they let Chuck give a speech about Hitler as the man he most admired in history? I guess in 1966 Catholic world, there was not much empathy for genocide. And, of course, the Catholic Church enabled Hitler in some meaningful ways that the church long refused to acknowledge. Maybe my parents were blind and clueless.
But Chuck wasn't.
Later, after my parents divorced, Chuck lived at his college campus during the school year but with my dad in the summers, as I did. In those long summers (long living with Chuck), he would pace up and down the length of our house talking manically about Hitler, the superiority of the Aryan race, the superiority of Chuck's ethnic background. I never really listened to him so I can't explain his position but Chuck seemed to take much comfort in endlessly assuring the rest of us that, according to Hitler, we would have been considered Aryan and safe from genocide. And this proved, in Chuck's rationale, that we were superior. Because, he said, people just didn't understand what Hitler was trying to do. He didn't want to erase Jews. He just wanted to ensure the human future by only allowing superior people to live in the future. It was basic jungle law. Survival of the fittest.
Then, as Chuck moved through law school, and I moved through law school and I went home to Chicago less and less and less, mostly to avoid him, he married and moved his wife into dad's house. And he still would pace up and down the house, talking endlessly and subjecting everyone in the house to his rants. It was crazy behavior. Manic. Definitely manic.
I tried to get my dad to forbid Chuck from unloading his ranting on the rest of us. Couldn't dad make Chuck stay in his room when he felt a need to rant? Dad did allow me the privacy of my bedroom but he couldn't stop Chuck from pacing and ranting.
I have four brothers. I was the second kid after Chuck-the-fuck. I didn't start calling him Chuck-the-fuck back in my childhood. I don't think I ever said the word fuck out loud until I had left home and even then, never at home. Good Catholic girls don't use profanity and I was a good one. Except for profanity, I still score as a good Catholic girl, in the sense that I actually follow all the rules. Well, I don't go to church or confession, those are still mortal sins, I guess. Never mind. If I edited myself, I'd delete this paragraph because I have digressed. This essay is about Chuck-the-fuck.
In our grammar school, an 8th grade rite of passage required every 8th grader to give a speech about the person they most admired in history. I graduated the 8th grade in 1967. Chuck in 1966. I suppose it was a sign of the times, pre-feminist consciousness in my life, because it never occurred to me to choose a woman. I can remember reflecting on what seemed, at the time, to be a portentous, meaningful choice. Which figure in history would I pick?! I never considered that there were any meaningful female history figures. That's sad, eh? And later, at my all girls' high school from 1967 to 1971, I don't remember any introductions from the nuns to the possibility that women had ever done anything important. The contemporary female issues that roiled our school was the new birth control pill, which the nuns seemed determined to keep all of us Catholic girls from using. Ever. We also debated the Vietnam War. I confess, with chagrin, that I happily advocated for the war. I remember talking, in my history class debate my sophomore year, about how we had some kind of commitment to support the French in Vietnam, so we had to fight there. I never gave a thought to the slaughter. I only analyzed the war in terms of the treaties my history book presented. I don't remember doing any other research, other than Encyclopedia Britannica. And EB talked about our treaty with the French.
When my kid was in high school and had to write papers, I took her to the library. Gosh, I worked in a library all through high school. I knew how to do research. I always loved libraries. But I have always had a black and white tendency to do things in rigid form. If my teacher had assigned us to do research at the library, I would have, but that was not assigned. I don't remember being encouraged, ever, to think independently. As a black and white thinker, I needed someone to tell me to be flexible. Maybe? Maybe I am manufacturing retroactive justification for what I readily concede was my considerable naivete in my teen years. I also acknowledge that I went to a mediocre high school. I don't think my school expected its graduates to go to college. I know that most of my friends only saw college as something to do until they married. None of my closest friends expected to finish college. My best friend and I had a bet, as we graduated, about who would drop out first. I can honestly report that I bet twenty bucks that I would graduate in four years and would not consider marriage until beyond college. My best friend bet against herself, at least I thought she did. She bet that she would drop out after one year, having landed her man. She and I lost touch. I don't know if she graduated. I remember her declared major, that she chose as soon as she got on campus. She announced that she was majoring in something related to fashion design. I don't remember how I might have responded to her announcement to her but I remember being appalled. First, she had never voiced any interest in fashion or design in four years of being best friends in high school. Where did she come up with that? I asked her that, I think. She said her advisor had asked her to talk about what she liked to do and then the advisor had suggested fashion design as a major and that sounded right to her. I hope I didn't say to her, but maybe I did, maybe this is why we lost touch with one another, but I remember being shocked. I was at a liberal arts college, looking forward to studying art, philosophy, literature, culture and history. I gave no thought whatsoever to tying my studies to a job. Such an approached offended something in my beliefs about a college education. What was she going to do with a year of fashion design? Remember, she expected to drop out of college after no more than two years to marry and have babies. I have dreamt about this friend countless times. I have a recurring dream about her. In this dream, I learn that her parents were secretly very wealthy and she never had to earn money and that was why she didn't care about finishing college. In this dream, she leads a mysteriously prosperous life, traveling a lot, free of all financial cares. Over and over, she and I, in these dreams, try to reconnect but we never do.
Gosh. I digress.
So. When my brother Chuck-the-fuck was in the 8th grade, he chose Adolf Hitler as the man he most admired in history. I found out about this because one of my girlfriends who lived next door was in the 8th grade. Ellen. I was buddies with both Ellen and her sister Nancy who was my age. Ellen told her mother about Chuck's speech choice when I was in their kitchen. I was instantly mortified, but tried to hide my uneasiness. I mentioned it to my folks, but if they ever discussed it with my brother, I never heard about it. Which means they probably didn't because Chuck would have punished me for interfering in his life. So I concluded that my folks ignored that choice. And Chuck gave that speech.
Chuck was that he admired Hitler because Hitler favored the Aryan race and our Celtic ancestry made us Aryan. Chuck's teacher must have known, in advance, that Chuck was going to talk about Hitler. This was not long after WWII. We, obviously, didn't have any Jews in our Catholic grammar school. But we had lots of refugees from Eastern Europe in our neighborhood, like Poles. Lots of Poles and immigrants from Slavic countries. Not many of them came to our school. I assumed, at the time, that the waves of immigrants that moved into our neighborhood weren't Catholic, because even poor kids could go to our school. This was in a heydey of Catholic schools in Chicago. Our school was stuffed to the fills with post-war baby boomers. Every grade had three classes and each class had, no kidding, fifty or sixty kids. Virtually all the kids in our neighborhood that were Catholic, even the poorest ones living in then-quite-rare single mother households, divorce being very rare, esp. for Catholics in the fifties and even the early sixties, went to Catholic school. Only one family on our block, and nearly every house on the block had kids, went to public school. That mom was a widow with 10 kids. They were very poor, that family, but that's not why they didn't go to Catholic school. The reason they didn't go to Catholic school was much, much odder than poverty: they weren't Catholic! They were the only non-Catholics I personally knew in my grammar school era. Now I am wondering if the Polish kids on nearby blocks might have been Jewish? I don't know anything about Polish history emigrating to America. I have a vague understanding that Hitler slaughtered a lot of Jews in Poland. Or did he just slaughter Poles in general? I don't know.
I don't remember hearing anti-semitism in my household growing up. I heard plenty of casual racist talk about blacks. Gosh, in those days, most white people referred to blacks as niggers and it was not really seen, in my white world, as a racist way to refer to African Americans. That was the vocabulary. But in my household, my mother forbid us to say nigger and she constantly complained when my dad used the word. My dad was an average civil-service (equivalent, in Chicago, to being a good union man) precinct captain whose livelihood was dependent on the Chicago political machine: dad delivered Democratic votes on election days and dad got his kids pleasant summer jobs at public libraries and dad got maximum promotions in his civil service career. He also had to pass exams to advance but once you made the list, your connects greatly influenced the jobs you scored. There were good locations for his work and bad ones. Dad got the good gigs. A very long battle with my parents revolved around dad's civil service politicking. Dad's connects were only good in certain strata of the city. My dad deliberately failed some civil service exams to avoid a promotion because there were no jobs at the higher grade where he already worked. My dad loved where he already worked. That first place was filled with guys from his old neighborhood, like his home town. If he got promoted, he would have to move to a facility with all unfamiliar co-workers, including more black civil engineers. My dad was a civil engineer for Chicago. He had the same job, I think, that Michelle Obama's dad had with the city, actually. I actually bet that my dad new her dad, because when mom won this fight and dad passed the test and got promoted, I am pretty sure he was transferred to the same plant where Obama's dad worked. Gosh, the things I remember. If I were to tell this stuff to my sister, who was born the week I graduated from the 8th grade, she would say "How come you remember all this family history and I don't?" Um gee, maybe cause you weren't born for some of it. We actually moved away from that parish the year my sister was born. My dad resisted that move, too. He loved our old neighborhood. But my mom prevailed. And then we all found out, part of mom's motivation had been to engineer her escape from the marriage. She knew she wanted out. She anticipated only taking the three youngest lids with her into her new life. She bought a house that she thought would be easier for her to take care of when she got it in the divorce. Our old house was a gigantic barn, with a rental apartment.
I am way off course. I was writing about Chuck the fuck.
Chuck worshipped Hitler. And I don't think he was faking to be outlandish, although at the time, I remember trying to convince myself that he had chosen Hitler just to be obnoxious. I didn't know much about Hitler. My Catholic grammar school and high school never discussed the Holocaust. Ever. I got lots of Holocaust at college. My undergraduate program had a much-touted Freshman Humanities requirement: all freshman took these classes and studied the same books, heard the same lectures and then met in small groups for discussion and paper writing. And the Holocaust was a big part of that. We watched the films showing what American soldiers found when they got to the death camps, seeing endless mounds of human skeletons, seeing the ovens, seeing the endless hovels that housed endless streams of innocently slaughtered humans just because they were Jewish.
My dad fought in WWII. My parents both followed the course of the war along with the rest of America. They had to have known that Hitler slaughtered millions of Jews. How could they let Chuck give a speech about Hitler as the man he most admired in history? I guess in 1966 Catholic world, there was not much empathy for genocide. And, of course, the Catholic Church enabled Hitler in some meaningful ways that the church long refused to acknowledge. Maybe my parents were blind and clueless.
But Chuck wasn't.
Later, after my parents divorced, Chuck lived at his college campus during the school year but with my dad in the summers, as I did. In those long summers (long living with Chuck), he would pace up and down the length of our house talking manically about Hitler, the superiority of the Aryan race, the superiority of Chuck's ethnic background. I never really listened to him so I can't explain his position but Chuck seemed to take much comfort in endlessly assuring the rest of us that, according to Hitler, we would have been considered Aryan and safe from genocide. And this proved, in Chuck's rationale, that we were superior. Because, he said, people just didn't understand what Hitler was trying to do. He didn't want to erase Jews. He just wanted to ensure the human future by only allowing superior people to live in the future. It was basic jungle law. Survival of the fittest.
Then, as Chuck moved through law school, and I moved through law school and I went home to Chicago less and less and less, mostly to avoid him, he married and moved his wife into dad's house. And he still would pace up and down the house, talking endlessly and subjecting everyone in the house to his rants. It was crazy behavior. Manic. Definitely manic.
I tried to get my dad to forbid Chuck from unloading his ranting on the rest of us. Couldn't dad make Chuck stay in his room when he felt a need to rant? Dad did allow me the privacy of my bedroom but he couldn't stop Chuck from pacing and ranting.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
my brudha da judge
I have a brother who was a judge for almost thirty years. He retired recently. Knowing my brudda, his pension must have vested. Or else he did something that the local political machine would not forgive. He retired. Someone else was appointed and his replacement quickly moved up. My brother never advanced. He was a magistrate. His job was always part time. He settled for that part time gig. It was with the county. It had great benefits. His pension vested with lifetime health care after a certain point. Most people who take the job want to become a full district court judge, full time, not a low level 'magistrate'. If someone settles for part time magistrate, they also maintain a private practice. Not my brother. He rented a law office for one year but he never got any business. He is plenty smart. He could do good legal work, I bet. But my brother is neurotic, shy and crazy. He cringed at the thought of needing customers. He was born to a public sector job mentality. His wife also worked for the public sector. She worked for one agency of government for twenty years, until her first pension vested and then she switched over. He always intended to get full time work, maybe move up as a judge to full time or into a law firm. But he never did. My brudha da judge is a Nazi fuck loonie.
Oh, and my brother the judge used to worship Rush Limbaugh. I haven't talked to this brother in fifteen or more years. More, I think. But back when I did still run into him once awhile, which was basically when I visited our mother, he liked to rant on and on with his beliefs about politics. He is one of the puzzling middle class voters who vote for the Karl Rove political agenda that has used abortion, gay marriage and eliminating big governent to incite middle class voters to vote against their own wellbeing. Back when I still talked to my brother once in a great while, he still believed that sooner or later he would rise into a higher economic bracket and benefit from the lower-our-taxes mentality. This brother had lots of theories about the superiority of the white race, esp. Aryans.
In the 8th grade in our grammar school, every student had to give a speech about a historical figure they admired. I gave mine about Abraham Lincoln. This was before I was infected with any feminist thought. My brother, in the 8th grade a year ahead of me, talked about Adolf Hitler. I am not making that up. It caused a bit of a scandal in our little world but my folks never seemed to notice. My folks never noticed anything this brother did, like when he beat me up. Once, when I was in the 5th grade and this brother in the 6th, my class had left the school before his. I waited for his class to exit to walk home with a girlfriend in his class. Brother bounded out the school door, seeming to gather power as he rushed up to me and then he smashed my left eye with his right fist and kept on going. I had a seriously black eye from it. But when my brother told my parents that he had accidentally run into me because I had been standing in his path, they believed him. He was not punished. I was blamed for standing in the wrong spot because I should have known by then what he was like. That's how my parents handled him. And this brother did not just beat on me. He beat on all us kids. And my folks let him. The nuns warned my folks not to waste money on Catholic h.s. for this brother cause he was destined to drop out and land in prison. So the nuns were wrong. He did become a judge.
It's funny how even losers can become judges. It seems that
Oh, and my brother the judge used to worship Rush Limbaugh. I haven't talked to this brother in fifteen or more years. More, I think. But back when I did still run into him once awhile, which was basically when I visited our mother, he liked to rant on and on with his beliefs about politics. He is one of the puzzling middle class voters who vote for the Karl Rove political agenda that has used abortion, gay marriage and eliminating big governent to incite middle class voters to vote against their own wellbeing. Back when I still talked to my brother once in a great while, he still believed that sooner or later he would rise into a higher economic bracket and benefit from the lower-our-taxes mentality. This brother had lots of theories about the superiority of the white race, esp. Aryans.
In the 8th grade in our grammar school, every student had to give a speech about a historical figure they admired. I gave mine about Abraham Lincoln. This was before I was infected with any feminist thought. My brother, in the 8th grade a year ahead of me, talked about Adolf Hitler. I am not making that up. It caused a bit of a scandal in our little world but my folks never seemed to notice. My folks never noticed anything this brother did, like when he beat me up. Once, when I was in the 5th grade and this brother in the 6th, my class had left the school before his. I waited for his class to exit to walk home with a girlfriend in his class. Brother bounded out the school door, seeming to gather power as he rushed up to me and then he smashed my left eye with his right fist and kept on going. I had a seriously black eye from it. But when my brother told my parents that he had accidentally run into me because I had been standing in his path, they believed him. He was not punished. I was blamed for standing in the wrong spot because I should have known by then what he was like. That's how my parents handled him. And this brother did not just beat on me. He beat on all us kids. And my folks let him. The nuns warned my folks not to waste money on Catholic h.s. for this brother cause he was destined to drop out and land in prison. So the nuns were wrong. He did become a judge.
It's funny how even losers can become judges. It seems that
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Tizzielish
Tizzie Lish was the name of a character in an old radio drama. In, I think, the forties.
I was born in the fifties. My mom called me Tizzielish as an affectionate pet name. I loved having a special name. Until I was thirteen, I only had brothers and my pet name was too feminine for boys.
Then my sister Margaret was born when I was thirteen. My mom started out calling her Tizzielish. I objected, in my awkward, gangly, teenage self. My mom capitulated a bit. She shifted to calling my sister Ms. Lish, but I objected to that. I told my mom it was just plain wrong.
My mom liked to ignore me. It seemed to empower her to defy me. And it seemed to me that the more reasonable my requests were, the more connected my requests to mom were about my own self care, the more she liked to defy me. It seemed to me, and it still does, that my mom liked to put me down, that it made her feeling better about herself to look down at her daughter.
I guess I kinda hate my mom.
She persisted in calling my sister Ms. Lish, but only infrequently. It never really caught on as the kid's nickname. And my sister didn't like being Ms. Lish. She wanted to be first in mom's heart and she wanted, I think, to be Tizzie Lish. But she wasn't. I was.
Sibling rivalry.
I was born in the fifties. My mom called me Tizzielish as an affectionate pet name. I loved having a special name. Until I was thirteen, I only had brothers and my pet name was too feminine for boys.
Then my sister Margaret was born when I was thirteen. My mom started out calling her Tizzielish. I objected, in my awkward, gangly, teenage self. My mom capitulated a bit. She shifted to calling my sister Ms. Lish, but I objected to that. I told my mom it was just plain wrong.
My mom liked to ignore me. It seemed to empower her to defy me. And it seemed to me that the more reasonable my requests were, the more connected my requests to mom were about my own self care, the more she liked to defy me. It seemed to me, and it still does, that my mom liked to put me down, that it made her feeling better about herself to look down at her daughter.
I guess I kinda hate my mom.
She persisted in calling my sister Ms. Lish, but only infrequently. It never really caught on as the kid's nickname. And my sister didn't like being Ms. Lish. She wanted to be first in mom's heart and she wanted, I think, to be Tizzie Lish. But she wasn't. I was.
Sibling rivalry.
Thursday, March 10, 2011
on wisconsin: be strong, fight the coup d'etat
Robert Reich says, at robertreich.org, what I'm thinking:
"If most citizens of Wisconsin are now convinced that Walker and his cohorts are extremists willing to go to any lengths for their big-business patrons (including the billionaire Koch brothers), those citizens will recall enough Republican senators to right this wrong.
But it’s critically important at this stage that Walker’s opponents maintain the self-discipline they have shown until this critical point. Walker would like nothing better than disorder to break out in Madison. Like the leader of any coup d’etat, he wants to show the public his strong-arm methods are made necessary by adversaries whose behavior can be characterized on the media as even more extreme.
Be measured. Stay cool. Know that we are a nation of laws, and those laws will prevail. The People’s Party is growing across America — and the actions of Scott Walker and his Republican colleagues are giving it even greater momentum. So are the actions of congressional Republicans who are using the threat of a government shutdown to strong-arm their way in Washington.
The American public may be divided over many things but we stand united behind our democratic process and the rule of law. And we reject coups in whatever form they occur."
It was actually pleasantly thrilling to experience nature in such high energy form. But I lived in the Upper Midwest (Minneapolis) most of my life, in a three story Victorian. My first floor was a rental unit and I became accustomed to living ‘up’ in my two-story home. I had a two-story atrium with windows all the way to the top, plus many skylights on the roof. All the windows were privacy windows, position so my near neighbors could not see into my home, nor I into theirs so I never covered the windows and I loved the feeling of being perched ‘up’ in the rain, snow, sun, shadow, and wind.
In the summer and fall, the house was densely shaded by the 110+ year old elm tree, which, alas, was declared dead by the city since I sold that home. That grand elm tree shaded three,three-story homes. It would feel like living in a bald spot to me now.
But with the elm tree wrapped over and around my windows, with or without leaves, depending on the time of year, I loved every minute I spent in that house during rain, snow, winds, and hail. I felt like I lived in that tree.
Up on the third story was another, completely different experience because up there, was was above much of the tree and my views of the weather were completely differently.
Ever since, I have longed to recreate a more direct experience of the weather than I got in my first California home. My first place in CA was in a second-story condo, nested around a very nicely landscaped courtyard but the only view was the top of shrubbery. I know there are some tall stately oaks in CA but there weren’t any tall trees in this mid-century-built complex. I was, as I said, a very nicely landscape space but there was little to see.
Now, perched in the sky, with views of the Berkeley hills peeking in my view, and endless sky, I don’t get the cosy feeling I used to get under my dear old elm tree. How I loved that tree. I am so glad I didn’t live there any longer when the city decided the tree had to come down. As it is, I mourn it but if I still lived there under the bald, unshaded sun, without the comfort of that cooling and embracing shade — I used to feel so embraced by that tree! — . . my weather/sky experience atop downtown Berkeley is different but I have come to love my view. When I moved in here, I resolved to love the view, for I expect to live here a long, long time.
When I awaken each morning, I try to calculate the time based on the sundial outside my window. This ‘sundial’ is simply the rounded tower of the other side of my building. Based on where the shadows fall on the wall, I can accurately tell the time. So I awaken, glance at the sundial and then check the clock to see if I am right. After two years, I have learned to adjust to the changing seasons, as the sun rises at different times and at different angles and I am right about the time each day. I have come to love my view, love what I learn about the changing sky conditions. Sometimes the fog dips down below the top of my building, even to the point where it covers my window. I love that. Mostly, it clear and sunny with overcast sky often, of course, but mostly it is always bright. And monotonous.
So last night, the light show was a thrill. I stopped what I was doing and just watched the sky for a long while. When the downpour began, it was another thrill. And then, by the time the hail was pounding down, all the high energy was happy excitement for me.
Wow. I live on the earth. Nature touches me, even in my very urban world.
This experience was very satisfying.
It was not so satisfying this morning when I trudged over to the farmers market in the cold rain. I have this one pair of shoes that I slip on most often to run neighborhood errands. I don’t understand why this one pair of shoes, a pair of ‘earth shoes’, as it happens, seem to catch the rainfall as I walk. It seems like my socks become wet after walking just one half a block. Slip-ons, I don’t quite understand where the rain falls so it is able to roll inside the shoe. But it does. I know other shoes I own keep my feet dry but I forget and seem to have on the wrong shoes every time it rains. I can’t stand it when my feet get wet because then they get cold.
So my trip to the farmers market became a shivered rush. I did my regular rounds, purchasing the same things I tend to buy each week, chatting with my regular vendors, which was much easier to do today because there were not many customers during the rain.
I felt assaulted, trudging through downtown, sloshing in the rain, the wind actually blowing back my Marmot hood, which is a rainjacket designed for windy and rain. I stopped at one point and secured the hood as snugly as possible, zipped everything as tightly as possible, pulled the rainhood so the visor left me almost blind as I walked and still the strong winds blew that hood back. It was a pain. I was cold. My feet felt like wet, icy chunks of chill. But, still and all, it was great. I was cold, icy, wet and alive alive alive.
All in all, a fine winter storm.