When The Wind Blows

Molly’s eyes open slow and sure into the twinkling blue slits she wears by day. The corners of her mouth turn up on her moony face, repositioning some sly old joke behind the crescent. The bedside lamp has been on all night. From flat on her pillow, she can see the first frost of the late season on her breath. Outside, thin, icy clouds sweep across the mountains. She separates the hands clasped at her fleshy breastbone and slaps one over the horsehair mattress, only to find familiar lumps big as bodies — not Griffin’s body itself.

No one’s home to hear but she barks out the coarse chuckle of the jolly girl she is supposed to be. She knows Griffin has been out since dawn:  He likes to visit the yawning girls putting together sausage biscuits at the Duck ‘n Go, or chat with Beau Tillman on his bread route. The truck rocks down the town’s dirt roads and Griffin walks alongside in the grainy light, hands in his pockets, hissing laughter. Maybe Beau is listening through the open window, maybe not.

Molly sits up, grabs the Noxema from the table, smears a thin coat over her freckles. Stubby fingers rake her hair into a tight ponytail. She stands into a pair of Birkenstocks worn shiny black by her round white feet and scuffs her way toward the kitchen. In the short hallway, she stops at a photograph of the father she has not seen since she was three — his sepia face hangs at the same height as a real father’s. On tiptoe, like a ballerina a fraction of her weight, she presses her cheek against his brash smile. His retouched hair looks black instead of red-brown, like hers.

In the kitchen, one of the vinyl chairs squeaks to accept her weight. Griffin has left a stolen newspaper on the table as usual — with a note on top, which is not usual. “Hey girl,” it says. “Thanks. Sister in Atlanta got me a job.” An expanse of blank white suggests he might have wanted to say more, but finally the word “Cool” closes the note, without punctuation, pencil line drifting off to nothing. Molly heaves herself from the chair, goes to the screen door and drops her Mexican poncho over her head. She leaves her Birkenstocks inside and stuffs bare feet into boots that have been on the steps since spring.

Her nose whistles on the walk. Her flannel drawstring pants pillow half in and half out of the boots. Her hands are small and exposed hanging outside the poncho, beside her wide hips. Opposite the back alley, shops are dressed up for the tourists like rows of saloon hall hussies, but away from the façades shop owners smoke or let their guts hang out while they empty trash.

“Hey Molly!” they call.

She turns suddenly into the back of the Mount Mercy Rescue Mission. Reverend Sebastian stirs a big pot of oatmeal with his bottom lip poked out, while she ties on her apron.

At length he says, “Saw Griffin at the bus stop this mornin’.”

“Yep,” Molly replies. Her nose is still whistling. She scans the dozen cots on the other side of the room. Half are taken.

The reverend points his dripping ladle without checking to see if she is watching. “That there’s Tallahassee Joe, come in last night from North Pass Campground.”

Molly locks down the joke she holds between her teeth and gums a little more securely.  

“Hey Joe!” she shouts. “Get over here and get some breakfast.”

Getaways

For the first few years Doug and I were married, our family traveled. Our crew of six crawled all over the mountains within hours of our home, in the Great Smokies and on others in Virginia and North Carolina. We camped and camped some more, or spent long, full days under the South Carolina sun, swimming along beaches, seining the tide pools, or dropping crab buckets off the piers. Most significantly, on a professor’s salary, we packed up and moved the whole household operation out West for two summers in a row. 

Horseback riding i n Colorado.

WhileDoug taught as an adjunct professor or volunteered for the National Forest Service in Wyoming, the rest of us tooled around New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Wyoming. Since our living expenses mostly came with us, the trips were surprisingly affordable, and we had a grand, spiritually and intellectually luxurious time. One of the summers, our 16-year-old twins worked their first jobs as lifeguards at the Saratoga Municipal Swimming Pool, within sight of the magnificent Medicine Bow mountains on WYO 130, while the two younger girls ran wild and free on their bikes through every nook and cranny of that small Wyoming town. On any night, all of us girls might lie down in the back of Doug’s pickup truck under the breathtaking explosion of Western stars, while he slowly drove along endless miles of dirt roads. Daily, we drove or hiked out to where we could see wolves, herds of elk, deer with two or three brand-spanking new babies, eagles, beaver, otters, trout — more wildlife than I could ever list here. Days and days we spent in native ruins, the cave dwellings at Mesa Verde, the Anasazi Great Houses in Chaco Canyon. Horseback riding and hot springs, and wildflowers — how to describe the wildflowers? The world a family of six could reach by minivan or in hiking boots was a wonder, and we basked in it all.

Hiking in Mesa Verde  --  and yeah, that's a bonafide cliff!

Alas, since we’ve moved onto the farm, those kinds of dreamy extended excursions have seemed over  for two years now, at least for Doug and me. Three of the girls we imparted with wanderlust are women now, and they still roam the world, for work and for fun — Mexico, the Honduras, Argentina, Australia and New Zealand and Tasmania, the Caribbean, Canada and Alaska, and always and repeatedly, the Western United States. Doug and I, meanwhile, have been tied to feeding horses, tending chickens, mowing, planting, putting up food. Responsibly leaving the animals has seemed an impossible specter.

One of our views.

Finally this past weekend, the two of us got away for one precious night in Knoxville, Tennessee, about two hours from home. We planned the short trip around a concert, and slept in the executive suite of a fine hotel, feeling strangely “1 percent” as we swiped our room cards in the elevator before it would even take us to our floor. The spring weather was beautiful. We walked the sleepy streets of old Knoxville in the sunshine until concert time on Sunday. We had a terrific time. Yet, afterward, we kept taking each other’s pulse.

Doug on top of the Medicine Bows.

“Did you have a good time?”

“Yes I did. You?”

“Why yes, yes I did.”

The answer was yes — really.

And no.

What was wrong, I wondered? Too much anticipation?

One day after we returned from our two-day trip, my three oldest daughters flew in from a 10-day vacation in Puerto Rico. They were thrilled with what they found here — a picture-book of rain forests and sapphire beaches and reefs. We laughed to hear about how they snorkeled amongst the fishes until their guide startled them with the order, “My friends! Wait right here!” They treaded water on a shallow section of reef looking around for sharks’ fins until their guide informed them of the problem:  “The boat!” he yelped, then dove into a 20-minute swim, to catch the drifting craft that would take them back to land …

They had a terrific time. And yet …

Holly, Tessa and Devon in front of the Medicine Bows.

What exactly was all this my extraordinarily lucky daughters were complaining about, I wondered?  Puerto Rico was awfully touristy, they said, and expensive  for the kinds of travelers who carry all their needs slung over their shoulders. The local people were westernized in a way that transcends “westernization” — bearing the overzealous quality of wannabes. They all had new cars, iPads, most were overweight. They wouldn’t allow my daughters to converse in Spanish with them, as though the local tongue were anathema. “Gluttonous,” one daughter said, and living in such a small place, homogenous — no escaping either Americans, or the relentless march of America on the native people. McDonalds, Burger King, KFC. The daughters, it turned out, had traveled to what they already knew all too well.

Then I realized:  the complaint was the same for Doug and me. We hadn’t gotten away. Our short stay in Knoxville took us right smack dab into the heart of our very own culture, with no nature and no change in the landscape of our everyday lives to distract us from — whoopee! — bars and restaurants and the touristy shopping on Market Square. Our brief taste of the 1 percent was rather flavorless. Little cabins in the middle of nowhere have served us so much better than that 18^th floor suite.

On the upside, we are making strides back toward balance, slowly finding the ways we might be able to travel again. I now have a horse-savvy friend who can feed my horses while I am away, and I will do the same for her. Doug, meanwhile, is planning another month-long hike out west for this summer, when I will be the sole animal caretaker, secure in the knowledge that my turn to hit the road will come.

And from now on, we’ll be sure to get away, whether we drive two hours or twenty or take a flight.

Taylor getting photographed (and checked out) after we'd been in the Saratoga, Wyo., Fourth of July parade!

Survivor Shoney's

I propose the all-you-can-eat buffet line is an excellent military training ground, and no place for the doves among us. What can you expect but trouble, when strangers armed with forks square off for the dearest of prizes known in all of evolution? Food. There sits the mother lode — a bottomless treasure chest spilling forth golden macaroni and cheese, winking seductively in the perfect light. Mothers with small children must take them up into protective arms, grandmothers get knocked down for the last piece of apple strudel, and entire trays of fried chicken get carted off by the most aggressive of our species.

I’ve been thinking lately about all the times I’ve witnessed selfish or angry or sensitive behavior around food. It’s not limited to the buffet line. I once had a date take my head off because I playfully took one of his French fries, as though come the dawn all fries would experience the Rapture. A friend seemed to writhe in pain if I looked across the table as she was eating — “Don’t watch me!” (“Okayyy. We’ll talk after lunch … ’’) And I’ve been glared at for casually saying someone’s meal in a restaurant looked good, as though I was going to ask the diner to give it up.

Some fraction of people seem extraordinarily touchy-touchy about food. I’ve begun to wonder about the evolutionary reasons, or the cultural, ancient tribal norms that unconsciously made their way through some family lines. Anyone who’s watched a PBS series on any of the great apes has probably seen murderous squabbles for food. That date of mine with the fries sure looked like an ape, throwing an arm around his plate and sulking over the rest of his dinner. As for tribal “norms,” Colin Turnbull’s The Mountain People will make even hawks cower, at just how depraved about food we humans can be. It is a shocking antithesis of hisThe Forest People, about a peaceful, loving, hunter-gatherer group, which many likely have read in college.

 Some of the jacket quotes:

“A beautiful and terrifying book of a people who have become monstrous almost beyond belief …. As Turnbull’s writing weaves in and out between outrageous acts and his own outrage, he emphasizes again and again how fragile the structure of a society is.” — Margaret Mead

“An important book, for it represents an anthropological field study of a unique people — a people who are dying because they have abandoned their humanity. The parallel with our own society is deadly.” — Ashley Montagu

Indeed. We’ve been known to kill and be killed in the paradigm of the scarcity model. But that’s not all we’ve been known for. As oil dwindles and the impossibility of limitless growth becomes apparent, we will have to cooperate. My family’s dabbling in a homestead makes that abundantly clear. A dairy and lots of other similar endeavors are full-time operations far beyond our humble capabilities. Veterinarians, mechanics, construction workers, and so many others have skills we could never hope to collect up in one family, in their entirety. We can’t save seed for everything we grow, because so many plants hybridize, creating something uncertain and probably inedible in their next generation. Small farmers will have to work together, to put some distance between certain food plants so that they don’t cross …

On and on the examples could go. We’re in for a bumpy ride, and I expect, some heightened “Mountain People”-like behavior — depraved, monstrous — on macro- and micro-levels. But let’s not forget:  in our whole human existence, egalitarianism didn’t completely suck, as a survival strategy. Often, it undoubtedly saved us.

Let Us Be Angels

After months of neglecting this blog, I was inspired to post the photograph you see here, which at first confused me. What was the writer trying to convey?

Then came the memories.

I had my first child when I was 20 years old, old enough to fully adore him, old enough to take excellent care of him, old enough to easily leave behind dating and partying and to give up my own wants in favor of his needs. But not old enough to solve all the problems that would come sliding like a killing avalanche through my front door.

He was born in 1984, during economic times not unlike the ones we are living through now. On the face of it, my husband and I should have been all right:  He had a job, we owned the house he had purchased with his first wife, we came from relatively affluent families. But then he lost the job. We couldn’t sell the house because of the upside-down mortgage, and because of our failures in paying even the minimum balance on our credit cards, they accrued stunning interest increases and fees. The balances grew hand-over-fist. The bank threatened foreclosure over and over again.

Creditors then could use the most terrifying bullying tactics — I remember wondering where do they get these horrible people, to do this job, maximum security prisons? As a very young, stay-at-home mother, I became a classic victim to those creditors. Shaking every time the phone rang, hiding behind closed curtains, urging my baby to be quiet until whoever was at the door left. A next-door neighbor virtually busted through my front door one day, walked directly to my kitchen cupboard, and turned to me holding up the single can of beets she found there. “Judy, you have to eat,” she said, and I began to do so — at her house. I remember one day my husband told me there was enough money in the checking account to go grocery shopping, but when my items had been rung up with a long line of shoppers behind me, the store refused my check. Not knowing what else to do, I scooped my baby from the cart and ran to my car, tears stinging my eyes.

We made desperate moves, literal and figurative, eventually landing on a dangerous government jobsite on an Indian Reservation. From there, things growing ever more desperate, I fled across the country to get to my parents in Tennessee. The repo man followed me 1,500 miles and put my car on a trailer to take back to Texas, while I watched from my parents’ door, my baby on my hip. I wondered how I would get a job now.

Within one week, I would refuse to take my sick, uninsured son to the hospital until it was about 12 hours too late, so terrified of the bill that it clouded my judgment. I will never, ever forgive myself for this. I had my first child when I was 20 years old, and I buried my first child when I was 22 years old.

Godspeed to the mother who wrote on the piece of cardboard in the photograph. May you and your baby find angels walking past you.

"We Ain't Got Time to Bleed"

Just in case anyone missed the 43 times I found places to post this on my social networking sites, here's one more time: 
http://weaintgottimetobleed.com/

I'm thinking My Man Jesse's photograph and letter will be my next Occupy Wall Street sign.

How Bad is It, When a Mass Movement Won't Even Take You?

This blog should be a "wrap" on this subject, and contrary to what the headline suggests, it's pretty positive. (I had to use the headline because it's funny.) I am happy report: I'm getting over it! Mostly. I am beginning to realize the joke was on me, and — believe it or not — it’s so rich that even I may LMAO about it.

Why didn’t the Occupy Wall Street organizers just say they “never trust anyone over 30” in the first place?

Now, don’t get me wrong, it was the height of rudeness to suggest this movement is open to “the 99 percent” when it’s not, yet. Somebody should teach those whippersnappers better manners than to start publicly announced meetings an hour late. Maybe those wacky kids could run meetings that respect that their elders only have half their lives left. If you say you’re going to march, then march; don’t set up a mike and ask people to sit around with their signs for two hours. An apology would be nice, if people travel a long way and use up a lot of gas but then are turned away … 

(If you’re not at least chuckling a little at my expense about here, I need to work on my comedy skills.)

A brilliant friend of mine commented on an earlier post: "I wonder if they used flow charts in Tiananmen Square." (Pity the poor fellow who found his name in the rectangle at the end, under the title "Stands In Front Of Tank.")

But in a way, you have really got to admire these American youngins' chutzpah. As of this writing, I no longer think their “bad behavior” spells the end of the movement, because their only job is to start it. It may well develop a life of its own, independently of all this nonsense. And the flow charts will be blowin’ in the wind then, and I’ll be there.

Human Prairie Fire

In a fit of fury and frustration yesterday, I posted a link to the flyer that Johnson City’s Occupy Wall Street group handed out, its guiding principles for building consensus within the movement. Its “guiding principles,” in my not-so-humble professional opinion, on how to destroy itself. Complete with flow chart. Any professional with organizational and real-world experience can look at that plan and think, OH SHIT. Anyone within the corporate realm, opposed to the Occupy Wall Street movement, is cackling evilly, to know of it. (And not because of what Corporate America understands of the corporate world we repudiate, but because of what applied marketing research has taught them about human nature. Quite successfully, in case you haven’t noticed.) I have wondered if Wall Street actually planted that flyer in the hands of a young OWS organizer punch drunk on 15 straight days of sidewalk sleep.

Some academic has probably spent an entire half-lifetime researching the “consensus plan” our local OWS group is using, working away inside a bubble, racking up the numbers that show “this is the best way to get consensus,” out the ass. How sweet. Here’s the problem:  that’s all the plan does. Build “consensus,” while A) the group shrinks down to a handful of the most passionate diehard souls holding mirrors up to each other and nodding their affirmations fiercely, and B) the goal (if anyone ever had one) turns to dust in our hands. I can imagine no better formula for frittering away a moment.

And the message of this potentially defining moment? Messages in a defining moment are not made by consensus, shows of “thumbs up” or “thumbs down.” Those messages are human prairie fire, raw emotion on the upturned faces of thousands, saying ”Go ahead. Shoot.” If a government is stupid enough to obliterate the first swell, hundreds-of-thousands rush in behind it.

But before we get started, let us see, do we have “consensus” on Raw Emotion #3.4A, Item 6, Line 23b?

Damn it, and this movement has more potential than any I’ve ever seen in my lifetime. (Because I was born in 1964, a flesh-and-bone byproduct of a particular kind of peace and love, who mostly missed the last great movement as a result of being in infancy.) This now grown-up marketing professional recognizes that just about everyone in this country is waking up to the fact they’ve been screwed by Wall Street for their entire lifetimes. Tea-baggers, even, although they’re suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. This movement has a perfect name, “Occupy Wall Street,” a perfect target, and a perfect slogan, “We are the 99.” (I wish I’d had such great ideas 15 years ago, when I was capitalizing on naming campaigns, targeting markets, and coming up with slogans.)

I came home yesterday after a second try at a local Occupy Wall Street event, and threw my signs in the trash. I was livid after getting up early, driving an hour to get there, and waiting the two hours the group was behind schedule. I didn’t speak up about these counter-culture babies’ confidence-killing faux pas when I had opportunities, both this weekend and last, because of what I know of human nature. I was a lone representative from outside the choir of activists; I had no dreads and no beads. I would have been wasting my breath, to say Stop! when these people were enjoying their open mikes so much.

But my wiser husband retrieved our signs from the trash, and propped them against the wall of his shed. The Most Cynical Man On Earth likes what he sees of the New York occupation, and — what? — doesn’t think it’s time to give up on it yet.

Twenty-four hours later, I am sitting back on my heels and wondering, “How can those of us who have something to add get in, and effectively share a little wisdom with these kids?” Or, considering that no small proportion were my age or older, “kids at heart.” (I know, I know — begin by not calling them “kids.”)

The rest of us must find a way, somehow.

Because we, too, are among the 99 percent.


http://zinelibrary.info/files/Consensus%20Achieved.pdf (The flyer.)
http://thinkinginthebathtubagain.blogspot.com/2011/10/bring-it-down.html (Previous blog on Knoxville OWS.)

The Right Winger's Guide to Helping A Popular Movement Destroy Itself

I wasted another four hours trying to participate in another Occupy Wall Street event, this time in Johnson City.

Want to have a good laugh, or a good cry? Click on the link below, a pdf of the flyer and "consensus building" plan the group followed. And don't miss that flow chart on the back!

http://zinelibrary.info/files/Consensus%20Achieved.pdf

When I got home, I threw our signs in the trash.

Who's Behind The Trigger?

Photo by Jim Kuhn, "Crime Scene, Do Not Cross" tape at The United States Supreme Court during the January 27, 2007, march on Washington D.C.

“And it all comes true.

Yes it all comes true.

Like a wheel inside a wheel, it turns on you.

And you ask, what have I done?

What can I do?

What you believe about yourself,

it all comes true.”

— John Mellencamp and George Michael Green

Last night, Doug and I were having a “48 Hours” fest, watching several of the reality crime shows back-to-back. We do this three or four times a year — I have no idea why. Maybe, for me, because it reminds me of the days I was a crime reporter — anyone who’s done that work can tell you, it’s the same all over. Big city, small town, detectives and criminals operate about exactly the same. It feels like going back to an old territory I know, and I can almost feel that small reporter’s notebook in my hand, as I watch. Anyway, Doug and I both lamented that the proportion of poor, black men who find themselves on this show seems too high, and then we nodded sadly. That’s probably pretty consistent with real life. Doug considered that white people’s murders might be less likely to be solved in 48 hours. The burden of proof changes when you’ve got money for an attorney.

And then out of my mouth it came: “What you believe about yourself, it all comes true.”  

“I’m never entirely sure what you mean, when you say that,” Doug said.

On the episode we were watching, the age-old crime reveal:  a double murder had begun as a “simple” armed robbery. Really, it was no lie, I think it rarely is — when the robbers jumped out of their hiding place, nobody was supposed to be shot. But pow pow pow pow — their guns went off and in an instant, their plans morphed into something else entirely.

“What those men believe about themselves,” I said. “That’s what pulled the triggers. They had one vision in their heads, of how the robbery would go down. Nobody was supposed to get killed, anyway — they saw themselves as armed robbers, not murderers. But unconsciously, they’d written a different story for themselves. Like a wheel inside a wheel …”

I did not get the impression my explanation was all that helpful. If we'd continued, Doug probably would have asked if I was trying to make a statement about “personal responsibility.” Was I saying they had a responsibility, to think of themselves differently? To get a handle on their unconscious selves? That they had some control over the circumstances of poverty and black skin? To which I would have said, Oh noooo. What people believe about themselves has everything to do with what the rest of the world believes about them. I am a huge proponent of personal responsibility, but people have to have better tools than guns, poverty, poor educations and bad expectations, to take it.

But you know, we were watching television, it’s not really time for chit-chat. On we went, to the next episode. Drug deal gone bad. Poor, black man is taken into custody. Detectives are questioning him, getting a little family history, which they hope to use to soften him up, get him to talk. “What about your father?” they asked.

“My father already done been killed.”

Like father, like son, kill and be killed. The story never ends. Maybe until we all create a new belief system about who we are.

Promises, Promises

Well, I did it again — made a promise about a future blog topic that I am now loath to fulfill. The tattoo was a brief thrill that has now assumed its rightful place on the Interest Meter, somewhere above bitching about the weather but below this year’s amazing fall color and reading my horses’ body language. (Noble steeds? I have a pair of four-legged clowns.) Now, it’s just a thing; I notice it from time to time but mostly it’s like a fabulous new nail color. Much as I might like it, I don’t pause to admire it while I’m picking the horses’ hooves. Life goes on in Brumley Gap.

But I said what I meant, and I meant what I said, I guess. I feel an obligation to finish what I started. I’ll try to say something for a broader audience, or at least throw in something completely unexpected, for gratuitous-sex-and-violence value.

Anyway …

Tips for Would-Be Tattooees

1) Wait a few decades.

I can date the first time I told a friend I was seriously considering a tattoo to sometime between 1993 and 1996, the years I worked with her. You always hear that tattoos are not just for sailors anymore, but just that few years ago, they were. It was a shocking thing for a college director of public relations to admit. My friend’s eyes grew wide, but when I told her I was thinking of something to memorialize the son that I had lost, she said, “Oh don’t worry about it. No matter what anyone thinks about the tattoo, they’ll forget it instantly when you tell them that.”

For well over a decade, I never got a tattoo, until about the exact moment a new idea replaced that old one. In my 30s I was wise enough to know that I didn’t want it to be my son’s name — I didn’t want to explain who “Andrew” was to every stranger who innocently asked. In my late 40s, I realized that I didn’t want a symbol of him either. In my case, the tattoo was all about me. I just wanted it. It was far, far too frivolous and self-centered an endeavor for a memorial. I would have felt silly and a little guilty every time that I saw it. On some level, I think I always knew that.

One last aside on this tip:  After reading the barest minimum on the long-term effects of tattoo inks, my personal opinion is that a woman, especially, should consider whether she should be beyond child-bearing age. I elected not to get vegetable inks no matter what, and not to think about the metal-based alternatives. That is a luxury of being my age — the ink in my skin that I will carry around with me for the rest of my life can only affect me.

2) Respect that your body will be taking a big immune-response “hit.”

In a previous blog on this subject, I posted an awful photograph of myself the evening after I got the tattoo, still looking exhausted and puffy-eyed after a hard two-hour nap. Doug said I looked stoned. I wasn’t real sure why I put it up, except for a vague sense that I wanted people (my daughters) to know, should they decide to get a tattoo: they should be very healthy and take excellent care of themselves, especially in the days before. It didn’t hurt until briefly, at the end of about two hours of needles, but I knew by the way that I crashed afterward that I was actively in the process of doing some serious healing. The artist that I had chosen said he could tell by looking at my skin and the way that it was responding that I eat very, very well (I do), and he asked me if I worked out. (I don’t, except for working horses and being outside a lot.) He himself is top-notch; among the things that impressed me when I chose him was that he takes photographs immediately after doing a job, so people can see that a brand new tattoo doesn’t have to look like bad road rash. I followed the after-care instructions, continued to rest and eat really well, and the thing was perfectly healed up in 5 to 7 days. Never itched, never hurt. Never got a wicked-bad antiobiotic-resistant staph infection.

And that will be enough of that. I’ve got horses to ride. But before I go …

Two old ladies are talking to each other. One whispers secretively, “I went to see my doctor because every time I sneeze, I have an orgasm!”

“Oh you poor dear!” says the other. “What are you taking for it?”

“Why, ragweed.”

BRING IT DOWN.

After spending a whole day excitedly making our signs and preparing to camp out with Knoxville Occupy Wall Street Saturday night, Doug and I walked amongst the group’s various organizational committee meetings in Krutch Park for about an hour, and decided to abort. Wordlessly, we read each other’s minds and nodded agreement: this isn’t working out. We were sorry, looking wistfully over our shoulders, as though we’d climbed a mountain to find God and instead found the note, “Sorry for the inconvenience.”*

It wasn’t an altogether wasted day. Before adding the Occupy Wall Street event to our agenda, we had already planned to visit some of Doug’s family at a couple of points along the two hour trip. This fall in East Tennessee (just across the Virginia state line from where we live) is spectacular beyond all reason. I felt the irony of zipping along in my new car in the crisp autumn light, and eating a most awesome lunch at Red Lobster, his father’s treat, before lighting out for Knoxville. (I love crab so much it hurts.) But spending time with Doug’s mother, who has advanced Alzheimer’s, was particularly sad and difficult. (The emotional “color” of the day.) As I told friends once we were back home late yesterday evening, “We were wrung out and in no mood for shenanigans” by the time we got to Krutch Park.

“Shenanigans” is probably not exactly the right word. We saw mostly young “hippies” (for lack of a better term), a few homeless people, a lot of passion, and a lot of immaturity. In trying to “organize,” the organization is falling apart. (See the Occupy Wall Street - Knoxville Facebook page, for details.) Three or four committees had taken up various spots in the small park, in circles comprised of about 20 rainbow-colored, pierced, dyed and dreadlocked kids seemingly getting their first chances to say something. More power to ’em; they’ve got some angst to get out of their systems before, hopefully, they move on to efforts more enduring and effective than this one was.

The real solidarity-killer was the “Constitutional Amendment” committee. As is almost always the case, a very few voices muted all others with their power and passion. One, jacked up on adrenaline, insisted that the Knoxville group’s codified demands include that the United States of America accept the authority of the World Court. Aw jeez, really?

There is nothing inherently wrong with anything I’ve described, except this: We are the 99. We are the 99 percent, getting fucked every which way but loose by the 1 percent. Contrary to the rapist’s cognitive-dissonance credo, we are not “enjoying” it. When a protest or occupation or rebellion includes 99 percent of the population, the reasons people are involved, or the issues that motivate them personally, are infinite. For example, one young, single mother I talked to was A) visibly struggling to make ends meet, B) obviously doing a bang-up job of raising a much-loved daughter, aged 6, presently; and C) really, really worried about public education. It has been stripped of funding to within an inch of its life in favor of military and other “government” profiteers, while commercialized interests seep in like water, to “take up the slack.” This woman had never had the luxury of higher education, and so the thought that, because of her so-called unlucky birth circumstances, her daughter would never even get a shot at college seemed grossly unfair. This young mother can’t afford to buy toilet paper for the school to supplement her daughter’s “public education,” and damn it, she should not have to.

And what about Doug and me, the people who drove a sweet brand-spanking new car to the event and ate at Red Lobster along the way? We are fortunate to a point that I regularly want to fall on my knees in gratitude. I have everything I ever, ever dreamed of in my life, including my first new car and the most spectacular set of stars that shine brighter-than-bright over my rural property in one of the most beautiful places on earth. I stood in the moonlight last night, with my two horses cuddling up against me on each side, 10 acres at their disposal, and I thought, OH GOD. Above all else, I attribute our great fortune to two facts — we were born white, to parents who willingly and generously helped pay to educate us, just as far as we wanted to go; and we carefully and humbly chose what it is that we want, over time. What we want is not “everything.”

We are also on a knife’s edge of losing everything, with one family emergency or serious illness. For years and years and years, we have paid top-dollar for family medical insurance, and paid into Medicare and Medicaid, and paid ridiculously rising medical deductibles besides. In our old age, despite the government medical programs that have collected from us over a lifetime of work, the health care industry will collect our assets in the form of a “spend down.” And after we’re dead, the medical industry will take the rest. Forget about inheritance taxes — nobody is leaving anything to anyone. Don’t be ninnies, Tea Baggers: it’s all getting shunted straight up, to the 1 percent. I'd be okay with it being taken, if it were for the greater good, which would include my children!

Meanwhile, our own college-educated children, the cost of whose educations would make your eyes pop out, are not having any luck finding work except for unpaid or low-pay “internships,” which they are taking, with energy and devotion, so that their resumes are not blank beyond graduation. And all indications are that we parents will be paying for their medical insurance until they are 26 or beyond, plus for their cars, car insurance, and all manner of emergencies that they can’t afford. See, Wall Street knows we’re better bets for paying for these things than our grown children are, by and large; despite all those kids’ great minds and willingness, they’re still fledgling adults, poor in their entry-level positions, struggling to make sound financial decisions, or with paying their debts. They have to learn. Better their parents do it.

And retirement? Now, who’s going to profit if anyone can actually retire? Who's going to pay for all those "less trustworthy" grown kids?

We, for all our good fortune, are the 99 percent.

When a protest or occupation or rebellion includes 99 percent of the population, the reasons people are involved, or the issues that motivate them personally, are infinite. But the cause is exactly the same: the 1 percent. There should only be one goal. Bringing it down.

* Douglas Adams, from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy "trilogy"

A Dying Sun

Maybe predictably, my fourth daughter, the last of my babies, was a Mama’s Girl from birth. She had a fevered lust to run with the pack of her older sisters and so walked and talked at what I had thought, up to then, was an impossible age:  7½ months, on both counts. But still she never danced and pranced her way far from my reach, my little bundle of starshine who loved to bask ceaselessly in the light she put in my eyes.

I knew she was the last one. Don't misunderstand, all of my girls enthralled me equally — you can’t have more than one and not know that each is born constitutionally different from you, all their sibs, and everyone else in the world at large. You can’t not marvel at the way they are delivered to this life with a unique set of baseline traits that, really, have very little to do with you. You try to both respect their individuality and guide them to color just a little bit inside the lines. But on the occasion of closing the door on my childbearing years, I relaxed decidedly and let the last one be, to see what would happen if she was mostly left to her own devices, to test out her inborn gregariousness to the max.

Out of respect for her privacy, I will only say here that, just as I might have imagined, she has found a stage. The very biggest one available to her at this relatively young age — she has found it, taken it for her own, pressed a boot to its neck to the sound of rousing applause. In this way, I cannot imagine she is related to me in any way. I am clapping madly, too, but looking furtively from her, down to the belly that once housed her prenatal self, back to her, back to my belly ...  I am so her mother! I was there the day she was born!

Like most any parent, my dearest wish is that she love her life, passionately, always. I can’t help but hold my breath a little too, though, as she steps into a particular worldview I do not understand, with a unique set of baseline traits I do not understand. Beware Narcissus’ pool, I want to whisper. Today's trade in human capital changes at lightning speed in the matrix of our jet-fueled mass communications; the parameters of what can be bought and sold, from our bodies to the quarks expressing themselves deep within our minds, are so very hard to define now. (Daughter: know that virtual “stages” must be taken with extreme care.) That age-old mother-mantra — oh please don’t get hurt — sounds with every beat of my heart. Some other less definable body part echoes, don't hurt others.

I also am coming to accept a major change from our auspicious mother-daughter beginning. I, once the designated center of her universe, am a dying sun in my growing daughter’s eyes. No really — I've already been through the normal teenage rebellions with three other daughters, the temporary rejections of all that I stand for, the vitriolic I hate yous! that landed sure and straight as Artemis's arrows. Whomever a small child might imagine her mother to be always becomes someone more human, as that child matures. This is different. The script that my youngest is writing on the stage of her mind, about me, is gelling into something more permanent, I think. I am beginning to realize she probably won't outgrow it. I, being quite simply who I am, can't rise to the occasion of the life this brilliant young artist wants for herself. I will always fall short.

To be clear, her version of me is her truth, her reality. It would be quite wrong of me, to diminish that in any way. I am just taking some comfort in the memories of our perfect early years together, and the thought that there's only one way to go, from perfection in a baby's eyes. She will always, always be my little Star.

Wine Mothers

This is a post I wrote in May 2011 and pulled from a previous, now-shuttered blog, to go along with new writing I will post momentarily. For anyone who may not have seen it before, it may illustrate a progression of thoughts. Sorry about the funky spacing. I have no idea when it comes to some of Blogger's quirks.

* * *

Real mothers do not live on sitcoms and, moreover, we don't want to. My generation has fought being boxed in by governments, stereotypes, glass ceilings, the Martha Stewart phenomenon, and every manner of marketing trick designed to define who we are while simultaneously emptying our pockets in order for us to successfully be that person. Why on earth would we want to step out of June Cleaver's prison and into Clair Huxtable's or Jill Taylor's?

"Jill Taylor"
Wikimedia Commons.

I have been intensely aware of my children's television-expectations of motherhood ever since we let cable into our lives, when my oldest daughters were about 13. Immediately I had to begin explaining.


No no no, girls, that's not a middle-class family, that is a rich family coming into our living room and acting like a middle-class family.


OK, Dears:  I know she's 13 on the show, but she's 20 in real life and she looks like a total slut. Etc. etc. etc.


My personal favorite is when we, as parents, don't turn out to be the dopes in real life that all parents on The Disney Channel are. The universal formula for preteen television: The kids' schemes go badly awry. By pure force of luck they are not harmed, maimed, or killed. Their parents (teachers, principals, adult authority figures) almost find out, but because they are dopes, easily distracted with pretty, shiny things, the youngins get away with their misdeeds. Lesson learned, without the unwanted side effect of punishment or guilt associated with getting caught.

I am thinking about this again in terms of "legacy," as my daughters enter their adulthoods, and their opinions of who I am and my performance as a mother solidify. That is not to say my job is completely finished  --  my youngest is in high school and still at home. A year or two ago, she asked me, "Why can't you be a Wine Mother?"

Ah, the Wine Mother. For those who may not know, a Wine Mother is super cool. She spends her entire evenings still sharply dressed from her day working in upper level management. Sexy silk blouse and pearls. She directs the family from the kitchen island, with her glass of white wine nearby. She is extremely popular with her children's friends, because she is so funny after about the second glass. She still manages to get up for her 5 a.m. aerobics class, though, and she could still drive her brand-spanking new SUV to the movies at any second, if her children want to go.

Well. I do love white wine. And I think I'm hilarious after the second glass.



Put me down, put me down!

From a young age, I’ve been completely magnetized by others’ cultural experience, human ways of being that are very different from my own. Up to a certain point, my mother would have grabbed me up by the collar to save me from my curious self, me wriggling and stroking the air like a rabbit being held by its neck fur.

With a little teenage autonomy and a car, I started exploring in earnest. I look back on a night I sat amongst the members of a major South El Paso street gang — in a dark, abandoned adobe house, guns, knives, bottles and bongs getting passed around with equal enthusiasm — and wonder, what the hell was I thinking? Like a white-blond, goody-two-shoes, 17-year-old East Side girl in an Izod shirt and saddle oxfords is going to pass for a fly on the wall? “Don’t mind me, ese, I’ll just squat here in this especially dark corner and be silent as a gargoyle. Proceed, proceed, pass those automatic weapons right along.” Girls like I was wind up the subjects of various CSI television series — and not in the good way. My mother tended never to believe the "anthropologist in training" explanation if I got myself caught, true as it was — nor would the court system, I suspect, if I'd found myself in it. Police busts, like revolutions and mob mentalities, usually sweep everyone up, even if one person in the group doesn't "look" like she belongs.

Luckily, I found safer ways to get inside strangers’ homes and study their lives at will, take notes even — first as a reporter for a newspaper, and later, in the actual, bona fide study of anthropology. (Looking at real estate works, too:  just don’t correct your agent’s misconceptions about the house you really want, and he or she will have to unlock lots and lots of doors for you.)

And of course, there’s travel. I've not gotten spectacular amounts of it, mind you; my life's been mostly otherwise engaged up until now. But one of my very fondest memories from my marriage is of sitting with Doug on a street curb in Juarez, Mexico, under a blazing hot summer sun, bathed in the language, color, stench and beauty of a big, robust city in an entirely different world. We were drinking fruity sodas from glass bottles, way too sweet for American tastes; Doug was asking for translations of the various billboards around us, with their oh-so-familiar American logos but colloquial slogans that made us laugh out loud. Behind us, the hand-blown-glass factory workers plied their dangerous trade in lava on a 114-degree day. People unlike us in every way swept by like water, diesel fumes and honking horns filled the air, whatever rules of the road existed failed to make any sense to us. I felt a familiar electrical sparking in my brain. I looked over at him, and he smiled, a discovery burgeoning and catching fire within him. I knew he got it — why I call travel to another country “the intellectual orgasm” — and I was overcome with the confirmation of that moment, that ours would be a long and happy pairing.

I write this as I consider some of the shocked responses I’ve gotten on my new tattoo. It seems strange to me. My own 80-something parents won’t be shocked. Not thrilled, but not shocked. Doing something like this is just like me. Ordering lunch with purple hair, in a Pennsylvania city where every last house is painted the exact same shade of white, makes me belly-laugh, and feel alive. Same with hiking to the furthest Anasazi outpost in Chaco Canyon, alone. Trying to blend in in South America, even if I am 5’11 and a female traveling alone. (People threw their arms around me with grief-stricken looks on their faces when they found out my husband was not with me, as though I'd been widowed and cast out onto the streets.)

I got this tattoo, 100 percent, for the experience. For the chance to think through such a scarily permanent change, and execute, even though I was scared. To see what all the fuss is about. To see if I could pull it off, with some degree of grace for a woman of my age. Typically for me, because I am older and smarter, I hope, I did my homework fiendishly. I wasn’t really seeking danger — I was seeking experience.

That I got, in a nice little chunk that didn’t require 20 hours on a plane and thousands of dollars. It was a perfect, crisp fall morning, punching the gas pedal through the Jefferson National Forest, speeding toward something that both frightened and excited me, and that I’ve been thinking about for almost 20 years. And wow — it turned out A-OK. Today, my dubious best friend said it was the most beautiful tattoo she’d ever seen. (Note: we have very similar tastes.) After an initial 12 hours of a little freaked-out buyer’s remorse, I am happy with it, too. Really happy.

But hoo boy, I’ve still got more to say. Like everything else in life, it's been a most interesting filter through which to consider the universe, internal and external. At least, to me, and isn't that the whole point with something as self-centered and personal as a tattoo? 

Next up:  why I feel a person should be in at least her fourth decade before getting a tattoo, maybe toward the end of it, and why I didn’t memorialize my son. And then to some other topic — promise.

It Feels Like The First Time

On this, the first day of the tenth month of the year 2011, in my 47^th year, I got my first tattoo. Or more accurately, my first 2/3 of a tattoo — I’ve got to go back in about a month to get some touchup on the part done up to now, and have the remaining 1/3 inked in.

This will almost certainly be my last tattoo, too, though I couldn’t say for sure on that. This morning, after weeks of fiddling with the design and fretting over composition, I let go of all those worries on the hour-and-a-half drive, and focused instead for the first time on how much it would hurt. It seemed about time to think about that. I’d seen one photo online that was firmly in my mind, of a big burly guy screaming out as the needle hit his back. Another local tat shop (that I chose not to go to) distributes bumper stickers to clients that we see on the roads here all the time. Hell yeah it hurts, the stickers say, above the shop’s name. I suppose “bad ass” is supposed to be part of a tattoo wearer’s bragging rights.

Much to my surprise, it didn’t hurt at all. Almost not at all. I sat in the chair with my chosen artist working behind me, screwed up my mouth and wondered what I was missing? I kept asking how far along we were in the process, since for the first two hours I was convinced he must still be sketching. Not really into it yet, or something. I was always pleased to hear we were pretty far along. In the last short while, it did smart a little, as layering a third color in asked a bit much of nerves that were raw from the previous two. Even then, I only jumped a hair, once.

Am I happy with it?

I am neither happy nor unhappy. I’ll be asking for specific corrections when I return in a month, super-minimal things like, “increase the size of this shading by 1/8 of an inch, and round this out more by a degree or two.” Yes, it’s nutty — I chose this artist for his own attention to detail. I should have known I’d want to grab up the needles and start doing my own drawing. Luckily, the real expert between the two of us was working on my back, so that even I realized I could not take over, and so that he did not need to call in the law. “Yes, I need an officer here right away please — I’ve got a crazy lady on my hands who thinks she can do her own tattoo.”

The fact remains, we still need to finish this one. I am being harsh, because damn it, the fact that I would be was just oh-so-predictable.

Stay tuned. I've already got tips for anyone who's even more of a newbie than I am.

I won't show a photograph until it's finished. So here's me instead after the fact, in a tube top with my sweater off the shoulder where my brand-spanking new tattoo is, ponytail on the opposite side to keep my hair off of it. And, looking really wrung out after this day. No pain, but apparently a lot of psychological stress. I guess.

Two to Tango

Not too long ago, I had a hairstylist I loved very much, and he loved me. Man, he gave good hair-washings  --  I gladly paid him every nickel he asked for his pricey cuts and color, plus a big fat tip for the time he spent with me at the sink. This was despite the fact that whatever I said I did not want, was what I got. If I said, "No red in the color, Jack; red is no good with my skin tone," then it was settled. Red it would be, a metallic, candy-apple red, something akin to what you might expect to see on a Corvette. (Jack was crazy-good with shine.) Oh well, I would think to myself, I guess Doug and I won't need to wear blaze orange in the mountains this hunting season.

This tango could not go on without two of us obviously, my hairdresser and me. I was a willing partner in the game of Let's Dress Judy Up. Over the years I've begun to understand a little better why a group of friends long before this began calling me Barbie no matter how much I protested, no matter how much I cussed and spit and told them to knock it off.

Wash my hair? OK, call me whatever you want.

I am thinking of this now as time hurtles me toward the tattoo appointment I've had for two weeks. I have thought about it plenty over the years, and then really really thought about it over the last 14 days. I have worked and reworked the design. I have done my utmost to find the right professional and artist. I also know very well what it's like to stand in front of the mirror and wonder if I even speak English  --  I who always thought of herself as pretty good in the language department.

Why do we find most alluring precisely what terrifies us? Would I go to all this trouble and expense, drive the hour and a half, plus endure the pain, if it weren't permanent?

No, I would not.

* By the way, the appointment is still something like 42 hours away, and I still reserve the right to back out.

Chickens have little itty-bitty brains

Chickens are a barrel of monkeys. Really. Here, Bangkok II stands on a low wall near the newly washed car, trying to figure out if his reflection is a threat.

The only chicken story from Brumley Gap I like better? The time Doug informed me solemnly that he ran over one of our chickens. "Aw," I said. "Which one?"

"The dumb one," he answered.

McMansion of Cards

I used to suffer the delusion that I could do it all. At the very least, I could do it “all” for some defined period of time, if the results would be worth the effort. In case you don’t know it already, that’s a philosophy that, one way or another, spells trouble.

When I think about this, a time-lapse memory collage comes to mind, of a house that my now ex-husband and I built, acting as our own contractors. We hoped for a best-case scenario of nine months, but understood that a year or 18 months were more realistic.

That's haughty enough. But you have to add all this to the story, to understand it:

1) I was primary breadwinner at that time, always solely the one to carry the family health insurance, and the mother of three elementary-age children.

2) As a certain sadistic supervisor in my life began to understand the extent to which I needed my employment to complete our building project, my job went from “high-stress” to “possessed by Satan.” A slave to my dream and that damned “can-do” attitude, I often:  went to work at 4 a.m.; came home in time to dress and feed children before school; worked until about 4 or 5 p.m.; and returned to the office at about 9 p.m., after the children were in bed, until midnight or 1 a.m. or later. In hindsight, I am stunned by how little sleep I got. Weekends, I tried to work on the house that we were building.

3) About a year into the project, I got pregnant with my fourth daughter. Yes I know how that happens; I also now know how a body can get all wackadoo with stress, and surprise a person mightily. Wisely, I gave up my support-contractor duties when one day, as I was running the table saw, I looked down to see my 9-months-pregnant belly sweep awfully close to the running blade. Soon after that, I would have a baby on my hip almost constantly for a few years, trying to protect her from the dangers of an unfinished house.

I got tired. My recollection of exact dates is fuzzy now, but my ability to “do it all” ended somewhere around the 3-year mark. We were, by then, a family of six, living in an unfinished house that was open to the Four Winds and all the pestilence and critters they could carry into it. Plagues — great. One more thing to fight.

I also remember, with no small amount of guilt, how I got a man fired at Lowe’s during this time. I had picked up my three daughters from after-school care, after my own day at work, pregnant enough to make strangers wince on my behalf. It was dinnertime, but I still had to get the whole crew to our rental house and start cooking. The children were getting whiny and impatient, but I had to get several gallons of polyurethane right quick, or our entire project would grind to a halt,again. Trouble was, I couldn’t find “matte finish” on the shelf anywhere. I pounded the call-button that was supposed to bring help for what seemed like half an hour.

I’ve been treated like complete shit by male employees at home improvement centers so many times, I can’t really defend getting one fired over another. This particular guy finally showed up, stopped dead in his tracks, and rolled his eyes. He proceeded to baby-talk me about the differences between “gloss,” “semi-gloss” and “matte” finishes, no matter how many times I protested  --  “I understand that. I just need to know where the matte is.”

Finally, disgusted by my interruptions, he said, “Look, lady, your husband really ought to be here doing this.”

My daughters were watching.

“Get me a manager,” I said.

“What kind of manager?”

“A big manager. A general manager.”

* * *

Ultimately, my marriage flopped dead across the finish line, a marathoner in cardiac arrest with just enough sheer force of will to get to a certain point and not one single step further. (Don’t cry — this was one of several excellent developments in the whole nightmarish scenario. Another would be the big, fat equity checks that allowed us to divide our household in two, and set up our children comfortably for the next phases of their lives.) Whether a person would say we failed spectacularly, or succeeded, depends on your viewpoint. Interestingly, the very same goes for whether the fellow in Lowes should have been fired. I recall his face to this day, and realize I knew nothing about his viewpoint; the words “uneducated” or “unworldly” come to my mind when I think of it now. 

I wonder if I can find the same tenderness, for that younger woman who once thought she could do it all.