Talking to Strangers: An Introvert Hits the Streets

Ordinary Time

2012-02-16T15:47:00.000-08:00

Our reading on Sunday, Feb. 12, went fine. We were glad to read in a queue of eighteen other couples, many of whom had written original poems for the occasion. We weren't that brave. I read "Carry" by Billy Collins, "Kissing," by Marie Howe, and "The Shirt," by Jane Kenyon. Warren read two E. E. Cummings poems, one of which made me cry. Our daughter told us later that the Michael Caine character in Hannah and Her Sisters read this same poem to the Barbara Hershey character, and adultery ensued.

The couples ranged widely in age, young enough to have infant children, old enough to have tremors. Every marriage trajectory, insofar as the listener could intuit it, was different. A very cool evening. Thanks to Sky and Lynn for coming. A former student showed up, too--with his girlfriend! That was thrilling.

Last week and weekend, we had a series of sunny and sparkling, but not freezing, days. A few things about the place I now work jumped out at me. There's no place to go if you're sick, to get an aspirin from someone who may or may not be qualified to give it to you. There is no place even to lie down. There are no department offices, or secretaries. The waiting area for the financial aid office is out in the open, along one of the main corridors of the student center.

I've been so glad to be employed as a teacher and so desperate to keep up with planning and grading that I was on campus six months before I noticed these things. When the governor of our state says that K-12 shouldn't be funded at the expense of higher education, she may recently have taken a tour of a community college campus.

On Sunday I was grateful for the couple that read some lines from the Song of Solomon: "...for now the winter is past, the rain is over and gone, the flowers appear on the earth, the time of singing has come..." May that be so for institutions serving people.

My Husband and I Read Poetry

2012-01-18T14:41:00.000-08:00

If you're in the Bellingham area, consider attending this event on the Sunday before Valentine's Day. Warren and I are one of at least 15 couples reading poetry, both original and published by others. Adults only!

For us, reading poetry together in public may turn out to be like dancing--a little awkward. We need some moral support!

7-9 PM at the Amadeus Project, 1209 Cornwall Ave., Bellingham.

Admission by voluntary donation to the Amadeus Project.

Writing and Teaching

2012-01-15T12:48:00.000-08:00

I’d rather be writing.

I’d rather be teaching.

Even if I believed that the way I spend my waking hours, my one and only life, could be reduced to a bumper sticker, neither of these would describe what I want.

In my community college basic writing class, one of three courses I’m teaching winter quarter, I assigned as content a few works, mostly short, about the Puget Sound area where my students and I live—or the Salish Sea, the native name we’re learning to use. I’ve begun with native myths about salmon, the buffalo of the Lummi, Snohomish, Pullayup and other coastal tribes, because that seemed natural, the best place to start. “Native” tribes are immigrants just like the rest of us, but their pedigree is older. Their forebears crossed the now submerged land bridge across the Bering Strait twenty to fifty thousand years ago, whereas other ancestral communities didn’t unpack their bags for good until the middle of the nineteenth century.

The problem is that I don’t altogether understand these native myths. If I did, I wouldn’t have assigned them. I know from past experience that the light will go on for me about ten minutes into the first class discussion of this material, and it will be a student who throws the switch. I love the suspense of this process and its collegiality. Now that I’m teaching again, I don’t think I can live without it. Still, it wears me out.

If you know the Myers Briggs Type Indicators, I’m an INFJ—an intuitive (N), feeling (F) and judging (J) introvert (I). (My under-developed capacities are thinking, sensing, perceiving, and extraversion.) I like Myers-Briggs, based on Carl Jung’s psychological types, because all the traits are given a positive spin. I am imaginative, compassionate, planful, and reflective—rather than illogical, unrealistic, unspontaneous, and antisocial. You could make a case that INFJs make good teachers as well as good writers. I seriously doubt, though, that doing both makes much sense for them, for me. We’re pretty high-strung folks, disinclined to spread ourselves thin.

Over the last week and a half I’ve met 80 new people, and because I’m “intimate’ (an aspect of introversion), I’ve learned about 70 of their names. I ran into several students from last quarter, which made me unaccountably happy. I signed lots of paperwork for financial aid and tutoring help without knowing much about the particular needs these services are filling. I listened to a vet explain PTSD in relation to Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life, a connection that never occurred to me. Because I’m teaching Business English for the first time, I went to the counseling center to ask some probably stupid questions about who my students are and what they’re up against. The answer to that last part—what they’re up against—is a lot.

When I’m teaching I write about two pages a week. I have a pile of stories in my drawer, most of which haven’t been published, and new voices in my head--characters buying ferry tickets and begging each other not to jump into the Salish Sea.

Teaching slows writing down to a trickle. And writing, if you let it, can squeeze out everything else, rendering an introvert like me agoraphobic and mute. What I want to avoid more than anything else is spending my numbered days wishing I were doing whatever I’m not. That would be a real shame.

"Rescue Me"

2012-01-07T15:18:00.000-08:00

I've been working on an essay today about introversion, pulling some of my old blogs together and reflecting on them. I have three stories that need rewrites, but I felt like starting something (sort of) new. I can't figure out where to start blogging in 2012, so here's an old story about two introverts who find each other, published obscurely in print in 1999. I think I still like it.

Rescue Me

Raymond's next-door neighbor, Brigit, stands in his driveway. He lowers the window of his car, extends his arm, and tries to shoo her out of the way: "Move, Brigit, OK?" When she doesn't, he drives around her and parks diagonally in the garage of his condo.

"I went to the community college, like you told me," she shouts as soon as he opens the car door. "They sent me to some center."

"The Center for the Learning Disabled," he says in a level voice as he walks toward her. She needs to be reminded to keep her voice down. She has trouble with volume control.

"How did you know that?" she whispers. Her blue eyes blink in slow motion, and she slumps a little. A head injury she received about two years ago has confused her thinking, and it depresses her when other people understand and remember easily. Raymond has spoken to her doctor and knows that her prognosis is uncertain. She may remain as she is, or she may get better, even much better. When she told him that her ex-husband left her days after she came home from the hospital, Raymond was outraged. In sickness and in health may be too big a promise for some people to keep, but at least her husband might have stuck around to find out which it was going to be.

"I called ahead to the Student Placement Office, remember?" he says. "That's how I knew about the center." He called the center, too, earlier this afternoon, to talk to the counselor who met with Brigit. Recently Raymond has involved himself--just a little--in Brigit's affairs. He has encouraged her to believe that she has some control over her condition, that she can work at getting better. He hopes he is right to have done this.

"Yes," she says, "Right. The man at the center talked to me for a long time and made me an . . . appointment."

Brigit is aware that people she meets for the first time assume she's always been stupid, or crazy. Raymond believes she's better off knowing this, because in addition to seeming either slow-witted or unbalanced, Brigit is simply beautiful, the most beautiful woman Raymond has ever met. She looks like the blonde Charlie's Angel, the second, small and neat one, not the first one with all the curly hair. Raymond watched reruns of this show, dubbed in Spanish, as a kid, when his parents were missionaries in Caracas. Unfolding in another language, the plots seemed complicated, but the mixture of lust and malice on the crooks' faces came across plainly enough. Brigit isn't up to springing any brilliant surprise plans as the Angels did. She isn't going to outsmart anyone, not now, maybe never. Over the last year and a half, since they have been neighbors, Raymond has come to care for her, but even he has dreams in which her limitations are--is there any other way to put it?--convenient.

"I've got a slip of paper here somewhere with the day and time on it," Brigit says. "The appointment's for a test or something. Where is that damn paper?" She reaches into each pocket of her jeans once, twice, three times. "Did you know there would be a test when you told me to go? I can't find it." She grabs Raymond's wrists, panicked. She tends to do this, touch him like this. Does she do it with other people? That, all by itself, could get her into trouble. Or does she do it just with him?

"Stop saying I told you to go, Brigit. I suggested that you go, that's all." He doesn't want her to become too dependent on him. So far he's acted responsibly. When she's standing right next to him, when he can smell her, he has a hard time remembering they aren't on a level playing field. He would like to believe he's a decent person.

"Here," he says, reaching into the pocket of her pink cotton shirt. "The paper is pink, and your shirt is pink. Here."

Why did he do that? Brigit's eyes have lit up. She is radiant.

"The test is on Monday. Today's . . .Friday," she says. "It's OK about the test, Raymond. I don't mind taking it. If you think I should. I trust you."

***

That night they sit in the living room of Brigit's condo, on a floral sofa. They've had pizza delivered. Its grease-stained box sits empty on Brigit's coffee table. Raymond is past 30. He's eaten plenty of meals with plenty of women and slept with some of them afterward, teachers, mainly, from the school district where he works networking computers and explaining how to use them. These women have drifted away, or he has. He can think of one or two who would say that he has. He has heard that his name buzzes around the teachers' lounges, that women warn each other about him.

His sister, Caroline, who lives with her family across town, finds the idea that Raymond is some sort of Don Juan among the laser printers--thin and freckled as he is, never married--ridiculous. He doesn't see himself that way either, of course, but he resents Caroline's tone. He doesn't care for her tendency to make summary judgments and is afraid that he resists making important decisions in his own life because he doesn't want to be like her.

"It doesn't matter how you do on this test," he says to Brigit. "It's only so the people at the center will know how to help you."

She wants him to spend the weekend helping her get ready for the test. He could. The math teacher he's been dating is out of town. His only plans are to have dinner with his sister, at her insistence, Saturday night.

"The test does matter, Raymond. I don't want them to put me in a bunch of bonehead classes. I don't have that much time. I got another letter from the lawyer."

Brigit and her husband were married only four years. In view of her condition, she was awarded three years of support in the divorce settlement. She has not quite two years' left. Before Raymond suggested the community college, she experimented with part-time jobs. Several months ago, for example, she worked in a bookstore, at the register. Every evening she got off the bus that stops on their corner looking more haggard, more used up. In fact, the first time she and Raymond had a personal conversation, he was out in front washing his car when he saw her stumble down the steps of the bus and fall onto the boulevard strip. He ran over to help her up, but she needed to talk first, to lie back in his arms and tell him what had happened. A woman had run into the store with a sick baby, Brigit said, and she had given the woman the wrong directions to the hospital.

Maybe you need a job where you don't have to work with people, Raymond suggested. And Brigit replied, I love people, but maybe you're right. Really, though, said Raymond, it's just as likely that I'm wrong. Brigit had looked up into his face then. He wondered what she saw there.

"What's on this test anyway?" says Brigit.

"I'm not sure." Raymond didn't ask. The counselor he spoke to today did say, however, that based on his interview with Brigit, he might suggest the court recording program. She wouldn't do well at work that required thinking about several things at once, or setting priorities, but her small motor skills appeared to be intact and fairly good. And it looked as if, when she wanted to, she could concentrate.

"I'm not dyslexic," Brigit says. "The hospital people figured that much out. And I can read fine. Try me. Go ahead."

He doesn't really know how to help with the test. He might confuse her, make her do worse on it than she would have done without him. She puts her arm around him.

"All right," he says. He pulls away a little, opens the newspaper, points at random to an article. "Read that sentence to me."

"'A Chinese real estate and gambling mogul linked to laundered campaign money visited the White House at least 10 times from 1994 to 1996.'" Brigit doesn't stumble over a single word.

"Very nice. So if I asked you a question about that, could you answer it?"

"Maybe. I don't know." She puts her fingers in his hair. "Probably not." She looks unhappy.

"Well, tell me what you do understand."

"It's about the President and some laundry money."

"Laundered money," says Raymond.

She looks hard at him. He can guess what she's thinking. "And there's something about a Chinese mogul," she says. "That's not the kind of mogul you ski around, I'm sure of that. My husband and I used to ski, you know. All the time. I'm a good skier. What is this article about?"

"How the president may have raised the money he needed to get elected."

"Oh. Laundered money."

"Right." Raymond hopes she doesn't ask him to explain how money is laundered, because he doesn't know.

"So will you help me, Raymond?" She pokes him in the stomach. Her hair brushes against his face.

He'll have to be careful, that's all. He'll have to be very clear and direct. "I'll try," he says.

***

He and Brigit spend Saturday morning taking books off the shelf in his bedroom, most of them from his childhood. They take the books into the living room--he insists on that--and read a paragraph or two together, talk about it, move on to the next, or to a more complicated book. They progress from The Red Fairy Book to Where the Red Fern Grows to The Scarlet Pimpernel. He makes lunch, but afterward says he's tired.

She knocks on his door again at 5:00. "Feel rested?"

"We'll do more in the morning, Brigit. I'm busy tonight."

Her eyes brim with tears. He feels as if two very large hands are closing around his throat. This is how Brigit's tears register, as life threatening.

"It's my sister," he rushes to explain. "I'm meeting her for dinner." He adds, irrelevantly, "She's older than I am."

"Why can't I go along?" asks Brigit.

He wants to say, because Caroline will see right away that you are the kind of person who would ask that question. "You wouldn't like my sister."

"Why not? We'll get along great. You'll see."

***

"Brigit, please keep your hands to yourself during dinner," he says as they walk into the Chinese restaurant that Caroline has chosen. "My sister won't know what to think if you touch me all the time. And watch your voice. People don't normally shout in restaurants."

"I bet the guy who owns this place is a mogul," Brigit shoots back.

He's nervous, and that's dangerous around Brigit. He might say the wrong thing, feel the wrong thing. And Caroline will notice.

His sister raises her eyebrows when she sees Brigit coming but says only, "Pleased to meet you." Caroline is wearing canary shoes, a dress that's green and purple, jungle-printed. Like Raymond, she is fair-skinned and small-boned, but somehow she is equal to this outfit. She threw over their mother's churchy taste as soon as she left home.

They order dinner, Brigit with some difficulty since Caroline is busily updating Raymond on her catalogue business in children's clothing.

"I rented warehouse space and hired a guy to fill orders," she says. "And I finally caved in and hired professional models." She turns to Brigit. "I used to use my own kids as models."

Brigit says, "Oh, I love kids. Someday I'm going to have lots of kids. I'll have to get married again, naturally."

"Naturally!" says Caroline, cocking her head to one side.

Raymond thinks, maybe this is going to turn out OK after all. Caroline likes honesty, and no one is more honest than Brigit. Dishonesty was his sister's charge against their missionary parents. "Why don't you just give these people a list of everything they're supposed to think and do?" She meant their father's Venezuelan congregation, and the neighborhood women as well, to whom their mother was always giving advice on hygiene. "Control and coercion--that's what missionary work amounts to. Why not be up front about it?"

The waitress serves their hot and sour soup.

Raymond feels disoriented. Having Brigit there with Caroline has confused the past and the present. "Brigit's going back to school," he says hopefully.

"Oh? What are you going to study?" Caroline asks.

"Well, you know, I'm not quite sure. It depends. Whatever seems . . . interesting." Brigit examines her fingernails.

"Surely you must have some idea about what you want to study," Caroline says. "I mean, why go back to school if you don't have a plan?"

Raymond sees he has inadvertently raised one of Caroline's red flags.

"I was in a car accident, and then I had surgery," Brigit says. She pats at the hair that covers her scar. "It wasn't completely successful." She is beginning to look agitated.

Raymond hurries to explain that he's arranged for a test to be given to Brigit, for career counseling, tutoring.

Caroline's face darkens. He knows that look. She gives her own kind of test, and he just failed it. "I think I understand," she says.

"What?" says Raymond, more loudly than he intended. "What do you understand?" Caroline is a weight on his chest. He would like to throw it off. From the time we were little and crammed together, sweating, in those front pews, he would like to tell her, I have never liked you.

"You see," Caroline says to Brigit, "our family has a certain tendency toward . . . missions."

"Bullshit," says Raymond, hissing. "Maybe you want to tell people how to live, but I don't. Maybe you think--"

Brigit casts a fretful beam of something, possibly love, in his direction. He feels it on his face.

Caroline is looking hard at both of them now. "Forgive me," she says to Brigit. "I see that I've been . . . mistaken about your relationship with my brother."

Something worse is on the way. Raymond knows it. Caroline turns to him. "My God, Raymond, this woman is injured. Is your conscience on vacation?"

"You don't know anything about Brigit and me! Nothing!" He's shouting now. People in the restaurant turn to look.

Brigit stands up, lays her hand on his shoulder. He's not sure what she wants, but he pushes his chair back. She sits down in his lap.

"Don't be upset, Ray," says Brigit. "Everything's fine. I like Caroline. And she likes me. Don't you, Caroline?"

"Well, yes," says his sister. "Of course I like you, but--"

"See, Ray?" Brigit hides her face in his neck and whispers, "Everything is just fine!"

***

On the way home, Raymond can't stop coughing. There's a piece of food stuck in his windpipe. Brigit inserts her hand between his back and the car seat and tries to slap him. The car swerves.

"Stop that, Brigit!"

She settles for unbuckling her seat belt, scooting over next to him. Her upper arm presses against his.

"Think of nice things," she says. "Think of Disneyland. Did you go to Disneyland when you were a kid?"

"Yes." His parents had taken Caroline and him once, the summer he was nine.

"Think of the electrical parade," says Brigit. "Think of the teacups."

Disneyland had disturbed him. He wanted so much to relax and enjoy himself, to be a regular American kid. The park, so bright, perfect, flamboyantly fake, cried out for a holiday mood, a foolishness that his family never practiced but ought to be able to manage this once if they would only try. And he supposed they did try, his mother and father and sister, but they were lousy actors, and after a while Raymond just wanted to get the whole thing over with.

"I'm not a kid anymore, Brigit."

"Then think of something else then. Think of . . . kissing."

Kissing. She clearly said kissing. But her feelings may be as short-lived, as unreal, as a visit to Disneyland. He doesn't know who she used to be, or who she will become. It's not her problem that he's fallen in love with the person she is right now.

"Ray!" Brigit says. "You're not sick, are you?"

He's cold now, and damp.

"You can't be sick. We have to study tomorrow."

They pull into his driveway. He's asking too much of himself, that he help her without touching her, without helping himself to her. She's asking too much.

"You could be a little less . . . demanding, Brigit. I mean, I gave you most of my Saturday. You could at least say thank you."

She moves away, then reaches up and feels around for the overhead light. She's steely eyed, but trembling. "Never mind about the test, Ray," she whispers. "I don't need help. You said yourself the test doesn't matter." She opens the car door.

He grabs her hand. She has to understand that he didn't mean what he just said, that all along he has meant well. "Don't think badly of me, Brigit," he begins, then something else comes out. "Come inside with me, Brigit. Spend the night with me."

He jumps out of the car, runs around to the other side.

"Let's go in, Brigit. Please, honey. Let's go now."

***

He sits up in bed, his back to her, trying to think of what her skin feels like, to fix a phrase in his mind, so he won't forget. Like the sky, if you could touch it. Like an eyelid.

"Ray," Brigit says, "Did I ever tell you about my mother?"

"No, honey." He wants to make love again, right away. He wants the whole length of her body stretched out against his. He inhales slowly, shakily, tries to calm down.

"She wasn't pretty, not like me. When I got to be about twelve, and she was maybe 40, she always looked, I don't know, kind of swollen up, red and blotchy. After a while she looked OK again. I'll show you my wedding pictures. She looked nice that day. But by then my dad was gone.

"I used to watch her in the mirror when she brushed my hair. She'd stop and hold a handful of it or touch the skin on my face. She said I'd never have the same kind of trouble she had. No one would ever leave me."

How hard Brigit's life has been. "I won't leave you," he says.

"You might. I have to be realistic. I need to be able to take care of myself."

"I know you do. You need a good job," he says, "a career. I'll help you." Will you leave me? he wants to ask. "Tomorrow, we'll study."

"Thank you, Ray. You're a good person. I knew that right from the start."

Raymond lies back down beside her, breathing more easily now, more smoothly, as if suddenly, somehow, he is entitled.

Stepping into 2012

2011-12-31T21:37:00.000-08:00

Our new kitten, Arthur

I've been gone, obviously. Teaching is hard; writing while teaching is harder; but not writing is hardest of all, and I vow to give it up. In 2012, I'm going to write while I teach, no matter how complicated my life becomes, how tired I get, how behind on laundry, no matter if both the teaching and writing go downhill as a result.

Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act today, meaning that American citizens accused of domestic terrorism can be detained, interrogated, and tried by military as well as civilian officials. The tricky thing will be how how broadly domestic terrorism is defined. (A scary example is the prosecution as terrorists of Earth Liberation Front activists, for property damage alone. Watch If a Tree Falls, now streaming on Netflix.) What has looked like a popular uprising in Syria turns out to be some kind of proxy war against Iran, with our fingerprints all over it. Los Angeles is on fire, and it isn't even fire season. My children struggle to make ends meet, and we struggle to help them.

Yet whether it's 1984 or 2012, on whatever morning in whatever year we wake up, we get in the shower, get dressed, and do the things we can't help doing. Not writing is harder on my health than fatigue will ever be. I hope that whatever it is you can't help doing, your most important occupation, thrives next year, and you along with it.

P. S. I plan to post a book review now and then on this blog since I'm not reviewing for Trachodon's Cheek Teeth site anymore...and I never stop reading.

Sick

2011-10-25T19:24:00.000-07:00

I've been sick--a little sick, then more sick--and now I'm well again. Two rounds of oral antibiotics didn't faze my infection, so I had to show up at the infusion room of St. Joseph's in Bellingham for an intravenous antibiotic.

"Considering how common illness is,"writes Virginia Woolf in On Being Ill, "how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influence brings to view . . . how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads . . . it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature."

Woolf's husband and doctors put her to bed when she was ill. While she was recuperating, they sent her out on long country walks and made her drink gallons of milk. They didn't let her write, believing that writing disturbed her mind and stressed her body. Not writing, I've always suspected, made her sicker. But maybe not.

I have a hard time staying in bed. I spent the days before my evening treatments grading fifty essays. I could have postponed this task, I guess, but I knew I would panic if I got behind in grading, if this set of essays was still unfinished when the next set rolled in. My IV port was in my left hand, so I was able to write in margins all day long. My husband and son walked the dog and washed the dishes and bought the groceries, all jobs I couldn't have done. Friends took care of the dog one day while my husband attended a meeting. I carried on with the one thing that I could do.

Woolf had household servants. Do I need to repeat this? Her family did not have to wait on her all day long. The idea that the very people I used to take care of are taking care of me may be what keeps me up and down the stairs, in and out of the house, or sitting up in my office moving my pen. I never quite commit to being the patient.

The infusion room at St. Joe's is quiet in the evening. My IV antibiotic was called Gentamicin, a friendly name for a substance that didn't make me sicker while it was making me well--unlike the pills I'd been swallowing. The nurses could not have been kinder, even when, after multiple sticks, they couldn't get through my thick skin to a vein. A"pick nurse," Janine, came to the rescue, inserting a pediatric-size needle near my wrist bone. Janine rolls her equipment around in front of her in a cart as tall as an IV pole, with stacks of baskets for her needles and tubes and a shoebox-sized ultrasound machine for spotting the tiny veins of children. Like anyone with a very specific skill she has utterly mastered and does not underestimate, she took her time, spoke softly, and succeeded on the first try.

The infusion room is not far from the chemo room, and I think this is what Woolf meant when she wrote that the "waters of annihilation close above our heads" in illness. You can't help, if you are 58 and sick, thinking ahead to future illnesses, to final ones. Maybe this, and not the discomfort of being waited on, is the real reason I don't lie down and let myself get well.

Sex as Deal Breaker in The Ides of March Spoiler Alert

2011-10-10T17:28:00.000-07:00

I went to see The Ides of March Saturday night with my husband and son, and I should have stayed home. A. O. Scott of The New York Times warned me that although the film has “lofty” ambitions—to wrestle with “the nature of honor, the price of loyalty, the ways that a man’s actions are a measure of his character”--in the end it simply points out instances of male politicians treating women like paper napkins, of lying in politics generally, and of reporters getting things wrong. None of this is news, Scott says. Right. I’d go a little further: the fine acting in this film is utterly wasted.

Married Democratic governor Mike Morris, played by George Clooney, is a guy with a conscience except when it comes to sex. His media manager, Stephen Myers, played by Ryan Gosling, puts Morris’s sexual errors into context this way:

Don’t you know, [says Myers to the governor] that you can start a war [and here my memory of the actual movie dialogue gets faulty, so I’ll make up a few things], you can throw innocent people into prison, you can wreck a thriving economy, you can burn the country to the ground, but [what comes next I can quote with some confidence] “the one thing you cannot do is FUCK AN INTERN!”

The intern in question, said to be 20 years old, is played by Evan Rachel Wood and is the daughter of the chairman of the DNC. It doesn’t matter much who she is, except that her connection makes Morris seem even more hubristic than we already believe him to be and renders Myers, who sleeps with her, too, reckless, at the very least.

So it all comes down to sex. That’s recent, though, isn’t it? Didn’t FDR have a long-lived affair with Lucy Mercer? Didn’t most of the Kennedy family get it on with Marilyn Monroe? Bill Clinton may have been the turning point. He was just a little too relaxed about his infidelities.

After the movie, I had an argument with my son:

Me: I don’t understand this puritanical attitude toward sex. The George Clooney character has sex with a young woman and suddenly he’s not fit to be president?

Son: He’s married, Mom. Are you saying that it shouldn’t matter if he screws around on the side?

Me I’m saying that once it wouldn’t have mattered.

Son: Would you have voted for Barack if it came out that he was doing an intern?

Me: I voted for Clinton when it was already pretty clear that he couldn’t keep it in his pants.

Son: But, see, that’s the difference. He never pretended he was a good guy that way.

Me: So it’s the hypocrisy you object to?

Son: Well yes, the lying, but also the sex.

Me: It wasn’t that way when we were young. You could sleep with anybody you wanted to. The birth control pill was a wonderful thing.

Husband: AIDS. That’s what changed everything.

[My son and I ignore him. This happens far too often.]

Son: But don’t you think it’s better this way, Mom, better now than then?

Me: I do not think so. [At this point I reassure both husband and son that I myself do not practice infidelity.] . . . All I’m saying is why does it matter so much? When did we start to hold up marital fidelity as THE indicator of character? George W and his father before him were faithful in office, so we believe, but how many deaths were they responsible for?

My son and I did not agree to disagree. We just disagreed. I’ve been thinking a lot about the conversation since.

I know what the seventh commandment is, but what about all the others?

My husband has always maintained that Democrats get elected to office so they can have illicit sex, and Republicans so they can make illicit money. (He means men, of course.) What bothers me is that the Republicans have set the agenda for what can ruin a public official. They can dole out enormous contracts to Diebold and Halliburton, torture prisoners and render them to countries who torture them worse, collect money hand over fist from lobbyists who (to put it mildly) do not have our best interests at heart, and . . . you know the list. But most of them manage either to stay faithful to their wives or give up sex altogether. (The third possibility is that they hire hit squads to take out any and all people who know different.) My theory is they think sex is way more trouble than it’s worth. It doesn’t affect the bottom line, for one thing. Yet we’re supposed to think they’re fine, upstanding, moral men—apart from the occasional sex in bathroom stalls or while your wife is dying of cancer anomalies.

[Okay, I realize that most Democrats are not on my side, either. They can’t get there. Their health insurance packages are so big they bar the way.]

The saddest footage of The Ides of March is Evan Rachel Wood’s character waiting alone in the lobby of an abortion clinic for her procedure and in a restaurant afterward, again alone, for Myers to pick her up. He never shows.

Does the intern herself ever matter one bit in these scenarios? The film takes her story one step further, and that irritated me, too, because the only result of her suicide (besides ending her life) is to make Myers a meaner, smarter political player than before.

Did you or didn’t you? And how can we make you pay? What an arid, loveless world we live in.

A Little Magazine

2011-10-02T17:56:00.000-07:00

The third issue of Trachodon: lit, art & artisan culture was mailed to subscribers this week, and once again, I’m pretty dang impressed by the efforts of John Carr Walker and Katey Schultz, friends from my MFA program at Pacific University, to publish something that feels new and old at the same time. The new issue is 60 pages of fresh and professional writing and images that taste as homemade as the salsa I canned with friends last week.

Issue #3 includes a new story by Pete Fromm called “God’s TV.” It would be hard to overestimate Pete’s influence on fiction writers at Pacific. He was my own faculty advisor for two semesters, and in arguing with him over just about everything that had to do with craft, I began to intuit what kind of writer I am. Four-time winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association’s “Book of the Year” award, Pete, in his novels and stories—I hope he doesn’t read this—persuaded me to cut men a little more slack, even and especially self-consciously manly men, whose hearts are pounded to pulp by love, lost or found, just like everyone else’s. His female characters are as sharp and real, and often as funny, as Larry McMurtry’s. The film version of his novel As Cool as I Am, about teenager Lucy Diamond and her young mother, both of them relentlessly pursuing love, opens in 2012, starring Claire Danes, James Marsden, and Sarah Bolger. “God’s TV” will not disappoint you.

Pete’s story is one of three in this issue, and I can recommend the other two as well: “Bacillus Anthracis” by Heather Clitheroe, about isolation in marriage caused by one partner's germophobia, and “The Littlest Goat,” by Daniel Pinkerton, about more general isolation caused by fear of bridges and a bunch of other things. Since "God's TV" follows a man resisting the lifestyle changes that fatherhood will bring . . . I guess I'm seeing a pattern here, a collective theme. Also in this issue: art by Marianne Dages, a nonfiction piece about printing by Ray Scanlon, and reflections on writing by John and Katey. Trachodon 3 is, in Raymond Carver’s words, a small, good thing. Subscribe or buy single issues at http://www.trachodon.org/subscribe.php.*

I got involved with Trachodon when they published one of my stories, “Shoebox,” in Issue #1. (You can read the first issue online for free now, at http://issuu.com/trachodon-lit-mag/docs/issue1?viewMode=magazine. Let me know what you think of my story.) I began contributing book reviews soon after to Cheek Teeth, the blog associated with the magazine. Cheek Teeth has attracted a stunning variety of guest blogs and bloggers. Check it out, too: http://www.cheekteethblog.com/.

*You can use my discount! For a 99-cent ebook of Issue 3, use promo code SZ52T and follow this link. (Regular price is $4.99) (In case the link fails: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/86391) For 25% off the print edition, use promo code QVHHQGHT and follow this link. (Regular price is $10) (In case the link fails: https://www.createspace.com/3659068)

Facing Forward

2011-09-24T15:35:00.000-07:00

Victor, my sweet son, now Chelsea's husband.

I started teaching again this week, two sections of English 101 at the main campus of Skagit Valley College in Mount Vernon, WA. I got up at 5:15, drove the 25 miles over the hill from Bellingham and walked into class by 7:30. I listened to music on the way, something that I rarely get around to doing at home. After thirty minutes of Sweet Honey in the Rock or Bonnie Raitt or Rosemary Clooney, I felt a little too awake, and had to remind myself to keep my voice down so as to not scare any students away. By Thursday morning, however, no lyric or chord or shot of espresso could have filled my tank. I taught comatose, trusting my lesson plan to get me through. I think that it did, in one of my sections anyway.

I've taught before, last spring at a satellite campus of SVC, and in one venue or another for about eight years in California. I like teaching. Grading papers is not a whole lot of fun, but it's part of teaching, so I try to do it well. In California, when my kids were teenagers, teaching was a way to relocate my voice to a place where it might do some good. At home my kids weren't listening, and every time I opened my mouth, their deafness deepened. So I stayed out of their way two afternoons and nights a week and the rest of the time was often too busy planning and grading to wander through the house checking up on what they were or weren't doing.

Teaching was an avocation, in other words, as writing also was. My vocation, from the minute I laid eyes on Alex, my first child, was my kids. But, as you see below in the photos from Victor's July wedding, my vocation has slipped away. I think of it as an empty park. I can walk through it, sit down, and enjoy the breeze, but I'm alone there. The people I used to hang out with return only for quick visits--to careen down the slide, or run to the restroom.

This emptiness has started, maybe, finally, to look like space. Maybe I'm beginning to remember how it felt to live just one life, my own. It's possible that I'll wake up tomorrow morning and ask myself what the day will bring me. I don't know what's finally shifting me in that direction. The kids have done everything they compassionately could to tell me it's time to move on. Maybe it was the wedding followed by the new job. I feel different.

Mom and Dad with the newlyweds Victor and Chelsea.

Plus Mary and Alex. All of us.

Alex and Mary dancing. (Okay, I made them.) Our dear friends, my kids' other parents, Kevin and Barbara Susco.

Plus my big brother, Ed, standing at right, my nephew, Paul, seated left, and my sister-in-law, Marrianne, seated right.

Barb and Kevin

Plus Laurie Miller, Warren's sister, and his mom, Mary Miller.

Victor in front, his groomsmen Alex, Warren, and Matt.

My park buddies, Alex, Victor, and Mary.

My Father Shakes Hands with the Stars

2011-09-09T07:16:00.000-07:00

My dad in his 30s, circa 1937.

My dad's silent old age put so much distance between us that when he died, he seemed merely to slip over the horizon. I visit his grave occasionally to remind myself that I knew him a little when I was a child. He and my mother are buried in Sacramento, California, not far from where I grew up, at Sunset Lawn Chapel of the Chimes, across the street from a single strip of tract houses with front yards piled deep in rusting appliances and next to a defunct drive-in theater. For a while the marker on his grave, one of the few written records I have of his life, confused me. It reads Herman Heydron, Master Sergeant, U.S. Army, January 11, 1901-July 2, 1983, Army/Air Corps. Was he a master sergeant in the Army or the Air Force? I did some reading to discover what is doubtless well known by many, that it was only in 1947, the year my dad retired from military service, that the Air Force split off from the Army and became an independent branch of the armed forces. I found that part of my father's history in a book, but it was a book in which his name was never mentioned.

There is no one to tell me the story that is only his. My father himself stuttered from birth. When I was old enough to wonder about his story, he had already contracted Parkinson's disease, a condition that made his hands tremble violently, grabbed hold of words he had once uttered with difficulty and shook them to pieces. My mother, fifteen years younger than he was, barely had time to see his marker laid in place before she died, too. In any case, she was never very forthcoming about the past. My brother and sister seem to know as little about my parents' history as I do.

Dear Mary, my dad wrote to my mom from Hollywood in January, 1944, How are you and Butch. Tell Janelle that I seen a lot of stars and shook hands with them. I wish you where (sic) here with me now I sure would enjoy it more. I love you very much [here a word or two is covered by a dab of glue]. Love, Herman. They had been married seven years. "Butch" was their firstborn, my brother Ed, a baby then, and Janelle was my mother's niece and neighbor in San Antonio, Texas. The message is on the back of a postcard from "The Masquers Club" whose members, as explained on the card, were "motion picture stars, directors, and producers." A further line of information is kindly provided for the sender: "I am having dinner here tonight as a guest of The Masquers Servicemen's Morale Corps."

Which stars, besides Eddie and Red Bracken (I'm not sure who Red is), did my father shake hands with? Did the morale corps invite him the evening of January 10 because the following day was his birthday? Or had he just come off the minesweeper he once mentioned having served on in the Atlantic? Was he often this tender, this open, with my mother, or was he afraid that she would be angry because he was in Hollywood without her?

Stories, especially stories loaded with detail, are the way I prefer to make sense of things, so it is hard to be in the dark about the very outline of my dad's life, to fill in the figures with only inference and imagination. And what I have known on some level all my life but have only recently become fully aware of is that without knowing his story, it is difficult to believe in my own.

My father loved movies--I know that much--from the day the Army lent him to the production of the 1927 film Wings, first winner of the Academy Award for best picture. He drove a truck in it, but I have never been able to spot him. His favorite actresses were Wings star Clara Bow, Claudette Colbert, and the lesser known Juliette Prowse. I see now that what these women had in common was a knowing gleam in their eyes. One wonders what exactly they knew. My dad himself was blue-eyed and red-haired, thick-lipped, large-eared. In face and build he looked remarkably like the handless veteran Harold Russell, winner of an Oscar for his supporting role in The Best Years of Our Lives. But my father came out of the war with no visible handicaps. He was famous in our neighborhood for what he could do with a ball, any kind of ball, either filling in at shortstop during my brother's Little League practices, past 50 by then, his pipe clenched in his teeth, or tapping my mother's croquet ball far from the wicket she was about to attempt.

But I am getting ahead of myself, rushing past the little I know.

Herman (I didn't name either of my sons after him) and his many siblings emigrated from Germany to Michigan in 1909. He was eight. Where in Germany did he come from? To where in Michigan did he go? Once he named Saginaw as his destination, but he didn't seem sure. He didn't know his mother's first name, when or how she died, but her death occurred early in his life, maybe before he left Germany. His father was killed in a coal-mine collapse long before Herman was grown. At sixteen, he and his twin brother enlisted in the Army, lying about their age. The two of them were at loose ends for some time before that, under the care of people who didn’t have the resources to care much. Herman, at least, stopped attending school when he was in the fourth grade.

Except for his brief career in film, the next twenty years of my dad's life are dark indeed. He is supposed to have had at least one sweetheart before my mother, a teacher in one of the towns in South Texas populated by German immigrants. I have one photo of him from these years. He is sitting against the dark floral wallpaper of what looks like a hotel lobby with a cocky look on his face. As a child, I only saw that look when he was winning a game. From 1937, there are more pictures, beginning with a few of my parents' wedding, held in a public park on a bright day, toilet paper strung from the trees as decoration.

Forty years old and recently married when the United States entered World War II, he left the service not long after it ended and took up the civilian half of his life in California. I have a picture of the car he and my mother drove out in the spring of 1947, a dark-colored sedan from the thirties with tiny windows. My sister Vicki, one and a half, sits on the hood wearing a plaid sweater. My dad had to shove a broomstick under the handle of the passenger door to hold it shut, and my mother shimmied across the hot seat every time they stopped, which with two little children must have been frequently, across the Texas Panhandle, through New Mexico, Arizona and Southern California. "It didn't bother us," my mother told me about the trip in general and the broom in particular. "We were young."

Vicki. Can't see the broomstick.

But I am 58 now, and I am guessing that my father, at 46, with a horrific childhood behind him, would not have felt very young. In Sacramento, he worked steadily and made a living wage as a civilian mechanic at McClellan Air Force Base. By 1953, when I was born, my family owned a small house in what was then a new suburb, a car, later two cars, a television set. We ate very well, thanks to my mother's skill as a money manager and backyard gardener, and although her taste was peculiar, we were well clothed. In 1963, my father retired permanently, sick with stomach cancer but, as no one predicted then, with 20 years left to live. My mother, believing his retirement wouldn't support a family with one daughter ready for college and another still young--my brother was in the army by then--went to work downtown as a civil servant, first as a switchboard operator and then as a clerk. My parents were, in sum, the kind of family-centered, working-class people whose existence is lauded by candidates for public office but no longer, I think, entirely believed in. Working hard may have kept their "crimes confined," their "sober wishes" from "straying," as it did for the farmers in Gray's “Elegy"--or it may have been the memory of hunger that kept them honest.

My father regretted his lack of schooling so much that his watchword, one phrase he never hesitated over, was get an education. It wasn't unusual advice, and I followed it; I still read like the world is about to run out of books and sit through multi-part PBS documentaries waiting for that key piece of information about the cosmos or the Civil War or the human brain that will explain . . . everything. My father, though, all but gave up his struggle with literacy. Besides the postcard from Hollywood, I have an album of snapshots he put together in Panama during the forties with a few captions scrawled on the pages, and a tiny notebook in which, much later, he figured the mileage of his car. That is all. Reading must have been difficult for him as well since I never saw him read anything but the Giants' statistics and the program listings in the TV Guide. Of course there is a third way in which we use language, the traditional one in which the unschooled pass on culture, but my father's stutter, later aggravated by illness, prevented him from talking much. Now called a speech disfluency, stuttering is believed to be congenital but is aggravated by trauma and long-term stress. I wonder, though, had my father been fluent, how much he would have said.

I have also wondered if he simply wasn't very smart, but the workings of my own mind, recognizably like his in many ways, and the intelligence of my siblings and all my father's grandchildren, lead me to believe that unlikely. Even as an adolescent I also realized, although the vocabulary for it didn't exist then, that my dad had a fine emotional intelligence. He seemed to know that my mom was getting mad even before she did, and he headed for the garage. At night, in my infancy, he walked back and forth with me across our tiny living room until I nodded off. Later, when as a sick child I didn't make it to the bathroom, he cleaned up the mess without waking my mother. Until I was grown and gone, he woke me from bad dreams.

No, low intelligence is not the only, surely not even the major, cause of illiteracy. Words awaken memories.

During the 1970s, the last decade of my dad's life, when I was in my twenties, I sometimes asked my mother to tell me more of their stories. By then my father had multiple and crushing health problems, and my mother was busy taking care of him, but she tried to oblige. On the subject of their childhoods, though, I learned not to ask many questions or appear too interested. When I did, she closed her eyes and changed the subject. Although the outline of my mother's life had always been clearer to me than that of my father's, there were events in her past--anything to which she couldn't attach a happy outcome or put some kind of positive spin on--that she wouldn't touch. Maybe she thought I couldn't handle the truth. I am certain that she was also ashamed of it. More important, she and my father spent their adult lives trying to forget where they came from. Carolyn Forche has written that "the world in which we [postwar American children] were born was wounded, and particularly in America, the suture of choice for the closing of this wound, was silence." Why should my mother relive past miseries to satisfy my curiosity when, by dint of her own hard work, I had been spared them?

Some years back a therapist found it necessary to remind me that although my grandparents died decades before I was born, I could rely on the fact that I did indeed have two grandmothers and two grandfathers, that they had been born and come together and died, that they had existed. But without records to refer to, without letters or diaries or pictures or even stories told around the dinner table, I have to invent them out of whole cloth, to guess at what they were like and what happened to them, then test my guesses against what I know of myself, the little I know of my parents, what I have learned about history and human nature. It is a process full of missteps, embarrassment, withdrawl, the regaining of nerve, more missteps. When I share my thinking and imagining, I often go too far, say too much to friends and acquaintances, more than they want to know. I cannot seem to find the right tone in which to speak or write of these things. I become frustrated, more convinced than ever that if I could only find out another detail or two, I wouldn't have such an alarming tendency to exaggerate, except on the days when I suspect that the truth would be worse than anything I've imagined, that in my version I've soft-pedaled everything, that I'm scared. I am often certain that everyone around me knows I am only pretending to be real, that my true nature is spectral, like that of the grandparents who I can only assume existed. In a family where hard times taught the middle generation, my parents', the one born between utter silence and telling, to push feelings down and away, emotion itself feels wrong, deviant, an act of disloyalty to the people whose story is also my own. Or worse, at least for me, emotion feels fake.

More than anything else, of course, my parents wanted their children to escape the past. If I have postponed the onset of desperation about being storyless until rather late in life, it is because I have been trying to raise my own three, now grown children. I wonder, though, if instead of having spent so much time taking my kids to see mountains and oceans and churches and museums, reading them books, and showing them old movies, it would have been better to let them witness my struggle to make myself whole by reimagining my family's story.

Last summer I noticed several crows--or were they ravens?--standing wide-eyed but with apparent nonchalance among the more recent graves at Sunset Lawn. I wondered if perhaps the standards of the place were slipping and considered chasing the birds away. In the end I got back in my car and drove past them. The birds scared me that time, but they won't again.

A red-haired boy stands alone on the rear deck of a ship on a cold night, avoiding the family scene below in which one of his sisters is very ill. He is just tall enough to peek over the railing, but cannot look down over it at the wake of the ship, illuminated by a lantern, which one of his brothers has told him is mesmerizing. He settles for listening to the rumble of the ship's engine and gazing at the stars. The life he left behind wasn't much fun, he reflects, and the place he is going may be better. It's the front of the ship that ought to interest him. He heads in that direction.

My dad teaches a dog to swim.

Watched!

2011-09-01T11:39:00.000-07:00

I’ve never worried much about privacy. Most people who want to know something about me can elicit my whole life story, including my biggest mistakes, in about fifteen minutes. I trust easily—that’s one thing. And I would rather not have to filter my response to people through a screen of what is or isn’t their business. This may be one way in which I am not an introvert.

When I follow debates over government and market surveillance, I have to goad myself toward outrage.

That hand-held gismo that McGee uses on NCIS to identify a body by fingerprint--Tana Ganeva of Alternet says in an online article today that machines like this can now also scan retinas and do facial recognition. But what does all that have to do with me? Will I show up dead and unrecognizable in some alley? Am I likely to be taken for a terrorist? The possibility of my getting into serious trouble is remote. Not even Derrick Jensen is blowing up dams or taking out cell towers yet. I don’t feel any incipient property damage bubbling up, never mind any violence.

Just because (even) Alternet flashes an ad for a dress I just looked at on a retail site, does that mean I have to buy it?

Should I worry that Facebook’s facial recognition software can now find me in photos others may have taken without my knowledge? Or that bars are streaming customers’ antics live online?

This stuff just doesn’t prey on my mind. In some ways I wish it did. I wish I had more secrets.

We let them get by us, all these new ways to track us down, to trap us, because we figure they won’t turn up anything actionable, not about us. Only the guilty or (in the case of marketing shakedowns, the stupid) need worry. Or the presumed guilty, like non-white young men.

This is my default setting. I’m not proud of it. Even the following, attributed to German pastor Martin Niemoller, only moves me sometimes.

First they came for the communists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.

I hope your conscience is working better than mine.

Separating the Sheep from the Goats

2011-08-23T14:46:00.000-07:00

This is a goat (pretty good for a girl from the burbs, eh?), one of the many I met last week at the Northwest Washington Fair, held in Lynden--about ten miles north of Bellingham, my hometown. Really cute, mostly Scandinavian, 4-H kids show up yearly to this fair with their equally cute horses, ponies, rabbits, guinea pigs, sheep, poultry, cats, dogs, cows, llamas (and alpacas), “swine,” and goats. The llamas, sheep and goats share a hall—my favorite exhibit.

Many of the goats had given birth in the previous two or three weeks. There were babies galore. The cute kids held the cute babies so we other children could pet them. The (goat) kids have wiry hair that lies flat (this will be important later, so pay attention), soft ears and sleepy but open eyes. They seemed utterly calm.

This, on the other hand, is a sheep. Sheep were fewer in number at the fair, and there weren't many lambs, no doubt for sound agricultural or commercial reasons. This sheep looks an awful lot like a goat, doesn't it (she? he?)? Or maybe the goats look a lot like this sheep? Both have eyes on the sides of their hard, bumpy heads. Some sheep and goats like petting, while others (like the members of one's family) do not. With variations according to breed, they are of a size, and both groups include species domestic and wild. (Think of mountain goats and long-horned sheep.) For you lovers of collective nouns, both sheep and goats gather in trips, droves, and, of course, herds.

Separating the sheep from the goats, shorthand for dividing people into two opposing camps, comes from the Gospel according to Matthew. See the NRSV version below. The sheep are the good guys, the goats the bad. If it were easy to make this call (sheep, proceed to the right hand of God; you, goats, other way!), if just any old person, and not the risen Christ, could do it, the metaphor would not work.

I hate this passage, by the way, for its baffling combination of generosity and brutality. Well, maybe I don't still hate it. I have to hope these resentments are healing in a way I don't yet sense.

According to the possibly accurate website, Scienceray (http://scienceray.com/biology/zoology/goats-and-sheep-the-basics/), not even body hair helps us tell sheep from goats: "Not all sheep have wool, and not all goats have short smooth hair." Yikes!

Some reliable differences do exist, thank whomever. A few are behavioral: male goats "rear up on their hind legs and come down" before they butt heads (really, really cute when the goats in question are only a few weeks old); whereas young male sheep just back up and run at each other. Goats are browsers like deer while sheep like to eat grass off the ground. Mother goats (nannies) wander away from their kids to feed; mother sheep (ewes) keep their lambs close. Here's what seems to be the most reliable trait: "goats have solid upper lips; in sheep the upper lip is divided."

The sheep at the fair were okay. I liked them fine. What's to object to in sheep? But the goats, wow! I loved the goats. What does that say about me?

Oops, this is Alice, our dog. All photos by Warren Miller.

The Judgment of the Nations (Matthew 25: 31-46)

When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left. Then the king will say to those at his right hand, “Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.” Then the righteous will answer him, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?” And the king will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”

Then he will say to those at his left hand, “You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.” Then they also will answer, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?” Then he will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.” And the king will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” Then he will say to those at his left hand, “You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.” Then they also will answer, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?”Then he will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.” And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.

Portlandification

2011-08-16T12:34:00.000-07:00

We drove south to Portland, Oregon last week to hug our daughter and check out her new employer, Sunshine Tavern, at 3111 SE Division. Mary, almost finished with her program at the Oregon Culinary Institute in Goose Hollow, is wildly happy to have a paid internship at chef Jenn Louis’s new restaurant. We’re happy that she’s happy, and that the school-to-job progression, so easy when her dad and I were 23 and so unlikely now, happened for her. Read about the restaurant at http://sunshinepdx.com/. The food is great! If you drop in, wave at Mary. Here she is at school:

Something else we're happy about--that we have a reason to go to Portland. We lived in Palo Alto for 30 years, where the old gets eradicated so fast that whole blocks become unrecognizable in the space of a year. We live now in Bellingham, WA, the City of Subdued Excitement, where appearances mean little. Portland isn't about upscale accumulation like Palo Alto, or earnestness like Bellingham. In Portland--Mary's southeast corner of it, anyway--how you look definitely counts, as does how your place looks, but shiny new goods, especially if they are mass-produced, are shunned like the work of the devil. The idea is to know where, when, and how everything you wear and use was made, or to make it yourself. Vintage clothing stores are everywhere. Slim young women drift into coffee houses in sixties flowered shifts with pieces of lace tied around their chignons. Neighbors paint sunflowers across the intersections of their residential streets. People gather to play "ironic" games like kickball. Every square inch of southeast Portland is in one way or another beautiful or formerly-beautiful-now-unaccountably-elegant or weirdly interesting.

Hippo Hardware on Burnside, carrying the salvaged kitchen drawer hardware of your dreams, announces itself this way:

Gnome Chomsky figures adorn the Laughing Horse bookstore, just off Burnside:

Also on Burnside, near the Imago Dei community, art serves the people:

My husband tells me that Portland, built on timber and shipping, is still livable partly because money comes into the city from outside, from parents of the lacy young. Mary insists that she hasn't been "Portlandified," a process depicted in the IFC TV series "Portlandia," but has found that Portland is a good fit for her, a hard-working food artist. She won't need our help much longer.

If you're interested in cultural trends, Willamette Week's Aug. 10 cover story, "Brooklyn Wants to be Portland: Should We Be Proud--or Embarrassed?"is funny and informative (http://wweek.com/portland/).

Spyware

2011-08-02T11:42:00.000-07:00

Alex, our oldest, Jo Ann, and Warren, father and family protector

The professional wedding photos are still being reviewed by the newly wedded, Victor and Chelsea, who (I suspect) are enjoying life way too much to prioritize this task. But snapshots are trickling in. This one, of my husband and son and me, was taken by my brother an hour or so before the ceremony.

I stumbled on an old book of Alex's the other day--The Usborne Spy's Guidebook. This little paperback provides illustrated instructions on stalking, tracking and shadowing, setting up drop spots, using and detecting disguises, scrambling and decoding messages. I'm particularly interested in the code ring, made of fuse wire (whatever that is) and four paper beads. The message you send, maybe with your arm nonchalantly draped over the back of a park bench so your contact can see it clearly as he or she approaches, depends on which bead is turned up and which finger you're wearing the ring on. The red bead up on your first finger, for example, might mean, "Danger! Don't make contact. Someone's watching!"

Alex at nine and ten used to carry a trench coat and fedora to school every morning in a brown paper bag, so he could wear them after school to traverse the block and a half home, darting from bush to bush. The coat, the only one his dad could find that would fit him, was a ladies' size four, which buttoned on the wrong side for him, a secret he never uncovered despite the excellent training provided by The Usborne Guide. He had more important business.

I'm thinking about secrets today because I wish I had a few. I recently went back to AA. I'd been out for four years following eleven years of sobriety, not drinking enough to damage my health, but noticing personality changes--more anger, some free-floating anxiety.

AA is all about honesty. Tell it, whatever it is, and it loses its power. But I feel a need for secrecy-- secret knowledge, secret friends, secret missions, code rings. My kids are grown up, and I'm still young enough that Advil takes care of my aches and pains. If not now, when? I want to hide treasures in tree hollows, like Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird, and watch while children carry them away. Are secrets just for children?

Gobsmacked

2011-07-15T09:58:00.000-07:00

Dancing at the wedding turned out to be no big deal. Warren and I did the sideways step and hold to everything. My only real challenge was trying to follow my 6’4” older son, Alex, whose aunt taught him the box step when he was about nine. I could not figure that out, and his steps were, well, giant.

My friend Barbara, who drove to Sacramento for the wedding with her husband, Kevin—both of them our neighbors and team parenting associates for 16 years in Palo Alto—sent me this message a couple of weeks ago: “Not to worry about your dance. The two of you standing and holding one another is simple and beautiful.” It’s impossible to say how much that helped. We practiced, too, at Chelsea’s house the day before the wedding, alongside her parents, Paul and Dianne.

Photos are still on the way, but I expect them to show what I already feel, that my children are beautiful, handsome, kind, smart and funny. They are royalty. They shimmer. I fell in love with Chelsea, my new daughter-in-law, for good and always, and with Alex, groom Victor, and Mary all over again.

I didn’t blog much in the run-up to the wedding, and I’ll have to creep up on writing about it now. I am truly gobsmacked.*

*Verb courtesy of Pete Fromm

What Tin House Really Wants

2011-06-29T10:15:00.000-07:00

I’m home from a postgrad conference at Pacific University’s low-residency MFA program, where I graduated in fiction in 2009. Since graduation, I’ve missed the craft talks and readings so much that I’ve shown up uninvited in June and January, sneaking in the back and hiding among current students—and I’m not the only one. The university apparently decided to turn stealth visits into a paying proposition and organized an official visit for us during the regular June residency. We didn’t have to pay much (at least this time) for three days of new information, fellowship, organized meals, and no homework.

It’s pretty great for an introvert to party with people she already knows but doesn’t see very often, most of whom are as weird as she is. I brought home a cold, though, and I’m writing this on cough medicine.

One of the craft talks that fell during our visit was given by Cheston Knapp, managing editor of Tin House magazine, and formerly director of the writers’ workshop held every summer on the campus of Reed College in Portland. In trying to describe the collective aesthetic of the magazine (all the editors and interns meet once a week to champion and vote on submitted material, about 14,000 ms. per year), he referred to the following:

Marie Howe’s poem “The Meadow,” for what it has to say about how we enter pre-existing language. The concluding words of this poem: “Bedeviled/ human, your plight, in waking, is to choose from the words/ that even now sleep on your tongue, and to know that tangled/ among them and terribly new is the sentence that could change your life.”

Paul Valery’s essay “Man and the Seashell” for the connections it makes between form and content. I haven’t read the essay, but Knapp seemed to say that it speaks against thesis/explanation/bald statement of theme and for the centrality of tone and tenor.

Frank Bidart’s poem “Lament for the Makers”: “Many creatures must/ make, but only one must seek/ within itself what to make.” This hit home with me because only the day before I’d found myself asking novelist Bonnie Jo Campbell how she described to herself what kind of writer she is, what her subject matter is, and who her readers might be. She said that telling me these things wouldn’t help, that each of us has to figure this out for herself, and it will take time.

William Gass on Borges’ creation of a verbal world.

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “The Birthmark”—in which the husband of a beautiful woman becomes obsessed with removing his wife’s one flaw, a hand-shaped birthmark on her face. In trying to make her perfect, he kills her. “Stories that are wound too tight,” Knapp said, “never take their first breath.”

Knapp’s talk was both evocative—calling up many things that taken together suggest one thing—and declarative. Tin House wants a writer’s vision—“a way of knowing more deeply . . . of uncovering things as they are”—that “restores to our world the very possibility of meaningfulness.”

Knapp pointed out that the book that is big news today will barely be remembered in a few years. We have to write for other reasons.

I haven’t done what Knapp said justice. It was a brilliant talk, which I hope will show up in Tin House or elsewhere in its entirety.

Summer Wedding

2011-06-16T09:50:00.000-07:00

I’ve been grading research papers. I know a lot more about forest restoration than I used to, and lithium mining in Afghanistan, and the likelihood that one of the ebola viruses will become airborne. I’m current as well on coral reef destruction and plastic in the ocean.

I know my students are relieved to be finished, and I’m glad not to drive to the southern tip of Whidbey Island twice a week, but I’ll miss them. I’m saying goodbye to them one at a time in my head.

Our son, Victor, gets married in three weeks in Sacramento, a few miles from where I grew up. He and Chelsea, his green-eyed, sweet, patient, pretty, and very smart fiancée, graduated from the nearby University of California at Davis.

They’re in Bellingham now, resting up for the big day. Two happy people.

Victor is our second child but the first of our kids to marry. All the hard labor of wedding planning has been done by Chelsea’s mother, Dianne, for which we are extremely grateful. We want to get the few things that are our responsibility right. My husband, Warren, is Victor’s best man, so he has a speech to write. I have to try not to make the honking and snorting noises that accompany hard crying. The rehearsal dinner is squared away, except for a few details. Alex and Mary, Victor’s siblings, have arranged for their wedding party duds. Warren and I have to dance, at least briefly, something neither of us remotely does. We checked out some DVDs from the library, but we haven’t played them yet. I think we’re embarrassed even to dance in front of each other. This may be a problem.

After that, summer. Vegetables and writing and feet in rivers. It gets dark in Bellingham about 10:00 now. We have all the time in the world.

Coal is Us

2011-05-30T16:00:00.000-07:00

Bill McKibben is coming to Bellingham on May 31. That would be pretty exciting if it weren’t for the reason he’s dropping by. On March 28 President Obama opened up public land in Wyoming to coal mining. (This just a few days after he lit a candle at Oscar Romero’s tomb in San Salvador—see my April 1 post. Who is this guy?) Peabody Energy, the world’s largest private-sector coal company, will mine Wyoming’s Powder River basin, and has contracted with SSA Marine (partially owned by Goldman-Sachs) to build a terminal at Cherry Point in Ferndale, the next, smaller town up the road from us, enabling shipment of from 20 to 50 million metric tons of coal per year to Asia, mainly China. Wyoming to China via Whatcom County, Washington. Imagine our surprise.

“There’s virtually no place on the continent that’s done a better job of showing us how to live locally,” McKibben said to the Cascadia Weekly (May 25). “Now, by quirk of geography, Bellingham is going to have to make some decisions about what kind of role it wants to play globally.”

About three hundred jobs are at stake for Ferndale, more while the terminal is built, and like every other area in the U.S., we could use them. But coal chugging along train tracks next to the waterfront in Bellingham will set back plans for developing what used to be the Georgia Pacific paper mill and surrounding lands, and that development represents more jobs still, although many will be service jobs. Bellingham can look forward to more noise and diesel pollution if Gateway is built, but none of this is the point, not for McKibben.

Carbon emissions have already raised global temperatures one degree, and weather over the last year has illustrated what kinds of havoc climate change can wreak. Spring in Bellingham is wetter than it used to be and will get wetter still. Small and blighted tomato crops are one thing, but even kale needs sunshine. McKibben and others have spent their adult lives explaining in a thousand different ways that we have to live differently or we won’t live at all. Coal may be plentiful but it is the dirtiest of fossil fuels. “If we burn coal at the rate envisioned by the owners of Powder River basin—here or in China,” McKibben says, “it’s very clear that will push us far, far deeper into serious global warming territory. The highest use of our coal reserves is to keep them where God put them—underground where they can do no harm.”

One thing this is not about is energy independence. The coal’s leaving, remember? It might be about the money the U.S. owes China, and the pressure that debt exerts in the other Washington. It’s very likely about Peabody Energy’s political clout. (Half the electricity in the U.S. is coal-generated.) And it is surely about raising the standard of living for 1.5 billion people in China—in the short run.

Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, by Bill McKibben, will keep you awake at night. You’ll be in good company. Wish us luck.

The Tarot of Books

2011-05-23T15:05:00.000-07:00

I spent the weekend going through books. My culling strategy turned out to be simple: I picked each book up and decided whether to keep it.

Once upon a time I read Tarot cards. Before shuffling the deck, I picked a signifier, one card that suggested my current state, leafing through the deck until I saw an image that rang true. Actually, that’s the only part of Tarot reading that did me any good, searching out the card that described how I felt in a particular moment—conditions prevailing, changes beginning to register, The Empress, The Magician, The Hanged Man. If you are a conscientious shuffler, the rest of the cards, the ones you actually turn up, are selected—I know this is hard to hear—randomly.

I picked up Meridel de Seuer’s Salute to Spring and after a moment re-shelved it. I held a biography of Agnes Smedley in my hands, considered the beautiful face on the cover, then threw it a box. John Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius stayed, but Harold Bloom’s Hamlet: Poem Unlimited went. I’ve read as much Harold Bloom, I decided, as I ever will.

Every book I looked at over the weekend felt like the signifier of a past self. If I hadn’t read it, which was true of ten to twenty percent of my books, why not? Why had I chosen it in the first place? I recalled the state of mind I was in when I bought Don’t Be Nice, Be Real, but I worked through that iffy time sans self-help literature and hope never to return. Out.

What about Roberton Davies’ The Deptford Trilogy? I got lost in it for a couple of blissful weeks in the early nineties, but if I want to re-inhabit a guilty community, I’d rather go home to Middlemarch. I kept all the old Penguins. They don’t take up much space.

I hung on to everything I owned of Miriam Toews, Jim Crace, Barry Unsworth, James Lasdun, and Virginia Woolf, boxed up Anne Tyler and Margaret Drabble (all but The Needle’s Eye).

I moved all the poetry into my office but kept only the unread biographies.

I expected to get rid of the Christian theology--James Allison, John Dominic Crossan, Gustavo Gutierrez—but in the end I kept most of it. I may never read those authors again, but they belong to a part of my life when I knew a few things for sure, and I don’t want to forget what that felt like.

The philosophy books went, except for Schopenhauer. Did I ever believe I was going to read Heidegger’s Being and Time?

I hauled seven bags of books to Henderson’s in downtown Bellingham, and the buyer took only two bags. I asked for trade instead of cash--$120—but on the way home I wondered if that made sense. I have maybe thirty boxes left to dispose of. Do I want hundreds and hundreds of dollars in trade? What will I do with that except pile up more books? I think I’ll sell as many as I can and donate the rest to the library. Maybe I’ll donate the money, too.

Stripping My Bookshelves

2011-05-15T11:39:00.000-07:00

I own too many books. Bookshelves line three walls of our extra room, each shelf stacked two books deep. In the closet off the fourth wall books are piled waist high. Down the hall in my office, every surface except the floor is covered, and the floor is going fast. I try to keep library books downstairs in the living room. If I bring them up here, I might never see them again.

My son gave me a Kindle for Christmas. I haven’t used it. It would solve my bedtime reading problems—no glare, light-weight—and my storage problems as well, but all my life, and I really mean all my life, I’ve been holding books in my hands. Books and babies—hand me either one and I know what to do.

I buy books from Amazon and used-book sites and independent bookstores. I get rid of books, too, in fits and starts, racking up credit in two fine used book stores downtown, where I return frequently to get more books.

I write in books, and that’s a problem. I highlight, underline, make notes in the margins, write questions on the flyleaves and lists of more books to read on the endpapers. Used book stores won’t take books that have been marked up. And if it’s a book I felt moved to write in, I usually don’t want to trade it anyway.

For the past year or two, while I’m reading a book I like, I’m restless until another book by the same author is on the way. That is, the good book in my hands isn’t enough. I comb Suggested Reading lists and sometimes footnotes for titles the author I’m reading used as source material. I’m halfway through John Gray’s Straw Dogs right now, and the list of books it’s suggesting is a little scary—for example, Schopenhauer. I’ve been circling around Schopenhauer for some time, coming closest to picking him up after reading Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. I need a really good reason, however, to enter the mind of an author who was, among other things, a famous misogynist. John Gray might be a good enough reason to read Schopenhauer.

Buying books has become one of my revolving addictions. I get rid of one addiction, and another one crops up—sort of like books. I’ve been hesitating for a long time to tackle this particular vice because (1) it's made me who I am, and (2) what follows might be worse. But I’m convinced now, late in the game, that the second-half-of-life project for us baby boomers must be to get rid of most of the stuff we’ve accumulated and go willingly into the stripped-down world our accumulation has caused. It's just around the corner.

So books. I need a culling strategy.

Bellingham and The Third Man

2011-05-10T13:55:00.000-07:00

It’s still raining off and on in Bellingham. My lettuce is doing great, but I’m losing patience. It doesn’t help that we had a truly glorious day last week, bright sun, light breeze, nearly 70 degrees. All that day I thought, Sun, here I am, shine your mercies on me.

The following day it rained really hard, January hard, and on the way into town to do errands, I passed what I’m pretty sure was a homeless person walking his bike, getting soaked to the skin, holding tight to a paper cup of something that was spilling over the rim, and shouting some awful stuff. Unbridled anger always scares me, but what rattled me even more was my suspicion that the man was not going home to a hot shower and meal, that he would be wet all day and maybe all night, that the next day would be much the same, and that none of this was a recipe for good judgment.

My first errand that rainy day involved finding a copy of Graham Greene’s screenplay for The Third Man, which I was showing that night to my research paper class—justifying a break in the march through our textbook by assigning some dialogue paraphrase and a plot summary. I parked outside a used bookstore and forgot to lock the car. When I came out of the store, book in hand, I saw another soaked homeless person, a woman this time, climb out of my car’s back seat, glance at me and walk fast into an alley. I ran to the car to see if anything had been stolen, but only library books were on offer, and they were still lying on the floor. The car was full of cigarette smoke, and the dog blanket in the back seat had a big wet spot on it, but otherwise, no harm done.

Unlike the anger in the bicycle man’s voice, this tiny non-event didn’t scare me, but it did surprise me. Downtown Bellingham’s homeless, I remember thinking during my first few weeks in town, were the cheeriest I’d ever seen—out and about, meeting and greeting on the corner of Magnolia and Railroad, using whatever resources were available to stay energetic and, I guessed from a distance, reasonably healthy. I may have been wrong then, but it’s obvious that whatever shape they were in four years ago, life is harder now.

I’ve noticed some other things, too, like young men in alleys checking out back doors. My friend’s purse sat in the window of a coffee house yesterday, and a man passing by took a long look at it. Everyone I know is feeling pinched. If my husband and I are looking for money to help our kids, others aren’t eating today, aren’t getting treated for pneumonia today, don’t have a coat to keep the rain off today. Is cutting resources to people who are already losing hope in our interest? Where is the trade-off between taxing the rich and arming ourselves against the desperate poor?

The Third Man is about post-World-War-II Vienna, much of it bombed to rubble, the city partitioned among four Allied countries, and the populace rationed, cold, and exhausted. But black marketeer Harry Lime, when we finally meet him in the person of Orson Welles, is doing fine. He’s stealing penicillin from hospitals and selling it, so diluted that it doesn’t work, to the sick. When his longtime friend, Holly Martins, confronts him, they are high up in a Ferris wheel looking down at “dots” boarding a merry-go-round below.

“Would you ever really feel any pity,” says Lime to Martins, “if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I said you can have twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stops, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money—or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man, free of income tax . . . It’s the only way to save nowadays.”

Lime’s diluted penicillin calls to mind our failing safety net, and Lime himself—well, he reminds me of all those who believe that it’s smart to get rich no matter how you do it and dumb to take care of the indigent. Spoiler alert: the police hunt down Harry Lime. Pretty soon we aren't going to have many police, and I’m willing to bet that we'll need the ones who are left in our alleys, that they won't have the time or the mandate to arrest the Harry Limes of the world although that's where all the trouble started.

photo by EmilyinChains714, from Photobucket.com

There’s a good article on The Nation’s website today about poverty “in the heartland": http://www.thenation.com/article/160533/worst-ive-seen-far-budget-cuts-meet-poverty-heartland?rel=emailNation.

Talking to Myself

2011-05-04T11:36:00.000-07:00

5 May 2011. I’m teaching a spring-quarter English class on writing research papers, at a community college on Whidbey Island. It’s a required class, and some students put it off until their last quarter. Nobody likes to cite sources, I guess. Noting the date of a web post and the date you looked at it is one thing. Remembering to abbreviate all months except May, June, and July, and to reverse month and day in the citation are another. Where in the citation do you put the number of volumes in a specialized encyclopedia? Is it necessary to spell out the names of well-known government agencies like the FDA?

Some of this stuff can be memorized, but I have to look a lot of it up again and again, and I suspect my students do, too. Even with grades as a motivator, it’s hard to make the case that the difference between April and Apr. in a citation is an important one. They know that I have to teach this stuff, and they have to learn it, but none of us is excited about it. I’m emphasizing other skills: pulling together information without plagiarizing, making sense of it, considering your own experience, writing something new and valuable.

Once I read that Sophia Loren believes that people won’t see you as old if you don’t make an old woman’s mistakes, namely, farting in public and talking to yourself. How do I cite this? I can’t find it on the web. Do I really need to go to the library and comb through biographies?

I’ll worry about that later. Meanwhile, I'll make notes for a future paper entitled “Signs of Aging or Just Living?”

Farting: it does get harder with every passing year to prevent untimely outbursts. Can't argue with that. I don't remember Loren giving any tips about how to avoid doing this in public. Stay home?

But talking to myself? I’ve always done that:

· When I’m weeding and lift my head into a rosebush.

· When I’m watching television and someone says, “Don’t try it, dirtbag.”

· When I’m in the kitchen getting dinner and can’t find the mozzarella I’m sure I bought at the grocery store, or any of the slotted serving spoons.

· Does talking to cats count?

· During every State of the Union speech when GWB was president.

· When I’m doing work that’s mind-numbingly boring, like ironing. I complain.

· Answering questions on Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me.

· When the kids were home, and the pair of scissors with my name on it wasn’t in the kitchen drawer.

· Does singing count?

· When I’m doing something strenuous, like climbing multiple flights of stairs.

· In tight spots—thinking out loud, praying.

· When my feelings are hurt.

One of the things I’m supposed to teach in “The Research Paper” is how to evaluate the quality of a website, given that on the Internet anyone can hold forth about anything. Look for documents, I tell my students, that list authors, have been recently updated, are sponsored by nonprofit rather than commercial enterprises, cite sources, and so on.

Just now I googled “talking to yourself,” and right away I found a clearly sensible remark by one Robinson: “Scientists advocate talking to yourself, believing it to be perfectly normal as well as having phenomenal emotional benefits.”

“Robinson”—no first name, but is that important?—does not bring up the issue of aging at all: “Children also stand to gain by speaking to themselves” (2009).

Work Cited

Robinson. “Talking to Yourself: Is It Normal?” HealthMad. 18 Oct. 2009. Web. 4 May 2011.

The Royal Wedding and Accidents of Birth

2011-04-29T12:49:00.001-07:00

This morning I watched clips from the Royal Wedding at Westminster Abbey. Pardon me while I make a pit stop at CNN.com to get the names of the bride and groom. Right. Prince William and Kate Middleton. Some thoughts:

1. I wouldn’t like to curtsey to my grandmother-in-law on the way back down the aisle.

2. What’s with the forehead hats? How do they stay on?

3. Eye shadow in the brown range might have been a better idea for Kate than that Gothic dark gray.

4. Prince William is (obviously) going bald. Is that the result of stress or, as bald men would have us believe, a superfluity of testosterone?

Everyone looked nice, even those with forehead hats, and I was happy to see that Elton John was in attendance. I’m not hugely talented or fabulously rich or a gay man, but he always makes me feel as if I have a representative at these events—someone who might get a little drunk at the after party and speak some small truth.

When I was teaching at a community college in east San Jose, California, my classes were mostly made of first and second-generation immigrants—from Vietnam and Mexico, Central America, Africa, the Middle East. A fair number were not yet citizens. Some may have been illegal. I had no way of knowing and didn’t much care.

Discussions in my Critical Thinking classes often wandered, or maybe came down to, the topic of birth. Many students believed, or found it expedient to say, that America was the greatest country in the world. Some had risked their lives to get here. If their parents both worked two jobs to keep food on the table, if they themselves worked nights and weekends while going to school, that was temporary, a small price to pay. Eventually they would be every bit as American as, say, George Bush.

Occasionally a student—one in particular, I remember, was from Palestine--suggested that he would never be considered truly American by people who were born here. And for this reason his opportunities—it took a lot of courage to say this—might be more limited. Some students, usually also immigrants, were enraged by comments like this. People who never spoke in class raised and waved their hands until I called on them. My native students, especially the white ones, typically kept quiet. I don’t know if they feared the speaker was right, or looking into their own hearts, knew he was.

In the interests of transparency, in Critical Thinking classes especially, I made it a policy during the first class session to out the most general of my views on life, the universe, and everything. After that, however, I tried hard to keep them to myself. Discussions about birth and human value almost always drove me to break my rule. “Who decides where and in what circumstances we’re born?” I said at least once a semester. “Who deposited me in the body of a white baby girl with a particular set of parents in mid-twentieth-century Sacramento, California, USA?”

Usually about half the class replied in unison: “God.”

“Okay,” I said, “maybe so, but does that have anything to do with what I deserve from life, how comfortable or uncomfortable I ought to be, how happy I am? Did God choose my birth based on my virtues?”

Some confusion here, but most students ultimately agreed that we get what we work for, that life, starting from birth, not from some nebulous place before birth, is a meritocracy—just like the United States of America. I don’t believe that for a second, but I didn’t go down that road.

“So we have no business pretending that we’re inherently better than others or less than others based on the details of our birth?”

Hesitant agreement.

“What if you don’t believe in God, or at least not in a god who’s the Big Master Planner? Doesn’t that mean that where you’re born, who your parents are, all that stuff, is just random, a crap shoot?”

Occasionally a student brought up karma and reincarnation at this point, and I invited her to explain those ideas to us.

I never let this discussion go on too long. Luck—and that’s what this is all about—is a deal-breaker for some, the first domino that knocks all the others down. I had good reasons in a class like Critical Thinking to be luck’s temporary spokesperson, but I didn’t want to jar that first domino. “All I’m saying is that the circumstances of our births may be accidental, and even if they aren’t, unless we had previous lives--" I nodded to any Hindu or New Age proponents—“our births say nothing about our fundamental value. We don't earn them.”

If this discussion changed the direction or tenor of my classes, I couldn’t pretend then, can’t pretend now, to say exactly how. But I remember this morning, as Kate Middleton joins the royal family of Great Britain, scoring all those wardrobe choices and fine wines, summers in Scotland, winters skiing in the Alps, stifling dinner conversations and boring social obligations, that her birth was an accident, too. Does she deserve all that stuff? No. Do I? No. Does a child born today in the Congo or Bangladesh or Rio’s favelas? Probably not, but those new babies matter as much as William and Kate do.

Here’s where I go off the rails.

Those children matter more.

April Love

2011-04-26T13:36:00.000-07:00

April is almost over, and it wasn’t too bad. It rained a lot, but it always rains a lot in Bellingham in the spring. It even snowed once, making me think that my basement grow-light seedlings—lettuce, spinach, spring radishes, cabbage—just planted outside, would die. Most didn’t, and anyway, I’ve already got another round started in egg-carton cradles.

The other day April Love, in my Netflix Availability Unknown queue for a year, bounced to Instant Play, just in time to watch it in April. Made in 1957 when I was four years old, and starring Pat Boone (then 23), Shirley Jones (also 23), Arthur O’Connell and Jeanette Nolan, it’s the story of an anti-social kid from Chicago, Nick Conover (note the Dickensian name), sent to his uncle’s horse farm in Kentucky to clean up his act. The horse farm is barely in business since the death of Nick’s cousin, whom the uncle is still mourning, and who alone could handle the champion trotter Tugfire. Nick’s a car guy, in trouble because he stole a car in Chicago “just for a joy ride.” On his uncle’s horse farm he revives a jalopy in the barn and shows no interest in harness racing.

On a more prosperous farm down the road live two young single women, Fran and Liz Templeton (played by Shirley Jones). You could think of them as Elinor and Marianne Dashwood or Elizabeth and Jane Bennett, but blonde. (Nearly every young woman in this film is blonde, down to the extras at the dance and the harness races.) Liz is the good-hearted, capable sister. She can drive a trotter. Fran is the hot sister. She drives a red sports car. Of course our Nick is attracted to Fran, thinking of Liz as merely a “good sport.”

April Love is not a musical in the sense that Oklahoma is, but Boone and Jones occasionally burst into song. I think it's the songs that made such an impression on me when I watched this film on television over and over again, on Saturday afternoons during the sixties in Sacramento. Nick and Liz (Boone and Jones) each sing a version of a particular song that amounts to a concise summary of fifties gender politics. Nick’s version: “Give me a gentle girl, a sweet and sentimental girl, one whose smile will warm my heart when summer days have flown . . .Give me the wistful type, with eyes the soft and mistful [sic] type, one whose wish will always be to live for me alone. For her I’d move a mountain, to her I would kneel . . .” Jones later sings the same song, slightly reworded (“Am I that gentle girl, that sweet and sentimental girl . . ..”) while undressing at home for a shower, clever waist-level closet doors and towels showing her legs and shoulders but nothing in between. This modest strip-tease is part of the propaganda, too.

Watching this film after so many years, nearly forty of them sexually active, twenty-six happily married, I remember now how confusing it was. I was pretty sure in my teens and twenties that Fran was the girl I wasn’t supposed to be—beautiful but irresponsible, driving her car too fast, tempting Nick, who is trying to reform, into racing his uncle’s car against hers on a public road (as in Rebel Without a Cause, which came out two years earlier). Fran, who is actually very likeable, is the wrong kind of girl. Liz, on the other hand, an expert harness racer, has driving hands like a man. That can’t be good. She herself has to reform, fall so in love with Nick that she stays up all night with him (clothes on) when Tugfire gets sick. She roots for Nick when he races Tugfire at the fair, although her own horse is also competing. She must demonstrate that her loyalty to Nick and Nick alone is worth more than her sister’s beauty—although, let’s face it, Shirley Jones at 23, with the blonde ponytail that curled at the end, was no dog.

How can a girl be exactly attractive enough? Exactly invested enough in a man’s life that she doesn’t drive him away, doesn’t crowd him, doesn’t endanger his future? If she manages to strike the right note, will she ever have the courage to strike any others?

In the end—you’re not going to watch this movie, are you?—Nick wins the race, isn’t arrested for violating his no-driving probation, and heads home from the fair singing “April Love,” accompanied by the whole damn county. He gives up dangerous modernity in the form of fast cars for fast horses and a girl suited to a peaceful, rural life. Not too peaceful: the dances in Kentucky are doo-wop rowdy, and don’t forget Liz's lovely legs.

Boone, by the way, never quite kisses Jones in this film. A conservative Christian, he protested that because she was married in real life, kissing her, even on film, would not be okay.

Today is my sweet husband Warren’s birthday. He’s changing in midlife. He works for a living, but also makes short films and has become a great photographer. He’s a leader in Bellingham’s transition town movement. The kids call him with all the questions I can’t answer—a long list—and a couple of weeks ago he made a middle of the night visit to the city jail when a friend of one of our kids got a DUI. If there’s a better man out there than Warren, I’ve never met him.

I write. That’s about it. Oh, I’m teaching a little now, too, but after so many years of obsessive mothering, I take writing pretty seriously. It’s hard to rejoin the world (and Warren is my world) after hours in one that I’ve made up. Warren has to wait that process out.

I worry that we have less and less in common as our child-rearing years recede. He’s never expected me to “live for him alone,” thank Whomever, but sometimes movies like April Love come back to me, and I worry that I’m taking a big risk making such an issue, even at this late date, of claiming my own life. Is it not wrong, wrote W. G. Sebald, to squander one's chance of happiness in order to indulge a talent?*

Here's Warren. Don’t get any ideas.

*Thanks to Craig Morgan Teicher, who uses this Sebald quote in his essay, "On His Bed and No Longer Among the Living," Colorado Review 38.1. Spring 2011.

Alley People 2

2011-04-22T12:40:00.000-07:00

On the sidewalks of my neighborhood, I chat with mothers and small children, gardeners, remodeling crews, although front-yard conversations aren’t very satisfying. They’re either conventional—“How old is your little girl?” I might ask—or somewhere between snarky and flirtatious—“That dog is walking you,” a roofer shouted down at me last week. Often conversations don’t happen at all. The self-sufficient don’t even make eye contact: horseman, pass by. Teenagers sitting on the hoods of cars or huddled around tailpipes ignore me. Kids walking to or from school sans parents have been instructed never to talk to strangers, never to pet strange dogs. I understand this, but part of me objects. They’re not supposed to talk to me? They’re not supposed to pet Alice?

Conversations in alleys, on the other hand, are always intimate.

Alice and I used to stop to greet an old white German shepherd who lay on a back deck, beyond a picket fence painted army green, a big red heart decorating the gate. The backyard was messy, vegetables planted here and there, open bags of mulch, a Weber barbecue abandoned to the rain, a splintering redwood picnic table.

“Hi there,” I said to the dog, but he always stayed put on the deck. He seemed to be meditating.

One morning we headed out earlier than usual, about seven o’clock, and found the dog sitting a few feet from the back fence. Alice wagged her tail, and I saw that the dog’s eyes were milky, unseeing.

Across the alley a woman in a fuzzy brown bathrobe opened a gate.

“He’s waiting for me,” she said. “I come over before work every morning with a treat, right after I feed my rabbits. Can your dog have one? They’re healthy.”

Alice had already planted herself in front of the woman, a front paw on one of the woman’s bare feet.

“Sure,” I said. I thought I heard a low growl come from the German shepherd.

“Okay, Jack,” the woman said, moving to the fence. The dog stepped cleanly around a pile of what was probably compost, covered now in mint, and the stack of clay pots next to it. The woman held out the treat, and he gingerly bit down on it, his teeth never touching her fingers. Soft mouth, dog trainers call that.

“He’s old,” she said.

I’m drawn to people who say what’s important, even if it means stating the obvious.

“Yes,” I said. The backyard might be a work in progress, but the dog’s work was just about finished.

The bath-robed woman had places to go. “Later, Jack."

Jack navigated the obstacles between the fence and the deck without a misstep, and lay back down in the sunshine. That might have been the last time Alice and I saw him, and I’ve never run into the woman again. Her back fence is tall. I can’t see over it. But I like knowing she’s there.

I haven’t blogged for ten days, and I’m having trouble finding the point. Whose red heart is painted on that green back gate?

Alley People 1

2011-04-12T13:19:00.000-07:00

If I’m walking with Alice down one of Bellingham’s less subdued alleys and stop to talk to someone over a back fence, there’s a good chance that my opening gambit—drawn from a very limited supply—will be dogs.

Last week Alice spotted a long-haired cat, patchy brown and black, who’d been rolling in dirt. He put his back up, puffs of dust levitating with the fur, and ran away. Alice dragged me the length of a few back fences, yipping wildly, until the cat turned a corner. She stopped to reconnoiter. No cat.

“Sorry about the noise,” I said to a man standing six feet away. Beyond a waist-high, slatted fence, he pointed an electric pruning blade, still off, toward a tree in the corner of his lot that had once been pollarded. A crop of sticks sprang from each fisted branch.

“My dog gets excited when cats run away," I said. "She wouldn’t hurt them. She just wants to chase them.” The cat might be his, after all.

“I’ve seen you walk by before, out in front.”

“Yep, I think my dog peed on the corner of your lawn once.” On that occasion, not too long ago, he’d been sitting next to the window in a high-backed armchair, crystal vase lamp switched on next to him. He’d watched Alice do her business on his immaculate lawn and shaken his head tolerantly.

A woman had lived in that house, I decided at the time, but she’d been gone a while. That was her tolerance on his face, a way to remember her.

I usually keep these snap judgments to myself although I’m wrong only about a quarter of the time. (Ask me how I know that.) If I share them with my husband, he shakes his head tolerantly too, as if nature is calling me in only a slightly different way than it calls Alice. This leads to harsh words.

“Oh that’s all right,” the man said about the peeing event. He was seventy or so, round-bellied, dressed in a blue work shirt and jeans jacket. “I had a dog, too, a Dachsie. She got cancer.”

“I remember your sign,” I said. A yellow caution sign that said Dachsund Crossing had hung on his front door when we first moved here. When had it disappeared?

“Lost her a year and five months ago today,” he said.

“It’s awful when they die.”

“A guy I know says to me, it’s just a dog. What’s the big deal?”

“He doesn’t get it,” I said. “He won’t get it until he has a dog of his own, and then maybe he still won’t get it.”

The man nodded and glanced at Alice, who was nosing the fence, still hoping, I guess, to spot the cat. “Well, I’ll let you go,” he said. “I got to do something about this tree.”

“What kind of tree is it?”

“No idea, but it’s a pain in the nose.”

Her tree.

“Maybe you need a new dog,” I said.

“First I need to take care of myself.”

I decided not to ask what was wrong. The man waited politely until Alice and I had crossed the street before switching on the pruner.

While we headed toward the park, I thought that it must be less painful for some to grieve the deaths of pets than the loss of people. Others find it impossible to grieve for anyone.

I’ve come to the point where pet death and human death are almost on a par. Grieving comes easier every day.

In Alleys with Alice

2011-04-07T12:47:00.000-07:00

Broadway, Bellingham—Few houses in my neighborhood have driveways. Our house does, but we share it with the house next door. We drive up a short and narrow hill that opens out in front of two detached garages. Backing down is harder.

Most homes around here have garages at the back of their property, approachable only by a rear alley. I love these alleys, but I’d have to walk them even if I didn’t, because my dog, Alice, loves them more. Bellingham calls itself the City of Subdued Excitement, but Alice thinks its alleys rock.

Alice is a nose-to-the-ground dog. Like every other dog, she hunts for other animals’ markings—we call that pee-mail—so she can neutralize it with her own. She likes to eat things off the ground, too. Our vet calls this “dietary indiscretion.” In our neighborhood garbage and recycling trucks pick up in alleys, and there are always things left on the ground that didn’t quite make it from the can to the truck. Some of what draws her is human trash. The rest you don't want to know about. I watch her pretty closely, but once in a while she gobbles something up before I can stop her, and we have to put plain yogurt in her food for a few days, and sometimes medicine, until her digestion calms down.

Then there are the backyard chicken coops and the occasional plastic swimming pool that serves as a duck pond. If Alice doesn’t spot the birds herself, I point them out to her, and she applies her nose to a back fence long enough to make an inspection.

Collies always look like they’re a day or two away from speaking English, but Alice, at least, never quite gets there, so we have to guess what she’s thinking. I wonder if she knows that chicken meat, her favorite thing, comes from animals like the ones she’s staring at. I don’t think so. Otherwise she’d get excited, bark, something.

Cats love alleys, too. The term alley cat implies uncertain parentage, I guess, because with so many cats in alleys, stuff happens. Alice isn’t as polite to cats as she is to chickens, but only if they run away. She yanks me forward and makes high-pitched yipping sounds well after the cat is out of sight. Sometimes this sets the dogs in the backyards we’re strolling past barking, too. I’ll see a curtain move in a back window, an annoyed human face searching for troublemakers.

Some cats don't run, don't even put their backs up. Alice sniffs. The cats study. We’ve run into two or three cats that walk toward Alice with a take no prisoners look on their faces. Alice has a cat of her own, Katie, who isn’t very nice to her. She wants no part of cats with attitude. We walk carefully around them, or turn around and walk the other way.

Dogs, too. Backyard dogs in Bellingham aren’t, generally speaking, watch dogs. Some growl and bark at us, but most come to the fence, whine, and wag their tails. Alice does likewise. On days when I can’t take her to an off-leash park, she gets in a little socializing, the odd chat or two, in nearby alleys.

Sometimes I chat as well, with fellow humans. People are different over back fences than in front yards. . . .

Two of our kids, Alex and Mary, with Alice in a Bellingham park, 2009.

Grab your gear, we got a dead Marine

2011-04-04T19:39:00.000-07:00

I remember opening lines, maybe because they are invitations. Here are some obvious ones:

Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, rich.

From Emma, by Jane Austen

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.

From David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree.

From “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” by William Butler Yeats

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky,

Like a patient etherized upon a table;

From “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” by T. S. Eliot

Here I heard the terrible chaste snorting of hogs trying to re-enter the underearth.

From “The Past” by Galway Kinnell

And I’m not too bad at remembering closing lines. They are usually judgments:

Bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage.

You know what that’s from.

As you for crimes would pardoned be/Let your indulgence set me free.

From Shakespeare’s The Tempest

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

From The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

My heart is moved by all I cannot save/so much has been destroyed/I have to cast my lot with those/who, age after age, perversely/reconstitute the world.

From “Natural Resources,” by Adrienne Rich

She would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.

From “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” by Flannery O’Connor

It’s the middles that are hard to remember, write, live. Only character makes middles work.

While I was ironing this morning, my mnemonic workout (hey, I’m getting old) involved trying to remember the middle of last week’s NCIS.

The beginning of NCIS is always the same. Somebody discovers a body. Titles. McGee, Tony, and Zeva (or some subset) exit the elevator, mid-banter, into their circle of cubicles. Gibbs enters double-quick from upstage or downstage and says, “Grab your gear. We got a dead Marine.” Sometimes it’s a dead sailor.

The ending is almost as uniform: The murderer is identified and dealt with harshly or gently, according to Gibbs’ only slightly fallible judgment.

When a story begins and ends the same way every time, you know you’re watching television.

But what happened in between?

The bad thing about NCIS is that all the episodes are alike, so they get mixed up in my head. The good thing about NCIS is that all the episodes are alike, so I have a formula for reconstructing them. If I can picture that first scene, the discovery of the body (this one featured a deer—I like deer), I can go the rest of the way, at least until Gibbs takes the elevator down to the lab and morgue, where I tend to get foggy.

This particular victim wrote the word “birdsong” in his own blood on a nearby rock. McGee discovers that Operation Birdsong is the name of a soon-to-be-published book. A second body turns up—who was in the process of reading the book. Then a third body, also a reader. At some point the publisher gives up the information that Birdsong is the name (of course) of a highly classified government program. The author is a whistle blower.

I remember now. The murders have nothing to do with Operation Birdsong. It’s a love triangle, the murderer a jealous husband.

How was the murder committed? Forensics is big on TV these days. While I’m extremely fond of Abby and Ducky, I don’t care about the mass spectrometer or the x-rays. Means will always be a memory problem for me. Stabbed, maybe? Were the victims stabbed?

Why do I (along with 20 million other people) bother? Because of Gibbs, Tony, Zeva, McGee, Ducky, and Abby, as two-dimensional as they often are. It’s embarrassing to admit how much I look forward to my weekly dose of all of them.

The middle of David Copperfield? I remember characters--Uriah Heep, ditsy Dora, saintly Agnes, Mr. Micawber, Steerforth.

The middle of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock?” The women who come and go, talking of Michelangelo, the lonely men in shirt-sleeves, the mermaids.

The middle of The Tempest?

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made; 

Those are pearls that were his eyes; 

Nothing of him that doth fade, 

But doth suffer a sea-change 

Into something rich and strange.

But wait--these lines are from near the beginning. Caliban? Shakespeare was terribly unfair to him, and that's what I mostly remember. Actually, I never liked The Tempest much.

The middle of “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”?

Cricket sings, linnet’s wings. One-note characters, but such notes!

The middle is where characters make themselves known, most often by taking action, where the evidence accrues, if you want to think of it that way, where we’re all at work.

El Salvador: Oscar Romero

2011-04-01T17:36:00.000-07:00

An American introvert travels with a group of Christians to a hot country. Tens of thousands were recently killed there by men trained in or by the United States and armed with American weapons.

At the embassy, our introvert asks prepared questions and nods politely at the answers, but is inclined to believe instead what radical priests and Marxist labor leaders tell her about what went on, what’s going on, and what might happen next.

In a village of war survivors, an old woman with a forgiving heart calls the visitors Good Samaritans, and our introvert feels warm inside—until she remembers that the U.S. is wiping its feet with these people’s futures. While that continues, any help that groups like hers can give will count, not for nothing, but for little. She would like to say this to at least one person in the village. She would like to have a conversation about babies or long-horned cows or Dick Cheney, but she’s too busy following rules she doesn’t entirely understand, and has been made too afraid of breaking, to wrestle out a little decipherable Spanish.

Yet she dreams of sharing the shade of huge trees and of attending black-lace funerals, of the devotion to living and nearness to dying that lends an indelible dignity to slapping tortillas and carrying water. She wants to go home, but when she gets there, she wants to go back, alone, and is afraid to. She wants to change, to reconstitute her idea of herself.

* * * * *

On Saturday morning as we’re about to leave COO, Blanca asks Greta and me if she can tell us her story. We know she means her war story, and we say yes. I don’t catch much of it, but Greta fills me in later. Blanca was an adolescent when she returned to her home in the northern mountains to find her big family shot dead, father and mother and siblings. She herself was shot while running away and lived for some days wounded, hiding in brush. Guerillas found her and took her to their camp, where she was given medical attention, and later trained to be a medic. The story is worse than this, of course, but that’s the core of it. In the van, Margaret questions its veracity.

We return to the guesthouse in San Salvador on Saturday afternoon. The next day is Palm Sunday and the twenty-second anniversary of Archbishop Oscar Romero’s 1980 assassination. We worship at the small church where he was killed while celebrating mass, and tour the apartment he lived in across the street. His bloody cassock still hangs in the closet. Later we join a march of about 30,000 to the national cathedral downtown.

Ordained in 1942, Romero remained a conservative Catholic until the mid-seventies. He was opposed to Vatican II and subsequent moves by Latin America clergy to commit the church to a “preferential option for the poor.” He changed his allegiance in the mid-seventies when government forces began what he called “the repression,” massacring villagers and clergy trying to organize. Sometimes campesinos were killed, it is said, for nothing more than possessing a Bible.

Romero’s appointment as Archbishop of San Salvador in 1977 intensified the fears of the privileged, as did the radio broadcast of his homilies and his letter asking President Jimmy Carter to stop military aid and promise non-intervention. He anticipated his assassination but continued preaching along these lines: “Those who . . . would save their lives (that is, those who want to get along, who don’t want commitments, who don’t want problems, who want to stay outside of a situation that demands the involvement of all of us) they will lose their lives. What a terrible thing to have lived quite comfortably, with no suffering . . . quite tranquil, quite settled, with good connections. . . . To what good?”

“If they kill me,” he said, “I will be resurrected in the Salvadoran people.” The war began in earnest after his death.

Director John Duigan’s film “Romero,” made in 1989 and starring Raul Julia, will give you a sense of the love poor Salvadorans felt and continue to feel for this man. (Tom would be sure to tell you that strongman Roberto D’Aubuisson’s men did not gamble for the privilege of shooting Romero. That part, according to Tom, was MADE UP.)

That Sunday, as the march is taking place, Bush II flies in for a total of five hours for CAFTA negotiations with Salvadoran leaders. Either he doesn’t know what day it is or he doesn’t care. The nicer signs posted around the city square call him a killer, and soldiers point guns from rooftops at the crowd below.

We visit Romero’s tomb in the basement of the cathedral. John 12:24 is engraved there on a plaque: “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

* * * * *

In the spring of 2009, an FMLN candidate is elected president of El Salvador.

On March 23 of 2011, on the eve of the thirty-first anniversary of Romero’s death, President Obama lights a candle at Romero’s tomb.

* * * * *

Am I a Christian? I don't know. There’s very little elbow room in that particular train car. The overhead light is unforgiving yet dim enough that some riders can’t see (or won’t look at) their own hands. The night outside is both terrifying and inviting.

Religion--or Christianity, I guess, since that's all I know--thrives on keeping secrets and telling people what to do. As far I can see, the liberatory strain that Romero and others stand for doesn't translate well into North American life. We have more to lose. We're addicted to control of all kinds.

I may not have enough courage to be Romero's kind of Christian. I may have too much fellow-feeling to be the North American kind.

I still read Romero. See The Violence of Love by Romero, Brockman, and Nouwen, Orbis Books, 2004.

Divine Providence Chapel, where Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated.

El Salvador: The Penultimate Post

2011-03-29T12:13:00.001-07:00

While we were in the village I gave up taking notes. I understood very little of the Spanish COO people were speaking, and I had begun to question Margaret and Tom’s translations and comments. I still believe that unscripted conversations might have been possible for me, given more opportunity.

I didn’t take photos in the village, either. Others in our group were snapping away and I didn’t want to ask people to keep on posing in the heat. I have only my foggy memory to lead me through the days we spent in the campo. What surfaces are mainly images, and a couple of unfiltered conversations.

The van didn’t languish while we were in the village. Except during official “time with hosting families,” Margaret and Tom kept us moving.

Arturo accompanied us on these local trips. Arturo was his “war name”; I never learned his real one. He farmed in COO and had served on the directiva, but now he was working with a regional grass-roots group. He is one of the images I brought home—a big, strong and smart man who was also mild-mannered and committed to the slow process of talking with his neighbors.

The van broke down during one of our day trips, and while we were waiting for Faustino to give us a prognosis, Arturo and Tom discussed the war and the peace in El Salvador.

“We never did a better thing than when we attacked the rich,” Arturo said in English. Somewhere along the line he’d learned it, but not, I think, in school. “They were fine with killing us in our villages, but they didn’t want a war on their doorsteps.”

“I don’t believe in violence,” Margaret said. “I’m a pacifist.”

“There’s plenty of violence in the Bible,” said Tom. “All that smiting.”

With Arturo we visited a coffee cooperative, where I saw the deepest poverty of the trip. The 2001 earthquake had destroyed many homes there and made the school unusable. New shelters were slowly going up, and children were out wandering barefoot among the hammers and nails. Tom and Margaret told us that these growers were nonetheless better off than most on privately owned plantations. At least the people here were still working. With help from the IMF, other countries—Vietnam, in particular, I later learned—were growing coffee cheaper and in larger quantities than El Salvador could.

We visited craft and cattle cooperatives, micro-lending operations conducted by women for women with funding from our group and others. One of the union organizers who spoke to us in the capitol said that central San Salvador was “a cemetery of microenterprises.” The operations in the campo appeared to be doing well. In the case of the cattle cooperative, a woman was loaned enough money to buy a calf and taught how to raise it. When she sold it and repaid the loan, she made a small profit and reinvested.

“It’s important to give the money to the women,” Margaret said, “because the men might use it some other way.”

On one of these days we visited a village hit hard by the earthquake. Because it was governed by the right-wing ARENA party, Margaret and Tom prepared us to see it as backward and disunited. And sure enough, when we visited the school, one of the teachers asked Margaret for funding—for earthquake reconstruction, I think. The teacher asked out of the blue, without asking first if she could ask, I guess.

“She shouldn’t have done that,” Tom said afterward.

“I figured that out all by myself, Tom.” I empathized with the woman. Maybe she was an introvert like me, given to blurting things out. Maybe she hadn’t figured out the etiquette because no one had explained it to her.

This village—I think it was this one—was situated in a tiny valley not far from a garbage dump. An enormous tree, a hundred feet high and nearly as wide stood in its center. We spotted the tree from the ridge above before we made out any village buildings. I’m picturing a sycamore, with wide leaves, but maybe that’s because there was a sycamore in the backyard of my childhood home. The village tree still shows up in my dreams. Its shade protects. It’s a tree of life.

We were still driving back to COO one night when dark fell, on a dirt road past a row of houses. One house was lit up like a store, door and window wide open. I caught a glimpse of a casket and a party of people dressed up, some in lace. I remember the body as dressed in lace, too--black lace—although I couldn’t have seen it from the van.

El Salvador: Managing Partnership

2011-03-25T16:45:00.000-07:00

We toured Comunidad Octavio Ortiz the day we arrived—about fifty houses, school and nursery, tiny clinic, community center, and communal fields planted mostly in corn. We walked along the river to see where irrigation had been tried. Sitting on benches outside the community center, we met with the directiva, the board that governed the village.

Everyone had a hug for Margaret. She was godmother to more than one child in the village, and the smaller kids who weren’t in school hid in the bushes hoping for a wave while we talked to their parents.

Then we entertained funding requests.

I appreciated that this process was straightforward. People in the village knew Margaret well and were comfortable describing their needs. I didn’t hear any servility in their voices.

The farmers wanted a motor to pump water out of the river and tubing to deliver it. The directiva could use an office. The clinic would be more useful if it were bigger. Some of the houses needed shoring up after the 2001 earthquake. Not all families had outhouses. The teachers were taking a bus to San Salvador a couple of nights a week to earn credentials. Did they need stipends? What about the youth, a few of whom were bussed miles to the nearest high school? Could we fund scholarships for the national university and rent a house for them in the capitol?

Blanca didn’t come to meet with us, but she’d told Greta and me, in a moment when neither Margaret nor Blanca's family was around, that she’d been diagnosed with cervical cancer. Where could she get treatment, Greta and I wondered. We’d already learned that in El Salvador most cancer victims simply went home and waited to die. Tom suggested a hospital in Cuba. Could we raise the money to send her there?

* * * * *

On one of Margaret’s many trips to El Salvador, she was accompanied by the director of homeless services in Palo Alto, an African-American woman who grew up in the South. The director remarked that she’d never seen such poverty as in our partner community nor such hospitality.

I must have heard Margaret repeat this remark twenty times the week we were in COO. Nine years later, I wonder why she clung to it. When people say the same thing over and over, it’s usually because they don’t think others will believe them. America is a beacon of democracy, or men hate to ask for directions, or rinse and repeat--if these messages didn't provoke doubt, we wouldn’t need to be tutored in them. Once convinced, however, we tend to ignore contradictory evidence—the fact that the U.S. incarcerates a larger percentage of its population than any other country in the world, for example. Or we act in particular ways—we ask for directions so our husbands or boyfriends won’t have to, or buy twice as much shampoo as we need. I’m talking about propaganda here. Someone has a vested interest in our credulity.

COO’s poverty and hospitality seemed incontrovertible. Why did Margaret keep talking about them? Had someone from a previous trip crossed a line, abusing hospitality or customs? That might explain her distrust of my overweight, forty-something, mother-of-three body. Had Blanca or somebody else requested money and then used it improperly, rendering them not precisely poor?

It was vital to Margaret that we saw the people of COO in just one way. That must be why she coached us before every meeting or conversation and then intervened in them anyway, why the words I suggest came out of her mouth all day long,

Tom, on the other hand, scowled most of the time. He sat through meetings, translating as needed, like he was auditioning for bad cop. Something was wrong in his organization’s relationship with ours, or in his with the village, or simply between him and Margaret.

If Margaret and Tom had been more honest from the start, or if I had been more willing to pry and challenge, I might remember my visit to Comunidad Octavio Ortiz with a full heart instead of a stomach ache. Despite my lousy Spanish, despite the heat and the sense that I was taking from poor people what they could not spare, if everything had been a little more transparent, I might have felt some sense of partnership with the people I met there, who were struggling as I was to make a connection.

* * * * *

Toward the end of that first afternoon, we met with the older woman who stood in for the priest at services and did pastoral care—the Delegate of the Word. Her face radiated acceptance, of us, her life, everything. Margaret asked if any of us had questions for her, and I raised my hand.

“What’s your favorite Bible story to teach?” I asked in English.

Disgusted, Tom translated.

“The Good Samaritan,” the woman said. “A stranger helps the man who has been beaten. Like you help us. No one forces you. You just come down here and help. You are our true neighbors.”

In that moment my heart was full.

El Salvador: Blanca's House

2011-03-22T13:50:00.000-07:00

I thought about taking a day off from El Salvador. I start teaching next week after a long break and I could be paging through The Curious Researcher, sixth edition, the words “Includes MLA Guidelines!” (exclamation point mine) on a gold star on the front cover. I could be digging a new vegetable bed or calling our insurance company to find out why my sleep study bill is so enormous. I just finished writing a short story, but I could be starting a new one.

It's better not to kid myself about why I’m hesitating. I don't know yet what I need to say about the village and how we conducted ourselves there, only that I feel a tremendous pressure to say it.

Greta and I stayed with Blanca and Carlos. Both husband and wife had been war combatants, so they qualified for a two-room instead of a one-room house, built of cinder blocks and roofed with tin, as nearly every house in COO was. Like many other families, they’d built an open kitchen by attaching a fiberglass roof to one of the exterior walls. Behind the house was a water pump with a big basin, where household drinking water came from, the long-horned cow drank, dishes and clothes were washed, and everyone bathed, Greta and I with acute circumspection. There was an outhouse as well, which we didn’t use much. We sweated through our clothes all day long. There was no liquid left in our bodies to pee out.

During the war, the FMLN trained Blanca to be a medic. Now she was COO’s health worker, dispensing whatever medicine was available from a closet in the community center, teaching hygiene, delivering babies, helping people die. Because she earned a small salary, she and Carlos didn’t depend entirely on farming or raising animals. They were a little better off than most.

If I were a bigger person, a person who could hold onto the project of reconstituting herself, I wouldn’t say this: when I met Blanca, she was wearing shorts.

Beds on frames were rare in COO—most people slept on palettes on the floor or in hammocks--but Blanca had two twin beds with mosquito nets ready for Greta and me, in the room where the kids slept, farthest from the kitchen. We began by putting the kids out, and we went on that way. Electricity is expensive, Blanca said in Spanish, translated by Greta, then brought in a fan when we went to bed. I think I’ll kill a chicken, she said before dinner the last night, and I can’t tell you how guilty every bite of that chicken made me feel, or how delicious it was.

Greta had to translate just about everything for me except what the kids said. “Don’t pet the dog,” the smallest one told me. “He has fleas.” Loud and clear.

I couldn’t figure out what the dogs were for. Protection, maybe. All the families locked their houses up tight at night, doors and windows, closing in the wood smoke that drifted in all day from the kitchen.

Greta and I offered to do the dishes, and Blanca led us to the basin that surrounded the pump, where we dipped the plates in the water and scrubbed them with tiny pieces of steel wool. I didn’t know whether to use the liquid soap sitting on a plastic table nearby. I’d have to rinse it off in the basin—I couldn’t see a dishpan or bucket—and then the cow, huge and oblivious, would drink the soapy water before it drained out. Greta and I were trying to reason our way through this when Blanca came out to check on us. She took a plate from my hand, poured some soap on it, scrubbed it hard with the steel wool, rinsed it in the basin, and handed it back to me.

Blanca and Carlos’s teenage son, David, played in the village band and looked like a movie star. He slept in the other room with his parents while Greta and I were there. Like his father, he smiled constantly but said very little. We asked him about his plans. “Music,” he said.

On the night we attended church, songbooks were passed out. We sang hymns to the tunes of “The Sounds of Silence” and—I think I’m remembering this right—“The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” No mass was offered because priests rarely made it to COO. One of the older women had studied to be a “Delegate of the Word.” She had a short message for us, which I didn’t understand. The band was finished by then, and David sat down next to me. Several women turned around and glared. Did they think I was coming on to a sixteen-year-old?

“This is what lives in the Lempa,” Blanca told us one afternoon, holding up a dried fish on a line. The fish had two sets of eyes, one on each side of its head. “This is why we can’t drink the water.” I concluded that a little soap didn’t matter much.

We told Margaret about the fish, how much it said about what the people of COO were up against. “If Blanca is telling the truth,” Margaret said, mysteriously.

At least I was clear on the soap thing.

Definition of community, from the center in San Salvador where Octavio Ortiz was killed. "Todos" means all the people.

El Salvador: Presidentialism

2011-03-18T16:09:00.000-07:00

Greta and I roomed together at the guesthouse and had a chance to chat every evening, but we were usually too tired to talk over what we’d seen and heard. Although I spent everyday with Will, Pete and Richard, apart from the plane trip down with Will I didn’t carry on a whole conversation with any of them over the ten days of the trip. Tom and Margaret were strong personalities. When we weren’t at the meetings they arranged for us, they talked and we listened.

Tom, young as he was, had a Salvadoran wife and two daughters. He wasn’t just passing through. He knew a lot about conditions, especially out in the country, and he believed he knew why these conditions prevailed. He was angry. Why had all those campesinos fought and died during the war? So Tom and people like him could cart around visitors from the U.S. and Europe, hoping they’d donate to a few local projects? Twelve thousand children still died every year of the gastrointestinal results of having no potable water. The Salvadoran government wasn’t going to help, and the U.S. would help only as long as Salvadorans went along with privatization, structural adjustments, free trade. These changes hurt, he and many others were convinced, more than they helped. The rich were committed to one thing only—getting richer. People like us made some difference, but not nearly enough.

Margaret’s true gifts didn’t surface until she was among her friends in COO. In the city she mainly gave instructions. She began most sentences with “I suggest”: I suggest we order pupusas and horchata for lunch. I suggest you ask the man from the health workers’ union about the firing of elected leaders by factory owners. She deferred to Tom when it came to politics, maybe because he argued with her when he thought she was wrong. Anyway, politics weren’t her thing. Her favorite Bible verse was Romans 8:28: “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.”

“I’ve been bringing people down here for a long time,” Margaret said, “and as long as there are people who want to come, I’ll keep bringing them.”

Margaret was about faith. Tom was about politics.

Here’s the big picture I was putting together as the trip progressed. The infamous “Fourteen Families,” who until the war had owned nearly all the land and planted it in cash crops like coffee, lost property in the land redistributions. Wealth had concentrated even further: now five or six families owned the banks, the insurance companies, importing, everything. Farming wasn’t important anymore because the U.S. had plenty of food suppliers. What U.S. corporations wanted was cheap labor and large consumer markets. The FMLN had managed to elect members to some local positions, but national Salvadoran politics were “presidentialist.” And due to corrupt elections, presidents had for decades been exclusively right wing. All those subsistence farmers in the campo would be better off, so went the free-trade argument, working at factories that foreign investors would build if conditions were right—that is, for example, if unions were kept out, one way or another.

That's all politics, isn't it? Wasn't the Jesuit Miguel Ventura also all about politics? I was having trouble seeing where faith came into this.

On day number three we drove east and south, the temperature rising as steadily as the humidity, and stayed the night at a leadership center run by nuns. The next morning we drove further, on roads that were paved until we came within a few miles of COO. Tom pointed out some things as we got closer—a fenced in soccer field, USAID stamps on houses and pumps—but Margaret was quiet. When we finally reached the village, she said only, “There they are. The teachers and kids came out to meet us. Everybody else is working."

El Salvador: The Jesuit and My Shorts

2011-03-15T13:06:00.000-07:00

Margaret was offended by my shorts. I sometimes wore them to evening church meetings in Palo Alto during the summer. After feeding kids and doing the dishes, it was hard enough to make a 7:00 meeting without also having to change my clothes. They were decent shorts with long inseams, showing no more leg than a jeans skirt but way more comfortable.

She started warning me as soon as I signed up for the trip that I couldn’t wear shorts in the churches.

“I know that,” I said. “I’ve been to Italy.”

“And not in COO either. The women wear dresses and skirts there, period.”

“No problem,” I said.

But I packed my shorts anyway, for San Salvador, for cooling off at the guesthouse. I’d worn them the night before our visit to the ambassador, sitting in the courtyard with Tom while he downed beers and held forth. At the dinner table Margaret said, “You know you can’t wear shorts in the village, right?”

* * *

After talking at cross purposes with the ambassador, we spent lunchtime discussing whether USAID pacified the population at the same time as it helped, and which was its primary mission. I discussed it, that is. Stuff was occurring to me, and I blurted it out.

Tom shrugged and ordered a beer.

Richard said, “Ask the people with roofs over their heads whether they care what the primary mission is.”

No one else said a thing.

I wished I could trade my skirt for my shorts. That way I’d be comfortable, at least. Introverts can be mighty petty.

* * *

That same day we visited the offices of the Segundo Montes Foundation. During the war, its director, Spanish Jesuit priest Miguel Ventura, had served in Morazon, a northern region where there was heavy fighting. I was looking forward to hearing him speak because he was only once removed from the six Jesuits murdered at the Universidad Centroamericana in 1989, and they in turn were once removed from Archbishop Oscar Romero himself, whose 1980 martyrdom had turned a peasant rebellion into a civil war. I’d been reading excerpts from his homilies daily in the months before I made this trip: “A church that doesn't provoke any crises, a gospel that doesn't unsettle, a word of God that doesn't get under anyone's skin, what gospel is that?”

Ventura was a small man, gray-skinned, with an academic’s English vocabulary.

“Failure to practice analysis of reality, to interpret it from a faith perspective, to identify a historic project, leads to launching projects that are ill conceived . . . Our foundation conducts schools for leaders, for young people . . . we teach processes that form the critical consciousness, so that projects rise up from the people themselves.”

El Salvador’s media, he said, amount to “ideological bombardment.” It “washes away historical memory.” The arrival of evangelical churches from the U.S. after the war was no accident, but intended to limit the influence of the progressive Catholic Church. The “sectas evangelicas transfer a conformist attitude.” They teach people “not to involve themselves in change but to leave it to God. All that is required is accepting Jesus.”

Ventura’s foundation channeled money from NGOs and churches to poor communities, but he was quietly critical of this process. Often Salvadoran groups sought international funds (as explicitly encouraged by the Peace Accords) and applied them according to standards that didn’t originate with the people.

What should we do? Margaret asked.

“The historical process requires reconstituting our idea of ourselves. You need to ask yourselves what is the historic project of the citizens of the United States.”

I climbed back into the van with Ventura’s voice echoing in my head: “The Left all over Latin America lacks a unifying vision. It personalizes ideas and conflicts.” When we got back to the guesthouse I packed my shorts away and didn’t get them out again.

Youth meeting in the community center where Octavio Ortiz was killed.

photo by me

Living in the End Times

2011-03-13T15:00:00.000-07:00

I’m not talking about shaking hands with the beast with seven heads or airmailing red calves to Jerusalem or sending Kirk Cameron on a mission to sniff out the Antichrist. When I say we’re living in the end times, I’m referring to what everyone who can stand to watch CNN for more than a few seconds knows all too well. California and Russia burn, New Orleans and Pakistan and Australia flood, summer cruises through what used to be the polar ice caps will soon be bookable through your travel agent. There are too many people living on this planet, and some of us have been living too well.

Remember when Dick Cheney said that the American way of life was not negotiable? I’m pretty sure he meant for the Cheney family. Here and abroad, the rich are bearing down on the poor, to make sure that what’s left stays in the right hands. And the poor are catching on.

When I think about this stuff, the muscles in my neck freeze up. And I’ve been thinking about it for years. Maybe you read James Kunstler’s blog on Monday mornings, too, and every word that Bill McKibben uttereth. Maybe Clive Hamilton is your go-to guy, as he is mine, and Michael Ruppert seems crazy only some of the time. Maybe, like me, you recently reread Albert Camus’ The Plague and sit down every day, as Carolyn Baker advises in Navigating the Coming Chaos, to let your grief wash over you. Maybe, in spite of everything, you can’t accept that your kids’ lives will be hard, that all the inoculations, tuition payments, library books, cupcakes, and musical instruments you provided won’t keep them safe on a used-up planet.

Today I’m holding on to those who are still alive under the rubble in Sendai and environs, or on some half-navigable road trying to get out of the range—whatever that might be—of radioactive fallout. I hope they have some sense of not being alone, of being part of one suffering world. I hope my compassion and yours reaches them. I hope they and their children survive.

El Salvador: The Ambassador

2011-03-11T16:50:00.000-08:00

Tom, who worked for the NGO that arranged our trip, was inclined to lecture. “Feeling guilty is a waste of time,” he said when one of us brought up how many of our tax dollars—more than a million a day at the height of the war—had gone to arming murderers. “Concentrate on learning what these people need now. Lots of Salvadorans say they’re worse off now than before the war.”

So far we hadn’t encountered many Salvadorans. But people Margaret knew well waited for us in the country, in Comunidad Octavio Ortiz. Meanwhile . . . to the embassy!

Apparently it’s possible, while touring a foreign country, to visit the U.S. ambassador and grill him or her about U.S. policy—as long as you make an appointment well in advance. The seven of us dressed up and climbed into the van—60-something Margaret and 20-something Tom, our leaders, Greta and Richard, our married couple, Will (from the plane) and Peter, both repeat visitors, and I.

Richard was already worried that we wouldn’t make it from the guesthouse to the embassy by 9:30. Yet while the rest of us were staring out the windows of the van—I was fast becoming obsessed by the number of starving dogs running wild through the neighborhoods—Tom asked our new driver, Faustino, to take a quick detour through a part of town where the rich lived.

San Salvador was a dense city of mostly shabby one- and two-story dwellings. On our detour Tom pointed to red-tile and stucco McMansions on acres of hilly ground enclosed by high walls, with armed guards pacing in front. “Quite a difference, right?” he said, looking back at us from the front passenger seat.

Richard was lost in reviewing the list of questions we’d prepared for the ambassador. When the van slowed to gawking speed, he looked up and said, “Are we even on the way to the embassy?” He checked his watch. “We’re going to be late!”

“Take it easy,” Tom said. “We’ll get there.”

We arrived at 9:32. Richard jumped out of the van and loped to the front gate. Turning toward Margaret and me, Tom mimicked Richard: “Are we even on the way to the embassy? Like, fuck, Richard, shut up.”

Margaret stared at her feet.

After opening our bags and showing our passports, we met Ambassador Rose Likins in an empty room. She sat in a big, comfortable chair; Mark Silverman, country director of USAID (the Agency for International Development) and a former Peace Corps volunteer, sat next to her; and we petitioners occupied folding chairs laid out opposite them in a semicircle.

We worked our way down the list of questions Tom had helped us formulate, asking about factories built by foreign investors where trade unionists were threatened, the police force’s record of rape, the absence of potable water and basic health care in the campo.

Likins, about 40 then, a practiced smile on her face, told us what “an exceptionally challenging year” it had been. Two earthquakes, affecting two-thirds of the department of Usulatan (where COO was), had left 25% of the population there homeless. The U.S. had provided a great deal of money for both temporary and permanent housing. (She nodded at Silverman.) Like the new governments in Honduras and Nicaragua, El Salvador was finding “constructive ways of looking at things rather than dwelling on the past.”

We pressed Likins about CAFTA, the pending extension of NAFTA to Central America. The Peace Accords had promised to extend participation in decision-making to popular organizations, but this wasn’t happening. While CAFTA was being fast-tracked through the U.S. Congress, many Salvadorans opposed it.

“The Peace Accords were never meant to address economic issues, only to establish democratic processes,” Likins said. “Trade agreements are government to government.”

So it went. Our little group was talking about providing for a country we’d helped to level. (Those earthquakes had nothing on us.) Ambassador Likins and hard-working Silverman were talking about making the country fit for investment.

The educational value of spending a morning being humored by one's ambassador—that can’t be overestimated.

El Salvador: The Van

2011-03-08T17:47:00.000-08:00

The guest house in San Salvador was fine. No hot water and only intermittent electricity didn’t affect us much because we were hardly ever there, being out and about in the VAN on our important business. When we came home in the evening, we cooled off in the courtyard and ate dinner together at a long table in the main room, talking health care and labor unions and micro-lending, matters few of us knew anything about before the trip. We discussed the continuing political power of the moneyed few and whether the FMLN would ever win a national election.

The FMLN, or Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, was the umbrella group for the armed opposition during the war. After the peace accords in 1992 it was reconstituted as a political party. The people of our “partner” community—I’ll get around eventually to explaining why I put that word in quotation marks—were all FMLN members, now settled on land granted them by the government as former combatants, really terrible land on the Lempa River near the Pacific Coast, in the hottest part of the country, where the soil was salinized and polluted from cotton production. We, Margaret's little band, tended to see Salvadoran life through FMLN eyes.

The other thing you need to know about El Salvador, if you don't already, is that many Roman Catholic clergy died there before and during the war. Priests and nuns who supported the poor, which was just about everybody in El Salvador, were gunned down by the armed forces, police or paramilitary groups with no compunction or accountability, in the same way that 60,000 or so peasants were murdered between the late seventies and early nineties. One of the clergy who died was Padre Octavio Ortiz, shot in 1979 while leading a retreat for youth. Our partner community, La Canoa, had renamed itself Comunidad Octavio Ortiz.

In this subtropical city, our VAN was black. Its seats, salvaged rather than original, were also black, and plastic. They sucked sweat from the backs of my thighs and kindly held it in pools, so I could sit in it. Here’s a picture out one of the van's windows, of the U.S. embassy, a bunker of a place. It's smaller than our embassy in Iraq, whose footprint is said to equal Vatican City’s, but I imagine that both compounds broadcast the same you’d-better-have-an-appointment message.

Margaret and Tom, our in-country guide, had set up meetings for us, lots and lots of meetings. In the next two days, courtesy of the van and van driver, we attended the church where Ortiz officiated, visited the community center where he died, toured a hospital, talked with hospital workers, and met with FMLN organizers, U.S. Ambassador Rose Likins, the director of USAID in El Salvador, textile union labor leaders, and a Jesuit who shared his analysis of the current situation. I hope this explains why I took so many notes.

El Salvador: The Red Guitar

2011-03-04T17:38:00.000-08:00

Will and I flew together from San Francisco to Houston, then on to San Salvador, the others having gone south early to take in-country Spanish lessons or . . . something. I’ve forgotten now.

Margaret had been taking groups to El Salvador at least once a year since before the war ended in 1992. She gave us each a binder that included some Salvadoran history, many facts about how the country was faring after the peace accords--a sort of left-wing CIA Fact Book--and her own words to the wise.
I still have the binder. The first two pages list things to bring along and general warnings. Mixed messages abound: “The sewage system [at the guest house in the capitol] is terrible. PUT ALL TOILET PAPER IN WASTE BASKET NEXT TO TOILET. If you forget and put paper in the toilet, fish it out and put in waste basket. . . . RELAX, be flexible and enjoy! It’s a great time to grow in patience and understanding and to be inspired by many Salvadorans.”

At the Continental counter in San Francisco, Will and I, despite our binders, failed the first test.

We each had a carry-on bag and, between us, three items to check for Margaret—a suitcase of books for the school in the village, another suitcase of over-the-counter medicines for the clinic, and a red electric guitar for the village band. Margaret was proud of having scored this guitar as a donation, and I knew she was looking forward to presenting it to the kids in the band.

Continental Airlines, however, would allow us to check only one item each. Margaret had said in no uncertain terms that we were not to pay any shipping charges: “Not a good use of money."

Will and I stared at each other for a few seconds, then handed over the books and medicine. I carried the red guitar to airport storage, where it would stay, incurring charges, until someone from my church picked it up.

In the Houston airport, while Will wandered off, I sat in the food court and watched a group of twenty or thirty people walk by, mixed ages, all white, wearing matching blue T-shirts with a Bible verse on the back—"Go therefore and make disciples of all nations" (Matthew 28:19). On my way to the gate I saw two similar groups, one flying to Quito, the other to Guatemala City. It dawned on me that we weren't the only church people traveling south, and I never feel more uncomfortable than as part of a crowd I didn't mean to join. At least we weren’t out to convert anybody. We were going to El Salvador to be converted ourselves--changed, we called it.

It's a long way from Houston to San Salvador. Will and I had plenty of time to get to know each other. We were both from Sacramento, both in our mid-forties, and . . . that was about all, besides this trip, that we had in common. I was married, a Presbyterian, a part-time English instructor at a community college, a very part-time writer, and the mother of three teenagers. Will was single, a Catholic, a lawyer who'd quit his job at a big firm and now practiced immigration law, on behalf of immigrants.

Uniformed men carrying automatic rifles stood with their backs to every pillar and corner in the San Salvador airport. After we got through customs and claimed Margaret's suitcases, we stepped outside to look for Alejandro--Will knew him--who was picking us up in a van.

It was about 7:00, dusk fading to dark, and the place was hopping. Pickups made multiple stops in the arrivals circle, more and more people climbing into the back.

"They load up their pickups here until people are practically falling out. I don't like it. Somebody's going to get hurt." He pointed at a black van. "There's Alejandro." As we loaded our bags behind the van's back seat, Will said, "That was the lawyer talking back there."

"What about all the machine guns?" I said. "Are you okay with those?"

"I don't like those either, but we have those at home."

Six months after 9/11, armed, blank-faced men had adorned Houston and San Francisco airports, but not this many. And these didn't look quite as blank as ours, although I could have imagined the hostility I saw on their faces.

The air was cloudy with exhaust, but it wasn't as hot as I'd expected. Along the airport road, where so many bodies had been dumped during the war, abandoned vehicles blazed.

Alejandro delivered us to the guest house Margaret always used, and she was there to meet us. Hugs all around.

"Excuse me, but where is the guitar? Is it still in the van? You didn't leave it at the airport!"

Will and I told our story.

"I don't care if the rules have changed," Margaret said. "If I'd been there, I would have made them check that guitar."

Nicaraguan poet Ernest Cardenal's version of Psalm 5, painted on a wall in San Salvador:

photo by me

Ten Days in El Salvador, a Long Time Ago

2011-03-01T15:07:00.001-08:00

I’ve been all over the place in my first month of blogging, but I think I’ll stay put for a few posts now, in the Central America of nine years ago. I want to tell you about a trip I took once to El Salvador.

I run into people occasionally who visited El Salvador during the civil war, or, as I did, in the years after the peace accords. They all get a glazed look in their eyes. One former priest said, “There’s a reason why it’s called El Salvador,” which means the Savior. “It saved my life.” Others, maybe those of us who didn’t stay very long, say something along these lines: It was a hard trip, but when I got home, first I wanted to throw out everything I owned, and then I wanted to go straight back.

I’ve just finished reading Deb Olin Unferth’s new book, Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War, about traveling and working in Central America in the late eighties. She writes about the aftermath of her trip, too, how she kept going back to rediscover something she couldn’t name and in the end couldn’t locate. It’s a good book, fast and light. I’ll try to do it justice in my review next week on CheekTeeth, the blog of Trachodon magazine.

Let me say first that I was in El Salvador for ten days in March 2002—not exactly a Peace Corps stint, and 50 weeks short of Unferth’s year. Furthermore, I’ve never been back, not in the flesh. While there I visited only three places--the capitol, San Salvador; Communidad Octavio Ortiz, the village the nonprofit I was traveling with “partnered”; and one spot in between, an educational facility run by nuns for local organizers and people like me—visitors trying hard not to feel like tourists.

I should tell you as well that until this trip I had never been to a developing nation, or a tropical one (except Hawaii), or any country that murdered its own people in huge numbers (not to be confused with countries like the U.S., who murder mainly foreigners).

I traveled with a few nice people from the Palo Alto area who were interested in solidarity work for reasons of faith. I haven’t written more than a couple hundred thousand pages about it yet, but I used to be a Christian, of the left-wing variety. My trip to El Salvador trip both deepened my aspirations and planted the seeds of my defection. That sounds a little melodramatic, doesn’t it? I’ll try to think fast and light.

We had a leader—I’ll call her Margaret. And an in-county liaison—I’ll call him Tom—from a nonprofit based in D.C. that set up trips like ours. I knew Margaret from my church at home. Tom I’d met only briefly, also at home, during a trip-planning meeting. The rest of us, we students, numbered five, but two of us, Will and Peter, were making return trips. That left three virgins—Greta and Richard, a married couple who both spoke fluent Spanish and had traveled widely, and me. I did okay if I could stay in the present tense, and get some time alone every day--which turned out to be impossible.

Stay tuned for the first episode, The Red Guitar: Will and I flew together from San Francisco to Houston, then on to San Salvador, the others having gone south early to take in-country Spanish lessons or . . . well, I can’t remember what they were all doing. In any case, Will and I were on our own, and we failed our first test . . .

Addendum 3/3: This post was first titled "Two Weeks in El Salvador," but today I located the two yellows pads I filled with notes while I was there. (Not to worry. I'm going to use about .001% of those notes here.) I found that my trip lasted only ten days. I guess it felt a little like the last ten days of a pregnancy.

Flannery O'Connor at home

2011-02-25T16:20:00.000-08:00

It's cold in Bellingham, 20 degrees in mid-afternoon, and the downtown library, where I'm writing this, is overheated. That's the sum of my complaints, yet it's one of those days when everything seems wrong, a good day to remember Flannery O'Connor, who carried on when very little was right.

Last summer I attended an Image Magazine seminar taught by Bret Lott in Charleston, South Carolina. Afterward, my husband and I travelled to Savannah, Georgia, where we visited, among other places, the house Flannery O'Connor lived in as a child. On Lafayette Square, the house is modest but solidly middle-class, grander than the prospects of Edward O'Connor, Mary's Irish, salesman father, would have suggested, provided for them by an aunt. It satisfied O'Connor's mother, Regina Cline, for a while.

O'Connor's bedroom in Savannah

While Mary Flannery, as she was called then, certainly invited friends over, the twin beds in her bedroom are a little misleading, suggesting a kind of slumber-party life that she did not have. Her mother was particular about whom MF befriended, and MF herself was shy. She was more likely to be writing in the margins of her books, or drawing, or in the backyard teaching her pet chicken to walk backwards (a feat that was filmed and shown in pre-movie newsreels in 1932) than socializing. She attended the not-so-modest church across the street, where she preferred the adult to the children's services, and the parochial school next door to the church. She also spent a fair amount of time parting the curtains at the window that looked out on Lafayette Square, taking in the movement and talk outside--although this last has the ring of legend.

The church across the street: the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist.

Regina pushed for a move to Atlanta, but MF wasn't happy in school there, and her father fell sick with what turned out to be lupus, the disease MF herself would later contract. Regina cared for Edward in the Cline family home in Milledgeville, about two hours inland from Savannah, until his death in 1941, when MF was 15. MF attended college in Milledgeville, then graduate school in Iowa City, where she first enrolled as a journalism student, but soon switched to the new MFA program, the first one in the U.S.

O'Connor found Iowa City, crowded in 1945 with returning veterans, a little "blank."* After graduating, she spent time at the Yaddo writer's colony and in the home of Robert and Sally Fitzgerald, The blankness of Iowa City gave way to fellowship with other writers, yet she wrote in 1948 that "there is no clearcut road for [the young writer] to travel on. He must chop a path in the wilderness of his own soul; a disheartening process; lifelong and lonesome."* Before 1951, when she too was diagnosed with lupus and resigned herself to returning to Georgia to be cared for by her mother, she had written the novel Wise Blood and some of the short stories that would make her reputation. She managed to live away from Regina for only six years.

Regina had inherited a dairy farm from an uncle. When Mary Flannery, now just Flannery, took up residence there, she mysteriously named it Andalusia.

Andalusia's farmhouse

The farmhouse is unoccupied now. We found a tiny sign marking a left turn about two miles from central Milledgeville, out a road lined with strip malls. A foundation is fixing what's broken, returning the farmhouse, the hired man's house, the barns, the pump house, the grounds to the way they looked when Flannery lived there. When Warren and I visited, four peacocks (maybe some were peahens) lived inside a pen behind the house. I don't know if anyone ever let them out, as Flannery did hers, taking them for strolls on the grounds, walking with the help of arm braces. The braces stand upright in the bedroom where she spent much of the rest of her life, 13 years, dying at 39. During that time she wrote more stories, collected in Everything That Rises Must Converge, and the novel The Violent Bear It Away.

Flannery's room at Andalusia

I'm sorry you can't see more of the bed. It's a twin again, but with no partner.

Reading O'Connor's fiction gives me no pleasure. Her characters suffer beyond reason. The grandmother in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," that old bat, is a manipulator and a narcissist, but should she really end up dead, and responsible for the deaths of her whole family? I tremble, reading O'Connor's stories--surely what she intended. I also see where they came from.

*See Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor, by Brad Gooch. New York: Back Bay Books, 2009.

Color photos by Warren Miller.

Inoculation Accidents

2011-02-22T16:30:00.000-08:00

I stood beside my friend Barbara while she gave birth to Annie, her second child. Barbara’s family lived around the corner from mine, and because she and I were such good friends, I saw Annie almost every day when she was little. I dragged a chair next to the stove so she could watch me stir the playdough. I set a place for her at every birthday table.

Annie was the caboose, six years younger than my youngest, Mary. Unlike her older brother, Joe, whose food preferences showed up on my grocery list, Annie found her second home with another family in the neighborhood. When she was twelve or so, my husband and I moved away from Palo Alto, the nesting culs-de-sac that were so child-friendly, and I lost track of Annie-time for real. It was a shock, therefore, to learn that Annie has (appallingly) grown old enough to drive, and not only that, last week she passed her driver’s test.

I have a lot invested in this kid, so here's what I hope: I hope she has an inoculation accident.

Just as pathologists introduce substances into our bodies that boost our immunity to certain diseases—and sometimes those substances are low, weakened doses of the disease itself—my teenagers were lucky enough, armed with new licenses, to run into parked cars, back into trees, get bumped forward when they appeared to be making a left turn but at the last second changed their minds. All these were excellent accidents for kids just hitting the streets. Nobody got hurt, and they had to hear the horrible crunch of metal against metal, a sound you don’t forget. They had to leave a note, tell us what happened, call the insurance company and in some cases the police to report the accident, negotiate costs, renegotiate driving privileges, all of which made enough of an impression that next time—as far as I know, none of the three of them has again been involved in an accident they caused.

It’s risky to hope for any kind of accident. I’ve been thinking all day about how risky. I worry about my own kids plenty--skittishness and introversion must go together--but in terms of making decisions on the ground, my husband has always been the more cautious parent. I’m thinking of the time I let the kids scale a wet, rocky wall next to a waterfall—until Warren made it down the trail and removed them, one at a time, to the other side of the creek. I’m remembering the time he hiked at top speed across the Golden Gate Bridge, with a dads-and-daughters group from the Y, keeping Mary on his shoulders all the way. I would have been satisfied to hold her hand. I would have stopped halfway to let her watch the sailboats.

You have to let things happen, send kids to school when a virus might be going around, let them swim in public pools, obey the three-second rule when they drop their goldfish on the kitchen floor. You have to—don’t you?

Last summer, the one kid-like being I’m still responsible for, my beautiful smooth collie, Alice, got hit by a car on the border of Broadway Park in Bellingham. She was chasing squirrels. Broadway Park is not an off-leash facility, but the whole neighborhood, except my husband, lets their dogs run free there. Warren drove Alice to the vet, while I nearly hyperventilated in the passenger seat.

Alice is fine now, and she minds better. So was that an inoculation accident? If so, it was a painful one, for everyone concerned.

So, Annie, I don’t know. Maybe you should be careful from the very start, on every turn, in every parking lot, on every on- and off-ramp. Maybe you should realize that some of us don’t know what we’re talking about.

Saying "Panties" on Television

2011-02-18T17:22:00.000-08:00

Thursday, Feb. 17, Bellingham YMCA. While I was in line at the drinking fountain, a man approached me, holding out his hand. “My name’s Frank.”

He was wearing a flannel shirt over pastel tie-dye, so I figured he must be nice. “I’m Jo Ann.”

“Do you work here?” His eyes were brighter, maybe, than they should be.

I wore my Y clothes—my old orange Bookshop Santa Cruz T-shirt and sweatpants. “No,” I said, “I just work out here.”

Frank had thin white hair, lifted by static electricity from his forehead and cheeks. The tail of his belt traveled so far beyond the buckle that I couldn’t see the end, and his khakis were a couple of sizes too big. “That’s what I meant,” he said. “I work out here, too. Are you in school?”

Frank didn’t appear to be blind. He couldn’t be suggesting that I looked so young I ought to be in school. “No, I’m a little old for school. I’m 57.”

“Oh!” he said. “I’m still working on my vet degree.” He moved down the line of people waiting for a drink. “My name’s Frank,” he said, holding out his hand to whoever was behind me.

I drank some water, grabbed my book from its cubbyhole, and headed for the treadmill, where at first I didn’t read a word.

I wasn’t worried about Frank. I didn’t know whether he was older or younger than I was, but either way I was pretty sure I hadn’t hurt his feelings. He’d made an announcement—he was going to be a vet—and whether he still had time to become a vet, or was currently in vet school, or was well enough to be thinking about doing much at all seemed to have no bearing on that announcement, just as my remark did not.

What was ridiculous about what I’d said, though, was that I’d been a student myself as recently as 2009. I no more believed there was an age limit on learning than on staring at the moon.

On Tuesday night, I’d read a poem in front of a TV camera for a spot that would run between programs on a local channel. I was one of several people doing this, but we taped our spots separately, and they would run one at a time. The people who did the scheduling, set-up, and filming—and my husband, who came along—were all encouraging and kind, but I was full of dread. I read my poem, “How to Stay,” with just one thing in mind—not rushing through it. But in trying not to read it too fast, I made it sound funereal, and the expression on my face in the first take suggested that the funeral was my own.

In the second take, my reading was livelier, maybe too lively, but we couldn’t use that one because I’d failed to stare into the camera long enough after the last line for what the director called the “fade out.” The third time around, I thought I’d delivered the poem pretty well, about as well as I could. When I viewed the tape, I saw that I had indeed read these lines from “How to Stay” in a celebratory spirit:

Spin the clothesline like a tetherball.
Hang your panties above the fence line.
Let the birds have the strawberries
and the squirrels
the one best bite
of every plum.
Bathe the cats in rosewater.
Line the drawers with mint . . .

But now I saw what I’d missed before, what I must have been dreading all along. I looked old, really old, older than 57, certainly too old to utter the word panties on television.

While on the treadmill, I realized that in saying to Frank, “I’m a little old for school,” I was trying to make an announcement of my own, loud enough so I’d really hear it—that some doors aren’t open anymore, that there are some things I’ll never do, some graces I’ll never recover. Frank didn’t pay any attention to what I said. And you shouldn’t, either. But I have to.

Added March 2: If you have the stomach for it, you can watch this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38QIdjnql90

William Vollman among the Homeless

2011-02-15T16:31:00.000-08:00

View Larger Map

I didn’t know that celebrated author William Vollman lived in Sacramento, California—about three miles from the schools I attended, the two houses I grew up in, and my parents’ graves—until I read his article in the March Harper’s, “Homeless in Sacramento: Welcome to the New Tent Cities.” It goes some way toward revealing the quality of life enjoyed by people of whom, as a bookish kid, the well-watched youngest child of older parents, I remained steadfastly unaware.

Vollman lives in Alkali Flat, an elite neighborhood in the nineteenth century, in “redevelopment” since the 1970s, and claimed now by urban garden projects, artists’ collectives, business and government offices, the down and out, and the organizations that serve them. The confluence of the Sacramento River (flowing south on the map above) and the American (flowing west) isn’t far away, and the banks of both rivers, according to Vollman, sheltered the homeless of the Great Depression, as they do the homeless of today. The first of several photographs accompanying Vollman’s article shows a section of the Jibboom Street Bridge ("A" on the map), so familiar a sight that in an instant I was riding on the Sacramento in the back of my friend Sylvia’s motorboat on a hot day in 1970.

Vollman, author of about twenty books (how many depends on how you count his multi-volume works), attributes his involvement with Sacramento’s homeless to the accident of having acquired a parking lot along with the old building he lives in, the exterior of which “cultivates an abandoned look.” Because he doesn’t drive, Vollman parks no vehicles of his own on this “giant rectangle of worn asphalt.” He rented parking spaces to commuters and a local body shop—until homeless people began to show up. The smell of human excrement and unwashed bodies bothers him, and fear of burglary keeps him from inviting the homeless into his house, but he lets his guests stay, some for months at a time. “Who should take care of people in need? . . . While you and I are disagreeing in good faith, what’s happening to the woman the police carried off from my parking lot in a squad car who now has returned to spend the night in a wet blanket . . . because she can’t find a better place?”

When civil charges are brought against Vollman—creating a public nuisance and failure to landscape—he meets advocates for Safe Ground, a “shelter” that moves with the homeless as they are evicted from one location after another. Safe Ground provides clean sleeping bags, tents, a place to stow belongings for short periods of time, and rules that prevent theft and violence within camps, enforced by elected elders. Vollman begins spending occasional nights among Safe Grounders, on the American River, at a Lutheran Church, under the 12th Street Bridge. He recounts some of the stories they tell, changing the tellers’ names.

Vollman is a big-deal writer, a category in which I place people, usually men, who write extremely long, unnecessarily difficult books, most of which I start but don’t finish, like Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, and—don’t string me up—James Joyce. But in this article at least, Vollman all but disappears. We hear the uninterpreted voices of the people he talks to and overhears. Whether we come to care for them or not depends on us, not on Vollman’s presentation. Read the article to hear those voices, not because you grew up watching the American River flow into the Sacramento, or because you are an introvert inspired by other introverts who walk out into the world.

Bellingham, or Where I Moved To

2011-02-11T17:32:00.000-08:00

Zuanich Point Park, on Bellingham Bay. Photo by Warren Miller.

I lived in Palo Alto, California for a total of 32 years, with short intermissions in Berkeley and Sacramento. Around here, that’s what people want to know: where I’m from and how I happened to come to Bellingham, twenty miles shy of Canada on the coast of Washington State. The tone of these questions is not always friendly. Natives would prefer, I think, that Bellingham were an island in a nameless sea, like Never Never Land, rather than visible on maps, certainly not maps that Californians are allowed to consult. I regret to say there’s a good reason for that.

Housing used to be affordable here, until Californians started cashing out their equities and moving north, driving prices up for all. Oregon and Washington residents have never been enthusiastic about visitors from the overpopulated south. “Welcome Californians!” says the occasional billboard. “Enjoy yourselves, then go home.” And they become less enthusiastic with every passing year. A new condo complex goes up in Bellingham on what used to be forested land, and I overhear “Californians!” at the nearest coffee house.

Bellingham, like Palo Alto, sits on a bay, but our new, 100-year-old house is 100 feet above sea level instead of seven, as our house in Palo Alto was. We can’t see the water or the closest of the San Juan Islands from our windows—views cost money here as everywhere—but if we walk a couple of blocks, blue pops over the horizon. Coastal winters are long but not harsh, and summers are glorious. Mount Baker, visible out our back windows, is snow-capped year round.

On our walks, my dog Alice plants herself in front of houses—lots of them—with backyard chicken coops. I can hear the freight train down at the docks whistle late at night. The middle school a few blocks away, which caught on fire last year and is being rebuilt, still bears the motto, Waste Not Thy Hour. The owner of our independent bookstore chartered a bus to Gary Snyder’s reading in Seattle last year and poured wine for the passengers all the way home. (I can tell you that he didn’t spill a drop.) My writing group meets in the Unitarian Church. There’s a drop box at the grocery store for public library books. We can get anything we really need on foot or by bus. Bellingham is a real town. That's one answer to the question, why Bellingham?

When people ask me where I'm from, I disclose my state of origin in a stage whisper. Sometimes that’s enough to disarm. To the question, why Bellingham, I tell them that my brother moved here more than twenty years ago, and so now has my sister. We’re a family reuniting.

The man at the Department of Licensing wasn’t mollified. “So your brother told you about Bellingham, eh?” He slid a piece of scratch paper across the counter. “His full name, please. I’m afraid I’ll have to revoke his license.”

My brother is still driving.

What About Bob?

2011-02-08T09:37:00.000-08:00

There’s always a chance that the stranger you decide to talk to won’t let you get away, that he'll develop an instant desire to put you in a container and hang it around his neck, as Bill Murray does with his goldfish in What About Bob? As Angelina and Billy Bob did with their vials of blood.

You’re on an airplane and you wave at the two-year-old peeking over the seat in front of you. He waves back, you smile, he bats his eyelashes, you bat yours. Pretty soon you’re committed to interacting with him all the way to Atlanta. If you stop, he cries, and his parents, along with the rest of coach, wish you’d minded your own business.

While walking your dog you strike up a conversation with a woman digging in her flowerbed. Your dog smells her dog’s rear end and in ten seconds they’re fast friends, bowing and barking and running in circles on their leashes. So you go on chatting, and you don’t mind at first, because she’s friendly and forthcoming. She’s lived in the neighborhood for twenty years—one of the first things she tells you--and you, a relative newcomer, want to learn some of its history.

Then she starts delivering set speeches, stories so perfectly worded, sentences with so many clauses that you know she’s told these stories the same way hundreds of times. Maybe they make her look a little too good, a little better than most of us really are. Maybe they involve certain judgments about others that you’re not comfortable with. In any case, you’re not part of a conversation anymore. You’re an audience.

Now what?

Before I map your escape route, I would like to pose a question.

Have you and I never been this child, this woman? Have we never tried someone else’s patience, or told the same story over and over, each time in a rosier light? Have we had no tiny narcissistic moments in which someone we just met, because she’s listening, because she hasn’t yet insisted on any reciprocity, seems like exactly the right person to confide in, to learn that our mother’s dying words to us were, “Aren’t you overdue for a haircut?”

Enough soul searching. Here’s what you do. You remember that you have to go to the bathroom.

In the case of the kid on the airplane, you head down the aisle as soon as possible and after using the facilities at length, you chat with the flight attendants or migrate from empty seat to empty seat until the two-year-old’s face is no longer visible, until he’s disappeared into a parental lap, settled down, maybe even fallen asleep.

In the case of the woman, you just say, I’ve got to go. And you won’t be lying, because you do have to go, at least some time soon. Bob might invite you into his house to use his own facilities, but the woman with the flowerbed and the dog probably won’t. And if she does, you just say no, thank you, that you’re weird about some things. Which of course you are.

NOT Talking to Service Dogs

2011-02-04T14:59:00.000-08:00

Seaside, Oregon. When Stephen Kuusisto, author of Planet of the Blind, joined the faculty of Pacific University’s MFA program in January 2009, he naturally brought along his seeing-eye dog, Nira. She was new to him then, youngish, and distractible. Shelley Washburn, our director, emailed some behavioral instructions in advance of our winter residency:

When Nira has her harness on, she is working and must not be flirted with, talked to or petted. She is trained to focus at street corners, not look for people to schmooze with. And when she is in a lecture, she is trained to sit still, not go searching for fun.

I was beginning my last semester in the program, wondering how (and if) the stories I’d written so far would turn into a thesis. Hanging out with a dog seemed like the perfect anti-anxiety medication. Nira, a golden lab, drew me like a magnet, whether she was sitting in the next row or on the other side of the lecture hall. I was very close to ignoring the ban on student-dog communication when the issue of tsunamis came up.

The hotel where we spent our winter residency sits on the promenade that runs alongside, and only a couple of feet above, Seaside’s two miles of straight, sandy beach. Development of the continental West Coast’s tsunami warning system began in 1997, but it was the Sumatra tsunami of 2004 that rattled property owners enough to take their own precautions. Our hotel posted instructions in fine print on the walls of our rooms about what to do when a warning was received.

Some seeing member of our group joked one morning that these instructions seemed unnecessarily complicated. Yes, we all agreed, the important thing was to head for the hills, away from the water. The rest was—I’m not sure we actually said this—academic.

Stephen raised his hand. “How will I know which way the hills are?”

I think he may have been joking, too, at least in part, but Shelley and others were quick to reassure him that, should a warning sound, we’d find him immediately and all head together toward the hills. I tried to picture that, but what I saw was Nira leading Stephen through the streets of Seaside amid panicked, jostling crowds, of which the rest of us were merely a part. Nira’s learning to focus was not one bit optional.

Stephen must have guessed that some of us were dying to interact with his dog because one afternoon about 4:00, I heard a roar coming from upstairs. I ran up to the fourth floor and found about forty people taking turns throwing a rope toy for Nira to fetch. It was nice of Stephen, I thought, to share.

The other night, in the parking lot of my grocery store in Bellingham, I met another service dog. I don’t know what kind of dog Lucky is—short in height, long in torso like a dachshund, but with shaggy black and white fur, a flat face, and hair in his eyes. I asked his companion, a man in his thirties wearing a reflective vest and thick glasses, but clearly not blind, if I could speak to Lucky. I said I knew there were rules about such things.

“Oh sure, right now it’s okay,” the man said.

Since I was embarrassed to ask him why he needed a service dog, I asked Lucky instead. (Lame, I know.) “What’s your job, Lucky?”

Lucky lifted his head and shot me a look so dark that I took a step back.

“I suffer from depression,” the man said, “and seizures.”

“And Lucky knows when there’s something wrong?”

“That’s right,” the man said. “Don’t you, Lucky?”

The look Lucky gave his human was positively intimate.

Going Cuban

2011-02-01T11:16:00.000-08:00

Bellingham. My husband is involved in Transition Town work, building local community for hard times ahead. I participate, too, but not much, and not very often. I hate meetings, for one thing. I believe in consensus building but sitting through it gives me restless leg syndrome body-wide. Potlucks would be okay if they didn't require a whole evening of blurting things out (See How to Talk to Strangers below). Work parties can be fun, but I often fall behind the thirty-somethings, who appear to move compost as effortlessly as they pick up their children’s toys.
The saving grace of transition folks: they show a lot of movies. I’ve seen The Age of Stupid, What a Way to Go, and The End of Suburbia—all of them recipes for sleepless nights—but missed some of the cheerier offerings, like Mad City Chickens. A few nights ago I decided to walk out with my husband (that’s what they call dating on the BBC) to watch The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989-1990, Cuba’s supplies of imported oil and food were drastically cut, causing widespread hunger and desperation. Cuba’s agricultural sector had previously embraced the “green revolution”—cash-crop farming requiring petroleum-based fertilizer and petroleum-fueled machinery. Their “peak oil moment”—many people believe ours is near—arrived suddenly, and they responded rapidly. In just a few years they were able to switch to organic methods of farming inside and around cities, producing enough food to feed the population. How they did this so fast and so expertly makes for a film full of fascinating interviews, too many shots of the backsides of oxen, and small but gorgeous gardens.
After the film, a woman who’d traveled to Cuba (illegally) during the latter Bush years showed her own photographs. She’d biked into countryside the filmmakers didn’t get to. Her impression—and mine, after listening to what she had to say—was that Cuba’s transition to local, organic agriculture worked throughout the country.
I sat there thinking how ironic it was that forty Americans were watching, in a room above a store,
a film in
which Cubans accomplished quickly and effectively what might take us decades to work through and may come too late to help much. How the worm has turned.

The thing about introverts is they tend to sit on questions so long, the stuffing goes out of them. What’s left isn’t carefully couched but flat and bumpy. I raised my hand. “They have a centralized government,” I said, “that provided experts, training, public policy. We’ll probably have to do all that ourselves.”
Which led to a discussion of HOW CUBA WORKS, in particular of Castro’s neighborhood watchdogs, the CDRs (Committees for the Defense of the Revolution), who organize things like blood banks and hurricane preparedness but also keep an eye out for those who, say, have a tendency to hoard supplies.
One man remarked that living the way Cubans do requires a level of maturity Americans haven’t developed. I wondered if I could develop that kind of maturity alone in my house, and given the treatment of outsiders in Cuba--gay men, for example--whether I wanted to. Talking to more strangers about this, about anything--I'm pretty sure it can't hurt.

Veteran

2011-01-25T12:04:00.001-08:00

Amtrak Cascades, Bellingham to Seattle. Picture George Kennedy in the cockpit in the movie Airport. Add a few decades. The guy taking the window seat across the aisle couldn’t have fit into a telephone booth. When he was settled, his bald head tipped forward onto his chest—too heavy, I thought, to hold up.
A Retired Air Force baseball cap lay on the empty seat between us. It was only a matter of time before I spoke to him.
I worked for fifteen minutes on my laptop, then closed it and squawked out a yawn. “Time for coffee,” I said. “Can I get you anything?”
“I’m heading in the same direction. I have to move around. Get stiff otherwise.”
I waited while he grabbed the seat back in front, stood up and positioned his cane. I walked ahead of him through the automatic door (“That makes life easy,” he said), but when I spotted a restroom I ducked into it. It was a huge handicapped restroom, and I thought maybe he needed it, so I turned around in the doorway and said, “I’m making a pit stop, unless . . . you want to.”
“No,” he said. “I’m okay.”
In the Bistro Car, he waved me toward the empty stool next to him, but I was embarrassed now and told him I was going back to my seat. When he got back, I had to start all over: “Did you like your cinnamon roll?”
He nodded.
I wondered what it felt like to live inside that enormous body, that weighty head. I pointed at the hat. “My dad was retired Air Force.”
“Oh yes?”
“I grew up near McClellan Field in Sacramento. Shopped at the PX with my mom. Went to cheap movies on base & bowled with my dad. Swam in the pool.”
My father, in his forties during World War II, died 28 years ago. He stuttered all his life, and from the time I was a teenager, Parkinson’s made the stutter worse. I’d like to say that I asked him questions while he was still alive; that he just couldn’t answer them. But that wouldn’t be true.
“A buddy of mine ended up at McClellan after the war,” he said. “I might see him today. Fifty of us from the battalion are still around. We get together twice a year. This time in Seattle.”
“Were you in Europe?” I was almost shouting, but I could see he was struggling to hear me, and the sign on the wall said Step between cars to use your cell phone, not Don’t talk to your neighbor.
“North Africa. Italy, on the Adriatic side. Flew bombing missions over the oil fields in Yugoslavia. I turned 18 over there, in 1943.”
I waited a minute. I didn’t want to spook him. “Were you wounded?”
“Shot in the neck above my flack jacket.” He pointed to a spot just below his ponderous head. “Missed the carotid arteries. A couple of guys in my plane knew what to do and kept me alive until we got back to base. The war was almost over by then.”
He turned toward me, one leg bent, the knee not quite resting on the bench seat. I didn’t think I’d been staring, but he said, “Oh this,” and spiraled his hand in front of him like Queen Elizabeth, as if to include his whole body, his entire kingdom. “A year ago I was playing tournament tennis twice a week. Then one day I didn’t feel right and by midnight I’d had a quadruple bypass.”
“We were just kids,” he said, talking about his battalion again, his youth. “I wouldn’t do it again, supposing I had a choice. I saw too much.”
He shrugged, looking not at me but at his hands in his lap. “I stayed in after the war, though. The reserves. Figured the fighting was over. I got called up again in 1950 for the Korean Conflict, but they sent me to Germany. My wife stayed home. She was pregnant with our first kid.”

“Couldn’t she go with you?” I said.
“She didn’t want to. I did a couple of stupid things, and she decided she was better off living close to her family. I was over there for two years.”
“But your marriage survived?” I said. I wanted life to have rewarded him retrospectively for his openness now. And he was wearing a ring.
“It did, until 1983. She died of colon cancer. Married again a few years ago.”
“How many kids?”
“Three. Lost one of my daughters. Didn’t show up at work on a Monday morning. Her sister went looking. She’d had a heart attack. She was 51.”
I thought I’d asked one question too many, that we were done. But after a few seconds he said, “How about you? Where are you headed?”

Talking to Strangers: An Introvert Hits the Streets

Ordinary Time

My Husband and I Read Poetry

Writing and Teaching

"Rescue Me"

Stepping into 2012

Sick

Sex as Deal Breaker in The Ides of March **Spoiler Alert**

A Little Magazine

Facing Forward

My Father Shakes Hands with the Stars

Watched!

Separating the Sheep from the Goats

Portlandification

Spyware

Gobsmacked

What Tin House Really Wants

Summer Wedding

Coal is Us

The Tarot of Books

Stripping My Bookshelves

Bellingham and The Third Man

Talking to Myself

The Royal Wedding and Accidents of Birth

April Love

Alley People 2

Alley People 1

In Alleys with Alice

Grab your gear, we got a dead Marine

El Salvador: Oscar Romero

El Salvador: The Penultimate Post

El Salvador: Managing Partnership

El Salvador: Blanca's House

El Salvador: Presidentialism

El Salvador: The Jesuit and My Shorts

Living in the End Times

El Salvador: The Ambassador

El Salvador: The Van

El Salvador: The Red Guitar

Ten Days in El Salvador, a Long Time Ago

Flannery O'Connor at home

Inoculation Accidents

Saying "Panties" on Television

William Vollman among the Homeless

Bellingham, or Where I Moved To

What About Bob?

NOT Talking to Service Dogs

Going Cuban

Veteran

Sex as Deal Breaker in The Ides of March Spoiler Alert