El Salvador: Presidentialism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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

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?

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

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

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.