Separating the Sheep from the Goats

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-American 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.