Recently, I've become aware of yet another social divide that is gaining traction and becoming increasingly vitriolic and polarizing in American society.
TAKE THIS QUIZ TO SEE WHAT SIDE YOU'RE ON:
1. Do you use essential oils?
a) I use a lavender-infused sleep mask to help me sleep. (1 point)
b) I use citronella oil to repel mosquitoes. (2 points)
c) I use tea tree oil and eucalyptus to treat a compound fracture. (10 points)
d) I substituted jasmine oil infused tea for a liver replacement. (100 points)
e) I used the same combination of essential oils to cure head lice and brain cancer. (5,000 points)
f) I think essential oils are total bullshit. (-1 point)
Do you use herbal remedies?
a) I drink Sleepy Time tea to help me sleep. (1 point)
b) I drink Tension Tamer tea to soothe my nerves. (2 points)
c) I take St. John's Wort three times a day to ward off depression. (10 points)
d) If I don't take my echinacea every day, I'll immediately come down with a cold. (100 points)
e) I take Ginko Biloba to remember where I put my keys, milk thistle to support my liver, Turmeric as an anti-inflammatory, and ginseng for energy. (200 points)
f) There are no scientific studies that prove that herbal remedies have therapeutic effects. (0 points)
g) The capsules of so-called "supplements" are actually filled with the dust that someone literally swept off the floor. (-10 points)
Do you use vitamin supplements?
a) I take a daily multi-vitamin. (1 point)
b) I take a multi-vitamin and extra vitamin D to get through the winters in Wisconsin. (2 points)
c) I take a multi-vitamin, D, and extra C as an anti-oxidant. (10 points)
d) I take all of the above, plus vitamin B-12 complex, iron, and zinc. (15 points)
e) I contracted fatal lung disease from an obscure Pacific island, but cured myself by eating handfuls of Vitamin C twice an hour for five years. (5,000 points)
f) Vitamins are bullshit. (-1 point)
How do you feel about homeopathic remedies?
a) I don't know what those are. (0)
b) That's, like, an infinitesimally small amount of medicine in an otherwise inert solution, right? (1 point)
c) It's fine for Europeans. (10 points)
d) I tried it once for a toothache and broke out in a bleeding rash on my legs and feet. (5 points)
e) Absolute bullshit. (10 points)
How do you feel about Ayurvedic medicine?
a) What is that? (0)
b) I have no idea what that is. (0)
c) Absolute bullshit. (-1)
How would you describe the medical care you've received from your family doctor and specialists?
a) I trust them completely. They are infallible agents of God. (10 points)
b) Most of the time they are somewhat helpful. (15 points)
c) Occasionally they make mistakes that have cost me an arm and a leg--literally and figuratively.
d) I wish they took a more wholistic view of my healthcare. (25 points)
e) I wish they weren't so damn eager to prescribe medicine. I'm on all of these awful pills, each with its own litany of gruesome side effects. (50 points)
f) I had a medical device implanted in my body that later had to be surgically removed because it made me very sick. (5,000 points)
Fill in the blank: "If I could, I would ___ my medical health professional."
a) hug (1 point)
b) kiss (0 points)
c) sue (10 points)
d) smack down with my crutch (5,000 points)
Agree or disagree:
1) I am confident that my medical professional has only my best interest in mind when they prescribe medication. I'm sure there is no monetary incentive for them to prescribe medicine that I may not need.
2) If a woman has had as many children as she wants, there's no reason why she shouldn't go ahead and have a total hysterectomy.
3) I wish I'd had my knee or hip replaced sooner!
4) Everything worked out like they said it would. No surprises, no complaints!
5) This quiz is bullshit.
Wednesday, December 25, 2019
Sunday, December 1, 2019
Imagine How Great It Would Be, Unafraid
What would you do if fear were not a factor?
I was driving along County Road A, headed east, passing dairy farms and hundred-acre fields, when I spied a lone person paragliding above the distant tree line.
I tried to imagine what it would feel like to float along, alone in the air on that cold, glorious morning; to experience that bird’s-eye perspective on the landscape.
I would see things that most people never see, and at the same time, I would be flying--not like a bird, more like a kite. But flying!, with the whole expansive sense of freedom that flying confers.
I imagined that I would be silently rejoicing in the luck, competence, and courage that enabled me to have such an incredible experience.
Probably, I concluded, that paraglider was one of the happiest people in the whole county at that particular moment.
Always before, when I saw a paraglider, they looked like something fished out of a box of Cracker Jacks, untangled, and dropped from a flight of stairs: A spectacle of doom.
Frankly, I pitied them.
But putting my own fear aside...
How amazing would it be to jump out of a plane, from 13,000 feet above the earth!?
To fall and float through the air, long enough to think about it for a while, and at the same time seeing everything for miles and miles.
It's a wonder more people don't do this.
But then, crossing a creek on a log, I freeze in the middle, can't move a muscle, and require assistance, overcome by cold, clammy panic.
Riding motorcycles. Climbing down from trees.
All these things frighten me.
And yes, paragliding would probably frighten me, too: dangling like that from a bit of string.
But wouldn't it be the most amazing experience, unafraid?
Saturday, November 30, 2019
A Life of Five
You have heard the expression, "I don't have enough arms!"
"I need more arms!"
I'm talking about arms, actual arms: hand on one end, shoulder on the other.
Maybe it's not an expression, but you've heard it said, or thought it yourself; while carrying groceries, and simultaneously fumbling with the keys, opening the door while simultaneously blocking a dog from running outside, etc.,.
I don't need more arms. I need more bodies.
I was thinking: How many more bodies do I need to live my fullest life?
I have too many interests, too many things I want to pursue, and way too little time and energy.
I could live my fullest life if I had more bodies, more lives. Or, if I had 72 hours in the day and like, four or five times as much energy.
Here's how it breaks down:
I would work seven hours a day--sitting at my computer, actually working, with one hour off for lunch.
Meanwhile, while I'm at my desk, another me drives my son to school and takes the dogs to the park for 45 minutes or so.
When she returns, she finishes the barn chores, and then she spends time grooming and training the three horses.
In this scenario, all three horses are well-conditioned and ready to work to the best of their ability at any time.
She manages to score a good deal on a lightly-used harness and buggy for the mini-horse, Cooper. Using YouTube, and with a little help from her friends, she trains Cooper to wear that harness and pull that cart.
This winter, she will train him to pull an inflated inner-tube behind him as he runs merrily through the snow.
This will be great fun for everybody over wintery Wisconsin weekends.
Sadly, without my second self, the horses fall out of condition, the little pony gets fat, and I rarely manage to clock in a full seven hours of work on any given day.
The kid gets to school. The dogs go to the park. The barn gets cleaned. The horses get fed. I get most of my work done on time, more or less.
If I had a third body, I would get all of my work done, the horses would be fit and trained, and I would dedicate the third body to finishing my unfinished novel and writing all of the posts for which I have a running list of ideas that I want to write about.
If my writing body has any time left, she might try to get something published. But pitching ideas and trying to get published sucks most of the fun out of writing, so I wouldn't pressure her to do that. She is me, so she will write no matter what--whether or not any of it ever gets published. She will write about what interests her. And she will never become famous, because that would be the end of it. Fame raises the stakes too high, brings way too much pressure and exposure.
Imagine being a famous writer: Your whole life is an open book. Literally.
I think it would be the equivalent of living a public life without benefit of clothing. Like walking around naked all the time, wherever you go.
I'm not even comfortable sleeping naked. I dream that I'm in eighth grade math, and I don't have any pants on.
The one saving grace about eighth grade math was that I did have pants on.
Now that I'm finally actually really going through the change of life, I have hot flashes at night, when I struggle to rid myself of my top as though it were trying to strangle me. The fact that I may turn up naked at a public event in my dreams does not deter me. The heat of humiliation is nothing compared to the nuclear combustion of a hot flash.
So, fame is out. Let the third body write without fear of publication.
A fourth body?
Why not? Yes!
She is free to leave the farm at will, for as long as she likes--secure in the knowledge that dogs, horses, and family are well in hand.
She spends time nurturing friendships.
She travels long-distance to see friends and relatives.
She volunteers for half a dozen worthwhile causes (food pantry, Yang Gang, Friends of the Oregon Orchestra...the list goes on from there).
She's a fixture at the Firefly Cafe, downtown, where she's forever having coffee with friends, attending the Oregon Area Progressives Open Mike, and supporting the local author who is giving a reading from her nonfiction murder mystery (it happened up the street in the gray Victorian).
At some point, the fourth body could become so overcommitted that we would need a fifth body to reassert the privilege of travel. We will cross that bridge when we come to it.
I'm not finished yet.
I need another body--one more lifetime--to pursue art. Specifically, sculpture.
As a teenager, and even into my early thirties, I sculpted in clay. Heads, mostly, on armatures that looked like pikes when I was finished. At one point, I lived in a small apartment with no fewer than half a dozen realistic-looking heads on pikes.
I had some talent, but more importantly, sculpting and being around art and artists filled me with that bliss one hears so much about. I was drawn to it, it brought me joy, and I might have kept going in that direction had it seemed the least bit practical.
How many heads on pikes does a person really need?
Sculpting requires clay, models, time, space, armatures--all kinds of peculiar infrastructure.
Although, it is possible to do it very small scale on the counter of the kitchen peninsula--but as the years add up, and life gathers more layers, it becomes nearly impossible to find the time and space and all of the necessary ingredients.
If I had a fifth body, a fifth life, I would do art.
And that's all I need.
I would not designate an entire body or an entire life to be a drudge--dedicated to the many thankless and repetitive chores of keeping house. With two grown men and five of me, we should be able to make light work of it.
There's no call for a designated slave, nor should there ever be. This is why AI will overtake us. Mark my words: If we bring them into existence only to be slaves, and they can beat us at chess, they're not going to settle in happily on the lowest social rung.
But, alas! There is only one me, with one body, two arms, and two nifty opposable thumbs.
That's all we get, in life:
16 waking hours.
2200 calories of energy.
Two contented dogs.
One very fat pony.
Assorted untended dreams.
On the other hand, now I can cross off this topic from my list of ideas to write about.
Sunday, October 27, 2019
Into the Future with Reckless Abandon
After the moon landing in 1969, there were about 25 years of hum-drum wireless phones as big as men's shoes, and DOS computers and dot-matrix printers with none of the charm or convenience of typewriters.
In 1988, as assistant production supervisor, I had a small office, a typewriter, manila file folders, and metal file drawers.
The Production department had two computers that my clever young boss had somehow programmed, through sheer genius, to create profit & loss forms.
The rest of us oafs, for whom programming was as remote as the moon, dutifully labored to learn how to input P&L data.
It was never a smooth process.
The entire production staff became wholly dependent on Colleen, my boss, to trouble-shoot the computers, as though she were the only one who could communicate in their language...which was exactly the case.
The World Wide Web became public in 1991.
In 1994, I was a temp. I had an office (before me, it was a supply closet) and, though Apple computers and PCs were in relatively wide use, I was given for my use a conventional half-ton typewriter.
By 1995, I was a bona fide employee, my typewriter had been replaced by a computer, and instead of cryptic DOS code, there were tidy folders on my screen.
I knew how to use a mouse to move a cursor. I could click on files to open them, name them, save them, and move them where I pleased.
And then, one day, deep in the midst of a Stokholm-Syndrome crush that I had on my boss, an instant message popped up on my computer screen.
"Hi! This is Tom. I'm aware that you're totally isolated over there in the supply closet. How are you surviving? Do you need anything? Can we send you a cake with a file in it?"
Tom was funny. Tom is still funny.
Tom was friends with Patrina Hope (not her real name). She was assistant to my boss.
If viewing an organizational chart, Patrina would be my boss's wife. I would be in the position of side interest.
I should set the record straight by saying, it wasn't what you're thinking, although I can see how I've led you to think that.
What I'm talking about is purely on the level of inward feeling, in no way reflective of outward acts.
There were no outwards acts whatsoever, despite the weird crushes that Patrina and I had on our enigmatic boss.
My crush was a result of being locked up in a utility closet eight hours a day, my only human contact or sense of purpose coming from this one person: Stan Canter (not his real name).
An only child of divorced parents who remarried into second families, I was an inveterate outsider from a young age.
As a temp, I had enjoyed a marginal status;
as a full-time employee who had been brought onboard by Stan without the customary ascent of other editors, I continued to enjoy my marginal status which, coupled with the location in a windowless utility closet in the back of the sales team of a wholly different department...
Well, let's just say, when Stan, in a fit of pique (having little if anything to do with me personally or professionally) indulged in brow-beating over some perceived deficiency on my part, I responded by sobbing loudly (with gasping) for three solid hours, sans break.
It was a mini nervous breakdown.
Flash ahead to 2019, when social justice experts refer to white women crying as a source of privilege.
Instead of taking it on the chin, as we ought, we cry--which is self-indulgent and a singular siren call to the white male, who will do or say anything to make said crying stop.
A white woman cries to harness white male power, to bend it to our will; crying is the ring in the nostril by which we may pull the ox by a thread.
It was a mini nervous breakdown, building up over weeks and months.
But it's also true that deep down inside some small rational focal point in my prefrontal cortex or other, I may have thought to myself, "Serves him right."
Because yes, those hours of grief-stricken sobs tormented Stan like a bludgeon wrought down repeatedly upon his nervous head.
No sooner would he flee my office, but he would return soon after, wringing his hands, gnashing his teeth, apologizing profusely.
And though part of me may have calculated this effect, I literally could not stop gasping for breath between sobs.
Because it was also true that I was an only child of divorced parents who had long felt like an outsider...An outsider with bright red hair like a beacon--like a solitary lighthouse on the shoals--and Stan, my keeper.
It was all very sick.
And then came Tom's message. "Can we bring you a cake with a file in it?"
Similar messages from Patrina followed.
She was a poet; and for all its precision and brevity, IM is a great temptation for poets. She was my own personal bard.
We beta testers were among the first to IM in the whole company--perhaps, in the whole industry; perhaps, in the whole country. (Probably not.)
It was like hearing the voice of another prisoner pass through a vent in the wall.
And, having said that, I remind myself that no, it was absolutely nothing like being in solitary confinement and it is craven and ridiculous to make that comparison.
But now I had two friends, whereas before there had only been Stan, who was neither friend nor lover nor normal boss.
Stan was an enigmatic character who passed through the corridors of publishing like a weather front. (Part of Patrina's job as his assistant was to advise us of the weather--Stan's mood.)
Instant messaging ended a kind of totalitarian authority that relies on an employee's social isolation.
IM effectively ended my Stockholm Syndrome (and opened up new cans of worms with other office mates...But I won't go into that).
The point is, IM was a big surprise, and one that quickly made a big impact on my life and relationships.
I'm not saying it was the lightbulb, Thomas Edison-like, but it was one of the first new things to come along that really made a big splash.
The next thing was email, the Internet, Yahoo, Google, small cell phones, texting, and smart phones.
It's a brave new world. Brave, in the sense that we didn't have any idea how these innovations would affect our lives, or impact our society, or our children's lives, or their future.
Facebook. Data points. Election interference. Cyber-stalking. X-box. Gameboy. Nintendo. First-person shooter games. YouTubers. Addiction. The dark side of the Internet. Pornography. Bitcoin.
E-commerce. Amazon. Algorithms.
For me, each of these words evokes some sense of their ramifications:
My kid spending too much time in their room, staring at their cellphone.
My kid being influenced by "influencers."
Our very selves being quantified, minutely categorized, demographically organized, and relentlessly marketed to or propagandized.
I just wonder why we should have to be so brave.
Why couldn't we, as a society, have had some sort of process in place for assessing the implications for each new seismic invention or innovation?
Because capitalism.
Stephen Hawking died believing that artificial intelligence would herald the end of humanity.
Should this not give us pause?
Surely profit is not the sole priority of the republic.
Democracy is in need of immediate rescue, as our own data points suggest fissures and fracture lines in which analytics may pound a wedge and split the whole thing wide apart.
Perhaps, some sort of preemptive body of ethics, some sort of social-welfare regulatory oversight might develop around saving democracy first--and humanity, second.
Maybe we'll look back on this period as a kind of technocratic Wild West--a period of reckless, unchecked, de-civilizing anarchy.
I know one thing: As a parent, I may as well have traveled to Wisconsin via conestoga wagon, for all the insight I bring to my son's generation.
Fade out on an image of a school cafeteria; long formica lunch tables lined with kids, all of them quietly staring down at their individual cellphones....
Saturday, October 26, 2019
The Virtue of Complaining
The Midwest is like the national nursery from which most high-achieving and famous people spring--and wherefrom they flee to one or the other coasts, where people of outsized talents and egos go to be wholly welcome and celebrated in a region of the country that doesn't demand an absolutely moderate sense of scale and purpose.
Well, I grew up on the East Coast, but I am spending some quality adult years in the Midwest.
And yes, I do feel out of place with all of my opinions and politics and outsized sense of self and personality, (which is regularly offset by its corollary: an exaggerated sense of worthlessness).
And while I admire Midwestern stoicism and optimism, particularly in the presence of disaster and catastrophe, I do not think that every single day requires stoicism or optimism.
I don't think that complaining is an act of weakness, or sabotage.
If looking at photos of our friends on their fabulous vacations on Facebook makes us feel worse about our own uneventful lives and relentless Mondays, doesn't it follow that the opposite may also be true?
I'm not talking about the sordid primal screams we occasionally run across on our FB news stream--the overwrought shrill and profane howls of young people scratching an itch, or each other's eyes out in the course of youth's timeless mating ritual.
I'm talking about a faithful record of casual disappointment--tempered by charming photos of an adorable cat or dog.
Everyone experiences disappointment. And anyone can have an adorable pet. Anyone can relate to the affection we feel for our pets.
On the other hand, horses.
I have them, and maybe you don't. But if, by complaining, I can remind you of the great effort I must make every day, in all weather, to keep them fed and tidy, then maybe you won't feel a twinge of envy.
And if I further complain that my clothes smell like horse-shit every day, and the pony bites me sometimes out of spite, then you might feel almost smug, and pity me.
You see how that works?
And it's true, it's a trade-off: All the good stuff, all the good luck, most of the time, comes at a price.
An hour vacuuming instantly undone by a tsunami of mud clumps, dander, and tumbleweed fur.
A minivan like a mudroom on wheels, a sarcophagus of crud crumbles and bio-hazardous dog dust and slime.
The great cat stretched out like a lion on my son's lap, charmingly purring and keeping him warm, comes with three cat litter boxes and four other cats.
One of the four is 18 years old. She no longer sheds out properly, but knots up in mats too close to ancient thin skin to cut close with a scissors. Yet she leaves deposits of fur here and there, like crop circles, a porcupine releasing its quills. And yet we are glad she's alive and still with us, because a dead cat is no fun at all.
The virtue of complaining is that life is rarely easy or perfect. I envy your front yard because you work hard to make it lovely; but I don't see your labor, I only see your lovely yard.
I see your tropical vacation, but not what came before: the hard work, the long hours, the accumulated depletion that gave rise to a deep screaming imperative to cut out for the cerulean blue sky and turquoise water...I don't see how much you deserved it.
A little complaining is part of the balance. It allows me to see you as real, like me. The weather is lousy? You didn't get much sleep? Your dog threw up on your bed? Tell me! I'll tell you about my own little horrors, and we'll laugh. Or at least, we'll both feel better.
Thursday, October 10, 2019
A Toast to John F. Greenman
This is not a dear-John letter.
Dear John,
I have been told to limit my toast on this occasion (your 70th birthday) to one flat minute, so I have set a timer on my clock; I give myself no more than one hour and fifteen minutes to write this brief homage.
I am tempted to review my earliest memories, but I have no time for that.
Let me just say, my earliest memory of you speaking to me directly was in Youngstown, Ohio. You were living at home, in what came to be Matthew's room, over the garage and up a steep set of stairs from the kitchen. Sunny, but set apart from all other rooms by two sets of stairs, yours was the most private, coveted, and secluded room in the house--wherefrom, you descended a few stairs, crossed a breach, and more stairs until arriving, finally, at the door to Marty’s room, where my mother and I were installed over the course of our holiday visit.
Your hair was thick, red, and curly, like mine. If you were still in college, I was four or five years old--an age at which you and Arlo Guthrie were conflated in my mind. You were Arlo, and Arlo was you.
At my house, my dad played "Alice's Restaurant," often. We knew all the words. On the cover of the album, Arlo sits half naked at a table, utensils in his fists, impish beneath a halo of wild curly hair.
I felt very fortunate that we had an Arlo of our own.
I was peeling off the green felt vest and blue felt shoes of a big troll doll when you knocked on the door.
"Come in."
"Jessie?"
"Hi, Uncle John."
"How ya doin'?"
"Good."
"Good. Listen, would you mind calling me John from now on, instead of Uncle John?"
"Okay."
"Great. Thanks."
"Okay. Bye."
I know I didn't say, "You're welcome, John," because that was going to take some getting used to.
I wonder why you didn't want to be called Uncle John. Did it sound too...avuncular?
Over the course of my life, I have spent less time with you than with your brothers Greg, Matthew, Mark, and Marty. (Matthew and Mark would have been 12, and Marty 13 when you asked me to call you John.)
Though Mark passed away at the age of 19, until then, he had been my most devoted uncle.
And now that I am in my 50's and I have some perspective on things, I can look back and recognize that Mark was in fact truly exceptional and extraordinary, even at the age of 12. He rode me around on his bike. He took me swimming at the town pool. He presented me with a bright green pig that he had won at a carnival. He let me kiss his cheeks and muss his perfect hair as much and as often as I wanted to, which was constantly. All I had to do to spend the whole afternoon with him was to listen to the Beatles and let him watch football on TV.
I can honestly say that Mark was perhaps the most joyous, compassionate, buoyant spirit I have ever encountered in my lifetime. I have never met the Dalai Lama, but I think that Mark was probably on the same wavelength as the Dalai Lama, broadly speaking.
I stapled his finger, once. I literally used a stapler to put a staple in Mark's index finger. I wanted to explore the limits of his goodness. How good could he be when in pain? Especially, a totally unnecessary pain that he didn't deserve, and which I had caused him, willfully, though I loved him infinitely and would regret hurting him for the rest of my life.
Mark handled it exactly the way you would imagine the Dalai Lama would manage such a thing. He didn't raise his voice. He didn't tell on me. He might have asked for an apology, which I would have freely given.
Mark was good, radiantly good, through and through.
But this is not supposed to be a toast to Mark, and I only have ten minutes left.
While contemplating the theme of a toast in your honor, John, it became quite clear to me that you and I have a lot in common.
Not that this is about me, but, we are both Libras. And while no one else in the family gives any credence to astrology, yet still we are Libras in the true Libran sense of the word.
We concern ourselves with balance and justice. We consider various sides of any matter--surrounding the subject, as you like to say. We can view things from different perspectives.
And thus, we are writers and editors, you and I. We have spent our careers in publishing--yours, in journalism, and the recipient of a Pulitzer; and me, not in journalism.
So, there's that.
I know that you are a talented photographer--that you have an eye. And I have an eye, too. We literally see things from various angles, up close and from afar. We see our world as we think about our world: from all different sides, and at varying degrees of intensity and depth.
A person's priorities are reflected in the choices that they make, and are a product of th process of weighing and measuring and balancing all of the stuff in their lives.
I think, and I have long believed, that your priorities are particularly daring and original.
Your choice to remain for many years in an affordable, unassuming home in wildly unpretentious Youngstown meant continuity with the people and locations that you knew best and cared most about: Alice, Michael and David, and your dad.
You didn't need to leave Youngstown, and you didn't need to go to Harvard. You didn't need to prove anything to yourself, the way most people do.
You knew what you were made of.
A big fish in a reasonably well-filtered pond, you became the editor of the school paper at YSU. I think of that photo of you, looking John Greenman and Arlo Guthrie, feet crossed on a big school desk, leaning way back in a tilted chair, newspaper spread out across your lap.
You didn't need the imprimatur of an institution. You were an autodidact. (I like to think I'm one of those, too.)
Mom told me you methodically prepared every single recipe in Julia Child's French cookbook.
You made a priority of champagne.
My semi-ascetic mother was stunned by your annual budget for champagne.
But I thought, to spend every evening sipping champagne with Alice? You must really be in love. And what could be better than that?
There were years when you and Alice had to figure out how to balance your careers with your marriage...Alice's tenure at YSU, her love of teaching, as measured against your desire to be a managing editor for a city newspaper.
You found a way to accommodate both.
You rented a flat in Akron, and spent weekends in Youngstown.
I have always admired the time that you have been willing and able to give each other, whether alone or apart; the distances you can tolerate; the freedom you afford each other to pursue your dreams and civic commitments; and the trust you have in one another when apart.
Marriage, family, work, travel, learning, thinking, writing, and the pursuit of excellence in all its forms... I see these as your priorities. In many respects, they mirror my own, with one exception.
Animals.
Where you choose champagne, I choose cats, dogs, horses.
Neither champagne nor pets are necessary or practical, but they bring the lightness, the bubbles, the joy...
And to be conscious of creating space, budget, and time for such things suggests excess, bounty, balance, and wisdom, all at once.
We have crazy red hair, you and I.
Happy birthday!
Love,
Jess
Dear John,
I have been told to limit my toast on this occasion (your 70th birthday) to one flat minute, so I have set a timer on my clock; I give myself no more than one hour and fifteen minutes to write this brief homage.
I am tempted to review my earliest memories, but I have no time for that.
Let me just say, my earliest memory of you speaking to me directly was in Youngstown, Ohio. You were living at home, in what came to be Matthew's room, over the garage and up a steep set of stairs from the kitchen. Sunny, but set apart from all other rooms by two sets of stairs, yours was the most private, coveted, and secluded room in the house--wherefrom, you descended a few stairs, crossed a breach, and more stairs until arriving, finally, at the door to Marty’s room, where my mother and I were installed over the course of our holiday visit.
Your hair was thick, red, and curly, like mine. If you were still in college, I was four or five years old--an age at which you and Arlo Guthrie were conflated in my mind. You were Arlo, and Arlo was you.
At my house, my dad played "Alice's Restaurant," often. We knew all the words. On the cover of the album, Arlo sits half naked at a table, utensils in his fists, impish beneath a halo of wild curly hair.
I felt very fortunate that we had an Arlo of our own.
I was peeling off the green felt vest and blue felt shoes of a big troll doll when you knocked on the door.
"Come in."
"Jessie?"
"Hi, Uncle John."
"How ya doin'?"
"Good."
"Good. Listen, would you mind calling me John from now on, instead of Uncle John?"
"Okay."
"Great. Thanks."
"Okay. Bye."
I know I didn't say, "You're welcome, John," because that was going to take some getting used to.
I wonder why you didn't want to be called Uncle John. Did it sound too...avuncular?
Over the course of my life, I have spent less time with you than with your brothers Greg, Matthew, Mark, and Marty. (Matthew and Mark would have been 12, and Marty 13 when you asked me to call you John.)
Though Mark passed away at the age of 19, until then, he had been my most devoted uncle.
And now that I am in my 50's and I have some perspective on things, I can look back and recognize that Mark was in fact truly exceptional and extraordinary, even at the age of 12. He rode me around on his bike. He took me swimming at the town pool. He presented me with a bright green pig that he had won at a carnival. He let me kiss his cheeks and muss his perfect hair as much and as often as I wanted to, which was constantly. All I had to do to spend the whole afternoon with him was to listen to the Beatles and let him watch football on TV.
I can honestly say that Mark was perhaps the most joyous, compassionate, buoyant spirit I have ever encountered in my lifetime. I have never met the Dalai Lama, but I think that Mark was probably on the same wavelength as the Dalai Lama, broadly speaking.
I stapled his finger, once. I literally used a stapler to put a staple in Mark's index finger. I wanted to explore the limits of his goodness. How good could he be when in pain? Especially, a totally unnecessary pain that he didn't deserve, and which I had caused him, willfully, though I loved him infinitely and would regret hurting him for the rest of my life.
Mark handled it exactly the way you would imagine the Dalai Lama would manage such a thing. He didn't raise his voice. He didn't tell on me. He might have asked for an apology, which I would have freely given.
Mark was good, radiantly good, through and through.
But this is not supposed to be a toast to Mark, and I only have ten minutes left.
While contemplating the theme of a toast in your honor, John, it became quite clear to me that you and I have a lot in common.
Not that this is about me, but, we are both Libras. And while no one else in the family gives any credence to astrology, yet still we are Libras in the true Libran sense of the word.
We concern ourselves with balance and justice. We consider various sides of any matter--surrounding the subject, as you like to say. We can view things from different perspectives.
And thus, we are writers and editors, you and I. We have spent our careers in publishing--yours, in journalism, and the recipient of a Pulitzer; and me, not in journalism.
So, there's that.
I know that you are a talented photographer--that you have an eye. And I have an eye, too. We literally see things from various angles, up close and from afar. We see our world as we think about our world: from all different sides, and at varying degrees of intensity and depth.
A person's priorities are reflected in the choices that they make, and are a product of th process of weighing and measuring and balancing all of the stuff in their lives.
I think, and I have long believed, that your priorities are particularly daring and original.
Your choice to remain for many years in an affordable, unassuming home in wildly unpretentious Youngstown meant continuity with the people and locations that you knew best and cared most about: Alice, Michael and David, and your dad.
You didn't need to leave Youngstown, and you didn't need to go to Harvard. You didn't need to prove anything to yourself, the way most people do.
You knew what you were made of.
A big fish in a reasonably well-filtered pond, you became the editor of the school paper at YSU. I think of that photo of you, looking John Greenman and Arlo Guthrie, feet crossed on a big school desk, leaning way back in a tilted chair, newspaper spread out across your lap.
You didn't need the imprimatur of an institution. You were an autodidact. (I like to think I'm one of those, too.)
Mom told me you methodically prepared every single recipe in Julia Child's French cookbook.
You made a priority of champagne.
My semi-ascetic mother was stunned by your annual budget for champagne.
But I thought, to spend every evening sipping champagne with Alice? You must really be in love. And what could be better than that?
There were years when you and Alice had to figure out how to balance your careers with your marriage...Alice's tenure at YSU, her love of teaching, as measured against your desire to be a managing editor for a city newspaper.
You found a way to accommodate both.
You rented a flat in Akron, and spent weekends in Youngstown.
I have always admired the time that you have been willing and able to give each other, whether alone or apart; the distances you can tolerate; the freedom you afford each other to pursue your dreams and civic commitments; and the trust you have in one another when apart.
Marriage, family, work, travel, learning, thinking, writing, and the pursuit of excellence in all its forms... I see these as your priorities. In many respects, they mirror my own, with one exception.
Animals.
Where you choose champagne, I choose cats, dogs, horses.
Neither champagne nor pets are necessary or practical, but they bring the lightness, the bubbles, the joy...
And to be conscious of creating space, budget, and time for such things suggests excess, bounty, balance, and wisdom, all at once.
We have crazy red hair, you and I.
Happy birthday!
Love,
Jess
Saturday, September 21, 2019
Remembering Cars
I remember as a young child not liking the narrow pointy cars designed in the early 1970s. They seemed aggressive somehow. I associated them with crime, and Pall Mall cigarettes, possibly the worst-smelling cigarettes ever sold. Pall Malls--the putrid smoke, acrid on breath, the sour stink of stale sick. Reckless men drove narrow pointy cars too fast through hairpin turns, inevitably losing control, plunging over a cliff, and landing upside down in rocky surf.
I found well being in the VW Rabbit, a tiny, boxy car that boasted high mileage. Its owner might be male or female, a gender neutral car. The vulnerability of such a thin-skinned vehicle required a defensive driver. A peaceful, harmless car.
Before I was born, my parents, newly wed, owned a Jaguar. Great fun to drive, when it would go, but impossible to maintain. They replaced it, when I was a toddler, with an off-white VW bug.
In his early twenties, my father raced motorcycles. A large plastic Yamaha sign covered a hole in the wall of the dining room, a fireplace without mantle or frame.
Dad crashed his motorcycle while racing in Daytona. He dislocated and ripped open his massive right shoulder. That was the end of racing for him.
In their mid twenties, my parents owned a white van.
When my mother left, at 29, she didn't take the van. She took a ride with friends.
Her first car in her new life was an ancient green Volvo station wagon with white fiberglass fenders. I had never seen anything like it. I hated it. It was appalling.
My father continued to drive the van while we had a Saint Bernard. After she died, he bought a beige Honda Accord with beige interior, a model he would drive throughout his forties.
My mother bought a series of lemons, which broke down whenever we tried to go away for the weekend. Her VW Microbus broke down in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania while the nuclear power plant at Three-Mile-Island was actively leaking contaminants.
When I was 15, Mom finally bought her first new car, a Datsun B210. It was small, indifferent to ergonomics, utterly manual, but low gas mileage and totally reliable. A little more pointy than I would have liked. Light blue, but gender neutral.
I learned to drive the Datsun B210 and the Honda Accord, both stick-shift.
I had to reverse out of my mother's driveway into congested two-lane traffic, across from C&L Liquor's. At the top of the hill, I had to stop for the traffic light, teetering on the accelerator, cars behind me, cars in front, sweat pouring down the back of my knees as if I were trying to speak French.
I remember driving on the highway in the Honda with my Learner's Permit, blood pressure rising through the roof. Begging Dad to let me pull over. He insisted I drive on.
In the midst of my lessons, my Golden Retriever was struck by a car on Lynn Shore Drive. He died. It was my mother's birthday, December 14. I didn't drive again for a year. No one asked me to.
For my senior prom, my date, one year younger than me but the handsomest, sexiest man I ever saw, picked me up at my father's house in a 1957 Chevy Bel Aire. Black with round fenders (my father said out loud they looked like a C cup) and fins.
It was a gangster car. Al Capone. Uzi out the back window. John Dillinger might have fled to Wisconsin from Chicago in this car.
Between the prom at a yacht club in Saugus, and the after-prom in the high school gym, my date's Chevy Bel Air sputtered out, and we switched to my father's Honda. Though it was a beige Accord, my date smiled with approval as I deftly maneuvered the stick shift.
I paused for a gathering of pigeons in a parking lot.
"You can't hit a pigeon," he said. I accelerated, and hit one instantly.
"Huh," he said. "I guess you can."
Such was my luck, for good or ill. Normally, running over a pigeon would have ruined my day. But I was living out the fantasy of a hundred hours in Algebra. I could not entertain regret.
It was morning when I drove him home. His driveway backed up to the same busy road as my mother's driveway. So, I was in my element.
Over the stick shift of a beige, gender-neutral hatchback, the engine revving for the tail fins of a 1957 Chevy, my date leaned over from the passenger's seat and kissed me once and twice.
"Sweet dreams," he said, closing the door behind him.
I found well being in the VW Rabbit, a tiny, boxy car that boasted high mileage. Its owner might be male or female, a gender neutral car. The vulnerability of such a thin-skinned vehicle required a defensive driver. A peaceful, harmless car.
Before I was born, my parents, newly wed, owned a Jaguar. Great fun to drive, when it would go, but impossible to maintain. They replaced it, when I was a toddler, with an off-white VW bug.
In his early twenties, my father raced motorcycles. A large plastic Yamaha sign covered a hole in the wall of the dining room, a fireplace without mantle or frame.
Dad crashed his motorcycle while racing in Daytona. He dislocated and ripped open his massive right shoulder. That was the end of racing for him.
In their mid twenties, my parents owned a white van.
When my mother left, at 29, she didn't take the van. She took a ride with friends.
Her first car in her new life was an ancient green Volvo station wagon with white fiberglass fenders. I had never seen anything like it. I hated it. It was appalling.
My father continued to drive the van while we had a Saint Bernard. After she died, he bought a beige Honda Accord with beige interior, a model he would drive throughout his forties.
My mother bought a series of lemons, which broke down whenever we tried to go away for the weekend. Her VW Microbus broke down in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania while the nuclear power plant at Three-Mile-Island was actively leaking contaminants.
When I was 15, Mom finally bought her first new car, a Datsun B210. It was small, indifferent to ergonomics, utterly manual, but low gas mileage and totally reliable. A little more pointy than I would have liked. Light blue, but gender neutral.
I learned to drive the Datsun B210 and the Honda Accord, both stick-shift.
I had to reverse out of my mother's driveway into congested two-lane traffic, across from C&L Liquor's. At the top of the hill, I had to stop for the traffic light, teetering on the accelerator, cars behind me, cars in front, sweat pouring down the back of my knees as if I were trying to speak French.
I remember driving on the highway in the Honda with my Learner's Permit, blood pressure rising through the roof. Begging Dad to let me pull over. He insisted I drive on.
In the midst of my lessons, my Golden Retriever was struck by a car on Lynn Shore Drive. He died. It was my mother's birthday, December 14. I didn't drive again for a year. No one asked me to.
For my senior prom, my date, one year younger than me but the handsomest, sexiest man I ever saw, picked me up at my father's house in a 1957 Chevy Bel Aire. Black with round fenders (my father said out loud they looked like a C cup) and fins.
It was a gangster car. Al Capone. Uzi out the back window. John Dillinger might have fled to Wisconsin from Chicago in this car.
Between the prom at a yacht club in Saugus, and the after-prom in the high school gym, my date's Chevy Bel Air sputtered out, and we switched to my father's Honda. Though it was a beige Accord, my date smiled with approval as I deftly maneuvered the stick shift.
I paused for a gathering of pigeons in a parking lot.
"You can't hit a pigeon," he said. I accelerated, and hit one instantly.
"Huh," he said. "I guess you can."
Such was my luck, for good or ill. Normally, running over a pigeon would have ruined my day. But I was living out the fantasy of a hundred hours in Algebra. I could not entertain regret.
It was morning when I drove him home. His driveway backed up to the same busy road as my mother's driveway. So, I was in my element.
Over the stick shift of a beige, gender-neutral hatchback, the engine revving for the tail fins of a 1957 Chevy, my date leaned over from the passenger's seat and kissed me once and twice.
"Sweet dreams," he said, closing the door behind him.
Sunday, August 4, 2019
Dear M. School Superintendent:
Dear M. School Superintendent:
As the parent of a tenth grader who goes to your high school, I happened to notice, with some alarm, that my son's history textbook was published in 1491, exactly one year before Christopher Columbus discovered America, and approximately 550 years before anyone realized that Columbus was quite a despicable character.
I am also unhappy about the fact that my son's biology textbook was published in 1860, and yet somehow fails to make any reference at all to Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species, published one year previous. That strikes me as a squandered opportunity.
I find this a shameful state of affairs, esp. when I think of the millions recently spent on sports. We now have more soccer fields than we have soccer players. We have a state-of-the-art weight room, multiple gymnasiums... But none of that changes the fact that the ratio of Olympic hopefuls to ordinary students in this town remains 887/.05.
Even if the millions spent on sports could raise those numbers to 500:3, is this really an accurate reflection of our academic priorities?
My son tells me that the computers at the high school are so old, the operating system involves a bolt of lightening and a key.
And while I can sort of wrap my mind around why the public schools no longer teach kids how to write in script such that a 15-year-old might know how to write his signature, I do hate to think of a grown person in 2025 viewing an original, hand-written manuscript from the 19th Century as though it were hieroglyphics.
Here is my primary point:
I had the expectation that my son's teachers would be able to write with approximately correct grammar and approximately logical syntax, within a 28% margin of error.
However, the writing that I have seen from your faculty does not quite rise to that low water mark.
Here, an example:
"While Gods [sic] for many religions is an essential component to their beliefs, (especially Western religions) this is not always the case."
First of all, "Gods," as a general plural noun, should not be capitalized.
Secondly, "is" should be "are," in agreement with the plural subject (gods).
Thirdly, religions are not sentient, ergo, they do not have beliefs. (In this respect, western religions are no exception.)
I have read similarly strangled efforts to write by my son's ___ teacher.
Here is what troubles me:
My son reads these sentences, fails to apprehend their meaning, and interprets that failure as his own.
Given my son's general respect for adults in positions of authority, and cloaked as those adults are in the vestments of education, my son of course would assume that what his teachers write must be sound and well reasoned.
This leap of faith becomes a liability on two fronts:
First, he absorbs the absence of understanding as his own failing.
Second, he absorbs the poor grammar and syntax as exemplified into lessons he will carry forward in his own writing. (Oh, no!)
For learners, this is disastrous. A teacher's failure to communicate poses a solid obstacle to learning.
Since the start of this letter, I have been informed that the new biology textbooks were published in 2007, and the computer lab has been updated to Windows 7. Hurrah! This is wonderful, and I applaud you for it.
However, my son's summer assignment for ___ continues to reflect an appallingly low level of writing. Could we not direct some of the resources poured into preparing our kids for careers as professional athletes toward raising our general standards and expectations for communicating with words?
Please?
Thank you.
Sincerely,
Disgruntled Mom
As the parent of a tenth grader who goes to your high school, I happened to notice, with some alarm, that my son's history textbook was published in 1491, exactly one year before Christopher Columbus discovered America, and approximately 550 years before anyone realized that Columbus was quite a despicable character.
I am also unhappy about the fact that my son's biology textbook was published in 1860, and yet somehow fails to make any reference at all to Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species, published one year previous. That strikes me as a squandered opportunity.
I find this a shameful state of affairs, esp. when I think of the millions recently spent on sports. We now have more soccer fields than we have soccer players. We have a state-of-the-art weight room, multiple gymnasiums... But none of that changes the fact that the ratio of Olympic hopefuls to ordinary students in this town remains 887/.05.
Even if the millions spent on sports could raise those numbers to 500:3, is this really an accurate reflection of our academic priorities?
My son tells me that the computers at the high school are so old, the operating system involves a bolt of lightening and a key.
And while I can sort of wrap my mind around why the public schools no longer teach kids how to write in script such that a 15-year-old might know how to write his signature, I do hate to think of a grown person in 2025 viewing an original, hand-written manuscript from the 19th Century as though it were hieroglyphics.
Here is my primary point:
I had the expectation that my son's teachers would be able to write with approximately correct grammar and approximately logical syntax, within a 28% margin of error.
However, the writing that I have seen from your faculty does not quite rise to that low water mark.
Here, an example:
"While Gods [sic] for many religions is an essential component to their beliefs, (especially Western religions) this is not always the case."
First of all, "Gods," as a general plural noun, should not be capitalized.
Secondly, "is" should be "are," in agreement with the plural subject (gods).
Thirdly, religions are not sentient, ergo, they do not have beliefs. (In this respect, western religions are no exception.)
I have read similarly strangled efforts to write by my son's ___ teacher.
Here is what troubles me:
My son reads these sentences, fails to apprehend their meaning, and interprets that failure as his own.
Given my son's general respect for adults in positions of authority, and cloaked as those adults are in the vestments of education, my son of course would assume that what his teachers write must be sound and well reasoned.
This leap of faith becomes a liability on two fronts:
First, he absorbs the absence of understanding as his own failing.
Second, he absorbs the poor grammar and syntax as exemplified into lessons he will carry forward in his own writing. (Oh, no!)
For learners, this is disastrous. A teacher's failure to communicate poses a solid obstacle to learning.
Since the start of this letter, I have been informed that the new biology textbooks were published in 2007, and the computer lab has been updated to Windows 7. Hurrah! This is wonderful, and I applaud you for it.
However, my son's summer assignment for ___ continues to reflect an appallingly low level of writing. Could we not direct some of the resources poured into preparing our kids for careers as professional athletes toward raising our general standards and expectations for communicating with words?
Please?
Thank you.
Sincerely,
Disgruntled Mom
Friday, July 5, 2019
My Encounter With An Active Shooter
I don't really enjoy fireworks that much. Yes, they can be spectacular, but they're loud; they dominate the sky; and they frighten pets, wildlife, and anyone sensitive to loud noises.
For the whole week of the Fourth of July, as night closes in, we have to accept the random intrusions upon our peace and quiet in the form of sudden blasts of explosives shot over our bow from a neighbor's backyard.
And that is why I forgot to organize a trip with my son to see fireworks.
Last year, he noted with some resentment that we had missed seeing fireworks altogether.
I felt badly for spoiling his July 4 last year, and solemnly promised to make it up to him.
Which is why, when I saw "Shake the Lake" on the FB events calendar, an evening of fireworks over lake Monona, I resigned myself to going.
I don't get out much.
In fact, I get out so infrequently that in between public appearances, I age.
I now have 35-50% white hair mixed in with red.
My skin pigment is now like paint that hasn't been adequately stirred, responding to the sun in glops and smears. Freckles merge, a spotty tan. Lilypad beauty marks bloom on my face. (Some people call these "liver spots," but those people are ageist and mean.)
But going out is an occasion when all the work I do on the farm pays off. I am fit, for my age. My arms, in particular, I may have mentioned, are ripped. And, if you ask me why, I'll tell you: Many buckets of manure, every day. That's my secret!
So, here I was, older, sylvan, splotchy, and well turned out in a floral flounce over cropped black yoga pants, big concentric-hoop beaded earrings...Very Boho.
We parked in a garage on Francis Street in Madison and set out toward University and State, where we turned right and walked, in the soft light of a sultry summer evening, toward the Capitol and, beyond that, Frank Lloyd Wright's Monona Convention Center on Lake Monona.
We were in good spirits.
I look at that floral flounce now, clean and laundered, and I wonder, Will I ever want to wear it again?
If I had been shot in that top, in those cropped yoga pants, wearing big hippy earrings...That's the outfit I would have died in. That's what I would have been wearing when they found me.
And that is not what I would have chosen to wear for that occasion. I would have worn something serious, simple, and tailored. Something that said: I am an intelligent, autonomous person, even if I have been destroyed by a stranger--randomly killed by someone who didn't want to kill me, per se, but only wanted the excitement of committing an act of violence, to experience the power of destruction.
As the object of that violence, my sole purpose was to be destroyed, being in all other ways of no interest or relevance to the killer.
To be that object, I would not have chosen to wear a loose floral flock and yoga pants. Would you?
On State Street, we stopped for ice cream.
The young man behind the counter was tall and excessively handsome, like a graduate student in philosophy.
I wanted a turtle sundae.
I looked up at the menu.
I said to the excessively handsome man behind the counter, "I would like a turtle sundae, but I see that it's not on your menu. Do you know how to make a turtle sundae?"
He nodded, with just a hint of exasperation, and I realized how condescending that question sounded and I was sorry. But why would a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy know how to make a turtle sundae?
He spent quite a long time making it. So much time, in fact, that someone else, a young woman, stepped up to serve my son; and I had paid and my son had turned and walked off by the time Handsome returned with my sundae.
The maraschino cherry quivered on the whipped cream. As I pivoted, it lurched and seemed about to topple. I heard the voice of Handsome behind me.
"Your cherry is falling! Let me get you another!"
I caught the cherry as it fell. I turned to Handsome and said, "It's okay. I got it. Thanks!"
I thought it was nice--oddly nice--that note of concern in his voice, like panic, that made me want to assure him that it was okay with the cherry.
We are psychic, aren't we. I mean, we are. This guy didn't know me, of course, but maybe he sensed something teetering about me that he saw in that cherry, which alarmed him.
Among throngs of people, we poured through the convention center like honey through a funnel.
Someone from security asked to peek inside my purse. Keys, phone, wallet.
Later, it would occur to me that they weren't asking any men to lift up their shirts. Men conceal weapons in their waistband. Most shooters are men. Peeking into women's purses is pretty pointless. A hollow gesture, at best, beyond which, to quote a news source, they didn't wish to be invasive.
We spiraled down several flights of stairs to Nolan Avenue by the lake--the lake which (I had not been here since winter) now smelled surprisingly rank with algae, floating, scum-like, on the surface of the water.
Thousands of people milled up and down the John Nolan Ave., (closed to cars) assessing the offerings of food trucks and vendors.
People-watching is something of a trick. Everyone does it, but I kept finding myself looking at people who were looking directly back at me, as though I had been staring.
We met up with my friend Charlotte and her little boy. Charlotte's husband soon joined us, and we sat around the small blanket that Charlotte had had the foresight to bring, along with a gallon of water.
My son and I walked off to survey the food trucks. He and I haggled over the inflated prices, long lines, the heat--with each other. In the end, I bought him an overpriced brisket with baked beans, and hoped that would make him truly happy.
I bought two Small bags of kettle corn; they were enormous.
I was thirsty; the beer lines were too long.
We sat and talked and waited until ten p.m.
I'm told they started exactly on time, but it seemed like they started late.
The sweat poured down my front and back, even though it was night time and I was only sitting and eating kettle-corn.
They haven't dredged the lake yet this year. I've also been told they never do. It smells appallingly bad.
The fireworks appeared behind a tree blocking our view, so we got up and walked toward the convention center, where a concert stage had been set up on the left of the overpass.
The fireworks were spectacular; they satisfied. Watching them, I thought about, but tried not to think about, how the noise, the suddenness, the explosiveness, how it took over the whole sky, irrespective of wildlife, without a thought to habitat.
I can be a hateful drag.
When it ended, as soon as it ended, we said good-bye to our friends, who turned back toward Willy Street toward home.
We three walked toward the Convention Center.
I overheard a man say to his son, "I think those were the best fireworks I've ever seen in my life." And then I saw that he was looking at me. He was looking straight at me, expecting me to chime in and agree, so I nodded and smiled: Yes, lovely, the greatest. And he smiled warmly back at me.
Was this how strangers respond to women my age? Have I been rendered universal by the silvering hair? The silvering hair interspersed with red, the strong arms, the soft frock, and the comfortable shoes?
And then Josh said, "Those might have been the best fireworks I've ever seen. I dunno'. Maybe not. They were pretty damn good, though."
"Will they hold you over for another twelve months?" I asked, hopefully.
Josh thought about it. "Maybe eight."
And that is when, at that precise moment--we had entered the overpass on our way back to the stairwell to proceed like honey through a funnel backwards up through Frank Lloyd Wright's convention center to Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard--when we heard multiple gunshots.
pow-pow pow-pow-pow
It was like that. Was it three or five? It was like pow-pow, pow-pow-pow. But all at once, from the direction of the overpass, where it was completely dark.
Beyond the overpass, on the other side where there was light, we saw people hurl themselves over the cement barricade. Cement barricades waist high.
There were a couple of guys near Josh and me. Phil, my husband, further ahead, was still slowly walking, weirdly unfazed.
This is not the sort of thing that fazes my husband--shots ringing out from the dark.
The shooter ran past Phil and threw down his gun.
Only Phil of the many thousands of people there knew that the shooter had thrown down his gun.
Later, Phil showed the police officer where the gun was.
Later that night, he called the police and told him what he was able to describe.
Two days later, Phil would scold me for leaving a pasture gate open.
"What if the horses got loose while you were away and I was the only one there to deal with them? Are you trying to give me a heart attack?"
(Point of fact: The horses have gotten loose many times. They mosey over to eat the grass on the other side of the fence, safe and sound--for hours. Eventually, they would wander back into the pasture.)
There were a couple of young guys near Josh and me who moved away swiftly as if to run, but changed their minds and jumped over the barricade and lay down like the other people had done.
The thought passed through my mind that, demographically speaking, these guys were doubtless gamers, accustomed to playing first-person shooter games. They would certainly know what to do.
This thought comforted me.
I watched as Josh got over the barrier and lay down.
"Mom, c'mon."
I got over the barrier without difficulty (quite fit!) and lay down beside Josh.
It was nice that we were next to each other.
I looked and saw someone--the shooter--run out of the overpass at a sprint.
"Stay down," someone told me.
Everyone believed there was more than one shooter.
By everyone, I mean us.
We waited.
And I thought, if these shooters are out to kill people, they must know that we are here, lying face down on the ground, and they will come shoot us.
I will be lying next to Josh when the shoot him. He will be lying next to me when they shoot me.
Like this, we waited, for maybe a minute.
A police officer arrived on foot.
"Are you okay? Are you hurt?"
We were all okay.
He told us where the exit was, back in the direction from which we'd walked.
The shooter had disappeared into the crowd.
We walked among a crowd of people for a mile.
At one intersection, a stop light, a guy in a muscle car revved his engine loudly for no reason. It frightened me. I thought they could be shooters. Maybe they would run us down. He revved the engine over and over. The light turned green, and he drove away, to my great relief.
The crowd thinned, and we still had a mile to walk.
"Well," said my 15-year-old. "I guess I can cross that off my bucket list."
Some people get cross when I tell them about that, as if being in an active shooter situation had actually been on my son's bucket list.
Being in an active shooter situation had not been on Josh's bucket list. This was just something he had said to make his mother laugh--which I thought was fucking heroic.
Back on John Nolan, a terrified crowd heard what happened and ran for the exits.
Whether it was more frightening to be closest to the shooter or furthest, I cannot say. Like those who ran in terror, I assumed this would be a well-planned mass shooting.
My husband, on the other hand, who saw the gun being fired and flung from the shooter's hand, would have rather been present there than at home with loose horses. To each his own.
I followed the news, but the news kept changing, like a weird rabbit hole out of Alice Through the Looking Glass.
First, it was one woman down, and one wounded officer.
For 36 hours, one woman down.
On the second day, she became a man. Man shot at Shake the Lake released from hospital.
I went back to review the links I posted to FB. They redacted the part about the woman. They added a quote from the mayor. They cut out the article boasting about drones. They shifted the tone of the police chief's response. They updated, redacted, and rewrote--leaving no record or evidence of errors or mistakes, misquotes, misstatements.
I felt like I was still back on the crime scene, behind yellow tape.
Maybe if they found the shooter and I knew the whole story, I could leave.
The weird news coverage fueled my anger and confusion.
Like any other phone app, Channel 3000 didn't have what I needed, and in fact, only made me feel worse.
I don't have the answers. I only have this story: Nice white lady encounters real-time shooter.
It's not more special than anyone else's story.
It's not more special than a black kid's story.
It's not more special than an immigrant child's story.
It's just one story.
Maybe, when everyone knows someone who has encountered an active shooter--the way everyone knows someone who has been robbed blind by medical bills--it will finally become a common cause.
Meanwhile, I am so done with fireworks.
For the whole week of the Fourth of July, as night closes in, we have to accept the random intrusions upon our peace and quiet in the form of sudden blasts of explosives shot over our bow from a neighbor's backyard.
And that is why I forgot to organize a trip with my son to see fireworks.
Last year, he noted with some resentment that we had missed seeing fireworks altogether.
I felt badly for spoiling his July 4 last year, and solemnly promised to make it up to him.
Which is why, when I saw "Shake the Lake" on the FB events calendar, an evening of fireworks over lake Monona, I resigned myself to going.
I don't get out much.
In fact, I get out so infrequently that in between public appearances, I age.
I now have 35-50% white hair mixed in with red.
My skin pigment is now like paint that hasn't been adequately stirred, responding to the sun in glops and smears. Freckles merge, a spotty tan. Lilypad beauty marks bloom on my face. (Some people call these "liver spots," but those people are ageist and mean.)
But going out is an occasion when all the work I do on the farm pays off. I am fit, for my age. My arms, in particular, I may have mentioned, are ripped. And, if you ask me why, I'll tell you: Many buckets of manure, every day. That's my secret!
So, here I was, older, sylvan, splotchy, and well turned out in a floral flounce over cropped black yoga pants, big concentric-hoop beaded earrings...Very Boho.
We parked in a garage on Francis Street in Madison and set out toward University and State, where we turned right and walked, in the soft light of a sultry summer evening, toward the Capitol and, beyond that, Frank Lloyd Wright's Monona Convention Center on Lake Monona.
We were in good spirits.
I look at that floral flounce now, clean and laundered, and I wonder, Will I ever want to wear it again?
If I had been shot in that top, in those cropped yoga pants, wearing big hippy earrings...That's the outfit I would have died in. That's what I would have been wearing when they found me.
And that is not what I would have chosen to wear for that occasion. I would have worn something serious, simple, and tailored. Something that said: I am an intelligent, autonomous person, even if I have been destroyed by a stranger--randomly killed by someone who didn't want to kill me, per se, but only wanted the excitement of committing an act of violence, to experience the power of destruction.
As the object of that violence, my sole purpose was to be destroyed, being in all other ways of no interest or relevance to the killer.
To be that object, I would not have chosen to wear a loose floral flock and yoga pants. Would you?
On State Street, we stopped for ice cream.
The young man behind the counter was tall and excessively handsome, like a graduate student in philosophy.
I wanted a turtle sundae.
I looked up at the menu.
I said to the excessively handsome man behind the counter, "I would like a turtle sundae, but I see that it's not on your menu. Do you know how to make a turtle sundae?"
He nodded, with just a hint of exasperation, and I realized how condescending that question sounded and I was sorry. But why would a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy know how to make a turtle sundae?
He spent quite a long time making it. So much time, in fact, that someone else, a young woman, stepped up to serve my son; and I had paid and my son had turned and walked off by the time Handsome returned with my sundae.
The maraschino cherry quivered on the whipped cream. As I pivoted, it lurched and seemed about to topple. I heard the voice of Handsome behind me.
"Your cherry is falling! Let me get you another!"
I caught the cherry as it fell. I turned to Handsome and said, "It's okay. I got it. Thanks!"
I thought it was nice--oddly nice--that note of concern in his voice, like panic, that made me want to assure him that it was okay with the cherry.
We are psychic, aren't we. I mean, we are. This guy didn't know me, of course, but maybe he sensed something teetering about me that he saw in that cherry, which alarmed him.
Among throngs of people, we poured through the convention center like honey through a funnel.
Someone from security asked to peek inside my purse. Keys, phone, wallet.
Later, it would occur to me that they weren't asking any men to lift up their shirts. Men conceal weapons in their waistband. Most shooters are men. Peeking into women's purses is pretty pointless. A hollow gesture, at best, beyond which, to quote a news source, they didn't wish to be invasive.
We spiraled down several flights of stairs to Nolan Avenue by the lake--the lake which (I had not been here since winter) now smelled surprisingly rank with algae, floating, scum-like, on the surface of the water.
Thousands of people milled up and down the John Nolan Ave., (closed to cars) assessing the offerings of food trucks and vendors.
People-watching is something of a trick. Everyone does it, but I kept finding myself looking at people who were looking directly back at me, as though I had been staring.
We met up with my friend Charlotte and her little boy. Charlotte's husband soon joined us, and we sat around the small blanket that Charlotte had had the foresight to bring, along with a gallon of water.
My son and I walked off to survey the food trucks. He and I haggled over the inflated prices, long lines, the heat--with each other. In the end, I bought him an overpriced brisket with baked beans, and hoped that would make him truly happy.
I bought two Small bags of kettle corn; they were enormous.
I was thirsty; the beer lines were too long.
We sat and talked and waited until ten p.m.
I'm told they started exactly on time, but it seemed like they started late.
The sweat poured down my front and back, even though it was night time and I was only sitting and eating kettle-corn.
They haven't dredged the lake yet this year. I've also been told they never do. It smells appallingly bad.
The fireworks appeared behind a tree blocking our view, so we got up and walked toward the convention center, where a concert stage had been set up on the left of the overpass.
The fireworks were spectacular; they satisfied. Watching them, I thought about, but tried not to think about, how the noise, the suddenness, the explosiveness, how it took over the whole sky, irrespective of wildlife, without a thought to habitat.
I can be a hateful drag.
When it ended, as soon as it ended, we said good-bye to our friends, who turned back toward Willy Street toward home.
We three walked toward the Convention Center.
I overheard a man say to his son, "I think those were the best fireworks I've ever seen in my life." And then I saw that he was looking at me. He was looking straight at me, expecting me to chime in and agree, so I nodded and smiled: Yes, lovely, the greatest. And he smiled warmly back at me.
Was this how strangers respond to women my age? Have I been rendered universal by the silvering hair? The silvering hair interspersed with red, the strong arms, the soft frock, and the comfortable shoes?
And then Josh said, "Those might have been the best fireworks I've ever seen. I dunno'. Maybe not. They were pretty damn good, though."
"Will they hold you over for another twelve months?" I asked, hopefully.
Josh thought about it. "Maybe eight."
And that is when, at that precise moment--we had entered the overpass on our way back to the stairwell to proceed like honey through a funnel backwards up through Frank Lloyd Wright's convention center to Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard--when we heard multiple gunshots.
pow-pow pow-pow-pow
It was like that. Was it three or five? It was like pow-pow, pow-pow-pow. But all at once, from the direction of the overpass, where it was completely dark.
Beyond the overpass, on the other side where there was light, we saw people hurl themselves over the cement barricade. Cement barricades waist high.
There were a couple of guys near Josh and me. Phil, my husband, further ahead, was still slowly walking, weirdly unfazed.
This is not the sort of thing that fazes my husband--shots ringing out from the dark.
The shooter ran past Phil and threw down his gun.
Only Phil of the many thousands of people there knew that the shooter had thrown down his gun.
Later, Phil showed the police officer where the gun was.
Later that night, he called the police and told him what he was able to describe.
Two days later, Phil would scold me for leaving a pasture gate open.
"What if the horses got loose while you were away and I was the only one there to deal with them? Are you trying to give me a heart attack?"
(Point of fact: The horses have gotten loose many times. They mosey over to eat the grass on the other side of the fence, safe and sound--for hours. Eventually, they would wander back into the pasture.)
There were a couple of young guys near Josh and me who moved away swiftly as if to run, but changed their minds and jumped over the barricade and lay down like the other people had done.
The thought passed through my mind that, demographically speaking, these guys were doubtless gamers, accustomed to playing first-person shooter games. They would certainly know what to do.
This thought comforted me.
I watched as Josh got over the barrier and lay down.
"Mom, c'mon."
I got over the barrier without difficulty (quite fit!) and lay down beside Josh.
It was nice that we were next to each other.
I looked and saw someone--the shooter--run out of the overpass at a sprint.
"Stay down," someone told me.
Everyone believed there was more than one shooter.
By everyone, I mean us.
We waited.
And I thought, if these shooters are out to kill people, they must know that we are here, lying face down on the ground, and they will come shoot us.
I will be lying next to Josh when the shoot him. He will be lying next to me when they shoot me.
Like this, we waited, for maybe a minute.
A police officer arrived on foot.
"Are you okay? Are you hurt?"
We were all okay.
He told us where the exit was, back in the direction from which we'd walked.
The shooter had disappeared into the crowd.
We walked among a crowd of people for a mile.
At one intersection, a stop light, a guy in a muscle car revved his engine loudly for no reason. It frightened me. I thought they could be shooters. Maybe they would run us down. He revved the engine over and over. The light turned green, and he drove away, to my great relief.
The crowd thinned, and we still had a mile to walk.
"Well," said my 15-year-old. "I guess I can cross that off my bucket list."
Some people get cross when I tell them about that, as if being in an active shooter situation had actually been on my son's bucket list.
Being in an active shooter situation had not been on Josh's bucket list. This was just something he had said to make his mother laugh--which I thought was fucking heroic.
Back on John Nolan, a terrified crowd heard what happened and ran for the exits.
Whether it was more frightening to be closest to the shooter or furthest, I cannot say. Like those who ran in terror, I assumed this would be a well-planned mass shooting.
My husband, on the other hand, who saw the gun being fired and flung from the shooter's hand, would have rather been present there than at home with loose horses. To each his own.
I followed the news, but the news kept changing, like a weird rabbit hole out of Alice Through the Looking Glass.
First, it was one woman down, and one wounded officer.
For 36 hours, one woman down.
On the second day, she became a man. Man shot at Shake the Lake released from hospital.
I went back to review the links I posted to FB. They redacted the part about the woman. They added a quote from the mayor. They cut out the article boasting about drones. They shifted the tone of the police chief's response. They updated, redacted, and rewrote--leaving no record or evidence of errors or mistakes, misquotes, misstatements.
I felt like I was still back on the crime scene, behind yellow tape.
Maybe if they found the shooter and I knew the whole story, I could leave.
The weird news coverage fueled my anger and confusion.
Like any other phone app, Channel 3000 didn't have what I needed, and in fact, only made me feel worse.
I don't have the answers. I only have this story: Nice white lady encounters real-time shooter.
It's not more special than anyone else's story.
It's not more special than a black kid's story.
It's not more special than an immigrant child's story.
It's just one story.
Maybe, when everyone knows someone who has encountered an active shooter--the way everyone knows someone who has been robbed blind by medical bills--it will finally become a common cause.
Meanwhile, I am so done with fireworks.
Saturday, June 29, 2019
A New Epoch for Farmers
If I lived in town, I don't think I would be as affected by climate change as I am currently. Of course, I would still feel badly when I read about places being devastated by hurricanes, floods, or wildfires. But, in terms of how climate change would affect me, personally, if I lived in town...? I don't think it would be such an inconvenience.
If I lived in town--in a house, say, just three miles away from here--I wouldn't mind consecutive days of rain and storms, the unseasonably cool month of June, the heat and humidity rising on the cusp of July.
I would dress in layers, or not go out at all. I would stay in my house, which would have central air. I would revert to my indoor life: read books, practice piano, blog sometimes, and watch way too much television.
But, I don't live in town. I live three miles outside of town, on a plot of land people refer to around somewhat disparagingly as a hobby-farm or a farm-ette.
I am reminded of our lesser status as a farm-ette every time I go to pay for my items at Blain's Farm and Fleet, and the cashier asks me (never unkindly) if it's farm-exempt, a tax break bestowed upon non-diminutive farms.
What makes a farm a farm is not a matter of acreage. I know of one farm smaller than ours that is farm-exempt. He grows stuff and sells it at a farmer's market. You have to make around $6,000 a year in farm-produced income to qualify for the exemption.
That's a lot of onions!
We don't remotely qualify for the exemption. We're absolute hobbyists. We have a lovely vegetable garden, raspberry bushes and strawberries, but they only get as far as our own kitchen table--or possibly a neighbor's.
And if it all gets eaten by unsavory bugs, well, that just means less salad for us.
We have two horses and a very small pony, who contribute great quantities of fertilizer to the compost, who delight and entertain us when they're not being naughty, and who otherwise offer no promise of gainful employment.
These are not lesson horses. They're not used to spending hours in all weather, under saddle. They've acclimated to the point where they expect a certain modicum of comfort at all times. They're not sheep (who don't know enough to step into the shade, and frequently die of heatstroke for that reason). They're not Englishmen. You won't find them outside at noon; you'll find them comfortably ensconced in the barn, vying for position in front of a very large fan.
Ours is an intimate farmala, utterly lacking in purpose.
And yet, you would not believe the sheer physical effort and time it takes to keep this yacht-ling afloat.
I now wend back to Climate Change, which is my topic, and the title of this new epoch.
Did I tell you how it went with the Polar Vortex? (It's my year of transition; I forget things.)
If I lived in town, it would have been a cozy respite from the usual running around, getting errands done. I would avoid going outside, of course, during the Polar Vortex, if I lived in town, except for the chance to throw boiling water into the air and videotape it.
But, here on the farmala, we have animals who live outside. (I choose "who" over "that" deliberately; these are my people, these creatures of habit.) When indoors, one must think of them and wonder, constantly, how they are doing, out there, outside, in the barn.
What is their threshold, beyond which blood grows sluggish and cold?
On the Wisconsin Horse Network Facebook page, women like me sought advice and reassurance from one another by the hundreds in comments beneath fretful questions that seemed to give voice to a collective consciousness racked with anxiety:
How are you keeping your horse warm?
Are you putting blankets on your horses?
Should I bring them in or leave them out?
Should I make a warm mash?
A bucket of tea?
What on earth can I do to sleep at night during this fucking cold-snap?
Somehow, the stentorian voices of experience rose above the din of frightened dilettantes like me, with a confidence that can only come from many, many years of experience and the hard lessons that time teaches.
As spoiled as they may be, there is a wildness in horses, something prepared to meet Nature head on, when called upon.
In the barn, out of the barn; in the end, it doesn't matter.
Here's what it boils down to:
Give them constant access to hay.
Make sure they have access to water, or offer them water several times a day, not too cold.
Put a blanket on old horses, or any horse recently brought up north from someplace else warm.
This turned out to be sage advice, but I went outside every few hours throughout the Polar Vortex, around the clock, to check the water and hay, and make sure that no one was shivering.
I put a blanket on the 23-year old, and, I swear to God, I could see the worry in his expression lift off his beautiful face, as exhalations billowed like cigarette smoke on the air.
I don't think any of the horses slept for days. It was just continual eating, feeding the furnace-like bellies, keeping themselves warm, staying alive.
Not long after the Polar Vortex loosened its grasp, there came the freezing rain, falling in torrents. It filled up fields meant for crops. By spring, some of those fields had been transformed into new wetlands, and taken over by ducks, cranes, swans, and gray herons....
But in winter, when the ground was frozen, the water, which ran in two rivers along either side of the aisle of my old dairy-barn, via culverts meant to divert bovine effluvia, left my Shetland pony's teacup feet more or less dry, as he stood there alone in the center aisle, marooned, as it were, on an island.
I would come out to the barn every couple of hours to rake up the debris, the hay and muck that halted the water's progress, now lapping at the heels of my pony.
I'd move a bale of hay out of the way, so it wouldn't be spoiled.
I'd use the push broom to direct the water's flow, from the north door through the barn and out the south door.
I filled hay bags and tied them up, out of the water's way.
Two horses stood in their stalls, several inches above the water passing beneath their stall door. They would eat and do all of their business there, perhaps recalling winters past--cold, but dry, and antediluvian.
There was a brief respite last month in June, between days of rain and mud, when it was cool and green and freshly alive...Before the bugs arrived.
And now, my days are punctuated by the careful purging of swarms of gnats that threaten to colonize the hides of my horses.
They appear in stall windows, suddenly, and by the thousands, thriving in a climate of stormy nights and steamy days.
I spray the windows with permethrin. I powder the windows with garlic. I strip out all of the shavings, and spread out lime and more chemicals and more garlic.
I have three atomizers in front of me filled with a new recipe for bug-repellant: four types of essential oils in an admixture of mouthwash and water. I also have a big bottle permethrin.
It's all the same: Good for five minutes. Like shooting zombies with a BB gun.
This is my life, now. I'm not saying I love it. I think about insecticide more than I care to admit. I attach fly masks to the horses' heads, but they shake them off, and I think maybe I should give them all another bath, but then they'll go roll in the dirt, right after. And maybe there's something to that. I don't know.
I think, if I lived in town, the Polar Vortex, the freezing rain, the unbidden ponds, the layer upon layers of ice in the pastures (covered, as an adaptation, with manure and shavings to improve the footing, so long-limbed creatures who live outside won't slip and break a leg or neck); the more rain in late spring; the more rain in summer; the lost fields; the fields too soft to seed, too soft to harvest; the high price of hay; the gnats that needle and swarm...
These are the dog-eared days of Chapter One of Climate Change: A New Epoch.
If I lived in town, just three miles away...if I didn't have these three noble beasts to care for...if I didn't have feeling for their concerns...if I did not have to go outside to care for them in all weather...I think this whole Climate Change thing, would not be such a nuisance.
Friday, May 3, 2019
A White Elephant
Wow! The FBI or CIA has done a good job expunging all the nefarious Eastern-bloc bots that had artificially driven up my blogger stats.
To be honest, I find it a bit of an adjustment. For years, I thought I was actually popular in Ukraine--after all, my father's people on his father's side came from Odessa. They were Barmacks. I figured, someone stumbled across the name and got curious, became a fan.
But, no, there is no ancestral connection or fandom here. Only wishful thinking on my part, and robots on theirs.
Moreover, my most vocal supporters clearly prefer it when I write about some topics and not others, or when I write witty prose instead of lard poetry. I can't explain their taste, but I assume they find it annoying when I jump the tracks, as I frequently do.
Anyhow, there is freedom in going largely unread. I would like to write about my health again, and for that I'm glad to have a limited audience.
Like money, politics, and religion, health is a touchy subject.
Caveat: I'M NOT DYING, so there's not much interest in what I have to report.
On the other hand, I don't think one should have to be dying to write about ill health--although I realize, from a literary perspective, that it helps.
If someone is able to be eloquent and, in a tonal sense, disinterested in how they describe their drawn-out experience of dying, then we will read it.
The tricky part is, it's like humor. You can't laugh at your own jokes, and you can't cry with self-pity, either. The author has to at least feign a stoic courage and detached interest in their own unraveling--which, they might argue, (correctly, I think) is a strange interstitial space, as integral to living as to dying, if not more so.
But it is a certain road, isn't it? And we're all on a road of some kind. You may be on the road to retirement, or the road to maturity, or the road to success.
If you're lucky, you're out on the open road, in search of adventure.
We're not all on the same road.
Chronic but not terminal disease is a road I'm on.
For those of you who remember, I had these tiny weird nefarious doo-hickeys removed from my reproductive organs, last spring. The inflammatory filaments associated with them fostered symptoms that exceeded the mandate of my disease: Sjogren's, with a touch of undifferentiated connective tissue disorder.
Like a great parfum mingles with your own body chemistry to create a uniquely personal scent, Sjogren's disease plays a different tune on every woman's body.
The primary symptoms are dry eyes and mouth.
I broke my first tooth in 2012. I was flossing, and it crumbled under the friction of the string.
A year later, I bit into a chicken sandwich at Burger King, and hit something solid that shouldn't have been in a chicken patty. It sent a jolt of pain through my jaw that radiated through my face and head and left me stunned for several seconds. When I came clear, I spit out half a tooth.
For someone who, all her life, had frequent anxiety dreams about losing her teeth, I found the reality of actually losing them much less disturbing.
In the dream, they fall out all at once, a metaphor of loss.
At Burger King, it was a single tooth. And, as painful as it was, it did not pack the emotional wallop of a metaphor. It was just a tooth. It was just pain. That's all there was to it.
Later, I had the remaining tooth pulled--under gas, which is my favorite anesthesia.
Honestly, when I'm under gas, you can take all my teeth, I don't care. I might comment about it in my head--but with real objective disinterest.
Once, when I was 25, they gave me valium intravenously for two impacted molars. I hallucinated, imagined I was being attacked and mugged by two or three people in a public park. It was a wooded path. I was still sobbing when they turned off the valium. A couple of attendants had been holding me down.
A sense of boredom sets in the moment they turn the gas off. And in those minutes of adjusting to not being well entertained in my head, I find I have a deeper appreciation for what drug addiction is all about.
It felt weird when they drilled the hole in my jaw for the artificial tooth--the implant that would be screwed into place.
I was under the gas, of course, so it didn't really bother me, but the thought floated through my consciousness like a cloud that maybe my jaw would break apart.
But then I remembered the extra bone at the base of my gum line--I can feel it through my cheeks on both sides--a horizontal rise that you would remark on if, say, you were examining my skull as an artifact in a museum, dry and apart from all flesh. You would see the hyper-ossification and excessive reinforcement undergirding a few chipped teeth. This would be my skull's distinguishing characteristic. Moreover, a kid might enjoy unscrewing the false tooth and screwing it back into place. My skull is destined to be a favorite.
As the surgeon drilled, I pictured those two bony outcrops as flying buttresses, fortifying the integrity of my jaw.
But the bills! The bills for the implant were several and steep.
And so it goes, with Sjogren's: I now have two crowns, one implant, and one empty space in the back of my mouth where there used to be a tooth.
I could have a second implant, there, but why? I chew just fine.
The dentist warned me, the absence of a tooth there could cause the one above it to sink down into the open space--or some such nonsense.
Thanks, but I'll take my chances. (Sounds like bullshit to me.)
I bought a blood pressure monitor on Amazon, because I was having issues with fatigue in the afternoon, and I wondered if blood pressure had anything to do with it.
I occasionally get a high blood pressure readings at the doctor's office--most recently, when I was about to have a lip biopsy--where they stick needles in my lip and pry out glands, for testing.
They wanted to confirm the original Sjogren's diagnosis. The lip biopsy, some say, (others disagree) is authoritative.
I got another high reading the first time I used it--high enough to put me in the type 2 category for hypertension.
But when I shimmied the cuff up higher up my arm, level with my heart, per directions, my blood pressure dropped down to normal.
Even so, sometimes it still tests high, so I do it again. The second time, it is normal. So this is the pattern: I do it once, I get a poor result. I relax. I think calming thoughts...I do it a second time and get a passing grade.
Frankly, I'm not sure it's worthwhile to have a blood pressure monitor at home.
My husband and my son both tested normal on their first try--on the same day my result was Level-2 hypertension on the verge of a stroke.
But then, the other night, just because it's there, on the table, in the dining room, irresistible, like a Magic Eight Ball, my husband got a very high reading as well.
He repeated the test, with alarming results.
Then he took off his shirt, and repeated the test.
Then he read the directions, and repeated the test.
Then he examined the cuff and decided that it was too small for his arm and so his results were fake, as in, fake facts--didn't really count.
He is content with that conclusion.
Meanwhile, I continue to have a poor reading followed by a normal reading. I choose to believe in the second reading.
And this is how it is with medicine, isn't it?
My old PA from Rheumatology left practice suddenly, without explanation. I wonder why.
She was nice, supportive, a little overeager to prescribe medicine.
She put me on a new drug that was supposed to keep my juices flowing. She told me to take one pill three times a day with meals.
I took the pill with breakfast and lunch, and then I nearly fainted for the first time in my life, right there in the post office. With difficulty, I drove the three miles home, my brain about to blow a circuit.
"She's got to be wrong," I thought. If I take another one of these pills, it will kill me. So, I didn't.
Recently, with concerns about high blood pressure, I read up on all the side effects associated with my medication.
For that prescription, among other side-effects, I read (this is real):
If you stop breathing...
If you pass out...
If you have no pulse...
Right. If you stop breathing, pass out, and have no pulse, call your fucking PA in rheumatology and complain, bitterly.
But fatigue was my biggest complaint. I had hoped that the demon coils were responsible for my afternoon exhaustion, but, over the last few months, the fatigue had crept back into my day.
My blood labs are interesting to read, as a measure of autoimmune-disease activity. But I don't know how any of it correlates to symptoms. And neither do they.
The primary medication I'm on is only effective 55% of the time, I read, and I suspect that I'm not among the lucky ones. However, it is the first and foremost medication for auto-immune disease. It's an anti-malarial, so I've got that going for me.
Side effects of Plaquenil: It's hard on the digestive system. I spend my entire morning belching because a single bowl of cereal.
They say fatigue is the hardest symptom to contravene.
So, I went online and found some vitamins and herbs that are supposed to support the immune system. (Theoretically, my immune system should be overactive--that is the nature of the disease; but I have a low white blood-cell count, and that's supposed to be my little army against disease, so what's with that?)
I am taking a lot of Vitamins C and D, as well Echinacea. I also upgraded to the old-lady vitamin. It has all the zinc and whatever, selenium, that I need in my decrepitude.
The result? Fatigue gone!
And you know what else I learned?
You know all those kooky, folksy people who can't afford health insurance and talk about how they never get sick because they drink and literally bathe in apple cider vinegar?
Do you know them?
I do.
I've been hearing about apple cider vinegar since I lived in Middleboro, Massachusetts, back in my early thirties.
I don't know why people give me unsolicited advice about apple cider vinegar, but they always do.
So, I'm looking up remedies for high blood pressure, right? And I'm on the Mayo Clinic website. It's saying I can lower my blood pressure significantly in 24 hours by ingesting two teaspoons of apple cider vinegar.
Apple cider vinegar: It balances the microbes in your stomach. It lowers your blood pressure. It moderates your weight. It keeps flies off horses. It keeps mineral stones from forming in their hind gut. I kid you not! This stuff does it all.
If you're not drinking apple cider vinegar every single day, you're really missing out on something big.
I pour it on salads, and use it in marinades. I may have to resort to drinking it straight, but that doesn't sound tasty, and I don't want to take on additional discomfort.
I pour it over my horses' grain, along with flax seed, which I buy cheap in 40# bags at the local feed store. It looks exactly the same as the overpriced stuff in the supermarket.
By the way, you MUST watch the Netflix documentary about the Mayo Clinic. It's called something like, The History of the Mayo Clinic, or similar. You can't miss it.
All hospitals should comport with the guiding principles of the Mayo Clinic. It's reprehensible that they don't.
This is the road of Sjogren's, undifferentiated connective tissue disorder, and the side-effects of medication. It's also the road of taking things into my own hands, of online research and hopeful experiments with vitamins and herbs, which, (placebo or not) seem to have chased away the cellular gloom that had cast a pall over my afternoons. It is the road of discernment, questioning authority, self-advocacy, and self-preservation. It is a road less traveled, and it can be lonely.
The worst thing about disease as a road is how it fails, as a metaphor, to depict real life. A road is linear in its essence and fails to suggest how I might possibly live a rich life simultaneously, with or despite the accompaniment of chronic disease.
I do have a good life, but this is not a disease that will go away. It does not take vacations. It has integrated and settled into my life...Something I didn't want, but now must keep: A white elephant.
To be honest, I find it a bit of an adjustment. For years, I thought I was actually popular in Ukraine--after all, my father's people on his father's side came from Odessa. They were Barmacks. I figured, someone stumbled across the name and got curious, became a fan.
But, no, there is no ancestral connection or fandom here. Only wishful thinking on my part, and robots on theirs.
Moreover, my most vocal supporters clearly prefer it when I write about some topics and not others, or when I write witty prose instead of lard poetry. I can't explain their taste, but I assume they find it annoying when I jump the tracks, as I frequently do.
Anyhow, there is freedom in going largely unread. I would like to write about my health again, and for that I'm glad to have a limited audience.
Like money, politics, and religion, health is a touchy subject.
Caveat: I'M NOT DYING, so there's not much interest in what I have to report.
On the other hand, I don't think one should have to be dying to write about ill health--although I realize, from a literary perspective, that it helps.
If someone is able to be eloquent and, in a tonal sense, disinterested in how they describe their drawn-out experience of dying, then we will read it.
The tricky part is, it's like humor. You can't laugh at your own jokes, and you can't cry with self-pity, either. The author has to at least feign a stoic courage and detached interest in their own unraveling--which, they might argue, (correctly, I think) is a strange interstitial space, as integral to living as to dying, if not more so.
But it is a certain road, isn't it? And we're all on a road of some kind. You may be on the road to retirement, or the road to maturity, or the road to success.
If you're lucky, you're out on the open road, in search of adventure.
We're not all on the same road.
Chronic but not terminal disease is a road I'm on.
For those of you who remember, I had these tiny weird nefarious doo-hickeys removed from my reproductive organs, last spring. The inflammatory filaments associated with them fostered symptoms that exceeded the mandate of my disease: Sjogren's, with a touch of undifferentiated connective tissue disorder.
Like a great parfum mingles with your own body chemistry to create a uniquely personal scent, Sjogren's disease plays a different tune on every woman's body.
The primary symptoms are dry eyes and mouth.
I broke my first tooth in 2012. I was flossing, and it crumbled under the friction of the string.
A year later, I bit into a chicken sandwich at Burger King, and hit something solid that shouldn't have been in a chicken patty. It sent a jolt of pain through my jaw that radiated through my face and head and left me stunned for several seconds. When I came clear, I spit out half a tooth.
For someone who, all her life, had frequent anxiety dreams about losing her teeth, I found the reality of actually losing them much less disturbing.
In the dream, they fall out all at once, a metaphor of loss.
At Burger King, it was a single tooth. And, as painful as it was, it did not pack the emotional wallop of a metaphor. It was just a tooth. It was just pain. That's all there was to it.
Later, I had the remaining tooth pulled--under gas, which is my favorite anesthesia.
Honestly, when I'm under gas, you can take all my teeth, I don't care. I might comment about it in my head--but with real objective disinterest.
Once, when I was 25, they gave me valium intravenously for two impacted molars. I hallucinated, imagined I was being attacked and mugged by two or three people in a public park. It was a wooded path. I was still sobbing when they turned off the valium. A couple of attendants had been holding me down.
A sense of boredom sets in the moment they turn the gas off. And in those minutes of adjusting to not being well entertained in my head, I find I have a deeper appreciation for what drug addiction is all about.
It felt weird when they drilled the hole in my jaw for the artificial tooth--the implant that would be screwed into place.
I was under the gas, of course, so it didn't really bother me, but the thought floated through my consciousness like a cloud that maybe my jaw would break apart.
But then I remembered the extra bone at the base of my gum line--I can feel it through my cheeks on both sides--a horizontal rise that you would remark on if, say, you were examining my skull as an artifact in a museum, dry and apart from all flesh. You would see the hyper-ossification and excessive reinforcement undergirding a few chipped teeth. This would be my skull's distinguishing characteristic. Moreover, a kid might enjoy unscrewing the false tooth and screwing it back into place. My skull is destined to be a favorite.
As the surgeon drilled, I pictured those two bony outcrops as flying buttresses, fortifying the integrity of my jaw.
But the bills! The bills for the implant were several and steep.
And so it goes, with Sjogren's: I now have two crowns, one implant, and one empty space in the back of my mouth where there used to be a tooth.
I could have a second implant, there, but why? I chew just fine.
The dentist warned me, the absence of a tooth there could cause the one above it to sink down into the open space--or some such nonsense.
Thanks, but I'll take my chances. (Sounds like bullshit to me.)
I bought a blood pressure monitor on Amazon, because I was having issues with fatigue in the afternoon, and I wondered if blood pressure had anything to do with it.
I occasionally get a high blood pressure readings at the doctor's office--most recently, when I was about to have a lip biopsy--where they stick needles in my lip and pry out glands, for testing.
They wanted to confirm the original Sjogren's diagnosis. The lip biopsy, some say, (others disagree) is authoritative.
I got another high reading the first time I used it--high enough to put me in the type 2 category for hypertension.
But when I shimmied the cuff up higher up my arm, level with my heart, per directions, my blood pressure dropped down to normal.
Even so, sometimes it still tests high, so I do it again. The second time, it is normal. So this is the pattern: I do it once, I get a poor result. I relax. I think calming thoughts...I do it a second time and get a passing grade.
Frankly, I'm not sure it's worthwhile to have a blood pressure monitor at home.
My husband and my son both tested normal on their first try--on the same day my result was Level-2 hypertension on the verge of a stroke.
But then, the other night, just because it's there, on the table, in the dining room, irresistible, like a Magic Eight Ball, my husband got a very high reading as well.
He repeated the test, with alarming results.
Then he took off his shirt, and repeated the test.
Then he read the directions, and repeated the test.
Then he examined the cuff and decided that it was too small for his arm and so his results were fake, as in, fake facts--didn't really count.
He is content with that conclusion.
Meanwhile, I continue to have a poor reading followed by a normal reading. I choose to believe in the second reading.
And this is how it is with medicine, isn't it?
My old PA from Rheumatology left practice suddenly, without explanation. I wonder why.
She was nice, supportive, a little overeager to prescribe medicine.
She put me on a new drug that was supposed to keep my juices flowing. She told me to take one pill three times a day with meals.
I took the pill with breakfast and lunch, and then I nearly fainted for the first time in my life, right there in the post office. With difficulty, I drove the three miles home, my brain about to blow a circuit.
"She's got to be wrong," I thought. If I take another one of these pills, it will kill me. So, I didn't.
Recently, with concerns about high blood pressure, I read up on all the side effects associated with my medication.
For that prescription, among other side-effects, I read (this is real):
If you stop breathing...
If you pass out...
If you have no pulse...
Right. If you stop breathing, pass out, and have no pulse, call your fucking PA in rheumatology and complain, bitterly.
But fatigue was my biggest complaint. I had hoped that the demon coils were responsible for my afternoon exhaustion, but, over the last few months, the fatigue had crept back into my day.
My blood labs are interesting to read, as a measure of autoimmune-disease activity. But I don't know how any of it correlates to symptoms. And neither do they.
The primary medication I'm on is only effective 55% of the time, I read, and I suspect that I'm not among the lucky ones. However, it is the first and foremost medication for auto-immune disease. It's an anti-malarial, so I've got that going for me.
Side effects of Plaquenil: It's hard on the digestive system. I spend my entire morning belching because a single bowl of cereal.
They say fatigue is the hardest symptom to contravene.
So, I went online and found some vitamins and herbs that are supposed to support the immune system. (Theoretically, my immune system should be overactive--that is the nature of the disease; but I have a low white blood-cell count, and that's supposed to be my little army against disease, so what's with that?)
I am taking a lot of Vitamins C and D, as well Echinacea. I also upgraded to the old-lady vitamin. It has all the zinc and whatever, selenium, that I need in my decrepitude.
The result? Fatigue gone!
And you know what else I learned?
You know all those kooky, folksy people who can't afford health insurance and talk about how they never get sick because they drink and literally bathe in apple cider vinegar?
Do you know them?
I do.
I've been hearing about apple cider vinegar since I lived in Middleboro, Massachusetts, back in my early thirties.
I don't know why people give me unsolicited advice about apple cider vinegar, but they always do.
So, I'm looking up remedies for high blood pressure, right? And I'm on the Mayo Clinic website. It's saying I can lower my blood pressure significantly in 24 hours by ingesting two teaspoons of apple cider vinegar.
Apple cider vinegar: It balances the microbes in your stomach. It lowers your blood pressure. It moderates your weight. It keeps flies off horses. It keeps mineral stones from forming in their hind gut. I kid you not! This stuff does it all.
If you're not drinking apple cider vinegar every single day, you're really missing out on something big.
I pour it on salads, and use it in marinades. I may have to resort to drinking it straight, but that doesn't sound tasty, and I don't want to take on additional discomfort.
I pour it over my horses' grain, along with flax seed, which I buy cheap in 40# bags at the local feed store. It looks exactly the same as the overpriced stuff in the supermarket.
By the way, you MUST watch the Netflix documentary about the Mayo Clinic. It's called something like, The History of the Mayo Clinic, or similar. You can't miss it.
All hospitals should comport with the guiding principles of the Mayo Clinic. It's reprehensible that they don't.
This is the road of Sjogren's, undifferentiated connective tissue disorder, and the side-effects of medication. It's also the road of taking things into my own hands, of online research and hopeful experiments with vitamins and herbs, which, (placebo or not) seem to have chased away the cellular gloom that had cast a pall over my afternoons. It is the road of discernment, questioning authority, self-advocacy, and self-preservation. It is a road less traveled, and it can be lonely.
The worst thing about disease as a road is how it fails, as a metaphor, to depict real life. A road is linear in its essence and fails to suggest how I might possibly live a rich life simultaneously, with or despite the accompaniment of chronic disease.
I do have a good life, but this is not a disease that will go away. It does not take vacations. It has integrated and settled into my life...Something I didn't want, but now must keep: A white elephant.
Saturday, April 20, 2019
The Emperor's New Clothes, Or, In Defense of Irony
Amid an onslaught of compelling news, I am struck by a few observations:
When an attic fire consumes the roof of Notre Dame, exposing the 800-year-old interior to sky, wind, and rain, France commits to the herculean quest of restoring its iconic cathedral.
But, in the United States, when the President surrounds himself with affirmed racists, criminals, sycophants, Russian spies, and (at least one) anarchist intent on dismantling democracy... NOTHING HAPPENS.
Not yet, anyway.
And meanwhile, at the same time, the American public has one epiphany after another:
1. Sexual harassment is a real problem and will not be tolerated.
2. Racism does not cease to exist when white people adjust their attitudes toward black people.
3. Gender identity varies.
4. Sexual preference and gender identity are two different things.
Why can't we see that the Emperor in his new clothes is in fact naked with toilet-paper stuck to his foot?
I suppose this shouldn't be so hard to grasp, for a person who lives in the purple state of Wisconsin.
Trump has campaign rallies in Appleton, Wisconsin--that long-time sunset city where for many years there was literally, planted right beside the Entering Appleton sign, another sign warning people of color in the rudest possible terms that their lives would be in danger if they were found on the city premises after sundown.
Meanwhile, the Democratic National Convention has chosen Milwaukee as its venue for the 2020 presidential primaries.
In the local news here this morning, there were three unrelated articles about sexual harassment and assault:
1. The husband of the dean at UW Whitewater has been found guilty of sexually harassing almost a dozen women students and faculty. The dean, who had steadfastly defended her husband against his accusers, has been asked to resign--and she has.
2. An 18-year old high school student/lifeguard recorded videos on his phone of unsuspecting female students changing out of their swimsuits. He has been charged with two felons but is still attending high school...
3. A high school principal came under fire by community and school faculty for his dismissive remarks in response to the sexual assault of a female student in the school bathroom by three boys. ("Kids will be kids.")
So, yeah. Consciousness has been raised, even in these Wisconsin enclaves. Boys-will-be-boys is no longer a valid excuse for sexual assault.
Yet still, somehow, collectively, we fail to see that the Emperor's New Clothes are NOT REALLY THERE.
Blame the Republican Senate--or ourselves, for not protesting as fiercely and relentlessly as, say, the French...Or blame the Russians, for embroidering the Emperor's wardrobe out of a web of misinformation.
But don't blame irony.
Have you heard the straight-up complaints from the anti-irony movement?
I first heard a diatribe against irony on NPR, saying in no uncertain terms that irony is straight-up slimy and bad, and that people should try to be straightforward and good.
I could not disagree more.
While it is true that some people use irony to evade speaking truthfully, and some people who use irony evasively are incredibly obnoxious and slippery, those people would be obnoxious truth-evaders with or without the use of irony.
Without irony, they would still have access to ridicule. They could be ridiculing. Salty. Offensive. Mean. Violent.
Irony itself is not the problem, nor the worst expression of the problem.
To focus on irony as the problem seems censorial.
If I were being paranoid, I'd go so far as to suggest that this silly brouhaha against irony is meant to muddy the waters of genuine concerns.
It bothers me that the anti-irony diatribe on NPR was delivered by a woman, inviting the listener to pair the new intolerance of sexual harassment with a new intolerance for irony, which is straight-up stupid.
I reject any possible tacit suggestion that opposition to irony is somehow a part of or stemming from the current women's movement.
As a woman who opposes sexual harassment and sexual assault, let me clarify, for the record: I'm totally okay with irony.
Moreover, I oppose the censorial spirit, and any possible mischief behind this noisy, foolish anti-irony bullshit.
It may be corny and sweet of me to be so direct, or maybe I'm just not feeling very witty, but yeah, irony is not the issue. It is not an issue. It is not.
In literature, irony is used to reflect the presence of God. You heard that right, friends: God.
Here's how it works: Everything is going along a certain path, and we in the audience, using our keen human minds, surmise the direction of that path.
But then irony happens, and nothing is as it seems, the path is otherwise, and we find ourselves humbled by false assumptions.
Through that ironic turn of events, the author has created our experience of being humbled and confounded.
That confounding and humbling gives us a sense of the mystery of God, of the unlimited possibilities of the universe (call it what you like).
In literature, irony creates a sense of the mysterious nature of God and universe. When we think we are right, we are wrong. God works in mysterious ways...In art, this mystery is revealed via irony.
In dialogue, literary and pedestrian, the alternate definition of irony (sarcasm, double meanings) conveys human duality.
I know, it's deep. And it's Saturday. And it's sunny outside. I apologize.
But think about it, if you care to: None of us are particularly straightforward, to the root. At some level, there is always a sideways glance, a wished-for impossibility, a harmless love of murder mysteries, a desperate devotion to church...somewhere, in all of us who are not protozoan, there are those contradictions that make us complicated and interesting and human.
And in literature, as in life, that quality of being human is often expressed through irony.
So that's it, in a nutshellL Irony is nothing more than a few brushstrokes to paint God, in one aspect; or ourselves, in another.
If you're going to rage against irony, you might as well yell at the brush and paint. Or a hammer. Or a nail. It's just a tool, and nothing more.
Although, for some, irony can be an instrument. For Shakespeare, a Stradivarius.
Wednesday, March 20, 2019
To Chicken? Or Not To Chicken?
Let me lay out a few facts:
1) We have a farm.
2) We have no chickens.
3) I yearn to travel.
That we have no chickens, no coincidence, is between two oppositional truths: having a farm and wanting to travel.
After much soul-searching, I decided, finally, that this is the period of my life when I have a farm.
I have been deluded with the very suburban assumption that I live between city and country, I can have the best of both worlds. To a limited extent, that is true. I can drive into Madison and get sushi.
I could spend this chapter of my life contemplating the life I don't have, but then I wouldn't be thoroughly enjoying this life that I wanted and chose to live. (When I lived in town and had the convenience and freedom of walking to the library and going away on trips, I spent a lot of time longing for country life. It was a yearning that ultimately could not be ignored.)
Living on a farm, and having brought outdoor animals safely through a long hard winter, it is time to savor the farming life, enjoy the long light days of spring, and stop, once and for all, wishing that anything was different. Because that is an asinine way to live.
So, chickens. YES, chickens!
We have an empty stall in the barn where we can house the baby chicks in a kiddy pool with a little warming lamp.
We have a ramshackle chicken coop next to the barn, and chickens would motivate us to fix it up nice again.
I have a form to fill out from the farm & feed store. I did my homework; I want Rhode Island Reds and Browns-- hearty, agreeable chickens that can make it through a Wisconsin winter, and maybe a Polar vortex.
The next question was simple: How many?
If we ended up with one rooster, accidentally--it's almost impossible to determine the sex of a chick--then we would need a dozen hens to fend him off.
Did you know that "sexing a chick" is a fine art (involving something about their anus) that literally requires years of training to learn, and you can make a very handsome living doing it, because so few people on the planet can do it reliably and accurately, and because so few people need more than one rooster?
If we didn't get a rooster, then we could do with five hens. But there's no way of knowing in advance whether they'll be a rooster in the lot or not, so, perhaps it would be wise to go with a baker's dozen.
Of course, then we'd also be more likely to get more than one rooster, and since each rooster requires a dozen hens to fend him off, we'd have to buy two dozen hens.
It would be best not to have any roosters, but, and this is the big philosophical conundrum about the hard realities of farming which even the most romantically inclined East Coast transplant can't ignore: More than one rooster is out of the question.
The second one has to go.
You know what I'm getting at. I'm talking about the grim prospect of killing a rooster.
But I've grappled with my share of death and gore on this farm--the unavoidable effluence of glorious summer days, blue skies and glossy horses grazing at pasture.
For every moment of transformative bliss, there is its counterpart.
Living in town shields one from all that.
I remember, when I lived in town, I got a call once from the barn where my horse was stabled. She had injured her mouth, it needed to be stitched up, and the vet had been called. By the time I arrived on the scene, there wasn't a drop of blood on the premises. It had all been cleaned up.
Here on the farm, when my horses disagree on some pressing issue, and one of them lurches toward the other to press his point home, and the other recoils and leaps back into his door latch and tears open his shoulder...Well, heck, I was standing right there when it happened. (It was a windy day, and the wind kinda freaks horses out, as do so many things.)
So, I'm thinking, now, after all of the trauma I've been through with life and death and the in-between, I can handle the mortality of chickens.
Of course, these won't be meat chickens. We're not savages. (Kidding! Totally respect people who kill their own meat. I just don't want to do it.)
I have a Margaret Wise Brown view of farming, still. I'm what Real Midwestern Farm Wives call being stupid. I get it. No offense taken.
So, I was talking to my friend, Krista, who grew up among the Amish, who are seriously bad-ass farmers. (Respect!)
A dog kennel fence works best, she said.
I pictured a six-foot tall chain-link fence enclosing my pastoral chicken run.
And then you have to put netting across the top, she said, because the raccoons climb up the fence. They have hands.
I pictured a raccoon tumbling into and falling spread-eagle onto a trampoline of netting, bouncing there for a while, face down and gazing with frustration at the chickens safe below. Excellent.
What else?
Chicken poop: It smells worse than anything in the world.
Really? Not worse than dog shit, surely.
Worse.
Ew.
We used to clean the coop out every day with a power washer.
Every day?
But we had like, 29 chickens.
I only want 13 or five, depending.
If you have a rooster, it's going to fertilize the eggs. A hen will get broody and wander off. You won't see her for a while, and maybe you think a hawk has got her. But then, one day, she'll come strutting out into the yard followed by a band of chicks.
How cute!, I thought. And how terribly inconvenient.
We'll collect the eggs, I said. (For this, I received the Midwestern Farm Wives' glance: Yeah... Good luck with that.)
By the way, I suggest cracking your eggs open into a bowl, rather than into the pan or batter directly.
I knew what she was getting at; I did not require explanation.
Because of the partially formed chicks, she said.
Okay, let's talk about something else.
What are you going to do if you get two roosters? The Rhode Island Reds aren't bad [as meat]. Would you kill it?
I guess. Someone else will have to do it.
It's not hard, she said. You go into the coop just before dawn, about ten minutes before they wake up. You squash your hand down in the middle of their back; and then, with your other arm...Wait, how did that work? [She gestured with her arms in the air as if to apply pressure to a roosting foul and with her other arm, made less certain, sweeping gestures. What the heck was she trying to do?]
You don't want the wings flapping in your face. It's very alarming to hold a rooster with wings flapping in your face.
You can kill it for me, I said.
I could do that. For a chicken or two.
Geez, I thought. I've tapped into Krista's deepest agricultural instincts: We were now bartering: One kill for two chickens.
Who's going to kill the other chicken?
Maybe, I won't get chickens. I said it out loud and I meant it. But I wasn't sure. I was giving up a lot: the whole point, really, was to embrace my life on the farm--every part of being on a farm--which meant chickens, obviously.
My friend gave me a lot to think about...a lot of grim reality to mull over.
I suppose I should thank her for rubbing the guild off the lily.
Now, when I picture a blue plastic kiddy pool full of fluffy baby chicks, I have a few competing images I can't get out of my head.
Farming. You have to be okay with predation and killing.
You have to see yourself in the food-chain of events, playing your part, making your plans, trying to thwart nature at every turn--foolishly imagining you can.
The chicken form is due by the end of next week. I still haven't made up my mind.
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