25 December 2014

So many things going on.  So much on my mind.  And like almost everything else I'm responsible for these days, I lose track of it, i.e., my thoughts, in a matter of minutes.  Oh.  Well.  Merry Christmas to those for whom it still matters.  I've been up since 2:30 this morning, a consequence of a changed schedule (the university is closed through New Year's) and too much contact with other human beings.  This is what happens to introverts when their social quota is exceeded.

Anyway, here's what I find interesting:

1.  It would be a good idea, at least in these United States, to put a moratorium on receiving gifts by the age of 40.  That way, you have (hopefully) a couple of decades and change to give them away and you don't have to rush.  I've owned (and lost) more than I either need or want for a long, long time.  Lately I walk around with a mental Post-It tagging who should get what.  The sentimental items are the hardest.  I don't want my family to be asking each other why I saved one pecan in my mementos box.  (A love story.)  They can understand the Jesse Jackson for President 1988 button, and I expect them to get a good price for it on e-Bay.  But, some of the other stuff, all they'll say before they throw things in the dumpster is:  what was she thinking?  So, to spare my feelings after death and to spare my family work they won't want to do anyway, I often wish that I had fewer things to decide what to do with.  In our family we've gone the quick and dirty route before (see Annals of Marriage, 2009:  Cuthbert Burns Down the House Because He Didn't Want to Clean the Bathrooms).  But, you can't do that too often.  Anyway, file this under First World Problems.

2.  Ray and Janay Price.  I finally get it, after reading about the longer version of the Killa-from-Manila tape.  Those two met when what, they were 15?  They complete each other; two halves who make a whole.

3.  Today is quiet.  Eventually my niece and her mother will come over to exchange gifts and eat.  The grown kids are doing their thing(s).  The brothers, theirs.  We'll all see each other when we see each others.  A few phone calls to friends and family far and wide.  I wonder when time management self-help books are written if anyone thinks to advise one that if you just omit Christmas you probably gain about 24 more hours in the year.  No shopping.  No card writing.  No travelling.  Plus, real life stresses me out enough; I'm old enough (and wise enough) not to add this kind of artificial stress.  I got deracinated of Christmas slowly over the years.  Part of it was estrangement from my parents (so going home was not an unalloyed joy) and much of it was poverty.  Once you decide that you can't keep up with the Jones' -- could barely keep up with myself -- some of us just let go.  If that doesn't work move into an orthodox Jewish neighborhood.  Christmas, what Christmas?

4.  Still enjoying my work enormously.  Complex, diverse, challenging and creative.  This upcoming semester will be a test of whether I can manage it and another math course.  In preparation I made sure I have a very very short haircut so that when my hair starts to fall out from stress alopecia the contrast won't be so severe.  You can't say I don't plan ahead!

5.  Don't mistake the absence of any remarks about Mike Brown or Eric Garner or Tamir Rice for a lack of interest.  (After all, I started this blog because I was incandescently angry about the controversy over the "Ground Zero" mosque.)  But, for now I work on the margins of resistance to violence, and if ever I can say something comprehensive about it, I will.  This I will say:  It's the first sixth of the 21st century and here in the US of A we have to articulate that Black Lives Matter.  For me, and many of those my age, that reveals a stunning loss of ground.

When I first envisioned writing this post, it was a lot more interesting and free-rangy.  But not wanting to make the perfect the enemy of the good, I said to myself, get something out because you never know when you'll be back here.  (This blog is like a seldom visited room in my house.  I scarcely know what's in here.)

Ciao, bella.  See you when I see you.

I've Been Across the River

It has been almost 6 weeks since I've been here.  Even for me that's a surprising absence.  This time I can't blame it on mathematics -- I'm in school, yes, but taking an educational foundations course, not a come-to-Jesus math course.  So, that's not it.  But what is, is that I am now working for somebody else (part-time) and I haven't figured out the line between impolitic and sometimes profane discourse (this blog) and my job responsibilities.  This will be the first of many attempts in real time to do so.

As I said before, I turned 60 this year.  It's been glorious and I may well celebrate it for the entire 365 days I'll be this age.  Husband, son-in-law and daughter conspired to throw a party in Brooklyn that was Absolutely Fabulous™ what with friends long- and short-term, great food, dancing, my own personal 60 crown with feathers and glittery pipecleaners, and a kick-ass pair of false eyelashes which I'm conspiring to wear again.

I returned to Planet New Haven to resume a life of studying American education, and enjoying a wonderful job that is both a continuation and an extension of some of the public health work I've done here as a citizen-activist.  Both in school and at work I am overwhelmed (in the best sense) by what I'm learning.  I feel myself to be fortunate indeed.

Of course, in times like these, I barely write.  So, once again I'me struggling with the paradox of being stimulated by so much that is new and being energy- and time-delimited from trying to turn it into fiction.  At best, and as far as I'm concerned it's a nourishing best, I will write some for my course, "The Child in the American Culture".  The title seems innocuous, and godknows, American education courses get dinged all the time for being content-lite, but I'm getting a lot out of this one.  The professor is a kooky pro and students, as they will, mistake her kookiness for a tolerance of mediocrity.  But she's sly:  she'll let a student get as much or as little out of the class as they want.  She asked us after a few classes how we wanted to conduct the remainder of the course.  Currently, we have a dense chapter a week to read and then a student has to present on the assigned chapter; and we've been given a few independent research assignments.  She wanted to know what else we wanted to do, and as she polled I kept hearing:  I find the textbook (American Education by Joel Spring) hard to understand so I'd like to discuss it in class ...

Now.  I gotta tell you that 1) even state school tuition's expensive and I am always conscious of paying for this 3 hours, once per week course that starts at 7:30 in the evening and  2) the textbook is hard to get through because in a typical chapter the author can cover decades of  Supreme Court decisions that altered American education, educational theory and contemporary movements in education, and an analysis of the impact of No Child Left Behind on say, bilingual education.  In all fairness to the other students, a majority of whom are in their early to mid-20's, the book's not easy and the hour is late.  But, goddamn.  The people in this room are, for better or worse, going to shape generations of American minds, and if there's one thing I know about learning it is if you can't demonstrate that you've learned something, you can't teach it.

So, when she rolled around to me, I was bloody, but I was quick.  I simply said that I was about 25 - 30 years older than most of the other students in this class and frankly, I don't know how much value I'll get out of classroom discussion (although I did say that I could be surprised), and that some of what Spring writes about I've lived, that many of the Court's decisions I read as contemporaneous accounts, I've raised kids, I'm a writer and I'm used to writing and so, in addition to in-class discussion, I vote for having to do a research paper.  Or, as I put it to friends:  Oh hell no I'm not paying to show up for 3 hours at night to hear some 20 year old talk about their feelings (largely because they're so incurious and ahistorical that although they are probably going to teach in public school they've never heard about Brown v. Topeka Board of Education, or Dred Scott, or how Loudon County Virginia closed it's public schools for years as opposed to desegregate, or the genesis of charter schools and magnet schools in Connecticut).

And so the course is a hybrid of class discussion as before, and a research paper where the first draft is to be shared with a partner to critique (a suggestion of yours truly) before the final version is written.  People, a little rigor here, please?

One friend said to me that the others will appreciate what I did later.  Don't know; don't care.  This is the minimum I demand of myself.

Tomorrow I leave for New Orleans (pronounced Nawlins) for a national meeting.  I haven't been there in 35 years since I graduated from college.  Loathed the place back then -- much of what I learned about the enduring trauma of racial oppression I learned in Louisiana -- and will probably see very little of it this time what with being consumed by presentations and meetings.  Didn't gloat when Katrina happened, it made a profoundly unjust culture exponentially worse, but am not sentimental about the place or its cultural roots or its food.  But, as in the case of my 20 something classmates, I may be surprised.  One can hope.

So, until the next intermittent dispatch, au revoir.

Saturday Poetry: Upon Seeing Fred in Bronze

It was the spring of year four

By then Fred was out of the luxury digs of Mt. Sinai.

We were back on Lorimer St.

He reclining

Me, as I was often during those years

Leaning in leaning over listening for news

From his body.

Aah, Fred, I said, as I counted the stitches down his torso

And brushed the medallion of skin made by his port.

Aah Fred, look at what the surgeons have gifted you

A way out, a way forward.

But not for his soul

for his waste.

Aah Fred and I leaned in closer

because now it was my turn to come to terms

with the positive and negative space of him.

Fred I said

You got you one hell of a crater.

And we laughed as we crossed that bridge.

Years later Bronze Fred stood before me:

I know you I said, how I know you.

Of course it made all the sense in the world to me that

Fred was decked out in saxophone keys

With good luck where the port used to be

Only partially clothed in splendor

Which was true during the days when wounds needed air.

The professorial specs

The eyes joined by his troublemaking grin.

I looked at Bronze Fred.

He looked at me.

We laughed.

Sixto

I'm 60 this month.

It is fall and I have the house to myself for a few weeks because Cuthbert is in Ireland.  And judging from the reports of aches and pains he's experiencing, I think he's just realized he's not the Strapping Young Lad he used to be.  (I tried ta tell 'em, but do he lissen to me?)

I am not taking a math class this semester so I will not be having my bi-annual Nervous Breakdown.

I have started a new job (part-time) which I will enjoy enormously.  I now consider myself the poster child for 2nd chances. I work with people who have a sense of mission and are (com)passionate.

Instead of math this semester, I'm enrolled in a course called, "The Child in American Culture," which until I attended my first session I feared would be an egregious waste of my hard-earned tuition dollars.  (When you're obtaining teaching credentials you have to take education courses.  Derp.)  Boy, was I wrong:  We will look at the aforementioned child through the lenses of history, gender studies, political science, economics, psychology, sociology, education.  (Have I left any discipline out?)  I'm pretty sure I will have to have a zipper surgically embedded in my mouth; but try as I might I always wind up scaring the horses and children.

I'm 60, y'all.  I.  Don't.  Care.

#YaddaYaddaYadda

Those who know me know I don't do Facebook.  And they know the reasons why.  So, it's no surprise to you that I don't tweet either.  It seems the nouvelle cheap and easy way to express one's outrage or ardor.  Like bumper stickers.  And t-shirts.  Advertisements that show I CARE™ and then we can move on having established our bona fides.  Wrong and injustice take a long time, sometimes a lifetime or two, to remedy.  They require courage, sacrifice, a tolerance for failure and being shunned, perservance, and the capacity to imagine a change you may not live to see.

Voicing online indignation about the precipitating event(s) that brings a wrong to our attention -- whether the murder of a black boy, the beheading of a journalist by fanatics, the war in Gaza or the humiliation and degradation of a wife -- and slapping a pound sign in front of it demands none of that. 

America, America, God Shed His Grace on Thee ...

When Kim and I decided to go on vacation we had every intention of heading northwards.  She from Indiana, me from Connecticut.  First it was Montreal, a precursor to Paris; then Northern Michigan, Great Lakes country to rendezvous with another Brooklynite, eventually making our way to Chicago, then home.  That being decided I flew out to Chicago, she picked me up the following day and we returned to Indiana for her medical appointments before taking off.  In no time we were in Louisville, KY.  You know how these things go:  we are going to get There from Here.

So, I have been in Middle America, and now South for a few days.  When you've spent most of your adult life in the cloistered, crowded, and urban Northeast, you forget (or I do) how huge, how vastly beautiful this country is.  Despite our expansive in geography we seem so miserly in spirit.  We as a collective are unbelievably endowed with resources, space, security and wealth.  But, as a nation we are collectively selfish, mean, greedy, callous towards and inordinately fearful of each other.  Perhaps I'm writing this because I've spent days in places where people of color, and I don't mean it as a euphemism, but literally, are few and far between.  I am back in places where I turn heads, and not for flattering reasons, where if there is a greeting exchanged I'm often the first to speak.  Also, my friend and I are an odd pair -- one white, one black, both middle-aged, both short-haired.  It's hard to know what we are, which disturbs people, but we are pros at being incandescently non-threatening.  And still I often sense a wariness that isn't specific to me (or us) but that seems to come from the social isolation we Americans suffer from.  Too many of us only know the other through television and movies, through sensationalized crises and the accompanying superficial and portentous analysis that is on-air news reporting.  It gives us a false knowledge -- "those white people do ...", "black people always ..." and other iterations that lead to illogical, and incorrect conclusions about others' behavior.  And reinforce prejudices, the ones we need to keep to justify how we live as a divided nation.

Others have written well and extensively about the decimation of the American landscape as the interstate system grew and micro-cultures and towns either vanished or were absorbed by consolidating industrialization and retail.  That's so apparent to me on this trip, too.  In the cities we've made a fetish of authenticity, historical preservation and artisanal living in a Hans Brinkerish attempt to stave off rapacious ecologically destructive modernity.  We pick and choose what parts of our lives will be lived in the 19th century as opposed to the 21st.  In other places that don't value or cultivate creative tension (which brings uncertainty and the threat of upsetting order) there is less dissonance.  It seems as if the denaturing of American's beauty and distinctiveness meets little or no objection.  And when there are attempts to revive places there is an air of contrivance (cf. the restored downtowns of many small cities).

I brought reading with me, the kind that I never seem to have enough time to do while at home.  I finally started Taylor Branch's At Canaan's Edge, the last of his magnificent trilogy of "America in the King Years".  No accident bringing this, although at the time I pulled it from my shelf I really didn't know we've travelling south, and it is a fantastic counterpoint to being in places like Louisville, Nashville, Memphis.  I am as intrigued reading modern American history as I am in how it is depicted.  I'm always looking to see how a matter like segregation is presented on the placards that explain the significance of a once-grand hotel, or movie house or a prominent business.  The elisions, the absence of photographic evidence, the galloping prose that brings us to the present.

Our present:  the shooting and police response in Ferguson, MO and the Tea Party and the 21st century strain of anti-immigrant nativism that manifests itself as callousness towards the fate of children and youth coming from Latin America and the delegitimization of the Obama Presidency with talk of impeachment and the shit sandwich that goes for cultural and political discourse on the media and a civic culture so fragile that a committment to universal, public education is imperiled and the siphoning upwards of political power and wealth.


  

Gone to the store ...

... to get cigarettes.  Will be back in approximately 14 days.

I'm off for a vacation where there is no fixed destination, no reservations, no sure itinerary, and no guaranteed return date.

One reason I don't care for vacations is that you have to plan them.  I don't care enough about frequent flyer miles, or hotel and auto discounts to be that organized about it.  All I want to know is where I can get my morning coffee.

Flying to Chicago on Tuesday.  All the rest is TBD.

Happy Birthday, Mr. President

Lately I've been getting e-mails from Michelle Obama asking me, beseeching me, really, to sign Barack's birthday card.  I've been thinking about it.  Ordinarily, if this was an office situation and I'd been asked to sign a card for an executive who was way way above my paygrade, I'd decline.  Chances are I wouldn't know him or her, and to sign the card would be to insinuate myself into their personal life for no other reason than I wanted to score points or just get-along-to-go-along.  But I admire the man, and might make an exception to my own rule.  Perhaps more than any president in my lifetime I wish Barack Obama as many birthdays (happy or otherwise) as he can have. There is such derangement in this country that every day seems to offer up a fresh opportunity for some aggrieved and put upon fin de siecle white guy to imagine himself the hero assassin of the President.  Can't cut more food stamps for the poor?  Shoot him.  Can't win the war in Iraq?  Shoot him.  Can't stop the tide of brown children from Central America who are coming here to take our jobs, and, as soon as they grow up, rape our women?  Shoot.  Him.  All of that to say that birthdays are not preordained for that man; so I hope he'll have his next one.

But Michelle's request notwithstanding, coming as it does in the midst of a slaughter in Gaza, I can't sign the card.  Because really, I've been so over Israel for decades.  Back in the 1980's, June Jordan and other leftist academics (who are so fashionably lampooned by smug libertarians and the unctuous assholes who love them) were publishing works about Israel as an apartheid state.  And Israel's support of its sister regime in South Africa.  This is Israel:  they spy on us, they have such power in the halls of Congress that both the Senate and House passed unanimous resolutions in support of this phase of the war.  (Now, I ask you, where else in the history of the Obama's presidency have House and Senate Republicans unanimously agreed with him on Anything?  Makes you wonder how that's even possible.)  They are the recipient of billions of US tax dollars that purchases weaponry (and no doubt intelligence) that advantages them to wage asymmetrical, brutalizing war based on any rationale that suits Israel at the time.  (See Gulf of Tonkin attack, Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction, the kidnapping and murder of 3 Israeli teenagers.)

And now -- what? almost 30 years later -- we have to listen to the likes of Barack Obama, a man who certainly knows better, trot out all that hum-de-hum-hum about Israel's right to defend itself.  Our stalwart friend in the Middle East, yada yada yada.  (If I paid a man to have sex with me on a regular basis and laugh at my jokes do I also have to stand in front of mikes and call him my friend?)  It would be insincere of me, Mr. President, to sign your card.  I wish I could say the same for your support of Israel's actions; but I can't.

A Cure for Everything But Death

Although I will never write a memoir -- buried bodies will remain buried bodies -- I do tend to think of my life in narrative.  What is the story?  I've been home since mid-April and were you to draw a picture of my life it would be typified by sitting at this desk in this office working with various mounds of papers -- the taxes, the medical bills, the scripts, the insurance, and so on and so forth.  For more than a year I've meant to re-write my will.  Since the last one was signed we've moved states, I haven't stabbed my spouse, my proxy grandchild has been born, and I've inherited money and intellectual property rights from a friend.  In other words, things have changed.  A lot.

I've been giving a lot of thought to who gets what and why. I have my own literary estate that matters enough to me that I'd like someone to take care of it.  And I want to provide for the generations after me.  So now I realize that this chapter, this spring and summer, is about organizing my life in the inevitable event of my death.  For someone like me doing this (although much of this work is tedious, if not downright boring) it is a "prophylactic", a cure for everything but Death.  I like order, a sense of control, a certainty that things are in place.  I don't consider what I'm doing death-defying behavior; this is death-acknowledging behavior.  I die and my physical and intellectual property is left behind.

Part of reconstructing the life of the dead is a treasure hunt.  My husband, and the rest of my family will finally have answers to questions they dare not ask me.  They will be capable of seeing who I was before they knew me, before I belonged to them.  That is, if they wish.  My intention (if I'm able) is to leave much of it behind -- the flash drives of files, the hard copies of correspondence, the souvenirs and letters from friends and family, the mementos.  Even my unfinished fiction and poetry.  (Although I suspect that I'll burn all that if time and circumstance permits.)

B'lievemewhenItellyou that I'm not at all morose, just realistic.  

I Hate Summer, 2014 edition

It's not that it's been a particularly bad summer.  In my role as Stoic Eco-Queen I try not to run the A/C too much and so far I've succeeded.  The worst thing that has happened is the Allergy Malady and I continue to remain in denial that my front and back yards have become a menace.  I am growing all kinds of flora in the front; some of it I recognize, others are "migrants". (True gardeners call them "volunteers" which I've never understood because if you were a seed and the wind blew you into my yard, or a cat shat (thank you! Dr. Seuss) you into my soil would you say that you had volunteered to grow there?  I mean, if you were a seed.)  Some of my migrants are undoubtedly weeds and drive the people who walk around with spray cans full of Round-Up mad.  I keep them because I'm curious, wondering what they will become.

One such plant with large lozenge-shaped leaves produced aureoles of delicate pale white flowers.  Now that those have died it's producing pods the size of a Christmas ornament.  And this is where the Annie Dillard in me stops and girl who watched Invasion of the Body Snatchers one time too many takes over.  I am actually expecting them to develop into pod people.  I fully expect to come downstairs in mid-August, make my espresso, sit in the dining room window and only to find that Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter have metastasized right before my very eyes.

Meanwhile Back at the Ranch ....

Believe me when I tell you that I had all good intentions to check in last Saturday -- the holiday be damned -- now that I am posting again.  But, as we all know what the Road to Hell is paved with, yes?

The truth is I was asleep.  For like 20 hours a day.  In the midst of a weekend visit by friends I got sick.  It was, mirabile dictu, a virulent response to something that's blooming, sailing through the air,or  being shat in my yard by birds or feral cats.  Being the logical type I tried to figure out, with the help of Cuthbert who got his Ph.D. in the Science of Mind from the Matchbook University of the Greater Palo Alto Community School District, why this had happen a moi after a decade or more of being seasonal allergy free.  Seasons come, seasons go, my sleep pattern alters a bit, and life goes on.  I just thought Claritan commercials were weird, that's how much I paid attention.

So, we said, what has changed?  Cuthbert grew a lawn in the back this year.  Would new grass be any different than that knarly crab grass that we lived with (because it went to so well with this knarly house)?  Don't think so.  Our retired neighbor is single-handedly trying to raise homeowner's property values on our little block and is on a one-man weed whacker crusade.  His rule of thumb is:  if it's higher than 2" and closer to the curb than 3" it's coming down.  So, many a morning while I'm watering the garden he's out there giving the block's weeds a haircut.  I put that in the maybe column.  What about the front yard, which now that it's beautiful with a profusion of flowering whatevahs my neighbors' opinion of me has gone from (in Spanish and English) "that weird woman with a white husband" to "that weird woman with a white husband who can grow some purty flowers", was it causing this malady?  I didn't want to blame my yard which gives me no end of pleasure and since I'm already a member in good standing of the I'll-Suffer-For-My-Art Corp, if it turns out that my front yard is making me sick, well I'll go.  It stays.

By the time we figured out that we didn't have it figured out I was quaffing a solution of sassafras and other herbs brewed by my friend who not only likes to cook but is a herbalist by avocation.  I'd drink, blink and go back to bed.  Everyone carried on very well without me, going ahead with the day after block picnic (which I joined for a while), cooking, sleeping, and putting a mirror to my lips to see if I was still breathing.

I didn't feel particularly bad -- no fever, not much phlegm, no nausea or vomiting -- I was just so very very tired and my brain had been replaced by a gigantic sinus cavity.  I still can't smell; I can just barely taste.  (It's probably sense memory and nothing more.)  That's not necessarily a bad thing since it means I eat a lot less.  I can't complete a sentence without coughing up a lung and since I am always on the verge of or well into a headache, when I'm out in public I looked like I'd just as soon kill you as talk to you.  (This is often true even when I'm not sick.)

Cuthbert thinks I had, have a mild infection.  Old Indestructible Moi thought that was nonsense until 2 days ago when he started to exhibit the same symptoms, too.  Fatigue, empty-headedness, and in his case, skeletal aches and pains.  Last night, feeling incrementally livelier than I had in days, I stayed up late ironing and watching the original Wallender (in Swedish).   (When I'm in slo-mo reading subtitles is soothing.)  I had already stood over him in the bedroom (well before dusk) and told him I was sleeping elsewhere.  It was obvious he was sick and was probably going to wind up on both sides of the bed and what the hell?, if what we have are infections why would I return to the scene of the crime?

Although this house is small, it does have an extra room.  (I've slept in a convent with larger sleeping quarters.)  I didn't even bother to move the linen I'd been piling on the bed for weeks; I just weaseled my way under the covers with aspirin and water within reach and went to sleep.  I woke up knowing I was getting better.  Parts of my brain had re-occupied my skull and I could breath through 2 nostrils and my mouth!  Not much, but I'll take it.  My hope is to have enough energy and will to houseclean today.  The place looks manky, and I can only imagine that it smells worse.  We'll see ...

Thus ends this installment of How I Spent My Summer Vacation.

A Letter to My Faithful Readers

... and to the porn sites which account for 90% of my traffic.  It has been 3 months and change since I last posted.  I stopped blogging for practical reasons:  my life was organized around the care of a dying friend.  I had no desire to write about "it" then, and I am reluctant to write about it now.  The irony is that many of us (in my generation) sculpted ourselves into fiction writers by confessing, mining the travails of our own lives and convincing ourselves that it represented the anxieties of the age.  Had I that need still there would be plenty of entries here, but I don't so there aren't.

It's spring.  Like many in the northeast I had my doubts that it would ever arrive.  I've been awarded for my patience with a front yard that is filling out with strawberries, echinacea, hydrangeas, day lilies, ferns, daisies, oxalis, clover, mint, sage and more than a few spectacular flowering weeds.  During the winter I would sit in my dining room willing the plants into existence, wondering if last year's volunteer squash would take over by late summer, imagining what color the hydrangea blossoms would be.  Now I happily bury the stools of the feral cats that use our yard as their litter box, pull and slice the roots off of weeds so that they can be composted.  And think.

I've been dreaming lately.  A few nights ago I had one where I was practically stalking the Math department's advisor to figure out what my next class should be.  (You don't have to go to far back into last fall's entries the discern the magnitude of my bitchin' and moanin' about how hard my coursework is.)  Nobody in my family believes that I will or should return to school.  (I didn't enroll the spring semester.)  That, too, is an old story.  But, I have spent a lot of time with people who have been delimited by physical illness, mental illness, addiction, and poverty.  One of the enduring effects of any of those conditions is the the lowering of expectations.  Of being defined by what one can't do as opposed to what one can.  And once you've bought that definition of yourself, you've taken over the maintenance of your oppression.  Then it's game, set, match for the oppressor.  Math is my instrument; public school students and adult learners are my audience.  To have the math to work with them I have to do more coursework.  It's as simple as that.

And last night I dreamed that I was in prison, but mysteriously released on furlough.  I spent it at a bar with a friend talking and drinking coffee, surrounded by totebags of paperwork and clothing.  I knew that I had to return to prison.  My friend, who had been imprisoned but was now paroled left to catch the subway.  I packed my bags, and then at the last minute decided I wasn't going back.  Fuck it, I said to myself, I'm an old lady.  Whadda they going to do to me?

Which is the attitude I've been taking now that I'm bike riding again, occasionally without a helmet after a (clears throat) 40 year interregnum.  Cuthbert and even strangers counsel me to do otherwise.  Of course they're right.  I know all too well what can happen and godknows this city has more than its share of reckless and unlicensed drivers.  But, oh freedom, and all of that.  It feels so good to fly down the street and split the air.

Perhaps these latest dreams about about the poles of Freedom and Obligation.  And the dance between the two as I enter my 60th year.  Don't know; may never know.  The sun's up; weeds await me.
 

Who Needs an AR-15 When You've Got a Seasoned Cast Iron Skillet?

In the annals of adaptive re-use I propose that every home be equipped with cast iron skillets.  You can (if you are of that ilk) cook anything from a roast to vegetables to cornbread in them, and when your husband gets on your last nerve (as mine has) you can employ them as a disciplinary tool.  (I believe in corporal punishment for grown adults.)  Plus, even a good skillet costs far less than a good gun with all the ammo and licenses and camo.

I live in a state that is home to hunters.  All kinds of people hunt here.  Enjoy it.  Part of how they were raised.  yadda yadda.  I have no problem with any of that.  But where and why did all that morph into these Army of One nuts who sleep with one eye open because the government (and it's just a matter of time) is gonna get them?

In my limited experience, here's how the government of the US of A gets it's domestic enemies:

1.  RICO (racketeering) prosecutions,
2.  infiltration of organizations via wiretapping and informants thereby sowing the seeds of mistrust, e.g., COINTELPRO, and letting vanity, ego and paranoia do the rest,
3.  persistent and relentless auditing by the IRS.

By the time the gov'mint whips out their guns, most of the damage is done.

So what if you haven't paid all your taxes?  You just aren't that important, fella.  Your hypervigilance about your own personal safety makes me wonder what you are so afraid of?  But what is more worrisome to me than the kind of naivete that leads to thinking your door is the one getting kicked in at 4 am is the indifference of many of these folks to what we so quaintly used to call the common good. For them there are not even any arguable issues to be considered to balance the tension between individuals' possession (and use) of firearms and the safety of those who don't.  And yeah, I've read the 2nd Amendment and could spend the rest of my life reading the judicial decisions that have flowed from it over the past 200+ years, but this has long since escaped being a jurisprudential argument and has become something else.

And the Winner Is ....

I don't care about the Oscars.  I don't.  And it's not sour grapes.  I don't know if my indifference coalesced before I'd served on several award panels and saw up-close-and-personal how the sausage was made or if it happened because there were whole years of my adult life where I didn't see first-run films much less own a television or if it's just the fact that over the course of a life one loses interest in things whether it be Fashion Week, the novels of Jane Austen or bathing.  Just don't know.

But, I am endlessly fascinated by by social psychology, group psychology, and the political science of cultural institutions and events.  Here's what I think will happen -- either Steve McQueen will win Best Director and/or 12 Years A Slave will win Best Picture.  Both deserve honor on merit alone, but to borrow from Mae West, merit has nothing to do with it.  In this era where even a blind man can see that social inequality has broadened and hardened in this nation, why not make a grand and empty gesture to celebrate our American Redemption Story and Our Never-ending Struggle to Live Up to  Our Ideals.  With the added benefit that the film was an allegory set in the 19th century, and we are not like that now.  Are we?

Wise Voices in CT About Education

I was teaching in NYC schools when No Child Left Behind avalanched into American education.  For those of us who treasure creativity, novelty, self-teaching by exploration and an eclectic education the principles behind NCLB were alarming.  Many teaching artists were both alarmed and wary of what it would mean for our work.  The law and the school system's policies that followed from it fundamentally changed how and what we taught.  And our revolutionary and transgressive roles in school were diminished.

It didn't take long before many of us turned our backs on the work.  We would have left anyway.  You can only work so long as an itinerant artist-educator.  At some point you long for focussed commitment -- either to your art or the teaching.  But even if I'd stayed longer, my analysis and critique of educational policy would have been disregarded.  I had no juice.  But the people I'm linking to do have juice.  One is the legendary Dr. James Comer, whose work I'd known of since the 1980's and the other is the Superintendent of East Lyme, CT Schools, Dr. James Lombardo, interviewed yesterday on WNPR-FM's Where We Live.  Lombardo wrote to Governor Malloy, Education Commissioner Pryor and others in state government enumerating just how wrong the "reform" initiatives the state is pursuing are and the false premises that led to them.

I hope these voices are part of a tide being turned.  It may be too late for much of public education, but perhaps that's the point.  I sometimes wonder if urban public education has become like early 20th settlement work.  Upper class women, prior to their coming out balls that signified their ascension into society would work with The Poor.  They performed charity work that by no means upended the systemic order of things.  The status remained quo.

Anyway, the links:

 New Haven Independent interview the Dr. Comer, and

WNPR.org story on Dr. Lombardo's letter to Malloy et al.

It's Hard to be Poor, Part II

My friend, B, who is probably reading this, told me this story.  It resonated because I've had a similar experience.  My takeaway was that if you haven't lived most of your life or your entire life poor, then the how and why of getting there is complex, often involving some debilitating mental or physical illness, drug or alcohol abuse, headbangingly bad decision-making, a narcissism and neediness which exponentially increases as your natural assets decrease (some money, a job, good looks or merely one's youth, a family member or friend who unconditionally loves you, etc.).

B is living in the south for now, inhabiting the home of her deceased mother.  Like a banquet where none of the guests show up, the house is way, way to big for one person to live in and to manage.  In a mixture of empathy and practicality she allowed a woman, I'll call her Q, to move in.  In exchange for housing Q was to serve as an assistant and keep an eye on the house when B was out of town.

It worked for a while, and then it didn't when Q started stealing money from B's wallet and B caught her red-handed.  Understandably, B issued an ultimatum:  Get out.  Q refused perhaps knowing that state law was on her side, perhaps not.  My observation is that people like Q don't know the law, they know survival.  And they will do anything, ignore anything, and pretend anything to hold on to whatever it is that staves off extinction.  And so Q decided she was going to stay.  And B, faced with the month's long legal proceeding before eviction is allowed, tried an approach akin to detoxification, i.e., talking Q into moving in with a family member.  After all, Q had a brother, a sister, a child living in the same neighborhood.  But Q refused that and any alternatives, and B, realizing that as dysfunctional as families can sometimes be, by the time you have alienated your siblings and offspring, you really have reached the end of the line.

So B drove Q to the local shelter, even paying the $25 administrative processing fee (god bless the State!) to get her in.  And Q told the shelter that she would only need the assistance for 2-3 weeks because as far as she was concerned, B would settle down and let her back in.  Which wasn't true, of course, but what she had to believe as she watched B's car leaving her behind.

It's Hard to be Poor, Part I

Lately there have been a few news stories about Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty now that it have reached its 50th milestone.  Until the moment I decided to write that sentence, it had never dawned on me that its advent coincides with Black History Month.  The convergence may be wholly accidental but it underscores something I've observed for a long time, that poverty and African-American-ness are used interchangeably as synonyms.

But, instead of exploring that today -- don't have the chops for a long, spit-hurling screed -- I'll tell two stories.  One involves me; the other, a friend:

I was in New York a few days ago.  As is true of my recent visits they are brief, specific and about business.  The day wasn't bitter cold but cold enough, so I was bundled up with my ersatz hunter's cap, mile-long scarf, big-collared winter jacket, and old Timberlands.  Perfect for the weather and normal for me.  As far as I was concerned, I didn't look any different that day than usual.  I should also mention that if it's not overcast I wear shades outdoors year-round; you can't see me seeing you.  That day, for whatever reason(s), people broke through my barriers -- the shades, the bundling -- and talked to me.  I was walking through the long station that is Courthouse Square.  Years ago you'd leave Grand Central on the 7 heading east, cross the East River, get a paper transfer, walk down a rickety steel and wood staircase, turn a corner and then present your transfer at the turnstiles for the G train.  It was a pain in the ass to execute and if you didn't do it often, you'd wind up wandering up and down the street looking for the subway entrance.  Some time (probably after I left the city) it all got connected and now you can transfer, under protection of a glass pavilion, between the 7 and the G which connect Manhattan, Queens and North Brooklyn.

I was heading back to Grand Central, glad that the meeting had gone well and was brief.  While marvelling (once again) about the ease of transfer, I was thinking that I could catch one of many trains before rush hour, so wasn't in any particular hurry.  Perhaps I was in a good mood, perhaps pleased with myself.  Either way I was free and heading home.  Next thing I know a skinny kid in a hoodie covered by a light jacket asks me if I can get him something to eat.

And I say, as I have in the past, would you like me to buy you a meal?  And he nods yes and I crook my head to indicate that I'll follow him and up the escalator, outside the station, around the corner, and across the street (underneath the BQE) we go.  Not a word.  We stop at the corner.  There's a bodega in front of us and a diner to our right.  He enters the bodega and goes through the store, returning to the counter with a can of iced tea.  I thought you wanted something to eat?  I didn't see where.  I'm struck by his candor and lack of greed.  This kid -- maybe 14 -- is hungry.  Hungry.  Grey from malnutrition and cold.  You don't hang out in a heatless pavilion in February begging for food if you don't have to.  We go outside.  I point to the diner.  There?  I point.  He's ambivalent.  He either can't see it because he needs glasses, or he doesn't want to go there because he has never in his life sat down and ordered from a menu, or he can't read.  Or all three.

The intersection before us gathers like Five Points.  We cross two streets to another bodega.  Almost every corner store worth its salt has a deli counter.  Why the first one we went into didn't is a mystery.  But this one does and he orders a Philly cheese steak.  I stand aside as he luxuriates in the power of having and exercising choice.  The clerk bags the sandwich and offers it to me because I'm the one with the wallet open.  I turn to the boy; for a moment the clerk is confused, but I wait for him to figure it out.  The boy steps up and the clerk gives him his food.  The boy thanks me and because of necessity and because when you're poor you learn to abdicate your dignity quickly and often he asks, in front of everyone, the important ask, the one for train fare to get home.  Oh.  Sure.  I say, handing him a few bills.  Then I leave.

Rumor Has It

... that it's Black History Month.  I forgot.  An easy thing to do when you're as untethered to any institution as I am right now (discounting the institution of marriage which knows no Black or White, or any Wrong or Right.)  You know I'm kiddin' about marriage, right?

Anyway, I finally copped on to the fact that it was time for our annual and peculiarly American malady, Racial Reaction Formation, when I started to read fascinating longform pieces that dealt with the history of 20th century American race relations in its many manifestations.  It's much on my mind as I prepare myself to enter what has become Ground Zero in American inequality, the nation's public schools.

Here's a link to Part I of Tanner Colby's multipart piece in Slate, The Massive Liberal Failure on Race, and yes, the title sounds like the clickbait it's supposed to be.  But, you know what?  I largely agree with what he's written.

A Gaggle of Geese, A Year of Elegies

Whatever I was determined to write about last night when I decided to write at all has passed through my mind faster than the V of geese on their way north.  (Perhaps to escape an unusually cold Atlanta?)  What remains is evidence of getting older, not the least of which is these bouts of forgetting.  In answer to someone who asked if I used to dance I started talking about salsa -- which I love and haven't danced since my first years here -- and it's cousin, mambo, and for the life of me I couldn't remember what to call it except that it started with an m.  This was mambo I was struggling to recall.  The passion for which caused me to get up at the crack 'o dawn each and every Saturday for years and take the 2 or 3 to Harlem, exiting at the 135th Street station and then around the corner to the legendary Y, exchange street shoes for dance shoes and dancing my ass off.  In studios, on gym floors.  In clubs.  And every once in a while on the street.  I needed mambo like peanut butter needs jelly.  And yet I couldn't recall the word.

Moving on.  It will be that way, for the immediate future and perhaps even for the future future.  (Other than in grammar there is no such thing as the future perfect.)  I have never been a fantasist (or at least don't consider myself one) but since I'm not going to remember things, might as well make them up, eh?  Or, at least try to remember the broad strokes of a life lived so long that I can point to a 40 year old crown in my mouth that now makes contact with a 24 hour crown, both of which better last me forever.

A year of elegies, I call this.  My friend, Fred, is dying.  He, who I had designated as the executor of my will 20 years ago, will not live long enough to do me the honor.  He's leaving before me, a result of Stage 3B colon cancer diagnosed 7 long years ago.  He, and any honest medical provider would tell you the same, should not be alive in 2014.  But he is and it has been grueling, magnificent, humbling, lonely, relentless, stupid, exhausting, infuriating, and tiring all at once.  Throughout most of the odyssey he kept a journal, the Cancer Diaries, which was published as a book by Skyhorse Publishing.  Not everyone, with or without cancer, can read it.  Much of it is too raw, too painful, too indicative of a fate from a disease that seems to say tag! you're it!  And we are superstitious creatures wondering if I read this will I get cancer, too?  But if you want to know some of what it's like to fight to live through searing pain and depression and hopelessness -- well, this may be the ticket.  Anyone who knows Fred knows he is one tough motherfucker and if you've been his friend or colleague for more than a minute, chances are you've been on the receiving end of his toughness.  But, he is also one of the most honorable and loving people I know.

As anyone who's gone through this with a friend or family member, there is dying and there is dying.    Fred's in the former stage, not the latter.  Which means that the, if not quite zest, but will to live is very strong.  Very strong.  He and many others will swim up from, literally, the depths of despair towards any and every kind of ameliorative treatment so that one more day -- even if it's flat on your back poised for the visitation of the roiling pain that tumors poaching your life force is -- of precious life.  So, we go on.  A drug here.  An definitive answer there.  A nap.  

There are two processes, excepting c-sections and suicide, that take their own damn time:  birth and death.  Make plans if you want to, but don't expect them to be followed according to your wishes.  The body will do what it wants to do.  We must make the most of time.

I Got Nothin'

As you may have surmised, the interlude between posts has almost everything to do with the fact that I am not writhing in the crucible of Mathematics these days.  By comparison, the things I consider on a daily basis -- death and taxes -- haven't driven me mad enough to post.  Or more accurately, they are both too personal to post about.  Yet.

So, not much in the bloggage department, but in that way I'm not much different than the bloggers I follow.  The scandals come.  The scandals go.  The President has a SOTU speech?  Well, suh, as my grandmother used to say.

It has been a bitter season.  Short of a pair of snow pants I have enough coat hat glove sweater scarf boots to protect me and even I have found excuses not to go out much.  My gym membership has lapsed and I haven't picked up anything heavier than a carton of half 'n half for a month.  By choice and aptitude I am at home a lot pushing the peas of creative ideas around my plate.  I spend my time trying to stay ahead of the freezing cold which infects our plumbing so that there has been many a morning where you can't flush if you wanted to.  I share my yard with a very hairy skunk.  Just like me its coat has become thicker and whiter, but at least I don't fart when I'm terrified.  So, if we are in the yard at the same time (even at night I can spot her traipsing around on the snow) I cut her a wide berth and she extends me the same courtesy.  Occasionally she gets into it with a friendly neighborhood feral cat and I'll be sitting here watching some British thriller (my preferred oeuvre du jour) while trying to filter out the hissing, howling, banging and scratching right behind me.  If I ever hear shots fired I'll call Animal Control, but until then let the best mammal win.

This Just In ....

... I can not, repeat, can not do math.  Trying to do a quilting project that involves working on a 20" x 20" square.  Ya following me?  I measure, cut, and painstakingly stitch 1" strips of fabric onto the 4 squares that would be combined to make the aforementioned big square.  So far.  So good.  Strips go on.  Strips are pressed flat.  Four squares are combined.  I hold up the result.  Uhmmmm, I sez to m'self, this looks kinda small.  Being the genius that I am I measure the final product.  I had created a 11" square because I had originally cut 6" blocks.

Just shoot me.  Or similar sentiments ifya know what I mean.  How stupid can I get?  I don't even want to find out frankly.  Perhaps the only wise thing I've done in the past few weeks is to decide not to enroll in yet another mental labyrinth with no exit which is what higher level mathematics courses have become for me.  I need a respite from abject failure for a while.  I need to have time to screw up a simple sewing project or read a book before the local library sets a bounty for my arrest for late returns.  I need some time to take stock of a life that will certainly include death, taxes and replacing a major appliance or computer.  Life, in other words, I need some time for life.

Almost unbeknownst to me I have crossed a threshhold.  In a few months I will be on the other side of 60 but I feel it deeply already.  More friends than ever are telling me about the birth of their grandchildren.  I am amused, sometimes amazed at the changes in my body.  Unwelcome hair everywhere and always another test to take to rule out cancer or another serious disorder.  You learn, or you better learn, to live with uncertainty:  your body is more your antagonist than your glory, and you don't know when your ticket will be punched, but punched it will be.

So, get on with it, you tell yourself.  I spend a lot of time these days looking back.  The past looks more interesting than the future.  Gleaning my personal experience and others for answers, for guidance, for meaning.  And, now out from under the yoke of all-math-all-the-time, the imperative to write has surged in like water through an opened sluice gate.

All of this to say that at least for 5 months, I won't be whining (at least not about math) and there will not be any blood splatter on the monitor as I try to prove the infinity of ∏.   My plan is to do a self-study of linear and abstract algebra -- okay, I'll wait while you snort through your nose -- but like working out at home it's far too easy to jettison self-imposed deadlines and projects.  We all know it, but that's the plan.