Saturday Poetry: Bait (from East River Soliloquies)

I pulled it out.

By then it scarcely hurt.

I winced just a little as I tore

sickly arteries apart.

I would not use it anymore.

Had no need for this one with

its thrumming dance,

no more space for its pathetic concuss,

that ushered a red serenade

through its chambers.

Why did Venus do this?

I'll feed it to the fish, I thought.

They'll eat it before it hits bottom,

before she finds it.

I can't be bothered with the thing, I said,

flexing my arm, testing until I was satisfied

it could bear the weight.

Sensing the end,

my heart surged unforgivably hot.

It leaped and pounded, gurgled and ran

so badly that I silenced it with my sopping shirt,

hastily dropped it in a plastic bag,

setting out heedless

to the fact that

I could be seen through,

laughed at,

humiliated all over again.

This Is What Being slightly < 60 Look Like

This is what getting older is like: Turns out I have sciatica.  I can pinpoint when it would have started over 20 years ago.  A 3 mile stroll down Flatbush Avenue on a blistering August day with 9 year old chatting me up and a suitcase on my back.  (Another day, another dispatch.)  Undiagnosed, ignored, I'm now certain it is the cause of the burning, rubber-banded, hey-did-I-step-on-a-bottle-cap? feeling I often have in my right leg.  But you know what?  I'm so bored by all the maladies large and small that visit me at this age, I haven't even bothered to google it.  Meh.  I'll see my internist soon enough.  "Doctor, will I ever be able to dance the Running Man again?"  Ha, ha cuz I couldn't dance it before .....  (Snares, please!  Rimshot!)

So, quiz #1 is over.  I barely got half the problems right.  I could have done better were it not for a stupid stupid mistake on a truth table.  Forewarned, as they say, is forearmed.  But, what really blows my whistle is that there isn't a person in that class of that thinks I should be there.  Here's what I've learned in 3 semesters:  that the higher you go in mathematics the whiter and more male it gets.

Don't these boys know I grew up in I-O-W-A where underestimating and denigrating negroes is and always has been a sport and a pasttime?  And don't these boys knows that they've wakened the competitiveness in Aunt Jemina?

It's on, ya'll ...

Never Stop

Picture this:  After math class where I raise the mean age of the students to 25, rush hour driving down the heart of black New Haven, Dixwell Ave., in a bigass banged up Nissan truck that gets 1 mile to the gallon while blasting Dylan and Marvin Gaye on my way home before going to my first Rosh Hashanah dinner.  Thinking about my beloved 6 year old niece, who goes to St. Whozit School of the Exculpatory Distraction and tells me 2 weeks into 1st grade that 2 girls said she's weird.

To which I say, never stop.  Stay weird.

Just Me, the Books and the Spiders

Blogging has been sporadic as fall and school descend.  Another September, another mind-boggling math course.  This time, Foundations of Mathematics, which seemed innocuous enough until the professor said that "it is the bridge between lower mathematics, e.g., Calculus (I kid you not) and higher mathematics".  I think I blacked out for a minute.  So, you ask why I'm doing this when my life could be so much more comfortable?

This is why:  a Mother Jones piece, “Everything You’ve Heard About Failing Schools Is Wrong,” by Kristina Rizga.  As a supplement you can listen to her terrific interview on Bob Edwards Weekend.

That's it for now.  I am temporarily living alone for the first time in 31 years.  Husband No. 1 is with his family, Beloved Niece and her mother moved out and I share the house with dying spiders and wasps.  It's great and I sometimes wonder if I'll croak like a frog when I do use my voice because other than a phone call or a meeting I don't talk much.  (At school I'm so old I'm virtually radioactive so no one engages me.)  This interlude reminds me that I'm an introvert with good social skills; this precious time allows me to be more of myself.  I hope to make the most of it.  Ciao, I'm off to Harlem for a meeting.

Saturday Poetry: Gorgeous Puddin'

In my next life

(if I get one)

I’m coming back as

Gorgeous Puddin’.

I’m coming back

to sing

scatting blue notes

through the pillars

that are my teeth.

They’ll hesitate

blue notes will,

quavering in their need

honeyed on the vulva

that is my mouth.

One note, a whole note

will tumble and slide

across the lounge, catching

(like a bb frenzied)

one the rim

of my next man’s ear

where it will tickle him

and unsettle him and

make his hands to stumble

(his fingers to splay).

They’ll flutter and sigh

and long to send me

one finger.

For me, one haloed digit,

upstage, at my piano.

Here where I lay playing

with tongue heavy

and lips ready

for his love.

Bumper Sticker I'd Like to See

Paul Ryan .... the Lance Amstrong of VP candidates

Mitt Romney, the GOP and Contemporary Political Operations

I follow the American political scene.  I just don't write about it much.  There are others more consistently tuned in and far better.  I leave it to them while I post poems in my dotage.  What follows is a brilliant "exegesis" about Romney, the convention, and his relationship to party mandarins and operatives.  (If I knew how to do a specific permalink I'd do it.  Instead this is a cut and paste from nancynall.com, 8/31/12.):

baldheadeddork said on August 31, 2012 at 5:59 pm

Long weekend, long post. 

This probably won’t be taken seriously by people who don’t already agree with me, but I think there is one serious point to take away from the convention dog-and-pony show. 

As noted by many others, a presidential nominee only has full control over two events in the entire election: Who he chooses as his running mate and his convention. Everything else he believes or wants to do might have to be massaged, ignored or even changed to get votes and money from one group or another. But choosing (and announcing) the nominee and running the convention are all his. 

I think there is a lot of evidence that in these moments a nominee gives a pretty good glimpse into how he’ll govern and lead if he wins. Look back to Obama for just one example. Watching Obama in the late primaries through the convention four years ago was nearly identical to how he’s operated as president for better and worse. (On the better side, a really smart staff with the lowest collective ego quotient I’ve ever seen in a campaign or administration. For worse, despite being really good at politics they hate to dirty their hands with it.) Bush 43 also showed a lot of his biggest strengths and flaws in the way he handled those decisions in 2000, as did Clinton in 1992.

So, with that in mind, it’s time to address something that people haven’t wanted to point out from the beginning of the campaign. Mitt Romney and his team are fucking awful at running for president. They’re barely competent on a good day and they make so many awful unforced errors.

This convention was a disaster. They invited a lot of unnecessary damage to the GOP in this election and beyond by bum rushing the Paul delegates. That’s the closest thing the GOP has to a viable youth movement and the Romney team threw them out because they played the game too well. The nominee always has final approval on the speeches given by the defeated candidates, but Romney’s team asserted no control and allowed everyone to talk about themselves for twenty minutes before mentioning Romney as a literal afterthought. There was no control of messaging at any point, and no control of the behavior of the delegates coming down from the top. What do you think Karl Rove would have done if the peanut incident happened at a convention he was running? It wouldn’t have just been the offenders thrown out. Whoever was responsible for that delegation would have been turned into a greasy stain on the convention floor – and every state leader would have known it before they landed in Tampa.

And then, at ten pm EST last night when the networks picked up the convention and the audience tripled, Mitt Romney began his introduction to the American people with an Oscar-caliber performance of Clint Eastwood impersonating Grandpa Effing Simpson. Then came Marco Rubio to talk about himself for twenty minutes, and finally Romney himself.
Probably only one person in four who was watching Romney’s acceptance speech was watching on the cable news channels or PBS before ten to see Romney’s introduction video. That is political malpractice on par with the Florida freak who injected cement into people’s asses and called it plastic surgery. Every candidate since Reagan in 1984 has used these meticulously crafted videos as the real introduction of the nominee. Know why? It fucking works. People like watching movies more than seeing someone give a speech and the campaign can use all of the soft focus and takes it needs to get the message right. Video, then – maybe – a brief introduction by someone who won’t outshine the candidate, then the acceptance speech. This is so simple and obvious, yet Romney and his team screwed it up beyond all recognition.
It’s not just that the Romney campaign team is in over its head. They are, and so deeply they can’t even see the top of the ocean. But the bigger problem is that despite months of miscues and mistakes no one has lost their job. And even despite a lot of experience people in GOP politics saying they’ve got major problems with the candidate and the people running the campaign, Romney continues to run the same way he ran in February and even in 2008, and with all of the same top people.
There is a strong correlation between how Romney is running his campaign and the way a bad CEO runs a company. You don’t have to follow business very long to find a company that gets into serious trouble because the CEO had bad staff and either didn’t have the vision to see what was really happening or a deep knowledge about the company or business. Draw your own connections between, say, Dan Ackerson’s travails at GM and Romney’s campaign problems.

But there’s a political precedent that deserves more attention. Romney has captured control of the Republican party this year, but he’s always run as an outsider to it. He’s never seriously tried to win over the party bosses and the conservative movement leaders. He’s come in with the conceit that if anyone wants to ride, they need to get on board with him. This isn’t a merger to Romney, it’s a takeover.

And in this way, the candidate of my lifetime that reminds me most of Mitt Romney is…Jimmy Carter. Carter had to run a brutal contest against the Democratic establishment to win the nomination in 1976 and his team was almost entirely composed of people who had not worked on other federal campaigns. Carter also had Romney-esque arrogance towards his party’s leaders after winning the nomination. The rift never healed and worse, Carter went into office really believing that the Democratic-controlled Congress should act like subsidiaries of his White House. It ruined any chance he had at a successful presidency.

The ideology is 180 degrees different, but I see a lot of the same method and personality in Mitt Romney. If he beats Obama the only common thread holding Romney, the GOP and the conservative movement together now will be gone. They will turn on each other and the fight between Romney’s WH, Eric Cantor’s Congress, and Dick Armey’s K-Street operations for who is really in charge will be on.

 

Saturday Poetry: Eight Post Meridiem

It's spring

yet Winter’s resentful of its diminution and

comes back to haunt us today.

We who have them, unearth the

scarves and mittens and caps that

flew into the laundry basket

for washing and putting away.

Finished with homework she consents

to walk to the co-op for food.

I was girded to resort to censure:

I'm not the only one who eats in this house, y'know...

I've work all week and I’m tired.

She soothes me, the gift of her company.

We walk together, minutes into

the bracing cold

gossiping to keep ourselves warm.

She tells me that she is through with her posse.

She is not hanging out

with them any more.

She tells me where they were supposed to meet, how she waited.

Then looked for them at the Burger King.

They weren't there

and she went to the take-out Chinese

where they weren't, either.

In the street was the principal

who gets mad if she sees you eat

outside.

It’s after lunch that she finds them

and she lays down the law:

I'm not waiting for anybody.

Thinking of all

the boys who have broken my heart

all the phone calls that

still don't come

I tell her, it's a good way to live.

Fortified she interrupts:

I'll hang with anybody

I don't have to stay with one group.

She boasts how easily she can make herself welcome.

We are halfway there,

Winter’s been forgotten.

I am proud of my level-headed girl

Grateful for this inadvertent canal

between chores

to learn who she is

and love her even more.

I Have Started School

Which is why I'm using it as an excuse for not posting.  Truth was I was away last weekend, in the City, pretending I was 25 years old.  But, yes, school has begun with an innocuous class called "Foundations of Mathematics".  Sounds simple, right?  How to count?  And multiply (cf. life before effective birth control) and divide (cf. Republican Convention, Tampa, 2012)?  No.  The course is none of the above.

You have to study logic.  And do proofs.  Husband No. 1 is waiting in the wings thinking this will knock some sense into my head.  I am headed to the nearest medical supply store to buy a leather helmet with a chin strap.  I've only had one class and already my head is starting to swell.  Excelsior, my ass ...
 

A Warning to All Those Ladder-Climbing Hot Mamas

Even MILF's get old.  Sigh ....

Saturday Poetry: The Box Step

Having spent years with her body

(loved more than my own)

my beautiful daughter is a thing I know.

A daughter soon to be my height.

Gone beyond my cervix

(that tough and ugly organ

who almost stopped her flight).

My hands read her tender soles.

She is limbs elongated

poised for womanhood.

Buttocks unselfconscious

beckon man and beast alike.

I walk her ribs at night.

My solicitous fingers find the nipples

grown last summer

protrusions that foreshadow blood,

the fights.

I'm in her way now.

But not for long.

Still my little girl, this night.

The one who tells me

that next year is the prom.

A prom?  I think of her beauty so new.

Of its rocks and shoals of attraction.

I turn off the iron, collapse the board.

The turntable offers La Divine.

My sturdy left hand cups the small

of her swayback.

Come, and she follows my right

as it wafts upward.

Her butterflied fingers alight my shoulder.

I kiss her forehead and take the lead.

She looks down at our feet.

We don't breathe.

Somehow knowing, she steps back on her right.

Together, I whisper.

Step?

Yes.  Then close.

Together.  We sigh.

Step.  Close.

She nods understanding

her hand on my shoulder, squeezing

in answer to commanding feet.

I kiss her cheek.

We box step

suffused with longing.

Pretend, I tell her, that I am the Boy.

The first with undulating voice.

He gives you a kiss

and betrays your symmetry.

He will.  I know this.

She looks at me and sees that

we have made boxes.

Two small boxes.

We step together

at this moment

in a way we

will never

again.

Step close.

A Saturday Morning

With the onset of early middle age, certain of my senses have improved.  I see better than ever before (even as the glasses I buy are more expensive than ever before).  I smell things that I couldn't in years past:  that tangy, bitter aroma of our garden's tomato plants as they struggle to make fruit, the odors of a neglected bathroom that doubles as a slopsink and washing station, the burnt butter in the iron skillet that my husband uses to make his version of home fries.  It's all revelatory for me.  Between bouts of digital neuropathy, chronic poor vision, tinnitus-compromised hearing, impaired olfactory sensors and indifferent taste buds it's rare to have my all my senses working adequately all at the same time.  There have been exceptions.  To this day I am attuned to a baby's wail, or any house sound that resembles or is a person coming through a door or window.  Otherwise, each and every one of my senses has presented me moments of gobsmacking bewilderment as they fade in and out of utility.

So, it's Saturday morning.  I have been home alone for 3 days.  Virtually the only calls I get are from a collector for a bill I have absolutely no intention of paying.  I do my chores, I read one of my favorite writers, Richard Price, (which makes me think of reading Richard Ford again, or Reynolds Price), I have seizures of mucus-snorting, spit-flecked glee as I consume TBogg and his brilliant commenters riffing on Paul Ryan with the help of T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Dr. Seuss, Shakespeare and Walt Whitman!  (Oh.  My.  Stars.).  I work.  Always rushed but seldom interrupted.  I look at my house in ways that one can't when there are others living there.  I even cooked because even I, as much as I don't want to cook, don't like to cook, can't see why one would spend so much time making something that hours later is going to excreted as waste from one's body -- even I am not going to make dinner from crap I could buy at the nearest corner store.  (I have some pride, people.)

It is lightly raining.  This is Irish weather -- cool, grey, wet.  (The husband's down in Brooklyn having flashbacks.)  As far as I'm concerned it is perfect.  For years summer was always a season I had to endure.  It's hot, it stinks, my bathing suit's always too smalI.  (For some reason I'm acutely aware of the alcoholics on the Green during the summer.  As I wait for a bus home I watch.  In no time comes the face, sometimes young, sometimes old, or made old, that is lividly red, tight, puffy so much so that even the lips are permanently engorged as if if they carry a collagen chapstick.  The face of someone who is drinking themselves towards cirrhosis.)  I live for the fall.  Each night progressively cooler than the one before.  The leaves turning, the humidity receding.  The ritual of children (and adults) heading towards school.  I love it all.

On Lisa Molomot's "The Hill"

New Haven is my adopted home.  I wasn't born here, I didn't grow up here.  I have no clan who traveled from the south 3 generations ago and settled in Dixwell or Dwight to take advantage of wartime jobs.  I didn't attend Yale nor do I work there.  I no longer have any formal role in the the city's Democratic Party hierarchy.  I just live here.

Here, in a city that is situated downstream from the catastrophic economic changes of the last few decades.  A company town with an entrenched full-time mayor and his political machine, and a part-time legislative body.  A segregated town where a segment of the promising middle class cycles out after obtaining a degree and another segment goes house shopping in Hamden or Guilford when the first kid turns 4.

When we first arrived, we would drive around town.  Soon I was playing a game, "Where's PS Waldo?" as we would encounter one after another of the city's breathtakingly beautiful school buildings.  (And yes, there are some spectacular duds.)  What kind of city is this I wondered, having spent years doing education activism in New York, that builds such beautiful schools?

I found out, yes I did.  It's a city that believes in top-down, ham-fisted educational reform based on old liberal pieties.  Convention wisdom has it that the Board of Education is a known depository for the politically connected, the mediocre loyalist and the status-seeking small-town careerist of middling abilities.  It's a city that is re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic as its neighborhoods become more racially and economically segregated, and where job creation is thought of as an act of noblesse oblige or chum on political waters.

For those of you who haven't seen it, the documentary, "The Hill", tells the story of an eminent domain battle between New Haven and residents of an area called the Upper Hill.  Goaded by state dollars that paid more for new construction than renovation, hubris, political calculation and vanity, the city set out to build a school.  The Upper Hill was and is a low-income area of homeowners and tenants.  The city's rationale was that since 2 other schools nearby were in terrible condition, and another school, Mauro, near the contested land could not accommodate the influx of more students another building was required.  To build would require removal of many households.  Some people were glad to go.  Others not, so they suggested that the city build on unused city-owned land nearby.  Those who wanted to stay (and their allies) raised hell and fought the city all the way to federal court to be able to keep their homes.  On a fine legal point (the doctrine of laches) they lost their case, although their moral argument won the day.

The homes were razed, the neighbors dispersed often incurring significant debt to rent or buy elsewhere, and the school was built.  In what I can only imagine was a final gesture worthy of Marie Antoinette, the school was named after the city's sole African-American mayor as if losing one's home and community is a small price to pay to honor a black man who led the city for 4 years.

And the 2 schools that were in terrible shape?  They exist today, more than a decade after this battle, as 1) a charter school and 2) a medical offices building.  And Mauro?  It's closed.  Not enough students.  The vacant land?  Sold to Yale New Haven Hospital and converted into a parking lot.  And the neighborhood?  Go see for yourself.  

And, too:  I can't seem to upload the trailer, so click the link.

My House is a Very Very Very Fine House

Husband No. 1 read my previous post about Rules for Living.  He felt empowered to make up one of his own.  I am now officially forbidden to write about what he does when he is in the basement.  So, I won't.  My lips are sealed.  (Cheshire grin ensues....)  For all I know he is saving mankind, which would be fine by me since we can no longer leave it to the Republican Party.  (Have they ever met a tax loophole they didn't want to drive through?)  So, fine, no basement stories but he hasn't forbade me writing about anything else in this comedy we call our life together.  At least not yet.  This is where fiction comes in.  Change the names, let others call it a roman a clef and you're off the hook!  Memoir, memoir?  We don't need no stinkin' memoir!

About that fire.

After I left Brooklyn in 2008, His Wonderfulness (HW) did an entire gut rehab of our house.  Architects and designers will tell you that there are many kinds of renovations.  For instance, there is 1) renovation by acquisition:  I just got the Eames couch of my dreams but it doesn't fit through the door so we'll just widen the opening and put in a new front door and while we're at it move the south wall out 3 inches so that the room is balanced and ...  There is 2) renovation due to aging or disablement:  now that we're middle-aged let's move the master bedroom downstairs and raise the dishwasher, and while we're at it, make sure the doors are big enough for a wheelchair or a coffin ...  There is 3) renovation by fire (which I recommend you only do once):  Step 1.  Burn the house down.  Step 2.  Rebuild from the basement up fighting with the insurance company every contractor's bill along the way.  Guess which one we did in Brooklyn?


Fast forward to 2012.  We are here in New Haven on our own (which I've written about previously).  We are old -- our knees point in opposite directions and our backs bark.  What do we do?  We start with the smallest room in a small house.  The one once occupied by the Beloved Niece.  Proud of myself that the wall paint for the room was stashed in the closet, I blithely started patching holes and cracks.  Couple of days at the most, I told myself, a few patches and I'll touch up.  Install new curtains, wash floor, et voila!  One down, 4 rooms to go.  On day 2 I picked up the gallon paint can which felt as light as cotton candy.  And mutual perversion set in.  What's that expression?  In for a penny, in for a pound.  We have now plastered that room within an inch of the original sheet rock almost to the point where you can scarcely see the original paint.  Another expensive gallon of bitter lemon (indeed!) sits downstairs waiting to be applied to newly skimmed walls and you know that when the walls are done we'll look at the floor which we've virtually destroyed with dollops of joint compound and before you know it we'll be sanding and polyurethaning.  And the original door?  Oh my, it's got paint on it!  Don't we want to strip it to release the oakiness of the oak?


After the last time, in 2009, where my sister and I spent Our Summer Vacation rigging ladders and scraping 50 year old nicotined-stained wallpaper off walls, I swore I would not be caught dead painting sanding scraping finishing a house again.  And here I am.  You'd say I need to have my head examined but I'm already having my head examined and still I do this.

Life ends, renovation don't.

Saturday Poetry: Red Hook Houses

I know, I know, it's Sunday.

(from "Turn Left At the Dead Dog")

After the plant closed

and he lost his last job

after that boy got shot

and the school turned black

she stopped going out at night.

To get from the train to the house

there was no bus to take.

After all that

she swore she’d get out.

Now it’s too late.

Rules for Living

Now that my banded neck is growing those intersecting strings from the juncture of the chin it's time for me to share my Rules for Living(tm).  Time and what to do with it changes when you get older.  It's one thing when you've still got a waist and your breasts are generally perpendicular to your collarbone and you think you have all the time in the world to become, and quite another when you buy clothes to fit a Teletubbie.

All of which to say, I have to daily remind myself to quit effing around.  So, here's the first:

No. 1 -  If you have a Facebook account don't, I repeat, do not get into a flame war.  Le Facebook is many things but it is not a bar with stools that can be ripped off their screws for throwing, nor is it a phone.  So, if someone writes something daft, bigoted, stupid or simply untrue, let it go.

No Excuses

for not writing since godknowswhen, so I'm not making any.  Suffice it to say the Id will be released.  What's on my mind? Here goes:

For starters, while I do not mind drinking alone (actually I prefer it) I do mind laughing alone which is why, at day's end, instead of watching comedies to signify the end of yet another mega-productive Day in the Life of Blocked Short Story Writer, I watch dramas.  I am a creature of routine -- same peanut butter and jelly sandwich every day, same TV series every day.  Lately I've been tearing through the police procedurals set in the British Isles -- Rebus (the Ian Rankin creation), Inspector Lewis, even some show set in Glasgow that wasn't all that good (like B-grade Law & Order) but I was proud of myself for comprehending most of the dialogue without having to resort to subtitles or close captioning.  (British and Irish English is a foreign language.)  After a few viewings I stopped to ask why I prefer them to the American shows.  Finally realized that hands-down the acting is better.  Even small roles are deliciously played, tutorials in the use of facial expression that American actors are scared to study.  I'm convinced that theater (here) attracts a whole lot of people who have faces that Hollywood would love.  They get into it for the gaze, and some of them become actors in the process.  England (and by extension, Ireland) I think the motivation is different.  Don't quite know what it is, but it seems different.

I mean, there are some phenomenally homely folks on camera in England.  If I were a kid I'd think that the English people have long faces, lantern jaws, and toothpick slashes for mouths.  (The women must save a fortune on lipstick.)  And who could blame me for coming to that conclusion?  It's fascinating.  There they are acting with gusto, tearing up the screen as if they had as much right to be there as Scarlett Johansson or James Franco (who, I have to admit, I find tiresomely pretentious.  Kind of like John Mayer without the songwriting chops).  That movie he did, 27 Hours? [nota bene:  it's 127 Hours, which is probably 126.5 too long]  Why didn't he just saw off his head and get it over with?)


And the English get to swear on camera!  How refreshing that you can call another character "a perfect little shit" instead of having to call him a perfect little twit.


And speaking of Perfect Twits!  Poor Romney.  He's starting to remind me of the Stephen Root character in NewsRadio, Jimmy James.  Lately there's been a lot of bloggage about why Mitt(ens) is making such a bollocks of it all.  (See I told ya I've been watching a lot of British TV.)  And while it's interesting reading, I think it goes too far.  I mean I'm as guilty as the next person for performing armchair psychoanalysis, but really?  Asperger's Syndrome?  Bi-polar disorder?  I've known people with Asperger's Syndrome and you, sir, are no Idiot Savant!  I mean really now.


Mitt Romney is, by virtue of being born into wealth and leading his own company, used to being in command and in charge.  Can't do that in the white-hot heart of a nuclear reactor called the modern American Presidential race.  You can't control it; it controls you.


Mitt Romney is old school Republican and a Mormon square to boot.  You don't talk about sex, the money you make, your feelings nor the nakedness of your personal ambition in public.  You.  Just.  Don't.  I draw a straight line from the triumph of confessional daytime TV (Oprah and Jerry Springer to name pre-eminent examples) to 24/7 cable coverage to blogging to Twitter et alia and personal rectitude goes out the window as a virtue, much less a practice.  In fact, it's become a liability.  The more the press asks of "Mitt" as opposed to "Mr. Romney" the more flummoxed and flustered he (his wife, and his staff will become).  Call it death by a 1,000 personal questions.

Joe. Paterno. Is. Dead. Again.

Part of the work of my maturity is to not rationalize the behavior of others who share my same name, or ethnicity or even my bed.  It isn't easy.  The impulse to cover the tracks of someone else's shit is deeply embedded, particularly if you identify with and could be mistaken for the perpetrator.  I watched the other black Americans I knew respond to Clarence Thomas' confirmation hearings.  They felt a collective shame about a man none of them knew, few of them would have liked, yet nevertheless felt his transgressions were their own.  Closer to home is how we all struggle when it is family  -- our siblings, children, spouses.  The tension between self-exculpation and loyalty to the transgressor is often unbearable and irreconcilable.

It's said that if you want to know something, follow your curiosity.  As much as I told myself that I had fiction to write, math to study or bills to pay, on Thursday I kept returning to news about the Report of the Special Investigative Counsel Regarding the Actions of The Pennsylvania State University Related to the Child Sexual Abuse Committed by Gerald A. Sandusky, which will forever be know simply as the Freeh Report, and the associated revelations and analyses that came pouring out and continue to pour out of the media.  Again, I cannot stop, so much so that despite reading excellent analyses and the report's Executive Summary I insist on reading the primary source -- the 267 page report.

I don't know what more I can learn that I haven't so far, or that I can't extrapolate.  Perhaps it is a complicated act of atonement, or moral education akin to watching Shoah, or viewing the PBS series, The Civil War.  I don't know.  Just as success has many fathers, shame has many cousins -- denial and avoidance, rationalization, defensive rage, retributive justice and reform to name a few -- and every one of us who have followed this story have felt shame.

It's what I recall as I read some of the anguished commentary from people defending Joe Paterno and by extension, the university and ultimately themselves.  They are beyond fact; as will the Paterno family be for the rest of their natural lives.  (Mark my words:  within a year's time Jay Paterno will publish an as told to book exonerating his father.)  It doesn't make it any less infuriating to read, but I understand it.  One of my perennial favorites is the lame excuse that "JoePA was an old man and wasn't familiar with man on boy rape."  Even if Joe Paterno hadn't gone to mass in 50 years, I'm sure he had a passing familiarity with the Catholic Church's pedophilia scandal and as a grandfather I'm sure he had some personal feelings about all of it even if he never made any public statements about it.  (Why, after all, would he be asked about that?).  But not to have an inkling of that particular brand of depravity? Even Paterno's contemporary, my sweet Texas born, Baptist stepmother, who is such a lady through and through that she wouldn't shout goddamnit if you dropped a refrigerator on her foot, knows what time it is when it comes to child abuse.  If she knows, Paterno knew but it is a fool's errand to argue with those who have everything to psychically lose by facing the truth.  It remains for the rest of us to make sense of what has happened.  Whether we want to, or not.

Saturday Poetry: And Don't We Sound Like A Broken Record?

I keep a copy of letters I've written

A backwards looking journal:

2004, 2003, and so on.

I read them when I'm needy

or lost.

Instead of offering solace

they admonish me

flashlighting my self-preoccupation.

And don't, they whisper,

don't we sound like

a broken record?

The song, the same old song again:

I'm unhappy.

Unhappy about not writing.

Writing is kicking my ass.

A minute longer I'm going to be depressed.

Then there's:  I love D. to death.

But I'm having problems with her while

I'm tired.

I'm broke.

And fat and tattered.

But not yet counted among the bitter

I type.

Not yet, not yet.

A Possum Walks into the Kitchen ....

... and scared the hell out of me when I walked  from my backyard office into the house late last night.  It used to be that the pipes would freeze, then burst when I was home alone, now I have to contend with critters.  The possum was young, not aggressive, and I honestly don't know which of us was the more startled.  What went through my mind was what goes through all cowards' minds:  call the police?, sleep in my office?, set the house on fire?  wake up my neighbor, Eric? blame Husband No. 1?


I came to my senses.  We've had the luxury of leaving the back door open to let cooler air in because the house always had people in it, people that any self-respecting creature could smell.  What is different now is that there are only 2 of us living here, and sometimes only one, and what I took for granted in terms of security and access has to change.  Lucky for me it was a possum this time.  While it cowered in the next room I poured Cocoa Puffs (leftover from my niece's residency) on a plate and placed them just outside the door.  Then I ran back to my office.  Cowering, I watched while the possum came back to the kitchen and stepped onto the deck.  I chastised myself for not placing the cereal further away, but It was outside.  As soon as It got further from the door I raced back to the house making stupid Natural-Predator-of-Possum noises, lunged into the house and proceeded to walk through it with my broom turning on every light in every room. Assured that I was alone (with the exception of a few thousand flies) I went outside, making sure to close the door (good-bye cool air) and whistling past the graveyard all the way back to my office.

Despite having grown up in Iowa, I am so not a country girl.  Undomesticated creatures walking into my house is a big deal and will always be a big deal.  When I lived in New York, I had to worry about human predators.  Those I'm used to; they I understand.  But possums?  New Haven I love you, but give me Park Avenuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuh .....