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 .....

Saturday Poetry: Leonia's Lament

an excerpt from The Cat Lover (Act II of Scenes From American Life), a collaboration with composer Roberto Pacé

(This act is set in the City.  The action takes place in bedrooms, a beauty parlor, doctors’ offices, and an analyst’s office.  There are several dyads [or chairs to represent the missing member of a dyad].  The pairs are:  doctor/patient, beautician/client, man/woman, husband/wife, woman/cat, analyst/analysand.)

(Solitary woman with cat begins singing to the audience.  Eventually she is joined by a person in a white coat, evidently a physician, and she tells the physician about a troubling ailment.)

Leonia:                   I have a feeling that something’s wrong

terribly wrong.

My Persian, Tutti

makes me red.

My body gets inflated

I start to cry

when I touch dear Tutti’s head.

I have a feeling that something’s wrong

terribly wrong.

I’m crying

for no reason at all

(for no reason at all).

I’m dying when sweet Tutti flicks me

with his tail.

My eyes are red.

My body gets inflated

whenever my Tutti licks me.

I start to cry.

I don’t know why.

I’m gonna die

whenever sweet Tutti flicks me

with his tail.

I’m crying…

I’m dying…

I think of marriage, I confess

when I fear I cannot keep my pet.

Am I allergic to the hair of

other mammals?

(Sometimes I can't stand my own.)

All the Single Ladies

Any long-married woman will tell you that husbands are made, not married.  So, Cuthbert, which is what I call mine when my gorge is rising, need only look out the back door and if I'm practicing semaphore signalling with the axe sitting 2 feet from this monitor he knows that it's a good time to get in his truck and go see a movie.  For you see, I don't believe in divorce.  I'm old-school in that way.  I believe in murder.
 
Psych.

We, the First Spouse and I are getting ready to become empty nesters. Fifteen and 1/2 years after our wedding day.  Thirteen years after Daughter No. 1 left for college.  And 5 years after Daughter No. 1 and boyfriend (now Husband of Daughter No. 1) moved out again after the requisite I-can't-afford-to-live-in-New-York-and-pay-rent sojourn.  (Don't laugh; with the way this economy's going, it can happen to you.)

We live in a very small house, by choice.  If you're not careful you can open the front door and knock yourself into the staircase.  When sober.  So, it takes practice and practice we've gotten along with my sister, and Beloved Niece No. 1.  We have been living together as a family full or part-time for 4 years.  A menagerie of 2 bulls, a ewe and a little lamb.  Hardly pastoral; rarely easy-going but often manageable.  (That previous sentence is classic NYTimes Grey Lady writing.  Deracinated of any drama.  Guess you'll just have to read my memoir, The Bachelor's Long-Suffering and Saintly Wife.)

Sister and Niece are moving soon to their own place and we will have a home to ourselves of our own.  Husband No. 1 and I are both looking forward to this new phase and while it won't be a miracle cure for all that ails our marriage we both know it's got to help.  A lot.

 

Saturday Poetry: Prospect Park III

 for Rachel Fruchter

Brooklyn is a small town

made up of villages.

Two such are at Clarkson and New York Ave.

Two hospitals:  One for the blessed, one for the rest.

Across the street from each other,

Downstate and Kings County,

first cousins, sharing blood and family,

yet, wary all the same.

Rachel lived in both.

Every Monday Rachel left Downstate,

her world of postdocs and clinical trials,

the world of NIH grants and abstracts

and jaywalked to Kings County

to be with her women.

Those women you see on the trains,

with 5:30 in the morning subway faces,

hands curled around hungry pocketbooks so dear,

Once a week Rachel offered them a Pap smear,

the first of their babymaking, closemouthed lives.

She collected, from these reticent ones,

their stories so that they might not have to die

of cancer undiscovered or AIDS denied.

At the end of the day, after tallying her results,

Rachel would argue for more money

for research and treatment.

But her committee was perplexed.

I can get another one to clean, they'd think

as she pleaded, if this one quits.

So, Friday, after another week of this

Rachel left to come home to me

and our standing date.

After 30 some years of marriage, 2 kids,

2 countries, and all the in-between

we saved Friday night for the movies,

for Saturday was for cleaning and shopping

and Sunday (in the way that people like us lived)

was for leisure.

A ride, she told me, I'm going for my ride.

Rachel loved to bike in the Park.

My round-hipped, gray-haired

professor wife would take the curves

of the bikers' lane in jubilation from the week's battles.

It was her courage and stubbornness

that allowed her to survive

in the labyrinth of Downstate,

and cost her her life.

For Rachel, a woman of brains

a-plenty never rode with a helmet.

I don't need it, she told me,

it's safe in the Park.

I see Rachel on her Sunday ride,

I can see that final Sunday,

hair sailing as usual when

over the hill pounced the rusty van,

too fast for a Sunday, too fast

for the Park and the curves

and for Rachel

whose next sight was a strolling mother.

So, she swerved.

She steered towards her right instead

and whomped by a dollar van

(full of Haitians it turned out)

Rachel, my brave Rachel, was

thrown all over the street.

The EMT's knew where to take her.

The people's hospital, her other home,

where the emergency team

wrestled all day with Death, but lost.

Dear Rachel would have been pleased, anyway.

The care, the passion they lavished on

my beautiful wife -- insured and white --

was something that she fought for

every Monday, in the villages,

all her life.

It's Been Hot, N'est-ce pas?

I have to admit that life's been pretty good to/for me.  My major worries these days are stepping on one of those infernal slugs on the path between my back door and my office door; or Husband No. 1 becoming a full-blown Libertarian as he's always threatening to do.  The slugs I worry about constantly; my husband's political evolution?  Not so much.  He cannot stay sufficiently interested in it all to follow politics -- local or presidential -- otherwise he'd care enough to try to convince me to consider the likes of Ron Paul.  (And god knows Libertarians -- the committed and the fellow travelers both -- do like to argue.  I think it's a defining trait in them.  Perhaps it comes from working alone by themselves too often.  And still having doubts about being The Smartest Guy In the Room.  I really don't know; I just find them all a bit off-kilter.)

It's no secret that I have no truck for Paul (or for Paulistas, not to be confused with Paulists, another group of troublesome fanatics).  He's a cold fish of a certain sort.  By the way, is it just me or do you, too, find obstretician/gynecologists some of the grimmest physicians working?  I'd had my share of doctors and while I don't chose doctors because I need to love them, while conceding that at this age it's a good idea to stick with your internist because you'll be seeing a lot more of him or her as time goes by, it's been my totally unscientific theory that the specialty of delivering babies and looking at ladyparts with a flashlight seems to attract it's fair share of people with an empathy deficit.  Don't know what it is but the closest I came to brawling with a doctor was the ob/gyn who "delivered" me 31+ years ago.  Yeah yeah, I didn't come to see her until I was 7 months gone.  Yeah yeah, I was placenta previa by then, which if the delivery had gone badly would have meant a messy malpractice suit on behalf of my heir and survivors.  Yeah yeah I didn't think she walked on water.  She and I just did not like one another.  As far as I was concerned I needed a "mechanic" to get this baby out of me in a couple of month's time so I could get on with my business.  Needless to say she got her revenge:  showed up for about a minute in a 9 hour and oh so painful delivery.  (Were it not for the delivery nurses, it would have been worse.)  BabyMama Doctor left me totally unprepared for the ravages of childbirth and beyond -- the hemorrhoids, the psychotic breaks with reality due to exhaustion and all the usual greatest post-partum hits.  But, I digress.

It's politics I'm thinking of, or mischief, when I tell my libertarianistically inclined spouse to run for mayor.  He isn't the slightest bit interested in governing.  (He wasn't even living in this country when Reagan and his ilk invented the "gov'mint is the Enemy of the People" mantra, but it speaks to his contrarian soul.  Yes it does.)  And I am not in the slightest bit interested in him becoming mayor, although there's a part of me that would love to don a Chanel suit, a string of pearls and a wig of blonde hair with highlights (or some variation of the above) and campaign on his behalf.  But, a spell needs to be broken here in New Haven.  And perhaps a jester with nothing to lose can help do that.  (Jeffrey Kereke's was a serious and honorable campaign.  Far different than what I'm proposing.)

The Age of DeStefano has lasted too long.  Both operational efficiency and dysfunction have consumed innovation and vision.  How many people who work for the city work for the city, as opposed to work to keep themselves clothed and fed and eligible for a pension?  What mechanisms exist to honestly and critically evaluate its major initiatives in health, in economic development, in school reform, in housing or crime prevention with enough accountability that if there is not reasonable progress heads roll?

I'm not unmindful of the city's challenges, and how some of them are due to factors beyond one municipality's control.  Nor am I unsympathetic to those who are responsible for day-to-day governance.  It isn't easy, and it's all too thankless.  Nevertheless, I've had the uneasy feeling for a while now that this is a feudal city with more supplicants than citizens.   The sooner that ends the better we will all be.
 

Saturday Poetry: There Are Men Dancing On My Afghan and I Need Them to Stop

Three bottles times 31 days times 4 months

Times 5 diapers times 31 days times 4 months

Times 2 visits to the gynecologist times

1 hour of unassailed sleep per night times 31 days times 4 months

Times I can’t keep track of it all but I talked to the doctor

And I told her

I told her this that there were men dancing on my afghan

And they are sometimes leprechauns and sometimes not

But they sing to me and won’t shut up.

I don’t know how they got in here, I am not afraid of them

They don’t seem to mean harm to me or the baby

They are not large either, tiny really but they keep dancing

dancing on my bed and almost more than I need sleep

I need them to stop.

New Haven's Brookside: Been There, Seen That

I was the designated babysitter yesterday.  I had 2 kids and a truck.  So, we went to Edgewood Park where they climbed trees and delighted an audience of developmentally disabled adults out on an excursion.  From my I'm-not-moving vantage point (as in if you climb that tree, you better figure out a way to get down without breaking your neck because I'm not rescuing you, Little Kittens) I watched the black boys and men play basketball.  As Niece No. 1 so perceptively observed, there were 2 games going on -- the teenagers and the adults.  It broke my heart:  It was mid-day on a Friday.  Why weren't they at school or work?  (I, we, know why.)

A city park on a weekday is populated by the disabled  -- by the economy, by culture, by either physical or emotional disability, by illness, or illegal status, or the imperative of caring for very young children sans institutional childcare.  As it is in Edgewood, it is in Brooklyn's Prospect Park, except that in Brooklyn the comet's tail of bikers and joggers rushing past obscures that fact.

New Haven, Elm City, is a beautiful city, especially in the spring, and we left one park in search of another.  But, I wanted to see the newly redeveloped Brookside so I decided to detour before we got to the next set of swings.  Back in 2009 when I was a public health study surveyor my partner and I drove out to the city's west side to interview residents of public housing.  I was stunned.  I knew New Haven wasn't all Whitney Avenue or Morris Cove; it wasn't even just my modest neighborhood.  But the west side of town, where these projects were located took my breath away, and I wasn't kidding when I came back barking that they were Bantustans, and although I was under no illusions that New Haven was le plus ultra in progressive urban planning, locating housing so far away from any and every kind of commercial center and supplying the entire area of mono-income families with one school, well if that wasn't worse than red-lining, show me the hell what is.

Later I was told that those projects were to be demolished, and I was actually shown plans for the new development.  Pretty houses, I thought, wouldn't mind one of those myself.  But, I asked, where's the bus stop?  Where's the grocery?  Surely the developers and designers already know that pretty townhouses do not a community make?  I don't want to get all New Urbanism-y here, but for god's sake I spent 1 1/2 years in Columbia, MD, and during the years I lived there I learned all I need know about Good-looking Dead Space.  (I concede that it may be a better place to live now.)  And that experiment is over 30 years old; not at all hard to research what it has become.

The kids and I drove through the development -- the windy streets, the newly-planted trees, the beautifully rendered, differentiated homes.  As the Irish say:  very nice, very luvly.  And yet, once it's populated, what will the people living here do?  If you don't have a car, if you're not the driver, where can you go, what can you do?  All I could think of was bored 13 and 14 year olds with too much time on their hands.  Too much early sex.  Too much food consumed to assuage loneliness and boredom.  Too much trouble to make because you feel trapped.

What will destroy Brookside cannot be prevented by fresh paint and square corners.  As if yet another ersatz stage set of the American Dream truly addresses the socio-economic and racial divide we all pretend isn't as pernicious as it is.  Be ashamed New Haven, be very ashamed.

Saturday Poetry: Across The Street the Unemployment Office is Closing

First she said:

We're short-staffed.

Business hours

are now from 8 to 3 p.m.

Come and get your money.  Then

it was:

This office will be closed.

At the Grand Central for the jobless

One tight-lipped unemployed smoker

joins the line.

How will Miss Unemployment Counselor explain?

What kind of job can there possibly be

for someone whose specialty

was scribbling denunciations on an NCR form

as the true believers, the sweet deceivers,

the hourly slaves and surplus MBA's

appeased her with assurances that they

had looked for work.

Will she, that scorn-filled bureaucrat,

take a number, after having arrived at 8?

Be made to watch the video, can she sit and wait

long enough to find out how to

phone in for the check, regular but small?

Will she curse, like the rest of us did

when it finally arrives:  Is that it?

Is this all?

This I Know About Getting Old

You gather around the radio on Saturday night to listen to "Prairie Home Companion".
And dress for it.

Everyone you meet you've met before.

The list of food and beverages you can ingest without doing serious harm to your body and mind is getting smaller and blander.

Never shocked, seldom surprised when you learn about the death of contemporaries.

 Almost every fantasy is nipped in the bud with the admonition, "That ship has sailed."

I've never been ashamed of my age.  Of course when I was a little girl I wanted to be a big girl; and when I was a teenager I wished I was old enough for some of the men who were buying me drinks, but ask me how old I am and I'll tell you the age I will be once I've reached my birthday milestone for that calendar year.

Except for now having sat in class for 2 semesters with 19, 20, 25 year olds.  Once again for the first time I'm in an environment where I'm simultaneously conspicuous and resoundingly invisible as an almost 60 year African-American woman taking a Calculus class.  I can see it from their POV:  She's almost dead; what's she doing here?  In some ways it's the Same 'Ol Same 'Ol -- girls good in math, African-Americans good in math, now it's competitive old hags doing math -- cognitive dissonance personified.

So, when one of my fellow students and I were chatting before class one day comparing notes about when either of us will be done I pulled my punches when I calculated out loud that I'd be about (cough) sixty-blah blah blah by the time I got my degree.  What a coward, I thought instantly.  All because I overheard a 19 year old ask a guy with a monk's tonsure how old he was and he said 36 and she gasped.  (You would have thought he farted in the elevator.)  I said to myself, they will not turn around and ask me.  They will not dare.  And they didn't.  Not to protect my sensibilities, mind you, but because even for the Facebook generation it would be TMI to know that that were taking a class with a 57 years old.  I mean that's like going bar hopping with your grandma.  Ewwwwwwwwwwww ...  One more class and I get to play with kids more my own age.  Or so I've been led to believe.

Happy Mother's Day: Femi Agana

To my friend and admiree, Femi Agana.  Mother of 3 wonderful children.  Artist.  New Year's Day swimmer.  Carpenter and shop steward.  Feminist.  Videographer.  Clothing designer.  Volunteer aid worker.  And godknows what else.  My hat's off to you!

Aah Hell, What's This?

I leave Dispatches for a month (more on that later) and once again they got to change up the look, and the how of navigating the site.  Can't You People leave things alone?  Have you never heard, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it?"  Haven't you got something else to do, and if not, d'ya mind working part-time and stop causing trouble for middle-aged control freaks?

My goodness it's been a hard couple of months, the great weather notwithstanding.  Calc I was bad enough; I held on by the hairs of my chinny-chin chin.  But, Calc II?  Almost from the beginning almost everything from Areas of Planar Regions to Dot Products and Cross Products has been like traveling in a foreign country without a phrase book.  The final was Thursday and the 8 days before that were All Calculus, All the Time (or as much time as I could sequester and/or steal) in order to swiftly access from memory much of what I learned since January.  Afterwards, on Thursday night I was giddy, and by Friday I was unbearably punny.  (It helps to have a 6 year old around who doesn't wince.  Much.)  Singing, dancing, acting like someone who had just had her sentence commuted.

I said to The Husband, "I'm free!!!  I'm free!"  He looked at me ruefully; he can barely tolerate the thought that I will be more cranky, more withdrawn, all the way through a master's.  (He's not down with me tying up my last days and time on dedicated study of anything but his wonderfulness.)

No matter.  It was great and now I have the summer to be.  Which includes tending to this blog and still trying to figure out how to allow comments.  (How much you wanna bet they didn't fix that?)  Gardening.  Exercising.  Playing, writing, arting.  I'll be back often.

Aaah, Motherhood

Trust me when I tell you that I really really have better things to do than pontificate about the latest mainstream political party gotcha move as in Hillary Rosen (The Democrat Liberal) vs. Ann Romney (The Republican Woman(c)).  But having other things to do never stopped me from writing when my head is about to pop off.

I had a baby at 26.  Late for many but fairly early for someone who was expected to not leave this mortal coil until she'd obtained 3 degrees.  I was single and believe me when I tell you that it was the lesser of 2 evils. (Although being a single parent wasn't what I considered an evil back then.  It's still isn't; I just know that I wouldn't wish its ardors on my worst enemy.)  Even if I was married or partnered I'm certain that I still would have worked full-time out of the house.  For one, because I was ambitious and craved intellectual stimulation (good luck getting ahead and stimulated in the pink collar ghetto, but that's another story) and 2) raising children day in and day out is B.O.R.I.N.G.)  In that way it is like war -- moments of pants-shitting terror sandwiched between long stretches of mind-numbing and often exhausting routine.

Maybe if I'd had infants after 30, maybe if I'd gotten a few good jobbing years under my belt and realized what a crock-o-shit what I called the "straight world" is, maybe I would have been keen to have a couple of kids and devote my intellectual and experiential energies to raising them.  Somehow, I don't think so.  It doesn't take a master's in queer theory to head the PTA; it simply doesn't and to pretend otherwise is to miss the point. I've seldom seen a woman be a better mother simply because she's educated.  (And I've seen many educated women be ridiculous mothers.)

Yes, child-rearing is hard work.  But part of the reason it is so hard in the industrialized world is because it is a relentless cycle of domestic acts, none, in and of themselves, hard to do and many made unbelievably efficient thanks to technology and chemistry, that no matter what one's proficiency, have to be done over and over again.  And the work's beneficiaries just don't give a shit.  (Ever heard a kid exclaim, "How'd this peanut butter and jelly sandwich get on the table?"  I haven't either.)  If that isn't the definition of unrewarding work, I don't know what is.  Who, if given a real choice, would opt for that?  Not me.  (Although I didn't have a choice.  Even if I did, I could not have been a fulltime homemaker.)

I am not putting down those who are, especially those who've had the education and privilege to do other things.  On more than one occasion I've played Cassandra to some starry-eyed young woman about to start a family.  I've told them that it's the hardest of jobs, the reward is long in coming, and that you will not be respected for raising children and you will be financially poorer for it.  And yet, if a family is what you want, I've told them, by all means have one.  All the same, can't we give the American deification of motherhood a rest, please?  After a few years, it's boring and you know it.  So, Ann Romney, just come clean -- being a homemaker allowed you to pursue an non-remunerative passion -- dressage -- and be a full-time wife of first, a Captain of Industry and then, a Politician's Wife, both of which have copious duties and social obligations.  You've worked, but not in a occupation that is currently admired, that of being a woman who made your husband's career possible.  And that's why you've had to hide behind the screen of Full-time Motherhood.