It's Friday and I'm done for the week and I'm sipping on a glass of cold wine, waiting for Alan to arrive here from his bungalow on the Shelton beach. It's Friday and my mind is still swirling from just hearing heard three different teenagers inside five hours tell me about the drug life at Bainbridge High School, the Oxy, the weed, the ecstasy, the alcohol, the stuff I've neve ever heard about. Before class, yeah, before lunch, yeah, during lunch, yeah, then down to Safeway to use and get back to class to use more before the next class and then the next and these are - - sorry, folks, but THESE are the NICE kids! The kids who are taking over their parents jobs at raising the younger children in the family. These are the kids who are THINKING (at least while they still have brains intact in their heads enough to think). I read their poems. I see their paintings. I hear their values.
"The WORST thing I've seen this past year was on a Nova program, when some asshole got right up closs to a mother turtle who was giving birth, and, during the MOST INTIMIATE MOMENT OF THAT TURTLE MAMA'S LIFE, he took his camera crew threw lights all over her, and photographed the entire thing. So do you think that was right? Do you think that was nice? Do you think that was worth whatever kind of education we got?"
His words made me think, and I told him so. Frankly, no adult in my past week has been so passionate or emphatic about any so-called "wrong" he or she's observed other than a political wrong, and politics is ALWAYS wrong, it's constructed that way. It's a given. At least THIS kid's wrong, this weed-addicted kid's wrong is......particular. Ideosyncratic. Specific. And goddamned right.
But it' isn't just the drug kids I've seen all week, it's the obsessive compulsives, for whom my heart just breaks. Let's say you are healthy in every way and you function well in every way: good job, good relationship, good enough marriage, good at sports.....but every time you lock your house, you don't believe you've done it. You just don't believe it. So you have to turn off your car's motor and go back up to your door and try the lock. Okay, it's locked. Whew. Good. Get into your car again and get set to go, but......wait a minute. Did you give that key a really good try? Did you shove it in to the hilt, back and forth, right and left? Because, look, all your life is in that place, all your photographs are in there and your Dad has just died and....oh Christ. Here you go.. You KNOW it's crazy, you KNOW other people don't do this, but you have to. You HAVE to. You have to back your car up and get back to that door again. Try that lock one more time. And then more time. And then one more time again.
But it's not just that. If you turn off your light at just the wrong moment, something bad may happen to somebody you love. Now, THAT'S crazy, you know damn WELL it's crazy, but you also know your'e NOT crazy. Say you go to turn your basement light off but somebody is calling you, say it's your wife, say she's calling your name and you turn off your light and.......and so what if....I mean, what IF....that moment, during which you turned off your basement light, caused....I mean, CAUSED....somebody else to have a really bad time of it? Maybe even somebody you know? Cause and effect.
And it's your fault. And you've gotta live with it. How do you change it? YOu've got two Masters Degrees, did THAT change it, hell no. You go to church, does that change it, hell no. You believe in God, does that change it, hell (sorry, God) no. So something's gotta be wrong with me. Something bad. And, if something's wrong with me, that means, quite simply, that I'M BAD.
I'm bad. I'm bad and I need to be punished but I don't like to be hurt but I need to be hurt, except that I HAVE been hurt and it didn't help. It didn't help. Ah, God. I must be the dumbest, loneliest mother-fucker in the whole wide world.
And why should this woman, this Ph.D. female with her weird library-looking office in the bottom level of her townhouse, be able to help me? Why her? I've been to five, six other therapists. I've even been to hospitals, begining when I was eleven! When I was eleven I lost total motor control of my left side! And now here's this lady saying she thinks she can help me!
This lady.
With her long dangly earrings.
And her "GONE TO THERAPY" wooden sign sitting on one of her shelves.
And her books. Oh my God, her books. She's probably crazier than I am.
Maybe she'll just tell me I have way too much time on my hands. Maybe she'll tell me my reflexes are exaggerated. Maybe she'll tell me to get more friends. Go on the newest antidepressant. Maybe she'll tell me to get lost, get a life, get a dog, get a girlfriend, a boyfriend, take up volunterring, stop being so self-absorbed.
********************************************************************************
Oops, and now here's Alan and I need to end this thing. What quote can I find to end it? Each week, for the past twenty-six weeks, various groups of symptomatic people have entered my various offices and - - I must say, I have loved these people, loved - - for the most part -- all. I have not loved the symptoms, although I have been engrossed and, for the most part, thoroughly fascinated, even captivated.. But I have surely loved the bearers of these most difficult and often tragic symptoms.
And then, each Friday, it has been like all their symptoms - - and all my pent-up compassion and empathy evolving from these symptoms - - have had a chance to slip away. So here, let me give you two quotes. One from the great Charles Dickens:
"No words can express the secret agony of my soul. Even now, famous and carressed and happy, I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children, even that I am a man, and wander desolately back to that hurt time in my life."
- C. Dickens
And the other, spoken by the great film actor Jack Nicholson, who played a person suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder in the movie "As Good As It Gets""
"I'm drowing here, and you're describing the water!"
May I never merely decribe the water..
Friday, April 27, 2012
Wednesday, April 25, 2012
Blogging! Bloggin! It's Worse Than Getting a Flogging!
I admit it. I'm a bad, bad blogger. It goes with the territory of having taught journal writing for three decades: Write fast, don't censor, hell, don't even think, just write, write your heart out, go ahead, don't write for your professor, don't write for your inncer critic.....well, it's not a popular approach to sensibility or rationality. And especially not when writing about which race of people were interred on Bainbridge Island during the Second World War.
"People," to coin a verbal tactic from Steven Colbert, "I know it wasn't the Koreans. I always KNEW it wasn't the Koreans. I was just testing YOU to make sure YOU knew it wasn't the Koreans."
I mean, I read Snow falling on Cedars along with everybody else. Also, I had two uncles who lost legs at Pearl Harbor and a father who fought in New Guinea. And my former blog statements still stand about coming here in the late fifties to work in the strawberry fields. Forever.
So I know. I knew. I always have known.
Incidentally, the best story I know about Pearl Harbor occurred when my dear deceased husband, Jim, was around ten years old and staying with his grandparents on a farm in Eastern Washington (his parents lived in E. Washintgon as well, but on this day he happend to be on his grandparents' farm), and they owned a horse named Jap. Jap was a large horse which Jim rode frequently and had ultimate faith in, in terms of being a horse big enough and calm enough to not buck Jim off or in any way behave overzealously or otherwise erractically.
So it was quite a shock to young Jim when he thought the words his frantic looking Grandmother was shouting, as she shook her white apron in the direction of the chickens and the hens to make them hasten and scoot, were, "Jap has bombed Pearl Harbor! Jap has bombed Pearl Harbor!"
Of course, what his Grandma said was, (Oh and pardon me, all you politically-correct-people-who-want-to-bring-the-past-into-the-present-and-make-it-nicer) - - ' "THE Japs have bombed Pearl Harbor!" but, to his ten year old years, that isn't what he heard. Ears are like that. They hear what's most familiar. If it isn't familiar, ears will bend sounds to make the sounds familiar. P.S. Just the same as eyes do.
But I'm doing it again; getting "off-point". However. I am afraid my last blog went off on SO many paths and was.......okay, so thoughtlessly erroneous.....in at least one major way......that I am certain I managed to convince several of my acquaintances (but none of my friends, I hope, since all my friends of at least, say, forty years, realize I am likely to write anything at any time and be absolutly all over the board, this end up or that end down, right or wrong, stark raving mad or just stark raving) - - - in such a way that I can sound Wise and Knowing or Dumb and Dumber.
Either way. That's me.
Oh, but I'm so GLAD I'm so glad I'm not Mitt Romney and don't have to stand in front of a bunch of cameras and grin a big shit-eating grin and shrug my shoulders and throw out my hands and say, "Oops!"
Because, see, I am someone who DOES believe, I mean I really really do, believe that words matter. I also believe that "knowing-stuff" matters. Although, like most people, I believe that the stuff I know is more important than the stuff YOU know.
But enough of this, since I can see that I am just getting myself in trouble all over again. So I'll just say this: I can see that I need to take care to organize my brain before I start pouring my so-called thoughts out onto the blank page. Because my life's sound track, when cranked up as loudly as I want, is way too full of Al Green and Alison Krauss and Leonard Cohen and Marianne Faithfull and Ray Charles and Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys and-all-at-the-same-time - - - for me to make much sense when I am whacking away at my keyboard, just enjoying my Self in a passionate writing sort of way, just scribbling in type, the way I do in my own journal...to make much sense to anyone..
I need to censor myself. Clearly. I need to edit myself. Clearly. I need to do like I do when I send something OUT to be considered to be published. Because, for me, the two - - blogging and composing for what I call "Real Publication" - - are two entirely different things.
I'll end with something Jim said to me years and years ago when I was having trouble with writing dialogue between characters in a story. He said the following: "When your dialogue flows as if you are tripping over chairs, stop writing."
I think that's about as good as it gets in the field of advice about writing.
Goodnight, People.
"People," to coin a verbal tactic from Steven Colbert, "I know it wasn't the Koreans. I always KNEW it wasn't the Koreans. I was just testing YOU to make sure YOU knew it wasn't the Koreans."
I mean, I read Snow falling on Cedars along with everybody else. Also, I had two uncles who lost legs at Pearl Harbor and a father who fought in New Guinea. And my former blog statements still stand about coming here in the late fifties to work in the strawberry fields. Forever.
So I know. I knew. I always have known.
Incidentally, the best story I know about Pearl Harbor occurred when my dear deceased husband, Jim, was around ten years old and staying with his grandparents on a farm in Eastern Washington (his parents lived in E. Washintgon as well, but on this day he happend to be on his grandparents' farm), and they owned a horse named Jap. Jap was a large horse which Jim rode frequently and had ultimate faith in, in terms of being a horse big enough and calm enough to not buck Jim off or in any way behave overzealously or otherwise erractically.
So it was quite a shock to young Jim when he thought the words his frantic looking Grandmother was shouting, as she shook her white apron in the direction of the chickens and the hens to make them hasten and scoot, were, "Jap has bombed Pearl Harbor! Jap has bombed Pearl Harbor!"
Of course, what his Grandma said was, (Oh and pardon me, all you politically-correct-people-who-want-to-bring-the-past-into-the-present-and-make-it-nicer) - - ' "THE Japs have bombed Pearl Harbor!" but, to his ten year old years, that isn't what he heard. Ears are like that. They hear what's most familiar. If it isn't familiar, ears will bend sounds to make the sounds familiar. P.S. Just the same as eyes do.
But I'm doing it again; getting "off-point". However. I am afraid my last blog went off on SO many paths and was.......okay, so thoughtlessly erroneous.....in at least one major way......that I am certain I managed to convince several of my acquaintances (but none of my friends, I hope, since all my friends of at least, say, forty years, realize I am likely to write anything at any time and be absolutly all over the board, this end up or that end down, right or wrong, stark raving mad or just stark raving) - - - in such a way that I can sound Wise and Knowing or Dumb and Dumber.
Either way. That's me.
Oh, but I'm so GLAD I'm so glad I'm not Mitt Romney and don't have to stand in front of a bunch of cameras and grin a big shit-eating grin and shrug my shoulders and throw out my hands and say, "Oops!"
Because, see, I am someone who DOES believe, I mean I really really do, believe that words matter. I also believe that "knowing-stuff" matters. Although, like most people, I believe that the stuff I know is more important than the stuff YOU know.
But enough of this, since I can see that I am just getting myself in trouble all over again. So I'll just say this: I can see that I need to take care to organize my brain before I start pouring my so-called thoughts out onto the blank page. Because my life's sound track, when cranked up as loudly as I want, is way too full of Al Green and Alison Krauss and Leonard Cohen and Marianne Faithfull and Ray Charles and Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys and-all-at-the-same-time - - - for me to make much sense when I am whacking away at my keyboard, just enjoying my Self in a passionate writing sort of way, just scribbling in type, the way I do in my own journal...to make much sense to anyone..
I need to censor myself. Clearly. I need to edit myself. Clearly. I need to do like I do when I send something OUT to be considered to be published. Because, for me, the two - - blogging and composing for what I call "Real Publication" - - are two entirely different things.
I'll end with something Jim said to me years and years ago when I was having trouble with writing dialogue between characters in a story. He said the following: "When your dialogue flows as if you are tripping over chairs, stop writing."
I think that's about as good as it gets in the field of advice about writing.
Goodnight, People.
Friday, April 20, 2012
To Be Or Not To Be.......GREEN!
What's wrong with me that I'm not green? I should be, shouldn't I? I'm a Boomer, aren't I? Well no, not actually. I'm one year older than the Boomers, actually. So, maybe that's it. On the other hand, one of my major jobs as a kid, was tending the compost pile, which we always kept going, always and always, on our farm in Silverdale. We fed cows our corn husks. We fed birds our left-over breads. And plastic bags? Hell, plastic bags, which were hard to get, mind you, because my mother made her bread, so no Wonderbread made it 's way through to our house and we grew all our own vegetables......anyway, I wore plastic bags on my feet....as boots!
Talk about humiliation.
Maybe it's that.
Maybe I was humiliated out of being green. At a young, tender age. Because I just can't seem to get going on this. Not even now. Not even yet.
And now my own town of Bainbridge has, of course, become the first city in Kitsap County to ban plastic bags. Oh, wow. Oh, good. Oh, terrific. I guess. Gee, though. I'll miss those plastic bags. I love them for potato and onion parings.
"It's an expression of our community values," said Councilwoman Kirsten Hytopoulos, who began crafting the proposed ban late last year. This last statement is part of an article in the most recent Bainbridge Islander newpaper which has kept quiet on the big police scandle that has made it to the front page of the Seattle Times twice in a row in the last two months but which loves to talk about the grace and goodness of banning plastic bags.
I love the ironic nature of Bainbridge Island. For instance, here, "On Island", we have a free drumming circle. You don't even have to own a drum, you can just come, pick one out, and go to it. The drumming circle is run by a black guy with a headfull of dreadlocks. He's pretty wonderful looking and so is his female partner, who is not black. Black, black, black. I love to say this in regards to people, because, really, there are virtually no blacks - - or African Americans - - on - -Bainbridge Island. None. Nada. Zero. Why?
Who knows?
There were a few in Poulsbo, but only a few. But, Bainbridge? Are you kidding? And now - - no plastic bags, either. Are both bad for the environment, or am I just a bad bitch for even asking this?
Probably the latter.
"I totally support this," said ____________, "I picked up a plastic bag from Lytle Beach and filled it with all the garbage I could find, and it only took me five minutes."
Huh? This is an argument against plastic bags? And what are people with dogs (who poop) going to do? What am I, who are soon going to inherit Magge's dog Tess, going to do, scoop up up her poop with ......what, paper towels? (NO!).....toilet paper?.....(NO!).....a tiny shovel and .......oh, give me a break.
It's obvious, isn't it? I'm starting to save my plastic bags.
But it isn't just plastic bags.
I'm also oblivious, pretty much, when it comes to most anything that is supposed to be "good" for society, at large. Recycling. I mean, I DO it, I just don't quite know HOW to do it and I certainly wouldn't go out of my way to do it.
My husband does. He drives places to do it. He drives glass to glass places and plastic to plastic places and he's this wonderful guy who believes in all this and I know he's right and I know I'm wrong but I can't help it, I want to strangle him sometimes for his..........self-righteousness. Not that he SEEMS and tries to be self-righteousness. So it must be my own guilt that I want to strangle him for, right? Right.
Guilt. It always always comes down to that.
I'm just not green. I only just learned that, if you turn a "something" over, and you can discern that there is a triangle-shaped - - well, "triangel" on the bottom of the said-thing - - then it's okay to drop it in the re-cycle. Re-cycle. Some people say RE-cycle and other's say re-CYcle.
I am one who says re-Cycle, with the emphasis on the "CY". See, that is the kind of person I am. I care more about where one puts the phoenetic emphasis than where one puts the article.
I am going to hell.
And there are labels. And what I call "due dates", but which are really dates after which one should really not eat certain foods. They are all printed there, on the food product, plain and simple. There they are. But I never pay attention. Probably because I didn't cook for the last God knows how many years of my marriage - - and then, after Jim died, I cooked - - oh, who knows what! Fresh shrimp and spinach. Cheese and crackers. I was VERY good at cooking cheese and crackers. Cheeseburgers from the local Pub. I can cook an EXcellend Pubburger from the Pub. And, if I want a filet mignon? The local Four Swallows has the best! So, why should I even bother?
So much for "due dates".
But today I looked at my "egg-dates" and I gulped and tossed a dozen out. As well as my "bacon dates". Just tossed them right out and wondered how the hell Jim ever kept up with this kind of thing, given his many, many tirps to the fossil dig sites and his days and days in front of computers, typing up scientific articles.
HOW, oh, HOW did he keep these dates in mind?
Or did he? Really?
I mean, was Cowboy "green"?
We never spoke about it once.
I do remember when Al Gore came on television and did whatever he did and said whatever he said, we applauded him. "Good going, Al!" we declared, or something like that. 'We've only got one planet here, and it is sure in danger and we are sure the cause and, goddammit, let's DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT, Al, WE ARE WITH YOU!!!" was pretty much our message to old Stiff-Faced. stiff-armed Al.
So we voted for Clinton (whom I loved and my now-husband hates) and we voted for Al and we won and here I am, with a refrigerator full of stuff that apparently won't not only last forever, it won't even last as long as ME, and god knows, I'm losing track fast.
Bainbridge. Bainbridge. Bainbridge. Let's get rid of the plastic bags. Let's buy more at T & C, it's WAY more expensive than Safeway, but it's more FUN. Let's go to these drumming classes, how.....EXCITING! We can pretend we are, like, Native! OOOOh, Native! Native isn't exactly like Korean, say, didn't "they" do something bad around here to the "Koreans" a long, long, long, long time ago? But that's over now, isn't it? Isn't it? Isn't it?
Sure it is. Now, the Koreans around here are RICH. So it's okaynow. Isn't it?
Sure it is. So it's okay.
Isn't it?
Oh, the nightmares Bainbridge would have, if it were one human being. About the atrocities during the Second World War. When I was a little girl, in the nineteen-fifties, I rode up here in trucks and picked strawberries in the strawberry fields and I made way less than minimum wage and I got yelled at and screamed at and I thought, "What's new? This sounds just like home!" and I just kept picking and made enough money to buy myself, over the summer, bit by bit, a few pieces of school clothing, and that was cool. That was cool. And that was what Bainbridge was to me.
And to my step-daughter Angela, Bainbridge was the home she lived in with her mother and her father and her brother until her her military-based-father left them all, and her mother had to go to work because when he left them he REALLY left them, meaning there was no child support, no nothing-support, and Kathy found work, first at Harrison Hospital, night shift duty, and then at Puget Sound Naval Shift Yard, night shift duty, because she had to feed her kids, because she was a mother and she had to keep a roof over her kids heads and clothes on her kids backs and she had to feed her kids and she didn't have Ann Romney's CHOICES, folks (please remember that, Frank Bruni, whoever you are, it's all about the choice, not your sadness over yourother's wranglings with the roofers and the electricians) - - and Bainbridge became "a-place-a-long-way-off-from-Bremerton" - - which is where the REAL jobs were. Imagine that.
Bremerton. The place where the real jobs were.
Oh, but I'm not "Green-thinking" here. I should be thinkng about "the kids" and how BAD it is for kids to become "latch-key-kids" because, although it's not precisely "green", it CERTAINLY isn't politically correct, is it? Is it? To to to work, to travel all the way from Bainbridge, where you own a house, to Bremerton, where you don't own anything except a job, a job which pays you enough money so that you can buy food and clothing and put gas in your car, to keep your kids in school and, and what?
Is that what it comes down to?
Is that the real question?
Is the real question this: is survival really necessary?
Because, if it is: screw plastic bags.
Sorry, folks.
Plastic bags are really, really, not going to be our undoingl.
As a psychotherapist here on Bainbridge Island, I can tell you all SORTS of things that, multiplied by one-hundred-thousand, may WELL become "our undoing" - - but it won't be plastic bags.
So I'm going to continue to hoard them. And, simultaneously, I'm going to continue to wonder what's wrong with me that I'm not "green".
FLASHBACK: I remember the week at the ocean with Jim and Bob and Mel Dietz and Steve Kager and Katy Warner, when they gave me my lovely little Ph.D. party and I sang a song I had composed for them, based on Kermit the Frog's song, "I's Not Easy Being Green" - - but my song was titled "It's Not Easy Being Phd" - - and Bob laughed so hard he had tears in his eyes. Even now, six years (nly six!!) later, my dizzy brain wheels, my heart swells, I wish for that night back. Steve and Katy had managed, somehow, to bring along to the ocean (for we were all staying at the ocean for a long weekend) a doctor's smock, long gloves, a stethoscope, etc. etc. - - and we came up, stontaneously, with quite a marvelous scene, with me, as the new Doctor, with all the Information, tending to These Dear Few in Need, but it was all in humour.
Nobody had died yet. Nobody had even fallen ill. The plastic bags lay, safe in their glorious usefulness, filled with fresh vegetables, on the counters of the Sandpiper Motel. I was probably nearly ready to contemplate making the infamous lemon tarte which would, once carved into, pitch itself like a baseball player gone mad, to the furthest wall, stick there for awhile and then pull itself down, goop by goop, while Steve and Bob stood there, giggling like two school boys who had just witnessed their principal go mad before their eyes and the women said words like, "Just pick it up, scoop it into bowels and cover it with whipped cream! It will still be delicious!"
Why does the past always seem so innocent?
So. Plastic bags. Al Gore. Lemon tartes. Long - - but short times - - ago. Innocence, innocence, innocence. Bob. Mel. Steve. Katy. Jim. Alan. The harmony underlying the disorder of the human world.
And me. Not quite in step, even yet. Even yet. Not even yet.
Talk about humiliation.
Maybe it's that.
Maybe I was humiliated out of being green. At a young, tender age. Because I just can't seem to get going on this. Not even now. Not even yet.
And now my own town of Bainbridge has, of course, become the first city in Kitsap County to ban plastic bags. Oh, wow. Oh, good. Oh, terrific. I guess. Gee, though. I'll miss those plastic bags. I love them for potato and onion parings.
"It's an expression of our community values," said Councilwoman Kirsten Hytopoulos, who began crafting the proposed ban late last year. This last statement is part of an article in the most recent Bainbridge Islander newpaper which has kept quiet on the big police scandle that has made it to the front page of the Seattle Times twice in a row in the last two months but which loves to talk about the grace and goodness of banning plastic bags.
I love the ironic nature of Bainbridge Island. For instance, here, "On Island", we have a free drumming circle. You don't even have to own a drum, you can just come, pick one out, and go to it. The drumming circle is run by a black guy with a headfull of dreadlocks. He's pretty wonderful looking and so is his female partner, who is not black. Black, black, black. I love to say this in regards to people, because, really, there are virtually no blacks - - or African Americans - - on - -Bainbridge Island. None. Nada. Zero. Why?
Who knows?
There were a few in Poulsbo, but only a few. But, Bainbridge? Are you kidding? And now - - no plastic bags, either. Are both bad for the environment, or am I just a bad bitch for even asking this?
Probably the latter.
"I totally support this," said ____________, "I picked up a plastic bag from Lytle Beach and filled it with all the garbage I could find, and it only took me five minutes."
Huh? This is an argument against plastic bags? And what are people with dogs (who poop) going to do? What am I, who are soon going to inherit Magge's dog Tess, going to do, scoop up up her poop with ......what, paper towels? (NO!).....toilet paper?.....(NO!).....a tiny shovel and .......oh, give me a break.
It's obvious, isn't it? I'm starting to save my plastic bags.
But it isn't just plastic bags.
I'm also oblivious, pretty much, when it comes to most anything that is supposed to be "good" for society, at large. Recycling. I mean, I DO it, I just don't quite know HOW to do it and I certainly wouldn't go out of my way to do it.
My husband does. He drives places to do it. He drives glass to glass places and plastic to plastic places and he's this wonderful guy who believes in all this and I know he's right and I know I'm wrong but I can't help it, I want to strangle him sometimes for his..........self-righteousness. Not that he SEEMS and tries to be self-righteousness. So it must be my own guilt that I want to strangle him for, right? Right.
Guilt. It always always comes down to that.
I'm just not green. I only just learned that, if you turn a "something" over, and you can discern that there is a triangle-shaped - - well, "triangel" on the bottom of the said-thing - - then it's okay to drop it in the re-cycle. Re-cycle. Some people say RE-cycle and other's say re-CYcle.
I am one who says re-Cycle, with the emphasis on the "CY". See, that is the kind of person I am. I care more about where one puts the phoenetic emphasis than where one puts the article.
I am going to hell.
And there are labels. And what I call "due dates", but which are really dates after which one should really not eat certain foods. They are all printed there, on the food product, plain and simple. There they are. But I never pay attention. Probably because I didn't cook for the last God knows how many years of my marriage - - and then, after Jim died, I cooked - - oh, who knows what! Fresh shrimp and spinach. Cheese and crackers. I was VERY good at cooking cheese and crackers. Cheeseburgers from the local Pub. I can cook an EXcellend Pubburger from the Pub. And, if I want a filet mignon? The local Four Swallows has the best! So, why should I even bother?
So much for "due dates".
But today I looked at my "egg-dates" and I gulped and tossed a dozen out. As well as my "bacon dates". Just tossed them right out and wondered how the hell Jim ever kept up with this kind of thing, given his many, many tirps to the fossil dig sites and his days and days in front of computers, typing up scientific articles.
HOW, oh, HOW did he keep these dates in mind?
Or did he? Really?
I mean, was Cowboy "green"?
We never spoke about it once.
I do remember when Al Gore came on television and did whatever he did and said whatever he said, we applauded him. "Good going, Al!" we declared, or something like that. 'We've only got one planet here, and it is sure in danger and we are sure the cause and, goddammit, let's DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT, Al, WE ARE WITH YOU!!!" was pretty much our message to old Stiff-Faced. stiff-armed Al.
So we voted for Clinton (whom I loved and my now-husband hates) and we voted for Al and we won and here I am, with a refrigerator full of stuff that apparently won't not only last forever, it won't even last as long as ME, and god knows, I'm losing track fast.
Bainbridge. Bainbridge. Bainbridge. Let's get rid of the plastic bags. Let's buy more at T & C, it's WAY more expensive than Safeway, but it's more FUN. Let's go to these drumming classes, how.....EXCITING! We can pretend we are, like, Native! OOOOh, Native! Native isn't exactly like Korean, say, didn't "they" do something bad around here to the "Koreans" a long, long, long, long time ago? But that's over now, isn't it? Isn't it? Isn't it?
Sure it is. Now, the Koreans around here are RICH. So it's okaynow. Isn't it?
Sure it is. So it's okay.
Isn't it?
Oh, the nightmares Bainbridge would have, if it were one human being. About the atrocities during the Second World War. When I was a little girl, in the nineteen-fifties, I rode up here in trucks and picked strawberries in the strawberry fields and I made way less than minimum wage and I got yelled at and screamed at and I thought, "What's new? This sounds just like home!" and I just kept picking and made enough money to buy myself, over the summer, bit by bit, a few pieces of school clothing, and that was cool. That was cool. And that was what Bainbridge was to me.
And to my step-daughter Angela, Bainbridge was the home she lived in with her mother and her father and her brother until her her military-based-father left them all, and her mother had to go to work because when he left them he REALLY left them, meaning there was no child support, no nothing-support, and Kathy found work, first at Harrison Hospital, night shift duty, and then at Puget Sound Naval Shift Yard, night shift duty, because she had to feed her kids, because she was a mother and she had to keep a roof over her kids heads and clothes on her kids backs and she had to feed her kids and she didn't have Ann Romney's CHOICES, folks (please remember that, Frank Bruni, whoever you are, it's all about the choice, not your sadness over yourother's wranglings with the roofers and the electricians) - - and Bainbridge became "a-place-a-long-way-off-from-Bremerton" - - which is where the REAL jobs were. Imagine that.
Bremerton. The place where the real jobs were.
Oh, but I'm not "Green-thinking" here. I should be thinkng about "the kids" and how BAD it is for kids to become "latch-key-kids" because, although it's not precisely "green", it CERTAINLY isn't politically correct, is it? Is it? To to to work, to travel all the way from Bainbridge, where you own a house, to Bremerton, where you don't own anything except a job, a job which pays you enough money so that you can buy food and clothing and put gas in your car, to keep your kids in school and, and what?
Is that what it comes down to?
Is that the real question?
Is the real question this: is survival really necessary?
Because, if it is: screw plastic bags.
Sorry, folks.
Plastic bags are really, really, not going to be our undoingl.
As a psychotherapist here on Bainbridge Island, I can tell you all SORTS of things that, multiplied by one-hundred-thousand, may WELL become "our undoing" - - but it won't be plastic bags.
So I'm going to continue to hoard them. And, simultaneously, I'm going to continue to wonder what's wrong with me that I'm not "green".
FLASHBACK: I remember the week at the ocean with Jim and Bob and Mel Dietz and Steve Kager and Katy Warner, when they gave me my lovely little Ph.D. party and I sang a song I had composed for them, based on Kermit the Frog's song, "I's Not Easy Being Green" - - but my song was titled "It's Not Easy Being Phd" - - and Bob laughed so hard he had tears in his eyes. Even now, six years (nly six!!) later, my dizzy brain wheels, my heart swells, I wish for that night back. Steve and Katy had managed, somehow, to bring along to the ocean (for we were all staying at the ocean for a long weekend) a doctor's smock, long gloves, a stethoscope, etc. etc. - - and we came up, stontaneously, with quite a marvelous scene, with me, as the new Doctor, with all the Information, tending to These Dear Few in Need, but it was all in humour.
Nobody had died yet. Nobody had even fallen ill. The plastic bags lay, safe in their glorious usefulness, filled with fresh vegetables, on the counters of the Sandpiper Motel. I was probably nearly ready to contemplate making the infamous lemon tarte which would, once carved into, pitch itself like a baseball player gone mad, to the furthest wall, stick there for awhile and then pull itself down, goop by goop, while Steve and Bob stood there, giggling like two school boys who had just witnessed their principal go mad before their eyes and the women said words like, "Just pick it up, scoop it into bowels and cover it with whipped cream! It will still be delicious!"
Why does the past always seem so innocent?
So. Plastic bags. Al Gore. Lemon tartes. Long - - but short times - - ago. Innocence, innocence, innocence. Bob. Mel. Steve. Katy. Jim. Alan. The harmony underlying the disorder of the human world.
And me. Not quite in step, even yet. Even yet. Not even yet.
Sunday, April 15, 2012
Working and Women Redux
Okay, I don't have any statistics to support me, but anyway, I'm mad, so I'm going to write about this, about Hilary Rosen's so-called "swipe" at poor Ann Romney (oh yeah! poor poor Ann Romeny) who you just know had nannys and maids and all sorts of child-elevator creatures helping her raise her five mighty Mormon boys) while Ann stayed home and - - and what? - - oh yeah - - and worked - - and has become a metaphor for all those other women who chose (or is that "who got to") - - stay at home and raise her children without having to at the same time go outside home and work out there.
In today's Sunday Review part of Sunday's New York Time's there's an editorial by a guy named Frank Bruni whose ode to his mother goes, in part, like this: "Mom didn't punch a clock or get a paycheck or any of that. She might have endured less stress and finagled more sleep if she had. But her arrangement with Dad was traditional: he sweated the income, she sweated the rest. Actually, it wasn't so traditonal, because the rest included the bill paying, the checkbook balancing, the wrangling with the roofer, the wrangling with the electrician, the car selection, the school selection, you name it."
IS THIS GUY KIDDING? "The wrangling with the roofer? The wrangling with the electrician? The car selection? The school selection? The "you name it"s? Oh, gee! What planet are these people who detest what Hilary Rosen said about Ann Romney coming from? Don't they realize that women with children who have gone to work outside the home have HAD to go to work outside the home and that activities like wrangling with roofers and electricians and selecting cars and schools are simply what people DO, period? No matter what? Period? Whether they work inside or outside or up in trees?
Period?
I grew up in a small town where most of the women with children did not work outside the home. To my knowledge, none of them were known to be roof-wranglers or electrician-wranglers. My own mother once selected a blue 1953 Plymouth all by herself, but I wouldn't say that it was in any way a tough decision for her to make, nor was it tough on my father, who, by the way, made the actual money to pay for the actual car, no matter how many dinners my mother managed to cook for us. Did she work hard? Not nearly as hard as women who worked inside AND outside their homes. She worked, I'd say, adequately hard enough. She took plenty of breaks, she managed to get back to North Dakota often enough to see her family of origin and the telephone bills she racked up must have been enormous.
Of course, she only had one child, me, and I didn't present that large of a problem. And she was sick with a fatal illness which nearly went undiagnosed, which DID present an enormous problem, so let's say that hers was a highly unusual situation which couldn't be applied to most other mothers in Silverdale-land in the 1950's. Even so, I was in and out of a lot of my friends' houses during the 50's and 60's and not one of my friends' moms worked and they all had at least two or more children and none of them seemed nearly - - not nearly - - as frazzled as the women I have known later in my life, the women who, because of real, actual circumstances, have had to have not one, but two careers simultaneously - - working inside the home as a mother, which IS labor-intensive (although you can modify and make it more or less as labor-intensive as you want, based on how dedicated you are to baking your own bread or driving your kids around to hell and back or hanging your sheets up on the line to dry, or putting together your own granola or you-know-what-I'm-talking-about, etc.) and complicated (see former parentheses) - - anyway, yes, working inside the home as a mother IS labor-intensive, but working as a mother AND, at the same time, working outside, as a whatever-it-is-you-are-working-as - - well, there's just no comparison. I mean, come ON.
Oh. So listen. Bruni's column in the Times goes on to say: "What's most bothersome about Rosen's comment, though, was its betrayal of what the Democratic Party and femininism at their best are supposed to be about: recognizing the full diversity of human experience and empowering everyone along that spectrum to walk successfully down the path of his or her choosing, so long as it poses no clear harm to anyone else."
Well. Isn't that special. Yeah, right, the women I know all chose for the American economy to tank so that suddenly it took two, not one, but two, incomes to forge or create or keep up or whatever the hell verb you want to use to mean keep your family alive and living with food in its belly and a roof over its head - - the women I know all CHOSE, they all took a look at their lives and their husbands or their lack of husbands, as the case may have been, and they took a look at their childrens' faces and they pondered a bit and thought about it a lot and weighed their options (right, sure they did, like they had options) and they thought to themselves, "Gee, I think I will CHOOSE to work double time, I think I will CHOOSE to get up at four or five in the morning and feed the kids and get them to playschool which takes a good chunk of my money but not all my money so that I can make a few more bucks so that I can buy enough food to put in my childrens' mouths because I love my children and I am responsible for my children and it isn't that I can't imagine life without work, it isn't that I go cold with fear if I think about life without work outside my home, it isn't that I am just compulsively drawn to enter the workplace, the jobplace, that shitty place out there with the glass ceiling that happens to be so low that my forehead has been bleeding for the past two, four, six, eight years in my life just from having my head having been crashed into that damn thick block of glass - - - it's really more a matter of other people, mostly male politicians who have mothers (whom they say they love and they get all wistful about when they think of them), who have made it so damn hard for me to have children AND keep my house going that I don't GET to make the nice cool choices that Annie Romney has been able to make....."
Choices. Uh-huh. The political savagery of this country has certainly allowed females in America plenty of choices. Thank you, guys. Things were different in the fifties. And things are different for the rich. And that's the way it was and that's the way it is. That's how the parity in this country crumbles. Don't talk to me about choices. And now you big-fat-political Republican Yay-hoos want to mess around with contraception so that poor women can have less choices than ever, except that women like your mothers and women like your wives will ALWAYS have choices, because that's one of the savage secrets we don't talk about in America.
The rage, the fury, the despair, the raw fear, the panic, the gauging of female's choices in America goes on and on and on and you're doing it again.
GOOD FOR YOUR, HILARY ROSEN! YOU WERE RIGHT, ALL THE TIME! And go stuff it, Frank Bruni, whoever you are. So your mother had to wrangle with the roofer. And you even feel badly about that, because you say you fear,"she didn't really choose it, inasmuch as she and Dad were products of a different generation, when too many women were prodded in too preordained a direction."
Well, well. But what a direction it was, Frank. What a direction it was.
In today's Sunday Review part of Sunday's New York Time's there's an editorial by a guy named Frank Bruni whose ode to his mother goes, in part, like this: "Mom didn't punch a clock or get a paycheck or any of that. She might have endured less stress and finagled more sleep if she had. But her arrangement with Dad was traditional: he sweated the income, she sweated the rest. Actually, it wasn't so traditonal, because the rest included the bill paying, the checkbook balancing, the wrangling with the roofer, the wrangling with the electrician, the car selection, the school selection, you name it."
IS THIS GUY KIDDING? "The wrangling with the roofer? The wrangling with the electrician? The car selection? The school selection? The "you name it"s? Oh, gee! What planet are these people who detest what Hilary Rosen said about Ann Romney coming from? Don't they realize that women with children who have gone to work outside the home have HAD to go to work outside the home and that activities like wrangling with roofers and electricians and selecting cars and schools are simply what people DO, period? No matter what? Period? Whether they work inside or outside or up in trees?
Period?
I grew up in a small town where most of the women with children did not work outside the home. To my knowledge, none of them were known to be roof-wranglers or electrician-wranglers. My own mother once selected a blue 1953 Plymouth all by herself, but I wouldn't say that it was in any way a tough decision for her to make, nor was it tough on my father, who, by the way, made the actual money to pay for the actual car, no matter how many dinners my mother managed to cook for us. Did she work hard? Not nearly as hard as women who worked inside AND outside their homes. She worked, I'd say, adequately hard enough. She took plenty of breaks, she managed to get back to North Dakota often enough to see her family of origin and the telephone bills she racked up must have been enormous.
Of course, she only had one child, me, and I didn't present that large of a problem. And she was sick with a fatal illness which nearly went undiagnosed, which DID present an enormous problem, so let's say that hers was a highly unusual situation which couldn't be applied to most other mothers in Silverdale-land in the 1950's. Even so, I was in and out of a lot of my friends' houses during the 50's and 60's and not one of my friends' moms worked and they all had at least two or more children and none of them seemed nearly - - not nearly - - as frazzled as the women I have known later in my life, the women who, because of real, actual circumstances, have had to have not one, but two careers simultaneously - - working inside the home as a mother, which IS labor-intensive (although you can modify and make it more or less as labor-intensive as you want, based on how dedicated you are to baking your own bread or driving your kids around to hell and back or hanging your sheets up on the line to dry, or putting together your own granola or you-know-what-I'm-talking-about, etc.) and complicated (see former parentheses) - - anyway, yes, working inside the home as a mother IS labor-intensive, but working as a mother AND, at the same time, working outside, as a whatever-it-is-you-are-working-as - - well, there's just no comparison. I mean, come ON.
Oh. So listen. Bruni's column in the Times goes on to say: "What's most bothersome about Rosen's comment, though, was its betrayal of what the Democratic Party and femininism at their best are supposed to be about: recognizing the full diversity of human experience and empowering everyone along that spectrum to walk successfully down the path of his or her choosing, so long as it poses no clear harm to anyone else."
Well. Isn't that special. Yeah, right, the women I know all chose for the American economy to tank so that suddenly it took two, not one, but two, incomes to forge or create or keep up or whatever the hell verb you want to use to mean keep your family alive and living with food in its belly and a roof over its head - - the women I know all CHOSE, they all took a look at their lives and their husbands or their lack of husbands, as the case may have been, and they took a look at their childrens' faces and they pondered a bit and thought about it a lot and weighed their options (right, sure they did, like they had options) and they thought to themselves, "Gee, I think I will CHOOSE to work double time, I think I will CHOOSE to get up at four or five in the morning and feed the kids and get them to playschool which takes a good chunk of my money but not all my money so that I can make a few more bucks so that I can buy enough food to put in my childrens' mouths because I love my children and I am responsible for my children and it isn't that I can't imagine life without work, it isn't that I go cold with fear if I think about life without work outside my home, it isn't that I am just compulsively drawn to enter the workplace, the jobplace, that shitty place out there with the glass ceiling that happens to be so low that my forehead has been bleeding for the past two, four, six, eight years in my life just from having my head having been crashed into that damn thick block of glass - - - it's really more a matter of other people, mostly male politicians who have mothers (whom they say they love and they get all wistful about when they think of them), who have made it so damn hard for me to have children AND keep my house going that I don't GET to make the nice cool choices that Annie Romney has been able to make....."
Choices. Uh-huh. The political savagery of this country has certainly allowed females in America plenty of choices. Thank you, guys. Things were different in the fifties. And things are different for the rich. And that's the way it was and that's the way it is. That's how the parity in this country crumbles. Don't talk to me about choices. And now you big-fat-political Republican Yay-hoos want to mess around with contraception so that poor women can have less choices than ever, except that women like your mothers and women like your wives will ALWAYS have choices, because that's one of the savage secrets we don't talk about in America.
The rage, the fury, the despair, the raw fear, the panic, the gauging of female's choices in America goes on and on and on and you're doing it again.
GOOD FOR YOUR, HILARY ROSEN! YOU WERE RIGHT, ALL THE TIME! And go stuff it, Frank Bruni, whoever you are. So your mother had to wrangle with the roofer. And you even feel badly about that, because you say you fear,"she didn't really choose it, inasmuch as she and Dad were products of a different generation, when too many women were prodded in too preordained a direction."
Well, well. But what a direction it was, Frank. What a direction it was.
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