There is a spillway that contains the water between the Coralville Reservoir and the Iowa River below the dam just outside of Iowa City, Iowa. The Corp of Engineers sits in their tower above the thundering water, maneuvering the levers to change the flow of the water to the farms and towns south. I still go to the Corp of Engineers' website and monitor the water level occasionally. I compare this year's water level with the record highs and lows. I check the level against the floods of 1993, when every river flooded and the engineer's released all the water they could, but the water built until it washed over the top of the dam, Iowa City flooded, and my sister's house was swept away.
I can measure the distances of my life by the spillway. My dad used to take us there when I was little. We'd stand at the railings, staring down at the water that crashed through the ridiculously small spillway, spraying anyone who stood too close. He'd tell me about the power of the water-- that anyone who dared to jump in would be swept under and down stream-- dead before they ever came up. He'd tell me lies-- about school buses that went in, whole cars full of people. I know now-- should have known then-- that a school bus would have to be going pretty far out of its way-- intentionally out of its way-- to get anywhere near the spillway. And the channel was so narrow that the bus might have a chance of hopping the spillway if they got up enough speed. I don't think anyone ever died there. If they did, I never heard about it.
One of the first things I did when I got my driver's license and a car was to load it up and drive out to the cliffs on the res that was cornered and allowed to escape so thinly through the spillway. We had to park on the side of the road and trek through the woods, dragging blankets, beer, and small grills along. We'd come out of the woods on a rocky cliff overlooking a turn on the river where it was dammed up into the reservoir. In low water, the cliff was thirty feet above the water, the shore below gray and sharp. A jumper had to get a running start to clear those shores below. I never jumped off the cliffs-- not until the year of the floods, when the water was so high it wasn't a jump so much as a step. I swim like a fish, and I'd jump off anything into clear water. But I had a fear of water I couldn't see through. I'd heard of too many kids who'd took that dive into dark water and cracked their necks on rocks they couldn't see. And in the dark, after the sun had cleared the trees on the other side, a diver would disappear from the air into the black water, and other than a splash no one would know for many minutes that they were under and not coming back up.
But that never happened. We sat on the rocks and watched the divers until there was no one left willing to fall into the icy night water, and we'd pack up and trek back through the woods, a completely foreign land in the dark. We'd come out of the woods hundreds of yards from the car and we'd have to walk down the berm of the highway to get back to where we'd begun.
I traveled with a strange mix of divers: kids from small towns who'd come to Iowa City when their parents booted them out when they were barely teens. Kids who'd grown up on the res, knew just by looking at the darker gray on the rocks whether the water was too low for diving, whether or not the corp was letting the water out or damming it up higher. Gang bangers from Chicago who'd come down with their parents, some, but mostly come because Iowa was just next door and an open market for drug dealers who were organized and had unlimited product to sell. We'd all stumble through the woods together, sit on the hot rocks and watch the pink sky, jump into the water and sit, shivering, drinking Old English beer from thick bottles.
Someone would have brought some weed and know how to roll it and would pass the joint around, many hands held up to keep the wind from knocking the fire off the top of the lighter.
My dad kept a speedboat at the Jolly Roger Marina on the res-- an eighteen foot Crestliner that I learned to drive when I was fourteen. When we came in from speeding up and down the reservoir the man who owned Jolly Roger would pull the boat up the ramp with an old tractor. The man was young, and his wife had a kind of cancer that caused small cysts to grow over her entire body. Her hands, her face, her eyes swelled with the gray cysts. The last summer I went to Jolly Roger before my dad died and we took the boat to my sister's barn I saw her again. Her cancer was cured and I was stunned. She was beautiful.
My high school boyfriend took me to the spillway once. I was fifteen and he had a new car, and he drove me out and we stood with the water spraying against our faces and the sky full of stars. They hung low and were textured in a way they never are in the city. He took me home after, and soon we broke up. I was too young and not very interesting, I'm sure. But when our lives converged again he took me back to the res, sat next to me on a bench at the deserted fall beach, asked me to tell him what had happened to me while he had been gone.
My daughters petted their first cat fish there by the spillway when we were in Iowa visiting. An old black man had been fishing straight into the churning waves, pulling up fish after fish. He held the cat fish still and told them to watch the whiskers, cause there was poison in there, and he smiled but didn't correct them when they told him how cool it was that he'd caught this ugly pet.
My sister had a house down by the river, miles below where the Corp of Engineers had dammed it off. She lived on a dirt road with no lights, her neighbors on one side a lesbian couple who I loved until I found out they were also cousins, and then I didn't know if I was allowed to love them or not. Down the other way a house where a woman had been found in winter, naked, dead in the snow. At the end of the road, deep in the woods, a man with mean dogs that meant you had to carry a stick if you took out walking. We'd ride in intertubes from semi truck tires we bought at the tire repairman's in the river, then stand up and walk out, dragging our tubes, when it got boring or the bugs came out. But in 93, not so long before I left town for good, the rain up north got too heavy, and the engineers did their best to dam up the water and save the homes and farms below, but the water would not be held, and it foamed up and over the dam, washing everything near the river away. My sister lost her house, and her cat, though the dogs swam to land. We took her stuff out on a canoe we borrowed-- as much as we could. The government took that land back when the floods receded and said no one could build there anymore.
I had spent my childhood swimming at the beach, waiting for the day I had the strength to swim all the way out to the buoys that marked the swimming area, then the next year shocked by how close those buoys actually were. They weren't far at all. I swam in secret coves off the back of my dad's boat and dug my feet into the three inches of loose mud at the bottom. But when I came back years later with my daughters, excited to take them there and let them swim, I didn't hardly remember the place anymore. It was small, and hot, and the water smelled like dead fish and scum. I remembered my sister's cat lost in the flood, and the way the water had slapped softly against the brick shower houses and toilets on the grass behind the beach when the roads opened and we could drive out and see what damage had been done by the big flood. I told my daughters they could go in, but not to put their faces in the water, to not swallow even a drop of it. The sand was rocky and the grass was brown and hard on the feet. The spillway looked small and old, and I couldn't imagine what had ever drug me there, had ever made me love the place at all.
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Saturday, September 25, 2010
All of God's Creatures, Including Slugs, Hamsters and Killer Frogs
My daughters are ten and eight, and an extremely dangerous situation this morning got me thinking about all the pets we've had in the last decade. More than our fair share, I'd say.
First, this morning. I found a huge (I mean super sized, probably antibiotic resistant nuclear powered) slug slithering along our outdoor fireplace. So, like a dumbass, I called the girls down to see it. They were willing to accommodate me, especially since they were getting ready for school and in various states of undress (re, naked). Ew! Cool! We moved on with our lives. I was upstairs, brushing my teeth and cleaning the mounds of toothpaste out of the sink when my eight year old hollered up the stairs, "I brushed my teeth already" (yes. I see that you also brushed the bathroom sink. Thank you.) "Oh, and Mama, I caught the slug. It's on the table."
"Why?" I wailed. "Why would you do that?" But I got no answer.
In addition to the monster slug (which I now can't find), we also have a frog. Someone gave my daughter a little aquarium for her eighth birthday (who would do that? Bad people.) So, of course we couldn't just fill it with grass and an imaginary frog-- the best kind of frog to my mind. We had to have the real fucking deal. Well, that frog outgrew the little plastic aquarium and had to go into a big glass one. And with all that room she (Alyssa Faith) seemed kind of lonely. So we bought her a friend. Who she promptly ate. Then Alyssa died. Larry found her, post mortem, and called me. "You better replace her now," I said. "We cannot repeat the hamster situation of oh-nine." So he replaced her that day with the same kind of frog, and we told them the other one died. One out of two ain't bad. So we have a new frog, and if I call her Alyssa Fake, the girls don't notice.
Alyssa Faith escaped from the aquarium the first night we put her in it. I was sitting on the couch, and I felt goose bumps begin to rise, and I got that feeling you get when you know something really terrible is about to happen. I looked at the floor, and there she was, halfway to me, a murderous glint in her beady, froggy eyes. Our damn dog (just one at the time-- more on the dogs later) didn't even notice the killer headed straight for me. Alyssa Fake escaped from the aquarium once. I have a clearly stated, contract signed, repeated over and over rule that no one is EVER to hold Alyssa Fake unless the door to the room she's in is closed, locked and barricaded. Someone forgot the rule. "Mama," my daughter calmly informed me. "We can't find Alyssa Faith."
"Larry! We've got to move right now!" I screamed. Luckily, the frog was later found. By that time I was comfortably living in my new, pet free house. The children aren't allowed to visit. They can stand outside and wave.
The hamsters. The hamsters were probably one of our greatest pet tragedies. The girls wanted hamsters for Christmas. That's all they wanted, swear to God, just hamsters we'lltakecareofthempleasemamaweloveyousantawillsayyesweloveyouweloveyou. We generally go to Iowa for Christmas, and anyone who thinks I was going to drive nine hours with live rodents in the vehicle is out of their g-d mind. So, the girls got a fancy hamster cage and a letter from Santa stating that it was against the law for Santa to transport live animals across state, let alone country, boundaries, but that this letter would serve as proof of payment for the hamsters they were to pick out from the pet store just as soon as we got back to Ohio and Mama got better anti-anxiety drugs.
So the very night we pulled back into Columbus I was forced at little girl gun point to the pet store. As they picked out their small hairy rats (They both wanted females. The pet store person said it's impossible to tell what sex they are. I told the pet store person just to say that any hamster they picked was a female. Duh, pet store person). It's also, it turns out, impossible to tell if they are pregnant and in the early stages of labor. More on that later.
We spent more than a hundred dollars on hamster accoutrement-- more cages, balls, toys, treats. We took the hamsters home, where they began their little hamster lives in earnest. Several nights later, we were awoken in the middle of the night by the sound of our dog Ali (we got him at the pound when he was a puppy) whining very excitedly. One of the hamsters had gotten out. The chase was on. We saved the hamster. Then, the next night we walked in to give them their treats and found some extra, hairless, white little nasty hamsters in the cage. I called the pet store. Ooops, was basically their response. And also that we needed to separate the non-mother hamster from the mother hamster and the babies or the non-mother would eat the babies. Yummers. So we snatched out the hamster we believed to be the non-mother, stuck her in a hamster ball, and took her to the store with us (I'm not sure if we thought she/he couldn't even be in the same house?) At the store, my family went to the hamster aisle, while I stood at the counter with the hamster in the ball.
"Can you just check to make sure we got the right one?" I asked the girl. She did. We didn't.
"Let's go, people!" I yelled through the pet store. "We brought the wrong one. We left the killer with the babies!"
We gathered another seventy-five dollars worth of hamster crap, and took off going sixty miles an hour down a residential street. We got home and the babies were still there in their white, hairless nastiness. We did the necessary switches. But the babies died anyway. And then the mother died. And then, to try to assuage the other hamster's grief, my daughter gave him/her a sucker. He/she died, too. No more hamsters. Ever.
We've lost more than our fair share of fish. At one point our aquarium caught the plague and they all died-- some fish we'd had for years.
We had a bull mastiff for a short time. A huge, red dog named Brooklyn we'd found in Winton Woods in Cincinnati. We were walking along the creek in the woods, and the dog was under a tree, across the water, watching us.
"Oh, my God, why is she here?" I asked my partner.
"She's been here," he said. He'd seen her before as he drove through the park on the way to the girls' preschool. I used his cell phone to call the SPCA, and they informed me that they knew she was there, had known she was there, but they didn't have the manpower to come get her.
"We're taking her home," I informed the kids. They didn't look all that thrilled about this massive dog, bigger than they were by a hundred pounds.
I told my partner to keep the girls on that side of the creek, and I crossed over, talking quietly to the dog. She watched me, seemingly interested, until I got within a few feet of her. Then she stood up-- she was huge-- and began to bark at me. Oh, crap. I'd left the only cell phone on the other side of the creek and now I was about to be eaten by a bull mastiff without even the comfort of dialing 911.
"OK, baby," I kept saying, backing away. I walked to the top of the hill where the woods met the road and watched her. And she watched me. My family began the trek back to our van, but I couldn't leave that monster dog there. "We're leaving," I told her. "If you're coming, come on" and I started walking. Every few steps I'd glance back and there she was, following me at a distance. My partner opened the back doors of the van and she jumped right in when we got there. She was coming.
Brooklyn was an awesome dog. The girls slept on her, they rode her, we took her everywhere we went. After a few days, I had no doubt she would never hurt the girls. However, she would hurt anyone who tried to hurt us. Or, you know, talk to us. Or approach our house. As a matter of fact, she'd prefer if you stayed off our block all together, thanks. Our neighbors were horrified and terrified. They stopped letting their kids come near our house. We couldn't have people over-- no one liked our Brookie.
Eventually, we had to give her to some people with a farm in Iowa (this is not a euphemism-- we actually took her to a farm in Iowa). We had little girls and a little house, and it got to the point where we couldn't move anymore, because Brook took up residence right in the middle of the living room floor. Not to mention we'd become pariahs in our neighborhoods and families.
We hadn't learned our lesson about pets as Christmas presents. Last year the girls got a brand new puppy. I guess we figured we've had pretty good luck with keeping dogs alive and happy. Ali is six-- he's happy, healthy.
Yesterday my eight year old came home with a book from school: How To Care for Your Pet Rabbit.
"No," I said.
"Listen," she said. And she read to me all about her new pet rabbit.
"No," I said.
"Yes, Mama," she said. "When we move to our new house." And she continued to read.
First, this morning. I found a huge (I mean super sized, probably antibiotic resistant nuclear powered) slug slithering along our outdoor fireplace. So, like a dumbass, I called the girls down to see it. They were willing to accommodate me, especially since they were getting ready for school and in various states of undress (re, naked). Ew! Cool! We moved on with our lives. I was upstairs, brushing my teeth and cleaning the mounds of toothpaste out of the sink when my eight year old hollered up the stairs, "I brushed my teeth already" (yes. I see that you also brushed the bathroom sink. Thank you.) "Oh, and Mama, I caught the slug. It's on the table."
"Why?" I wailed. "Why would you do that?" But I got no answer.
In addition to the monster slug (which I now can't find), we also have a frog. Someone gave my daughter a little aquarium for her eighth birthday (who would do that? Bad people.) So, of course we couldn't just fill it with grass and an imaginary frog-- the best kind of frog to my mind. We had to have the real fucking deal. Well, that frog outgrew the little plastic aquarium and had to go into a big glass one. And with all that room she (Alyssa Faith) seemed kind of lonely. So we bought her a friend. Who she promptly ate. Then Alyssa died. Larry found her, post mortem, and called me. "You better replace her now," I said. "We cannot repeat the hamster situation of oh-nine." So he replaced her that day with the same kind of frog, and we told them the other one died. One out of two ain't bad. So we have a new frog, and if I call her Alyssa Fake, the girls don't notice.
Alyssa Faith escaped from the aquarium the first night we put her in it. I was sitting on the couch, and I felt goose bumps begin to rise, and I got that feeling you get when you know something really terrible is about to happen. I looked at the floor, and there she was, halfway to me, a murderous glint in her beady, froggy eyes. Our damn dog (just one at the time-- more on the dogs later) didn't even notice the killer headed straight for me. Alyssa Fake escaped from the aquarium once. I have a clearly stated, contract signed, repeated over and over rule that no one is EVER to hold Alyssa Fake unless the door to the room she's in is closed, locked and barricaded. Someone forgot the rule. "Mama," my daughter calmly informed me. "We can't find Alyssa Faith."
"Larry! We've got to move right now!" I screamed. Luckily, the frog was later found. By that time I was comfortably living in my new, pet free house. The children aren't allowed to visit. They can stand outside and wave.
The hamsters. The hamsters were probably one of our greatest pet tragedies. The girls wanted hamsters for Christmas. That's all they wanted, swear to God, just hamsters we'lltakecareofthempleasemamaweloveyousantawillsayyesweloveyouweloveyou. We generally go to Iowa for Christmas, and anyone who thinks I was going to drive nine hours with live rodents in the vehicle is out of their g-d mind. So, the girls got a fancy hamster cage and a letter from Santa stating that it was against the law for Santa to transport live animals across state, let alone country, boundaries, but that this letter would serve as proof of payment for the hamsters they were to pick out from the pet store just as soon as we got back to Ohio and Mama got better anti-anxiety drugs.
So the very night we pulled back into Columbus I was forced at little girl gun point to the pet store. As they picked out their small hairy rats (They both wanted females. The pet store person said it's impossible to tell what sex they are. I told the pet store person just to say that any hamster they picked was a female. Duh, pet store person). It's also, it turns out, impossible to tell if they are pregnant and in the early stages of labor. More on that later.
We spent more than a hundred dollars on hamster accoutrement-- more cages, balls, toys, treats. We took the hamsters home, where they began their little hamster lives in earnest. Several nights later, we were awoken in the middle of the night by the sound of our dog Ali (we got him at the pound when he was a puppy) whining very excitedly. One of the hamsters had gotten out. The chase was on. We saved the hamster. Then, the next night we walked in to give them their treats and found some extra, hairless, white little nasty hamsters in the cage. I called the pet store. Ooops, was basically their response. And also that we needed to separate the non-mother hamster from the mother hamster and the babies or the non-mother would eat the babies. Yummers. So we snatched out the hamster we believed to be the non-mother, stuck her in a hamster ball, and took her to the store with us (I'm not sure if we thought she/he couldn't even be in the same house?) At the store, my family went to the hamster aisle, while I stood at the counter with the hamster in the ball.
"Can you just check to make sure we got the right one?" I asked the girl. She did. We didn't.
"Let's go, people!" I yelled through the pet store. "We brought the wrong one. We left the killer with the babies!"
We gathered another seventy-five dollars worth of hamster crap, and took off going sixty miles an hour down a residential street. We got home and the babies were still there in their white, hairless nastiness. We did the necessary switches. But the babies died anyway. And then the mother died. And then, to try to assuage the other hamster's grief, my daughter gave him/her a sucker. He/she died, too. No more hamsters. Ever.
We've lost more than our fair share of fish. At one point our aquarium caught the plague and they all died-- some fish we'd had for years.
We had a bull mastiff for a short time. A huge, red dog named Brooklyn we'd found in Winton Woods in Cincinnati. We were walking along the creek in the woods, and the dog was under a tree, across the water, watching us.
"Oh, my God, why is she here?" I asked my partner.
"She's been here," he said. He'd seen her before as he drove through the park on the way to the girls' preschool. I used his cell phone to call the SPCA, and they informed me that they knew she was there, had known she was there, but they didn't have the manpower to come get her.
"We're taking her home," I informed the kids. They didn't look all that thrilled about this massive dog, bigger than they were by a hundred pounds.
I told my partner to keep the girls on that side of the creek, and I crossed over, talking quietly to the dog. She watched me, seemingly interested, until I got within a few feet of her. Then she stood up-- she was huge-- and began to bark at me. Oh, crap. I'd left the only cell phone on the other side of the creek and now I was about to be eaten by a bull mastiff without even the comfort of dialing 911.
"OK, baby," I kept saying, backing away. I walked to the top of the hill where the woods met the road and watched her. And she watched me. My family began the trek back to our van, but I couldn't leave that monster dog there. "We're leaving," I told her. "If you're coming, come on" and I started walking. Every few steps I'd glance back and there she was, following me at a distance. My partner opened the back doors of the van and she jumped right in when we got there. She was coming.
Brooklyn was an awesome dog. The girls slept on her, they rode her, we took her everywhere we went. After a few days, I had no doubt she would never hurt the girls. However, she would hurt anyone who tried to hurt us. Or, you know, talk to us. Or approach our house. As a matter of fact, she'd prefer if you stayed off our block all together, thanks. Our neighbors were horrified and terrified. They stopped letting their kids come near our house. We couldn't have people over-- no one liked our Brookie.
Eventually, we had to give her to some people with a farm in Iowa (this is not a euphemism-- we actually took her to a farm in Iowa). We had little girls and a little house, and it got to the point where we couldn't move anymore, because Brook took up residence right in the middle of the living room floor. Not to mention we'd become pariahs in our neighborhoods and families.
We hadn't learned our lesson about pets as Christmas presents. Last year the girls got a brand new puppy. I guess we figured we've had pretty good luck with keeping dogs alive and happy. Ali is six-- he's happy, healthy.
Yesterday my eight year old came home with a book from school: How To Care for Your Pet Rabbit.
"No," I said.
"Listen," she said. And she read to me all about her new pet rabbit.
"No," I said.
"Yes, Mama," she said. "When we move to our new house." And she continued to read.
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Duck, Duck, Goose
I have a tendency to approach the world with this attitude: I'm not going to do that. That's dumb. For instance, "I'm not going to cross the mile high bridge. If I wanted to be suspended a mile above terra firma, terrified for my life, I'd fly in an airplane like a normal person."..."Wow, that was the most amazing view I've ever seen." "I'm not going to roller skate. Do I look eight?"..."That was so much fun. Let's do it again!" I tend to build up a resistance before I even try something. I don't know if this is some kind of ancient survival instinct (if I convince myself everything is horrible, then when it is horrible, I won't care very much).
I've been taking this approach to my newest undertaking. In my attempts to get my ducks in a row for next year, when I'm going to get shot out of the santa-slide into the real world again, I've sent away to the Ohio Department of Education a request for an alternative licensure for high school teaching. There is a part of me-- the part that taught and lived with high school students during the week long OSU Young Writers Workshop this summer--that thinks this is a fabulous idea. I love those students. The experience was one of the best of my life. And, yet.
I have this sense of high school (one not earned, as I mentioned in an earlier blog, I never gave high school much of a fighting chance). But what I have seen: an environment that seems to me most easily described as prison-like. Including the shower behavior. Teachers who are fighting against a pretty much worthless system, or who have been so inundated with teaching to the test mentality they've decided they can no longer fight at all. Students who aren't being offered much in the way of education as I envision it (kind of like I envision parenthood-- you show them some cool shit to get them started, then let them fly. Hopefully, if you've shown them cool enough shit, they fly in directions you've never expected, and they use their wings in ways you couldn't have imagined. Had enough of the bird metaphor? Yah. Weak.)
But this morning I thought: what if I'm wrong? I know-- shocking. What if my beliefs about high school are based on my (pretty much nonexistent) experience and substitute teaching in a pretty bad district? Hmmm.
I also have another fear. It's a big one. I'm afraid I'd get fired in the first week. Maybe two weeks. First, I'm not the most appropriate person ever invented. I swore (snicker) I'd try not to swear during my first class yesterday, and then my phone rang (dammit) and I said "crap" as I turned the ringer off. That was in the first two minutes. I have a tendency to share things I think are interesting, regardless of age-appropriateness (see this summer's experience, when I might possibly have mentioned that the narrative arc, much loved by western tradition, most closely represents the sexual experience...Also much loved by western tradition. And the students told on me THAT SAME DAY. Yes, I believe they did it with good intentions ("hey-- did you know the narrative arc looks like sex? It even has a climax!") but nonetheless.)
I also have extremely limited tolerance for intolerance. One might even say I'm intolerant of intolerance. I'm not the kind of person who hears something like "I just don't believe in same sex marriages" and says, "Well, I disagree, but you have the right to your opinion." I'm more like, "Get out and die, fucker. That kind of discrimination is equal in evilness to racism. Are you proud of yourself and your religion? Do you like it when you hurt your fellow Americans and make their lives impossible to live? Die! Die! Do it now!" Luckily, I create my college level class plans with the soul purpose of avoiding finding out about their social/political opinions, so I never have to know if they feel this way. But I wonder if I'd have that kind of freedom in a high school classroom. Again-- I don't know. But that never stopped me before.
I've been taking this approach to my newest undertaking. In my attempts to get my ducks in a row for next year, when I'm going to get shot out of the santa-slide into the real world again, I've sent away to the Ohio Department of Education a request for an alternative licensure for high school teaching. There is a part of me-- the part that taught and lived with high school students during the week long OSU Young Writers Workshop this summer--that thinks this is a fabulous idea. I love those students. The experience was one of the best of my life. And, yet.
I have this sense of high school (one not earned, as I mentioned in an earlier blog, I never gave high school much of a fighting chance). But what I have seen: an environment that seems to me most easily described as prison-like. Including the shower behavior. Teachers who are fighting against a pretty much worthless system, or who have been so inundated with teaching to the test mentality they've decided they can no longer fight at all. Students who aren't being offered much in the way of education as I envision it (kind of like I envision parenthood-- you show them some cool shit to get them started, then let them fly. Hopefully, if you've shown them cool enough shit, they fly in directions you've never expected, and they use their wings in ways you couldn't have imagined. Had enough of the bird metaphor? Yah. Weak.)
But this morning I thought: what if I'm wrong? I know-- shocking. What if my beliefs about high school are based on my (pretty much nonexistent) experience and substitute teaching in a pretty bad district? Hmmm.
I also have another fear. It's a big one. I'm afraid I'd get fired in the first week. Maybe two weeks. First, I'm not the most appropriate person ever invented. I swore (snicker) I'd try not to swear during my first class yesterday, and then my phone rang (dammit) and I said "crap" as I turned the ringer off. That was in the first two minutes. I have a tendency to share things I think are interesting, regardless of age-appropriateness (see this summer's experience, when I might possibly have mentioned that the narrative arc, much loved by western tradition, most closely represents the sexual experience...Also much loved by western tradition. And the students told on me THAT SAME DAY. Yes, I believe they did it with good intentions ("hey-- did you know the narrative arc looks like sex? It even has a climax!") but nonetheless.)
I also have extremely limited tolerance for intolerance. One might even say I'm intolerant of intolerance. I'm not the kind of person who hears something like "I just don't believe in same sex marriages" and says, "Well, I disagree, but you have the right to your opinion." I'm more like, "Get out and die, fucker. That kind of discrimination is equal in evilness to racism. Are you proud of yourself and your religion? Do you like it when you hurt your fellow Americans and make their lives impossible to live? Die! Die! Do it now!" Luckily, I create my college level class plans with the soul purpose of avoiding finding out about their social/political opinions, so I never have to know if they feel this way. But I wonder if I'd have that kind of freedom in a high school classroom. Again-- I don't know. But that never stopped me before.
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
If Nothing Else, An MFA in Hand Means Not Selling Penis Pills
I've been thinking (obsessing) this week about jobs. I'm in my third year of my MFA, which means next year they're going to kick me out (unless I can convince someone to turn this into a five year program?!). It's not so much that I think the job I get when I leave here is going to be the job I have for the rest of my life, or even that I'm terribly picky about what I do. I just want to like my job. That's it.
I love teaching. I've never loved any other job. Of course, I've never had any great jobs. My worst job was selling "all natural male enhancement pills" for Berkley Pharmaceuticals. And the "pharmaceuticals" should not be taken too seriously. I was in college and I had two kids to support, and they let me set my own hours. It was basically a mail order company that sold "all natural" pills of various kinds. But the penis pills were the big sellers. They had these ridiculous commercials (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTa98ixcy9Q), and we knew when the commercials were scheduled to come on, because the phones would start ringing. Men would call in for the "free" sample. Free, except you have to pay shipping. And also, they use the credit card you gave them for the shipping and handling to sign you up for this monthly deal, where if you "donotcancel" you will start getting charged for these penis pills.
The name of them was Enzyte. All of the "natural" pills had really interesting names. I discovered soon after I began working there that they came up with the pill names based on the 1-800 number the phone company assigned them. So, 1-800-Enzyte. I was on the selling side of the floor. For some odd reason I was really good at convincing men who had just called in to try this free thing to buy a year's supply for three hundred bucks. I'm still pretty proud.
I made friends with some of the people who had worked there long enough to get assigned to "customer service" calls. It turns out many of those calls were angry customers who had not heard or had not been told that they would be signed up for this monthly deal. Other callers were concerned by side effects such as vomiting, itching, skin discoloration. Anal bleeding. I quit before the FBI raided the company for charges of mail fraud. They were shut down for quite a while. They're back open now, at least they were the last time I drove past.
I worked at Lowes for a year. There is no worse place for a woman to work than Lowes. I met many single, middle aged mothers who were terribly abused by the management. I went to a meeting once and watched the store manager scream at these women for an hour. I never really caught what he was screaming about-- it had something to do with someone complaining to corporate. Lowes (at least the one I was at) is a terrible place to work.
The other, better but still terrible, job I had was substitute teaching middle school and high school. For those who ask me if they should substitute teach, I say go for it. But substitute teaching is not teaching. Subbing is babysitting with horrible handouts. The teacher would leave a packet on his or her desk of handouts and overhead sheets for the class period. Students engaged in such serious learning as reading out loud (it turns out not all teenagers can read-- so I had to read to them), and copying answers directly from an overhead to a handout. The entire time you're trying to break up fights, convince them not to leave, and praying to God that this isn't what they normally do in this class.
From the very first period, the first kids walk in, see you, walk back out in the hallway and scream "Sub! Sub today!" It goes down hill from there. It's not teaching, it's not fun, but it does pay OK, and you can learn something. Like how to use your body language to threaten fourteen year old girls into shutting up and using your body itself to break up fights between six foot tall teenage boys.
I have to find a job. But I hold out hope that nothing I can do is worse than things I have done. And, if all else fails, there's PhD programs. And Post Doc. I could do this for years.
I love teaching. I've never loved any other job. Of course, I've never had any great jobs. My worst job was selling "all natural male enhancement pills" for Berkley Pharmaceuticals. And the "pharmaceuticals" should not be taken too seriously. I was in college and I had two kids to support, and they let me set my own hours. It was basically a mail order company that sold "all natural" pills of various kinds. But the penis pills were the big sellers. They had these ridiculous commercials (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTa98ixcy9Q), and we knew when the commercials were scheduled to come on, because the phones would start ringing. Men would call in for the "free" sample. Free, except you have to pay shipping. And also, they use the credit card you gave them for the shipping and handling to sign you up for this monthly deal, where if you "donotcancel" you will start getting charged for these penis pills.
The name of them was Enzyte. All of the "natural" pills had really interesting names. I discovered soon after I began working there that they came up with the pill names based on the 1-800 number the phone company assigned them. So, 1-800-Enzyte. I was on the selling side of the floor. For some odd reason I was really good at convincing men who had just called in to try this free thing to buy a year's supply for three hundred bucks. I'm still pretty proud.
I made friends with some of the people who had worked there long enough to get assigned to "customer service" calls. It turns out many of those calls were angry customers who had not heard or had not been told that they would be signed up for this monthly deal. Other callers were concerned by side effects such as vomiting, itching, skin discoloration. Anal bleeding. I quit before the FBI raided the company for charges of mail fraud. They were shut down for quite a while. They're back open now, at least they were the last time I drove past.
I worked at Lowes for a year. There is no worse place for a woman to work than Lowes. I met many single, middle aged mothers who were terribly abused by the management. I went to a meeting once and watched the store manager scream at these women for an hour. I never really caught what he was screaming about-- it had something to do with someone complaining to corporate. Lowes (at least the one I was at) is a terrible place to work.
The other, better but still terrible, job I had was substitute teaching middle school and high school. For those who ask me if they should substitute teach, I say go for it. But substitute teaching is not teaching. Subbing is babysitting with horrible handouts. The teacher would leave a packet on his or her desk of handouts and overhead sheets for the class period. Students engaged in such serious learning as reading out loud (it turns out not all teenagers can read-- so I had to read to them), and copying answers directly from an overhead to a handout. The entire time you're trying to break up fights, convince them not to leave, and praying to God that this isn't what they normally do in this class.
From the very first period, the first kids walk in, see you, walk back out in the hallway and scream "Sub! Sub today!" It goes down hill from there. It's not teaching, it's not fun, but it does pay OK, and you can learn something. Like how to use your body language to threaten fourteen year old girls into shutting up and using your body itself to break up fights between six foot tall teenage boys.
I have to find a job. But I hold out hope that nothing I can do is worse than things I have done. And, if all else fails, there's PhD programs. And Post Doc. I could do this for years.
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Compost me. I Want to Be a Tree
I just finished reading Stiff by Mary Roach recently, and it got me all hyped up about having my corpse freeze dried, mashed up and turned into compost so I can grow a tree. I informed my partner about this and his response was, "We'll see." WTF do you mean we'll see? WHEN exactly will we see?
When I was a kid I used to love to wander through cemeteries, mostly with my dad. We'd go to the famous Black Angel Cemetery in Iowa City and walk through. He'd point out the unmarked graves over to the side that belonged to the unclaimed bodies, the elaborate white gates that marked the entrance to the baby cemetery on the hill (I can't remember what it was called, but it had it's own name, and I swear to God it was something like "Baby Land." I'm going to find out, cuz I really hope I'm wrong on that one.) When I was seventeen a friend of mine's baby died of SIDS, and she was buried there in that cemetery. I remember the tiny coffin-- it was like a toy coffin, if such things existed. She found the baby, just a month old, in the morning. She had died in the night.
The first funeral I ever attended was for my Great-Uncle Bert. I was four, and all I remember is getting pinched by my mother when my brother and I wouldn't stop fighting and sliding up and down the pews.
There is a cemetery about a mile down the gravel road from where my sister used to live. I'd let my little nephews drive (they were probably three and six, and they sat on my lap and steered the car) down there some days. My little nephew would cross through the wrought iron gate and climb the hill with his hand clutching my pants, confirming what I already knew-- that he could see dead people. "Sanctuary," he called the cemetery. "Sanctuary!" Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame had just come out.
I've never been too much troubled by cemeteries. One of my high school friends convinced us that there was a haunted cemetery in Cedar Rapids, a good half an hour drive away. So, we dutifully loaded up my car and drove up there in the dead of winter. For some reason the cemetery gates were open, despite the fact that it was night time. I drove my car slipping up and down the little snow covered roads of the cemetery, waiting for the promised nudge of a dead hand against the bumper. It didn't happen, and I was disgusted that we had wasted perfectly good drinking time.
After my dad died, about a year later, I got a call from the people who owned the Bohemian cemetery where he's buried. It turns out they put him in the wrong place-- he didn't own the plot where he was laid for his eternal rest. Either we had to find the person who owned it and get permission for the plot, or my dad would have to be moved. I made many phone calls to distant cousins (the cemetery is tiny, and almost everyone over on that side is some kind of relation) until we found out that the cousin who owned the plot had died years before and been buried in California. (Here's a bit of corpse law-- if you choose not to use the plot you buy, you lose your rights to it. Bear that in mind.) I spent many hours picturing the moving of my dad's steel colored coffin, and imagining what he might look like now, a year after dying (not that they would open the coffin, but still). It grossed me out. It still does. Why would a person want to be stuck in the ground to slowly rot away? Compost me. I want to be a tree.
When I was a kid I used to love to wander through cemeteries, mostly with my dad. We'd go to the famous Black Angel Cemetery in Iowa City and walk through. He'd point out the unmarked graves over to the side that belonged to the unclaimed bodies, the elaborate white gates that marked the entrance to the baby cemetery on the hill (I can't remember what it was called, but it had it's own name, and I swear to God it was something like "Baby Land." I'm going to find out, cuz I really hope I'm wrong on that one.) When I was seventeen a friend of mine's baby died of SIDS, and she was buried there in that cemetery. I remember the tiny coffin-- it was like a toy coffin, if such things existed. She found the baby, just a month old, in the morning. She had died in the night.
The first funeral I ever attended was for my Great-Uncle Bert. I was four, and all I remember is getting pinched by my mother when my brother and I wouldn't stop fighting and sliding up and down the pews.
There is a cemetery about a mile down the gravel road from where my sister used to live. I'd let my little nephews drive (they were probably three and six, and they sat on my lap and steered the car) down there some days. My little nephew would cross through the wrought iron gate and climb the hill with his hand clutching my pants, confirming what I already knew-- that he could see dead people. "Sanctuary," he called the cemetery. "Sanctuary!" Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame had just come out.
I've never been too much troubled by cemeteries. One of my high school friends convinced us that there was a haunted cemetery in Cedar Rapids, a good half an hour drive away. So, we dutifully loaded up my car and drove up there in the dead of winter. For some reason the cemetery gates were open, despite the fact that it was night time. I drove my car slipping up and down the little snow covered roads of the cemetery, waiting for the promised nudge of a dead hand against the bumper. It didn't happen, and I was disgusted that we had wasted perfectly good drinking time.
After my dad died, about a year later, I got a call from the people who owned the Bohemian cemetery where he's buried. It turns out they put him in the wrong place-- he didn't own the plot where he was laid for his eternal rest. Either we had to find the person who owned it and get permission for the plot, or my dad would have to be moved. I made many phone calls to distant cousins (the cemetery is tiny, and almost everyone over on that side is some kind of relation) until we found out that the cousin who owned the plot had died years before and been buried in California. (Here's a bit of corpse law-- if you choose not to use the plot you buy, you lose your rights to it. Bear that in mind.) I spent many hours picturing the moving of my dad's steel colored coffin, and imagining what he might look like now, a year after dying (not that they would open the coffin, but still). It grossed me out. It still does. Why would a person want to be stuck in the ground to slowly rot away? Compost me. I want to be a tree.
Saturday, September 18, 2010
Forgetting the Map and Other Tragedies
I'm feeling guilty about a conversation I had with my oldest daughter in the car yesterday. In the fifth grade, every Thursday they get a map (it might be a map of the oceans, or the continents, or whatever). They take the map home, and they study it for a week, and then they take the test. This is the third week of school, and for the third week she has forgotten to bring home her map (just to be clear-- it's not that big of a deal-- the maps are easy, she still gets an A every time. 100%. This will matter later. Maybe only to me).
But I got really upset in the car. At some point I said something like, you know the difference between people who go to Harvard and people who go to some state college? ("What?") Remembering to bring their maps home. Yes, I was serious. My stomach started to hurt from the massive amount of agony I was in. I may have cried a little out of fear (not that my kid would end up at state college, I swear. Fear that I have no idea how to help her, and I never will).
I'm a driven person. That's what other people tell me, most notably my psychiatrist. Maybe so. But really I'm a loser. I'm telling you-- you don't have to believe me, but it's true. Sometimes I sit on the couch for up to an hour and watch reality TV. Occasionally I do nothing useful all day except be a mother and clean the house. There's a voice in my brain all the time "Loser, loser, loser", but sometimes it's louder than other times. Yes, I'm driven. I'm driven to get out of loserville. I could make a list. OK, I will.
1. I dropped out of high school. Yes, I have a bachelor's degree and 1.75 master's degrees, but really I have a ninth grade education. Ninth grade being the last grade I actually showed up (I did 10th grade in an alternative school, but I don't think standing outside smoking pot and attempting to shove the couch out of the lounge window count toward my education).
2. I have a criminal record. Disorderly conduct. I'll never be president.
3. I'm a terrible mother. Please see the conversation above.
4. I rarely clean the corners. And then I see how dirty they are, and I buy one of those rotating brushes and clean them, but they get dirty again.
5. I swear. A lot.
6. I have terrible hair.
7. I have big feet.
8. I taught myself to braid hair, but I never do it right. The braids are too loose.
9. My dogs jump on people. Nobody likes dogs that jump. Nobody likes my dogs.
10. I bite my nails.
I mean, honestly, the list goes on for days. My counselor has suggested wearing a piece of jewelry (11. I don't wear jewelry), something that is slightly irritating, to remind me not to be mean to myself. (12. I think that's dumb.) At first, when he brought up this whole "you're in an abusive relationship with yourself" thing, I thought, oh, ok, I'll just try to be nicer to myself. No problem. But the more I pay attention the more I realize that this "driven-ness" I have seeps into everything. It's not just that I want things to be perfect. I make myself sick, and I waste a lot of time I could otherwise be using to clean corners telling myself how much I've failed. I'm terrified of failure. Cliche alert. But I mean terrified. I mean ulcer attack, can't breath, tight chest, oh, God, I'm going to throw up terror.
Nothing's ever good enough. A clean house is not clean enough, remembering to bring home your math and spelling, but not your map, is failure. A *B* is failure. I don't judge other people so harshly (I try not to), but I wonder if that's because, deep down, I don't care so much if they fail. Make space for the other losers. I don't think that's true-- I hope it's not.
So hysterical. I'm not that bad. The older I get, the more I'm able to let some things go. I try to keep my mouth shut when it comes to my kids (sometimes I fail. Lahoooser.). I don't know, since I went to state college, but I'm guessing admission to Harvard has more to do with choosing to be born to rich parents and/or having parents who support and encourage you, even when you forget to bring your map home.
This morning we were in the car (maybe I should just stay out of cars?) discussing a certain incident in which my older daughter failed to stand up for my younger daughter when they were playing with a group of kids.
"Is that what Dr. Martin Luther King would do?" I asked my older daughter. All I got was silence. I turned around and looked at her. "Is it?"
She looked completely befuddled. "I have no idea, Mama. I really don't know."
But I got really upset in the car. At some point I said something like, you know the difference between people who go to Harvard and people who go to some state college? ("What?") Remembering to bring their maps home. Yes, I was serious. My stomach started to hurt from the massive amount of agony I was in. I may have cried a little out of fear (not that my kid would end up at state college, I swear. Fear that I have no idea how to help her, and I never will).
I'm a driven person. That's what other people tell me, most notably my psychiatrist. Maybe so. But really I'm a loser. I'm telling you-- you don't have to believe me, but it's true. Sometimes I sit on the couch for up to an hour and watch reality TV. Occasionally I do nothing useful all day except be a mother and clean the house. There's a voice in my brain all the time "Loser, loser, loser", but sometimes it's louder than other times. Yes, I'm driven. I'm driven to get out of loserville. I could make a list. OK, I will.
1. I dropped out of high school. Yes, I have a bachelor's degree and 1.75 master's degrees, but really I have a ninth grade education. Ninth grade being the last grade I actually showed up (I did 10th grade in an alternative school, but I don't think standing outside smoking pot and attempting to shove the couch out of the lounge window count toward my education).
2. I have a criminal record. Disorderly conduct. I'll never be president.
3. I'm a terrible mother. Please see the conversation above.
4. I rarely clean the corners. And then I see how dirty they are, and I buy one of those rotating brushes and clean them, but they get dirty again.
5. I swear. A lot.
6. I have terrible hair.
7. I have big feet.
8. I taught myself to braid hair, but I never do it right. The braids are too loose.
9. My dogs jump on people. Nobody likes dogs that jump. Nobody likes my dogs.
10. I bite my nails.
I mean, honestly, the list goes on for days. My counselor has suggested wearing a piece of jewelry (11. I don't wear jewelry), something that is slightly irritating, to remind me not to be mean to myself. (12. I think that's dumb.) At first, when he brought up this whole "you're in an abusive relationship with yourself" thing, I thought, oh, ok, I'll just try to be nicer to myself. No problem. But the more I pay attention the more I realize that this "driven-ness" I have seeps into everything. It's not just that I want things to be perfect. I make myself sick, and I waste a lot of time I could otherwise be using to clean corners telling myself how much I've failed. I'm terrified of failure. Cliche alert. But I mean terrified. I mean ulcer attack, can't breath, tight chest, oh, God, I'm going to throw up terror.
Nothing's ever good enough. A clean house is not clean enough, remembering to bring home your math and spelling, but not your map, is failure. A *B* is failure. I don't judge other people so harshly (I try not to), but I wonder if that's because, deep down, I don't care so much if they fail. Make space for the other losers. I don't think that's true-- I hope it's not.
So hysterical. I'm not that bad. The older I get, the more I'm able to let some things go. I try to keep my mouth shut when it comes to my kids (sometimes I fail. Lahoooser.). I don't know, since I went to state college, but I'm guessing admission to Harvard has more to do with choosing to be born to rich parents and/or having parents who support and encourage you, even when you forget to bring your map home.
This morning we were in the car (maybe I should just stay out of cars?) discussing a certain incident in which my older daughter failed to stand up for my younger daughter when they were playing with a group of kids.
"Is that what Dr. Martin Luther King would do?" I asked my older daughter. All I got was silence. I turned around and looked at her. "Is it?"
She looked completely befuddled. "I have no idea, Mama. I really don't know."
Monday, September 13, 2010
Minding my Own Biz
I was talking to one of my sisters yesterday about an inner-familial problem, and she cut me off right at the beginning. "Why are you even in this? How is this your business?" Whoa. Slow down there. Not my business? But, but, but. OK, it's really not my business. Damn. At some point in my life I designated myself Captain Save a Ho. If someone has a problem, and I know about it, I consider it my life's goal to fix that problem if I can. And if I can't fix it, I at least offer my ass kicking services. As I grow older, I've managed to stay out of other people's problems both because of lack of proximity (I'm just not paying as close of attention), and I'm too busy solving the problems of my kids, my partner, myself, my dogs. A Captain gets busy.
I remember when my ten year old told me about a friend she was having a problem with, and I immediately started my plotting about what we (I) were going to do about this problem. "Mama," my daughter said, "Can I just solve this one myself? I mean, I'm ten years old. If I can't solve it, then you can step in." The speech had the smack of being rehearsed-- she'd been working on this one. It felt like I had just gotten all suited up in my Roman armor, my shield, my sword, my horse, and somebody said, "Hey, you know what, how about we don't conquer that country? What if we just stayed home?" I was all dressed up for a violent overtaking, and the violence got canceled. I'm still kind of upset.
Luckily, my younger daughter doesn't mind it when I get involved. "What do you do if a boy hits you?" I ask her. "Call Mama," she responds. Mama will handle this. Someone once told me that you can't go in front of your children, protecting them from everything. First, it's impossible. Second, it's not good for them. I know that's true. But, but, but. My job is to be there as a sounding board, to offer advice, but to stay off the field. That's hard, especially when the advice I want to give is "Who needs friends? Screw friends-- you can hang out with me!" I am the mother who shows up at every game. If my kid gets hurt, I'm there before the coach. If they hit the winning run, I meet them at the plate. I once jumped up and down screaming "Safe! She's safe! Ha!" at a five year old catcher when my daughter crossed home plate just seconds before the little girl picked the ball up. It took me a few seconds to notice everyone staring at me.
So I'm working on minding my own business. And when I don't have any? I guess I'll have to make some.
I remember when my ten year old told me about a friend she was having a problem with, and I immediately started my plotting about what we (I) were going to do about this problem. "Mama," my daughter said, "Can I just solve this one myself? I mean, I'm ten years old. If I can't solve it, then you can step in." The speech had the smack of being rehearsed-- she'd been working on this one. It felt like I had just gotten all suited up in my Roman armor, my shield, my sword, my horse, and somebody said, "Hey, you know what, how about we don't conquer that country? What if we just stayed home?" I was all dressed up for a violent overtaking, and the violence got canceled. I'm still kind of upset.
Luckily, my younger daughter doesn't mind it when I get involved. "What do you do if a boy hits you?" I ask her. "Call Mama," she responds. Mama will handle this. Someone once told me that you can't go in front of your children, protecting them from everything. First, it's impossible. Second, it's not good for them. I know that's true. But, but, but. My job is to be there as a sounding board, to offer advice, but to stay off the field. That's hard, especially when the advice I want to give is "Who needs friends? Screw friends-- you can hang out with me!" I am the mother who shows up at every game. If my kid gets hurt, I'm there before the coach. If they hit the winning run, I meet them at the plate. I once jumped up and down screaming "Safe! She's safe! Ha!" at a five year old catcher when my daughter crossed home plate just seconds before the little girl picked the ball up. It took me a few seconds to notice everyone staring at me.
So I'm working on minding my own business. And when I don't have any? I guess I'll have to make some.
Sunday, September 12, 2010
Useless Questions
Last week I spent a day in my favorite useless pastime-- wondering if, in fact, I was a writer at all. I tentatively investigated jobs that had nothing to do with writing or teaching. I thought about other possibilities. Nursing? No. I hate sick people. Lawyer? Bah. I hate litigious people. Marketing? OK, bottom line-- I pretty much just don't like people. I like student people, but mostly because I don't see them too much and they seem at least nominally interested in books and rhetoric and writing and the crazy shit people say and do.
Elizabeth McCracken came to give a reading at a university I attended, and she gave a small Q and A afterward for the graduate students. She said that her biggest regret is that she spent so much time wondering, worrying, if she was a writer. That once she stopped asking that question she was suddenly producing a lot of writing. Like books of writing. Since then, I've tried to remind myself that the question, at this point, is moot. I've been writing since I was four years old (a plagiarised copy of a book about a puppy-- I simply changed the puppy's name and kept all the other words the same. My technique has evolved since then). I remember sitting at a typewriter at the dining room table and pounding out my own version of The Boxcar Children, then later poems and short stories by the dozen. It's not that I chose writing. I write, as has been famously said by many famous writers, because writing chose me. I write because I have no other choice.
It's not just that I write stories. I write my whole life. I write letters because I know in a letter I will get everything I want to say in. When my partner and I were first together we would argue through email and text-- hashing out those small things you never realize you're going to have to hash out once you settle into the long run. He indulged in my desire for written communication, though I know it boggled him-- he's not a writer, but, luckily for me, he, like I, doesn't much go for verbal discussions either. When I'm not writing I'm writing in my head. Just give me a comfortable seat and a blank wall, and I'll stare at the wall for hours. I have whole books in my head, several to choose from, and I just write them inside my brain. When I get bad news I write the whole story out in my head-- how will this play out? What if I revise? What if I change this or that?
I have another useless question. Am I a bad mother? It's similar to the writer question, because, like, dude, you're in the fire. At this point you fight the fire and don't worry too much about the hard questions. I'm a mother. I'm a writer. It's a given-- I have to do the best I can do. The questions (and answers) are eerily similar.
Elizabeth McCracken came to give a reading at a university I attended, and she gave a small Q and A afterward for the graduate students. She said that her biggest regret is that she spent so much time wondering, worrying, if she was a writer. That once she stopped asking that question she was suddenly producing a lot of writing. Like books of writing. Since then, I've tried to remind myself that the question, at this point, is moot. I've been writing since I was four years old (a plagiarised copy of a book about a puppy-- I simply changed the puppy's name and kept all the other words the same. My technique has evolved since then). I remember sitting at a typewriter at the dining room table and pounding out my own version of The Boxcar Children, then later poems and short stories by the dozen. It's not that I chose writing. I write, as has been famously said by many famous writers, because writing chose me. I write because I have no other choice.
It's not just that I write stories. I write my whole life. I write letters because I know in a letter I will get everything I want to say in. When my partner and I were first together we would argue through email and text-- hashing out those small things you never realize you're going to have to hash out once you settle into the long run. He indulged in my desire for written communication, though I know it boggled him-- he's not a writer, but, luckily for me, he, like I, doesn't much go for verbal discussions either. When I'm not writing I'm writing in my head. Just give me a comfortable seat and a blank wall, and I'll stare at the wall for hours. I have whole books in my head, several to choose from, and I just write them inside my brain. When I get bad news I write the whole story out in my head-- how will this play out? What if I revise? What if I change this or that?
I have another useless question. Am I a bad mother? It's similar to the writer question, because, like, dude, you're in the fire. At this point you fight the fire and don't worry too much about the hard questions. I'm a mother. I'm a writer. It's a given-- I have to do the best I can do. The questions (and answers) are eerily similar.
Friday, September 10, 2010
People Tell You Who They Are
I was having a conversation this morning with someone about a young person in my life who I wish would stop having a relationship with another young person. It's so clear to me, I kept saying, what Young Person B is. How can Young Person A not see it? But I earned my knowledge. I know who people are because I spent years completely clueless about seeing people for what they really were. And I had to make much bigger mistakes than Young Person A has thus far made to get to this point.
Someone told me years ago, "People tell you who they are. Listen." This became my personal mantra. Maybe too much so. The other day one of my oldest daughter's friends was behaving in a way I thought was inappropriate. "Geez, she's rude," I said to my daughter when the other girl was gone. OK, I may have said it as she was walking away. Even fifth graders are not wholly protected from my wrath.
"No, she's actually not, Mama," my daughter told me. "She's just tired."
Maybe my daughter's right. Maybe she knows more than I do-- it's happened before. Maybe I've used my mantra for evil instead of good sometimes in my life. I do tend to make snap judgments about people. Luckily, I'm a solitary soul, and I keep a small circle. This will probably never change, but I do notice myself having to revise my decisions about people after I've made really quick judgments, then took the time to watch them operate.
People tell you who they are. Listen. I've applied this to myself. I've tried to operate in the world in a way that tells people who I am, good and bad. With mixed results. People sometimes tell me that they were scared of me before they got to know me. Actually, one of my students wrote that in an assessment of my teaching and classroom. "At first I thought she was mean..." it gets better after that, I promise. I do have a protective bubble, both in my body language and my actions. "Grrrrr," it says. "Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr." I try to let it down, but I'm a solitary girl. Growling at people, whether vocally (only one or twice), or physically, helps keep me isolated. And I like isolation in a lot of ways. I like to be alone.
People can change (ugh-- that phrase). I know because I've changed. I've seen other people change. But sometimes that change changes more than I intended. It's like I had to run through a fire to get out of things I should never have been in. And in order to run through that fire I had to don some protective clothing. It's heavy, and there's a lot of crap involved--helmets, socks, gloves. And it worked so well to get me through the fire I figured, why take it off at all? Just keep it on in case another fire springs up.
Sometimes I try to make my kids wear the fire clothes. But they don't see a need, which is a good thing. Sometimes when I'm with them I feel like a body guard-- I'm always watching the people around us, the traffic, the weather, them. It's a relief when they're at school, because my watch is over. Except it's not, because even when they're at school it's in my head-- my charges are on the loose. This morning we were talking about school being a safe place on the drive to said school.
"Mama, did you know you can get expended for bringing a toy weapon to school?" my eight year old asked.
"I did know that. School is a safe place-- no weapons, no hitting, you can't even talk about violence. Your school is a safe place."
"But it's not," she said. "Because a kid got expended for bringing a toy to school."
"Your school is safe-- that's why they suspended him, because he broke the safe school rules." She seemed satisfied, but I was not. I pulled into the parking lot thinking about the possibility of doing some sort of search of the classmates-- just a pat down, nothing too scary.
"What do you do if someone hits you, though?" my daughter asked.
I hate this question. The right answer, of course, is "don't ever hit anybody first, but if they hit you, WHOOP their motherfucking ass. Don't stop until that kid is bleeding. Then call me, and I'll kick the little fucker." But I'm not allowed to say that. So I say, "You tell a teacher. We never hit. If you hit someone, you'll be in big trouble. School is a safe place."
And they got out and went into their safe school with the little weapon-carrying violent sociopath kids. And I drove off, resisting the urge to follow them in and glare at any seven year old who looked askance at my daughters. I just can't help myself. People tell you who they are. I'm the kind of person who hits first, at least in my heart, as much as I try to resist it in my person. My dad used to say, "I'm going to kick ass now and take names later" (in reference mostly to punishing all five of us for something maybe one of us did. Seriously. He'd line us all up and we'd all get it with the belt. I was ten years younger than the oldest kids. Do you really think it was ME you asshole?). Maybe that's my manta, really. I kick ass now and take names later.
Someone told me years ago, "People tell you who they are. Listen." This became my personal mantra. Maybe too much so. The other day one of my oldest daughter's friends was behaving in a way I thought was inappropriate. "Geez, she's rude," I said to my daughter when the other girl was gone. OK, I may have said it as she was walking away. Even fifth graders are not wholly protected from my wrath.
"No, she's actually not, Mama," my daughter told me. "She's just tired."
Maybe my daughter's right. Maybe she knows more than I do-- it's happened before. Maybe I've used my mantra for evil instead of good sometimes in my life. I do tend to make snap judgments about people. Luckily, I'm a solitary soul, and I keep a small circle. This will probably never change, but I do notice myself having to revise my decisions about people after I've made really quick judgments, then took the time to watch them operate.
People tell you who they are. Listen. I've applied this to myself. I've tried to operate in the world in a way that tells people who I am, good and bad. With mixed results. People sometimes tell me that they were scared of me before they got to know me. Actually, one of my students wrote that in an assessment of my teaching and classroom. "At first I thought she was mean..." it gets better after that, I promise. I do have a protective bubble, both in my body language and my actions. "Grrrrr," it says. "Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr." I try to let it down, but I'm a solitary girl. Growling at people, whether vocally (only one or twice), or physically, helps keep me isolated. And I like isolation in a lot of ways. I like to be alone.
People can change (ugh-- that phrase). I know because I've changed. I've seen other people change. But sometimes that change changes more than I intended. It's like I had to run through a fire to get out of things I should never have been in. And in order to run through that fire I had to don some protective clothing. It's heavy, and there's a lot of crap involved--helmets, socks, gloves. And it worked so well to get me through the fire I figured, why take it off at all? Just keep it on in case another fire springs up.
Sometimes I try to make my kids wear the fire clothes. But they don't see a need, which is a good thing. Sometimes when I'm with them I feel like a body guard-- I'm always watching the people around us, the traffic, the weather, them. It's a relief when they're at school, because my watch is over. Except it's not, because even when they're at school it's in my head-- my charges are on the loose. This morning we were talking about school being a safe place on the drive to said school.
"Mama, did you know you can get expended for bringing a toy weapon to school?" my eight year old asked.
"I did know that. School is a safe place-- no weapons, no hitting, you can't even talk about violence. Your school is a safe place."
"But it's not," she said. "Because a kid got expended for bringing a toy to school."
"Your school is safe-- that's why they suspended him, because he broke the safe school rules." She seemed satisfied, but I was not. I pulled into the parking lot thinking about the possibility of doing some sort of search of the classmates-- just a pat down, nothing too scary.
"What do you do if someone hits you, though?" my daughter asked.
I hate this question. The right answer, of course, is "don't ever hit anybody first, but if they hit you, WHOOP their motherfucking ass. Don't stop until that kid is bleeding. Then call me, and I'll kick the little fucker." But I'm not allowed to say that. So I say, "You tell a teacher. We never hit. If you hit someone, you'll be in big trouble. School is a safe place."
And they got out and went into their safe school with the little weapon-carrying violent sociopath kids. And I drove off, resisting the urge to follow them in and glare at any seven year old who looked askance at my daughters. I just can't help myself. People tell you who they are. I'm the kind of person who hits first, at least in my heart, as much as I try to resist it in my person. My dad used to say, "I'm going to kick ass now and take names later" (in reference mostly to punishing all five of us for something maybe one of us did. Seriously. He'd line us all up and we'd all get it with the belt. I was ten years younger than the oldest kids. Do you really think it was ME you asshole?). Maybe that's my manta, really. I kick ass now and take names later.
Sunday, September 5, 2010
Leaving, But not Before I Sweep
I'm heading back to Columbus today after a week of staying in Cincinnati with my mom during and after her chemotherapy. Yesterday I wrote no less than seven emails to my brother and sisters (who will be coming down for consecutive chemo therapies) listing foods my mom likes, things that seem to help, calls for a different approach after the learning curve of this time. I went to the store five times yesterday. I bought enough protein bars, chicken noodle soup, ginger ale and crackers to feed at least five cancer patients. In a fit of hyper strength I moved a queen sized box spring from my mom's basement to her guest room for future guests. Then I blew up an air mattress and made it up in the other extra room. Then I added clean pillow cases. I did the dishes. I vacuumed.
All of this reminds me of when the girls were littler and I would type two and three (single spaced) page letters when they would go to Iowa for a week to visit my family without me. I included their lotions, their medicines, their special blankets and special bears. I reminded my relatives that the girls like chocolate milk in the morning, keep them away from cats, and never, ever, ever spank them. No matter what.
It's a bunker mentality. I'm surprised, in hindsight, that I don't actually have a bunker in the backyard. It would fit my personality completely. In all my years of teaching I've never forgotten a book or a handout. Not once. I did once forget the book I needed for a class I was taking, and I was so horrified I began to cry as I searched the building for the professor to tell her ahead of time what I had done. Look at what I have done!
I remember my therapist once asked me what it would feel like if I got a B in a class. I started to laugh. Not only can't I imagine such a feeling, I wouldn't even try. I remember talking to a mentor about some of my students who were earning Bs and Cs in my class, and being worried about them. "They're not you," my mentor responded. Enough said.
I like to believe this level of perfectionism doesn't touch my children. They are perfect to me-- they don't have to run through the world proving it (as I do). But then I think about two weeks ago when my daughter had a loose sheet of paper in her bag (fifth graders have like seven folders--color coded-- to keep themselves organized. This brings me so much joy.)
"Uh-oh," I said, pulling out the piece of paper. "We've got a loose one. Remember, the goal is organization! Where does this one go?" Yes. I actually said this. It seems funny now, but I'd do it again. I can't seem to stop myself.
My oldest daughter, perpetrator of the loose sheet, is enough like me that she quickly found the paper's place. My youngest daughter amuses me to no end because she's not a fan of my bullshit, and she'll call me on it. "Uh-oh," I'll say to her. "Your papers are not in your take home folder! Now they're all messy!"
"Yup," she responds, not even bothering to look at me. "But they're in my backpack. You're lucky they got here at all." And I know it's true. Because she was just as likely to throw them away, leave them in some one else's mailbox, or just turn them into paper airplanes and watch them fly away into the blue future.
I know what all of this is about (I'm the worst kind of crazy-- I know I'm crazy, and I know why I'm crazy). If I miss a piece of paper about field trips or PTA meetings or Curriculum Night I am powerless. As I've said to my kids before, "I can't do anything if I don't KNOW!" If I slip up and miss a signature somewhere the school will find out, and when they're counting signatures I'll go on the list of bad parents. Parent of kids that should henceforth be ignored or possibly abused, because their parents don't really care about them at all.
So I buy twenty-five protein bars and stack them neatly by type in a bowl on my mother's counter. I ask her repeatedly if it's OK for me to leave today. I vacuum the floor again. I mop the upstairs once last time. Because all of this will forestall the universe. Oh, there's action in that house. Let's leave that lady alone-- we won't make her sicker or make the chemo not work, because somebody cares enough about her to sweep. All that noise and action scares the bad spirits away. If every thing's clean and tidy and organized nothing bad can happen. All the papers will be in their places.
All of this reminds me of when the girls were littler and I would type two and three (single spaced) page letters when they would go to Iowa for a week to visit my family without me. I included their lotions, their medicines, their special blankets and special bears. I reminded my relatives that the girls like chocolate milk in the morning, keep them away from cats, and never, ever, ever spank them. No matter what.
It's a bunker mentality. I'm surprised, in hindsight, that I don't actually have a bunker in the backyard. It would fit my personality completely. In all my years of teaching I've never forgotten a book or a handout. Not once. I did once forget the book I needed for a class I was taking, and I was so horrified I began to cry as I searched the building for the professor to tell her ahead of time what I had done. Look at what I have done!
I remember my therapist once asked me what it would feel like if I got a B in a class. I started to laugh. Not only can't I imagine such a feeling, I wouldn't even try. I remember talking to a mentor about some of my students who were earning Bs and Cs in my class, and being worried about them. "They're not you," my mentor responded. Enough said.
I like to believe this level of perfectionism doesn't touch my children. They are perfect to me-- they don't have to run through the world proving it (as I do). But then I think about two weeks ago when my daughter had a loose sheet of paper in her bag (fifth graders have like seven folders--color coded-- to keep themselves organized. This brings me so much joy.)
"Uh-oh," I said, pulling out the piece of paper. "We've got a loose one. Remember, the goal is organization! Where does this one go?" Yes. I actually said this. It seems funny now, but I'd do it again. I can't seem to stop myself.
My oldest daughter, perpetrator of the loose sheet, is enough like me that she quickly found the paper's place. My youngest daughter amuses me to no end because she's not a fan of my bullshit, and she'll call me on it. "Uh-oh," I'll say to her. "Your papers are not in your take home folder! Now they're all messy!"
"Yup," she responds, not even bothering to look at me. "But they're in my backpack. You're lucky they got here at all." And I know it's true. Because she was just as likely to throw them away, leave them in some one else's mailbox, or just turn them into paper airplanes and watch them fly away into the blue future.
I know what all of this is about (I'm the worst kind of crazy-- I know I'm crazy, and I know why I'm crazy). If I miss a piece of paper about field trips or PTA meetings or Curriculum Night I am powerless. As I've said to my kids before, "I can't do anything if I don't KNOW!" If I slip up and miss a signature somewhere the school will find out, and when they're counting signatures I'll go on the list of bad parents. Parent of kids that should henceforth be ignored or possibly abused, because their parents don't really care about them at all.
So I buy twenty-five protein bars and stack them neatly by type in a bowl on my mother's counter. I ask her repeatedly if it's OK for me to leave today. I vacuum the floor again. I mop the upstairs once last time. Because all of this will forestall the universe. Oh, there's action in that house. Let's leave that lady alone-- we won't make her sicker or make the chemo not work, because somebody cares enough about her to sweep. All that noise and action scares the bad spirits away. If every thing's clean and tidy and organized nothing bad can happen. All the papers will be in their places.
Friday, September 3, 2010
Caretaking
The chemotherapy treatment my mom is on is kicking in-- at least the side effects are. It's a nice reminder for me that I would never make a good nurse (isn't this all writers' alternative plan? Nursing or teaching high school? Or truck driving, which I would suck at, too).
When my dad was dying of pancreatic cancer I took care of him. I remember the busy-ness of it. The changing of the IVs, the emptying of the gastric bag, the changing of the pain patch, then later making sure the morphine drip was working correctly. But if I really think about it, much of the time I was bored. I don't remember if I was reading a book (I've already read three since I got to my mom's). I do remember that I couldn't watch TV or talk on the phone. My dad couldn't stand any noise at all in his apartment. In fact, he made me unplug the television.
That quiet-- that's the part that gets to me. My mom would never demand that I turn off the TV or not use the phone. But her house isn't that big, and the wood floors and wood ceilings cause everything to echo. So, I read my nook or I sit on the back porch and have short conversations while she sleeps in her chair in the living room. I try to offer to do things for her, but I don't want to offer to do too much. It has to be good for her to get up and be autonomous, right? She can't drive, so I do go out and do that work for her, but she's certainly still capable of standing up and pouring herself a glass of ginger ale. So, I let her. She's in charge of her own pills (I don't dole out the medicine like I had to for my dad). Because I'm going to have to leave at some point, and she'll need to be able to take her medicine-- as she has been all along before I got here.
I feel real guilt that I have to leave. I miss my kids. I miss my bed. I miss my dogs. I miss my life. I know it's only been a week, geez. I'm worried that when I leave something will happen and it will take me nearly two hours to get back here. I'm hoping she starts to feel better soon, but what if she doesn't? I'm tired all the time, and I feel sick to my stomach. I guess I have psychosomatic chemo.
When my dad was dying of pancreatic cancer I took care of him. I remember the busy-ness of it. The changing of the IVs, the emptying of the gastric bag, the changing of the pain patch, then later making sure the morphine drip was working correctly. But if I really think about it, much of the time I was bored. I don't remember if I was reading a book (I've already read three since I got to my mom's). I do remember that I couldn't watch TV or talk on the phone. My dad couldn't stand any noise at all in his apartment. In fact, he made me unplug the television.
That quiet-- that's the part that gets to me. My mom would never demand that I turn off the TV or not use the phone. But her house isn't that big, and the wood floors and wood ceilings cause everything to echo. So, I read my nook or I sit on the back porch and have short conversations while she sleeps in her chair in the living room. I try to offer to do things for her, but I don't want to offer to do too much. It has to be good for her to get up and be autonomous, right? She can't drive, so I do go out and do that work for her, but she's certainly still capable of standing up and pouring herself a glass of ginger ale. So, I let her. She's in charge of her own pills (I don't dole out the medicine like I had to for my dad). Because I'm going to have to leave at some point, and she'll need to be able to take her medicine-- as she has been all along before I got here.
I feel real guilt that I have to leave. I miss my kids. I miss my bed. I miss my dogs. I miss my life. I know it's only been a week, geez. I'm worried that when I leave something will happen and it will take me nearly two hours to get back here. I'm hoping she starts to feel better soon, but what if she doesn't? I'm tired all the time, and I feel sick to my stomach. I guess I have psychosomatic chemo.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Emma
Dad's girlfriend and Dad dated off and on throughout my childhood after my parents' divorce when I was nine. Rumor has it that he proposed to her during the time of his chemo/radiation at the Mayo Clinic for pancreatic cancer, though they never got married. They broke up before I got involved in his care, after they did exploratory surgery at Mayo and realized the cancer had spread everywhere and he only had six weeks to live. But Dad’s girlfriend was at his funeral. I remember she asked our permission to put something in his casket. A picture, I think. Or maybe a flower.
What I really remember about Dad's girlfriend was that she was the head of the anti-abortion movement in Iowa City, where I grew up. When I was about ten Dad and Dad’s girlfriend sent me into the parking lot of a gynecologist with a huge stack of anti-abortion fliers to stick underneath the windshield wipers of those who parked there. The reason why they sent me was because it was illegal-- trespassing--and they told me to play dumb if the fuzz came. The fuzz didn't come. I remember I only stuck a couple of fliers on the cars, then I threw the rest away and walked home.
My dad and I protested at the local women's clinic-- the Emma Goldman clinic. At that time, Iowa City had established an ordinance stating that protestors couldn't stand together or be within fifty feet of one another while protesting (to try to stem the tide of times the protestors would accost women trying to get inside). The staff at Emma Goldman took my dad and I's picture when we stood together. “Smile,” my dad whispered, putting his arm around my shoulders.
The only other thing I remember was a guy walking by and saying, "How would you feel if your daughter got raped?" My dad put his arm around me and said, "This is my daughter." Then the Emma Goldman staff woman took another picture, standing in the doorway, hip holding the door open, ready to escape back into the safety of the inside.
Six years later I went into the Emma Goldman Clinic when I was in need of their services. I was terrified that there would be a poster on the wall with my picture on it: Enemy Against Women's Rights or something, or that the staff would recognize me from that little kid self. But they didn't.
I had been driven to Emma for a rape kit to be performed. I was seventeen. I remember feeling sad because the doctor was so nice. She spoke kindly and she offered to testify for me. I laid back and stared at the mobile of butterflies floating above my head and I wanted to tell her what I had done when I was a child. I wanted to confess. I wanted to apologize. I watched the butterflies float above my head and thought about how nice that was, that they had remembered that a woman might need something to watch, and that butterflies were nicer than posters of kitties, and that before the butterflies were all the way around their breezy circle this would be over.
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