A reconstructed dialogue proving what a douche I am:
Me: "My life sucks."
Not Me: "Two months ago you were sending out stories, all excited about your new projects. What happened?"
Me: "I got a stack of rejections."
Not Me: "Let me guess, 'Dear MaryKatherine, We're not just rejecting this story. We're rejecting you as a human being. Love, Please Eat Shit and Die Review"
Me: "Well, that's not verbatim. Plus I don't know what I'm going to be doing next year."
Not Me: "You're facing the job market with three degrees when 90% of the world can't claim one. Yeah, I see how it's tough for you to get out of bed come morning."
M: "I'm tired-- I'm working four jobs!"
Not Me: "Four part time jobs."
M: "I work harder than a lot of people who make more money than me!"
NM: "You cannot be serious. A. How do you know, B. So what? You know what an addict's worst fear is?"
M: "Are you calling me an addict?"
NM: "If the black ski mask fits. An addict's worst fear is that all their dreams will come true. You have good jobs that allow you to do most of your work sitting in a tree if you want. You have a decent house in a decent neighborhood. No one in your family has ever gone hungry or without..."
M: "But I don't have a dishwasher."
NM: "May I punch you in the face now?"
M: "Yes, I think that would be appropriate."
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Spectacle Ethnography and Other Polysyllabic Words
The other night we had a family conversation that occurs about once a year. My older daughter was talking about some "brown" person, and I "corrected" her and said "black" person. This makes no sense to them, of course. They know I'm white. They know their dad is black, but it doesn't really make sense to them. My older daughter prefers "brown skinned" if she must talk about race. But honestly, she seems not to need to talk about it. So, they know they're not "black" they know they're not "white." They prefer "tan", but I was explaining that society has certain words they use to describe what they believe to be the "race" of people (I'm going to stop with the quotes now. You get the idea).
So, I said "you're mixed. Or biracial. You're half white and half black."
"I prefer zebra," my oldest daughter said.
Don't be too shocked-- she's been saying this since she first heard the term years ago. I remind her every time that it's not appropriate, but she doesn't understand why. She would much rather be called a zebra than mixed. And I don't think she's totally wrong there.
My children aren't very interested in their racial characteristics. They know who they are, and that seems to satisfy them. They know who we are as their parents, and they know they have white aunts and black aunts and white grandmas and black grandmas and, well, you get the idea.
Other people, however, seem much more interested in the spectacle of our family. The line I most hear (and that most cracks me up) is, once they meet my partner, "I never would have imagined you with a black guy." Seriously? All I can say is I'm sorry. I'll try harder to be the kind of woman who would be with a black guy. I'm not sure what that means, but when I find out, I'm going to dedicate my life to being that kinda gal.
When I'm out with my daughters and their dad is not with us I hear "what are they?" Why, they're little girls, of course. "No, I mean, what are they mixed with? That one (pointing at my youngest) looks Indian. That one (older) looks Mexican (or Greek, or Italian...)" This is not a game, people. There are no prizes for guessing correctly.
More innocuously, I often have people tell me what a nice guy my partner is. He is a nice guy. He's way nicer than I am. But sometimes I wonder why people have to tell me all the time. Is it because, with his bald head, tattoos, black skin and bitchin motorcycle they expected something different? Or is it because they thought he would be different? Was he supposed to not be a nice guy?
He is much more forgiving than I am when it comes to people's racism. I can't guess why, but if I was forced to, I'd say he's probably more used to it than I am. He told me a story about his Mee-Maw. She's passed now, but when she was alive she was probably one of the gentlest ladies (and I mean LADY) that you'd ever want to meet. Tiny, maybe 5 feet tall, thin, beautiful. She went to church every week, taught special education, was loved by many, many people. I never heard her say an unkind word. I never, ever, EVER heard her curse. Once, when my partner was a youngster (I imagine twelve, though I don't think he ever said), he traveled with his Mee-Maw down south to the Tennessee/North Carolina area, where she was from. They were at a gas station, filling up, when a truck full of white men blew past and screamed out the window, "Fucking N---s!" Larry's sweet Mee-Maw turned around, held up the special finger and screamed back "Fuck you, you fucking rednecks!"
I'm more comfortable with my family when we're in a group of black people, even if I am the only white person. People notice me, obviously, but it's a kind of, oh, she's white. Moving on. With large groups of white people, more often than not people approach to tell me how beautiful the girls are (which they are, so thank you), but also to touch their hair and exclaim over and over (and over), oh their skin is so BEAUTIFUL! I wish I had that skin, my goodness that SKIN! Sometimes I want to ask, would you like me to lift their lips so you can see their teeth? Go 'way, please.
White people (in general) are extremely uncomfortable talking about racism. They get all stiff and mutter "race card". Black people have no problem with the discussion, when it comes up.
I was talking, before a graduate level class, about the experience of taking my girls to vacuum out the car at a car wash just up the street from our house. The girls love to work the vacuum. Scratched there, just under the quarter feeder, was the N word. I moved the car so the girls wouldn't see it, but I found myself looking over my shoulder (I know, ridiculous).
One of the men in the class said, "I think racism has gotten a lot better."
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"Well, I haven't heard about any lynchings lately."
Well, if that's the standard we're using, then yes, hallelujah, racism has been cured.
Race is not a "major part" of our life in the way some people seem to assume. We don't talk about it very often ("Black man, if it's not too oppressive, could you do the dishes?" We do have a favorite phrase I heard on a black radio talk show one morning-- "All the doo doo you done done to my people!" but generally I say it to him when he asks me to do something I don't want to do.) And when we do, it's with the girls, in the way all parents at some point have to talk about the craziness of race in American society. We understand discrimination as a family, so we work hard to have a home where discrimination is not tolerated in any of its ugly forms. Are there cultural differences? I guess so, though I think of it more as "how his family does stuff versus how my family does" or "what his mom cooks versus what my mom cooks." Which I think is pretty much how my girls view it, although I suppose I'd have to ask them. We've faced discrimination, and even some meanness ( in some cases from family members, but not close ones).
Spectacle ethnography. I love that phrase. I picked it up when I was taking a woman's lit class, and a theorist was writing about white America's response to the influx of Chinese immigrants in the early 20th century (or perhaps before, the details escape me now). I love the term, because it so neatly describes the kind of racism that still openly exists-- the spectacle of difference.
So, I said "you're mixed. Or biracial. You're half white and half black."
"I prefer zebra," my oldest daughter said.
Don't be too shocked-- she's been saying this since she first heard the term years ago. I remind her every time that it's not appropriate, but she doesn't understand why. She would much rather be called a zebra than mixed. And I don't think she's totally wrong there.
My children aren't very interested in their racial characteristics. They know who they are, and that seems to satisfy them. They know who we are as their parents, and they know they have white aunts and black aunts and white grandmas and black grandmas and, well, you get the idea.
Other people, however, seem much more interested in the spectacle of our family. The line I most hear (and that most cracks me up) is, once they meet my partner, "I never would have imagined you with a black guy." Seriously? All I can say is I'm sorry. I'll try harder to be the kind of woman who would be with a black guy. I'm not sure what that means, but when I find out, I'm going to dedicate my life to being that kinda gal.
When I'm out with my daughters and their dad is not with us I hear "what are they?" Why, they're little girls, of course. "No, I mean, what are they mixed with? That one (pointing at my youngest) looks Indian. That one (older) looks Mexican (or Greek, or Italian...)" This is not a game, people. There are no prizes for guessing correctly.
More innocuously, I often have people tell me what a nice guy my partner is. He is a nice guy. He's way nicer than I am. But sometimes I wonder why people have to tell me all the time. Is it because, with his bald head, tattoos, black skin and bitchin motorcycle they expected something different? Or is it because they thought he would be different? Was he supposed to not be a nice guy?
He is much more forgiving than I am when it comes to people's racism. I can't guess why, but if I was forced to, I'd say he's probably more used to it than I am. He told me a story about his Mee-Maw. She's passed now, but when she was alive she was probably one of the gentlest ladies (and I mean LADY) that you'd ever want to meet. Tiny, maybe 5 feet tall, thin, beautiful. She went to church every week, taught special education, was loved by many, many people. I never heard her say an unkind word. I never, ever, EVER heard her curse. Once, when my partner was a youngster (I imagine twelve, though I don't think he ever said), he traveled with his Mee-Maw down south to the Tennessee/North Carolina area, where she was from. They were at a gas station, filling up, when a truck full of white men blew past and screamed out the window, "Fucking N---s!" Larry's sweet Mee-Maw turned around, held up the special finger and screamed back "Fuck you, you fucking rednecks!"
I'm more comfortable with my family when we're in a group of black people, even if I am the only white person. People notice me, obviously, but it's a kind of, oh, she's white. Moving on. With large groups of white people, more often than not people approach to tell me how beautiful the girls are (which they are, so thank you), but also to touch their hair and exclaim over and over (and over), oh their skin is so BEAUTIFUL! I wish I had that skin, my goodness that SKIN! Sometimes I want to ask, would you like me to lift their lips so you can see their teeth? Go 'way, please.
White people (in general) are extremely uncomfortable talking about racism. They get all stiff and mutter "race card". Black people have no problem with the discussion, when it comes up.
I was talking, before a graduate level class, about the experience of taking my girls to vacuum out the car at a car wash just up the street from our house. The girls love to work the vacuum. Scratched there, just under the quarter feeder, was the N word. I moved the car so the girls wouldn't see it, but I found myself looking over my shoulder (I know, ridiculous).
One of the men in the class said, "I think racism has gotten a lot better."
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"Well, I haven't heard about any lynchings lately."
Well, if that's the standard we're using, then yes, hallelujah, racism has been cured.
Race is not a "major part" of our life in the way some people seem to assume. We don't talk about it very often ("Black man, if it's not too oppressive, could you do the dishes?" We do have a favorite phrase I heard on a black radio talk show one morning-- "All the doo doo you done done to my people!" but generally I say it to him when he asks me to do something I don't want to do.) And when we do, it's with the girls, in the way all parents at some point have to talk about the craziness of race in American society. We understand discrimination as a family, so we work hard to have a home where discrimination is not tolerated in any of its ugly forms. Are there cultural differences? I guess so, though I think of it more as "how his family does stuff versus how my family does" or "what his mom cooks versus what my mom cooks." Which I think is pretty much how my girls view it, although I suppose I'd have to ask them. We've faced discrimination, and even some meanness ( in some cases from family members, but not close ones).
Spectacle ethnography. I love that phrase. I picked it up when I was taking a woman's lit class, and a theorist was writing about white America's response to the influx of Chinese immigrants in the early 20th century (or perhaps before, the details escape me now). I love the term, because it so neatly describes the kind of racism that still openly exists-- the spectacle of difference.
Sunday, September 26, 2010
The Spillway
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.
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.
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.
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