Escaping the Gravity Well, Part II

“And are you retired now?”

I get this question every few months, usually spoken from a kind face (but in a condescending tone, ready to ask and then move on), always from someone younger than myself. At first, it really irritated me. All right, it STILL really irritates me. What, do I look like someone who has nothing more to offer the world? And what would I do for the next forty years, anyway? 

The fact is, I have a more than full-time job that I just can’t seem to quit. It’s called, “Empress of the World Wanna Be.” I have been trying to save the world my whole life. Which, I’ll admit, has been a pretty long life. And you know what? The world isn’t saved yet! As a matter of fact, most people don’t even notice that I’ve been working my head off to save the world since I was twelve. That’s a long time to be worried about things that are too big for me, like nuclear proliferation and the ozone layer and global warming and the general movement away from compassion and community and toward fear and gotcha-ism and zero-sum thinking and the media echo chamber. That’s a long time to feel a heavy weight of grief about the state of our people and our planet.

 I’ve heard repeatedly that one of the ways to process grief and trauma is to connect with other people. To take action. I didn’t seem to be having any luck with finding effective ways to do that, so the answer seemed be to just give up. Give. Up. Take a rest! Fold in on myself and sink into some distracting pursuits, like writing science fiction or maybe learning drums. Then my phone did one of those creepy things it does when it reads my mind and sticks an ad into my YouTube feed. This one was an announcement of a new program at Portland State University. “Change the world. Get a Master’s degree in Emergency Management and Community Resilience,” it said. 

Whaaat?

Two days later, I had read everything I could get my hands on about the program and spoken to the program director at length. It seemed that this program really would teach me what I need to know to leverage my efforts – and in concert with other people, not all on my lonesome - to help solve seemingly intractable problems. I had no idea where it would lead me.  But if you want to get to know dolphins, you’ll have to swim where they swim. Jump into the ocean and see if you float. 

To my surprise, I floated. As a matter of fact, during my third term, one of my professors asked me to be part of a multi-agency committee to produce Heat Week, an event meant to bring city and county officials and community-based organizations together to talk about ways to prepare for extreme heat events in the Portland area. I ended up drafting a media strategy concept (I had never done this before, but hey, I had taken a media class during winter term) and helping to conceptualize and produce a climate aware grief panel (I’m not a therapist, but I’ve sure had a lot of therapy, and I certainly feel a lot of grief about the planet).

And everything turned out fine. My worries that “If the other committee members realize I don’t know what I’m doing, they won’t want me on the committee anymore” turned out to be unfounded. They were just happy that I showed up and did my part. 

I report all this to let you know that if you feel overwhelmed and afraid of the future and think that you can’t make a difference, you are almost certainly wrong about that last part. I’m pretty sure a lot of us feel overwhelmed and afraid of what the future will bring. But I will tell you that meeting these people and contributing to this group effort has made me feel more reassured, contented, and calmer. Less alone. I didn’t have to be a rock star or even a runner up for Empress of the World. All I had to do was show up and try.

I can’t wait to jump into the ocean again and swim with the dolphins some more.

Wonderful Moment, (Almost) Unbearable Moment

 Well, so I thought I would just start with where I left off, with my announcement of being in recovery from alcoholism and then plod chronologically through the last seven years. But since I live another day every day, and there are new fucking learning opportunities every day - don't you hate it when that happens - there is no way I would ever catch up. So I'm just going to throw a big bunch of stuff in the air, like throwing pasta at the wall to see if it sticks, because Sue Howard said that's how you tell if it's done, although my Italian friend Andrea says that means it's overdone.

Here's something. When I got sober, my wonderful doctor at Hazelden told me that starting drinking at age twelve had affected my developing brain. I was understandably disheartened at this news, until he told me I was going to be all right. Brains can heal and re-wire. It's called "neuroplasticity," and boy howdy, am I glad this turned out to be true - although it did cause a few leetle changes, such as a complete reboot of my personality. The keys to the transformation, creating new dopamine receptors and neural pathways, were meditation, time, and a lot of sleep. The healing brain needs lots of sleep. And a LOT of meditation. Heart practices, sound meditation, following the breath. We're talking twenty, forty, sixty minutes a day or more, for years.

I started with a Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) class, then started going to a Buddhist-oriented recovery program four times a week, then to the Heart of Wisdom Zen temple, and eventually started participating in day-long meditation retreats - then a weekend - then a full week. When you literally meditate all day, either formally sitting in the zendo, or during walking practice, or work practice, or mindful eating, every moment becomes the present moment, to be given your full attention. No reading, talking, writing, phones or TV. Even the clocks and mirrors are covered. Suddenly, twenty minutes of counting breaths became just a mindfulness snack.

And I started to change. I learned that thoughts are just thoughts. That you can't argue with reality. Well, you can, but you'll suffer. Reality always wins. That feelings won't kill me. My personality changed profoundly, to the point where my kids were thrilled but my (now ex-) husband, used to a reactive overly-dramatic heavy drinker, wanted out. My inner landscape changed so much that introspection became something of a spectator sport - what unfamiliar thing will I do or think next? 

I'll leave you today with a poem I wrote that evokes what one meditation retreat meant to me. Three vocabulary words: "Han" is the pattern of sounds caused by striking a wooden board by a mallet, that calls the community to meditation. "Zendo" is the meditation hall. "Zazen" means formal sitting practice.

RETREAT: TRIO

#1 Walking Practice

All the shoes by the door

All the hands palm to palm

All the soles pressed to the floor

Heels, toes, feet as balm

Thirty pairs of eyes downcast

One heart.

#2 Work Practice

Crack

Blade strikes cutting board

Han.

Tone

Silver bowl sings to spoon

Bell.

Inhale

Peppers, oranges. Nostrils, awake!

Exhale.

#3 Zazen

Drop the story, me.

Drop the me, story.

Weeping in the zendo.

Breathe softly. Blow the breath away.

Does suffering have a sound?

Is it visible by candlelight?

Drop the stone woman

Drop her from a great height

When she shatters, gather her up

Wrap her in the weft and warp of thirty breaths

A Sense of Place

"Place isn't a setting. Place is an elder in the family. We are not describing landscapes; we are writing biographies." Luis Alberto Urrea

I've been thinking about place a lot lately. I'm getting a degree in emergency management and community resilience, which means I know a lot more about climate change threats (wildfires, toxic smoke, floods, weather weirding) and the Big One than I want to know. There was a time in 2020 when it was dangerous to breathe in the house (COVID) and outside of the house (smoke), I was putting together supplies to prepare for the Cascadia Subduction Zone event, and I could hear explosions from the riots in downtown Portland from my house, four miles away.

I wrote in this space a few years ago about how sometimes I just want to unfurl my magical wings and fly away. I want a different planet.

And because I want a different planet, and I can't have one, I attended a Climate Aware Grief workshop last weekend, hoping for some support and insight. One of the panelists told us to close our eyes and envision a "beloved place of ease." If we could be anywhere, anywhere at all, where would we want to be? And then to open our eyes and take a few minutes to write about it.

This is what I wrote.

"To my surprise, I am sitting in my beloved place of ease. It isn't the beach or Southern Oregon or Italy. It's this office nook, in this kitchen. About this place, I have no complicated feelings of loss or regret or apprehension. 

I lean my elbows on the big butcher block desk. I see my files and books and laptop and tools and ways to communicate, connect, and meditate. The pear tree and my son Robin's little house and garden are visible through the window. To my right are the stairs that lead to reading, rest, sleep, and a view of the western horizon (stars, moon, and sunset).

I smell coffee. I see the Deruta cookie jar and a pile of clementines. I hear my housemate John bumping around downstairs, under my feet. I hear the cat munching his breakfast. I smell incense and see my favorite piece of art in the house, a silkscreen of a silhouetted waterway at dusk, above my desk.

I feel grounded in my entire life here - family, spiritual practice, nature, love, cooking, service and action, creative expression.

This is my beloved place. I don't need to go to a remembered past or envision a future, or go anywhere. I am here now."

So maybe I don't need to fly away. Maybe I don't need a different planet. I can lean into what I have here, now, and continue my work to reduce harm while I'm here. And be grateful.

Re-Entry

Dear friends,

It's been years since I've posted. So many changes. An unexpected divorce. Creating a new home out of the old one. Going back to work as a teacher, leaving the teaching profession, entering graduate school, beginning the work of mitigating harm caused by global warming. The dislocations that we have all experienced: the threats to democracy, the pandemic, civil unrest, the exposure of huge inequities and suffering that many of us didn't want to see. Here in the Pacific Northwest, toxic air, wildfire smoke, flooding - what we call in the Emergency Management field, "weather weirding." Snuggling into familial, spiritual, academic, and activist communities. Restoring my health, mental and physical.

And six years of sobriety, which have made everything else in my life possible.

I have a lot to share with you all.  All the emotions, among them: frustration, anger, fear, and grief; humor, love, gratitude and optimism. A lot of opinions. Learning and curiosity. 

I'm fond of quoting Jed Bartlet in West Wing, and here goes,

"What's next?"

Getting Well

If you’re a follower of this space, and if you are reading this, you probably are, you will have noticed that I haven’t posted much recently. That little respite has come to an end, sports fans. I’ve learned a lot in the last four years, and I’ve decided it’s about time to share some of it with you! Because I’m that kind of public service gal!

But first, some catch up. You probably want to know, where’d Brenda go, and who the hell is Bee?

Now, now. Be patient. I’m going to save the answers to those questions for another post. We’re going to start back in April of 2015, when I was diagnosed with a neurological disorder, a pathology of the meso-limbic dopamine system. This disease is chronic and progressive, and if left untreated, it leads to a really ugly death. I had suspected it for years, and had had a couple of doctors want to take a good look at my symptoms, but I wasn’t interested. I wanted to believe that if it wasn’t diagnosed, it wouldn’t be there or it would go away or I could treat it myself.

But the symptoms got too bad to ignore. Depression. Weight gain. Insomnia. Night sweats, shaky hands, severe back pain. Confusion and memory loss. My eyesight got so bad, I couldn’t read. I lost my singing voice.  I was unable to get through a sentence without stopping two or three times to think of a word. Rapid pulse and tachycardia. Of course, I tried treating it myself, because hey, this is me! I know everything, and if I don’t know it, I’ll Google it! I flirted with different diets and even thyroid medication until finally I wasn’t able to function. I went to my primary doctor, the wonderful Mary Pickett at OHSU, and said, okay, test me. I’ll never forget one of the comments at the bottom of the first page of test results. “Abnormalities at the cellular level.” That got my attention. Maybe this isn’t a do-it-yourself project.

Mary agreed. No, she said, this isn’t something you can self-treat. You need intensive treatment and you need it right now, or make no mistake, it will kill you.

Needless to say, I didn’t want to start any damn intensive treatment. It meant that I had to quit working. I wouldn’t be able to do anything except pay attention to my health. I didn’t have time for this. I resisted for a week. Then I went to donate blood at the Red Cross, and the intake nurse asked about the irregular, rapid pulse. Oh, I said, that’s not anything to worry about. It’s just that I have this disease. She looked intently into my eyes and said, “You need to take care of that. My brother died of that condition yesterday.”

I went home and started making phone calls. Where’s the best place to be treated and who takes my insurance, because we’re looking at many thousands of dollars here? That was a Friday afternoon. By 5:00, I was on a wait list, and on the following Monday morning, I was admitted to a treatment program.

Three doctors. Monitoring blood levels four times a day. Medication. Special diet. A strict exercise and meditation regimen. Three support groups. I thought I would feel better right away, but actually, at first, the treatment made me feel worse. For six weeks, I thought I was going to die or go crazy. That’s not a dramatic statement from a classic soprano, it’s just a fact. Panic attacks, some out of a sound sleep at 4:00 a.m. Crushing chest pain, pretty much twenty-four hours a day. Severe fatigue, unpredictable mood swings, more confusion, more weight gain, worsened irregular heartbeat. The specialist I saw daily said to be patient, that I would get better, it just would take time. I stuck with it, because what else could I do?

My system healed, but slowly. I was discharged from the program after four months, and was able to go back to work full-time five months after that. I was told that after five years, I would stay in remission if I stayed on a management plan for life. 

Four years later, I’m feeling pretty confident. Once I make up my mind to do something, I don’t do it half way. I feel great. My cardiologist says my heart is fine. My eyesight is almost completely back to normal, and I’m singing again. As a matter of fact, I am entirely symptom-free. (My friends will tell you that if not being able to shut up is an indicator, my speech center definitely is back to normal.)

There was one little speed bump. As my brain healed, my personality changed significantly. It was disconcerting to not recognize the contents of my brain, to have to get to know myself all over again. It took a couple of years for me to get comfortable with the new me. My kids told me that they liked the new me just fine, the new me was a much nicer person, but that I was a different person than the one they had always known. My husband at the time had a different take on it, but that’s another story for another day.

I’m one of the lucky ones.  I only had to take four months off from work. I managed to find the doctors, nurses, specialists, medication, and support groups I needed, just in time, and I had insurance that paid most of the expenses. Not everyone does. According to some studies, 80% of the folks who have this illness don’t recover. I’m grateful and my kids are grateful.

And that diagnosis? The pathology of the meso-limbic dopamine system? You never heard of it? There is a colloquial term that’s in standard use. You’ll know that one.

I’m an alcoholic.

Report

Captain Picard says, “Report!” So I will.

I used to report to Ed, back when he was around to be reported to, although I suspect now that he hated getting reported to, but since he and Captain Picard are now fictional actors in my little personal TV show, I will report to y’all instead.

I am out in the garden having a reprise of the 2008 Great Zucchini Flood. Except that I didn’t plant my garden this year, my friend Fonda did, and apparently she liked cucumbers. A lot. As well as summer squash.  And arugula, but I was gone for the first three weeks after it was planted and so by the time I got home and checked out the garden, it had sprouted, shot up, bolted, and gone to seed. I am saving the seed pods for some hypothetical future date when I plant more arugula.

And I’m figuring out soaker hoses!  All by myself! Apparently there are two ends of the hose and one end screws into the other end. Who knew. I am proud. I bought a timer, too, but that will have to wait until tomorrow because all my neurotransmitters are used up for the day.

That’s the garden part of my report. On to e-mail and God.

E-mail wisdom. You’ll like this. I’ve learned that you don’t have to push “send” after you’ve written an e-mail. There’s this little “save” button that it is much, much better to push instead. And then you can find the draft a week later and thank GOD that you didn’t send it.

And I know you want to know this, so I will tell you. I’m having a little trouble with my Higher Power. (This is not as easily fixable as the safety bar on the bumper of my car, because they have autobody shops for that, but oh well.) Before you say to yourself, and I know there’s a good chance that you are, “Oh oh, Brenda has got religion, now she will really be obnoxious,” nobody knows what my H.P. is, including me. I think it has something to do with uncovering my Buddha nature, and the one-ness of the universe, and compassion and forgiveness, and believing that the resources will be available to handle whatever comes next. But I’m not sure, because the next starting point in my life is To Be Determined, mostly by other people. And I really wish I had the kind of Higher Power that some of my friends seem to have, where they are just sure they will be taken care of and they won’t have to worry, because my worrier seems to be stuck on Turbo, except when I remember to breathe.

One of my meditation buddies says to remember that I just have this one breath, this only breath, and that during this one breath, I am okay. Works for him. Sometimes works for me.

And then my wise friend Jayna says that my Higher Power kicks ass. I’m glad she’s sure about that.

She also says that I’m not in control of the wind, or the current, or the tides. But I am in control of whether I take the boat out that day.

She says that there are some streets I shouldn’t drive down, and some holes I don’t have to jump into. I could pay attention to that little (metaphorical) sign, Bridge Out, instead.

The sun is shining, I took the detour, I’m breathing, I am now the proud possessor of thirteen cucumbers, and I can take the boat out today.

And that’s my report.

Where's Tom Lehrer When You Need Him?

Geek alert: references to Eddie Izzard, 1950s science fiction, the New York Times and Star Trek. But you’ll get the gist even if you don’t get all the references.

 

Okay, I’m beginning to think that the human race is overdue for another big fuck-off flood.

Oh, that’s right! We’re going to get one! Because the Antarctic ice sheet is melting! I just saw a picture on Google maps – there’s this great inspirational app you can get that shows you what your street will look like once the sea levels rise ten feet, which is pretty much inevitable now, probably within my children and grandchildren’s lifetimes and maybe even mine if I succeed in my wild-assed vegan/vigorous-exercise-scheme to live to be 105. I live a hundred miles from the Pacific Ocean and the water will be up to the floorboards of my house. I did always want to move to Venice and now Venice will move to me, sweet!

Anyway. What’s got Brenda’s knickers in a twist now. 

Let’s start with Harvard professors. You just knew this was coming, didn’t you? Because you undoubtedly saw the NYT article about how Harvard economics professors are now upset about the ACA, known in many circles as “Obamacare.” 

Seems that some Harvard professors, many of whom championed the ACA, are now upset because their very own health plan is changing to require them to pay a deductible ($250 for an individual, $750 for a family) and a co-payment of $20 for a doctor’s visit. Bar the door Nellie! It’s the end of civilization!

To quote from the article, “… the university said it ‘must respond to the national trend of rising health care costs, including some driven by…the Affordable Care Act.'” Because gee! “Harvard faces added costs because of provisions that extend coverage for children up to age 26 [and] offer(s) free preventive services like mammograms and colonoscopies…”

Coverage for children?! Including college students, hum. Now there’s a thought. Tired of that oppressive teaching load of ten to twelve hours a week? (I used to teach public school and find this laughable.) Just make it harder for them to afford health insurance and maybe some of them will go away!

Preventative health care? Nah. Just wait until folks are really sick and they’ll go away too, especially if they’re one of the millions who live in a state where their Republican governor said no thanks to federal subsidies for the ACA just to make the President look bad.

And it’s not just Harvard professors that have it in for kids and anybody who might get cancer. The USA Today’s “liberal” article de jour (the jour in question being January 6, 2015) worried about why wages aren’t increasing. Sure, “Stunning technological advances have eliminated millions of jobs.” And, “…at the same time, rising global competition is pressing wages downward even as it adds new markets for American products.” But the biggest concern is this!

 “This year, Washington will raise roughly $3.3 trillion in taxes, mostly from the young, productive and healthy. And it will spend roughly $3.9 trillion, mostly on benefits for the retired, the unproductive and the unhealthy."

Oh my God! Say it’s not so! Taking care of people who are sick, unemployed, or elderly? Or all three? Jeez!  

So that’s just my little outburst about our societal response to taking care of people who aren’t so good at taking care of themselves, like people who are young, old, poor, or sick. If you are one of those people who agree with the sentiments expressed above, then don’t bother leaving a comment because I don’t want to know you.

But my OTHER crab for the day, and the main reason why I think we might need a big fuck-off flood (watch the first fifteen minutes of Eddie Izzard’s video Glorious if you don’t get this reference, and if you don’t have time, it’s about Noah saying to the ducks to get in the ark because there’s going to be a big fuck-off flood and the ducks say, “What’s the big problem?”), is...

Sorry. I got distracted. What I wanted to express is my deep sorrow about the planetary disaster we are facing. Yes, back to the topic I introduced in the first paragraph. I’m talking about global warming. (You can read my op-ed piece, “Bubble Bubble,” that was kindly aired by PRP.fm about this, if you want all the links to back up my assertion that the reason the back of our seed packets got changed to reflect the WARMING of my very own little GROWING ZONE was…global warming. Or you can go on to the next paragraph where I get a little discouraged and sad.)

According to NASA, ninety-seven percent of the scientists on the planet think that global warming is a fact and is caused by human activities. These really smart, educated, thoughtful people are observing, documenting, and worrying about the catastrophic rate at which our planetary ecology is heating up. I say “catastrophic” because it’s all happening too fast for us to respond to it, as a global society and indeed, as a species. If human beings don’t even seem to know how to deal with taking care of the health needs of the sick, young, old and poor, they certainly don’t know how to deal with a sick planet, except to say, “It’s not my fault!” Which brilliant response didn’t help Han Solo, and it’s not gonna help us.

One of my favorite science fiction stories is Zenna Henderson’s The People: No Different Flesh, about people who must flee their failing planet. Lytha, a teenager who witnesses the destruction of her favorite lake, says, “My poor Home! It’s dying!” That’s how I feel, several days a month. And there’s no Jean-Luc Picard and Geordi and Data orbiting in the Enterprise, folks, sent by a benevolent Federation to save us from our folly. There’s just us, frackin’ and grabbin’ and building pipelines and putting our fingers in our ears going “la la la” or at least “Bill Nye the Science Guy, what a joke! Global warming is all a liberal conspiracy to take away my SUV!”

So I’m feeling a bit like a disappointed Mom today. I want the human race, as a whole, to be smarter. More compassionate. More observant and capable of long-term planning. If the human race were my classroom, I’d be teaching them all critical thinking skills and how to work well in groups right now.

Maybe you’re saying, “That’s not me.” Okay, good for you and good for me. Let’s make sure we’re doing all we can do to make our home a nicer place…reasonably, because hey, we wouldn’t want to be too inconvenienced by our opinions. But maybe we could speak up once in awhile or drive a little less or not complain about how our health insurance premiums went up because some kid now has access to medical care?

Change the attitude a little? Be a little nicer to ourselves as a group? Nicer to our home planet, which if you haven’t noticed is the only one we’ve got?

And that’s my wail for the day. I’m trying to laugh, because I suspect that humor is going to be a survival mechanism for me. Where’s Tom Lehrer when you need him? Now there was a Harvard professor.

Shakespeare Could Have Been a Contender

I love Shakespeare. I really do! Every year I spend a few days watching a bunch of my favorites. I know, it’s geeky, but I watch the whole extended edition of The Lord of the Rings every New Year’s Eve, too.

But this time I started to get irritated. You know, Shakespeare is a pretty good playwright, I think we can all agree. These plays are really good, and they could be outstanding if ol’ Bill had gotten over just a few bad habits. Like, he’ll set up the kind of plot and characters that make you watch through your fingers going, “Nooooo!” You laugh, you cry, big wow finish and then just as you’re about to get up, recycle your program and stretch your legs – because he does go on – nooooo, you’ve got to sit there and listen to a character who’s so boring he sometimes hasn’t even shown up yet explain what it is just happened.

Like in Richard III, (Act V Scene V for those of you who care, but just turn to the last page), Richmond, who the only reason he’s not dead is he’s so boring that Richard didn’t bother to kill him, says they should bury a bunch of important dead guys, go to church, and make nice.  Not a lot of people left to make nice, but they should do it. You’re just now figuring this out? After two and half hours we've got to sit through 41 more lines, ending with “Now civil wounds are stopp’d, peace lives again; That she may long live here, God say amen!” Man. I used to teach middle school.  That sounds like stuff I graded on the weekend. 

Then there’s Macbeth. It’s great. But he has to spoil it all at the end when Malcolm, who the heck is he, ends the play with a party invitation. “So thanks to all at once and to each one, Whom we invite to see us crown’d at Scone.” I mean, scun.  At least now we know how to pronounce the baked breakfast good.

Oh, and Romeo and Juliet! Now there’s a play! He dies due to a lack of cell phone coverage just before she wakes up, she dies just before the emergency responders get there! What a choke-up! Then suddenly here’s this Prince-guy, who we were all horrified Juliet might have to marry because he’s the most boring person in the whole world, with a looooong speech about how sad it all is and how this feud got their kids killed. Yeah okay! We can all get together on that one!

And Hamlet. I really like Hamlet. The character and the movie. I mean the play. But I’ve got problems with it. Like when Gertrude describes Ophelia drowning in the creek. What’s she doing, hiding in the bushes? I mean, she goes into such DEtail. I know she can't exactly call 911, but Jeez, lady, have a heart! Don’t just stand there, DO something! 

I think she wanted to silence Ophelia. I think Ophelia knew something and Gertrude wanted her out of the way. 'Cause I'm sure Gertrude knew about her new husband killing her old husband all the time. And by the way, Polonius knew too. Come on. He KNEW. They’re all guilty.

There should be a prequel. I want to see how the uncle seduces Gertrude. There’s a lot of plot set-up that needs to get unpacked. I mean, I had a whole class in college where we argued for HOURS about what Hamlet was doing and what was really going on. The way it’s written now, it’s too confusing. Someone should do it. Jeez, we’ve been waiting 500 years! That’s worse than waiting for the next season of Sherlock.

But then we get to the end. They’re holding a sword fight in the middle of a party – now there’s a great party game, that beats Cards Against Humanity any day! Both Mom and step-dad get killed, plus that whiner Leartes. And Hamlet too! That’s like Game of Thrones where even your favorite guy dies! But Shakespeare has to spoil it all with Fortinbras. We’ve heard a lot about him, but he’s no dum-dum, he waits to show up until everybody but Horatio’s dead. The play’s over! We’ve been sitting there forever and Horatio’s HAD his great flights of angels line. I mean, whatever you think of Horatio – and he is a bit of an egg-head and a cry-baby – that’s a GREAT line. But no! Fortinbras comes on with a bunch of English ambassadors, I never really got why, has a chat with Horatio, claims Denmark because he’s got some vague memory that it really should have always been his anyway, notices there’s a lot of dead bodies and says this “shows much amiss, Go bid the soldiers shoot.”

Really. 

Bill, we get it. It’s not like a school essay where you tell ‘em what you’re going to tell ‘em, then you tell ‘em, then you told ‘em what you told ‘em. We GET it. It’s a TRAGEDY.

Anyway. Shakespeare. You got some good stuff there. Cut out the fat and it’ll be a lot better. Just a little friendly writing advice.

Running Lights

This essay was originally published on PRP.FM as a Carp O'Diem, and expressed my worry about the mix on our roadways of people encased in a car and people not so protected by a big metal shell.

"So I was working out at the gym one morning and on TV I see a story about when people are most likely to run red lights. Apparently you’re most likely to run a red light between one to five on a Friday. Well, yeah!

Which brings me to a pet peeve, which is, we get so focused on our next urgent appointment that we don’t see the human beings who get in our way.

One of my favorite movies of all time is Starman, mostly because I love it when Jeff Bridges, the alien who is learning how to drive, says to Karen Allen, “I watched you very carefully. Red light, stop. Green light, go. Yellow light, go very fast.” Luckily, he didn’t know my first husband, who believed that if you’d seen a green light at any time while you were approaching the intersection, well! Drive on through!

And this sounds funny, but actually it’s not, because sometimes there’s someone already in the intersection. Sometimes it’s a pedestrian or a bicyclist who doesn’t have a big metal shell around them. Maybe they’re talking on their cell phone, or taking their time. They might even be breaking a traffic rule. And you might be in a rush yourself or have the sun in your eyes, and then someone gets hurt. And it’s probably not you.

So please.  Give yourself a little bit more time today so that you notice the mother with the stroller who is crossing the street in front of your car.

Green light, go. Red light, stop. It was true in kindergarten and it still is."

Let the Little Children

This Carp O'Diem aired on Portland Radio Project June 9. 

"It sure seems like we get a lot of reports of police mistreatment of the mentally ill or people of color. Now last month we got the news that we have to be vigilant about how officers treat little kids, too.

According to the Portland Mercury and The Oregonian, two police officers handcuffed a nine-year-old girl and took her to an adult holding cell at a police station a week after she had been involved in a fight at a Boys and Girls Club. This was a year ago April.

Both girls had apologized to each other. Staff members told police there hadn’t been any obvious injuries. They sent the girl home and suspended her from the club. Okay. A week later, officers came to her house where she was running through a sprinkler in a swimsuit, questioned her, perp-walked her to the police car and took her away. They didn’t give her time to get dressed and they wouldn’t let her mother come with her.

The girl, who was a TAG student at Rosa Parks, is still recovering emotionally.

The police said they didn’t like her answers when they asked her about the fight. I’ve raised two kids and there’ve been plenty of times when I didn’t like their answers, but hey, they were kids. Besides, there’s this little thing we have here in the U.S. called Miranda rights. If you’re going to be treated like an adult to the extent of being led away in handcuffs, I think you should get the full deal including your civil rights.

According to the police bureau, the officers didn’t violate any policies. By the way, the Citizen Review Committee is now evaluating city and police guidelines that govern taking children into custody.

There are many things that disturb me about this. The fact that it took a year for it to hit the news. The language being used. “They didn’t violate any policies.” She was nine years old. I don’t care if they didn’t break any rules. That doesn’t make it right. The child’s mother thinks the officers were trying to scare and humiliate the girl, when all she needed was a good ‘talking to.’ I agree with her."

Thanks for reading, and share it if you think it's important for other people to read it.

Bubble Bubble, This is Trouble

This "Carp O'Diem" aired on Portland Radio Project on May 19, 2014.  You can go to that website listen to the audio and download and even share it!  

It drew a heavy mail, well, heavy for me anyway, mostly from people who believe global warming is a hoax.  As Neil DeGrasse Tyson said, "The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it." 

I'm just reporting what the USDA put in my new growing guide. 

"It was ninety-one degrees here in Portland last Wednesday. Now I feel really like a slacker for not getting my peas in, especially since according to the new USDA’s growing guide, Portland just got bumped from zone 7 to 8, which is warmer. So I could have planted my peas a long time ago. I thought something was up when I heard that we’ve got enough olives growing in the Willamette Valley to warrant an olive oil festival. As a matter of fact, according to the Washington Post, the new growing guide shifted the kinds of plants that need warm weather north all over the country. I must be a curmudgeon, because being able to find Hood strawberries at the farmer’s market three weeks early doesn’t make me happy. I think it’s scary.

Sure, the Midwest is having a long winter – but that’s the difference between weather and global climate change. As a whole, the planet is warming up. Now it’s something you can see. Big chunks of ice melting. Big! Like polar ice caps and Antarctic sheets.

And I’m not irritated about that, because well, how can you be irritated about your home planet turning into Waterworld? And running around screaming doesn’t seem to do any good. I tried that, yesterday.

But what does irritate me is that only 47% of Americans believe that global warming is caused by human activities. Only one in five Americans know that eighty percent of the planet’s scientists agree on global warming as a basic fact.

Time to believe the back of your seed packet. It’s here. It’s happening. And whether or not it’s our fault, it’s time to figure out what to do about it."

People Lie Down, Chickens Lay Eggs

I’m not a grammar grouch. Okay, I am a grammar grouch. And I’ve got just one grammar-related thing to say.

           

I’ve been waiting for somebody, Noam Chomsky or the President, SOMEBODY, to make an announcement, but apparently they’re not going to. So this is my grammar public service announcement.

You don’t LAY down, people. You LIE down. “To lay” means “to put.” If you say “I’m going to lay down,” you just said, “I’m going to put down.” Put down what? You need to say what you are laying down, even if it’s just yourself. “I lay myself down on the couch!” “To lie” means to rest or recline, or to tell a fib. Here’s an easy way to remember it. People lie down, chickens lay eggs. Now, if you lay down yesterday, that’s OK, because it’s past tense. If you lay something down, that’s OK, because you put something down.

You can tell a lie, and you can lie down.  

Got it? Thank you.

I’m going to go LIE down now.

Mother's Day Report

I am having one of the most wonderful Mother's Days ever.  The sun is shining.  Ed is upstairs folding laundry and vaccuming.  A  former college roommate, visiting from out of town, is outside planting tomatoes. I am making waffles. And now from another old friend comes this wonderful, wonderful Mother's Day poem by Billy Collins.

So I'm sharing this poem for all you mothers.  But before you read that, I would like to thank my children from the bottom of my heart for transforming me into a mother. It has been the most incredible experience any human being could have.  I am so grateful to the universe for sending you to us! 

And I'd like to thank MY mother for teaching me so much about how to love little children.  And I'd like to thank HER mother...because she got it from somewhere and I'm pretty sure that's where she got it.

Happy Mother's Day!

The Lanyard - Billy Collins

The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light
and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.

Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.
Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.

And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the archaic truth
that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

The Giants Are Falling

First there was Mickey Rooney.  Almost a century of Mickey being a bad boy, delighting us with his round face, wry fast delivery and flying feet.  Gone.

It’s getting a little nerve-wracking.  In recent years we’ve lost Steve Jobs and Neil Armstrong.  Now just this year, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nobel Prize in Literature.   Philip Seymour Hoffman.  Phil Everly, who gave us “Bye, Bye Love.”  Shirley Temple, who helped keep depression out of the Depression.  Pete Seeger, for crying out loud!

But now there’s Jack Ramsay.  In case you aren't a basketball fan or a Portlander and so don’t know his name, Dr. Jack led the Trailblazers to their national victory in 1977.  Sure, he coached a few other little teams, I guess, but for those of us who remember driving around in the wee small hours of the morning after that memorable win, screaming “We’re Number One!” he was the Trailblazers coach for all time.  Plaid pants and all.

And now he’s gone, too.  I know he was old.  But since when does being old mean we can do without you?  Mt. Hood is old too, and I don’t know about you, but I need it in my skyline.  I know there’s a natural span here, and most of these people had been around for over eighty years.  But I don’t have to like it.

And I don’t.

Swish!

Well, sports fans, I don’t have a Carp today. Today I have a Swish. Three points!

Last week the big news was the release of a recording of LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling telling his girlfriend that she shouldn’t appear in pictures with black men or bring Magic Johnson to Clippers games.

Fans and players, not to mention the NBA leadership, were talking sanctions. Should we fine him? Give him a heads up? That we’re in a post-racism world? Any two-and-a-half million dollar fine isn’t going to get the attention of a man worth almost 2 billion. So what else can you do? Fans boycott, teams refuse to play? Corporate sponsors started to desert. Here in Portland, fans were waiting anxiously to see how the league would respond. 

But just as Rip City and the Green Sports Alliance has led the way in protecting our environment, sports has long led the way in changing our attitudes towards people of diverse backgrounds and colors. 

So now comes the news that Sterling has been banned from the NBA for life. He’s still fabulously wealthy. But according to the Portland Business Journal, Adidas is back to sponsoring the Clippers. And for most of us, it’s good to confirm that our intolerance for bigotry is bigger even than our love of being in the play-offs. 

Swish. Three points!

Be a Drip!

This commentary was originally posted and aired on Portland Radio Project.

Okay folks, cue the music...or just go to this YouTube of the Manhattan Transfer singing my theme, song, "Java Jive..."

I love coffee. I don’t mean that in the generic way that most Portlanders say, “I love coffee.”  I mean that I refuse to get out of bed until someone brings me a cup of coffee. Fit the paper cone into a funnel, put in two scoops of Stumptown, pour hot water over it.  And you can even compost the grounds.  How Portland can you get?

Portlanders recycle, we bike, we compost, we garden, and we drink coffee.  A lot of coffee.  Pour over, lattes, grande decaf skinny mochas with double whip, single-cup…whoa.  Back up.  Single-cup?

The Harris poll reports that the market for single cup brewers doubled in the last year alone.  You know, those machines that use a little teensy plastic container with two tablespoons of coffee and flavoring to make just one special cup of coffee?  According to the Oregon Business Journal, even our very own Boyd Coffee is now making single-cup coffee pods.  They use less packaging than other single-cup brewers, so I guess that’s good, the Oregon reduce/reuse/recycle aesthetic meets crazy-individual-serving-waste.   But really, people!  Even John Sylvan, the founder of Keurig, says that coffee made the single-cup way creates ten times more garbage than the drip method!

We’re talking hundreds of millions of pounds of coffee-pod trash going into landfills every year.

So I say, don’t be a derp, be a drip!  

Ahh!

Teenagers Are People Too

This post originally appeared and was aired on Portland Radio Project.

Hey, can we stop treating teenagers like they’re nuts, dishonest, or predatory?

Where did this COME from? I’ve taught a lot of middle and high school kids here in the Portland metro area and this seems to be one of the last legit biases.  Most young people I know are loving, funny, they work hard, and they have personal integrity to burn. At first it just made me tired to have people say things like, “And you believed him?” or “I’m sorry, I can’t trust a boy to babysit my children.” Well, now it just makes me mad. According to the class in Adolescent Psychology, adolescents are inherently idealistic, not dishonest. Yeah, they are a bit self-centered, and wouldn’t you be if you were doing all the grown-up things for the first time and hoping that you were doing them right? Most teenagers I know are trying as hard and as anxiously as they can to please the adults in their lives, and they’re running scared because they don’t think it’s possible.  

Cut ‘em a break, folks.  You were there once, remember?

Sad

I woke up crying this morning.

I have a new way of crying…it doesn’t involve sobbing, or diaphragmatic contractions, or really any physical sensations at all.  My throat doesn’t even get tight.  I’ll just become aware that my sight is blurred.  It gets hard to see, and then I feel water spilling down my cheeks from my eyes.  They just fill up with water and then overflow.

Where is this coming from?  There’s a lot of undifferentiated Weltschmerz going on, I know.  Or maybe not so undifferentiated.  The New York Times estimated that between 7,000 and 17,000 people will die each year because of Republican governors who have repudiated federal dollars to extend Medicaid to their constituents, just to vent their political spleen. 

That kind of thing used to make me mad.  But now I don’t have the energy that anger takes.  It just makes me sad.

           

The recent reports provided to the U.N. on global warming – I’m sorry, climate change – which was accompanied by the conclusion that we really have just about ten years in which to make the huge changes in carbon emissions necessary to avoid catastrophic events such as the “collapse of ice sheets, a rapid rise in sea levels, and difficulty growing enough food,” -- which said that 95% of the world’s scientists are convinced that not only is global warming real, but it’s much worse than the worst case scenarios for this spot in the apocalyptic timeline had envisioned in the last report – has me feeling a little bit blue.

That’s an understatement.  A little blue?  I feel like I’m Spock.  Remember the Star Trek movie, “The Search for Spock,” where his aging was tied to the aging and death of the Genesis planet?  I’m almost 58, and I keep hearing doomsday predictions of what kind of case this ol’ planet will be in, in the year 2050 – about the time I’ll be 94.  Not the age you want to be about the time the Earth starts to resemble the set of Waterworld.

So there’s that, and the propensity of the Supreme Court to redefine corporations as individual human beings, at least in terms of freedom of speech and religion, and don’t even get me started on the NRA and how many more freedoms we have to bear arms in the wake of the slaughter of five-year-olds at Sandy Hook.  What happened to the evolutionary adaptation of taking care of your tribe?

No.  What’s really got me lately is that for the first time in thirty years, this was the first Easter that I didn’t sneak into a kid’s room with an Easter basket.  Last year, I snuck into my nineteen-year-old son’s room at six a.m.  Why in the world would any teenage boy be awake then?  I have the weight of dozens of scientific studies that say that teenagers’ bio-clocks are set on a time zone from another planet completely.  Well, my son must not have kept up with science because he sat up in bed, pointed at me and said, “I KNEW you were the Easter Bunny!”  Finally.  He was elated at having evidence, PROOF, at last.  I guess after that he could move out.  Mom is the Easter Bunny.

But this Easter, we got up, Ed went downstairs to work because he’s trying to meet a deadline, I went outside to do battle with the dandelions and then we went to brunch with my mother and father-in-law. We didn’t even dye eggs. Happy Easter.

If I were to be completely honest, I would have to say that I think the real reason I’m sad is that my job of parenting is done.  My job of mothering a daughter is over – she’s thirty, so this isn’t big news.  That job has been replaced with a relationship, and it’s a happy one, so good.  My job of mothering a son is over.  He’s twenty, so again, it was time for him to join the Navy or the Peace Corps or go to college.  It doesn’t matter which one he chose. What matters is that for the last year, instead of cuddling a little warm body in a blue footie sleeper or following around a chortling two-year-old or mentoring a clueless middle school boy with out-of-control-hair or driving around a popular high school music star, I got nothin’.  When I want someone around who gets my sense of humor and dishes it back effortlessly, I got nothin’, and when I want to hug my kid, feeling a little bit of soft fat over hard muscle and a big heart, I got nothin’.

And during this seismic shift, my best friend decided that for some reason she doesn't want to talk to me anymore…so now I don’t have her to gripe to.

So I’m sad.  And the big question now is, what to do about it?

Hey, this is me.  So what I did was write a 340-page novel.  And get involved in local independent media and learn to write commentary and edit audio files.  But at the end of the day – and eventually you have to acknowledge that the day is over and it’s time to do something other than work or sleep – what I’ve got is sadness.

So I’m feeling sad right now.  And that’s just a fact.

Feel the Pulse

Everyone in my family is a musician and performer and our son is no exception, so when we chose a neighborhood to move into years ago, we were careful to choose one with a school that had a performing arts program. We bought a house that would let Robin go to Cleveland High, a large inner city school with one of the three good music programs left intact in the city's public schools.

At the end of Robin's Junior year, we learned that the district was cutting the music program in half and replacing the full-time teacher with a half-time middle school teacher who had mostly taught band. In case you're wondering (and you may not be), music teachers are not interchangeable. Middle school kids are not high school kids, and teaching students to play a musical instrument is an entirely different skill set from teaching choral singing. As far as the community could tell, this meant that our wonderful music program was going down.

And this is a school where parents send their talented young musicians, because they believe that the arts is an important part of a culture and that their children should have a musical education and that the creation and enjoyment of music is as important to our quality of life as, say, learning calculus.

So far, kids at Cleveland are still receiving music instruction and having the opportunity to learn and perform in a nationally recognized music program, but it's because we were lucky enough to be assigned a teacher who is energetic, optimistic, smart, skilled beyond her credential and was willing to spend her first year at Cleveland working a 60 hour week for 20 hours of pay, while retraining herself by taking classes in choral literature, vocal production, and conducting, and because there were and continue to be many volunteers, parents of kids in the program, who put in close to another 40-50 hours each week to raise money, communicate with parents and kids, organize the choir retreat and tour, and keep up with the music library.  (That was three years ago, by the way, and the story has a happy ending -- our marvelous choir director is up to speed and is now being paid what she's worth, there are hundreds of kids in the choral program, and volunteers keep signing up, thank goodness.) 

I've been curious about why it seems to be okay with us, as a society, to treat music as a profession and as an academic offering in this shoddy way.   Would we put up with having to run an MBA program on volunteers and contributions?  We seem to believe that music itself is important.  Who among us could get along without hundreds of songs loaded onto our phone or iPod? But we still think of music classes as one of those peripheral things, easy to drop when the funding gets tough. We don't have to pay musicians. They should just make music for free. And it's true that most musicians will sing or play for free, because we just can't help it. But we need to pay the bills too.

There's more to say about this, and someday I'll write a post about the "sacralization of art" -- that is, imbuing the arts, and music in particular, with a mystique that is, for some of us, reality -- the reality that music touches our souls, and therefore doesn't fall into the category of something that has to be paid for, any more than you pay to go to church.

But just for those of you who want or need one more example about the power of music, here's a little story from a few years ago.

Robin was admitted into the hospital for a heart procedure. It was  his third one, so you'd think we would have gotten used to it, but you never entirely get used to the idea that a cardiologist is going to thread a catheter into your son's carotid artery and down to his heart, look around and maybe cauterize a troublesome electrical pathway in there. Robin was anxious, shall we say. It was 7:00 a.m. and his pulse rate was 100 beats per minute. And he was just lying there waiting for an IV.

Then his dad started singing a British pub song, "Country Life," and Robin joined in with some harmony. Then they sang a camp song about a sailing ship, "The Golden Vanity." Robin's pulse dropped to 72. They started to wheel him down to the operating room and Robin sang "We're Off to See the Wizard" all the way down the hall. Just before they took him in, Robin took my hand and said, "I'm okay, Mom. I'm not afraid any more."

They wheeled him into the room and the nurse, who had noticed that Robin had brought his ukelele with him, turned on the stereo with Izzy Kamakawiwo'ole singing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." Through the door, I could see Robin smile. Then they closed the double doors and his Dad and I went upstairs to wait.

Six hours later we talked to the surgeon. They had found two pathways that were creating odd heart rhythms, one right on the AV node. They were successful in ablating the pathways. We were able to go in and see him, once he was awake enough to pay attention, and could tell him that the procedure was successful and that he could enroll him in a driver's education program now.

And although I don't have any scientific reason for knowing this, I am sure that one reason why he did so well is because of singing harmony in a hospital room and listening to his favorite singer and having his ukelele with him, right beside his bed.

And I know why his parents did so well, too.
Music heals hearts.

It's a Choice

This post originally appeared and was aired on Portland Radio Project, the brainchild of the friend of my youth, Rebecca Webb -- a very cool pastiche of radio, digital newspaper and social media.  Check it out in all its glory!

 

Here in Sellwood, we’re getting a groovy organic non-GMO food store, the Moreland Pantry.  My neighbors and I were all excited about this.  Then we learned that the owner had posted on her Facebook page that she believes homosexuality leads to pedophilia and bigamy.  Now, she wouldn’t refuse service to homosexuals, although she believes that businesses should have the right to do so.

Now I know that just because someone agrees with me about food, they may not agree with me about religion or politics.  That’s Thanksgiving in a nutshell.  And they might not approve of some of my friends’ marriages, because they’re both men or they’re both women.

And I understand that for some people, it’s an article of faith that people who have similar plumbing shouldn’t have sex, and religious freedom is a right protected by the First Amendment. And they have the right to express those beliefs  – there’s that First Amendment again.

But if you want to open a groovy store in a neighborhood full of tolerant straight people and married gay people, then you might not want to go Facebook with those beliefs.  

Because now a lot of my neighbors and I don’t want to shop at the Moreland Pantry.  And that’s our right too.