BREATHING ROOM

It isn’t writer’s block, quite. In fact, the word counts make me look entirely productive: more than 5000 over the span of two nights. And when I say “over the span of two nights,” that’s exactly what I mean. This morning I went to bed at 7 am. Yesterday it was 6:30 a.m. Both times I fell asleep in absolute defeat. I have wrestled the essay two nights running and I am losing.

I want to write about why I live where I live. In the 1970s, “Why I Live Where I Live” was a regular column in Esquire Magazine, each one featuring a different writer. I read them avidly. The two that stick with me are those written by Annie Dillard and Harry Crews, both of whom lived in places where I too had lived. I’m not sure you would have recognized either place if they hadn’t named them. In the course of trying to coax the piece into shape, I re-read Harry’s column. It rambles all over the place too. Esquire notwithstanding, maybe it’s the topic that doesn’t work. Still, just like a dog with her teeth into something, I don’t want to let go.

Where we live is sometimes dictated by necessity, sometimes by whim. (Occasionally you have to wonder if fate intervenes. Why did I pick up and move to Montana, a place I’d never even visited? And then I was stuck there. For years.)

Whether or not you are at home there is at the heart of the matter. I chose Montana and lived there 18 years, but I was never a Montanan. I spent a decade in Boston, but found no peace there. However that city influenced me, it’s since washed off like a watercolor. (Well, maybe some driving habits remain.)  I wasn’t even a citizen of the one place that did feel like home, and couldn’t claim it as anything but borrowed. My whole life was like something out of Goldilocks. Too hard, too soft, too small, too large, too hot, too cold.  Until now.

So why can’t I write about it? I love this town, but when I try to organize those thoughts on paper, they read like something creative from the Chamber of Commerce. When I try to talk about how we came to be here, the essay takes on that terrible pedestrian narrative – “and then, and then, and then.”

Harry Crews said one of the reasons he lives in Gainesville is because three hours away there’s really good fishing. I like horse racing, but I don’t live in Dayton because it’s three hours from the Kentucky Derby. If “really good fishing” was the criteria for living somewhere, you’d think Harry would have moved closer to the beach. Of course, he lived in Gainesville because he taught there, just as we live here because we chose the extraordinary public performing arts high school for our son.

Why I think I’ll stay for ever and always is a whole different question. And for that matter, Harry has long retired from the University of Florida, and yet he lingers quite near there, in Melrose. I lived Gainesville as well; three times. In utero, as a little girl from age 2 to 6 and again when I was 17, and I returned for college. I don’t go near Gainesville now, it’s clearly my geographical tar baby and I’m terrified I might get stuck.  And when I left there in 1980, I didn’t even glance back.

I did take a couple of classes from Harry Crews, though. They were upper-level creative writing courses and I never should have been allowed to sign up. Lucky me the computer didn’t kick me out and neither did Harry. We used to meet at night. We’d have an assignment to read and then we’d talk about it. We’d turn in our papers to Harry and he’d return those that were already graded. I don’t think we ever talked about each other’s writing, and so much the better. We really only cared what Harry thought. One night, after we’d read Kafka’s “The Hunger Artist,” he asked me to tell the class what I thought about it. So I told them. “A brilliant story,” I said, “but I didn’t really care for it.” (Which I still think is an entirely legitimate opinion.)

Well, Harry was on that like white on rice. “Didn’t care for it! Little Miss Coed here doesn’t care for the great Kafka!”  And so on. Really, I suppose I should have figured that it would have been one of Harry’s favorites. I’d read all his novels in high school, and a love for Kafka should have come as no surprise. I sat there and listened while he raved and tried not to cry.

At the break, I went up and asked for my story. If you didn’t pick up your work, he threw it out.

“Name?”

“Larkin Vonalt.”

“Oh yeah. The one with the people wandering around in the middle of the night.” He shuffled through a few more papers. “Here it is.”  I could see he’d marked it with a B. He paused, though, before handing it over. Leaning back in his chair he looked at me as if he was seeing me for the first time.

“Are you kin to Larry Vonalt? He drew the word “kin” out three beats.

“Yes, I’m his daughter.” Harry slapped the desktop so hard people in the room jumped.

“Well, how the hell is he??!! We were the dearest of friends. You tell him, you tell him the next time you talk to him, you tell him Harry Crews sent his luvvvv.”

Well, I did tell him of course, and my father called Harry and they had a fine old time rekindling their graduate school friendship.  What I learned from Harry over the next two semesters was how to not flinch. It has served me well. I wish I could learn from him now how to say why I live where I live.

Why do I live where I live? There’s the history of course– the brothers Wright and their bicycles, their friend, Paul Laurence Dunbar and his poems. Jane Reese and her camera, John Patterson and his rowboats (yes, yes cash registers too) Esther Price and her chocolates. There’s the Federal Courthouse where Lincoln spoke, and damn near every president after  him. There are the 3000 creches at the University of Dayton and the 104,000 inhabitants of Woodland Cemetery, itself a National Historic Landmark. Every mover and shaker Dayton ever had is buried there– but the most visited grave is that of a boy and his dog.

There are the long straight boulevards of fine houses and the cobblestone streets, and the river, like a great grey ribbon curling through the town. Great old industrial sites dot the town, factories and warehouses and great hulking ruins. There are fountains in the river and a skating rink in a park downtown and a baseball stadium where the minor league team boasts the longest sell-out record of any professional sports team. Colored lights flicker underneath the bridges.

I lost my dog here for nine days. Everyone wanted to help: letter carriers, A.T. & T. repair crews, UPS, the Police Department, the Sheriff’s office, college students, homeless men and women. A local mover and shaker wrote about her in his blog. Days went by without a word. It was like she’d fallen off the edge of the earth. The hardest call each day was to street maintenance, to see if they’d found her body. When she was finally spotted, five miles across town in a wooded area behind the Hospice, nearly the entire staff became involved in our reunion. I’ll never forget the euphoria that swept over me as she raced into my arms, and I’ll never forget the UPS man dancing a little jig on my front porch that afternoon, upon hearing the good news. “The guys are gonna be so  happy to hear this, we’ve all been looking for her.” When I brought pastries to the hospice to thank them again on the anniversary of her return, the whole story was written up (badly, but it was a sweet gesture) in the Dayton Daily News as if the return of a lost dog is a story that ought to be newsworthy. Something like that can make you partial to a town.

Just a few weeks ago they named one of the bridges across the Great Miami River the Richard Holbrooke Memorial Bridge after the late American diplomat.  In 1995, Holbrooke brokered a peace treaty here in Dayton  that ended the Balkan conflict. He wrote about Dayton in his memoirs:

There was also a real Dayton out there, a charming Ohio city, famous as the birthplace of the Wright Brothers. Its citizens energized us from the outset. Unlike the population of, say New York, Geneva or Washington which would scarcely notice another conference, Daytonians were proud to be part of history. Large signs at the commercial airport hailed Dayton as the “temporary center of international peace”. The local newspapers and television stations covered the story from every angle, drawing the people deeper into the proceedings. When we ventured into a restaurant or a shopping center downtown, people crowded around, saying that they were praying for us. Warren Christopher was given at least one standing ovation in a restaurant. Families on the air base placed “candles of peace” in their front windows, and people gathered in peace vigils outside the base. One day they formed a “peace chain”, although it was not quite large enough to surround the sprawling eight-thousand-acre base.

When I read that out loud to my husband, I have to stop for a second to regain my composure. Why should that make me cry? It’s not sad. That’s Dayton for you. Not always the most sophisticated, perhaps, but hopeful and optimistic and caring. Even when the city keeps getting cut off at the knees– the departure of GM was dreadful, but NCR leaving by far the worst betrayal. (No doubt John Patterson rolled over in his grave several times.) Even when that happens, the city is like a scrappy little terrier– up on its feet and ready to go.

But when I try to write about it I get tangled up in keeping all the details straight and carefully drawing each line on the dot-to-dot. I try to keep my own story in there as well– after all, it’s supposed to be why I live here, not why those other 142,000 do. (Or a million if you want to count the outlying areas.)

I’d like to tell the story of the drunk guy that helped us unload the moving truck the hot August night we arrived here, or the woman who lived across the alley from us and her beautiful daughter and how the daughter died one night while they were making dinner. Or the man across the street who helped us carry a treadmill up the stairs and the stricken figure of a dog to the car, has cut the grass, strung the lights, and borrowed every tool we have, all the while keeping us apprised on neighborhood gossip. There are still so many things I don’t want to forget. But I just can’t seem to make the words cooperate.

It’s nights like that where my skill as a writer is less than useful. The sentences are pretty. They scan well. The metaphors are clever or apt. But it’s all so boring I can hardly stand to read it out loud to myself. Two nights of that is about enough to make me wild with despair.

Now comes the question of what to do? This experiment, this 30 Days Notice, was supposed to be neatly tied up and put away two days ago, on the 30th. I cannot seem to climb over this one piece and there are still two more lying in wait on the other side. Am I supposed to just give up and walk away after devoting two days of my life to it? Or should I go on wrangling the sentences until at last they move forward together? Maybe I just say forget it about the other two stories and move on to the next thing, closing down 30 Days Notice two days overdue instead of four?

I needed breathing room to sort it out. I used to sleep on this sort of thing, but I’m so exhausted by the time I fall into bed in the morning, that the sleep is hard and dreamless.

So today I let myself breathe a bit, hugging my sides like an exhausted runner, and I made some decisions.

I’m going to save “Why I Live Where I Live” for another project. It may take 10,000 words to tell that story. Or a hundred thousand. There will be one more piece here tomorrow and after that, a little wrap-up. And though the curtains are coming down on this show, I’ve left the stage door open– and I’ll leave a note with directions to the next theatre. One of these days I’ll figure it out, and then I’ll tell you how it is that I came home at last.

 

NOW I LAY ME DOWN TO SLEEP

 

The clock ticks over another minute. Thoughts spin round creakily like a hamster on its squeaky wheel. Fold the pillow, rearrange the blankets. Next to you your spouse sleeps peacefully. 3 a.m. Count sheep, count former lovers, count days left. Doze for a minute or two. 3:20 a.m. Get up. Check Facebook. Open the refrigerator door and peer in. Leftover pizza– ooh, chicken, bacon and spinach on white sauce, your favorite. Put a slice in the microwave. Eat the limp slice of pizza. Drink a glass of water. Brush teeth. Trundle back to bed. 4:16 a.m. Sigh. Turn over on your other side. Practice breathing. Think about your father, the bill you forgot to pay, the thing you said that time. Just as the sky begins to lighten in the east, sleep overtakes you at last. And then it’s time to get up.

We can’t fall asleep. Well, of course we do eventually lose consciousness, having worked until we’re bleary-eyed, or driven in straight-through from San Antonio, or had enough cocktails to fell a small horse. But we aren’t sleeping easily or well. 70 million people in the United States are believed to be afflicted with sleep troubles, generating some 43 million prescriptions for five billion dollars in sleep aids.

In 2006, when Lunesta first appeared on the market, people were so seduced by the lurid green butterfly floating across their television screen (promising them the good night’s sleep they deserved) it more than doubled the amount of money Americans spent on sleeping pills. One physician,David Claman, director of the UCSF sleep disorders center, told the San Francisco Chronicle “In the 12 years I’ve been in practice, this was the only time I’ve had a line of people out the door waiting to try a medicine.”

The National Sleep Foundation estimates that including health care costs we spend $14 billion dollars a year trying to fall asleep. When you add in indirect costs like loss productivity and property damage (i.e. from accidents caused by the sleep impaired) the number shoots to more than $35 billion dollars. Ad Age reports that the current recession has not affected the sales of sleeping pills (or antidepressants.)

43 percent of people aged 13 to 64 report that they rarely or never get “a good night’s sleep,” and 63 percent of American adults believe that their sleep needs are not adequately met during the week.  Between 2000 and 2004, prescriptions for hypnotics for individuals age 20 to 44 doubled and those for children age 10 to 19 increased by 85 percent.

We’re really in a state here, aren’t we?

The ability to transition from a busy day into a state of restful sleep is for many people a lifelong challenge, and trying to get children to fall asleep (and children arriving in your room wanting another story, a drink of water or the eviction of the monster from under the bed) contributes to our bedtime woes.

Nowhere has this been more humorously illustrated than in last year’s smash hit of Go the Fuck to Sleep, a children’s book for adults, written by Adam Mansbach, which reached number one on Amazon.com’s bestseller list  a month before it had even been published. (An email link sent to booksellers in advance of the book went “viral,” because anyone who has ever tried to get a toddler to go to sleep felt resonance with the book. The combined “hits” on YouTube for readings by Samuel L. Jackson or Werner Herzog are at 1.4 million.)

When my own son was an infant, he suffered from colic. Night after night, he wailed. My mother was staying with us and the three adults took turns walking the floor with him. I remember feeling asleep on my feet, it was all so exhausting. Then one night I put on some music and he stopped crying. Within a few minutes he’d settled down and fallen asleep.  It was a Billie Holiday record and over the next few days, we discovered that the child could be soothed and eased into sleep by Billie Holiday and nothing else.

I wonder if it would work now, as that baby boy is 17 years old, and he still doesn’t sleep much. I can hear him moving around in his room, listening to music or talking on the  phone. On mornings where he doesn’t have to get up, we won’t see him until noon at the earliest. At least we don’t have to walk the floor with him anymore.

It’s hard to put away your toys and go to bed. (And conversely, once we do fall asleep, it’s hard to stir out of that cozy and warm bed and face the day.)  But we need the sleep. That suspended sensory activity creates a heightened anabolic state which allows for the growth and rejuvenation of the immune, skeletal, muscular and central nervous systems. Many migraine sufferers find relief in a sleep state, and conversely  numerous studies show that wound healing is significantly slowed in the sleep deprived. A very rare and terrible inherited condition called “Fatal Familial Insomnia” has cruelly demonstrated that  we cannot survive without sleep.

While it is difficult to shift from the constant forward motion of our days to a good night’s sleep, anxiety is one of insidious components of insomnia that plagues us day and night. Not necessarily clinical anxiety, just the regular day-to-day worries can keep you awake. For instance, the number of people seeking assistance with insomnia jumped dramatically after the attacks of September 11, 2001.

When we are asleep we are vulnerable. We are not in control of the situation that surrounds us. We must be willing to let go and let nature take its course. It’s hard to do that if you don’t have faith that you will wake up again. People do die in their sleep. My own mother-in-law sat down for a nap in her recliner after a nice breakfast with her daughter, fell asleep and died so quietly that no one knew until they went to wake her. She was 94, but it can happen to people of any age. Every new parent knows the anxiety that lurks in the spectre of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Or pity the poor man or woman who awakes to find their spouse’s body cooling next to them. Each year 38,000 people die from sleep apnea. No wonder we’re reluctant to let go.

As a child I used to recite a bedtime prayer: “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” Well, honestly, I don’t know what my mother was thinking when she taught me this. We didn’t go to church on Sunday, we went to dog shows. The message I got from this little ritual was not “God will look after me no matter what” but “I could die before I wake up.” (I’ve noticed on a recent recording that the prayer’s been adjusted to the less worrying “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, Thy Love go with me through the night and wake me with the morning light.” ) But it was the prayer she’d been taught as a child and she simply handed it down. I counter-acted this by saying this little five-word spell  to my parents every single night “See you in the morning.”  I didn’t teach the bedtime prayer to my son, but I noticed that after my father died that he added that same promise each night before he went to bed. See you in the morning.

In addition to bedtime prayers, most of us had sleep rituals as children. We would put away our toys and start winding down for the day. We’d have a bath and put on our pajamas. We’d be tucked into bed. Perhaps there would be a story. I started thinking about this one night when the hamster wheel was going around and around in my head while I was struggling to get to sleep.

We pack our days full. An estimated 95 percent of us engage in some kind of electronic stimulation in the hour before bed– television, computer, cell phone, and sometimes we bring that stuff to bed too. We fall into bed exhausted, our brains still feverishly working on whatever dilemmas we faced in our waking hours. No wonder we aren’t falling asleep. Though my husband can fall asleep anywhere, he was game to try the experiment I suggested.

We cleared our bedroom of accumulated junk, books and newspapers stacked next to the bed, clothes left across a chair and never put away, things stuck in the room because we had no other place to put them. I cleared all the surfaces and put a vase of fresh flowers on a dresser. I made a point to actually pull together a complete set of sheets, lovely Egyptian cotton the color of hope. The bed was made up with the precision of hospital staff. (That would be my husband, I’ve never been any good with corners.)

We chose midnight as our bedtime. It might not be optimum, but it was realistic given our habits. An hour before bed we turned off the television and the computer. (Harder than you might think.) We put the phones on the charger and left them there.

Night-clothes were laid out on the bed. One of us brewed green tea. We had showers and put on our jammies and sat in bed together drinking our tea. We talked, but we agreed that we would not talk about the problems that had beset us during the day, whether in our own household or in the wider world of news and politics. We were gentle and quiet with each other. Occasionally we read, but again, we tried to choose carefully; a biography of John Wooden or a well-loved novel. No controversy, and no despair. Sometimes there was soothing music. Sometimes I had to make a conscious effort to settle my thoughts, but having the hour of bedtime preparation really helped. Occasionally I’d use breathing exercises to relax. The end result? We fell asleep. We slept well. We awoke in the morning refreshed and energized.

Then the inevitable happened. We got busy with other projects. We started using every last minute until the one where we fell into bed. Elmer started dozing off in front of the television. I started staying up all night writing. The room filled up with more stuff. The tea stayed in the cupboard. I was going to bed as my husband was getting up. (And I have to say I’m not beset with insomnia now, but only because I’m exhausted. I’m running on afterburners. When I wake up again, it might be three or four in the afternoon. And that’s no way to live.)

So to ring in the New Year, we are turning off the television at eleven. We are clearing our bedroom of accumulated junk, books and newspapers stacked next to the bed, clothes left across a chair and never put away, things stuck in the room because we had no other place to put them. Surfaces will be cleared and polished and there will be flowers again, and Egyptian cotton sheets the color of– spring. Maybe I’ll buy myself new pajamas. Santa brought a glass teapot and flowering tea with which to close the day. We will make an effort to be kind and gentle with each other for at least that last hour of the day. Thy love go with me through the night and wake me with the morning light.

 

FAIREST OF THEM ALL

A few weeks ago I came across a tiny little object that left me feeling most vexed.  It was a bathroom scale the size of a postage stamp. Well, it was a miniature plastic toy bathroom scale, in pink. With the weight permanently set to read at 110 pounds.  Barbie’s bathroom scale.

I’m not militant about Barbie. I had Barbies as a child. They’d been given to me in 1968 by a friend of my mother’s when her daughters finished playing with them. My mother used to leave the whole black vinyl trunk of them on the front steps at night hoping someone would steal them.  I bought Barbies for my stepdaughters and I’ve amassed a vintage train case full of them and their silly outfits for our 4-year-old granddaughter to play with when she visits. I realize that Barbie sets forth an entirely unrealistic role model for little girls, but I give little girls enough credit for imagination and good sense to know not to base their life expectations on an 11″ plastic doll.

But a bathroom scale for the leggy blonde? That just struck me as particularly insidious. Barbie is designed on a 1:6 scale, what’s known in the industry as “playscale”.  The proportions for Real Life work out like this: she’d be 5’9″ tall, with a 36-inch chest, an 18-inch waist, 33-inch hips and a body mass index of 16.24, which fits the weight criteria for anorexia. A study at Finland University’s Central Hospital revealed that Barbie would lack the 17 to 22 percent body fat that women require in order to menstruate.  She does not need a bathroom scale.

Yet Mattel issued a play set “Barbie Baby Sits” that included a book called “How to Lose Weight” with a page that instructed “Don’t Eat!” Two years later, the play set “Slumber Party” included that same “book” and also a bathroom scale which permanently read 110, about 35 pounds underweight for a woman 5-foot, 9-inches tall.

Little girls do grow up hearing their mothers complain about diets and needing to lose weight. In fact, in Sweden (where there is no childhood obesity epidemic) a study at Uppsala University revealed that one-out-of-five seven-year-old girls believed that she needed to lose weight. In 2009, the British Journal of Developmental Psychology reported on a study conducted at the University of Central Florida which found that of the little girls studied, age three to six, half of them thought they were fat.

In 2008, the New York Times published a story on a study that had just been posted in the German medical journal, Deutsches Artzeblatt International that interviewed 7000 girls aged 7 to 12. The study asked the girls to rank themselves on a scale that included Far Too Thin, a Bit Too Thin, Just Right, a Bit Too Fat, and Far Too Fat. 75 percent of the girls were in a normal weight range, but half of those girls (of normal weight) thought they were too fat. It gets worse. Normal weight girls who felt they were fat scored as poorly on Quality of Life and Self-Esteem tests as those girls who truly were obese; and they scored worse than obese girls on tests regarding family relationships.  The same story noted a 1999 study by the American Dietetic Association that found 55 percent of American girls 7 to 12 years old wanted to be thinner.

It’s not much of a stretch then, to imagine a little girl playing with Barbie and the Barbie bathroom scale and telling her anorexic doll “Oooh, Barbie you’ve gained weight! No dinner for you tonight, you little piglet.”  This is seriously screwed up.

As a child I was pretty active, busy with dogs and horses, and by the time I was in my teens, sailing and skiing. I don’t remember thinking I was fat. I did have a friend in high school who was carrying a few extra pounds– and I mean a few– I look at yearbook pictures of her and she does not look significantly fatter than the rest of us. If she was teased about her weight, I don’t remember that either, but what I do remember is how hard she tried to diet, existing for weeks at a time on carrot sticks and Tab.

The anorexic daughter of friends lived with us for a while, while I was in high school. Ruthie was a few years older than me and her arms were as big around as the core of a paper towel roll. Her parents had put padlocks on the cupboards and the fridge. Still, Ruthie would manage to eat whole sticks of butter or an entire pound of raw bacon and then vomit it all back up again. She was always trying to kill herself by taking overdoses of aspirin.  She was trying very hard to look just like David Bowie in Aladdin Sane.

One of my worst and most-embarrassing moments regarding weight stems from an evening at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta. I was writing for a cutting-edge punk rock magazine, Dogfood, and I was 20 years old. We’d just interviewed the headlining band,  Psychedelic Furs before the show and now I was sitting in the balcony with the band watching the opening act, Romeo Void. I was absolutely thrilled to be sitting next to Richard Butler, the raspy-voiced lead singer, replete in pleated trousers and silk scarf. On stage, Romeo Void was playing their hit “Never Say Never” (famous for 15 minutes for the refrain “I might like you better if we slept together”) Richard was enjoying himself immensely, shouting down repeatedly at the singer “Fat Chicks Suck!” What were the rest of us doing? We were laughing hysterically. Every time he yelled it, we all rolled with laughter. I was laughing so hard tears streamed down my face.  Now there’s no way that Deborah Iyall could have heard him across a theatre of screaming fans, and she was sort of Rosie O’Donnell plump. But when I think about that evening I am ashamed.

Payback would come for me sooner rather than later. A few months after that evening I moved to Boston.  I’d married in a rush (to get in-state tuition, we told everybody) and not surprisingly the marriage fell apart in pretty short order. Boston is a cold town, and I’m not talking about the climate. I may have been hip in the south but that didn’t count for shit in Massachusetts.   I was studying performance art, which is all about laying one’s self bare (sometimes literally) and surrounded all the time by people who were prettier, skinnier, cooler.  My nominal husband was staying out all night and I was staying home by myself eating buttered egg noodles.

When I looked in the mirror I saw a fat girl-woman. It didn’t help that Bob would not touch me at all if he could help it. In retrospect I was probably twenty pounds overweight, but on the Boston art scene that meant I was invisible.  A friend of mine wrote recently about his time in Boston: “One of the things I hated the most was the absolute lack of positive energy, lack of drive and ambition, the lack of wonder about the world that always existed in that city. I have lived all over the world– that place just sucks the life out of people. I have never, for one second had any regret for leaving.”  He was in a band, for God’s sake, he was popular. Reading his message was like long-won vindication.

By 1986, Bob and I split and I moved across town. I’d finished with school and had a job with people I liked, and even found some kind of modicum of self-acceptance, and was doing my best to hold onto that with both hands. I hadn’t lost the weight, but I still looked fine in my little boots and black tights, vintage dresses and leather jackets. One afternoon I was walking through Kenmore Square, when a homeless man called out to me.

“Hey, hey, c’mere, I want to tell you something.”  As it happened this wasn’t just any homeless man, this was Mr. Butch, a minor celebrity in Boston. (Honest to God.) That didn’t matter, I tended to give money to panhandlers when I had some in my pocket, and anyway I was curious as to what he had to tell me. So I stepped towards him. He leaned in closer and pointed his finger at me. “I want to tell you that you’d look human if you lost fifty pounds.”

Twenty-five years have passed since that moment on the sidewalk, and I still vividly remember how I felt like I’d been physically smacked. I reeled away, angry and embarrassed. I kept telling myself “He’s a homeless jerk, why do you even care what he thinks?” but my own voice was not enough to quell the unsolicited opinion from a stranger.

The funny thing is that I did lose weight– fifty pounds and then some, and I was horrified at what a pig I’d been. I swore I’d never put that weight on again. I was working at a tony art museum, going to openings in tiny little black dresses and tall shoes and everyone was so nice to me.  Women wanted to be my friend, men wanted to fuck me. I had never been so miserable. I don’t have many photographs from that time, it seems I sent them all to my mother. But when I look at them I can’t really find myself there. I look gaunt, not slender. Even when my mouth is smiling, the rest of my face isn’t.

I didn’t make a conscious decision to gain weight, but I did find a man who loves me for all the important reasons and we had a child and we live in a culture that celebrates every occasion with food. Within ten years I’d gained back every ounce and then some. There are times that I am self-conscious about my size and shape, but I guess I don’t care enough to do anything about it. Last summer, I went back to Prince Edward Island, where I’d gone to high school, after being away for 31 years– and yes, I wish I’d been thinner. Not that anyone said anything, but you know, everyone wants to make a triumphant return.

There was just one thing. I was invited for drinks at the plush waterside home of a man who, when we were in high school, had been my first serious boyfriend.  Our parents were friends and our high school romance went on for three years. My parents were terrified that when he went away to college that I would run away to be with him, and indeed I did plot that for a time.  So, now decades later, we are having a pleasant evening over a glass of wine in his living room with him and his wife. At one point their adult daughter appeared on the scene, and asked “Who’s that?”  Her father responded “This is Larkin. She went to Three Oaks at the same time I did.”

I should have called him on it, but I didn’t. Instead, I went back to the motel that night wondering if I’d shown up looking like Kate Moss if he would have claimed me then. Really, though his inability to be honest with his daughter, and his dismissal of me says more about him than it does about me. It just makes me happy that I married the man that I did, and that all those fervent high-school prayers went unanswered.

We continue to be sold the message that thinner is better. Even some of  Sports Illustrated‘s swimsuit models look like they could use a meal or two or ten. Every few months the media reports the death of another fashion model from causes related to eating disorders. Britain has taken the steps of banning print ads that show women who are dangerously underweight. Milan, one year, would not let models participate in the annual show who did not have a “normal” body mass index. (You have to wonder if designers had to take to the Italian streets to find those women.) But that seems to have been a novelty for that year alone.  It’s a mystery why designers want to use women built like clothes hangers to show their season’s offerings anyway. I mean, why not just use a  hanger if that’s the look you want? Or why not design clothes for women of a healthy weight?

It’s worth noting that these models don’t actually look like women, they look like children. A size zero model (which is among the current industry standards) has a waist measurement of 56 cm, which is the same size waist as an average 8-year-old child. Isn’t using sexually provocative advertising featuring women that look like pre-pubescent children feeding into the burgeoning problem of pedophilia? Men are sent the message that this is what they’re supposed to be attracted to, and women are sent the message that voluptuous is grotesque.

For years it’s been rumoured that Marilyn Monroe wore a size 16 dress. While the rumour isn’t true, what is true is that the iconic actress, at five-foot five, had a weight that fluctuated between 118 and 140 pounds. For years, she had been the epitome of sex appeal, yet the scrawny Elizabeth Hurley (an English model most famous for being Hugh Grant’s one time girlfriend) is known to have said “I’d kill myself if I was as fat as Marilyn Monroe.”

How did we get to such a twisted measure for the value of a woman? Men aren’t judged solely by their appearance, and even when their appearance is considered, they can still be deemed attractive (especially by themselves!) even when they have pot bellies, thinning hair and pasty white legs. And that’s as it should be . Surely that kinder appraisal ought to be extended to the fairer sex too, using more important facets like intellect, compassion, talent, and insight as the measures of someone’s worth rather than just their physical appearance?

I know that there is an astronaut Barbie, and a NASCAR Barbie and Pillow Talk Barbie, and veterinarian Barbie. It’s amazing that she can do all those things while dangerously underweight. I just hope to God that our daughters aspire to share those achievements rather than Barbie’ body mass index and 18 inch waist. But in either case, Barbie’s bathroom scale has got to go.

How We Can Save America

(And ourselves in the process.)

Driving down I-75 in the rain tonight, we find ourselves grousing, again, about having to share the highway with long-haul truckers.  Even the apologists at www.truckinfo.net admit that there are half a million accidents on US  highways every year involving tractor trailers. They would like us to believe that 75 percent of these are the fault of the driver of the car, but anyone who has been on an interstate highway probably has some other ideas about that particular statistic.

If you want to see the real toll of trucking, google “big rig + killed” or  ”tractor trailer death.” Is there a driver in America that has not passed the scene of a tractor-trailer fatality at least once? Last summer I sat on an interstate in South Carolina for three hours while they cleaned up an accident that killed two big rig drivers and a guy in a pick-up.

Some states mandate a slower speed limit for tractor-trailers, but realistically, those are only effective when there’s a cop in the median, and sometimes not even then. Many companies keep drivers on a strict and unrealistic schedule (because time is always money) and drivers are forced to push the speedometer just to keep their jobs. The average truck driver makes about $32,000 a year and it is a grueling life.

Though the trucking industry is quick to point out the amount they pay in over-the-road taxes, everyone who uses un-dyed diesel fuel pays the same tax. I used to pay that extra tax to drive my 1984 diesel Volkswagen Rabbit, but these enormously heavy trucks really exact an astounding toll in wear and tear on US highways.

At an average of 5.3 mpg and a carbon dioxide emission of  22.4 pounds per gallon of diesel fuel consumed, makes the carbon footprint of the more than two million tractor trailers in the US pretty significant.

Surely there must be a better way.

Of course there is. And the answer is  . . .  to ship freight (and maybe people as well) via rail and water.

Before the Greek Chorus starts up, I am fully aware of the state of American railroads. That’s part of the plan. When I first started talking about the better way to move freight and all of its attendant benefits, I used to begin by saying “If I was Warren Buffet, I would  . . . ” and it is worth noting that last spring Warren Buffet bought the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad, the second largest railroad in the country. Maybe he was listening.

A locomotive can move a ton of freight 430 miles on one gallon of diesel fuel.

Go ahead, read it again. Read it out loud. The carbon emissions for trains per ton-mile is the least of any sort of freight handling and one-tenth that of trucks.

Yes, the railroad system in this country is abandoned, decrepit, and not nearly as extensive as it was 100 years ago. But that can be fixed. It is almost too late, but if we act quickly, we can recreate a glorious railway empire, create jobs, make a greener environment and save ourselves.

In the current economic doldrums, there has been talk in Washington of restoring and rebuilding infrastructure, both because it’s necessary and because the country could really use a modern day WPA program. It worked for FDR and it can work again.

By starting with freight handling, and the restoration of the rail system to change the mode by which we move America, we give this notion of a new Works Project Administration a focus, and a place to start. Laying track, building depots, designing computer systems, building and maintaining locomotives and freight cars– that all spells JOBS. Not just part time, unskilled labor jobs, (though there would be some of those too) but a lifetime career, if one should so desire. Implementing navigable waterways into this means jobs in ports, jobs in shipyards, jobs in warehousing. There would be still room for some trucking- mostly short haul, specializing in getting goods to the rails and to the ports. Truckers could sleep at home at night in their own beds rather than in the cab of their truck along some interstate rest stop.

Everything can be and has been moved on the railroad. Livestock, airplanes, automobiles, milk, oil, grain, coal, manufactured goods– and people. With a reconfigured railroad, we can once again look at moving people by rail. It’s more restful than flying (albeit slower) and it’s more efficient, and certainly greener than driving yourself.

Highways would not require the maintenance they currently demand, because fewer trucks means less wear. The materials used to make big rigs can be recycled into ships, containers, box cars. Architects get work designing depots, construction workers find work building them. Manufacturers enjoy less expensive shipping costs. Air pollution drops, employment is up. The number of tractor-trailer accidents would dwindle, meaning less expense due to medical care, less mayhem on the highways, and less heartbreak for the families.

It could be done. It wouldn’t be cheap, but it would pay for itself over the long haul, and in the end we would have something to be proud of– unlike, say, a war. One ton of freight moved 430 miles on one gallon of diesel fuel. Warren Buffet is in. Are you?

Stop in the Name of Love

It’s the Monday of Labor Day weekend. As we approach the intersection of Main and Fifth streets, the light, long yellow, turns red. We stop, but the car behind us in the adjacent lane guns it through the intersection. To our left, on Fifth Street,  is a City of Dayton Police Officer in his patrol car. We chuckle a bit, expecting the cop to pull out (he has the green after all) and pursue the scofflaw. To our consternation, the officer simply drives across the intersection at a leisurely pace and onwards to whatever non-pressing destination awaits him.

In the days that follow, I make several attempts to bring this incident to someone’s attention. Anyone. It is deeply disappointing that an officer of the law cares so little for the enforcement of those laws that he simply does not bother. I cannot find anyone who is interested. I leave messages at several different offices and not one single solitary representative of the Dayton Police Department bothers to return my call.

While the Dayton Police Department’s tendency to turn a blind eye towards traffic misdemeanors is worthy of a column in itself, just looking at the issue of red-light tickets in our fair city should be enough to make you pause. From 2003 (when red-light ticket cameras were installed in ten intersections around the city) until June 2011, 92,900 citations for failure to stop were issued. As of last summer, 46,124 remained unpaid, a staggering $3.9 million dollars worth. The city mulled the possibility of impounding vehicles that belonged to individuals who had racked up more than two traffic camera tickets. 53 percent of the local paper’s readership felt that was “too harsh.”

Typical were public comments like this one from “Loralee.” (Quoted here just as she wrote it, non sequiturs and mangled grammar intact.)

“these red light (and now speeding cameras)are causing more accidents then doing good.People are slamming on thier breaks inorder to not go through a red light causeing fender benders wasting police time with these minor traffic accidents. there is a camera just down the street from where I live so I see it all the time.We are already short staffed with police patroling the neighborhoods.Hate the idea! I think they have been watching too much reality tv! Parking wars????!!!! from Dayton by Loralee “

In Seattle, a reporter from the Post-Intelligencer was snagged violating a red light. He wrote a column about the experience (he had “rolled” the light, turning right on red) and attached a poll to his story, inviting readers to make known their feelings about the cameras. A woeful 52 percent opined that the cameras should be “removed completely,” 14 percent thought they could stay but they should have “much smaller” fines, and 8 percent were spread over a variety of non-favorable responses. Only 25 percent of those polled were in favour of increasing the number of red-light cameras. 1 in 4. You know, that’s  pretty shameful. What earthly reason could there be for not wanting a red light camera unless you make it a regular habit to plow through intersections? (There is a famous red-light camera photo of a guilty-looking platinum blond woman with her hand wrapped around the phallus of her passenger– no doubt she was, is and always will be vehemently opposed to cameras.)

The Seattle writer went on to say that now he stops at yellow lights. In Boston, we used to joke that the light turning yellow meant “speed up.” It’s not such a joke anymore, because the overriding selfish desire of drivers to “make the light” has made that quip a reality. And people die.

People like Barbara Ryan, 44 and her daughter, Joanna, 11, who were killed in Bethpage, NY when a tractor-trailer failed to stop at a red light. The truck driver was not drunk. People like Los Angeles Angels rookie pitcher, Nick Adenhart, who was killed in Riverside, CA when an intoxicated driver failed to stop at an intersection and drove his minivan into the baseball player’s car. An acquaintance of ours, the distinguished and very kind William Dwelly, who was out running errands on a Saturday morning in his hometown of Spartanburg, SC. A woman driving a truck was distracted and “missed the light.” She was not drunk. She was not charged. Bill was killed. The poor sap just trying to cross the street in the photo accompanying this piece. Journalist David Halberstam who was being driven to an interview by a student. The student (not drunk) was anxious to “make the light” and turned left in front of an oncoming car. Think for a minute of two-year-old Morgan Lee Pena, napping in her car seat as her mother drove her home from a play date. A harried businessman, not drunk,  trying to make a call to say he’d be late for a meeting missed a stop sign and smashed broadside into Morgan’s mother’s car. Little Morgan died of fatal head injuries. The man received two tickets and a fifty dollar fine.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA)  classifies broadside (or t-bone) collisions as the most dangerous kind of car accident. While these collisions only account for approximately 29 percent of all automobile accidents, they make up 51 percent of all traffic fatalities. Look at it this way: more people are killed by being broadsided than are killed in every other kind of car accident put together.

There are a couple of reasons for this. First, cars are not engineered to absorb side-impact force. Though some now have side air-curtains, many still have very little in the way of shock-sustaining forces. Sport utility vehicles are very prone to rollover when hit from the side. The other reason has to do with the way our bodies are engineered. Our necks and backs and brains are built to withstand the motion that we think of as “whiplash,” a violent forward and backward motion. But it doesn’t work as well when the blow is from the side, resulting in head and brain injuries, skull fractures and broken necks.

Mothers Against Drunk Driving have been very successful in developing an enormous stigma for drinking-and-driving. They take credit for reducing “alcohol-related traffic deaths” since 1982 by nearly one-third. Their lobbying efforts have led to prison sentences for repeat offenders.  They were successful in reducing an actionable blood alcohol level from .12 to .10 to .08 percent. They spearheaded a constitutionally questionable program that allows law enforcement to establish “sobriety check points” where drivers could be stopped without any probable cause and examined as to their ingestion of alcohol.

A 120-pound woman with an average metabolism can reach a .08 BAC by consuming two six-ounce glasses of wine over a period of two hours, and in fact, people with BAC of .08 to .10 are involved in fewer significant car accidents than individuals with BAC of .01 to .03, which is what you can achieve with a single dose of cough syrup. Eventually the founder of MADD, Candi Lightner, was forced out of the organization by people she describes as “radical prohibitionists” and she herself has joined a DC-area liquor lobby.

“Driving while impaired” may be the only offense that can be prosecuted because a situation exists in which an actual crime might occur. It is a bit like prosecuting a hungry person in a grocery store because they might shoplift a loaf of bread.  I don’t think people should drive while impaired– whether they are impaired by fatigue, low blood sugar, prescription medication, cell phone use or the fact that they had a fight with their boss, kid or significant other. But there is absolutely no certainty that an individual getting into a car after having a glass of wine with dinner or a beer after work will cause any harm to any one.

Yet, the local gendarmes spend considerable effort and expense on questionable “sobriety checkpoints”  every holiday weekend of the year– and all the while allowing any number of drivers to blow through controlled intersections, putting themselves and dozens of others at terrible risk. If a driver makes it a habit to run red lights, how many times do you think that he’ll be able to do so without being involved in a serious accident? One time? Five times? Ten times?  Just counting the intersections where there are red-light cameras, drivers in Dayton have breached the red  light nearly a hundred thousand times in eight years.

Perhaps you’re not one of those people who pushes the yellow light, sliding through as it turns red. Maybe you’re a fine upstanding citizen in that regard. Or are you rolling those right-on-red “stops”?  The law is not that we merge, you know. It’s that we come to a full stop. We once saw a Dayton Regional Transit Authority bus nearly take out a guy that was walking his two dogs . He was crossing a side street, and the walk-light was in his favor, when the bus decided to move. He jumped back and the bus driver slammed on the brakes, but it was a very near thing. Last month one of my son’s classmates was knocked down and knocked out while standing on a corner. A woman in a Chevy Tahoe didn’t see him, didn’t look, and the impact tossed his body twenty feet.  You have to stop, a complete and utter stop.

Here’s the way to make people stop running red lights, blowing through stop signs, rolling around corners without slowing down and otherwise endangering everyone around them:

First offense is a thousand dollar fine.

Second offense is a thousand dollar fine and 3 day mandatory jail sentence.

Third offense is a thousand dollar fine, 7 days mandatory jail sentence, and license suspension until a Driver’s Education course is completed.

Fourth offense is a thousand dollar fine, 30 days mandatory jail sentence, license suspension, driver education and impound of car for six months.

If Dayton had been charging a thousand dollars on all those red-light citations, they could have collected (or at least  been owed) 97 million dollars. Wouldn’t you slow down and stop at the yellows if you knew there was the potential for those kinds of penalties?

Every morning my husband and son travel through 32 controlled intersections downtown on the way to school. My husband goes through all 32 again on his way  home. When school is over, we go through this slalom again. Everyday I worry that the law of averages is going to spell disaster for someone I love. Or someone you love. There’s nothing important enough to go through the red light at that intersection, the life you save may be your own.

A Cop at the Door

The doorbell is ringing. I am deeply asleep and it has rung several times before I surface enough to recognize the sound. It’s still dark outside and I squint at the clock.

“It’s the doorbell,” I say to my husband. “Who would be ringing the doorbell at six o’clock on a Sunday morning?’

“Larkin?” It’s my mother, visiting for the holidays, in the hallway. “It looks like it’s the police.”  The police? What. Why would the police I am confused. My husband starts to sit up and is immediately felled by a leg cramp. Isn’t this what we have husbands for, to handle a cop on the front step? The doorbell rings again.

In the 27 seconds that it takes me to sit upright, get out of bed, walk down the stairs, and turn off the alarm before I open the door, I think of four things. First, I am glad that this is a night I bothered to put on pajamas.  Second, third and fourth: did someone torch one of our cars? Are the neighbors okay? Is there a dead body on the front lawn? I mean, it is six o’clock on a Sunday morning.

It never occurs to me that it might be about my 17-year-old son. Or that something awful might have happened to one of his half-sisters halfway across the country.

When I open the door there is no one there. The Sunday paper’s been delivered though. Could they have rung the doorbell. Nope, a white sedan is backing up. It is . . . .  the Ohio State Highway Patrol.

The driver’s door opens and the trooper bounds out of the car and trots up the walk. He is wearing his Smokey-the-Bear hat, and his tie is flapping in the wind.

“Is this address 944?”

Is that code? I wonder.

“I’m sorry, what did you ask?”

“Is this 944 West . . . “

“Oh, no.” The address. “No, this is 1010.”

“Oh, okay. Well, do you know where 944 is?” He gestures towards the Cochran’s house on the left.  ”Is that 944?”

“No, 944 would be the other way, but on this side of the street. There’s just the red brick house.” I am trying to concentrate, but I am still groggy with sleep. I can’t think. “It could be on the other side of Salem Avenue, down that way.” Even as I say it, I don’t think that’s right, but I think the red brick house has a house number that is higher. I bend to pick up the newspaper and there’s a little black leather wallet under it.

The trooper, who seems young enough to be my son, turns a little pink.

“Well do you know that person?” he asks gesturing towards the wallet in my hand. “She dropped this when she was walking away and I, I was just trying to get it back to her.”  I look at the picture on the license.  It is a 30-something black woman. It’s impossible to tell if she’s attractive or not, the BMV never makes anyone look their best, and I don’t have my reading glasses on. The name isn’t familiar. I shake my head, and hand him the wallet.

“I don’t think so, I’m sorry. You could try that brick house on the corner. It could be 944.”

“Well, okay, thank you. You know, we just wanted to get it back to her, because, you know, she dropped it as she was leaving.”  I nod, though in truth I cannot figure out what he’s talking about. Why is he ringing doorbells in the middle of the night trying to return a wallet?  ”Okay, well thank you. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight,” I say and he turns on his heel and disappears down the steps and out to the street. I close the door and turn the lock. My mother is standing in the hall. “That was so weird,” I tell her.

“I wonder what the real story is,” she says.  She heads back to bed and I wander into the kitchen, pour half a glass of milk and bite the head off a leftover gingerbread midget. 944. Was that the brick house? I remember instead something that happened when I lived in Montana. Very early one morning, before light, two sheriff’s deputies drove out to the dairy farm of this nice couple to tell them that their 15-year-old son had been killed in an automobile accident. The couple, bewildered, said no that wasn’t possible. Their son was asleep in his bed. It must be somebody else. Of course, it wasn’t somebody else. Their child’s bed was empty. The boy had snuck out and met up with friends. There’d been a crash and he had not survived.

Before going back to bed, I continue down the hall and peek into my son’s room, and there is the sleeping form of my wild child stretched out across his bed. His iPod is still playing, illuminating the crook of his elbow. Tears well up in my eyes for a second, and I say a little prayer of thanksgiving that it was just a cop on some kind of surreal errand and not there on my threshold to deliver some kind of unbearable news.

Later in the morning I check the paper and online for mention of car accidents or anything else that might have involved the name of the woman on the license, but find nothing. She’s not listed among the inmates at the county jail. Why would she drop her wallet walking away? That was what he said, wasn’t in?  I check the address. Oh, it is the red brick house on the corner. I wonder if it is the woman with the Chevy Suburban, which rests in its regular spot this morning.  Why would she have dropped her wallet, was she running? Why wouldn’t she notice, and why would the state patrol have it? Why would they leave it under my newspaper if they were trying to return it to her? We don’t know her, really. Her ex-boyfriend used to wave in passing, he was always pretty friendly, peddling marijuana from a bicycle. But she’s always been a bit, well, aloof, for want of a better word. The neighbor across the street said she works as a stripper. Sometimes the dots just don’t connect.  I hope she got her wallet back.

The Truth About the Amish

photo by N. Bourne

This horse is dead. He worked hard every day of his life and when his owner thought he could do  better with a new horse, he hauled this Belgian to New Holland, Pennsylvania, and sold him directly to slaughter. It didn’t matter if there was someone at the auction looking for a draft horse, or a rescue wanting to give him well-earned pasture rest– this horse never made it to the sale ring. Instead, they slapped a white USDA sticker with a bar code to his back and sealed his fate.

What became of this gentle giant, bound for slaughter?  If he was lucky, he went Canada, where he  was killed with a captive bolt or .22 bullet before butchering. (Because he was a large fellow, and apparently sound, and because the Canadian customs demand it, it’s likely that all the horses on that trip arrived at their final destination in reasonable condition. )

For the horses whose luck has truly run out,  they are shipped 2000 miles to a Mexican slaughter-house. Shipped in mixed lots, some are dead on arrival, or sick, or badly injured. Some abattoirs there do have a captive bolt gun, it fires a mechanical rod into the brain, instead of a bullet.  But the method most often used is a small Puntilla knife. Lisa Sandberg, in a 2007 story for the Houston Chronicle, noted that it is a point of pride to be able to drop the horse with one quick stab that severs the spinal cord. But too often, as on the day she was there, the Apuñalador is inept:  she watched as a roan mare was stabbed 13 times along the back before she fell. The horses are then hoisted into the air by a rear leg, paralyzed but still alive, their throats are cut and they bleed to death.

When equine slaughter facilities were closed in this country, the number of horses shipped across the US border to Mexico increased more than 300 percent.

Knowing this, it’s hard not to support the return of equine slaughter to the United States. I’d much prefer it if there was no need or demand for horses to be killed for their meat. Yes, they are livestock, but our relationship with horses is more complicated than that. If we could mandate and insure a dignified and humane death for each horse by legalizing and stringently regulating slaughter in our own country, and closing the door for export to Mexico– then we could at least stop that part of the nightmare.

But right now, that’s what the future held for this big gelding: a trip to Canada, or one to Mexico– with no possible chance of reprieve. No one could save him, because the seller decided to get a guaranteed price (perhaps less) by selling directly to the kill buyer than taking their chances in the auction ring.  Who does that to their horses? Who steals from them their very, very last chance?

The Amish, that’s who.

It’s not just plow horses the Amish consign to this terrible fate every single Monday all year long. It’s their buggy horses too, Saddlebreds, Standardbreds, Morgans. Often underweight, scarred by ill-fitting harness, lame from something awful, or just lame from a stone bruise.  Frequently their forelocks have been shaved, so as not to cause the farmer inconvenience with the overcheck bridle– never mind that the forelock is invaluable in aiding the horse’s comfort in fly season. They bring in a horse whose stamina is falling off, or one that can’t go so fast anymore, trotting mile after mile on pavement. No point in feeding an animal that can’t pull its own weight, and theirs as well.  (New Holland sells other kinds of livestock too– pigs and sheep and cattle.  Notable among these were some Amish-owned Holsteins, their udders swollen as big as medicine balls, dragging on the ground between their legs.)

Outside the auction house, all day long, Amish buggy horses stand tethered on pavement. They have no water. Often the check rein (which keeps the horse’s head up) is left fastened. They are still in traces, bearing the weight of the buggy shafts. All day they stand like this, and then stiff and miserable, are expected to trot briskly home in the failing light. When they are too old, or too tired, or used up they will be discarded here and sent directly to slaughter.

Oh, the bucolic simple life of the Amish! How charming the plain folk, the tidy farms, the children in straw hats and dark bonnets, the hard-working, the humble and the meek. What a load of hogwash. You want adjectives for the Amish? What about shrewd, selfish, oppressive, and cruel?

In 2006, Charles Carl Roberts IV, took ten Amish schoolgirls, age 6 to 13, hostage in their school in Nickel Mines, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. He let all of the adults and the boys leave the school, and then shot all of the girls and himself. Five of the girls survived. The Amish community made national headlines by declaring their immediate and complete forgiveness of the gunman and support for his family. One can’t help but wonder if they’d have been so quick to turn the other cheek if it had been their sons who had been lined up and executed.

Donald Kraybill, a scholar of Amish life (who went on to sell his book about the atrocity, Amish Grace : How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy to Lifetime Television for a made-for-tv movie) said the Amish willingness to forgo vengeance “does not undo the tragedy or pardon the wrong, but rather constitutes a first step toward a future that is more hopeful.”  The Amish have made “forgiveness” part of their stock in trade.

I haven’t forgiven Elmer Zimmerman.

Elmer Zimmerman is an Amish farmer, also in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. He and his brother Ammon operated a large commercial dog breeding operation. During a state inspection of the kennel by the Pennsylvania State Bureau of Dog Law Enforcement in July 2008,  the two brothers were cited for extreme heat, insufficient bedding and wire kennel floors that the dogs’ feet could fall through. In addition they were instructed to have 39 dogs examined and treated for fly bites and flea infestation. The brothers chose not to comply with the state’s recommendations. Instead they shot and killed 80 dogs. 80 dogs that died without a name, without a kind word, without a comforting hand. 80 dogs that died terrified.

“The decision by commercial breeders to kill healthy dogs instead of paying to repair a kennel and seek veterinary care is alarming and will likely outrage many people,” state Secretary of Agriculture Dennis Wolff commented.  “Until our state’s outdated dog law is changed, kennel owners may continue to kill their dogs for any reason they see fit, even if it is simply to save money.”  (Pennsylvania HB 2525 which had been in the works at the time of the Zimmerman’s rampage, was passed in October 2008, requiring that dogs may only be euthanized by a veterinarian.)

In Lancaster county alone, there are more than 300 commercial dog breeders, some of them with more than 500 dogs, and the great majority of them are Amish-owned. Up until November 2009, when then Governor Ed Rendell signed into law new anti-cruelty measures, Amish-owned breeding dogs were subject to primitive de-barking by having a metal rod shoved down their throats, often breaking the jaw and lower teeth in the process.  Farmers were docking tails and cutting off dewclaws when puppies were several weeks old. Ears were being cropped with kitchen shears. Caesareans were being performed on whelping bitches without benefit of anesthesia or sedation.

While the rights of responsible individuals to breed dogs should be protected and supported, no one has the right to subject dogs to neglect, abuse and outright torture.

The Amish are not educated beyond the 8th grade. They are entirely patriarchal. They sell the “product” of “Amishness” but it is false. Despite their evident piety, they choose to ignore the teachings of Jesus that aren’t convenient to their lifestyle. Do they not see themselves in Proverbs 12:10?  ”A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast; but the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel.”

Lancaster, Pennsylvania, areas of Ohio, Indiana and fifteen other states with a significant Amish population see a fair amount of income from Amish-related tourism. There is often an implied, if not an explicit reluctance to tarnish the image of the noble, gentle, Plain Folk. Law enforcement may turn a blind eye to a victim that goes to great effort to report a crime in the community. (One girl’s mother had all of her daughter’s teeth pulled out after the girl used a neighbor’s telephone to contact a battered women’s shelter to tell them she was being raped by her brothers.) State departments of education allow for the Amish to stop attending school at age 13. The Amish are expected to police themselves, but their system of crime and punishment is like something out of Alice in Wonderland. The accused confesses and is forgiven, the victim is punished.

The Amish are a cult. But because they are picturesque and we are nostalgic for earlier, simpler times, we not only accept their eccentricities, we celebrate them. We buy their faceless dolls, their dark quilts, their cheese and chairs. We buy their myth.

It doesn’t take much looking to find one account after another as to how cruel the Amish are to their children, their cash crop of puppies, their exhausted, broken, beaten and fearful horses. How an animal is treated is surely the measure of a man, and it’s not surprising that the problems in the Amish community extend to child abuse, battered wives, rape and incest.  (An extensive article in the January 2005 issue of Legal Affairs describes those problems in chilling and absolutely sickening detail. ) Isn’t this what you might expect though, from men who condemn their loyal servant  to a terrible death in exchange for a few hundred dollars?  Surely no less is to be expected from someone who denies them that one last tender mercy.

For the fate of the sons of men and the fate of beasts is the same. As one dies so dies the other; indeed, they all have the same breath and there is no advantage for man over beast, for all is vanity. Ecclesiastes 3:19

I HAVE A HOLE IN MY SHOE

Damn, there’s a hole in my shoe. I thought maybe the leather was getting a little thin there a few days ago, walking down that gravel drive.  Still, this is one of my favorite pairs, cordovan Johnston and Murphy wingtips.  Did Ellen get these for me before she took her powder? I can’t remember. No, I think I got them at Altman’s over on Monroe. Doesn’t matter, I guess. There’s a hole in one, now.  I wonder if I should take them to the shoe repair. But they’re never the same when you get them back. It’s like putting the new sole on makes them smaller, or tighter or something. They’re never as comfortable.

Well, they say if you’re going to campaign, you’ve got to use a lot of shoe leather, heh heh. Sometimes I wonder why I let the President talk me into this. Still, Kefauver is too much of a loose cannon, and Russell, that fucking bigot, no surprise that he didn’t get much love at the convention. Jesus, it’s hot up here in Michigan. The venue’s outside tonight, maybe there will be a breeze. It’s great of old Soapy to get the faithful out, but it must be 90 degrees for his Labor Day picnic.

Eisenhower’s going to make this a struggle anyway, he’s got that whole war hero thing going for him, and Stewart Alsop with that crack about “eggheads.” Alsop went to Groton, what does that make him– the common man?  Glad I brought this linen jacket, it’s just stifling in here. What is that on the radio? Sounds like someone stepping on a cat. Oh, Johnnie Ray, can’t stand that guy. Where’s the knob? Blessed silence. All right, time to go and meet the throngs of happy Democrats. I’m sad about this shoe, though. It’s one of my favorites. Guess it’ll have to do for now. I wonder if they have a good shoe store here in Flint.

I have a hole in my shoe.

RESTITUTION

I am not a cat person. I like cats, but I have never longed to have one. When I was in the first grade, a classmate offered me a “calico kitten” and I asked my mother if we might be able to have a kitten. When we went to pick her up she turned out to be a plain brown mackerel tabby, who I named (with a singular lack of imagination) Whiskers.

Although there were plenty of “family” cats in the intervening years, it was nearly  two decades before I chose another cat for myself.  I lived in a decrepit old house in Dorchester, as close to a ghetto as Boston had. The apartment had mice, and traps were too ghastly to contemplate and poison a non-starter. So, off I went with the twenty dollars birthday money that my great-aunt had sent me, to adopt a cat from the MSPCA. (Oh, for the days when you could adopt a cat for twenty bucks!)

Cats and dogs were not separated there, and I chose the unflappable orange tabby with the extra toes. The incessant barking didn’t phase him a bit– when I held my palm flat against the front of his crate, he rubbed his face against it. This was Kaspar Mauser (named with a nod to Werner Herzog’s film about the mysterious German boy: Kaspar Hauser: Every Man for Himself and God Against All.) He would be with me for thirteen years, and for a short period of time, he was my only pet– and he was a very, very nice cat. (And an excellent mouser.)

In 1991, I drove from my parents’ house in Florida to my new life in Montana. I had decided to take the blue highways, steering well clear of interstates. It was uncomfortable to drive my little diesel Volkswagen Rabbit amidst cars and trucks traveling much faster than we could manage, and anyway, I thought I’d see more of the country that way.

My mother came along for the ride, and the very first day out,  in Apalachicola, Florida, we found an emaciated foxhound. Sitting in the Gibson Inn that night, I realized that no one would know if we rescued the dog and carried her off with us. Now, you have to understand that  inside this un-air-conditioned Volkswagen Rabbit (“Thumper,” named for its grey color and its ongoing thumpthumpthumpthump sound characteristic to diesel engines) were all the things I thought I’d need to start my new life: a few bits of crockery, an omelet pan, a saucepan, a few good knives, a box of my favorite books, sheets, quilts, clothes, three pairs of Doc Martins, my typewriter, and hanging off the back, my mountain bike. In addition, there was my little black dog of uncertain origin, Elinor Jane Pinkerton Schwartz, and in a large carrier, sitting on a blue ice pack wrapped in a towel, Kasper Mauser. It was tidy, but there was not much extra space.

In the morning, while settling the bill, I asked about the miniature dog house sitting on the counter.

“Oh, we’re raising money to build an animal shelter here, we don’t have one,” the clerk said, handing me ten dollars change. I put the ten dollars in the little doghouse and made up my mind. It took about three minutes driving around “downtown” Apalachicola (population 2000)  to locate the dog, curled up asleep on a sidewalk. I pulled over, bundled her onto my mother’s lap and sped away.  When we brought her to a veterinarian in Panama City, sixty miles up the road, we found that she weighed 35 pounds.

I confessed our dognapping to the vet. (After all, who would want to take credit for a dog in such condition.) He looked at me rather sternly and said, “My best friend is the vet in Apalachicola, and when I tell him what you’ve done . . . he is going to be  just thrilled.” He grinned, we grinned, and they gave her a bath, sent us off with a new collar and leash, stuff for her ear mites and fleas and many blessings. Now the car was even more crowded.

At this point, you’re saying “I thought this piece was going to be about a cat.” Well, it is. We just have to get there.

I’d mapped the route to Montana poring over AAA guidebooks and old atlases. We enjoyed Wintzell’s Oyster House in Mobile, and William Faulkner’s home in Oxford, Mississippi. We only drove past Graceland, but we spent hours on Beale Street. We looked for Ernest Hemingway in Piggott, Arkansas and quoted Hamlet in Ellsinore, Missouri. The starving dog was putting on weight, but when passersby looked askance at us, we were quick to volunteer that she had been recently rescued.

There was so much to see and do in Kansas City we decided to stay at the Best Western there for a couple of days. The motel had an interior corridor to the rooms, so I was very surprised the first evening there to hear something mewing on the other side of the door. I opened the door and there stood a grey cat.

“Hi Kitty, what are you doing here?”

“Meow,” she replied, looking me straight in the eye.

“Maybe she got locked in the motel by mistake,” my mother suggested. As I was going out to get ice anyway, I walked her to the exit and opened the door for her and out she went.

In the morning when we went out to the car, the cat hurried over to us from underneath a nearby tree. It was then that I noticed that she had caught one leg through her flea collar and was wearing it bandolier style. I bent down and undid the collar and re-fastened it around her neck. The hair under her elbow and around her midsection had been rubbed down to the skin. “There you go, that should be better,” I told her.

We got in the car, and went off to visit the home and studio of Thomas Hart Benton. When we came back to the motel, after a great dinner at Stroud’s, the little grey cat was nowhere to be seen.  We were quite relieved. We’d been in the room about half an hour when I heard it again.

“Meow.” There she was, back at the door. I let her in this time, and walked down to the desk to see if they knew anything about the cat. Maybe she’d been separated from a previous guest, who, one might hope, was feverishly searching for her.

“Oh, is that your cat?” the desk clerk asked. “She’s scooted inside several times today and always goes right to the door of your room. We thought maybe she’d gotten away from you this morning.”

The cat slept on the end of the bed that night, and in the morning I called several animal shelters. They all wanted to know if I was in Kansas City, Kansas or Kansas City, Missouri. It was Kansas, as it turns out, but at the time I thought Missouri. I got directions to the shelter and drove the little grey cat there.  When the animal control officer saw the bald spot on (from the flea collar) she said “Oh, she’ll probably be euthanized because of that.”

“What? That’s just some missing hair. It will grow back.”

I can’t tell you how many times I wish I’d just turned around and gone back to the car with the cat. But I didn’t. I did the sensible thing and I have yet to get over it. That cat had a message for me, and I failed to understand. I failed her. I failed miserably.

We went on to Montana. The little grey cat was in all likelihood dead before the day ended. We’d have done better to leave her on the streets of Kansas City. We were naive then. We believed “animal shelter” meant that they would take care of the dogs and cats, provide whatever reasonable care they might need and find them a loving home. We might as well have believed in unicorns. What difference did it make where we found her, Kansas City, Kansas or Kansas City, Missouri when they were just going to kill her?

In Montana, there were more cats; a trio of kittens I gave my husband for his 50th birthday, a pair of blue-eyed, cream-colored cats to deal with the newspaper office mice, along with assorted barn cats, and stray cats that people dumped off to fend for themselves in the country. We found Kaspar dead on a hay bale one morning, as if he’d been leaping and died mid-flight.

In 2007, we moved to Ohio. One autumn day I went to a tag sale at my son’s school. The school had once been a convent, and it is set on the top of a hill in a wooded, park-like setting. There were many great things at this sale, and it was rather lightly attended. My arms were full when I stepped out the door heading for my car.

“Meow.”

I knew that voice. Setting the box down, I looked at the cat before me. She was a half-grown kitten, a brown mackerel tabby with an orange spot on her forehead. Did you think she’d be grey? I did.  She continued to look right at me. “Meow,” she repeated.

“Well, just a minute, let me put this in the car.”  She followed me. I picked her up and set her in the car and drove her home. I wasn’t about to make the same mistake twice.

 I think I get the message now. We don’t take cats to shelters, so few make it out alive. The regret I feel for the little grey cat lives on long past whatever natural life she might have hoped to enjoy.  The brown mackerel tabby from the school lives with us, of course, along with the two cream-colored office cats, and is sleeping on top of the piano as I write. She is a kind of restitution for the little grey cat, the most I can hope for.

 

 

DAYS OF INFAMY

It’s the 70th anniversary of the bombing of the Pearl Harbor Naval Base today.  2,458 people were killed; 68 of them were civilians and 55 were Japanese. Though we weren’t officially at war, we’d heard the drumbeat coming since 1938, with the Japanese invasion of China and the aggressions of  Nazi Germany in Britain and other allied countries.

Franklin Roosevelt called December 7th  ”a date which will live in infamy” and promptly declared war on Japan. Hawaii, 2400 miles off the coast of California, was a protectorate of the United States and wouldn’t become the 50th state for 18 more years.

Fewer than 200 Pearl Harbor survivors are still alive today, most of them in their 90s. Yet, every year, on December 7th, we stir up our old nationalist outrage, revisiting this “sneak attack” by the “Japs”, picking at the long-healed wound.

Let us consider for a moment a few instances of our retaliation for the bombing of the Pearl Harbor Naval Base that killed 2,335 servicemen.

Beginning in  1942, 110,00 American citizens of Japanese descent were moved from their homes and businesses to internment camps in the most Godforsaken and isolated places in the United States. At the time there were only 127,000 Americans of Japanese descent in the country. It didn’t matter if your family had been in the United States for many generations. It didn’t matter if you were as little as 1/16th Japanese.  Orphaned infants with “one drop of Japanese blood” (a letter from one official explains) were included in the program.

Lt. General John L. DeWitt, who administered the internment program said in testimony before Congress:  ”I don’t want any of them here. They are a dangerous element. There is no way to determine their loyalty. It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen, he is still a Japanese. American citizenship does not necessarily determine loyalty. But we must worry about the Japanese all the time until he is wiped off the map.”

DeWitt was more colloquial with newspaper reporters, repeatedly telling them “A Jap’s a Jap.”  The Los Angeles Times wrote an editorial explaining why the internment program was “essential”: “A viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched.”

We sent 110,000 of our own people to live in rudimentary barracks in the desert, we took their businesses and their homes and we never gave them back.  There was an attempt at redress 40 years later, when survivors of the camps were each offered a $20,000 payment. On the sites of each camp, there is a monument to the sons of internees who died in service to the United States Armed Forces in World War II.

Three and a half years after the attack on Pearl Harbor, on August 6, 1945– after six months of intense fire-bombing against Japan, we dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, immediately killing approximately 80,000 people, almost all of them women, children and the elderly. Three days later, another atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, killing more than 40,000, again almost all of them women, children and elderly.

Of the women, children and elderly killed on those two days, 72,000 died from flash burns, 36,000 percent from falling debris and 12,000 from other causes. In the next two months, more than 120,000 more Japanese civilians would die from burns, radiation sickness and injuries. The cities were obliterated, the whole country- about the size of California-  was poisoned.

The fact that we have a reasonable and cordial relationship with Japan today has a lot more to do with them and their capacity for forgiveness than it does with us.

Before you say, “Oh, well, that was 70 years ago, and things were different then,” I will leave you this to ponder. Remember our invasion of Baghdad, where we were going to be “seen as liberators,” “freeing” Iraq from the oppression of Sadaam Hussein? Remember watching on television the “Shock and Awe” bombing of Baghdad at night?  Iraq didn’t have a beef with us. In fact, some administrations had enjoyed friendly relations with Hussein. There were, of course, no weapons of mass destruction, and no involvement in the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. My husband and I happened to be in Canada the weekend those airstrikes occurred and their newspapers, in 64 pt. headlines reported it (perhaps more accurately) as “Attack on Iraq!” In that initial unprovoked military action against another country, with whom we were not at war, more than 30,000 Iraqi civilians died.

So, before we ever talk about “Days of Infamy,” let us first look in the mirror.