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.

SURRENDER

 

I just can’t do it, not tonight. I give up. Consider this my unconditional surrender. I finished yesterday’s piece at six in the morning, after writing through the night. By then my son and husband were up and I thought I could clear the hurdle that is the oppressive desire for sleep, and I stayed up. Until 9:30 anyway and then I fell down in my bed, with my shoes still on for God’s sake, and slept until two in the afternoon. It wasn’t enough, and by the then half the damn day was gone anyway. More than half.

This madness has gone three weeks straight. Last night wasn’t the hardest. Tonight isn’t even the hardest, but this is the night when I am the most fed up with myself. I have managed to write everyday, but I have failed (spectacularly, I might add) at putting the writing first. With all due respect to Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass, this is life out of balance. The writing is supposed to come first. I don’t know how to put it first. By the time I get up in the afternoon, I don’t even want to see the keyboard. I am tired of my own opinions, I am sick of the sound of my voice.

Everything aches. Even though I have a wonderful Aeron chair, one of the best inventions known to anyone who has to sit at a desk for hours– I tend to lean forward on my elbows, shoulders folded like an accordion. One night I got out of the chair, poured myself a glass of Maker’s Mark, turned up the music (Seal’s covers of great soul songs) and stood in the doorway, listening, humming, singing a snatch of this song or that one, until it was four in the morning and I really had to write something. I’m not sure that’s building a work ethic.

Today, after Christmas shopping with my mother, and finally addressing the issue of 500 lights on the naked ten foot tree in the living room only to find the lights had been rolled backwards onto the reel, so the plug at the very end was the female version– so the tree’s been undressed; and after listening to my son talk about his final exam in algebra, and after talking to my aunt and my father’s widow about my decision to not go to the extended family Christmas party on Friday, after the taking of toast and tea (thank you T.S.E.) do I have the strength to force the moment to its crisis? I do not.

I started at it. A few weeks ago I found a tiny pink bathroom scale, about the size of a matchbook. Guess who it belongs to? Barbie, of course! Of all the weirdness surrounding Mattel’s iconic doll, this was the thing that struck me as the most sinister. The weight is perpetually stuck at 110, which is about 35 pounds underweight for a living doll of Barbie’s proportions. I could just picture some little girl saying “Oooh, Barbie, those pants make you look fat! No Christmas cookies for you, you little sow.”  Say what you will about Barbie, she does not need to be on a diet. I sketched out the draft, and checked out a few other columns about the nefariousness of Barbie’s “weight problem” and watched a video for the first Barbie commercial in 1959. But I just don’t have it in me. I have reached for the reserves, and dear reader, those are empty.

There’s a little list pinned to the bulletin board next to the desk, with prompts for 17 more stories. There are only 9 days left to go in 30 Days Notice– so they’re not all going to make it. Some of these stories really do deserve to be told, but by the time I get to the writing, after all the day-to-day nonsense that populates my life (and yours too, and his, and hers, and theirs) after all that, I don’t have what it takes to do those topics justice. So I push them around on the plate and feel discouraged. I am so damn tired.

So I am going to go upstairs, unbuckle my shoes, pull off my clothes and crawl into bed next to my husband and go to sleep. We’ll see what tomorrow brings. I’m sorry.

 

 

 

 

Imagine Larkin Going Among the Dead

Howard Nemerov, 1988

A Tale of Two and a Half Poets

People ask me where I got my name.  I can understand that, it’s a different sort of name. My answer varies on the circumstance. If they seem interested, I might tell the truth. Otherwise I just toss aloft a little lie like “It’s a family name.” (The only member of my family that has the name “Larkin” is me. And that’s the truth.)  There are other Larkins, of course. Hundreds, I would think. It’s a big world after all, and it is a common family name in the British Isles. I occasionally meet people who have daughters named Larkin. One woman named her daughter after a wildlife preserve for ducks. The woman at the rental car counter just liked the way it sounded. And one day, in the McDonald’s drive-through of the town in which I used to live, I discovered that someone had named their little girl after me.

When I handed my debit card through the window to pay for my coffee and Egg McMuffin she said “You’re Larkin Vonalt!?”  When I admitted that I was (with some trepidation) she said “I just loved what you wrote so much and your name is so wonderful I named my daughter after you!” Honestly, I had no idea what the proper response to that situation is. Emily Post does not cover it. I told her that I was honored, that she had made my day and that I hoped her Larkin had a long and happy life. Then I drove away with my breakfast.

So, first of all, I did not name myself. My mother named me, though it took her a little while to come up with “Larkin.”  I was damned near called “Laura Kirstin.” Apparently, as the story goes, I was a few weeks old when my mother realized that I was not a “Laura.” (I’m not sure what that means, and I don’t know what I did that made “Laura” unsuitable.) “Larkin” was conjured out of several things: a contraction of Laura plus Kirstin, the nickname of St. Lawrence (“Lorchin”) and influenced somewhat by the British poet, Philip Larkin. I was not named for Philip Larkin, but his name helped to inspire mine.

Both of my parents were English professors, and writing came easily to me even as quite a young child, nature and nurture I guess. (I still have a “biography” of George Washington I wrote in the first grade. The last sentence is astounding: “He had red hair, he liked women and he liked to dance.” ) Nevertheless I never wanted to be a writer. Nope. Never. I wanted to be a ballerina, a veterinarian, a trainer of race horses, an actor, a director, an archaelogist (that one was short-lived) and a film maker. I resisted writing with all the ferocity I could muster, and you see how well it turned out.

While working on my BFA in Performance Art, I started to fool around with poetry a bit. I’d cut my teeth on Anne Sexton and T.S. Eliot, and being twenty-something in Boston, Massachusetts lends itself to the poetic life. It fits in well with art school– black clothes and English cigarettes, plenty of self-examination, both figurative and literal. Much of performance art was about stripping bare the soul (and often your person as well) and poetry was a means of getting there.

In the autumn of 1987, I saw that Howard Nemerov was going to be the writer in residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, which was quite near my mother and stepfather’s house. Qualified individuals could apply for a month-long fellowship to work with the esteemed American poet, and he alone would choose the chosen. I gathered up the poems I thought were reasonably good, filled out the application and sent it in. And I was chosen.

This is how these things work: you gather in a room with the Master, and the other (in this case five) supplicants. You sit around a table and one person reads their work and the others use their analytical and critical skills to trash it. Some of the criticism served up at residencies has been so brutal as to become legend. The brilliant Flannery O’Connor attended Breadloaf, the Iowa Writer’s Conference. There, she wasn’t permitted to read her own material, as the other writers complained they couldn’t understand her Georgia accent. So someone else read the story and Flannery took notes. The other writers dismantled and dissected her story ruthlessly and she wrote down their every comment. (The idea was that you would take the commentary and suggestions of the other writers to revise your work, and then return with a new draft.) When she returned to have her story read again, she had not changed one word.

At 26, I was the youngest poet in residence, at least 15 years younger than anyone else. The oldest participant was in his 80s. His poems had footnotes. Some days listening to the works in progress, I wondered if there had only been six applicants. (There were over 200, I was told later.) We talked about trends in poetry and work habits and favorite poems by other writers.

“Were you named after Philip Larkin?” someone asked.

“Sort of,” I said and didn’t offer any more. Instead, I asked Howard about a poem that had been widely cited in the obituaries of Philip Larkin, three years previous. In those days, you had to know the first line or title to look up a poem, and I had not been able to find  the one that ends “Man hands on misery to man/It deepens like a coastal shelf/ Get out as early as you can/and don’t have any kids yourself.”

Howard grinned. His face was almost a perfect rectangle, topped  by a thatch of white hair. He had blue eyes and they honest-to-God twinkled. “That’s the poem that starts out ‘They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad,’ ‘This Be the Verse,’ ” And indeed it was. I still know the poem by heart and can recite it like a parlor trick. That day Howard recited it for us.

We sat around a horse-shoe shaped table with Howard at the apex. Every day I sat at Howard’s right hand.  He had said he didn’t hear well out of his left ear, and I was intent to get the optimum experience. Every morning I arrived with my canvas mason’s bag, unfastening the little buckles to fish out my notes, Moleskine-style notebooks, fountain pens, and my very large antique Wedgwood Edme coffee cup, eschewing the styrofoam provided by the Center. As if those affectations weren’t enough, in those days I looked like I could have stepped out of a J. William Waterhouse pre-Raphaelite painting; all long red hair and pale complexion. The first week came and went and I was the only one that hadn’t yet read my own work, leaving me the weekend to stew over what I was going to present. I was nearly done with a new poem, and I was carefully shaping it, strengthening it in preparation for its dissection.

On Sunday night I laid that poem aside, put a new sheet of paper in the typewriter and wrote “Contemplating Hannah,” a poem about my stepsister, in about 15 minutes.  I had to tweak it here and there, but essentially it arrived on the page like a gift. On Monday morning, I unpacked the notebooks, the pens, the coffee cup, and the poem.  When I read, my voice shook.

Contemplating Hannah

We were in the garden

among the poppies

talking about French kissing

and shrieking at some

stripling’s miserable efforts.

We were sixteen and the

sun was high.

She was the pretty one

with her lacquer and hard

eyes, hoarder of secrets and

silver. I was older:

we were in it together.

 

There’s a baleful husband and

two tiny children entwined

in her fine tea brown hair.

She’s made her face of

paint and feathers, hidden her

heart in the secret drawers,

left her orange peel on

the front hall floor

and gone

 

To gorge on lotus fruit

locked in the Happy Prison,

The road home long forgotten.

Where is Hannah who sat

on my bed bemoaning history

And braiding my hair ?

Where are those sharp nails

that dug half moons across

my hand? Our conspiracy

of the lickerish?

 

The starlet of mathematics

has disappeared against the

sky; where are her Tolkein

books and Tarot cards?

Are they lost with the

cold Canadian morning, her

sandalwood soap, clarinet reed

and amber beads, all of

Being Sixteen.

 

Hannah says she’s out there

in some hazy Manx landscape

and when I saw this woman

she held me by the waist and

nuzzled my face. And I wondered

Who is this impostor and

Where is my lost sister?

Arriving at the end of the poem, I was met with utter silence. Then Alan, across the table, leaned forward to speak. Howard held up his hand to stop him.

“That was lovely,” Howard said, and no one else said a thing.  After we sat there for a minute or two, Howard leaned over and said “There’s only one ‘s’ in ‘disappear.’ Why don’t we take a break now?”

For years, I thought that it was all about the poem. I bet I was 40 years old before I realized that it probably had at least as much to do with being a twenty-something girl – woman with long red hair. Not that it’s a bad poem. The poem has some significant flaws– the last stanza should be deep-sixed altogether, but it wasn’t bad.

The next day, we all came in, sat down. I took out my notebooks, and my fountain pens and my English coffee cup.  The woman to my right was tidying her notes, preparing to read, chewing a fingernail, when Howard came in and sat down.

“Good morning, all.  Last night I wrote a new poem, and today I thought I would share it with you. It’s called ‘Larkin’.”  No one said a word. No one gasped, or choked or laughed out loud. Their eyes shot darts though. Thank God the poem was not about me.

Imagine Larkin going among the dead,
Not yet at home there, as he wasn’t here,
And doing them the way he did The Old Fools,
With edged contempt becoming sympathy
Of a sort, and sympathy contempt for death.

It’s a quirky spirit he carried through the arch
To aftertime, making a salted fun
Of the holy show and grudging his respect
For all but truth, the master of a style
Able to see things as he saw through things.

He was our modern; in his attitude,
And not in all that crap about free verse.
He understood us, not as we would be
Understood in smartass critical remarks,
But as we are when we stand in our shoes and say.

Our Roman, too; he might not have cared to be,
But what I mean is this: you wander through
The galleries entranced with shepherdess and nymph,
The marble or alabaster faery and fay,
Then suddenly you come on him, the stone

Of his face scored up and scarred with the defeat
An honorable life has brought him to,
And know that backing up the tales we tell
Is mortal this, the what-it’s-all-about,
So that you turn away, the lesson told,

That’s it. Dear Warlock-Williams, might you weep?
The penetrative emptiness of that gaze
Kindly accusing none, forgiving none,
Is just the look upon the face of truth,
Mortality knowing itself as told to do,

And death the familiar comes as no surprise –
“Ah, Warlock-Williams, are you here as well?”
With Auden, with Hardy, with the other great and dead,
Dear Larkin of the anastrophic mind,
Forever now among the undeceived.

At the end of the session, he stood up, scrawled his name across the bottom of the onionskin, and handed it to me. “This copy is for you.”

By Wednesday, things were back to normal. When I read my second poem, he was less impressed. When I asked  him about it later he advised that it just needed more work. But when he went on to say that he thought I’d have a great talent for writing popular songs, I burst into tears on the spot. I didn’t want to write popular songs! I wanted to be Elizabeth Bishop! Marianne Moore! Stevie Smith! I wanted to be taken seriously.  Poor Howard, he handed me a tissue, quite flummoxed by my response to what he meant as a compliment.

When the month was over, Howard gave me an inscribed copy of his collected poems. It didn’t contain “Larkin,” of course. He’d just written it. But my typescript copy is still tucked inside. We wrote letters every so often for nearly three years. I’d send poems. He’d send them back with cryptic notes, a word circled, with “no” written next to it, or “nice” or “yes.”  Sometimes the poem was ignored altogether. I wrote that I was disturbed to discover that Philip Larkin had been revealed to be a “right-wing, racist, womanizing misanthrope.”

“He was charming,” Howard wrote back. Indeed, he must have been. No one could stretch a description of Larkin to include “handsome,” and yet he was often balancing two and three romantic relationships at one time. But you don’t have to love the poet to love their work. Then Howard’s letters stopped. He died two months after the last one, of throat cancer at the age of 71. (Ironically, for me, Philip Larkin died of the same in 1985, at age 63. And my own father, in 2005 at age 68.) I never wrote another poem.

Knowing “This Be the Verse” by heart is a lot like knowing a good joke. Larkin had better poems. One of them was “For Sidney Bechet,” written in 1954  in homage to the great Jazz clarinetist. In the second to last stanza, there’s a particular line:  ”On me your voice falls as they say love should; Like an enormous yes.”  When I read that, it’s not Sidney Bechet’s horn I hear, but Howard’s commentary, a combination of gravel and gentle wickedness– and his inscription in my copy of the Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov: “To Larkin with love from Howard and Larkin.”  An enormous yes.

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.

AFTER

I could have been done with this hours ago.  The luminaria have all burned out. The guests have all gone home. Every living soul in the house is sound asleep. I’ve just sat here for three hours barefoot at my desk, in pajamas and a wool pullover because the house is cold at night, daydreaming.  In the shower I thought I knew what I was going to write, and I might still write that, just not tonight. Tonight I am something beyond tired– gone long past sleepy to something else. Even now, I’m just noodling away at this. There’s no story here, folks, move along.

It was a good party, our first in probably a decade. I don’t even remember which one was the last one. I think it could have been the year that I started out for Bozeman before dawn to pick up a last few things and the car shuddered to a stop on the pass when the gas lines froze. By the time someone stopped to help me, I was beginning to be hypothermic. The person who lifted me from the driver’s seat was an extraordinarily kind snowplow operator. He set me up in the cab of the plow and drove 15 miles straight down the hill  to the Bozeman ER .  In the emergency room, they rolled me up in layers of heated blankets, changing them out as they cooled.

That year, we put the party off for a day. There were times this week that I wished I could push back the start time a day or two or ten– and yet, we were reasonably presentable when the first guests stepped through the door. Presentable, but still cooking. Maybe that was an excuse. It gave me something to do with my hands, cutting up cantaloupe with woeful inelegance. It made people come to me, rather than making me choose. I think I’m a little rusty at this hostess business.  I was thrilled to see each one of those folks walk through the door, though.

William Faulkner once said “Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency to get the book written.”  I don’t think I’m quite there. (This is probably a relief to my husband as I understand old Bill was pretty difficult to live with when he was writing. And damn difficult when he wasn’t.) It’s getting better though– at least there is writing is going on. It may not be good writing, but it’s got little legs all the same.

Unlike Faulkner, I’m not willing to just dump everything else in my life. I would just as soon find time for  making eggnog for my friends; taking the coats, and bottles of wine and gingerbread from their arms; hearing about their children, and dogs and political campaigns. Even if finding the balance means too many late nights trudging along one after the other. I’ll get down to the business of the writing tomorrow, and might be able to transform that into something worth reading.

In the meantime, I’m just going to sit here at my desk, enjoying the kilim under my bare feet, remembering a splendid evening with friends, the magic of the lanterns in the garden – until I’m too sleepy to do so.

A Song for December 17

The camera is set up, and John has the bulb in his hand, ready to squeeze off the shot. The wind is cold today. Laying along the top of the machine, he doesn’t think of it.

One-two-three-four, the machine powers down the track. His brother runs next to him in the sand, holding the strut of the right-wing, steadying the machine.  With a shout his brother releases them and they are airborne.

Like an unruly horse, the machine bucks and pitches. It darts this way, then that way. He moves the rudder to steady it. The propellers are so loud he hears little else, but he feels the spruce snapping and creaking beneath him.

A sudden dart ends the flight, and they tumble onto the sand: 12 seconds, more than a hundred feet. The small group assembled on the beach is cheering. His brother, usually so taciturn, is jumping up and down.

Then there’s a second flight, 175 feet, and a third, 200 feet. Hail the new, ye lads and lasses.

“One chimpanzee, two chimpanzee, three chimpanzee,” he counts under his breath, as his brother takes the helm.  There’s a watch for official time, but he can’t take his eyes off the machine.

As before, the machine pitches and rolls, yet stays aloft. After a few hundred feet, the stability improves. 852 feet in 57 seconds.  The landing has a few problems– easily repaired, they note. But as it is moved back towards the camp, a gust of wind catches the wing, sending the machine somersaulting into the dunes, flinging off the crew that tries to hold it down. It is wrecked beyond repair. No matter, they’ve crossed the rubicon, there will be no turning back.

The brothers walk four miles into town, sand blowing in the windy hills. Sing we joyous, all together. He feels light. They have just mastered gravity, they have achieved powered flight. Heedless of the wind and weather, they are laughing.

Grinning at their hard-won triumph, they stop at the telegram office they send a wire home to their father. The message they send is artfully cool:

“Success four flights Thursday morning, all against twenty-one mile wind started from level with engine power alone average speed 31 miles, longest 57 seconds, Inform press, home Christmas. “

Fa la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la. 

Night Hawks

“Night people, funky but neat” – John Cooper Clarke

More than one person has advised to write in the morning. Only one of them is a writer, and she happens to be a morning person.  The last thing my husband says to me before he goes up to bed is “Don’t stay up so late tonight.” I can’t help it.  This is when I write.

I’ve tried to write in the daytime. Writing on deadline would have been a lot easier if I could somehow focus on the matter at hand during the daylight hours. I could do the interviews, make the notes, fact-check and peel back the layers of research, but I had the damnedest time getting the words down on the paper in some kind of orderly fashion, let alone words that would dance, take flight, suspend disbelief.

Some of the absolutely most brilliant things I’ve written have been crafted long after the rest of the world has gone to bed–and some of the worst dreck too, which is why although it’s good to write late at night, it’s wise to edit in the daytime.

I am less guarded at night , which allows for the literary blood-letting that seems to have become an essential component of a number of these personal essays. It also allows me the quiet and the solitude to work out complicated issues and present them in some kind of halfway coherent manner.

It’s been this way a long time. In college, I once wrote a poem about defrosting the refrigerator at four in the morning, and I wrote it after I finished defrosting the refrigerator. And not just for the writing, but most social interaction too. In the old days, we didn’t even get ready to go out until 10 o’clock, closing down the clubs and finishing up with breakfast at the Varsity, or whatever all-night diner was available. Then, as now, I did try to go to bed before it was entirely light out. Last night was a squeaker in that regard.

At home or out in the world, the night feels comfortable to me. The risks seem better calculated, the interaction with other people more immediate, the night its own soft, safe velvet cloak. Even online, there is a sense of camaraderie at finding that someone else is also up in the middle of the night.

Edward Hopper’s painting Nighthawks, has become a kind of icon for night-crawling, and the scene with its four figures has been the subject of many short stories, poems and cinematic homage. Fluorescent lights were quite new when Hopper made the  painting in 1942, and they seem a beacon out of the diner. After seeing the painting as a cheap print, it was quite shocking to come face to face with it in the Chicago Art Institute.  For one thing, it’s quite large– five feet long and almost three feet tall. But more immediate to me was the sense of wistfulness it evoked. Not that the figures were experiencing “existential loneliness”  (as suggested by one self-important art critic) but that Hopper had captured that late night blend of melancholy and magic. I wanted to be at some counter in the middle of the night, eating pie and drinking coffee from a stout mug.

Sister Wendy Bennett, an English nun who has been trotted out for a program in Art History on the BBC (honestly, even the premise sounds like a Monty Python skit) wrote in her book Sister Wendy’s American Masterpieces that the figures in the painting symbolized caged and miserable birds of prey, but it was unclear if the woman was preying on the men or the men on the woman. She loaded on more tripe about only the counterman being able to experience freedom by having a life outside of the diner. She thinks perhaps Hopper based both the male customers on himself (not the case) and that this indicated that he thought of the men as clones. Clones?

It’s not my place (or anyone else’s) to tell you what the  painting’s about. That’s the nature of art. Experience it for yourself and make your own interpretation– but in my opinion the English nun is heavily layering her own negative feelings about late night perambulations on top of whatever Hopper intended.

There is a very definite sense  in our culture that it is virtuous to be up early, and degenerate to be asleep at noon, even though there should really be no difference.  Ben Franklin, echoing earlier philosophers wrote “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy wealthy and wise,” and those prejudices linger, generating all kinds of pop culture studies, medical research and unending zeitgeist that it is better to get up early. Sometimes that moment of awakening and leaping from the bed is referred to as the heroic minute. Heroic! But apparently not so heroic when the minute of your rising is after 11 a.m.

Studies over the last forty years have shown that there are “differences in the fundamental property of the intrinsic period of the circadian rhythms” that will determine whether someone is an early bird or a night owl. These differences then are hard-wired, but can be adjusted through habit, will, and light therapy. There is sometimes a bias against “night people” in the workplace, where they may be regarded as undisciplined or lazy. In January 2007, “night people” in Denmark began a serious campaign to end discrimination against those who stay up late. Forming the “B Society,” they argued that the “Early Bird Model” was less relevant in a post-agricultural society and sought to attract the support of “trade unions, politicians and policy makers interested in making a more flexible workplace.”

I don’t consider myself “nocturnal,” but rather “cathemeral,” like a lion– an animal that is active night and day, depending on the circumstances. We night-hawks are in good company, though:  James Joyce, Winston Churchill, Marcel Proust, Hunter S. Thompson and Keith Richards.

A few years ago, a high school classmate rekindled our acquaintance. She and her husband both did shift work for the Canadian coast guard and often we were all three up in the wee small hours of the morning. I think those late night online conversations helped us to forge a much better friendship than the one we enjoyed in high school.Since then they have both retired and no longer have to deal with shift work (which neither particularly cared for) and I’m glad for them. But I miss seeing Jeanne pop up on my computer screen when I am noodling around after dark.

Tom Waits’  1975 album Nighthawks at the Diner was inspired by Edward Hopper’s painting, and the song “Eggs and Sausage“  is a brilliant evocation of late night in a diner. For years though, I mis-heard the line “Now the paper’s been read” as “Now the paper’s put to bed,” which for journalists is a lot more sensical. The paper’s “put to bed” when it’s sent to the press, a nocturnal exercise everywhere– it’s close to daylight when the day’s edition hits the streets. (And if it was the previous day’s — why bother reading it?)

There’s a rendezvous of strangers around the coffee urn tonight
All the gypsy hacks and the insomniacs . . .

I could get up at, say 5 a.m. and try to write. An hour into it, my son would be hitting the shower. My husband would be up soon after, and then downstairs making coffee, and letting the dogs out. The television would snap on for the morning news. Julian would stick his head in the study to ask if I know where something is, or can he have ten bucks, or did I  make an appointment for the dentist? They’d be out the door to school — I’d have 30 glorious minutes of peace and quiet and then my husband would be back. The mailman rings the doorbell, the dogs bark, everything pulling at my attention from fifty different directions.

If I start writing about midnight, I can write for four hours with very little to interrupt me. Four glorious hours, my family snug in their beds, the dogs snuffle, feet twitching, chasing rabbits in their dreams.

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

CRASH

I knew this day was coming. I knew even before I started this project that I would reach a point where I would want to just to blow off the writing and crash. This is that night.

First comes the bargaining: it’s okay, you can go to bed and get up early and write, who will know the difference? Then comes the crankiness: why even bother, who even cares, why do you write this crap?  Then there’s the worst: the whining. I am so tired. I just want to lay my head down, I just want someone to rock me to sleep, I just want . . .

The truth is that I’m tired because I’ve been cleaning my house. How lame is that? The house is not that bad– it’s not like we’re in the running for an episode of Hoarders or anything. But there is a lot of stuff to sort through, and in the past I’ve just stuffed it in that closet or stowed it in those boxes or put it in the corner and thrown a festive tablecloth over it. It’s time to finally figure out where everything goes and put it there. We’ve been here for four years after all.

To compound my to-do list, Christmas is around the corner. And we’ve invited folks over. What is it about humans that makes us decide to replace the front door glass, paint the back door, install a new kitchen island and sort out the dresser drawers (underwear with holes to the trash, underwear with shot elastic to the trash. Hell, put it all in the trash) when we have an absolute no-fail, no wiggle-room deadline.  We must be nuts.

And I am tired. My back is a little achy, I have a paper cut, I need to do something with my hair and good God, it’s nearly two in the morning again? I am peering up over the edge of fifty and I guess it’s okay to be tired.

But before I can ramp up a full-fledged pity fest, I remember. One of my friends was just diagnosed with stage 3 ovarian cancer. She’s optimistic, her doctors are optimistic, she’s going to do her best to beat this. Still, one of our mutual friends was already spinning out a eulogy over dinner.

Eulogies are being written for the sister of one of my high school classmates. She drowned last week while on vacation in Mexico, and my friend struggles daily with authorities in another country  to have her sister’s remains brought back to Canada.

Last week, another friend joyfully announced her remission from leukemia and in the next breath said she was going in for more chemotherapy to keep it that way, and the way she said it  made it sound like she’d decided to go to Michigan for the weekend or something. She must be so very tired, but she is determined.

The near constant severe headaches plaguing yet another friend turned out to not be Lyme Disease (her original diagnosis, which would have been bad enough) but a godawful thing called Fahr’s Syndrome. When she told me in an email that this was what she was facing, I had to look it up. When I saw what it said, I wept. There is no treatment for this progressive neurological disease. Unlike my friends with cancer, she cannot get better. She and her husband have two daughters not yet in high school.

So who am I to even feel weary? My friends are the most amazing people, and I am humbled by their strength. If they want to pitch a fit sixteen ways to Sunday  surely that’s their prerogative, because life really is so damn unfair. It is not for me to whine about having all this to do, and wishing I had another week to spin my wheels. It’s not for me to complain that I can’t fall into bed because I will not be dissuaded from this relatively modest project of writing something everyday. I didn’t even say that I had to write something good.

Dear readers, please say a prayer for Audrey and Marilyn, for Stacy and for Sue.  Know, too,  that I am counting my weariness and minor aches and pains like blessings. Tomorrow is another day, and one of those tomorrows I am going to sort out my schedule to get the writing done first.

But for tonight, I really do have to crawl into bed. I am so sleepy I don’t think I can write one more

 

 

 

(word.)