Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
Angels on the Head of a Pin
Sometimes my work involves counting people in misery. Not helping them. Figuring out how to count them. It’s disconcerting sometimes to think a lifetime of education and work has come down to discussions about how to find every single last homeless person so that person can be counted in our city’s annual census of homelessness.
Yesterday, visiting in Washington, D.C., I walked down 12th Street. from G Street to F to E. A man rolled by in his wheelchair, a cardboard sign propped on his lap. I didn’t read the sign but saw the words “homeless vet.” Another man shook his canister at me when I walked by, the change rattled like the beginner instruments they gave us in kindergarten, the ones like big salt shakers loaded with gravel. Another homeless vet. They’re very popular this year. The federal government has set a goal of ending veteran homelessness by 2015 so it’s a hip group right now. Better than your run of the mill homeless person and, really, who could argue?
One man’s eyes bore in to me so hard I could feel him a block away. He stood standing, his hands in his pockets, a hat pulled down over his eyebrows, staring at passers-by as if to dare them to look back, as if to say ‘You should feel guilty for walking by me with your fat wallet in your purse and your cellphone in your pocket, your credit card and a flat $20 bill hidden inside. I know what you have.’ But that wasn’t him talking or even thinking, it was me assigning him language and intent, interpreting his demeanor and putting it into my frame of reference. You’ve heard of ‘driving while black?’ This was ‘standing while homeless.’
I should know better. I really should.
There have been visibly homeless people on every block I’ve walked this week. They are in the same places every day, ensconced with their stuff, staying put, but talking to people walking by. At an intersection, an older man sat on a milk crate holding an umbrella against the wind. Every couple of minutes, he’d bellow out a scrap of a tune, more like the sound of a shofar calling people to prayer, only we were a bunch of pedestrians waiting for the walk signal and trying not to notice. Shofar Man had grinned at me as I’d walked up, though, so I felt a connection. I resolve to look at people when I’m walking, homeless or not, nostalgic for the days when people would acknowledge each other, say hello or good morning.
Nothing about my feelings about homelessness is simple. I do a lot of work on the issue; in fact, today, I sat in my hotel room and made revisions on our city’s 10-Year Plan to End Homelessness. Then I went to lunch. Around the block, I saw a woman sitting on the sidewalk selling newspapers so I bought one. I’d heard about Street Sense a long time ago and was surprised it was still around. A newspaper for and by people who are homeless. Each homeless vendor buys copies for fifty cents a piece and then sells them for $2. The idea is to engage people in enterprise, get some money in their pockets, and build a sense of community. Jennifer, the lady who sold me the paper, showed me her vendor badge and told me she’d written an article that was on page 8.
So I read it while I ate my soup.
Ode to Jeans
Who wears jeans and why?
If I was a boy, I’d wear jeans with a tie.
Buff my shoes to a shine, look so fly.
Trade suits for jeans, start a fad.
Men to boys, go back to the bad.
Girls are the same, trapped in age.
Leave their jeans on the last page.
It’s true an old ass is not the same.
But it take years to learn the game.
Wish for youth each day you wake.
Or wear it with boots, it’s your take.
___________________
Just so you know I’ve not lost my mind (not entirely) – this is in response to The Daily Post daring us to write a post using only one-syllable words. You think it’s so easy? Try it!
In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “One at a Time.”
Prepare a Place For Me
This is a favorite piece of mine written three years ago. I’m bringing it out of the closet for another wearing.
What to Read Next: Wandering the Stacks
I’m reading two books right now. I’m midway through Travelling to Infinity by Jane Hawking and I just started Nothing to Envy, Ordinary Lives in North Korea, by Barbara Demick.
My selection of books to read is almost entirely random. Like wine, a lot is based on cover art. Middle of the night Kindle clicking is delicious. It’s so easy to touch Buy Now and watch a new book download and then see its lovely cover lined up along all the rest of my secret buys.
There are years of tangents on my Kindle. It should be buried with me. No one still living needs to know about my many-book exploration of pimpology. Or my fascination with badly written memoirs. Usually involving a tragedy, almost always with children gone very awry. Oppression is another big theme. I have for most of this year been on an intensive learning expedition about American slavery and have read an enormous number of slave narratives, memoirs, histories, and academic studies. How did this happen? How did people survive?
I have learned more American history in the past 10 months than I learned in 25 years in school. Actually wanting to know something makes a big difference in knowledge acquisition. I am just now finding that out.
Lately, I’ve been spending time in actual libraries. Part of the reason is that many of the books I wanted to read in my slavery studies weren’t available via Kindle. But the big reason was that reading tougher stuff, by that I mean, books with footnotes and endnotes, small print and no dialogue, put me in an academic place. It brought back to me the feeling of going through the stacks, looking for books I’d found referenced somewhere else, piecing together research, connecting my thinking, understanding how one idea relates to another.
That’s what I loved about the academic life. Those books and the time it took to know what they all said. There is no hurrying a 400 page economic analysis of slavery in Tennessee and Kentucky compared to the Deep South. And no movie coming out about it any time soon.
So, in the next few days I’ll know how Jane Hawking managed to be married to Stephen for so long; if and how she made a life for herself in an environment defined so much by her husband’s extreme brilliance and his as extreme disability and I’ll know how people in North Korea manage to have lives at all.
Nothing profound here tonight. Just a book report.
Blindsided
I wasn’t prepared for this. No one told me how to take my personality, my intelligence, my accomplishments, my ambition, my ego and put them all behind a gauzy thick wall that mutes most voices and distorts the sounds of everyday life. The siren could be a whistle or a baby screaming or someone’s worn out rear brakes, I won’t know until the ambulance crosses the street in front of me.
I wasn’t prepared for this. No one told me how to stop the waves of self-pity, the dejectedness I feel when I realize that once again I have missed the point of an important conversation or become the target of loved ones’ exasperation with my having heard them wrong one time too many today. Until death do us part skipped the part about the burden of a disability suffered by the partner who doesn’t have it.
I wasn’t prepared for this. No one told me how to breathe through my hearing loss like the nurse told me to breathe through contractions, how to accept what can’t be changed but not give an inch away too early, how to look at people when they are talking, how to fully concentrate on them, take each word one at a time, see it formed, watch hands showing, illustrating. I have been spoiled by the expectation of casual conversation, the challenge of finding the best argument, winning.
I wasn’t prepared for this. No one told me how to find other ways to be smart, different ways to be competent and capable, strong and steady, and how to resist the magnet of dependency, how to be honest about what I can no longer do well but courageous about what I can still do if I am not afraid, but I am always afraid, in my heart, of failing, of not being the person I was ten years ago or five.
But then I think who am I to think I should have been specially prepared for hearing loss? There are so many people who truly were blindsided by terrible conditions, limbs lost in war, speech lost in strokes, catastrophic blindness, extreme depression, all things coming out of the blue. That’s not what happened to me. My hearing loss crept up on me, a bit at a time, until the lines on the graph headed ever and ever more downward. In my head, a constant sound plays, like water running through a pipe, sometimes there is a humming accompaniment, a secret din. I look at people talking to me and want to say, you have no idea how loud it is in here.
Every day I remember that there are many worse things. I tell myself that it is up to me whether I see myself as broken. It is up to me to handle this in a way that keeps hearing loss from being the cancer that ends my career and hobbles my relationships.
It is my job to be stronger than the thing that is crippling me.
The Person Formerly Known as Short Pants
My uncle’s name was J. No, it wasn’t Jay. It was J.
This was a guy who was born in 1911 so it wasn’t like his parents were into some symbol for the person formerly known as Prince thing. Why would anyone name their son a single letter? I would have asked them, my grandparents, if I had ever talked to them but I never did. Oh, they were alive until I was about fifteen and we did visit but we didn’t actually converse. Ask me about my grandfather’s worm bin though. It was massive. He would turn the dirt over with a pitchfork and there would be hundreds of big fat angleworms, the ones that had knuckles they were so big. Ponder on that for a minute.
Anyway, I thought about Uncle J because he was a person not in need of a nickname. There is no diminutive for a single letter. Maybe he had a different nickname altogether, though. One not based on his name. Maybe one based on his looks or what he liked to eat. I know he loved pork chops. Maybe his folks called him Pork Chop. Or more likely P.C.
I love nicknames. Love them to death. I don’t think there are enough nicknames anymore. And by nicknames I don’t mean honey or sweetie or any of the other interchangeable endearments constructed to accommodate serial monogamy. New sweetie? No need to change the nickname. Just go generic.
I like nicknames with character. My husband’s childhood nickname was Schnitz. I had two nicknames given to me by my brother and he was the only person to ever use them. Red (hello) and Short Pants. He would write letters to me from college that started “Dear Short Pants.”
My husband had a friend once who had a tic. His nickname was Wink. I knew a man who called his wife Girly Dear. I loved that. I don’t know if she did. One of my sons started calling one of his sisters La, an extreme diminutive of her name that caught on within minutes and we were all calling her La. She never knew what hit her. La.
My older daughter’s nickname is Birdie, given to her by her stepfather but so perfectly describing her decades later that it’s hard not to think it was her original birth name. The same daughter is still called Yo by her younger siblings. What one started the others continued; they may be aware that she has a full proper name but they’ve never let on.
Me, I’ve had a host of nicknames given to me by my husband, so ridiculous and queer that I won’t even list them. He is now consistently using J.J. which oddly brings us full circle.
J. to J.J.
It’s News to Me
My daughter posted on Facebook yesterday that she’d seen an ancestry.com commercial, signed up and was hooked. Over the course of twenty-four hours, she’s sent me several texts and emails telling me things I never knew and wouldn’t have imagined about our ancestors including her discovery that two many-times great grandfathers had served in the Revolutionary War. She followed that with news tracing relatives to the 1600’s in New York. A former reporter, my girl knows how to get the details of a story in minutes. By morning, she will have everyone’s roots traced back to the minute they landed in America. I’m in awe. But it’s not the first time that she has made the complex simple. She is, after all, the mother of twins.
What amazes me even more than her practically instantaneous tracking of our origins is that no one ever said boo about any of this before.
Seriously, did my father not know that his many-times great grandfathers had taken aim at the British Army? There wasn’t anyone in his family who mentioned it to him? At what point in the transfer of info from generation to generation did it become superfluous to mention service in the Revolutionary War?
This has given me a lot to think about. My ancestors, I know, are English, Dutch, and now German (I learned today). By nature, it seems to me just from observation of the relatives, a taciturn bunch of folk. Conversation at family gatherings centered on how well people’s cars were running and how people thought the Lions were doing. Sometimes there was a family project like a plumbing issue or a stubborn garage door opener that would rivet dialogue on the really important issues. Nobody, ever, talked about anything in the past except in the most fleeting of terms.
The past? What was the past? It was yesterday.
I don’t get it. Where was the oral history? Why did it become unimportant to relay what happened before? How did the past become so submerged that there wasn’t even a bastardized shred of information passed from generation to generation? I’m not looking for a sword or a sketch of Washington crossing the Delaware River, I’m thinking just a casual remark like ‘it was tense out there waiting for Paul Revere to ride by.’ Something. Anything.
It isn’t the first thing about my family that baffles me, believe me. Was it their natural proclivity not to talk about anything, much less about the past? Or had the knowledge fallen away, an appendix of history not needed for day to day life? Of course, my parents aren’t here for questioning. They would just shrug anyway.
And ask me how my car is running.
Shopping Trip
So Walmart is selling caskets. Why would they not?
When I was growing up, the monthly magazine Chain Store Age sat on our coffee table. Chain Store Age had articles about all the latest merchandising cons. My dad taught me to love a good con like undercutting K-Mart on the price of Aqua-Net and having parakeets and goldfish in our Ben Franklin Store. Mom’ll come in for the hair spray, he told me, or the kids will drag her in to see the birds.
I swear when I read that Walmart is selling caskets, I wanted to spurt out, “More power to ya,” just like my dad, old Roy, would have. Except he wouldn’t because he despised the ‘big guys’ as he called them although when he was in business there really was no Walmart. The big guys or big guy, as it were, was K-Mart. K-Mart the hated. If I bought something at K-Mart, which I never would, I had better burn the bag before I got home. My dad could smell K-Mart on me better than he could smell some high school fumbler’s sweaty advances. One did not mess with such zealotry.
Anyway, when I saw this Walmart casket business, I thought, hey, why not? Better yet would be to order a coffin on Amazon although the delivery logistics seem baffling. Anything that would involve sitting with a drink and a laptop and clicking through different coffins, different linings, hues, buffs, shines, handles, insignias seems so civilized and calm to me, remote, arms-length. How do we just get this death and funeral thing done with the least amount of hassle and stress?
I went with my father to the funeral home to pick out the casket for my mother. The showroom was in the lower level, the basement actually. We went down the stairs together and walked from casket to casket. Some were obviously not ‘her.’ They were too male, too lawyer’s office wood and plush. Others were too fancy, the white ones in particular seemed showy. He wasted no time picking out a very pale pink casket with a white lining, I think it was white, I’m not sure. I’m now trying to see, in my mind’s eye, my mother’s head resting on the satin pillow the next day at her wake but I can’t see it. The lining may also have been pink. I remember nothing except she was wearing my pearl earrings and the locket my father had given her 65 years before.
Halfway up the stairs, my father turned back. “I changed my mind,” he said.
So there were two remarkable things that had never happened before: my mother died and my father changed his mind.
He walked back across the casket showroom and tapped another casket, this one pink but burnished, it had a rich shine to it. He ran his hand along the side, feeling the finish. I knew it must have cost more money. “She’d like this one better, I think.”
“What do you think?”
Now there was a third remarkable thing that never happened before: my father asked my opinion.
“I think she would like it a lot, Dad.” What else would I say? I had never thought about how a pink casket would go with my mother’s style. It never occurred to me, when she was living, to think of her in a casket. She was always so tailored, so put together. I can’t ever remember her wearing pink, tolerating a ruffle. She was all about straight lines, belted pencil skirts, and t-strap heels. What about death would make her suddenly like a pink casket?
As if it would matter. The only person that mattered at the moment was her husband who, when faced with the options, thought of her as buried best in a burnished pink casket. My only job was to tell him he was right.
We could have done all this at Walmart in the department next to the sewing notions and crock pots or even online peering into a tiny computer screen.
But it wouldn’t have been the same.
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Snow Door | wisconsinacademy.org
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “The Parish Hall,” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
How Competition Makes Me a Better Writer
Posted on December 7, 2014 by Jan Wilberg
9 Comments
Some of my favorite bloggers right now are the ones competing with me in the weekly writing contests organized by Yeah Write. Yeah Write is a marvelously attractive site, very visual with great weekly challenge questions like ‘how come no one warned me?’ and and this week’s ‘what do we have to lose?’ to which bloggers can respond with fiction, nonfiction, or a 42-word flasher. Each category has its own deadline during the week and each is voted on separately by readers who are strongly encouraged and guided to read all of the entries before selecting their three favorites.
The popular vote is one thing. It’s great to rank first or come up in the top row. But two things are way more important to me than the vote results. The first is other bloggers’ comments. For a person who aspires to be a writer, works hard at it, and is a pretty steady blogger, I’m a terrible commenter. But these other folks are really good at it. They leave comments that analyze my writing, tell me what I did in a piece that I had no idea I was doing, and pick out the sentences they thought were especially striking. Their comments are so thoughtful, so intelligent, my ‘wow, this is amazing. I loved it!’ comes up as completely seventh grade in comparison. The substance of other writers’ comments has pushed me to take the time to analyze the essays I read even though it’s hard and reminds me of the poetry class I took at Michigan State where the instructor laughed out loud that I compared some stanza in an old poem to the Beatles’ The Fool on the Hill. Oh well. Time to get over it.
The second lovely thing about Yeah Write is the editors’ picks and comments. So, in addition to the popular voting, the Yeah Write editors post their top three picks from that week’s entries. Sometimes these parallel the popular voting but a lot of times they don’t. The editors look for the unique story that is well-told (technically); they say they use a rubric and I believe them since they post the actual rubric. I’m so much of a reactor that the discipline of a rubric seems restraining, too complex. I am, after all, the person who fell for a guy (30+ years ago, the same guy sitting downstairs now watching football) because of how he looked in jeans and Frye boots. Lucky the YW editors weren’t around then to insist on more careful assessment.
When the editors pick, they explain. Here is a Yeah Write’s comments about a piece I posted on Yeah Write last week that addressed very difficult dimensions of my hearing loss. The piece, titled Blindsided, was probably the most honest and cathartic piece I’ve written in a very long time. This essay was different, more personal and way more honest. I hesitated to post it in a writing competition but it fell into good hands both in terms of the editors and the other writers whose comments helped me see the strengths to build on. You know, weirdly, I felt like I could trust these strangers with this piece of work.
“Jan’s voice is so clear in her piece this week about her hearing loss. The phrase, “I wasn’t prepared for this,” is repeated several times and breaks down the ways in which Jan was blindsided, tying the essay together quite nicely. This part struck me particularly: “No one told me… how to accept what can’t be changed but not give an inch away too early.” I am haunted by the idea presented that accepting the loss is about doing so in stages, about carefully monitoring where she is at and neither getting ahead of nor lagging behind something that’s moving at a rate she cannot control. This is a beautifully sad narrative but it has notes of empowerment and hope at the end leaving the reader with the same uncertainty I believe Jan may have been feeling when she wrote this.”
You know what this editor’s comment and the other writers’ comments did for me? They made me feel like a legitimate writer. Not a pretender or a hobbyist but someone capable of doing decent work that is meaningful to others. So it was well worth the risk to post the piece, enter it in a competition, allow it to be read and evaluated by people who don’t know me and have no reason to indulge my feelings.
So a message to other bloggers: those of you who think you’re writers or want to be writers but you hang back because you’re afraid of being judged, stop it. Write your best work and show it to people who know what they’re looking at. Not your friends, not your admirers. Strangers. Strangers who are writers who believe in being generous to help other writers. That’s my favorite bunch of folks right now.
And there’s room for more, room for you. Come on.
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