Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
Meet Mr. Jones
Blogging involves a fair amount of risk-taking. So it’s tempting to hedge one’s bets. Taking a risk in one venue but not in another. Encouraging some people to read and follow and hoping others don’t.
But the great writers of the world don’t write their masterpieces and hope that only certain people will read them. They write and release their words to everyone. Something important is said in a final, enduring way because it is published. Then Great Writer A, B. and C can go on to their next masterpiece.
Do the great writers of the world worry about who will read their work? Maybe. I’m sure in the Big Girl Writing School, there is instruction in how to step over fractured family relationships and surprised co-workers in the interest of literature. Is there, after all, anything nobler than the truth? A great writer of the world can handle the truth even if her former friends and relatives are weeping in the corner.
Blogging is the same, only different. There are a lot of people who denigrate blogging. I wouldn’t be one of them. There is junk in the blogging world but also a lot of genuine and beautifully expressed observations. I know. Sometimes I have them. I appreciate the bloggers that I follow, if only, some days, for a turn of phrase. I love an artful use of words. Other days, I am dwarfed and depressed by reading bloggers who are so much better than me. I wonder how they can write so perfectly and have such extraordinary photos day after day.
With many blogs, and sometimes my own, I’m struck by the blogger’s risk-taking. This isn’t so much in confessing big fat family secrets as it is tackling topics with which a blogger would not normally feel at home. Like race. The immediacy of the blogging world makes it the source of the rawest, freshest, and least edited commentary about race right now. It’s where people are saying what they mean even though it’s awkward and ill-put sometimes. I’d rather listen to a bumbling truth-teller than a TV commentator checking his hair between soundbites calculated to boost ratings.
But for all this brave talk, I hang back in curious ways. And I know other bloggers do as well. There remains a residual tentativeness. In my case, I’m fine with the rest of the world, ready to put my stuff anywhere it will be read and generally able to handle the consequences. It’s the people I know that are confounding.
This dichotomy occurred to me tonight when I was looking at my Facebook ‘fan’ page for Red’s Wrap. It’s irksome that I’ve been stuck at 195 ‘fans’ for months, especially when I look at other bloggers’ pages and they have thousands. It’s not a competition, of course, but it is. The more followers, the more one is read, the more interaction, the more opportunities, the better. If I didn’t want people to read what I was writing, I would write a diary and keep the key on a string necklace around my neck. So yes, I want more followers. I’m not an attention whore for saying it, I’m honest. Writing is about being read. Go back and ask one of the great writers of the world.
So I asked myself, what is keeping me from hustling people to like the Red’s Wrap fan page (you’ll notice that I’m trying to get over my reticence here)? And then I asked, in the infamous words of Sheryl Sandberg, what would I do if I wasn’t afraid?
I would decide that my blog is something worth sharing, no, wait, something worth selling to other people. Not in a coy, gee, I hope you like me, my blog is over here behind this large rock but in a straightforward, I’m a blogger that everyone should read. Tolstoy didn’t prescreen his War and Peace readers, why should I decide who should read Red’s Wrap? (Yes, the comparison is useful. Don’t get all tense.)
So that’s what I’m doing. Sheryl, if you’re out there, listen up. Tonight is the night I lean in. Or go all in. Or go big or go home. No more keeping my blogging life under wraps from the people I know like meeting Mr. Jones “every day at the same cafe, six-thirty, I know he’ll be there, holding hands, making all kinds of plans, while the jukebox plays our favorite song.”
Time for Mr. Jones to get to know the neighbors.
_________________
“Me and Mrs. Jones,” lyrics by Billy Paul
Blue Gill Meets Caribou
I’m watching a show about a family that lives in the Alaska wilderness. They shoot caribou on the tundra, skin them on the spot, and have dinner, each person with a big bone in their hand, gnawing. The next morning they go searching for sea gull eggs. It was in between the egg hunt and the dad making some kind of fish catcher with a giant branch that he bent in a circle and was then going to weave something, not sure what since it is the tundra after all, to make a net-like instrument that my husband turned to me and said, “I’d trade this (looking around our living room) for that life, wouldn’t you?”
Another guy on the show, living in another part of Alaska, just built his own sweat lodge, again out of those handy bendable branches and then he put pine boughs on the bottom to sit on, naked, and lit his little stove and apparently sweated enough to run out of the sweat lodge with the TV people blurring his ass as he ran into the part of the lake in front of his cabin where the ice has started to break up. When asked, my husband says he doesn’t not want this man’s life because “he’s by himself.” “I don’t want to be by myself in the middle of nowhere.”
There is a chick named Sue who lives by herself in the way high up Arctic Circle. She wears a hat that has little animal ears, like a kid at a playground would wear, and smokes a lot. Sue has major ornery balls. She just shot a caribou and is, this very minute, slicing it up in between drags on her cigarette. I’m sorry. I can’t fucking imagine. My dad used to make me clean the fish I caught and it was just the most gruesome and foul thing on earth. How does a person graduate from a blue gill to a giant, furry animal with hooves? Sue talked to the dead caribou first, some kind of survival of the fittest simpatico thing. Creepy.
This morning, not wanting to set my husband’s day on a downward course (which is almost impossible to do if there’s football on TV), but still thinking that it was something we should discuss, I asked him, “What would be the first things I should do if you dropped dead right this minute?” He looked at me for a quick minute and went back to reading the sports page, murmuring something about it not being a very cheerful topic.
A few hours later, after I’d gone on to other worries like getting my pie done before I had to put the turkey in, he came into the kitchen and told me what I should do. Here’s what you should do first, call this person, and then make sure you do this, and don’t forget these things. All of it was about making sure our money was in order, our caribou. It was sort of like if we get split up in the blizzard, here’s your beef jerky and a box of matches.
I’ve been holding him back. I see that now. We should be sitting, naked, on pine boughs, not lounging around on leather sofas like spoiled, soft, ineffectual city slickers. It’s my fault he hasn’t led the life he wanted. It’s taken years and many episodes of Life Below Zero for me to get to this realization.
Oh well.
10 Things on Thanksgiving Eve
On this Thanksgiving Eve,
1. I bought pants.
2. I have a tragedy hangover.
3. I appreciate the words of a friend about Thanksgiving being a time to rest from the chaos of the world.
4. I was sad to see that B. Smith of the famous Washington D.C. restaurant is missing and has Alzheimer’s. She is beautiful and successful and lost.
5. I asked my friend Christina how to make her wild rice casserole and was relieved to hear mushroom soup was involved. This makes putting it together more like reflex than actual paying-attention cooking.
6. The onset of the holidays brings about an irresistible urge to travel to places where small huts accommodate only two people.
7. We would all do better with SNL reruns from the 70’s than the dreck that passes for comedy now.
8. I love rough Wisconsin weather especially on Thanksgiving. Nothing better than a snowy, sleety walk and coming home to a roasting turkey.
9. The Serenity Prayer is tacked to the wall above my desk. I took a picture of it today and posted it on Facebook saying that I double down on the SP during the holidays and I do.
10. There’s an amazing amount of crazy shit in the world that we can’t do anything about but there’s also a lot of crazy shit that can be fixed. Let’s be thankful for that.
That’s my list today. Distilled thinking at its finest.
Start Where You Are
It’s depressing like a funeral.
I went to the demonstration at Milwaukee’s Red Arrow Park because I had to be a body. I’ve gone to funerals sometimes because I’ve gotten it in my head that the bereaved, a dead friend or acquaintance’s relatives, should be able to turn around in their seats and see a sea of people. All I aim to be is part of the sea. I have nothing else to offer but my physical, silent self.
As I stood waiting for the talking to begin, the organizer walked through the crowd asking if there were any other mothers of murdered children. I backed up to get out of the way.
I was ten feet from the mother of a man shot by a Milwaukee police officer. She held a giant color photo of her son in his graduation cap and gown. It was mesmerizing. Her proudest moment, maybe, her son looking so alive and healthy, so full of all she had put into him and whatever his future held. It made me sick. I wanted to cry.
I’ve heard her speak before, her calm presence and determination teaching whoever is ready to listen how to behave as a mother bereaved by violence. If I am ever in this situation or any other that requires extraordinary composure and persistence, I will have a role model.
It’s the day after Ferguson.
A pastor quoted Scripture. He spoke loudly and with great commitment, he exhorted us to insist on fairness, to believe that everyone could live and prosper, and at the end, he raised his hand high in the air in a move that seemed part blessing and part power salute. He wore hand-knit mittens with pink, blue and green yarn, Christmas-y almost.
Before the demonstration, as I was walking the few blocks from my car to Red Arrow Park, I noticed police cars parked, with their lights off. While people were speaking at the park, there was a helicopter overhead. After the speeches, when the crowd headed for the street to march to City Hall, I turned the other way, heading back up the hill back to my car. I wanted to represent, what, I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t want to march in the street. I don’t know why but it was my turn away point.
Walking back to my car, the police cars came alive, their lights flashing, more squads came from all directions, more lights but no sirens, streets were blocked off. At first, I wondered whether something bad had happened. That didn’t make sense since the crowd I’d left was quiet and serious. What trouble could there be? I walked past a group of officers talking and watching the crowd. It gave me little chills.
Then I thought that maybe the police were keeping traffic away so protesters could safely walk in the street. That’s what I wanted to think. But the truth was I didn’t know. I just knew it was time for me to leave and I did. I had gone to the demonstration to contribute to the sea of people and I fear that may be all I have to offer going forward.
It isn’t enough, I can tell you that right now. But that’s all I’ve got.
I was disheartened by this until I remembered Arthur Ashe’s famous advice: Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.
A 33-Word Editorial about Ferguson
People whose anger could ignite change opt instead to be polite, not wanting to rock boats carrying disapproval, while those whose anger is expected and discounted influence nothing but the air around them.
But He Seemed Like Such a Nice Guy
A highly-respected local columnist is catching it on Facebook because of a piece he published in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel entitled “This is the Bill Cosby I Know.” The columnist, Eugene Kane, came to know Bill Cosby after criticizing him for one of his famous rants about ‘all that is wrong about the black community.’
Kane talks about the Bill Cosby he came to know and it’s clear he both likes and admires the guy but, as a journalist, can’t ignore the claims of a growing number of women that Cosby drugged and raped them. No one but the world’s biggest misogynist idiot would advance the idea that over a dozen women are lying or have somehow orchestrated their stories so that they each sounds like the same movie rerun a dozen times. And Eugene Kane, a writer whose work I’ve read for years and who I would trust to have the right, common sense, progressive opinion about 99% of the issues facing our community, is not a misogynist nor an idiot.
Yet his struggle to sync his famous friend’s magnetic personality and good works with the extensively documented pattern of sexual assault gets tangled on the page. It surprises me that Kane, a newspaper reporter before he was a columnist, seems so flummoxed by this. Even I know that most really bad guys act pretty darn regular most of the time. Rapists don’t run around raping people 24/7. They have jobs. They go to school. They raise children, go to their mom’s on Thanksgiving. People can be really, really bad guys and still say ‘excuse me’ when they belch and drive nice in bad traffic.
The acute discomfort that so many seem to feel because of their inability to reconcile Cosby’s American’s Dad image with the rapist label reminds me of the years of denial exercised by Penn State about Jerry Sandusky’s repeated sexual abuse of young boys. In that case, Sandusky was even caught showering with a little boy in the Penn State locker room. But that wasn’t enough to take action. Apparently, the Penn State administrators were stuck in the same ‘I don’t get it’ place that Eugene Kane describes so well. How could a well-known coach working with the revered Joe Paterno at THE Pennsylvania State University actually be a child rapist?
Just doesn’t compute. Bad guys don’t do things like coach college football, stand on the sidelines on beautiful fall days, waiting for the Penn State marching band to finish playing “The Nittany Lion.” So because his crimes didn’t fit the wholesomeness of college football, everyone filed accusations about his sexual abuse of children in a small folder in the back of the cabinet. Oh, the accusations were there, all right, but hard to get to, shadowy, and more and more discredited the longer left untouched.
Now, what happened to Jerry Sandusky is happening to Bill Cosby. First one person and then another and another went into the file cabinet and started added a lot of paper to that thin folder. The first person in each case was the strongest person, the one who could only hope to get all of their story told before the first critic started with the shaming and ridicule. Picture this: you are one person with a couple thousand dollars in the bank, maybe you have a family or not, but you have a job and no one at your job has any idea about your past even though what happened to you at the hands of a rapist makes you sick every time you think about it which is pretty much every day and you are now going to stand up in front of the world and accuse a very famous and very rich person of a terrible crime. At this point, there’s no army of victims standing with you. You are a tiny person in a canyon.
In both the Cosby and Sandusky cases, it required a steady, unrelenting stream of accusers for the accusations to stick and for the authorities, the press, the public to acknowledge ‘ah well, where there’s smoke there’s fire,’ in these cases, a line of smoke for incidents old and new, bridging decades, a smoldering forest fire running the whole length of the Rocky Mountains. Yes, the smoke would be a very big tip-off.
On the flip side of the impossible to accuse are the quickly accused. In these cases, generally involving young African American men, accusations of criminal behavior are so absolutely in sync with what people already think about them, there is no struggle to align the crime with the person. The same incongruity that seems to be giving us fits with Bill Cosby doesn’t exist with this group. Central city black man robs somebody on the street. No surprise here, no need to have it happen a hundred times before we get it. Once is plenty. Compare and contrast.
In the end, I sympathize with Mr. Kane’s quandary. He seems to find it hard to believe the accusations against Bill Cosby because to do so would negate what he believes he knows about the man. That, in turn, would call into question his own ability to read people, to sort out the bad guys from the good guys and, Lord knows, we all think we can do just that. We steer clear of the former and hang out with the latter. We don’t like getting that mixed up, our own taxonomy of goodness and badness has kept us out of trouble all these years. Why does Bill Cosby have to go and screw that up?
Good question, my friend. But not the most important one. What we need to ask is this: what happens next?
Diversify
“What’s your deal with wrecked things?”
“It’s not wrecked. It’s just leaning a little. If it was wrecked, there’d be a hole in the roof or a side of it would be on the ground.”
“Sure, whatever you say. But don’t deny you’ve got a thing for things that are falling in on themselves.”
“I like history is all.”
“So that’s why we always have to go to the oldest cemeteries with the oldest headstones to look for the oldest graves, the ones with the earth sinking and the stones falling over?”
“New things have no story. Neither do perfect things.”
“Maybe you should give them a chance.”
“I will. Later.”
Fashion News
The most amazing thing in my life right now is that most of my pants are falling off my ass. This might be something that has happened to most people but it has never happened to me. Generally, the opposite has been true where I have had to stuff, tuck, or at least coax my ass into my pants. Now I am walking along and stopping to hitch up my pants every thirty seconds like a ‘pants on the ground’ kid. If a stiff wind hit me, I swear my pants would collapse on the ground around my feet. I kid you not. It’s completely crazy.
“Wear a belt,” my husband says.
I look at him, like, seriously? I should just hitch up my pants under my arms and wind a belt around my waist? How about a piece of rope? “Where’s our rope?” I ask him. “I need some rope to hold up my pants.”
The same weird thing has happened with my chest. An area of some pride, my chest in recent years has been known to pop the buttons on my favorite Jones New York business shirts. “Maybe you should wear a camisole,” a prim friend once told me, rolling her eyes just the slightest bit. This hurt my feelings a little because I always felt a little behind and sideways in the lingerie department, utilitarian, minimalist. For a long time my favorite bras came from K-Mart, a period coinciding with my Jean Nate fetish. It’s okay. I’m over it now although there is still a bottle of Jean Nate in my linen closet. I sniff it now and then just to try to remember what it was that I saw in it. It’s rancid, I think. Is that what happens to drug store body splash after fifteen years?
Shirts button now. So do jackets. I bundle up like a proper old lady, there is not much hanging out on top and the rope seems to be doing the job with my pants.
All of this wardrobe adjustment is a function of having lost just twenty pounds. I probably look just the same to the rest of the world but in my mind’s eye, I feel like Audrey Hepburn. I just need a pixie cut and some cuter flats. It’s lovely, floating through my day as Audrey Hepburn. I am lithe, elegant, so very narrow.
It occurs to me now that I would have had this sublime joy years ago had I just bought pants two sizes too big.
What one learns as one matures is just extraordinary.
#NaBloPoMo
I’m 1 in 3
Today is the national 1 in 3 Speak Out, part of a multi-year movement to reduce abortion stigma by asking women to tell their stories.
I know this is a powerful thing because I did it. Twice. After I wrote an essay that got a lot of attention, I was invited to speak in October 2012 to the campus chapter of Planned Parenthood at Central Michigan University, the school I was attending when I had an abortion in 1967, six years before Roe v. Wade. Last month, I went back to CMU, this time to be the opening speaker at an Abortion Speak-Out, a 1 in 3 event coordinated by students.
At both events, I stood with a microphone in my hand and tried to describe what life was like on their campus in the late sixties. I joked that I was there representing Life before Time. Even that reference was too historic for them. These were people who were ten years old ten years ago, being carted around to soccer practice. I was fifty-six ten years ago, wearing some of the same clothes I have now and almost driving the same car. Now, I am clearly older, thinner, deafer, but also more certain, with more courage and less regard for consequences. These students didn’t need to know that, though. The empowering nature of aging from fifty-six to sixty-six could not have been more irrelevant or uninteresting to them. In their eyes, I had just simply crossed over and I had probably done it, not ten years ago, but twenty or thirty.
I stood there and felt like I was calling to them from across the Grand Canyon. I want to tell you how it was, I said, my voice echoing in the auditorium. They looked at me so respectfully, so ready to listen.
And I tried. I told them about the different rules for male and female students, how premarital sex was a bad thing for women but an expected thing for men, how there was no access to birth control, that a woman had to be married to get a doctor to prescribe birth control pills. I told them about the extraordinary stigma about unwed pregnancy, that girls in high school and college would just suddenly be gone, visiting their aunt in another state, so they said, never to be heard from again. There would be rumors about babies being born and put up for adoption, but nothing was ever confirmed. All of it was shadowy, not discussed.
The shame and the fear of shame were gargantuan. I tried to convey that to young people who, rightfully and thankfully, had no idea what I was talking about.
I wanted to bring them into the head of my 19-year old self but everything I said sounded like a caption under a black and white photograph in a history book someone left on the bus in 1970. There was no way for me to tell them that the girl I was then hewed to all of the gender stereotypes that existed, rebelled against nothing, felt powerless a good share of the time, and had no compelling direction. That girl was a sliver of the person I am now, the thinnest specimen that could possibly be extracted from a living organism, put on a slide, it would barely be visible, that’s how small a part of me she was. But still I remembered how she thought, how she careened around the alternatives after she found out she was pregnant and knew right away that an abortion was the only option.
I told them the overwhelming feeling of being trapped by having gotten pregnant and my realization, only many years later, how I was trapped alone, my partner in crime, as it were, able to stroll away with no repercussions. The unfairness made me indignant all over again but I think my young audience thought I was just being political, harping on gender inequality as they knew it, their world full of the tiny micro-aggressions that have become so popular to spot and denounce.
So I finished telling my story and they applauded. After we waited several impossibly long minutes, a young woman got up in the back of the auditorium and walked down the aisle. She sat on the carpeted stairs of the stage and told her story. Hers was more recent. The evening progressed that way. Long waits, silence, and then someone else stepping forward. It was a show of patience and listening, remarkable and precious.
Since then I have been going over what I said, wondering why I wasn’t able to get those young people to see what it was like, to understand the walls of gender roles, and to really understand the horrible stigma of not being married and having a baby. And then I realized it’s because the stigma is gone. It just simply doesn’t exist anymore. The creature I tried to describe has become extinct, there is no conveying how its huge ragged wings attached to its furry hide.
What that tells me is that stigma that makes people ashamed, gets them sent away, means that they never speak about what happened to them can be lifted. If it can happen with women getting pregnant and not being married, it can certainly happen with women who have had abortions. Having had an abortion can become something that happens. It doesn’t have to be a stony, ugly secret that takes forty-five years to unearth.
So if you have a story, tell it. If you don’t have a story, listen to one.
We can change this thing, we already have.
#1in3Speaks
Pops
My dad handled everything smoking a cigarette, later a cigar clenched in his teeth. He fixed things with a blowtorch, kept screws in peanut butter jars. When he wasn’t fixing things, he took my mother to the hospital and played the piano.
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
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