… because in ten short days I will be here:

I can barely sit in a chair with myself.

It used to be the chant of June liberation when I was a kid – and likely it still is,  just one of the many defiant little rituals that constituted the love-hate relationship with the school year.  For the socially inept, school meant navigating the minefield of the hall locker society, where those square pegs that could not fit easily into the nice round holes of the strict youth caste system were relentlessly hammered.  Nevertheless I loved school.  I loved class; the new school booklist, the cup of newly sharpened pencils and the clean lined lettering paper.  It made crossing the fire of between-class transitions bearable.

When I was an elementary school kid,  basic classroom supplies were provided.  We gathered into our groups around the table and were dispensed a new-sharpened fat pencils and a writing tablet on which we painstakingly formed our letters by rote.  For art class, the shiny art paper and paint appeared, each child with a different color that we were expected to share with our neighbors, and the communal cup of quickly-dingied rinse water.    Our reading books were issued at the beginning of each new section, sometimes new, but more often passed from year to year.  We quickly opened the front covers to see whose book we had inherited, which of our friend’s older sisters or brothers had left their doodles in the margins of the pages.

Having put so much temporal distance between my school years and having my son, my awareness of the subtle decline of the classroom supply concept was non-existant, until I started noting the classroom supply lists posted in the local Walmart at the start of each new school year.  Our primary school websites offer the “option” of donating the money directly to the school for the issuance of a supply pack on the child’s first day, containing all the anointed educational necessities.  Textbook fees as early as middle school are commonplace.

I was stunned.

I grew up poor, one of six siblings and half-siblings, and a product of the New York public schools.  Everything I have now, I owe to the public educational system, the great class equalizer.  The fact that I can afford to buy new clothes and backpacks and shoes AND school supplies for my son every Fall is predicated on the fact that my parents were NOT required to provide them for me.  My pencils looked like everyone else’s pencils.  I took my crayons from the communal box.   My notebooks were of the same black compositional cover as the girl from across the tracks (literally) in more affluent Chili.  The idea of my own potential as being just as limitless, my access just as justified, was not diminished early by what basic equipment I could afford to have in my desk.

We have systematically dismantled public access to decent basic education in this country.  My sister is a teacher in an impoverished district, and often purchases hundreds of dollars in supplies over the school year for those children whose parents either cannot afford them, or are too strung out to care.  She is giving them probably their only chance at breaking the class cycle and making their lives, and the lives of their children better, and she is doing it on an elementary teacher’s salary.   I am very proud of my sister, but this is not something she should have to do in a society that, even now in this financial downturn, is one of the most economically prominent in the world.  Somehow we have become so successfully affluent as a society that we have decided that we can afford to ignore an enormous pool of potential, a resource that was recognized and acknowledged by the founders of this country themselves.  We have abandoned the have-nots.  We have cemented class, not just in the hallways, but in the classroom itself.

“No more pencils, no more books…” has become less a cry of vernal freedom, and more a sad fact of schoolyear life.

Feed the Children has recognized that a child needs more than food for his belly, but hope for a better future.  An $18 donation can provide a backpack of school supplies, personal care items and healthy snacks for a homeless school child.  Give back that chance, that feeling that as children, our future is limitless, and can be fueled by a love of learning and a daydream of hope.  Help send the message to these kids that WE believe that we all have a place, if we want to claim it, if we will work to make it so.
Thanks.

I was watching my son today in the rear view mirror.

Don’t worry, I was STOPPED while I did it, not speeding down the highway obliviously captivated by my son and being a general road hazard.  I was sanely waiting for a red light to turn so I could get onto the highway.

Anyway, I was watching him in the rear view mirror, gazing contemplatively out the window, and I wonder what catches his notice and what he thinks of it all.  In the prevailing theory of infant development, it is believed that it takes some time after birth for the child to recognize itself as a being separate from its mother.  If I had to be completely honest, I think it takes even longer to recognize that your child is a being separate from yourself.   As babies, they feel so very much like an extension of your own being, formed from the cells of your very heart and containing a tiny piece of your soul.  It leaves you raw and exposed and supremely possessive.

But there is a day when it comes upon you suddenly that this little person is indeed a person.  Whole, independent, and possessing an inner life to which you will forever be excluded.  I watch the reflection of the external world pass across them and I wonder what he sees through those big dark eyes, wholly different from mine and completely his own.    I wonder what he sees and he thinks when he looks at me.  My relationship with my own mother has evolved to one that is so complex with mutual history, that I have forgotten what it was to see her with the eyes of a child.

The realization that he is not “mine”, not truly my flesh and blood, but possessed only of himself, comes with a mixture of intense pride and a horrible pang of loss.  He is Himself.  Hieronymus Gabriel.  Saddled with the weight of his maternal expectations, but forever seeing himself as something apart, something that can move away from that expectation and into his own future.   That is where children have the advantage in the parent-child relationship.  Parents never truly separate themselves from their children, and children will never understand the longing for that lost part of self, that burden of intense love that will remain a part of our lives forever.

Until they have their own and they will know it only in the rear view.

I had a wedding to attend late this spring – my final unmarried brother is now happily wedded off to his lovely bride, and I am spared the ordeal of any more weddings until my nieces and nephews are old enough to tie the knot.  I don’t do family gatherings well, and I have threatened all my siblings with certain death if they even so much as THINK of divorcing and remarrying.  I love them all.  Just not all at once, and not in dress clothes.  I want to love them in jeans and T-shirts, one at a time.

While I was in Upstate, we took the opportunity to take my son to Niagara Falls for the second time.  The first time we took him, he was five months old and it was the dead of winter.  The Falls in winter is a truly under-appreciated site.  The mist from the falls transforms everything around it into a sparkling winter wonderland of ice.  It’s truly beautiful.  I think my son was among the ranks of the under-appreciating, since his view was limited by the thirty layers of clothing, culminating in a full body snowsuit, that his new-and-paranoid mother had strapped on his helpless five-month-old Southern body.

In the spring however, Niagara Falls offers up all her traditional treats – both the awe-inspiring and the kitsch.  There was, of course, the obligatory ride on the Maid of the Mists, swaddled in the thin blue trash bags that pass for rain ponchos, handed out by the thousands every summer.  But in my memory, this old stand-by pales in comparison to the Cave of the Winds.

The cave long ago ceased to be a cave when the rotting stairs were replaced with an elevator shaft, but the wooden viewing platforms remain.  Rebuilt yearly from the wooden ruins of the year before, the platforms remain almost quaintly untouched by the hand of modernity.  Gulls still nest amongst the rickety wooden braces, still able to raise their young between the onslaught of both the spray and the pounding feet of tourists, close enough to bring downy feathers within reach, and surprisingly remain unruffled and unmolested.

But the real star of the attraction is the dominating majesty of the Falls itself.  The platforms take you all the way to the very base of the Bridal Veil.  It pounds at your ears, sucks with cold fingers at your feet, and the wind generated by thousands of gallons of flowing water plasters your clothing and whips your hair, pulling you and pushing you simultaneously.  It is nature’s power manifest:

The reaction  from the visitors  is near universal.  The almost irresistable urge is not to bow down in our comparitive insignificance, at the realization of how small we are in the raw, unbridled, might of the world.

It is to scream.

It is to dance.

It is to pull back your hood and throw your head back and your arms out and howl.  It is to affirm both our right to exist as an individual breathing being and our deep recognition that we are at one with the heartbeat of the world, and we are standing on the very brink of it, with our fingers on the pulse of it.  It is to feel life thrum through every fiber of your being and to roar with sheer existence and to shake your fist at mortality.  It is empowering and exhausting and absolutely wonderful all at the same frozen moment in time.

It is simply amazing.

My relationship with peonies is complicated.

I don’t see them as much in Arkansas as I did as a child in New York.  I don’t know enough about gardening to know if there is a horticultural reason for this, or if it’s just the vagaries of regional preference.

It has been gray here.  July was a month of record rainfall in Arkansas, and we have been under overcast skies for much of the summer.  Perhaps it is because the quality of light reminds me so much of home that I pulled out my pictures of my trip to New York in May to cheer me up.  I missed most of the lilacs, but the peonies had started to bloom in Seneca Park, and the inevitable ant invasion had not discovered them yet.    For anyone who knows about peonies, you know that they are irresistible to ants, who swarm the sugary buds in profusion.

For this reason, I have loved peonies from a distance, and have never mustered the courage to actually plant them.  As a child I cautiously positioned myself downwind of my neighbors blooms, to catch the breeze-borne heavy floral scent, almost fruitlike in its sweetness.  I could never muster the fortitude to put my nose to the blooms, or, heaven forbid, to put my fingers in crawly danger to actually pick a bouquet.   I accepted preoffered bunches gingerly, waiting anxiously until the donor was blissfully out of sight before I inspected them diligently for ants.  My skin crawls a tiny bit even now just thinking about it.

I am not a person who shys away from the messiness of life.  Rewards often take risk.  There are always ants in our metaphorical garden.

But I would prefer not to have them in my metaphorical kitchen,  if you know what I mean.

Sometimes it’s okay to appreciate beauty from a little distance downwind.

Aren’t these beautiful?

Knit Picks Zephyrs

They can be yours, all yours…

We interrupt your three-part miniseries of misery with a breaking story of new woe from Casa de Awareness. This just in, overheard by a representative who prefers to remain anonymous:

Momma-de-Awareness: <singing with the television>

Harry: <playing game distractedly> Momma, stop that.

M-d-A: Stop what?

H: That singing. I don’t want to hear that singing.

M-d-A: <looking utterly, incomprehensibly crushed >

H: <soothingly> But it’s okay, I still love you.

<M-d-A exits weeping, stage left, H returns to game, fade to black>

And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful Wife
And you may ask yourself-well…how did I get here?

If we found ourselves isolated from our tribe, the internal upheaval was equally dramatic.  We became victims of our own luck.  The government, my New Orleans employer, had placed me on temporary duty assignment, and was helping to pay for us to live, provided we stayed in Arkansas.  But the time was running out;  Kris had to either report back to New Orleans or lose his job, and I had to stay in Arkansas or lose our housing.    In the midst of this crisis of warring responsibities, I got a job offer for a permanent position in Arkansas.  One that paid well.  One that would require me to leave primary research – the thing I had trained for over fifteen years to do and that I loved – pretty much forever.

It’s one thing to make decisions for your own future.  When you have a family depending on you for THEIR future, it’s changes the equation entirely.  We weren’t going to be allowed to have the luxury of limbo before economically things were going to get very bad, and the options were quite narrow – and narrowing quickly.  In the heat of the moment, sometimes you make decisions without the foresight to anticipate the aftermath.  Sometimes, the way out seems so clear that it doesn’t occur to you that it isn’t as clear to everyone else, and the drive to survive narrows your focus.  You miss predicting the impact of your actions on every aspect of your life.

Kris and I were so focused on ourselves alone, on how the massive upheaval was affecting us directly and how to survive it, that we stopped thinking about each other.  We faced down the crisis together, and then completely fell apart in the aftermath.

Kris always said that being a stay-at-home Dad was his dream job.   Like most fantasies-come-true, the reality was very different.   Home alone, in a city that was completely new to him, with a very young child dependent on him all day, and he in turn dependent on my income, he was isolated and detached.  I was facing a complete career change from the work I had spent my entire life preparing for, and was wrapped up in navigating an entirely new set of skills.  I felt the horrible pressure of trying to manage on a single income, and every expression of frustration struck Kris as criticism of him.  He, in turn, was away from friends and family, alone and feeling dependent and every expression of frustration on his part hit me as blame.

The dynamic of our marriage was completely overturned.  The perfect working harmony we had established in the relationship was shattered and an adversarial dissent had rushed in to fill the vaccuum.   When a relationship descends into chaos, it becomes altogether too easy for outside influences to flow into the cracks, freeze and fragment you further and further apart.  Others, with their interests not vested in marital survival, took advantage of the discontent in favor of their own agendas.   The frictions and compromises of a normal marriage suddenly became intolerable arrows of insult.

It took a near-crisis for us to recognize what we had become, how we had degenerated, the lies and half-truths we had told ourselves in our moments of loneliness and isolation.  We  looked around us and realized that we no longer recognized each other as the couple who had married and, hand in hand, had endured years of joy and sorrow; selfishness had made us into lesser monsters who where capable of inflicting horrible pain on precisely the people we loved and depended on the most – each other.  We had systematically dismantled, in mere months of anger and self-deception, what had taken years to lovingly build.

All that was left was to pick up the fragmented memoirs and restore them to the place of pride on the mantel.  We learned our lessons.  We must be “us” again, not “her” and “him”.  We turn inward, not outward.  Our only friends are friends of the marriage – OUR friends.  We had to relearn the rule that you should never treat your spouse worse than you would treat a total stranger.  So simple a rule, and so often broken.  But destruction is so swift, so easy to accomplish utterly and completely, while restoration is so very painstaking, and slow;  not only to bring back the original luster, but to strengthen against the storms that lie in the future.  We struggle, but we endure.   WE are still here.

Next – Dismantling of a Life, Part 3 – Maturity?  I can’t say I recommend it…

How We Went Wandering, Missed the Promised Land, and Lost our Tribe.

New Orleans truly is the Big Easy in more ways that are apparent to those whose acquaintance is based on Mardis Gras visits, or bachelor parties on Bourbon Street.   Yes, on the surface, it seems self-evident how the appellation arose; the free flow of drink, of sex, of food and music.  The ‘Lassaiz les bon temps roulez” mentality of the place seem so obvious, that I don’t think you ever really understand the depth of the nickname unless you live there.   It’s a whole lot more than that.

If you have the great fortune of living in New Orleans, what you will find is an openness of society, a life lived in public and with your neighbors that is unique to Southern Louisiana society.   There is a congenial acceptance, even of relative newcomers, provided that you respond with the same open warmth reciprocal to the hospitality offered.  In New Orleans, if you haven’t made friends, you really had to work at it.  After five years, our keyrings bourgeoned with the keys of other’s houses.  We were conditioned not to do a double take to come into our kitchen and find a friend heading shrimp in the sink (there was a good deal at the docks), or borrowing the sewing machine.  We knew where the iced tea and glasses were kept, and why bother the hostess about it?  It is a spontaneously genuine kind of place, the kind of place that you will miss out on entirely if you focus on the artifice of the Mardis Gras floats or the adult fantasyland of Bourbon St.   That was my New Orleans, the New Orleans that sticks in my heart, like the lump in my throat when I don’t turn my thoughts away fast enough.

Now, If you ever have the great misfortune of losing a house, in New Orleans or not,  you will very quickly find that it isn’t really the structure, or even 90% of the contents that you miss.  It’s the delineation of space.   The point that we, at least the American subspecies, are almost pathologically territorial gets driven home in spades.  We have an almost desperate need to define our borders and plant our flag and defend against all comers.  Remove that defined space, and we really don’t know what to do with ourselves.    Pre-Katrina, I never could wrap my brain around the number of homeless that would rather live in a highway underpass than seek out a shelter.

Now I get it.  Completely.

I count ourselves amongst the lucky.  Post-Katrina, we were never homeless in the “sign by the side of the road” sense of the word.  We had an abundant network of friends and family that opened their guest rooms and spare bathrooms to us.  Not once did we materially suffer.  Not once did we go unclothed or unfed.  We had the things that keep the body together

The soul is a different matter.

No matter how well cared-for you are, the instinct to plant your flag and the need for your social network war with each other for primacy.  We were lucky enough to be with friends who didn’t think twice about the fact you were sitting cross legged in your pajamas in the middle of their living room floor nursing the baby, or letting you raid their pantries for lunch.  We were comfortable with these people.  We were easy.  They were our Tribe.

But it was difficult to get beyond the feeling that this home was not OUR home.  This bed was not OUR bed.  The dictates of even the most casual society recognize the supremacy of ownership.  We were with our Tribe, but the flag flying outside was not our flag.  Obligation struggled with the innate need to control our own surroundings, fulfill our needs for ourselves, in our way.   We didn’t feel comfortable imposing ourselves on any one house for more than two weeks at a time.  Ultimately, it sent us wandering into our own wilderness, house to house to bleak hotel room, until the government sent us north and far away.

The decision not to return was one that was logically a no-brainer.   My job in New Orleans was essentially over.   There was no possiblity that my center was going to be rebuilt in time for me to complete my postdoctoral work, and with every university and research facility in the New Orleans area laying off hundreds, there were no prospects.  Southern Louisiana simply could not absorb that number of out-of-work professionals.  Kris’s job alone wouldn’t cover the cost of the reconstruction and the skyrocketing insurance.  The propect of raising a child, an infant, in a FEMA trailer in the dark ruins of New Orleans with only the rudiments of power, water and security was simply unthinkable.  The only alternative, living with friends for a completely undefined period of time was not any better.  Rental houses were either non-existant or astronomically expensive in the post-Katrina scramble to put roofs over the heads of the displaced masses, and most simply couldn’t find the realistic means of coming home.  There was so few choices that were livable by any standard we were accustomed to.

But the head and the heart don’t often want the same things.  In finding our piece of land, we lost the Tribe.

For a person who has moved from city to city on an average of every 4 years for almost thirty years, this should be something I am used to.  I have had to reinvent myself so many times that I have it almost down to routine.  But not this time.  This time was different.  This time the feeling of isolation and disconnect was so powerful, it permeated our lives.  We were a new family, with a new baby, living in a house that never quite managed to feel like our home.  It’s not that people didn’t reach out to us up here.  It’s that we lacked the emotional energy to reciprocate and were almost overwhelmed with a feeling of being perpetually “outside,” even within our own four walls.

Katrina’s storm surge had picked us up, and tumbled us in its undertow and just as abruptly receded, a party of three in the great New Orleans diaspora – far from home, and outside the Tribe.

Next:  Part 2 – This is not my beautiful house…