NOW AND THEN

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I apologize to people who will see no point in reading this post. There is no point in reading this post.

I have been trying to think of other things, to focus on the good I know is everywhere around, and to remember that I am a fortunate person. I am the oldest in my family and a woman, and the men in my life are almost entirely good people, kind and decent and loving people. I am trying to remember that times have changed.

When I was a freshman in college, a man in the house behind me was molesting his daughter (“Please Daddy, no.”). The police advised me to call the public health nurse in downtown. It was late at night. The police would not come. They said there was nothing they could do. Maybe they did come but could do nothing to the man. It’s hard to remember. They did not accuse me of making up my story for political reasons.

It was 1970. It was probably October, forty-eight years ago. I can only pin down the date that far because I have thought it through so many times over the years. It was while I lived in the View Ridge house before I was laid off from work in the record store at Northgate and caught the flu and moved back home with my parents even before my first college term ended. So I might still have been 17 years old. Or maybe it was right after my October birthday.

In a fit of desperation and fear, one night, listening to that child cry, I ran around the block on the wet sidewalks and confronted the man. I was barefoot. I could describe the house, the front door, how naked my knuckles felt knocking on his door, what the man was wearing when he answered it, the expression on his face when he said, “Who are you?” He looked around behind me to see who else was there. Just me. I was terrified. I felt like a fool. I feared he would follow me home and hurt me. Cowardice. Impotence.

For many years, this terrible mix of self-blame and fear did not connect to carrying keys splayed between my fingers when I walked across campus or to hiding from people who crossed my path in the dark. Or to my own experience on the playground when I was a little girl (I never told) or to an explosive overreaction when a boy trapped me against a counter in my junior year of high school (was that overreaction?), the men who exposed themselves to me, the physical therapist who made lewd suggestions (that was recent), or my embarrassment trying to report a man who chose to masturbate beside me in an otherwise empty college lecture hall when I was 18 (“Well, if you’re scared,” he’d jeered as I ran away).

I was young then. And now I am old. I did not even have words to describe what I experienced then. I still prefer not to think about it now.

Nobel Peace Prize for anti-rape activists Nadia Murad and Denis Mukwege

RANDOM FACTS

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Years ago, long before non-GMO became a common label on foods, before Safeway even had an “Organics” section, and before “gluten-free” became a thing, a junior came to class with an idea for her research paper. “It sounds interesting. They are altering the genes of food,” she said about the NPR broadcast she’d listened to on her way to school. ”

“What do you think about it?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I want to find out.”

Her eventual essay included the word “Frankenfoods” in the title, so we can see where that led.

Over the years, students rarely choose to write about topics they begin by knowing little about, but those papers are most often the best. Writing a research paper should be as much about finding out truth as proving it.

Changing our mind is probably one of the greatest struggles any of us have. We get an idea in our head and simply cannot move. For a teenager to research a topic with an idea already clear in their head about what they want to say is pretty typical. For a reversal to occur is rare indeed.

Recently, a junior was writing about forcing sports teams to change what some perceived were racist logos. She argued this would be unnecessarily costly and inconvenient, would destroy honored traditions and history, and anyway, “racism” was not the intent and probably not even effect of these logos. She got through two drafts, and then the day before the next draft was due, the one that was supposed to be done other than minor word-smithing, she came to see me after class.

“I have a problem,” she said. “My thesis is wrong, or anyway I disagree with my thesis. I made a mistake and now I don’t know what to do.” She had, the night before, read an opinion piece about the damage racist stereotypes, including the images used as sports logos, do to young people living on reservations. Such images preserve and inflate prejudices and contribute to a sense of exclusion and hopelessness for children already living in poverty and on the margins of society. “I’ve seen that,” she said. “It’s true.” She had worked as a volunteer on a reservation.

“Change your thesis,” I said.

“But I don’t have time to start over.” She sounded surprisingly reasonable, given her sense of her dilemma. This had to feel like a disaster in her world and she was struggling to maintain her calm. She began to rattle off all the arguments that supported her original thesis.

“But one article convinced you that you were wrong.”

She nodded.

“So use everything you already have, and then show me how you were convinced. Concede everything—inconvenience, costs, fan outrage—and show me how there is something more important at stake. It convinced you; convince me as a reader.”

She did it too. Changed her hook, reversed her thesis, fiddled her body paragraphs, and concluded with a bang. Her argument was logical and emotional, reasonable and persuasive.

It can be done. We can change our minds.

Long ago, another junior showed up before class, the day before a draft of the same assignment was due. She was in tears. “They have to shoot them,” she wailed. “They have to do it as a symbol, and the sea lions aren’t even the real problem.” She had been writing a paper to argue against killing the sea lions that were eating salmon at the base of a dam spillway. She could prove that the sea lions were not the cause of dwindling wild salmon populations, but she also came to understand that the issue was not as simple as she’d hoped.

Another student, in his senior research paper (SRP) was struggling to prove his thesis, that welfare recipients should be drug tested as a condition of receiving public assistance. Why should people on public assistance be allowed to abused those funds? The trouble was that drug-testing had been tried and had proven that few people do abuse drugs and it cost a great deal more to test for drug abuse than was gained by cutting such people off from public services. Ten or twenty times more. There were also issues related to privacy and other forms of public assistance and contracts that he did not even want to address. He had not changed his world view, but he did change his point of view on this particular policy.

Students have proposed legislation that was eventually adopted (hat off to you, Russell for advocating pleasure boat pilot licenses), as well as the use of artificial turf, graphite bats, and golf carts during tournaments. I read about forty essays on allowing or banning abortion, most of them on both sides rather hysterical and unconvincing, before I banned the topic altogether. One senior cried so hard every time she tried to work on her pit bull essay that I chose to put that topic, too, on the banned list.

Religious arguments? Mostly banned. When a student used Thomas Jefferson’s faith as part of his proof that we are a Christian nation, I suggested he had better read the work of our third President. When his mother argued that no Christian ever owned slaves, I gave up trying to reason with her. In order to use a faith-based argument, you would first have to convert your audience. I was teaching in a public school.

I readily confessed the obvious. I have opinions. I am opinionated, but I am more interested in the writing. I have been convinced by students, and even when I am not convinced, my purpose is to evaluate their skill, not to make them agree with me. One of my all-time favorite essays, one I still recall vividly and with respect, was written to support preserving “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance. It was a hot topic one year because of a California lawsuit. Three students wrote supporting restoration of the original form of the Pledge. Two wrote supporting the current form. One of those last was brilliant. I still don’t say “under God” because my mother taught me not to, but I respect and honor that student’s essay. Her exploration of the history and implications of the Pledge were more complete than anyone else. She won me over.

It is one of the side gifts of teaching researched persuasive essays: I learn a lot. Sometimes I find I know random facts I cannot even explain. I have no reason for knowing about water rights and road-building, statistics about rape and fishing, the costs of medical insurance and how many student athletes are injured by sport. Part of scoring their papers involves reviewing their research, verifying their claims, checking for additional overlooked aspects of a problem. I read a great deal.

And as determined as students are to avoid interviews, talking to the right person will yield solid facts and details available no other way. Even so, the right questions of the right person are critical. A student asked an engineer working with nuclear power via email what health risks were associated with nuclear power? The man emailed back that he was “unaware of any health risks.” The student quoted this as proof that nuclear power was non-polluting and harmless. I had to break it to the student that “he may be joking.” An engineer would not be the right person to ask about health issues, and he needed to research nuclear accidents. Plus, you know, the long term effects of The Manhattan Project . . . “Look it up.”

I am a good researcher, and with the internet and experience evaluating sources, it is surprising even to me what I can find out if I look hard enough. The key is a willingness to look beyond what supports my prejudice.

Skepticism is a good thing, I have found. Finding multiple sources to confirm the same information is important. Avoiding the crazies. Doing the math. Recognizing that a minority opinion is not necessarily wrong. But it isn’t necessarily right either. What’s worth arguing is never simple.

In the face of personal experience, we might alter our perspective. In the face of evidence and logic, we must be willing to consider other perspectives.

 

READING OUT OF THE SHELL

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The student working on the research paper was well and truly stuck. He walked from the back table to where I sat at the front and asked me for help. “I am really far behind,” he said as if this were a permanent condition. He had the research. He had an idea of what he would say. He told me about what he knew and showed me the research. When I asked him questions about supporting information and about complications, about the opposition to him claims, he was able to answer.He had nothing written down. I helped him create a simple graphic of pros and cons. Then I gave him chocolate and 20 minutes and when I came back his page was completely blank. Time had passed and his fear stared him down.

Last year, when I suggested to a friend that reading for 10-15 minutes a day would result in reading a complete book every 3-4 weeks, she commented wryly, “You could say that about a lot of things.”

Well, yes, I could.

Let me put this another way. If you stayed off Facebook and your cell phone for 10-15 minutes a day, you would have time to exercise, write an actual letter, do some yoga, meditate, cook oatmeal for breakfast, make a salad . . . or read.

Making time is not so hard. It is impossible. Time is not created, it merely passes. How we pass with that time is choice. Recently I binged an Australian television series, walked the beach, played Scrabble with a friend, and laid awake worrying about family in the middle of the night. I wrote blog posts and helped a student with Geometry while volunteering in the local high school library and yesterday I helped a student with his Senior Research Paper. I made bread of bananas just in time, and each morning I read the news. I read novels and nonfiction. Just now there are two books on the shelf behind me.

I never begin a book I do not hope to love. Sometimes I am disappointed. More often I am amazed. Reading transports, instructs, teaches—if I am willing to allow that to happen, if I am willing to stretch and learn, to participate in a process. I am willing to invest the time to read.

A new post on the Brevity blog discusses time for change. The author and her husband have sold their house and are moving to a much smaller house in another state. It is a thoughtful essay about movement, both exterior movement and interior movement, about simplification and change, about making those choices to be somewhere and perhaps even someone new.

My sense is that significant change is almost entirely interior, that large or small house, New Mexico or Florida, and perhaps even near family or far away, we carry ourselves along as the primary baggage. Our capacity for becoming, for changing our lives, breaks down to our willingness to use time in new ways. That is less about external than internal geography.

No matter where we go, there we are.

In the mean time, I have avoided knitting and weaving and a story because I fear I will do projects badly. I have a plan but things are not looking promising. Last night while giving good advice and deadlines to a student, time passed. I experimented with point of view (tried third person thanks to Ursula) in fiction. He eventually had a list of paragraphs to be written and a start. That student had an introductory paragraph, I had 500 new words of a story. Like the student in the library, I had stared too long at my blank page, certain I was doomed.

I was not doomed, I was trying to wait out time. Time merely passes.

As he was leaving, the student said, “I have a month to finish it.” But he doesn’t have a month. He had that evening for an hour, and he needs to use an hour each day until he’s done. If he thinks of the month, he will wait to begin. He will slide along without progressing because there is a month, then three weeks, then less and less time left as he allows it to pass. Thinking like that will land him in the same spot he started yesterday evening, a blank page before him—the way we all end up staring at the same spot because we have an hour to start the work or a lifetime to begin a new life.

It is always there for the start.

 

FLYING ON

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When I prepared my application to the MFA (Masters of Fine Arts in fiction) at Pacific University, I needed a short story, a very brief literary analysis essay, and a personal statement. This was 2004. My mother had been dying for over two years, and my brother had declared me “the most disfunctional person” he knew.

I had recently unshouldered the yearbook and left the high school cross country team, but I was teaching high school English full time, and visiting my mother at least three times a day since her collapse in 2002. My husband, too, carried this burden, stopping on his way to work to get Mom up and make her coffee, at lunch, and again on his way home. I have my annotated calendars from those years. They do not list these and other daily tasks or fun events as they would have during my working-my-way-through-college years. They note my mother’s hospital visits.

There was a four day period that included my high school Open House and three visits to the ER. I never missed school. I trudged on.

It’s true that I felt disfunctional. I was overworked, but I did not have the leisure to alter my obligations. I loved my mother and she was too stubborn to change. I was only halfway through the most stressful and painful and emotionally destructive period of my life, but I was doing the job. All the jobs of teacher, wife, mother, and daughter.

In the midst of this chaos, halfway through what would be the five years of Mom’s dying, I began to carve out a new life for myself. Our older son had completed his first college degree and our younger son, despite taking time out for commercial and regional theater and a leading role in a film, was completing his degree. I was, I see now, adjusting to my life chaos, struggling to regain space for myself as an individual.

My application to an MFA program, then, was essentially a survival strategy. I have absolutely no memory of what I wrote in my personal statement. I wrote my literary analysis about how Edward P. Jones details events without reflection in The Known World. And then, because I had never written a story longer than ten pages, I set out to write a story of close to twenty.

“The Promised Hour” was based on a pair of a true events, one of personal experience in college when I believed a child was being molested and I confronted the man after the Seattle Police said they could do nothing. The other, more recent event, concerned a local doctor, a man I knew whose daughters had gone to my sons’ grade school before moving out of the area. After his wife left him, the doctor deliberately bankrupted his practice and then seized and murdered his children and killed himself.

These deaths were reported in the newspaper and had a devastating impact on my community, on the people who knew the girls, teachers who had cared for them in the classroom, neighbors and school friends. I kept trying to understand how that mother could ever recover.

That was the story I told, the story of a woman carving out existence after devastating loss. I told it badly, I was later told, but well enough that someone thought I might have potential as a writer of fiction.

The story itself went through endless revisions. I mostly stopped keeping track after the first forty or so rewrites. I moved events into and out of chronological order, added and deleted scenes and details. Removed characters and created them. The story has since been submitted to literary journals a few dozen times. Sometimes it is summarily dismissed. A few journals kept it for months past their normal review time. Some wrote back with admiration and perhaps even sincere regret, but always rejection.

Then, in 2016, I turned it into a novel, which allowed me room to explore this woman’s life after death, the years of clawing her way back to life. Only fourteen drafts of the novel, and I am done rewriting. That novel has done no better than the story in submission. Mostly, it does not get past the query letter.

Everybody’s Mother Dies, a literary novel of about 78k words, follows a woman’s odyssey through grief. 

Thena Justice was building a new life near Seattle after the death of her mother and breakup of a terrible marriage when her former husband murders the neighbor-babysitter and their daughter before committing suicide. Lost in grief, Thena first hides in a friend’s converted garage, then in a tiny cottage on the Pacific coast, thrashing her way through apathy, anger, and routine. Instead of returning to Puget Sound, she moves to the city where she was born, takes the bus to a retail job each day, and keeps her head down until a child crying in the night wakens whatever it is that gives existence meaning. 

One agent wrote:

“But no, I’m sorry.  . . . I read this query letter, it’s thoughtful and well-written. I don’t, however, have the mental energy to read a novel of this description, the world has become such a violent and angry place, I find myself unwilling to read fiction which deepens that impression. I’m sure there are others who will disagree with me and toward that end, best of luck.”

Though I rewrote the query, too, others do not disagree with her. Even the reader who read the entire work and liked it ultimately said no,

“I would love to take your manuscript on and work with you in placing it, but I’m afraid my current workload simply wouldn’t do it justice. This project requires care and attention – because it is no doubt a beautifully quiet yet impactful story – that I don’t feel I can give. I say this with a heavy heart.” 

Whatever care and attention it requires is beyond me. Though the bulk of my story is about recovery, not the devastating loss that demands it, I cannot help but respect these views. The world has become too angry and violent. And I have written my story badly.

Two agents and seven* small presses have sample pages, and then I will regretfully put this work aside permanently.

Sometimes the only way to survive is just to fly on.

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*I had to go look this up. Not four, seven.

 

MEETING & GREETING

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The man I love. Gary does not read my blog, so he will have no idea I posted this photograph. He is beautiful to my eyes. He won’t think so, but it’s true.

Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other. —Rainer Maria Rilke

When my husband and I take our morning walk, we wander apart as much as we walk side by side. “I am going up to check that,” Gary will say, gesturing at something pink higher upshore. Yesterday morning it was a used diaper in a pink plastic bag. If it’s still there tomorrow, he’ll pick it up.

That is not what we talked about for quite a while that morning. We talked about candor and honesty in our relationship. We reviewed our history. We acknowledged our shared trust. I have since been thinking about love and family.

My mother and I were always very close. She had mental health problems and sometimes that made for painful or awkward moments, but her mental health while I was a girl only hovered on the edge of my awareness. The therapy. Medication. Hospitalization. Her furious insistence on trivial matters was just the way it was. (She had to be the first one to open a magazine that came in the mail. Tape, glue, and scissors were hidden.) She was my mother.

I told my mother most everything. Yes, I was one of those girls. I never revealed the worst, but mostly I told. I told her about boys I liked at school. We talked and talked and talked. We had family discussions about people I knew from school. We argued about gun control and hunting and race relations. My parents used their new reel-to-reel tape recorder to record family conversations about boys I knew and other issues. Conversation and debate were valued in my home.

Yes, I understand now that some of this is odd.  (Weird?) It only occasionally seemed uncomfortable at the time, and I was not in a position to judge. This was my family. (Some things are actually bizarre—strange enough that I do not see how I could use these events in fiction, and I have cannibalized most of my life for my fiction.)

When I began dating my future husband in 1969, I did not discuss him with my parents. This was not a conscious choice, it was merely the result of my absolute conviction that Gary was better than I deserved or was ever likely to meet again, and my determination that our relationship would last. I was not going to muck it up. Gary went further in that he believed we were destined. So we worked at our relationship. We made some smart choices.

For one, we played no games. We were and remain entirely honest with one another. Do I tell him every thought that crosses my mind? No. But mostly he knows and I trust him with that knowing. He knows me and I know him equally well.

It was my mother who pointed out early on, “You never talk about Gary. I think you must not care much about him.” She smiled but was wary.

I did not rise to what I now recognize was bait. I was merely surprised at the time. I think I smiled and shrugged. Did I tell her she was wrong? Not that I recall. But since then, I have thought a lot about that comment from my mother. She was threatened, of course. Did she think he was a bad influence? Did she judge him too old for me? Was it really that she did not care for him or about his family? He was never going to make enough money to support me in the manner she hoped I would become accustomed? Probably bits of all those things.

I never discussed Gary with my parents. I never complained about him to them either. I had complaints, of course I did. I have had my grievances and so has he. We have quarreled. We talked about them. We were loud. We were apologetic. I considered leaving the relationship. I yelled and ranted and we hurt one another’s feelings. We apologized. We tried to do better. Sometimes we were successful. Mostly we said little or nothing to anyone else. This was between us.

Even now, when I recognize that someone is more forthcoming with a friend than a “partner”, I figure it’s a bad sign. I might joke about Gary’s “failings” but there is no running to others about them. I did not complain to my mother about Gary. I did not complain to my girlfriends about Gary. I never once complained to his parents about Gary. They would have been hurt, I think. They would not have been able to help. If I had a problem, I complained to Gary. We discussed our issues between us.

We shared the good stuff with others. We did not intend to portray a false impression of our relationship. Sure, we argued, we bickered, we hurt each other. But only we could address that between us. Our honesty was honestly shared.

Outside of Gary, I am inclined to lie about annoyances. It is unfortunate, perhaps even dishonest and unhelpful and mostly the result of how I was raised as a girl. Do you like turquoise clothing? No, but I will say yes. Is that okay with you? No, but sometimes I will not admit that. Did I hurt your feelings? Only to Gary will I immediately admit: Yes. Yes, you did.

I love him and respect him and we have both worked hard to build a relationship of trust and openness.

If that used diaper is still there tomorrow, Gary will take along an extra plastic bag to use to pick it up. Yes, he is a bit of a germ-phobe. He wakes up too early in the morning. He wants to be asleep by 8pm. He still listens sometimes to old rock-and-roll that I could never hear again and be satisfied.

These are not things I expect others to help me change. These are not even things I expect him to change. He has a list, I know, of my troubling habits. These are not character flaws. These are merely the ordinary wackiness any of us must learn to live with if we hope to have a family.

 

THE TRIAL

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“It’s not funny,” my husband said after staring at the cartoon above.

 

There is a nasty rumor I found on the Facebook page of someone trying to friend me. It claims Ford’s father was a CIA assassin. Seriously? This should be reported to Mulder immediately. And Scully.

Today, I wanted to turn away from all this ugliness. I wanted to weave and wind yarn, and begin knitting a cat sweater for my granddaughter.

Insane accusations will be given credence because we enjoy a good thriller. I do not think the past few days have been fun.

All I think is absolutely certain is that Kavanaugh drank way too much while a boy and a young man, and he failed to come to grips with that drinking in any useful way—he was still bragging about it in public a few years ago. On tape. So forgive me for not applauding his repeated remark in his well-rehearsed speech about liking beer. Did you notice he expected a laugh at the end of those lines the first time he delivered them? He waited for laughter. It was supposed to make him more human. “I like beer” that last word expanded to two syllables.

His own written notes in his yearbook, his own speeches, and the numerous recollections of people who knew him and the crowd he hung with confirm his drinking behavior. He admitted to falling asleep but not to passing out from drink? No, I do not believe him.

I found his testimony embarrassing, evasive, bombastic, arrogant, disrespectful, and often hysterical. I think people who fail to see this are not people I can respect.

I believe Ford. I believe the others who have come forward. I think he remembers enough to want to protect his behavior from public view.

Of those asking questions? I give a pass to Cory Booker who made me cry too. They rest can take their political messages elsewhere. They are beside the point.

The men in my family and in my life would not behave the way all these men behaved. They would not talk this way. They would not pass judgement before the trial. For the past two years I have listened to “locker room talk” that might be typical of vulgar 13 year old boys, but is not acceptable, is deplorable in a grown person.

Every woman I have talked to in the past few days has had her own stories. I have mine. The testimony Dr. Ford offered was entirely believable. She has nothing to gain and has already suffered death threats and attacks from Senators. He is in danger of losing the golden ring—the prize he has pursued all his life, from his tony prep school beginnings to the Appeal Court (a position, btw, which was not achieved without considerable controversy—it is a lie that his reputation was “without blemish”.)

On Facebook my posts since Thursday have been consistently supportive of Dr. Ford. They have been public. Why is this man at the other end of my county, who has reported over and over about Dr. Ford’s father’s supposed record, trying to friend me? We have many mutual friends, but he does not seem to be a former student. If he has looked at my page he knows I disagree with his own public hysterical claims.

How I see it: I think Brett Kavanaugh was brought up to be a good Catholic boy. I think he also felt enormous pressure to achieve—nothing wrong with that. By all reports he was generally quiet and respectful in his youth, when sober. But he is also, by many reports, anxious about belonging to a particular powerful group. He wanted to be cool. Very badly. He went where they went. He did what they did. He drank because they drank. I do not know if he lied about blacking out while drunk. No one I knew who drank during high school parties drank merely because they “liked beer”, they drank to get drunk, they drank to excess to falling down drunk. Often. I do not know if he lied about remembering his abusive behavior, in each case egged on by classmates he admired, whose position he envied. 

I see he is a judgmental man barely in control of his emotions. That alone should make him unfit to serve on the Supreme Court. In his hysterical claims during his opening statement and his ugly attitude toward those asking calm and reasonable questions, he reveals partisanship.

 

“Judge Kavanaugh’s troubling record on protecting the rights of the most vulnerable in our society convinces us that he is not suited for a lifetime appointment to the court,” [Southern Poverty Law] wrote. “Our concerns about him have been exacerbated by his seeming lack of candor during the confirmation process.”

What I think is that he remembers just a bit of his aggressive and out-of-character behavior while drinking. He remembers more than he wishes he did, and that is why he has been at such pains to publicly support women while also attacking our rights as human beings. He is an ambitious and aggressive man. That was clear from his opening address during testimony. I think he believes his most recent actions have made amends for those early transgressions. I think he believes he is among the entitled elite and no longer subject to question.

This last is clear to me, with all objectivity. He believes he is beyond the law.

We are on trial in America. We are on trial for our honor and willingness to do what is right, on trial for our capacity to reveal compassion.

Our rights as free human beings are on trial.

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VIOLATION

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The rape scene is explicit. I taught The Bluest Eye for 25 years. It is an extraordinary novel told from multiple perspectives. A little girl is ruined, driven insane and lost. The language is stunning, beautiful, masterful. I introduced the novel with an early event where a narrator describes being sick and feeling her mother’s anger. This anger is not toward her daughter, but toward the sickness, which the narrator eventually understands: “Love, thick and dark as Alaga syrup . . . welled up in that house”

The first pages tell the story. I always warned my students about the graphic description of the rapes so that they could skip those pages if they wished. Sometimes they asked to read another book, which I offered. I reread the novel every year with my students, but truthfully, I did not reread those pages myself every year. They are brilliant. Brutal paradox  is set up immediately in the book when Claudia McTeer describes how her vomit sticks to itself “so neat and nasty at the same time.” Ultimately about love, the eloquent revelation of pain never lets up. It is sharp and bloodying. Toni Morrison claims there is no understanding the why of her Pecola’s father violating his 11 year old child, of a community destroying her. We must be content with how.

Morrison accomplishes more than that, in my opinion. I always told students they might understand why Cholly Breedlove rapes his little girl, but that Morrison does not require us to forgive him. We are not asked to forgive him. We understand, but even so his actions are not forgivable.

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The rape scene before me was explicit. I stood up and walked out of the room. My thoughts fluttered. Why? Generally, I am a determined viewer. I do not watch porn, but I do not enjoy scenes of sex in books or movies. Nudity does not bother me a bit, but violence with sex makes me cringe. Rape drives me out of the theater, off the page.

For most of my adult life, I struggled to understand why I reacted so badly to rape scenes in films and avoided them in books. I was never raped. I was never violated. It made no sense that I had such a visceral reaction to violation in fiction.

I wondered if I had suffered some trauma I had repressed? I raked through my memories for truth. Nothing. All through this, I was aware of an ugly experience from the age of 7 or 8. I knew it had happened, but my understanding of that event minimalized my experience. It was not so bad, I would think for many years after. After all, much worse things happened to others. Much, much worse things happened all the time.

“It isn’t necessary to minimize one group’s pain and suffering in order to legitimize another’s,” a former student posted on my Facebook page.

I think enormous stigma and shame is what all survivors share. Insistence that some suffer more than others—while certainly true in a general way—serves to separate us and undermine our shared felt reaction.

There is a reason that even today only a tiny fraction of rape victims of either sex report the crime. Recently, I have posted elsewhere that I was molested on the playground by a group of boys who held me still. I never told anyone at the time and did not even admit it as an act of molestation to myself or characterize the experience as a sexual assault for almost 50 years.

As a young teenager, men exposed themselves to me and I did not tell.

The one time I tried as a college freshman to report an event, I was treated very poorly. And I knew this was my fault. I had no words to describe it as anything else by mine. I had been told in an infinite number of ways from the sex education I received at home and at school to the general attitude of my culture, that if I was victimized, if something “nasty” happened to me, I had done something to “ask for it.” My fault.

Are we not still in that terrible place?

Being loud, insistent, bombastic even, seems to convince some people. When it comes from a man. Tears. Denial. The silence or the soft (female) voice is refuted. Why not talk about it immediately? Why talk about it at all. What did you do?

Society weaves a thick blanket of blame and certainty over who I was then. That absolute judgement that what happened to me, if it happened at all, did not matter. That, I knew.

And now I unweave this memory. I examine it. I consider the glee in the faces of those boys. Those boys who never had paid me the slightest attention in the past, a wonder to me, approaching me with grins on their faces. I was small, small for my age, and youngest in the class.

I could not tell you the boys’ names or the date it happened. I could describe the light, their faces, the buzz cut of the boy who violated me. I know where I was standing on the playground. I remember the weeds I ran through after running from the blacktop playground. I was surprised to have escaped. My arms had been pinned, boys all around me. Perhaps my passivity, my well-trained smile, left them unprepared for my explosion. I escaped, but they had already gained what they wanted. Hadn’t they? They were done with me. They let me go.

It felt like escape at the time. I had not escaped. They were through.

The story of that day never left me. I simply ignored the warning.

If, as a victim, I could not admit even to myself the trauma of those boys surrounding me on the playground, holding on to my body, and one boy thrusting his hand into panties, my abrupt realization of what he was doing, and my scream and abrupt break. Running away. My tears. I told not a single soul. I did not, in 1960, even have words to describe what those boys and that boy had done. I pushed the memory away. I told myself it was a minor event.

So many people have suffered so much worse.

PARING DOWN and going out

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In our continuing effort to tidy the house, I am following an online series of articles on how to edit and tidy my home. Fifteen days of advice on how to eliminate clutter, and basically sort “stuff” into giveaway, toss, and keep-but-put-away.

The process began by suggesting that I have a “monster pile” someplace in my home. It was true. I had a pile that was a couple of feet high and three by six feet. By the time I’d cleared other areas of my house my monster had grown to four times that size. Even made tidy into straight lines and contained by boxes, it filled the center of my workspace. My online article told me to remove three items from the pile and find a place for them or scoot them out of the house. The next day it gave me a different area to tackle, but then reminded me to take three things out of the pile. That’s mostly how it’s been ever since.

A junk drawer is not necessary only in my kitchen, I was told, there should be one in each room. That made me laugh. I had already sorted out my sewing “junk drawer” but kept the little plastic bin of miscellaneous stuff that needed to be somewhere but did not belong in the baskets with thread, the drawer with scissors, or any other particular place. I have an orderly junk drawer in my kitchen and one in the bathroom vanity. The dressing table in my bedroom contains scarves and miscellaneous “junk” too. All this has been sorted recently, but each day I try to turn the home-tidying advice into practice.

Yesterday, I was told to edit my freezer, fridge, and pantry with specific attention to outdated items or foods I had tried but did not like. While I was upstairs reading these instructions on my computer, my husband was downstairs actually emptying one shelf at a time in—you guessed it—the freezer, fridge, and pantry. He sorted. That afternoon I went through his piles as a second reviewer. Trash, giveaway, and keep. He cleaned the shelves too. The resulting order went well beyond what had been suggested, and even though I didn’t do most of the work, I felt accomplished!

I have been advised to spend a limited time sorting one specific area each day. I did the entire linen closet. I was advised to remove three items from the “monster pile” and sometimes I eliminated an entire cardboard box from the room.

I spent some extra time with my monster pile after dinner, choosing not three items but a mini-pile or box to sort, several days in a row, while the television played something in English where I did not have to read subtitles. My monster is mostly gone, though it seems to be rebuilding.

However, the attic is completely empty. I still have space on my book shelves. (I ruthlessly sorted books again this summer, but there are still eleven bookcases upstairs and more than that downstairs.) We took a small painting to be framed in a wooden frame that came out of the attic. On Friday we hope to take a tiny print up to be placed in another frame from the attic. I gently oiled, sanded, and waxed the beautiful walnut veneer.

Over the past summer, I painted the entire upstairs, ceiling included.

There is still work to be done. Next summer we need to move all the furniture out of the living and dining rooms and varnish the floors. The kitchen, too. The entry and hall floors have a different finish on them and I plan to paint over it. I suspect I missed the weather window for floor paint, so that will likely wait till next year. I sorted through everything in the lower half of my grandmother’s secretary, but there is still the top half.

The Christmas ornaments are at home in a downstairs closet. I have completed most of my Christmas shopping. There is paper and tissue and green velvet ribbon waiting for me to wrap.

I have put a warp on my loom for a pair of scarves and begun knitting a third. These are straight forward, simple projects I can do without thinking much. But I also have less than five weeks to knit my granddaughter a sweater with a cat on it for her birthday.

My laptop is getting a little creaky, but I have been putting off buying a new one. This morning it abruptly turned itself off, screen went black. Later it was fine. Not a very good sign, though. My older son told me before I replaced my last one (after nine years) that laptops have a half-life of about 18 months. The one I am using now is going on six years and unlikely to last much longer, I fear. I want a lighter laptop. I enjoy the screen on my 15″ MacBookPro, but it weighs four and a half pounds. How about two pounds? I am thinking a tiny screen and two pounds, but I have a couple of bills to pay first. In the mean time, I am backing things up.

I made a ginger plumcake the day before yesterday, which we had for breakfast and then broccoli for lunch.

It is also Wednesday and I am sitting in the high school library for Open Library. Three sophomores were working on Chemistry lab write-ups, but they’ve left. Last week I helped a freshman with his Geometry. I’m not sure he finally had the correct answer to the last problem. He’d done it wrong the first time and I did my best to steer him in the right direction. Next week I am promised a few frantic juniors working on the infamous Reading for Writers. I would rather have customers than not.

I have committed to NaNoWriMo this year, and begun notes on an SF novel. That cat sweater has to be done. Maybe that is something I should start tomorrow?

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HONORING ERROR

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Several dozen brown pelicans stopped by on their way south last week. A smaller group or 13 or 14 has arrived in the summer during recent years and generally stayed into the fall. 

When I was in high school, we told a joke: This life is a test. It is only a test. Had this been an actual life you would have been told where to go and what to do. 

We can choose what we do with ourselves and we can choose to seek meaning. But we must also accept that not everything that happens is within our control. Some things just happen.

There is a story about a man who was living a good life. He was thoughtful and kind, virtuous and loving. But then things go wrong for him. His family dies, his occupation dissolves, the very earth itself seems to rise up and spit in his cup.

“What have I done wrong to deserve this?” he begs the universe. He examines his behavior, seeking an explanation for his abrupt change of fortune. Has he erred without knowing? Has he committed some sin and failed to notice. Whom has he offended?

His friends ask him too: “Oh, man, what did you do?”

“Nothing!” the poor man cries. He reviews his own life for some explanation of his punishment and can find no answer.

After a lot of begging and eventual anger he understands that people should know better than to demand an explanation. There is none.

Bad things happen to people. Job, the man in the story, had more than his share of hardship arrive all at once. At one point all his family and wealth are gone, and he lies on a heap of manure, his body covered in sores. Job certainly experiences more than his share of bad stuff. He is warned not to look for a reason. He is assured that if there is a reason behind his suffering, he will never understand it. He shouldn’t even try.

This is life sometimes. Terrible things happen. Sometimes we bring that bad stuff right to our own door. Other times, it’s no one’s fault and there is no one to blame and nothing to be done with the sorrow and grief that come our way. 

We can only go on.

Success is like this too. Good and ill befall each of us. Some of our fortune we worked hard to earn—by kindly, wise choices or skillful ones. We learn from mistakes, they say, or we do not.

Eventually we are old with have more years to look back on than we can imagine right now, and like all old people who are worth anything at all, we will have regrets. We will look back at mistakes and wish we could rewind and repair them. We want to think we are wiser, perhaps, than when we were young. All those years of hard work and love and loss and suffering and hope. Surely those experiences made us better people.

Maybe it will even be true.

We will know more. Maybe we will read too many books. Maybe we will attend college and develop a passion for anthropology or linguistics or software engineering or Renaissance poetry. Stranger things have happened. A work-study job in a hospital will take us through nursing school instead of electric engineering. A terrible accident will cripple your future and suddenly instead of working as a personal trainer, we work in a London nonprofit aiding children of war torn nations. We thought we would study history and find ourselves doing pure math. We thought we wanted to live in the SW and find ourselves in Manhattan. Our life course will probably change and those experiences will change us. Some of our life experiences will take us wholly by surprise.

But who we are is who we are. We will not begin tomorrow or sixty years from now. Real life isn’t something that begins later, when we have more time; it’s something we’ve been living all along.

What’s true is that every choice we make, moment to moment, on the hardest days: on the day we think we are too tired to get up in the middle of the night to check the baby; on the afternoon we snarl at the Safeway cashier and realize too late that he’s doing the best he can; on the days we cheat and tell ourselves it doesn’t count because we are not that kind of person. Yes, we are. That’s who we are. At our best and our worst, often trying hard to do what should be done and sometimes failing. We are the person who let the baby cry for half an hour, the one who yelled at the mentally disabled clerk, the one who cheated. That is us.

But we are more. We are the same person who helped the woman with the screaming toddler get her groceries into the back of her car, the same one who smiled at our own little boy’s hideous handmade birthday gift, the same person who took an extra breath and admitted we didn’t get the work done on time, but tomorrow we’ll do better. And then tomorrow we do better. That is us too. 

I’m not saying there are two kinds of people in the world. I’m saying there are a lot of situations, and all of us, every single one of us with an ounce of introspection will have good and bad moments. Every single one of us will have to face terrible things. Sometimes we will not do our best. Sometimes we will have to forgive our own failures and mistakes and go on hoping to do better next time. If you think that’s easy, think again. 

Don’t pretend you haven’t made mistakes, but don’t forget that you need to forgive yourself for them. And when you do well, when you do something kind and generous and honest and open-hearted, notice that too. How you get to that place where you can stop blaming and starting forgiving—that’s called growing up, taking responsibility. It’s called being good. 

You need to go. You are far from the end of your journey.

This isn’t a test. It was never a test. This is your life, the only one you get. You have been told to go on and you have been told to do the best you can. It’s your life. Make good use of it.

People have been telling me lately that I look tired. Oh yes, it’s also how I feel. So very tired. Not enough sleep. Lying awake worrying. Unable to run off my stress. 

But here’s the other side of a hard day several years ago: The cat was asleep at my knees. Ruby had “called” twice to talk to her grandpa. Three students who worked very hard to get there will attend the colleges of their choice thanks to a Gates and two Fords. It was Saturday of a long weekend, and though I had two boxes of essays to review, that was the good news. I had a lot of students who had done their job that week. Some of them still had long labor before them, but they seemed willing to do it. I was thankful for their hard work. 

I am thankful for my own hard work—something I could not have said when I was seventeen and about to start college. I am thankful for my family, friends, and the people I work with. We all wish we could do more or have more at times, but it’s good to recognize what we already have, what we have survived and earned, that we have stumbled and stood back up, and that there are places we still want to go.

I understand the limits of my power. I no longer expect or even desire wealth. I try to make a difference, a positive difference in the lives of people I know. I have my regrets, but I accept my disappointments and I forgive my own failures. It’s never too late to do the right thing next time. I just have to see, really see what is here before me right now. I have to look ahead to the path I intend to follow. And then…

I walk on.

THE WORDS I WANT

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Most days I find glass during my walk on the beach, but I always find agates. Rarely I will pick up a feather. I lean down slowly, sliding my hand down my thigh, and even so my head throbs when I pluck a treasure from the sand.

Ten days ago I suffered a concussion in a fall that threw me hard on my back. Two days ago I sat on the edge of a too-soft chair, leaning forward while I played Scrabble with a friend for an hour. That has my back acting up.My head hurts when I wake. I drink plenty of water. Today I will try to stay off my feet and off the computer, but here I am typing.

Sometimes you just do what you want, what you might even pretend you must do. I could be knitting now or winding a warp. I could be watching television or reading. There are other satisfying, creative outlets. None of them reward me as writing does.

I have completed many stories, I could not even guess how many. Novels, and collections of writings, children’s stories and a novel probably suitable as YA, craft essays and creative nonfiction. Poems.

On the other hand. (She had warts.)

On the other hand, writing troubles me. Writing takes longer than anything else I do, longer than baking, knitting, piecing a quilt top, planning, teaching, a long walk on the beach. Reading a book. It is less certain. There is no absolute I-am-done point with writing. There is no clear reward, in most cases there is no reward at all. Few people ever see my knitting, weaving, and few eat my baking. Fewer read my words.

The novel that I have been sending out since last winter has been rejected 68 times. So far. Is that enough? Am I done? May I set this writing aside and move on? Should I?

But still, it is the words I want.