Life Is Not Fair

Writing is difficult this week. A dear family member is going through a rough patch, and it is hard to concentrate in between prayers and telling myself that since I can’t do anything, I shall try to lovingly detach.

Yeah. That’s only the hardest thing in the world, as all you loving detachers know.

Life is unfair. Have you noticed?

It does not matter how well you behave, or if you follow what you believe is the one true faith to the letter, or if you brush and floss every day.

Life has an amoral insouciance - “light hearted unconcern” according to my Webster’s Ninth Collegiate, which in a moment of the dyslexic mischief that seems to be happening more and more as I age I read as a “light hearted unicorn.” Now we’re talking. Light hearted unicorns! Bring on the elves and fairies!

Wait. Where was I?

Oh, yes. Life’s amoral insouciance.

Everything does not happen for a reason.

If God has a plan, I am not in on it, because it seems to me that most of what happens around here is pretty random.

I thought about this randomness a lot during the AIDS years, in the 80s and early 90s. The HIV virus has no morality – it is a virus that, like the boll weevil, is looking for a home. In those days when it found a home, it killed its host. It still does, if the infected person is not treated with the miracle drugs that prolong people’s lives.

By the mid-90s when those miracle drugs began to arrive, and people facing death sentences began to realize that they were not going to die so soon after all, it was like the world turned upside down. Now instead of dying from the illnesses and infections they couldn’t fight because they had autoimmune deficiency syndrome – AIDS – they were people living with HIV.

Don’t kid yourself. AIDS is not gone, even if its news cycle is. The Center for Disease Control’s current statistics are not comforting. By their reckoning, 38,739 people were diagnosed as being infected with HIV in the United States in 2017. At the end of 2015, about 1.1 million people in the United States had HIV, and about 15 percent of those people did not know they were infected. Around the world about 36.9 million people were living with HIV in 2017, but only 21.7 million of them were receiving medicines to treat it. Close to a million people die of AIDS related illnesses every year. We don’t run around squawking about it like hysterical chickens anymore. We save that for ebola.

But I think of all the people who wasted away and suffered and died before those drugs came along, including three guys I knew in high school. Cut down in their youth. That was so unfair.

The other side of the unfairness is that things are sometimes exceptionally and undeservedly great.

The day my second son was born I felt like the wealthiest person in the world. I could not imagine wanting for anything more.

Granted, I was also too stupefied by hormones to move. In caveman days I would have been easy fodder for the first passing panther, but that is idle speculation. It was 1985, I was at Swedish Hospital, and there was nary a panther prowling the halls. The worst thing that happened that day was missing the ferry we tried to catch home, which we thought was appropriate for an island child starting life.

I inherited some money once from an aunt and uncle who never had children. I did nothing to earn or deserve that windfall. I just happened to be born the niece of my aunt and uncle. Was that fair? I don’t think so, but we were poor, so we whooped and cheered and accepted our good fortune.

I invested my inheritance and drew on it for the next few years to, as Rick said, cling to the soft white underbelly of the middle class. The kids got to have a comfortable childhood, and we got to travel, just a little. It was nice, while it lasted.

Except for my constant worry that I’d lose it, so it was kind of a relief when it was all gone. I don’t think I was cut out to have money.

I was blessed in many other ways in this life. Rick loved me, and I loved him, and we had more than thirty-four years together. That was more than I expected to have in life.

I need to get back to my prayers for my dear one. Blessings to you all. May life be unfair to you in good ways!

Post Script: the rough patch has passed, and my dear one is okay for the time being. Not that I'll stop praying. Don't believe in praying? Just think of it as deeply and faithfully and constantly wishing all the best for someone you love, with all your heart and mind and soul. I believe it tips the balance of the universe.

The Accidental Vegetarian

A few months ago the lovely young woman who was renting my upstairs loft asked me if I was a vegetarian. She had seen no meat in my refrigerator, and she was afraid she might offend me if she brought home any animal products.

I laughed.

No, I told her. I can’t afford to buy meat, that’s all. I’m an accidental vegetarian, and even if I was an intentional vegetarian, I don’t think I’d judge the eating habits of a lodger.

I try to be non-judgmental, although you never know.

Yesterday my son Drew was telling me about the Evertune guitar bridge, which keeps an electric guitar in tune for months.

I had a primitive visceral reaction: This is magic! I do not understand it! I fear it! We must burn somebody!

It seemed outside the realm of reason that you would not have to tune your guitar for months. Looked up the Evertune online and read an explanation of the engineering and physics of the machine. It is awfully clever, and not a reason to burn anyone.

Whew. Education to the rescue.

So I believe I would not judge how someone ate. Now, if someone was holier-than-thou about their diet or started giving me, “I’m only trying to help you,” suggestions, then yeah - judgment.

Many years ago, when I was young and could handle a little vitamin and mineral deprivation, I was an intentional vegetarian for a few months.

I cooked out of “Diet for a Small Planet,” a little book that talked about combining your foods so you got complete proteins, and “Ten Talents,” the official cookbook of the Seventh Day Adventists, who promote a plant-based diet, but don’t insist on it.

The Small Planet recipes tended to taste alike, so, boring.

The Ten Talents recipes were labor intensive and came with a lot of preaching about right living. Seventh Day Adventists with whom I went to elementary school and their parents looked normal, but the front cover of Ten Talents featured a woman who could step right into a wagon train. Her clothing, her hair, her smile, her whole demeanor, looked 19th century Stepford wife to me.

But the recipes were time-tested. There is a recipe for cashew gravy in that book that I have made several times over the years.

Most people become vegetarian intentionally. They make their choice for various reasons.

Perhaps they realize how many resources go into producing a pound of beef and wish to eat in a way that is more environmentally sound.

Perhaps they love animals and have heard of or have seen the squalid conditions in which corporate meat and dairy peddlers house their pigs, chickens, and cattle. They have seen how animal flesh is processed, and they like it not.

Some, like the Seventh Day Adventists, who strive to be healthy so they can better serve God, are vegetarian for reasons of a belief system.

Some people eat a vegetarian diet to lose weight.

Some people can’t afford meat.

Some vegetarians say they will not eat anything with a face. It would be cruel to serve them a vegan pancake with a face drawn on it in syrup, but that is what I thought of right away because I am twisted.

Historically we humans are omnivores. We hunted and gathered, and we ate what we could, when we could. The idea was to survive. Having access to enough food to survive and thrive on a chosen diet is a luxury. If you have enough food security to make the choice to be a carnivore or vegetarian or vegan, wow, you are living, forgive me, high on the hog.

Which reminds me:

Photo by Phil Hearing on Unsplash

When my husband Rick was a boy his Uncle Dean worked in a meat processing plant in Iowa. Dean took Rick on a tour of the facility once. Rick said there was a chute that live pigs went down, into a little shed, and they came out the other side on a conveyor belt, dead.

That day one pig went down, and whatever the killing process was, it didn’t quite work on him. He came out of the shed alive, and boy, was he mad. He jumped off the conveyor belt and ran amok through the plant.

Took them a while to chase him down and, alas, send him to the same fate as his brothers and sisters.

I have always felt admiration for that pig. Up the revolution! He was doomed, but he let them know how he felt, how they all would feel if they had the chance. You go, pig. Rage, rage, rage against the dying of the light!

That pig’s story, right there, is a good argument for being a vegetarian.

Oh, Crap, Grief Again

Face mugs by Rick's old friends Jay Trenchard and Susi Arrow. \
When I first met him he had one that looked exactly like him,
 and I thought it was a coincidence, but realized later that it wasn't.
Susi gets a mention in this essay.  

In my last column I invited you to google Micah 6:8 from the Hebrew scriptures. Just in case you didn’t, here it is:

“He has told you, O mortal, what is good;

And what does the Lord require of you

But to do justice, and to love kindness,

And to walk humbly with your God?”

Micah 6:8 – The New Oxford Annotated Bible

In other news, it is the end of 2018. Some of us are still standing. Some have shuffled off the mortal coil, and we miss them.

I sent out some greeting cards this year, as well as some email greetings. Usually these are cheerful catch ups with people, but this year I put my foot in it.

I wrote a holiday email to a high school friend of Rick's, wishing the friend and his wife a good holiday together. They married six or seven years ago, a second late in life marriage for both. He wrote back to tell me he had some hard news – his wife died suddenly and unexpectedly last July, of a fast-moving infection. Two days in the ICU, and blink. Damn it. And I had chirped on so merrily in my note, wishing them a happy holiday together.

I wrote back expressing my condolences.

Another high school friend of Rick's, Susi, called to touch base. She lost her mother this year. She was close to her mother, and her mother's death is hitting her hard, so we talked about grief and how it takes you.

  What I have learned about grief is that while it is a universal experience, and you can talk about your common experiences with other people, everyone experiences it uniquely. Some people start sobbing immediately. When Rick died I sat here staring at the trees, numb with shock, for about four and a half months, and then I started going to pieces, and yes, sobbing, and that went on for a long time. Sometimes I wished I could go back to the numbness. Sometimes I still wish that.

Sometimes people new to grief ask, how long does the initial intense pain go on? I can’t tell you. It will lessen. It takes “tincture of time.”

Those of us who have been at this a while laugh at the stages of grief. You go through all of them, all the time. This is not a program where you get to graduate and receive a certificate at the end.

You never get over grief. This huge event, the loss of someone you loved, becomes part of who you are, and part of your understanding of what the world is and your place in the world. It changes you and everything else, and it gives you terrific compassion for people experiencing grief.

Rick will be gone five years on December 29th. This year I feel like I have built a new life as a single person. Rick is an integrated part of me. After all, we knew each other for forty years, and were together for 36 years. When you are with a person that long, you kind of know how they would respond or what they would say about things.

I try to remember the guy he was, and not make him into the guy I might wish he was in memory. He was a human being and he was not a paragon or a saint. He was a wonderful singer and guitar player, a cartoonist, an Army brat, a Vietnam vet, a water worker, a workaholic, an introvert who wanted to be left alone.

When my mother came to visit she kept asking, “Where’s Rick?” He was out on the porch smoking a cigarette or a pipe, usually.

He had a ribald sense of humor. He said he could never be a successful cartoonist because his sense of humor was too obscene. I only agreed with him on one cartoon he drew. No, I’m not telling you what it was.

Living together was not always easy. I think a lot of married people can relate. Marriage! A blessing and an aggravation, as another long-time married friend and I were saying to each other the other day.

I’m not here to lie to you. Much.

I have overbooked myself, so I’m trying to get a little more solitude at home now. This after decades of people, even a psychic, who told me his spirit guides were quite emphatic about this, telling me to get out of the house more. It’s difficult to find a balance, but I’m trying. My plan at present is to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with my God, to the best of my ability.

“Ah, but a woman’s reach should exceed her grasp, Or what's a heaven for?” – Robert Browning. Paraphrased.

Post Script, January 7, 2019: The fifth anniversary of Rick's passing was a rough one. I found myself re-living the circumstances of his death. I was there, in the hospital again, feeling the feelings again.
  Quite frankly, it blew, but I am recovering now. I never know how an anniversary will take me - easy or hard, or something in between. That old rascal Grief always has a surprise up its sleeve.

You Never Know

This week the local water system sprung a leak. It was raining so steadily that it took five days to find and fix the leak, and we were on water hours for those five days. We who are used to potable water from the tap on demand find that having the water shut off is stressful.

This is what is called a “first world problem.”

Now, my kitchen faucet has been dripping for months and I knew it would only get worse. It finally reached the point of not turning off at all, no matter how I tweaked the handle. So I got under the kitchen sink and turned off the water there. Voila, no more leak. When I needed water, I walked to the bathroom, filled a container, and carried it back to the kitchen. When the water was on.

Then my car’s seat belt got stuck tight. Turned out that little threads that had frayed on one edge of the belt got caught in the works, so not a hard fix. The car is in its eighteenth year of service and still runs great, so I can’t complain, even if it is held together with duct tape and has several battle scars, mostly because Fiberglas tends to explode when subjected to the least pressure, such as backing into the bumper of a Rover Discovery in a parking lot. Ahem.

Back to water issues. As I put some soup on the stove one night, a stream of water came trickling from the cabinet above the stove.

A quick look showed that the cabinet was flooded, and there was a leak in the flashing around the range hood’s stack. I emptied the cabinet and threw some towels up there to soak up water. Add that to the fix-it list.

The romance of home ownership wore off years ago. I live in fear that the hot water heater is going to conk out, or some other crisis will come up which will require the swift application of big money for parts and labor. That’s home ownership: maintenance and upkeep.

Cars need that, too. There used to be more romance to automobile maintenance and upkeep. When I was a young sprat I could jack up my ’58 Chevy and change the oil, and I knew how to get the linkage loose when it locked up.

Now, I open the hood of my Honda, and if I have an audience I say, “Oh, I see the problem. They put the engine in sideways.” I am the only person in the entire world who thinks this is funny.

I know how to check the oil, how to add windshield wiper fluid to the reservoir, how to jump start the car, and how to fill ‘er up, but mostly my car is a mystery to me, even though we have been together for almost eighteen years and over 170,000 miles. Cars are not simple anymore.

So both the house and the car could use some tender loving care, and, oh yeah, the yard is being taken over by blackberries.

But I’ll say this for all these little problems - they distract me from what I consider bigger problems and concerns, such as climate change; the plight of survivors and victims of wildfires, hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes, tsunamis, and other natural disasters; the dangers and hardships faced by refugees and the homeless; the fact that our country has gone seriously awry. Human beings’ inhumanity to other human beings. You know. That stuff. That gets me down sometimes.

I was reading the first three chapters of the book of Micah in the Hebrew scriptures this morning, and Micah was railing against human beings behaving as badly then, in the 8th century BCE, as they do now, terrorizing the peaceful and innocent in the name of acquiring money and power.

This tells me that we are a consistent species. This consistency does not comfort me.

Micah gets more encouraging after chapter three, and in chapter six, verse eight, lays down a simple guide for how to live. You can google it and compare translations. (Micah 6:8, for you non-Bible types)

Leaks can be fixed, faucets replaced, and stuck seatbelts unstuck. These are practical little problems. Big stuff – the world, the country, the climate, all of us broken people – no easy fixes.

I turned the water on to the kitchen sink yesterday so I could wash dishes. When the dishpan was full, and I turned off the faucet, it did not leak. Not one drop. It continues dry this morning. I figure this is temporary, but it reminds me: you never know.

It is wise not to get too attached to what you think you know.

Not an original opinion of mine, but, just saying.

Common Ground

Watching the news coverage of the fires in California the last few days it occurred to me that no firefighter, no police officer, no volunteer, no regular Joe or Joleen, stopped to ask anyone whose life they were saving if they were a Republican or a Democrat, if they were in the country legally or illegally, if they were Christian, or if they were politically correct.

People and animals have died. Many people are listed as missing, and the sad sense that they are missing because they are dead is becoming stronger.

Still, people hope and pray for miracles, and for the survivors, and their families and friends, and for animals both domestic and wild. Still we donate* to help survivors begin to recover. Some survivors do not have so much as a change of underwear.

Is this what it takes to bring people together in their humanity? The common ground of crisis?

Recently an essay by a man named Evan Sayet came across my computer screen. He said the Democrats have been conducting a war against Republicans the last fifty years, while the Republicans have behaved with nothing but dignity, propriety, and collegiality.

How true. I choke up when I think of how fairly and respectfully the Republicans treated Democratic presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and how Republicans have always been ready and willing to seek bipartisan solutions in Congress.

Right.

I went to Mr. Sayet’s web site. He labels himself a “conservative comedian.” I watched a video of one of his routines. He leads off by saying that liberals are “the stupidest of the stupid.” His audience ate it up, laughing loudly.

Ouch. Not much common ground there.

He also posits in a piece on his website that Jews vote Democrat because “they feel safer in a party that is devoid of any values or convictions.” Republicans have Christian values, he says, so Jews fear them.

Ouch, again. The Democrats I know have solid values and convictions. Some are Christians, some agnostics, some atheists, some Muslim, some Buddhist, some Hindu, some Sikh, some Wiccan, some none of the above, and they tend to respect one another’s differences.

No common ground there.

I once knew a man from the Netherlands who is deceased now. During World War II he was sent by the Germans to a labor camp in Poland. He was a teenager then and managed to survive the war. He told me that the Germans had Gott mit uns (God with us) on their belt buckles and he snorted in derision. So much for Christian values.

(The British liked to say, "Yeah, we got mittens, too.")

Back to the conservative comedian - Sayet states that Saul Alinsky’s book, “Rules for Radicals,” has been the Democrats’ handbook for their war on Republicans. Saul Alinsky (1909-1972) was recognized as a gifted organizer by people on all parts of the political spectrum. Alinsky was an agnostic, and dedicated his book to Lucifer, whom he saw as the first radical to rise up against the boss for those who had no control.

Sayet fails to mention that Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” was also the handbook for the Tea Party and still is the handbook for the Republican party.

When I try to acquire a rational understanding of right wing beliefs, I find I acquire cognitive dissonance.

There is an easy and obvious explanation for some people’s support of the current administration: their portfolios are growing. For people who are not wealthy, their beliefs seem based in fear of the other: the stupidest of the stupid, people they believe have no Christian values or convictions, foreigners, the other than white.

Now, I feel it is imperative that we find some common ground and begin to pull together rather than hating and dehumanizing one another, but how do you find common ground with people who base their own self-worth on the belief that you are not a human being?

When the fire, tornado, earthquake, tsunami, or hurricane comes, for most people all prejudices go up in smoke. You want someone to rescue you and you don’t care who; or, you are committed to rescuing people, unconditionally.

A few people remain intransigent, but almost all people step up when the need arises. We find common ground.

It is a shame that it takes a crisis to do that. Some of us believe these hurricanes and fires are the vanguard of climate change. Will that ongoing crisis shake some sense into us? I hope and pray. Of course many conservatives believe that climate change is a hoax.

In case you are wondering if a wildfire can happen on Vashon Island – yes, it can. In 1893 a fire burned a large portion of what we now call the Island Center Forest.

*If you wish to help California fire survivors, google “How to help California wildfire victims,” and “How to help animals California fires.” You will see options galore.

Uncivil War

By the time this is published, the election will be over, and there will be rejoicing and dancing in the streets, and weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth, depending on what your hopes were.

In the last couple of weeks, people were gunned down in parking lots and in synagogues. Bombs were sent through the mail, though they were detected and stopped before they reached their intended targets.

Are we descending into another civil war?

May I recount another time, fifty years ago, when we were at war with ourselves? I was so young the events did not seem unusual.

Assassinations: President Kennedy, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert Kennedy. Horrible, traumatic for the whole country – but in those years, assassinations became normal.

Civil rights marchers were beaten with truncheons and blown away with fire hoses, having dogs set on them, and being tear gassed. Black churches were firebombed, children killed, civil rights workers murdered. We saw these things every night on the news.

The Black Panther Party was founded in Oakland, California, in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale to form armed citizens’ patrols to police the Oakland police. They wore berets and leather jackets and carried rifles. Many of the Black Panthers were killed in police shootouts.

Women did most of the Black Panther party’s organization and administration: Elaine Brown, who became the leader of the Black Panthers, Kathleen Cleaver, Angela Davis, Erika Huggins.

 The Nation of Islam, led by Elijah Muhammad, proclaimed that all white people were devils. Black men stood tall in their dark suits with white shirts and red bow ties. Black women were robed in head-to-toe outfits, sometimes white, sometimes rainbow-hued. Malcolm X rose from their ranks, and when he decided the Nation was too extreme and got out, they assassinated him.

Then there were the Weathermen, a splinter group of white radicals who believed that peaceful means got no results.

In March 1970, three Weathermen who were building bombs in the basement of a Manhattan townhouse died when one of the bombs went off. In June, the remaining Weathermen bombed the New York City police headquarters. In July when a grand jury indicted thirteen of their members for conspiring to engage in acts of terrorism, they bombed a bank in retaliation. After that the Weathermen went into hiding and became the Weather Underground.

On April 8, 1970, then California Governor Ronald Reagan, who had protests and strikes on almost every college and university campus in the state system, suggested a solution: “If it takes a bloodbath to end it, let’s get it over with, no more appeasement.”

A few weeks later Governor James Rhodes of Ohio called in the National Guard to quell student unrest on campus at Kent State, and on May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard opened fire on anti-war protesters at Kent State. Four people were killed, and nine wounded.

My friends, these are but a few examples of Americans turning on Americans with violence. They occurred in the United States in the sixties and seventies. I didn’t get to the 1967 Detroit riots, which lasted five days, or the Democratic convention riots in Chicago in the summer of 1968. It was determined afterward that the police had rioted. I have hardly brushed the anti-Vietnam war movement and have barely mentioned events on the West Coast.

This country was founded on an uneasy alliance between slaveholders and non-slaveholders who needed one another to make a nation strong enough to defeat and break free from England. We’ve been shooting at each other ever since. From 1861 to 1865 we had a declared Civil War.

Some people say that Robert E. Lee may have surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, but our differences have never been settled. We’re still fighting, and the antagonism between different groups now feels rawer and less susceptible to reason than any of us can remember. So, we ask, are we heading for another civil war? And if we are, where would the boundaries be drawn? I read somewhere the other day that at least one white supremacist group had the states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming staked out to make up their all white homeland.

So I’ll say that I certainly hope we don’t have a declared civil war. We are already uncivil enough to each other.

No matter how the mid-term elections have gone, our differences remain, and there are plenty of weasels out there willing to exploit those differences. We need to learn how to live with our differences. We need to be smarter than the weasels.

Life is so short. Keep breathing, keep loving, keep encouraging and hugging one another. We all need those things.

Blessings to you all.

Post from Syria

A friend who works with refugees in Syria wrote recently that seven hundred refugees had been abducted by ISIL to be used as human shields as ISIL flees Assad’s forces.

Last week he wrote:

“Dearest friends.....

“This is my 7th attempt to make this post. My first 6 attempts took me to a screen that wanted me to prove that I am not a "robot." I followed the given instructions each time to no avail. All that I know to do now is to change some key words in the post. I have some of the smartest friends on the planet and I am certain that you will be able to read between the lines...

“I want to be as clear as I possibly can about the abductees that a certain well known "state" in this part of the world have captured. I talked about this briefly on my post of -- October. Many of the abductees are internally displaced families. The aforementioned "state" went into an encampment for internally displaced citizens who were forced to flee their homes due to this war. We've been advised that the aforementioned "state" is currently actively seeking more refugees to abduct. This act took place in broad daylight within seeing distance of deployed military members from the country that *we* live in while no action was taken to thwart this horrible crime against humanity. Not one damn thing. Ask yourself why that would be. No matter where you stand politically, in your heart you know the answer to that query........

“We've been advised to relocate yet again. This will be the 4th time that we've had to completely pull up stakes and move the war weary internally displaced people that we reside among. I want for you all to know that our kids have been in hiding since Monday. There's no other choice on the matter right now. We're old men but these children are the future here. The only difference in all of these good people and anyone reading this is geography. That's all. They want the same things out of life that we all want.......

“Perhaps soon the occupant will get his lips off of Putin's ass for long enough to address the issue of why we watched this take place and took no action. I mean, I know he's really really busy defending and giving the "benefit of the doubt" to MbS and the Kingdom. As I said earlier, I have highly intelligent friends. We *all* know what happened to Khashoggi. We *all* know why it happened. We *all* know the Kingdom is directly responsible. This may seem like a political post but it's not. This really isn't about politics. This is about morality.......

“Let me be very direct for a moment here. I don't need for one damn person to tell me what you read about the over 700 abductees here where I've been for the last 22 months. I'm telling you what I know. Take it or leave it. I'm trying to be cautious with my statement. Though to be perfectly honest with you, this is far too important to let go without me divulging the truth. Just in case. Understand this......there are many things worth living for and there are only a few things worth dying for. A man who is too afraid to die is too afraid to live......

“I have no idea when I will be able to update again. Know that I truly do love each and every one of you and I carry you *all* in my heart every day. Please, all of you take care of each other.....

“Love to all and steady on we go.......

“There's all that hate out in the world and then there is this sunrise as we leave our little camp for the last time for now.....”

There ends the post.

How are you doing at reading between the lines?

Anne Lamott writes that we must not let hate make us into poisoned vessels. She’s right. Hate corrodes the vessel that contains it. As my friend in Syria says, there’s all this hate in the world, and then there are refugee children playing soccer in the rubble, planning to grow up to be doctors, and lawyers, and teachers. He and his colleagues work to keep these children alive, because they are the hope of their country, their culture, and their families.

You know – same as our children are for us.

Let’s Clean the Whole House

There was this chair at Granny’s. I’d never seen a chair like that. The left arm was a normal wooden chair arm, but the right arm swooped out into a flat writing surface.

It was interesting, but I didn’t need a chair, and there was nowhere in my house to put it, and besides, I didn’t have much money.

It took me a couple of weeks to give in and buy it. I drove it home, shaking my head at my own irrational behavior.

I put it in my music room – office, after kicking aside some of the clutter. I knew something was going to have to give. There was a pile in that room. That pile has had me stuck for at least fifteen years.

It was all the family photos. Rick was an only child, so I have all the photos from his family, and his mother’s family and his father’s family. I also have pictures of our kids and my grandson growing up, and pictures from my childhood and my mother’s family, and my father’s family. Pictures of the aunts and uncles and cousins, and some who died young, because people did die young, of disease and accident.

 So, one hundred and twenty or thirty years of photographs, six families. People. Stories. People whose names I don’t know, much less their stories.

I have never been able to sort these photographs. Oh, I’d start putting them into piles, by date and family, but I’d give up after a few days. It was too much.

But now something had turned a corner inside of me. Suddenly it was time to clear out the pile, and time to get into Rick’s corner in the bedroom, which I have not been able to touch since he died.

I dug in. Started moving stuff out of Rick’s corner.  Mind you, tidying up Rick’s corner is not a rational action. There was his drawing board, and the space heater he kept under the drawing board, so he was toasty warm when he worked. There were sketchbooks and drawings, and tons of pencils and drawing pens, and along with Rick’s drawings that I knew well, I found things I’d never seen. Little notes he’d scribbled on the backs of envelopes, or on odd scraps of paper.

It took most of the week, but I got the corner a little more organized and I got the pile of photos moved out of the music room – office. The chair I did not need now sits where the pile was, and the floor is clear for the first time in years.

Bags of stuff went to recycling. Bags of stuff went to Granny’s. Bags of stuff went into the garbage cans to await being taken to the transfer station.

There is much more to do. It was tiring work, but so worth it, and I really loved finding those little Easter eggs from Rick.

Meanwhile, back out in the world, there were bad things happening. A journalist was brutally murdered, for speaking truth to power. Most of us understood what had happened and why, even if we didn’t know the gruesome details, but the powers that be lied about what happened, and dissimulated. They said, “We don’t know if he’s dead; he left by the back door; we’re investigating; oh, he’s dead but it was an accident, an interrogation got out of hand;” and finally, “Why are you so outraged? You want to shut up your critical journalists.”

Meanwhile we have heard that a caravan of thousands of refugees from Honduras is marching north through Guatemala into Mexico, heading for the United States. Things must be terrible in Honduras if people would walk over a thousand miles to arrive at our border, where they will most likely be arrested and deported, and lose their children in the bargain.

Conservatives I know are angry and afraid because of this caravan. The thought of immigrants coming here threatens them. “They are coming here to get FREE things,” one friend said.

Yes. It is so cheap to live in this country. The free health care, the free education, the free housing for the homeless … oops, I dozed off there for a minute.

America is not cheap, but America is our home and it is in trouble. I can still write smart aleck essays and not get my head chopped off. It’s a home, a country, worth fighting for. Let’s clean house.

VOTE: Get your ballot in before the mail goes out on November 6, or into the ballot drop box at the Vashon library before the box is closed at 8 p.m. that night.

We’ll see how the election goes, and then we’ll have a clearer idea of where we go from here.