I’d Like to Talk About Something Else, But …

The last week or so, all the talk on radio and television has been about the novel coronavirus, or COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, and the competition of Democratic would-be presidential candidates, who were dropping like flies.

My philosophy is, when we have a Democratic candidate, I’ll vote for him. I will not go into the back yard and eat worms because candidates I liked better did not make the final cut.

I will be voting for what I hope will be the beginning of the reclamation of the United States of America.

Both parties have a lot invested in Business as Usual, but we have not had Business as Usual the last four years, and we have not had the former two parties.

Some Republicans are now former Republicans. Some call themselves Independents. The Republican Party they signed up for no longer exists. It has been stolen like a car with the keys left in the ignition and is being taken for a spectacular and dangerous joyride. At some point, it will be left wrecked in a ditch.

Most former or disaffected Republicans can’t hold their noses and call themselves Democrats – that would be going too far. According to Chris Vance, former chairman of the Washington State Republican Party and now an Independent, these people meet to discuss, “What are we going to do?”

I feel your pain, kids.

I’ll tell you what I would like to see out of the next Democratic President and Congress (I do like to dream big):

I would like to see the country pulled back from the abyss into which we have been plummeting the last four years, starting with getting rid of that ruinous tax package, and raising taxes on the wealthy.

I would like to see a renewed separation of church and state, because as Martha Stewart would say, that’s a Good Thing. I would like to see legislation and behavior based on rational thinking, and rational decisions based on (wow) facts, and science, and the Constitution and the rule of law. I would like to see legislators stop trying to control everyone’s, especially women’s, bodies, and the executive branch stop making racism an overt, legal, national institution. I would like to see anti-Semitism and the violence it spawns brought to a full stop.

I would like a new government to get busy repairing the many catastrophic blunders and intentional wrong-headed screw-ups of the current administration.

I would like to see the United States of America stop becoming a banana republic ruled by a crybaby Caligula and his cronies. We deserve better.

Then there’s that coronavirus/COVID-19 thing.

King County has the distinction of being the epicenter of the outbreak of novel coronavirus in the United States. Most people who get it have mild or no symptoms, we are told. They infect people around them, though, and some people die, mostly people who are elderly and have health issues already, as did most of the people in the Kirkland nursing home who died. You have all heard or read this information by now.

Dr. Lisa Gilbert, MD, FAAFP, CTropMed (no, as a matter of fact, I do not know what all those letters after the MD mean), a specialist in infectious diseases, says in an interview in the March 4, 2020 issue of The Living Church, “We know that coronavirus or influenza are the pandemics that are likely going to circulate worldwide.” She goes on to say that this coronavirus is going to kill our elders more than anyone else.

So I have the impression that public health people believe that this novel coronavirus will be or already is a global pandemic, and our older generation will be hardest hit by mortality.

Speaking as an elder, not too chuffed by that.

So. We have a president who has been doing his best to gut the Centers for Disease Control since he got into office, so now the CDC does not have the people or the budget to effectively deal with a pandemic.

This is a president who began by saying that the virus would disappear in April when the weather got warm.

He has also said that the virus is a hoax perpetrated by the Democratic party, which is trying to injure his chances of being re-elected.

He has also said that there are plenty of tests for the virus (not true).

I read this morning that he is saying that the virus is having the positive impact of making people shop and stay at hotels within the US instead of going abroad.

I wonder if he thinks that his usual ration of hyperbole will stop the progress of the coronavirus.

I don’t think so. The coronavirus is not part of his base.

Being Enough

Having arrived at a certain age and come through a bout of cancer, I find myself taking stock.

Some decades ago I decided that one of the shortest roads to happiness would be to lower my expectations. In retrospect, it would have been more accurate to say I needed to get in touch with reality.

Check out the lyrics of this beautiful iconic entry in the American songbook:

“There’s a someone that I’m longing to see,

I hope that he

Turns out to be

Someone to watch over me.”

© 1926 George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin

Boy, did that, and almost every other song I heard, give me the wrong idea. That’s the trouble with exposing children to things that they don’t understand and can’t handle – song lyrics, Bible verses, loaded guns.

It sounds good, doesn’t it? Someone taking care of you and all your worries for the rest of your life? Who does that?

No one.

By the time I was in my late twenties I knew what I wanted: a partner, a friend. Someone who did not lie to me or cheat on me.

Against all odds, and after several Mr. Oh-Hell-Nos, Rick and I got together, and we were friends, and we were partners, and we played music together, and we took care of each other, and we drove each other crazy, and we laughed a lot, and we raised a couple of great kids.

Our marriage wasn’t a fairy tale – name me one that is - but it was a good if sometimes hard life. There wasn’t a lot of money most of the time, and that was the hardest part.

Then, before Rick and I could share our old age together, he died.

So “happily ever after” was a crock from the get-go.

Yeah. I was raised with a ton of unrealistic expectations, or as I think of them now, lies.

What about you men? What was the crock you were fed about your place in life and relationships?

Do you like women? Do you resent and fear women? I think that a lot of men resent and fear women. That is made clear by how women are treated, and how some men speak about women when they think we are not around.

When I was young I accidentally overheard men talking about women a few times. It was enlightening. It didn’t make me feel like men saw me as an equal human being. It made me feel like a piece of gum stuck to the bottom of a man’s shoe.

I say that in sadness, not anger. I burned through my anger at men as a class decades ago. I know how many good men there are, by which I mean decent people doing the best they can. Now I think someone is an asshat when I experience them as an asshat, regardless of classification, by gender or anything else.

There were dreams I had in this life.

I meant to spend my adult life touring all over the country as a singer/songwriter, eventually ending up doing it with Rick.

I started out doing it solo in my twenties, and in my thirties and forties did a lot more of it in the trio, Women, Women & Song. We went up and down the West Coast a few times and had a lot of fun. Wrote a lot of songs, did some radio, did some television, made some recordings, played the Northwest Folklife Festival every year.

But then I had these children.

Being childless is an asset in the life of a traveling singer/songwriter; that or having a stay-at-home spouse to mind the family, and it is mostly male singer/songwriters who have that arrangement. Rick did his best when I was out playing music, but he was not a stay-at-home spouse. That was one reason I left the trio in 1991 and went home. That was the end of my touring days.

Most of all, in my youth I hoped to make a difference for the better in the world. I worked hard most of my adult life trying to prove to the mean voice in my head (my mother’s, it turned out) that I had worth, that I could make a difference.

So now, at a certain age, having had cancer, looking my life over, what do I see?

I did the best I could. Sometimes great, sometimes tragically wrong, mostly somewhere in between.

Now I write, and I sing, and sometimes make people laugh, and sometimes I listen, and I love people.

I am beginning to think that I am enough, at last.

You are, too – enough, I mean. Who you are, what gifts you have, what you bring to your life. You have nothing to prove.

Funny how it’s easier to say that to the whole wide world than to myself.

Republican America

“Stop being Democratic or Republican. Be honest, have morals, show empathy, value integrity. Be a GOOD HUMAN.”

That little meme came around on Facebook this week. It seemed like good advice, so I offer it here.

The President was acquitted by the Senate in an impeachment trial that wasn’t a trial. We all knew that his acquittal by the Senate was a foregone conclusion.

Before the trial, he said that anyone who opposed him would end up with their heads on pikes.

Shades of Henry VIII. I suppose we should be grateful that he hasn’t cut off the heads of the wives and other people who have lost his favor.

As many Americans are grieving the end of our democracy, the rule of law, and our constitution, Republicans are shouting about how Democrats are responsible for those things. You know, like those preachers and politicians who scream and holler about the evils of homosexuality and then get caught soliciting boys in public bathrooms. I grow weary of people complaining about other people committing the sins of which they are guilty, truly I do, although it is the best way to keep track of what they are up to.

Many people are celebrating a victory for Making America Great Again, which is code for Making America White Again.

Not that America ever was white. It has been ruled by white Western European males since the 1700s – check out those paintings of the founding fathers - but when Europeans arrived, the Americas were populated by millions of indigenous people whose ancestors had been here for tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of years. They had cultures, customs, cities, languages, laws, agriculture, trade routes, wars, spiritual beliefs and practices.

All that and most of those people were virtually wiped out by 1900.

African slaves were brought to Central and South America in the sixteenth century, and then North America. Slaves were bought and sold and bred like cattle.

Up until 1860 Africans and their descendants numbered about one-fifth of the population in the US census. In the 1860 census the US began to count American Indians, Eskimos, Aleuts, Asian and Pacific Islanders, and Hispanics of all races - people who were here all the time but were not counted.

When the Irish, the Greeks, the Italians, and Eastern Europeans arrived, they were not considered properly white. Jews? Hah.

America has never been white. It has been ruled by western European white men ever since they could grab the power, true. I believe this whole “making America white again” means a hysterical grab for power by people who feel they are being robbed of their white European birthright. Just guessing.

A little over half the country is certain we are seeing the death throes of this republic and what it stood for. All the high ideals we were taught about freedom and liberty and rights and patriotism and us being the good guys seem to be going by the wayside. Now we’re living George Orwell’s vision: “Lies are truth, wrong is right, up is down, day is night.”

Forget the comparisons with Nazi Germany. We are Republican America, with a new madman at the helm, Henry the VIII with a Twitter account and the certain knowledge that he answers to no one, at least in this country. His followers cheer because for some reason they don’t see the world of hurt that’s building.

For some of us our nation’s best hope is to vote him out this November. That’s tough when the Democrats seem as organized as a herd of cats on the back of a flatbed truck, but still – vote.

It couldn’t be easier here in King County – the ballot comes to your house with a postage paid return envelope. Follow the directions and send it off. Get registered now if you are not registered.

How to register or make sure you are registered: google King County Elections, and that will be the first thing that comes up. Go to the site and follow the instructions. They tell you several ways you can register, online, by mail, and in person.

If you are not a computer person, go to the library and ask for help.

We can expect outside interference, prevention of people voting, the “loss” of votes, and plain old dirty tricks. Voting might not matter in the end, but we must act as if it does, and hope it does.

I hope I live to see the reunification of our country. That’s what I think would make America great.

Because, yoo hoo: climate change. Again, the planet will survive. It’s our children and grandchildren for whom we need to work and fight. Sitting around snarling at each other like we’re doing now, we lose track of what’s important.

Cold? Virus?

This winter people on the island have been falling like flies with a nasty virus.

Through December and the first part of January my friends were dropping all around me while I carried on, un-virused. Maybe I’ll make it through the winter without getting sick, I thought.

Hah.

There was that moment in mid-January when I knew. The knowledge came up from the cellular level: the virus has moved in.

Does anyone else have that experience? Your body telling you when you’ve been infected, days before you develop symptoms? I can’t be the only one.

On the evening of Wednesday, January 22, my throat began to feel sore, and my head began to ache.

By morning I was toast. Sore throat, head congestion, chest congestion, and a fatigue I describe as feeling like I’ve been run over by a truck.

After five days it felt like a smaller truck, and the chest congestion had matured into a juicy and extremely productive cough. The cough caused me to lose my voice. Couldn’t yell at the dog to stop barking.

Digression: I have a string of bells hanging from the doorknob on the front door. They ring whenever someone comes in or goes out, and Marley runs over to the door and barks every time the bells ring. Lately I’ve noticed that whenever a bell rings on television, even one lone ding, she runs over to the front door and barks. Of course she also barks if I set a spoon on the table and it makes a noise. She barks at any random noise, but this television bell thing is new. End of digression.

Around days eight and nine the virus was beginning to feel like it was going to go on forever.

On day ten, I had the first moments of feeling human.

On day eleven I was feeling even more human, but not yet fit for human company.

Day thirteen and the end was in sight, though I wasn’t making any fast moves.

Some of the people who have had this virus have been so sick that they have been calling it the flu. I am sure that some of you have had the flu. What I have had is a nasty virus, or a bad cold.

Influenza is different. Two of the main differences between this virus and the flu virus would be the body aches and the high fever the flu gives you. I was running a low fever. Never hit 100.

For another thing, influenza is more likely to kill you than a cold virus. In the 2017-2018 season the flu outdid itself and killed a record 79,400 people, as estimated by the Center for Disease Control. Last winter was a more normal year. Only 61,200 flu deaths. Looked it up on the internet. It must be true.

I had the flu in 1993. I had a high fever, splitting headache, horrible aching in every part of my body – I could swear that even my hair hurt - and I was semi-delirious, thrashing about in the bed for a couple of days. After that Rick said I lay in bed looking like I was dead for a few days.

It was debilitating. I was puny for weeks. Months. That’s the sickest I have ever been in my adult life. That’s when I started getting flu shots every year.

This year I got the senior flu shot. Oh lordy. The elderly, of which I am now one, dammit, get a high dose shot of vaccine. My arm was sore for days. Worth it, though.

I am amazed by the number of people I meet who don’t get flu shots, saying that flu shots give them the flu. Hunh.

My deepest sympathies to those of you who have had the flu, as well as to those of you who have had this virus. They are both rotten.

Right now there is panic about the coronavirus, fresh from China, because it is new to humans, and it seems to be spreading fast. People are tossing around words like “pandemic.” The one person who came home to Washington from China with the coronavirus got over it. Let’s hope that’s the extent of our exposure until there is a vaccine or a successful treatment.

Meanwhile, what to do? The usual: wash your hands, cover your coughs and sneezes, and avoid sick people (right). Get your rest, drink water. Listen to Grandma.

Post Script, March 2020: Sure got it wrong about that one person being the extent of our exposure. The coronavirus has been declared a pandemic. Many cities in the US are on lockdown, in hopes of curtailing the spread. "Flattening the curve," they call it. I'm staying home until - well, I don't know when.

Daddy’s Leg

Alley Sheffield, my mother’s father, lost a leg around 1920. I don’t know how he lost it, or which leg he lost, only that he lost a leg.

The story that came down to me from my aunt, Sister, was that after he lost his leg he was unable to support a family with five children, and that’s why the four younger children were put into the Salvation Army orphanage in El Paso, Texas, in 1921.

Then he and my grandmother, Lottie, divorced and went their separate ways, and Alley settled in Carrolton, Texas, where he remained the rest of his life.

I never met these grandparents, only heard stories.

After Sister was married and settled in California, she kept in touch with her older sister Gladys and her father in Texas, and even went to visit them a time or two.

Now, Sister was married to my Uncle Mike, who worked as an auto mechanic, and he was darn good at it. Uncle Mike was born in the 1890s and grew up in a time when if you needed something, you built it or made it. At least he did, because he had the magic in his hands, and the skill in his soul.

By the time he and Sister married, it was the 1930s, and Daddy, as Sister called him, must have complained about the deficiencies of his wooden legs.

I am willing to guess that the science of prosthetics was not advanced in Carrolton, Texas, in the 1930s, and if there were more sophisticated options than a handmade wooden leg, Alley could not afford them.

So Uncle Mike began making wooden legs for Daddy.

As a child I had no idea about Uncle Mike’s leg making activity. One more thing in my world to which I was completely oblivious.

Until 1968, when my college sweetheart, Van, and I dropped by Sister and Uncle Mike’s house one day for a visit when we were in town.

We talked of this and that, and then for some reason Sister got onto the subject of Daddy’s wooden legs.

Mike had made so many legs for Daddy, she said, and when they sent them to Texas, they were beautiful, and when Daddy got them he used them until after a time the wood would crack, and then he’d need a new one. So Uncle Mike would make a new one.

Uncle Mike would saw and carve the pieces and put them together and sand the surfaces until you could slide down them on your bare fanny, I’ll bet. Uncle Mike was a perfectionist.

It was so frustrating that the wood always cracked, Sister said. Mike tried different varieties of wood, and he would let the wood get good and dry before working with it so that theoretically it would be beyond cracking. It cracked, anyway.

Once, Sister said, they submerged a log in the Pajaro River for six months, then brought it out and let it dry for several months, hoping that would bring out all the wood’s cracking tendencies before it was used.

The finished leg was sent off with high hopes for its longevity.

Alas, that leg cracked, too.

Finally they got fed up, and figured that if Uncle Mike was going to have to make another leg soon, why not skip curing the wood? He made a leg out of green wood and shipped it off to Texas.

Sister beamed triumphantly as she said, “And Daddy said it was the best leg he ever had!”

Van and I sat and listened to this story with the politeness and respect due to Sister and Uncle Mike, and we must have said, well, that’s great, and how about that, how wonderful, and so on.

After a while it was time for us to take our leave.

We got out to Van’s car, looked at each other, and burst out laughing.

Why did the leg story strike us as so funny? I don’t know. It just did. Speaking for myself, I was a callow youth at the time. I will say that over the years when I remembered Sister saying that last line, I laughed again, and smiled, and not in a mean way, honestly.

Sister and Uncle Mike both died in 1987. Sister gave me my first guitar, the Stella she played while singing on the street in the Salvation Army. Uncle Mike helped my dad repair my ’58 Chevy when I drove it without water and turned the cork gaskets into charcoal.

God bless them all.

Nor Be Overcome by Adversity

“Lord God, almighty and everlasting Father, you have brought us in safety to this new day: Preserve us with your mighty power, that we may not fall into sin, nor be overcome by adversity; and in all we do, direct us to the fulfilling of your purpose; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. - The Book of Common Prayer, page 137, In the Morning

It has been a long time since I have specifically mentioned my Christian faith. I was aware from the beginning, eighteen years ago, that I was not preaching to the choir in this column. I determined early in my adult conversion that I would not apologize for being a Christian, nor would I push what I believe on anyone. What I believe is my business, what you believe is your business. Peace.

As we all know, some people are incapable of keeping their beliefs to themselves, and want everyone to believe exactly as they believe, and become extremely upset when that is not the case, and go on and on at tedious emotional lengths about what is wrong with what others believe and what is right with what they believe.

Atheists, I’m looking at you. We get it. There is no god. Give it a rest.

Christianity has made a terrible name for itself. No argument there. Other religions have not done well in the peace and love department, either.

Still, my faith has led me to believe in kindness to, and respect for, the other. Not that I don’t pop my cork. I do. I probably think to myself that someone is an (adjective) moron at least once a day.

I am a Christian, and a human being, which is why I came to the concept of being a spiritual smart aleck, a Christian with a potty mouth and a dark and sometimes sick sense of humor. I try to behave, but if anyone needs Jesus, it’s me.

It is hard to bring together two apparently impossible things, trying to be the presence of Christ in the world but instead being me in the world. I “practice my faith.” You build faith the same way you get to Carnegie Hall: practice, practice, practice. It is faith that sustains me in the hard times, faith and grace, which so often comes through the love of wonderful people.

That faith and those people have carried me the last few days, as our country has slaughtered people in Iran, and Iran has retaliated.

This exchange of hostilities is frightening to us because it means that we are being sucked into another endless war in the Middle East, and we don’t know yet what will be the scope of that war, and we don’t know what terrorist attacks will happen here.

In this war, in the ongoing never-ending war, it is us, our kids, our family members, who will die or be maimed or commit suicide.

Please keep in mind that some people in this world have been living with war in their countries forever. We’ve all seen pictures of people howling over their dead children.

Some of us in this country are the people howling over their dead children.

We have casualties in these distant wars, and we do have people in this country who mow other people down as efficiently as they can, people with guns and knives, until they are stopped, or stop themselves.

Not to mention the violence of a country that splits up families and imprisons children and shows no sign of stopping or listening to people who protest this inhumanity.

These things bludgeon the heart and mind.

How do I take in the grief of knowing what is happening, and keep going on? How do I not “be overcome by adversity?”

There are many traditions that speak to these hard times, traditions of meditation, and prayer, of breathing and movement, traditions and practices that have been worked out and gone over by our ancestors for centuries and are now well-worn paths.

What I am doing now: I pray. I acknowledge the horrors. I fold them into my heart and soul, I take deep breaths, in and out, and get up, and go on, carrying what I know and feel. I embrace life and fold the beauty and love and joy and kindness of this world into myself along with the grief, and endeavor to do what I can to connect with you and remind you and me that we are all in this together.

Because we cannot mend the world if we allow ourselves to be defeated by the evil of the world.

We are all in this together. You, me, even Tom Brady, who I think is an (adjective) moron for saying God takes sides in football games.

My Ambition

 There was a time when I stood five feet six and three-quarters inches tall. Never made that last quarter inch to five feet seven. Now they tell me I am five feet five inches.

Once my hair was such a dark brown that people told me I had black hair. Now it is becoming more and more gray. People say it still looks brown. Ish. But it has gone over to the salt side of salt and pepper.

Once I could get up out of a chair, or up off the ground, without thinking about it, and certainly without moaning and groaning.

Once I could walk a mile and back with a baby in a backpack.

Once I could run.

Once I could sing for an hour standing up, take a break, and then come back and do it again. I knew all the songs from memory. Now I must sit down and use a songbook.

Once I was married to a sweet guy who loved me, and I loved him. Our marriage lasted for more than thirty-four years, and then he died, and I miss him.

Now I live with a dog and a cat. They love me, although sometimes I doubt that. What kind of best friend steals and eats all your pistachios?

Now I am in my seventies, and all the things that I used to be and have and used to be able to do have changed.

When I was young and heard of someone dying in their seventies, I thought, they had a good innings. But then I heard someone say, “If I was seventy-six, my ambition would be to become seventy-seven.”

I totally get that now. I also realize that many people do not make it to their seventies, and I have to say that as my friends and I get older we have noticed that we are losing friends more often.

Having said all that, I will note that in my seventy-plus years I have had several run-ins with the medical establishment. I have acquired a long list of prescription drugs that I take. I swear I spend more time going to the pharmacy than to the grocery store these days.

If you are in your seventies or better and are not taking any prescription drugs, God bless you, and whatever you’re doing, keep it up.

Because I take so many pills, I have a little pill container that I fill up once a week. It has fourteen little compartments labeled for the days of the week, seven for morning and seven for evening. Each compartment has a little lid that snaps shut. It takes a while to fill this pill box, sorting which pill goes where and slicing in half the pill that needs to be divided. I carefully dole out my pills and when I’m done, I feel like I’ve done a good job. I’m set for the week.

The other day when I had finished sorting pills and was enjoying that moment of satisfaction, I snapped all the lids shut, stood up, and turned to put the pillbox on its shelf. That went well. Until …

I caught the box on something. I dropped it. When the box hit the floor the lids flew open and pills scattered and bounced and rolled across the kitchen like so much pill confetti. Festive, really.

They did not go all over the kitchen, only most of it, under the kitchen table here and the dog’s blanket there, under the kitchen island, the baseboard heater, my old boombox, and a bookshelf next to the table.

After a moment of closing my eyes and taking a deep breath and letting it out, I went and got a dustpan and brush and got to work.

Collecting most of them took a while, using a straw to push them out from under the bookshelf and the boombox and the baseboard, shaking out the dog blanket, brushing carefully in all directions, and searching for pills as far as they might have gone. A pill bouncing on a hardwood floor can go a long way.

I collected all the ones I could find in a clean tin can, picked up the pill box, sat back down at the table, and started over.

It was another twenty minutes before I had the pills back in their little bins again. This time I secured them with great big rubber bands. Take that, gravity.

Oh well. Life happens, and even though I can’t do all the things I used to do anymore, and my hair is gray, and I’m in my seventies and must take all those pills, I’m happy to be here experiencing life happening. I’m seventy-one and my ambition is to become seventy-two.