Thrown Under the Bus

 Many of us are feeling calmer these days. It is such a relief to wake up every morning and not wonder, “What’s he done now?”

It seemed like every day there was an attention-getting tweet or speech or impulsive action, each one designed to rile up the MAGA crowd, or endanger the country and the planet, or “throw someone under the bus.” A person gets tired of being goosed like that.

By the way, I have never heard the expression, “thrown under the bus,” so many times in my life as during the last four years. You wonder why anyone would want to work in that White House, knowing that your boss would turn on you.

Vice President Michael Pence was the last and most important Trump supporter to be thrown under the bus. When he opted to observe the rule of law after the election, he became the enemy. When he presided over the Senate on January 6 and the crowds marching on the Capitol were chanting, “Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence!” and built that scaffold with a noose, his commander-in-chief did nothing to protect Pence from the mob. This after Pence’s four years of unwavering loyalty and support for Trump. We have all seen the video of Pence and his staff being escorted to safety that day.

Granted, sometimes at press conferences during the last four years he would stare into space and bite his lip so hard I feared he would hurt himself. Quite a few people standing behind Trump when he spoke kept their faces carefully blank.

When Pence was asked to speak at the 2021 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) last week, he said yes at first, but then he learned that the guy who was going to allow him to be lynched would be there.

Maybe another year, he said.

I will be honest. I was not a fan of Mike Pence. His stand on abortion, which indicated a take on women as inferior animals who must be feared and controlled, and his weird relationship with his wife, put me off (still do). Also, he was chosen by Trump to be vice president and accepted the job, which I thought showed bad judgment.

During the last weeks of the Trump presidency, when Pence respected the outcome of the election and did his duty as Vice President, even in the face of a mob that wanted to kill him, my respect for him went way up.

He is, after all, a politician. He is betting that the unwieldy bureaucracy and infrastructure of the American government is going to last longer than Trump’s toddler behavior and the Trump cult. I hope he is right.

The cult is with us, and they have no intention of being pacified. I am on an email newsletter list that is a forum for Trump supporters to speak freely. If you say “unity” to these people, they are liable to spit in the corner. Or on you.

So I say nothing. I read. I do not wish to be in denial about what the angry minority is thinking.

From my point of view, their thinking and beliefs are backwards, inside out, upside down, and sad. The election was stolen; Democrats are Socialists/Communists; white people rule; disguised antifa laid siege to the Capitol on January 6.

Their email comments tend to be vitriolic, the rants of people who feel victimized. They are mad as hell. They seem impervious to reason. They are still believing and spreading lies and conspiracy theories, and they vote. Take heed, friends.

Think on this: these cult members, these scary people, are human beings, with hearts and families and tragedies and triumphs. They are just like you and me, except they are pissed, whiny, and dangerous.

While I am in the neighborhood, informal poll: how many of you have experienced the good-heartedness, hospitality, and generosity of conservatives? I have. It is confusing to be hated for being a liberal when I am treated well when seen simply as another human being.

America has a lot that needs fixing and healing. We get a lot wrong.

Racism is wrong. Sexism is wrong. Breaking up families and imprisoning and sexually abusing children is wrong. Bombing people in Eastern Syria, or anyone, is wrong, just my opinion. Seeing people with whom you disagree as not human is wrong. Throwing your supporters under a bus is wrong.

However much we want to criticize this country – and we do, and we are allowed – I am often in awe of how sweet it was to be born in America, where I have had freedoms, advantages, and blessings unheard of in many countries.

Of course, I am white. I did not realize what a difference that made for decades.

Slow learner.

Graze, Pray, Nap, Repeat – oh, and Curse

 There is a big snowfall here today, which is cheering, even though I will not be able to get up my driveway for days, not that I want to. Being snowbound is not that different from isolation, so not a change.

Coming up on my one-year anniversary of isolation. That is the paper anniversary, right?

Talking with my friend Lynn Carrigan the other day, she said her isolation routine is graze, nap, sleep, repeat. My isolation protocol includes “pray,” and then “curse.”

I added cursing, because, boy, do I. Here alone at home I observe how often I drop things, run into things, trip on things (or nothing), lose things, and forget things. So, cursing.

I do not mind breaking things, because I can throw whatever it is out and be relieved of that part of my burden. Sometimes that is what it takes to break the bonds of sentiment.

Despair has been knocking on my door a lot the last few months. Life is hard anyway, and now it is harder. I do not know about you, but I am experiencing Isolation Adjectives: I define myself with words like, “loony,” and “squirrely” and “depressed.”

“Lonely” figures large in there, too.

It was my belief last spring that the pandemic would not be over in six months or even a year, or longer, and I should settle in, but having a reasonable perspective on a situation is not the same as living through the situation.

This is what it is like to be in a plush solitary confinement for a year. So far. I could not possibly have imagined what this would be like, or how it would affect me.

I am thinking of the anchoresses in the middle ages, women who were walled into little rooms to spend the rest of their lives in prayer and contemplation.

They had a little window into the church so they could watch mass; they got food handed in (and waste handed out) through that window.

Then there was one window outside where people could come up and talk to them, ask them for spiritual advice or prayers, or shoot the breeze, I suppose.

That fad did not last long, and I can see why. First, wall yourself into a little room for the rest of your life? What? Second, you had to pay some servants to do the food passing in and the slops taking out, so only women of means were able to take this path.

There are people now who live in tiny houses, but those houses have doors and windows, and plumbing and kitchens and a heat source, not to mention the composting toilet and the sleeping loft. Not the same thing at all. You must haul your own slops.

But I digress.

Isolation life has been hard. I miss people. I especially miss making music with people and laughing with people. I miss hugs, and I miss real books because I get most of mine on kindle now.

People said, “Make yourself a routine.” I am more of a “variety is the spice of life” kind of gal. I do have a routine into which I have settled, but probably not what the advice folks have in mind.

My friend Alice told me that her biggest challenge was doing nothing. I get it.

I was pushing myself for months to be productive with the chores: do the dishes, sweep the floors, do the laundry, sort out stuff so I could send some things to Granny’s and some things to the transfer station. Now that I was isolating at home, I finally had the time to get all that sorting and tossing done, right?

I got some of it done. I will keep at it.

I am also at level 900 or so of a phone game to which I am addicted. I have the television schedule for weeknights memorized. Do not come between me and my British murder mysteries.

I have more of a “what the heck” philosophy these days and I am working on my doing nothing skills.

Productivity is overrated.

Yeah, when you cannot go anywhere or see anyone, or laugh with anyone, or hug anyone, or sing with anyone, eating, praying, and sleeping can make the time fly.

And cursing, of course.

How are you getting by in this pandemic world?

News: Trump was acquitted in his impeachment trial, which was expected. Republican Senators had two big reasons to acquit: they want to be re-elected, and death threats.

Watching videos of what went on inside the Capitol did not convince Republican Senators that they needed to convict Trump. It made them realize what might happen to them if they did not acquit him.

O, Republicans. How far you have strayed.

Requiem for a Contractor

 

In the late summer of 1975, a restaurant called Sound Food opened a couple of miles south of town on the Main Highway. The restaurant was funded by several partners, of whom the most visible was Frank Miller, who worked in the restaurant.

Linda Miller, Frank’s wife, also worked there. She had long hair and wore long skirts. Many women wore long hair and long skirts in those days.

Then, and I do not know the time frame or the order of these events, Linda came out, cut her hair short, stopped wearing skirts, announced that her name was now Lotus, and left Frank.

(She once told me that men were okay, but when it came to the quality of a relationship, women were beyond compare. When Rick and I married, Lotus told me that Rick was a good guy and all, but it was kind of a shame, because I would have made a great lesbian. I took it as a compliment.)

As a single mother she needed a means of support, so she became the best contractor on Vashon Island.

Seriously, she was.

In 1977 I came to live in the dilapidated former mess hall of what had been the Beulah Park church camp and Chautauqua grounds. The property had passed into private hands, and the mess hall and the little cabins on the property had become cheap rentals.

The mess hall had many deficiencies as a living space.

No bathroom. You had to walk up the hill to another building where the toilets and a shower were located.

No heat except the brick fireplace. Rick plugged several airtight stoves into the fireplace over the years. Remember airtights? All the structural integrity of a beer can and they burned out fast, but they were cheap, and they worked.

The building had two electrical circuits. There was a four-socket box with a breaker next to it on the kitchen wall. Two sockets, on the left side, were one circuit. The two sockets on the right were on the second circuit, and that circuit supplied electricity to the entire building.

If the lights were on in more than one room, and I was cooking on the electric stove, the breaker would snap, and the lights would dim. At which point I would go over and push the breaker back up. We lived with that until the night I pushed the breaker up, and sparks flew.

So I applied for a couple of King County loans, and in 1987 we signed a contract with Lotus to remodel our house.

Lotus had Kimmco come down and put a concrete foundation under one side of the house. Meanwhile, Lotus and her assistant Kate (mea culpa, Kate – I have forgotten your last name) got into the crawl space on the ravine side and put in supports that went down to bedrock.

Once the house was stable and level, Lotus and Kate stripped the interior of the building down to the studs and outer walls. Then they built a new house inside that shell, listening to loud country music on the radio while they worked. Lotus hired subcontractors to do the wiring, sheetrock, taping and mudding of sheetrock, and plumbing. Once Lotus and Kate started the job, they worked straight through to the finish. There were no “contractor gone missing” episodes.

The transformation took about four months, ending in January 1988.

Lotus and Kate did meticulous work. Everything was level and plumb and sound. There were no mistakes, no need for do-overs. Nothing turned up months or years later.

The house had all new wiring.

It had baseboard heaters. After relying on wood heat for ten years, Rick set down his chainsaw and never looked back.

It had insulation.

We had an indoor bathroom, with toilet, sink, and tub. Wahoo!

It was a great place to live and bring up the kids.

I do not know how many houses Lotus built or remodeled or what other projects she did on the island. I only heard good about her and her work and a lot of us were disappointed when she hung up her tool belt and started teaching at a community college.

I look around the house now and think what a fine builder she was, and what fine work she and Kate did.

She was a good friend. She was a person of integrity. She was practical, but she knew how to laugh. She was a fine farmer/gardener. She did a lot of volunteer work with several island organizations to make Vashon a better place to live.

A couple of years ago, she became ill.

A couple of weeks ago her bright light blinked out.

Deepest condolences to her wife, Barbara; her son, Sonam; and all other family and friends. Virtual hugs, and peace, and grace, to you.

Rest in peace, Lotus. You done good.

Relief

 

We were all hurt by the insurrection at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., on January 6.

Honestly, I would like to ignore the seriousness of the situation. It is the time of year when I go out into the yard and tell the emerging bulbs, “Go back. You’re too early.” It is hard to think about our country’s troubles when spring flowers are coming up.

The violence springs from the large minority of people in our country who have been fed, and have believed, lies and conspiracies for years. There are plenty of real outrages and wrongs that need to be set right, but those do not seem to register with them.

Watching the Capitol building invasion I kept thinking of Fort Sumter. Is this the opening skirmish of our second civil war? A civil war with technology and automatic rifles; with no geographic boundaries; with millions of people willing to fight for what they want?

What they want is to sustain the delusion that they are better than other people because they are white.

This insurrection is not yet the death throe of that toxic lie, but the desperation of the invaders looked like the writhing of a wounded creature. Nobody seems to have learned anything from our Civil War, or from any war, for that matter.

“I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded, who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.” - William Tecumseh Sherman, Union General in the Civil War. Afterward Head of the Army committed to exterminating our native people.

Some of the post-insurrection reactions of the Capitol invaders have surprised me. It is as if they did not think it through or foresee that their actions would have consequences.

They did not like getting gassed.

The people who did not hide their faces and bragged on social media about what they had done, are now being identified, arrested, and/or losing their jobs.

Fur-hat-and-horns-painted-face-shirtless guy (nice abs, right? Sadly, he is pretty on the outside and bean dip on the inside) was arrested and went on a food strike because his jailers would not serve him organic food. His lawyer’s defense argument is that Donald Trump’s rhetoric led the puir wee bairn astray.

Many people were hurt in the melee. Did they not imagine the possibilities of being wounded, arrested, or fired? Or dying? The rioter who was shot and killed probably did not think she was going to die when she got up that morning.

Beyond all this, I am pondering who stands to gain from the overthrow of American Democracy. Where does the money lead? What do I not know, or see, or understand? Quite a lot, I am guessing. I know our struggle is not anywhere near over.

This morning I watched the live streaming of the Inauguration. Kamala Harris is now our Vice President, and Joe Biden is now our President. I did not expect the feeling of relief that washed over me. My whole body was relaxing in a way that it had not for a long time.

Oh, I know the situation is still terrible – pandemic, tanked economy, unemployment, division of the country as much as ever – but at least now we will have a President and administration that will be working to solve problems. It will be nice to hear something Joe Biden says and think that it is probably the truth.

We owe a debt of thanks to the journalists who have reported the news honestly the last four years. Thank you. You are my heroes. You have done a great service to this country, and the world.

In other news, the house finches are here, and like most of the cute little birds who visit my yard, they attack other birds when fighting for a perch on a feeder. Nice to know we are not the only warlike species, I guess. I got out my bird identification book and browsed through it, looking at all the feathered friends who come back year after year. Red breasted nuthatches, chickadees, spotted towhees, juncos, robins, sparrows, and various LBBs (little brown birds).

I would like to spend my days living quietly, uninterrupted, in my peaceful little world. No civil unrest or war, no fascism, no pandemic, no people without homes, no poverty, no starvation, no bad water, no lies. No sick conspiracy theories. No suffering of the innocent. Only music and writing and friends and family, my dog and cat, the birds. And books. And the internet.

Unfortunately, if I put my head in the sand, I will not be able to breathe. This is our world, and we are stuck with it.

Prayer, Exile, and the New Normal

 The pandemic has taught me how fragile and precious we are to one another. I am not alone in that realization.

On Christmas Day I was burning with cabin fever, missing my family, and not keeping up a good attitude about this whole lockdown/isolation thing. I work to adjust my attitude – I use gratitude, and deep breathing, and what I call the power of Positive Denial: fiddle-dee-dee, I’ll think about that tomorrow.

In this time of loneliness and strained hope, prayer has been remarkably effective in lifting my spirits. It’s like forgiveness: I feel a lot better doing it than the people I’m forgiving or praying for feel. It makes me better.

Still I pray, in hope of doing some good in this hard old world. I pray for family, friends, acquaintances, and people I really dislike.

I pray for the repose of the souls of the dead, and I pray for all who mourn, specifically and in general.

I pray for all who have no one to pray for them.

I pray prayers of thanks for all the many blessings in my life.

There is a bible passage that says you should pray in private, so that no one knows. You should not boast of your praying. I do not mean to boast here. I am telling you what helps me get through hard days. It is good to stop whining and pray.

I pray to connect with the creator, but still need to connect with people right here on earth.

Facebook is a connection to the world for me, but I wish someone would start up a social media platform for older people who have been in the house for months and need connection, without Facebook’s evil algorithms and election hacking. Maybe we could call it Boomerbook.

The gospel reading for January 3 is the story in the Gospel of Matthew of how Joseph is told by an angel in a dream to take Mary and Jesus and get the heck out of Palestine, because Herod the Great has been told that a new king of the Jews has been born in Bethlehem. Naturally, Herod sees the baby as a rival, and wants to eliminate him. He orders every male child two years of age and under in Bethlehem and its vicinity be killed. This is known as the slaughter of the Holy Innocents.

This is when I squint at God and say, why didn’t all the parents get a warning? Why did the Holy Innocents have to die? It takes only a little research to learn that historians who have studied Herod and his times believe this story to be folklore – a myth that never happened.

Maybe so, but we know that Innocents are slaughtered every day in our time.

Every.

Damn.

Day.

This is why myth and folklore teach us the truth, even if they are not the facts.

But I digress.

Joseph, Mary, and Jesus went down to Egypt and lived there in exile until Joseph had another dream in which an angel told him that Herod had died, and it was safe to go back home. The little family headed back to Palestine and settled in Nazareth, their new home.

As I pondered this story this week, thinking about that family living in exile, it occurred to me that we are all living in exile right now. We are living far away from the familiar lives we had – the jobs, the family gatherings, meals, school, classes, concerts, all the human closeness and interaction which is so necessary and sometimes annoying for us. We are fleeing not from an evil king, but a virus.

We cannot get out of exile until the virus is under control. Then we can head back home. Not the home from which we were exiled, the new home, where we shall rebuild the new normal life.

Let’s be honest, now: life is a series of building new normals. You get past an obstacle and the next obstacle says, “Hi, there! I’ve been waiting for you.”

When my husband died, my old life was burned to the ground, and I had to build a new life, piece by little piece. It was hard work and I felt like a stranger in my own life, but I did it. I did not give up on life, even though there were times I was tempted.

We miss the old times before Covid-19, a way of life that looks so easy in retrospect.

I encourage us all to build new normal times.

In closing, I ask, do you remember when people said, “Have a nice day?” Now people say, “Stay safe.” That is part of our new normal.

Stay safe, beloveds.