Natural Slope

Part one: Back in the 1970s I lived for a time in a house with some friends, one of whom was an engineer. He introduced me to the concept of natural slope by saying the house had achieved natural slope, i.e., it needed cleaning. Not that he was going to clean it. Cleaning was not men’s work.

Merriam Webster defines natural slope as “the slope assumed by a mass of earth thrown up into a heap.”

So, natural slope is the point where gravity kicks in and soil begins to slide back down on itself, although you can apply it to materials other than soil, like crap stacked up in your house.

Part two: last Friday morning while driving to my class at the swimming pool I heard a story on the radio which shocked me. I had never heard language like that on National Public Radio. Realizing what had been said, and who had said it, hit like a body blow.

Then the announcer switched out of his announcer role for a moment, and said he could not let this pass without saying, “This is racist.”

Once again, I found myself wondering where are the grownups? Why is there no accountability?

Part three: A few months ago, I quoted Holocaust survivors who said it’s too late to leave this country, as it became too late to leave Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

We may not have camps and gas showers and ovens, but we are letting brown and black people die in Puerto Rico. We gun down and lynch black people. Our president is calling countries populated by black and brown people “shitholes.” He praises white supremacists as “fine people.” He has made it okay for Nazis to march with impunity in America.

The Republican party, which is in power, does nothing to stop this.

As a mother and a grandmother, I have to say it: shame on you, Republicans. Shame on you.

I don’t say shame on him. I know he has no shame.

Part four: I keep thinking that all this unregulated terrible behavior is piling up like all the papers and boxes and other crap in my house. When that stuff reaches natural slope, it starts to fall. You can keep throwing things on top of other things, but they slide and roll over each other and spread out and you can’t walk anywhere until you clean up the mess.

I keep thinking that’s what our government is doing, stacking crap on top of crap. I keep thinking it must be getting to natural slope. Every time the president shoots himself in the foot, I wonder, is this it? Is this the day the country simply cannot bear the weight of one more quarter-teaspoon of bullshit?

Part five: Yesterday I watched a video taken in Orange County, of homeless people camped in tents and makeshift shelters on the banks of a river there. Their encampments stretched on mile after mile, and looked like the encampments here, tents and tarps, and piles of bags of stuff, and people milling around. I imagine most homeless encampments look like that. Homeless people and their encampments have become normal in America.

Then I hear on the news that the stock market is hitting record highs. I see pictures of white guys in suits, smiling because they are making lots of nice money, like they think this boom will never end. What short memories they have. The stock market’s natural slope is not predictable.

Part six: Last night I watched, “I Am Not Your Negro,” a documentary about James Baldwin. If you have not seen it and you get the chance, see it.

The movie tells Baldwin’s story, and the story of race in America in his lifetime, and now.

When they showed film of him speaking, his intelligence, his search for exactly the right words to say exactly what he meant, his clear and profoundly humane being, were a balm to my heart and mind and soul. He did not pull any punches, he spoke the truth, even though white people really could not handle hearing the truth.

Sometime after his friends Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr., were shot and killed, he moved to France and lived out the rest of his life there. Listening to him in the movie I realized how much I miss hearing the intelligent, rational voices of honest, humane people.

Part seven: I encourage you to spill intelligence, rational thought, honesty, good humor, and kindness over every person you meet, as if those qualities have reached natural slope within you, and are tumbling out of you unrestrained.

If you can’t do that, at least be quiet and don’t make things worse.

Blessings and peace, friends. We are all in this together.

Buy Dirt

“Buy dirt,” says my cousin Charlotte. “Dirt is the only sure thing.”

A lot of people who had to sell their homes at a loss in the last ten years might disagree with that sentiment, but it has worked for Charlotte. She stood her ground, er, dirt, through the recession, and now her dirt is worth more than ever.

Her point is that what goes down will come up in the real estate market.

Vashon Island dirt has gone up in price. An off-island real estate firm recently sent me an email advising me that my house is now worth over half a million dollars. Boy, I got a good laugh out of that one. They’ve been sniffing glue or something.

They were trying to light the fires of greed and get me to list my house, I suppose, but I’m holding on to my house for my kids. That’s what you do in my family. I received an inheritance back in the 80s that kept our family afloat, or as Rick said, “Clinging to the soft white underbelly of the middle class,” during some tough years.

My inheritance came about because of the Salvation Army.

My mother and her siblings grew up in a Salvation Army orphanage in Texas, and my Aunt Della, my mother’s older sister, went into the Salvation Army when she graduated from high school. She was sent out to San Francisco, and then down the coast to a little town named Watsonville (which is not the artichoke capital of the world. That is Castroville).

In Watsonville, she was one of the Salvation Army lassies who sold the War Cry, the Salvation Army’s magazine, at businesses around town. At one auto repair garage there was a guy who always wanted to buy a War Cry, and wanted to talk to her. One thing led to another, and she ended up marrying him. She was twenty, and he was thirty-six.

They never had children.

When my mother graduated from high school in Texas at the age of fifteen, she got on the train and came out to Watsonville to be near my aunt. I think Watsonville looked like Eden to her after El Paso.

My aunt and uncle lived in a modest little house in town, and my aunt, being canny, acquired over time two more houses as rentals. She was fond of telling us to put aside something for our old age, as she was doing.

It was a good thing she did. My uncle lived to be 92. My aunt died first, worn out from taking care of him, and he spent his last years in a nursing home. She had saved up enough to cover those expenses.

When they were both gone, I learned that, being childless, they left everything to my mother, my brother, and me.

It turned out that dirt on the central California coast, and the houses on the dirt, appreciated quite a bit between the 1930s and the 1980s.

I was stunned. It was the first time in my life I had some money. I invested my share and made it last a few years, but in time it was all gone. That was a great ride. It helped us to raise the kids for a few years, and not live in want. It got Rick a pickup which is still running, twenty-seven years later (Nissans are underrated).

A tip o’ the hat and profound gratitude to my Aunt Della and Uncle Mike, God bless them. I did nothing for that money, I didn’t deserve it, and it made my life and my family’s life so much better for those years. I am so grateful.

So, you see, buying dirt is not a bad idea, though you may not know when you buy it if it’s going to turn out in fifty years to have appreciated in value, or to be under water, in every sense of the phrase. Let’s face it. Life is a crap shoot, but cousin Charlotte has a point. As investments go, dirt is not bad, if you are interested in that sort of thing.

So, I don’t want to sell my house. I want to keep it, so my kids will get an inheritance, although I am creeping myself out here talking about things that will happen after I’m dead. I’M NOT READY, LORD.

Anyway, if I sold my house, where would I live?

Maybe I need to go back to Youtube and watch more videos of people on Social Security who live in their cars. Pick up some tips. You never know.

Four Years

Well, friends, comes now the end of another year, and with it come Christmas, Kwanzaa, and the Solstice which will mean longer days and more light for us up here in the Northern Hemisphere. Hanukkah has passed. The sixth of January will bring Epiphany for western Christianity, and around the same time Christmas will come for Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and in February we’ll be hearing about the Chinese New Year and saying, “Gong hey fat choy,” or “Gong xi fa cai,” depending on whether we’re going with Cantonese or Mandarin.

I have my personal milestone coming up. On the twenty-ninth of December, my husband Rick will have been gone for four years. If you’re sick of reading about it, go read something else. Thanks.

Boy, that four years was fast, but it sure wasn’t easy.

I miss Rick every day, but I find that I have come to some peace and acceptance of his being gone. It really takes a long time to wrap your head around the fact of the death of someone who has been a part of your life for so many years. So many years that he still is a part of my life. I find myself having attitudes that I caught from him, and I remember often instances of his humor, and I laugh again.

I have a friend who says, “The peace of the Lord be with you,” every time she leaves my house. One day I was baking something, and I pulled out the built-in bread board that lives under my kitchen counter. To my shock, one corner of the board broke off and fell on the floor.

“The piece of the board be with you,” Rick said.

I feel like for a long time I made myself smash my head on the reality of his absence, trying to bring it home to myself that he was gone, dwelling in that harshness as a way of not feeling the pain of the great things about him that I miss so much. Choosing which hurt I wanted to feel, I suppose.

Now I seem to be relaxing a little, getting a little softer, smiling at the memories of things I loved, and things I did not love so much as well. Laughing at both sides of that spectrum. Looking at his journals and drawings and getting a hit of who he really was, instead of the guy I idealize in my head. I think I prefer the real guy.

Four years gone, that man of mine. I’m doing okay on my own now. It feels like there is never enough money, a chronic condition of adult life, but then somehow there is enough money, and I’m still here. Go figure.

Rick’s father’s widow, Diane, and I have bonded over our similar journeys. We talk about belonging to a club nobody wants to join. She reported to me the other day that there is a new member, one of her sisters, whose husband has died at the age of sixty-seven, after almost forty years of marriage. It hurts to hear.

I know that new members come into the club every day, and I can only say I am so sorry for your loss, and it isn’t easy, and it will not seem like time is going fast as you go through it, but in time, in your time, your grief will simply become a part of who you are. You’ll never be the same, and you’ll never “get over it,” like recovering from a bad cold. It will change how you look at the world, and other people, and yourself.

Perhaps you will find out you are stronger, and weaker, than you thought. Perhaps you’ll learn how to ask for help. Perhaps you will have more compassion for and connection with people who grieve, and more understanding of people who have not walked the grief journey yet. Perhaps grief will express itself in your art, in your work, in the way you care about people.

Perhaps you will love again. You never know. Life is funny, and people are strange.

I approach this anniversary wondering how it will be. Each one is a little different. I have more equilibrium, more peace, year by year.

I wish you joy, and I wish you courage in these challenging times.

You know, for years I have signed off letters, emails, and sometimes this column with, “Blessings, love, hugs,” but lately I have found myself signing off, “Blessings, love, hugs, peace, and resist the damn fascists.” I didn’t mean to. It just started coming out that way.

I think it is an expression of grief.