Let Them Eat Big Macs

I'm not sure I have the energy. Then again, I'm not sure she's worth my time. Keith's got the gist, here, and honestly the prospect of picking through all the logical flaws, willful misunderstandings, and inconsistencies in Missouri state rep Davis's objections to the Summer Food Service program just hurts my head. I don't even know where to begin. Perhaps she is similarly flumoxed by her work as the Chair of the Committee on Poverty, considering she doesn't seem to think it exists.

My Father's Day

Twenty dollar bills and oil change reminders. Dire warnings about, oh, everything. A paralysis of worry over what might and who could and what will. Sentimental tears and shouted impatience. A certain family resemblance in the lines of my face or the edge of my temper. That's what I think of, when I think of my dad. That and talents rarely used but always perfected; pride in accomplishment. That and a laugh at the kitchen table. That and money being no object even when it was. The best was all he ever wanted. Sometimes, he'd tell ya, he got it.

dialogue

She does not, shall we say, tread lightly.

And being a mother, I seem pre-programmed to shout over the rattle and the thump of the stairs as I wonder if it actually matters:

"You sound like a herd of buffalo!"

She leaps off the last step and peers in the laundry room door: "At least you didn't say elephants this time."

"This time?" I think, despite instantaneous evidence. "Do I really have a mom-speak repetoire?"

"Elephants," she grins, already pleased with herself, "are significantly larger than buffalo."

Score one for the girl.

an alternate reality

http://www.flickr.com/photos/9681449@N05/3482064163/

Okay, so Amtrak waiting areas don't really deserve to be called Little Calcutta, the epithet I was just hot, tired, and crowded enough to throw out at Chicago's Union Station yesterday. It wasn't even close to chaos, though when that woman cut to the front of the line I felt it move closer to the verge. The cost of any fare, however, is inversely proportional to the number of times one will hear, "You can't make me take my bipolar pills!" during the course of a journey. I do stand by that.

And I do stand by the train as a good-enough, cheap-enough way to get from here to a place such as the Chicago part of Chicago, as my friend puts it-- not Berwyn or Schaumburg or some other Chicagoland locale full of free parking and lots. I don't mind the driving, but my dread of the citified car-storage, both finding it and paying for it, is great enough that when I heard the story of the neighborhood loon who leases three cars to store excess junk-- real trash: fast food bags and empty detergent boxes! I saw it myself, I swear--the craziest part of the story seemed to be voluntarily trying to park a trio of cars on the metered, zoned, and otherwise unavailable city streets.

If that deranged soul ever felt like hitting the road, as it were, I'd suggest he look into Amtrak. I'm convinced porters allow anything on as long as the bag can be lifted without assistance; the entire security system seems to be photographs of badge-wearing dogs. No x-rays, no pat-down, no 3.4 ounce bottles in ziplock bags, no ID, shoeless shuffle to the gate-- it's a traveler's pre-9/11 timewarp. Unless and until, I hesitate to say, one of the crazies decides to really blow up.

work

My father was a union man, an art school dropout who spent 40 years making the parts that make machines that make glass bottles. How's that for a niche? He worked with his father and his uncles in a shop that is now closed that belonged to a company that no longer exists. How's that for an American story? He earned a wage that provided plenty and a pension, though a paltry one. He still has metal fragments in his hands.

The man who bought this house--my house--when it was new was a union man. After 30 years in the blast furnace of a steel mill, he was ready to sell and retire young when his retirement vanished in a merger. He moved to Pensacola anyway. Last I heard, he was working as a security guard. What else is there to do? Back here, in the life he left, the mill is now idle, has been for months, and thousands like him await their fates.

This county, where I've lived 90% of my life, used to seem 90% a blue collar place, by family if not individual. Brass, steel, oil refining, ammunition (Winchester)-- most people seem to have a connection. And if not for the workers and managers who moved out and up, literally, a good fraction of the houses in my current town need never have been built.

And so when I ask, "now what?" that unorginal question, it is not theoretical, but a concrete query about will happen here when these jobs cease to exist. It's not as if I don't see that labor has run itself off a cliff alongside big business; it's just that I wonder where the bottom is, and how hard it will hurt when we all hit.

parade

It's a few minutes past as I navigate a sidewalk shoved off-kilter by tree roots; I look up when I hear a band. The intersection ahead is yet empty--I've made it, technically, despite a poor choice at that last crossroads. I look up and I look ahead. A float concocted out of a pick-up truck and good intentions passes as the percussion grows louder; I reach the corner as rows of grey polos and khaki shorts approach. My mission is almost accomplished. I scan trombones and trumpets, clarinets, saxophones, clarinets, and then a pony-tailed flute-player not too far out of line.

I think twice about calling her name, do it anyway, am somehow glad when she doesn't notice. For half a block, I walk alongside, in plain view, out of sight, out of mind. Minutes later, the middle school marching band debut will have ended at the edge of this neighborhood that claims city limits, and so I head to my car to beat the buses back to the school. Given the sprouting corn and furrowed fields that fill the ten minutes between here and our suburban home, it feels as if we're in a much different place now. And in a way, we are.

repetition

This is 12, as I remember. Not exactly, but the gist. 

This afternoon I stand at the counter, giggling-- some of us don't outgrow it-- at the pair of girls flitting through the clearance racks. One of them, mine, cares nothing for clothes or whether they match or whether they're clean. But give her an array of chunky plastic bracelets or sparkling cut glass pendants or, today, long summer scarves knit out of blue and black stripes and she's like a crow collecting. 

She comes over, especially: "It's only two dollars."  

My "I wonder why,"  doesn't even lift my eyebrows before she wanders away. Her money, her fun-- doubled,  I soon see: her friend is buying an identical accessory. Of course. They both wear them out of the store, discussing whose is "cooler," oblivious to all else. A generational deja vu that somehow confirms what I knew was someday coming. 

As we walk to the car I remember a picture that was, back then, my favorite. The seventh grade me and two friends out of three were wearing nearly exact sweaters. I'm not sure I noticed it at the time. 

two questions

1.   Who orders this?

2.  Does Will Smith know?

Holy cow, Dick Cheney

goes without saying

Commencement concludes and the graduates spill out. Family portraits line the sidewalk, convened by cell phone and tip-toed scans of the crowd. As I make my last-chance circuit, I'm glad to recognize sister, mother, not-exactly-stepdad around my now-former student with an aunt behind the lens. 

We do-si-do, snap pictures and pose, and I reach for the mother's hand.  She nods through my congratulations and says, "She told me you're a very very nice teacher." And the hesitation in my pleased reply is part polite and part unspoken, "You do speak English!" interfering with my words. She never has, in front of me, before.  

In short, present-tense sentences that I could understand in Spanish, I tell her that I think the world of her daughter and that we'll be in touch.  It's not the time or place for much more than that, though there's plenty more that I could have said and been glad for her to understand. Maybe now there will be another time.  Perhaps before the younger sister graduates I'll remember to thank the woman for the tamales!  

the morning after

The house is quiet, finally.  I choose to believe they're finally asleep. They being the half-dozen 12 and 13 year-old girls who are under my roof, still. I don't hear the TV or the video camera or the desktop; I'm taking the silence at its face. Because at four a.m. they were steadfastly awake and even a caffeinated sugar high runs out eventually-- doesn't it? 

But better-far-to be self-sufficiently oblivious to the clock than to be caught in some don't-wanna-be-here-can't-get-home-crying-vomiting-loop of exhaustion with some woman who is not your mother! 

I'm pretty sure the newly minted 12 year old--mine--assumes her birthday present was the iPod. Little does she know.

A Thank You

"Do they even work?" she asks as I scribble out a line of stubborn black ink that looks faded even though it's new, or new to me, if not the Celexa rep who left dozens of pens behind in the laundry.

I smile and shrug at her contribution to my customary stash;I don't care that she didn't get to go buy pencils as she intended. I tease that each of her family stories begins, inevitably, "We were gonna. . . ." When it matters, she always does. And that is why my gift is not the pens, or the teacher-y cup in which I'll store them until they disappear. My gift is the sentences she added under, "Thanks for Everything," on the card.

"I'd like to thank you," she wrote, in the hand I'll always recognize, "for all the encouragement, guidance, patience, and understanding you have shown me throughout my school years. Thank you for teaching me the importance of knowledge and allowing me to be in your class all these six years." I choke up a little as I read it, and again now as I type for reasons both obvious and obscure. I blink it back with gratitude that she knew what I was trying to do, and let me.

Sunday Morning Copy & Paste: Frank Rich

La Cage aux Democrats
by Frank Rich

THE most potent word in our new president’s lexicon — change — has been heard much less since his inspiring campaign gave way to the hard realities of governing. But on Tuesday night, the irresistible Obama brand made an unexpected and pointed cameo appearance on America’s most popular television show, “American Idol.” In the talent competition’s climactic faceoff, the song picked for one of the two finalists, Adam Lambert, was Sam Cooke’s soul classic, “A Change Is Gonna Come.”

Cooke recorded it in January 1964. Some four months earlier he had been arrested when trying to check into a whites-only motel in Shreveport, La. “It’s been a long, long time coming,” goes the lyric. “But I know a change is gonna come, oh yes it will.” Cooke, who was killed later that same year in a shooting at another motel, in Los Angeles, didn’t live to see his song turn into a civil rights anthem. He could not have imagined how many changes were gonna come, including the election of an African-American president who ran on change some 44 years later.

Cooke might also have been baffled to see his song covered by Lambert, a 27-year-old white guy from San Diego, on Fox last week. But the producers of “American Idol” knew what they were doing. With his dyed black hair, eyeliner and black nail polish — and an Internet photographic trail of same-sex canoodling — Lambert was “widely assumed to be gay” (Entertainment Weekly), “seemingly gay” (The Times) and “flam-bam-boyantly queeny” (Rolling Stone). Another civil rights movement was in the house even if Lambert himself stopped just short of coming out (as of my deadline, anyway) in the ritualistic Ellen DeGeneres/Clay Aiken show-biz manner.

In the end, Lambert was runner-up to his friendly and blander opponent, Kris Allen, an evangelical Christian from Arkansas. That verdict, dominated by the votes of texting tween girls, was in all likelihood a referendum on musical and cultural habits, not red/blue politics or sexual orientation. As the pop critic Ann Powers wrote in The Los Angeles Times, the victorious Allen also has a gay fan base, much as Lambert has vocal Christian admirers.

This is increasingly the live-and-let-live society we inhabit — particularly younger America. In a Times/CBS News poll in April, 57 percent of those under 40 supported same-sex marriage. The approval figure for all ages (42 percent) has nearly doubled in just five years. On Tuesday the California Supreme Court will render its opinion on that state’s pox on gay marriage, Proposition 8. Since Prop 8 passed last fall, four states have legalized gay marriage and New Hampshire is about to. This rapid change has been greeted not by a backlash, but by a national shrug — just as a seemingly gay “American Idol” victory most likely would have been.
And yet the changes aren’t coming as fast as many gay Americans would like, and as our Bill of Rights would demand. Especially in Washington. Despite Barack Obama’s pledges as a candidate and president, there is no discernible movement on repealing the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy or the Defense of Marriage Act. Both seem more cruelly discriminatory by the day.

When yet another Arabic translator was thrown out of the Army this month for being gay, Jon Stewart nailed the self-destructive Catch-22 of “don’t ask”: We allow interrogators to waterboard detainees and then banish a soldier who can tell us what that detainee is saying. The equally egregious Defense of Marriage Act, a k a DOMA, punishes same-sex spouses by voiding their federal marital rights even in states that have legalized gay marriage. As The Wall Street Journal reported, the widower of America’s first openly gay congressman, Gerry Studds of Massachusetts, must mount a long-shot court battle to try to collect the survivor benefits from his federal pension and health insurance plans. (Studds died in 2006.) Nothing short of Congressional repeal of DOMA is likely to rectify that injustice.

The civil rights lawyer Evan Wolfson, who is executive director of the advocacy group Freedom to Marry, notes that the current stasis in Washington is a bit reminiscent of early 1963, when major triumphs in the black civil rights movement (Brown v. Board of Education, the Freedom Riders, the Montgomery bus boycott) had been followed by stalling, infighting and more violent setbacks. Victories were on their way but it took the march on Washington and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech to galvanize John Kennedy and ultimately Lyndon Johnson into action. Even after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Johnson had to step up big time — and did — to prod Congressional passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (now under imminent threat from the Roberts Supreme Court).

It would be easy to blame the Beltway logjam in gay civil rights progress on the cultural warriors of the religious right and its political host, the Republican Party. But it would be inaccurate. The right has lost much of its clout in the capital and, as President Obama’s thoughtful performance at Notre Dame dramatized last weekend, its shrill anti-abortion-rights extremism now plays badly even in supposedly friendly confines.

Anyone with half a brain in the incredibly shrinking G.O.P. knows that gay bashing will further dim the party’s already remote chance of recruiting young voters to replenish its aging ranks, much as the right’s immigrant bashing drove away Hispanics. This is why Republican politicians now say they oppose only gay marriage, not gay people, even when it’s blatant that they’re dissembling. Naked homophobia — those campy, fear-mongering National Organization for Marriage ads, for instance — is increasingly unwelcome in a party fighting for survival. The wingnuts don’t even have Dick Cheney on their side on this issue.

Most Congressional Republicans will still vote against gay civil rights. Some may take the politically risky path of demonizing same-sex marriage during the coming debate over the new Supreme Court nominee. Old prejudices and defense mechanisms die hard, after all: there are still many gay men in the party’s hierarchy hiding in fear from what remains of the old religious-right base. In “Outrage,” a new documentary addressing precisely this point, Kirk Fordham, who had been chief of staff to Mark Foley, the former Republican congressman, says, “If they tried to fire gay staff like they do booting people out of the military, the legislative process would screech to a halt.” A closet divided against itself cannot stand.

But when Congressional Republicans try to block gay civil rights — last week one cadre introduced a bill to void the recognition of same-sex marriage in the District of Columbia — they just don’t have the votes to get their way. The Democrats do have the votes to advance the gay civil rights legislation Obama has promised to sign. And they have a serious responsibility to do so. Let’s not forget that “don’t ask” and DOMA both happened on Bill Clinton’s watch and with his approval. Indeed, in the 2008 campaign, Obama’s promise to repeal DOMA outright was a position meant to outflank Hillary Clinton, who favored only a partial revision.

So what’s stopping the Democrats from rectifying that legacy now? As Wolfson said to me last week, they lack “a towering national figure to make the moral case” for full gay civil rights. There’s no one of that stature in Congress now that Ted Kennedy has been sidelined by illness, and the president shows no signs so far of following the example of L.B.J., who championed black civil rights even though he knew it would cost his own party the South. When Obama invoked same-sex marriage in an innocuous joke at the White House correspondents’ dinner two weeks ago — he and his political partner, David Axelrod, went to Iowa to “make it official” — it seemed all the odder that he hasn’t engaged the issue substantively.

“This is a civil rights moment,” Wolfson said, “and Obama has not yet risen to it.” Worse, Obama’s opposition to same-sex marriage is now giving cover to every hard-core opponent of gay rights, from the Miss USA contestant Carrie Prejean to the former Washington mayor Marion Barry, each of whom can claim with nominal justification to share the president’s views.

In reality, they don’t. Obama has long been, as he says, a fierce advocate for gay equality. The Windy City Times has reported that he initially endorsed legalizing same-sex marriage when running for the Illinois State Senate in 1996. The most common rationale for his current passivity is that his plate is too full. But the president has so far shown an impressive inclination both to multitask and to argue passionately for bedrock American principles when he wants to. Relegating fundamental constitutional rights to the bottom of the pile until some to-be-determined future seems like a shell game.

As Wolfson reminds us in his book “Why Marriage Matters,” Dr. King addressed such dawdling in 1963. “For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait,’ ” King wrote. “It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’ ”

The gay civil rights movement has fewer obstacles in its path than did Dr. King’s Herculean mission to overthrow the singular legacy of slavery. That makes it all the more shameful that it has fewer courageous allies in Washington than King did. If “American Idol” can sing out for change on Fox in prime time, it ill becomes Obama, of all presidents, to remain mute in the White House.
Type rest of the post here

The Real World

"I got my Passport!" she beams as she walks in the door.

 I don't detect that capital p, don't remember the jargon, so my, "Did you!" is especially emphatic and pleased, befitting a paperwork miracle.  To her, it doesn't seem out of line.

With a flourish, she hands it over, and at once I remember. "Passport" is the name of the tech school portfolio; I keep my mistake to myself, glad not to have sullied her moment. I page through the vinyl binder, genuinely impressed:

"Look at everything you know how to do!" I say as I look up to meet her smile. Her certificate is backed by a pages-long checklist of the nursing skills she has mastered; it's a real guarantee, spelled-out and explicit, for anyone looking to hire. 

But that was yesterday.

 "Hi," she says flatly, as she walks in the door. 

When I ask how she is, she claims to be fine as she slings her bag on the desk, but as her shoulders fall she admits:

"I'm a little disappointed." And then she explains her understatement. Today, on the last day of her hospital rotation, she had been working with a supervisor. A supervisor who offered her a job. 

"Go get your CNA, and I'll hire you," she'd said. "You'll have a job before you graduate." 

Except she won't, not there. Not with "not valid for employment" printed across the front of her card.  

There's so much to say but we've already said it, in this place but in other times. 

"If it weren't for my dad," she trails off, emotion, as always in check.  She knows how to endure. The father in question has been absent for years; his whereabouts are unknown. But once upon a time time he was in the States, legally, and he had applied to be a resident. The one adult in her life who has done her wrong may be her only way to make things right.  The world is often cruel. 

We sit on opposite sides of the desk, our helpless grimaces as mirrors. 

 

Not that I'm counting

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how the other half lives

"Yes, I know how AP works," I say as I meet a skeptical gaze. 

As a favor I'm proctoring a test during my ironically named plan time, and thus I have a room full of strangers. They've made their way down to my corner of the building and are politely out of their element. They come through the wrong door; half are a tiny bit late. As they enter, each is mutely questioning. 

"Yes, here. This is where you're supposed to be."  I don't bother to introduce myself or explain what normally goes on here. But as they fall deep into their diligence a boy shows up with a PE test; he knows most of the answers as I read the questions and draw a baseball diamond on a scrap. I wonder what our audience makes of it. 

At the tail end of the hour tests are over and so is their silence. In the meantime, my Senior has arrived to tell me about a tech school field trip to the morgue; we've exchanged only a few whispers out of deference. I wonder if she knows these kids or if she finds today's set-up weird; it definitely feels different. 

In the minutes before the bell one of our guests begins to talk about moving; the room's small enough that it's impossible not to listen. She speaks as matter-of-factly as she can manage about the new bedroom that awaits in the walk-out basement, and about the promotion that led to new construction. "My dad just wanted the four-car garage," she shrugs. 

I turn to my compatriot as the classroom clears at the bell, "And that would be how the other half lives," I say.  She nods emphatically. 

an appeal

"You may not know," wrote my friend, as she shared something I'd never heard. "Jeff is a survivor of non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Eventually a bone marrow transplant saved his life." And there it was, crystalized. In two sentences: everything. A man who is a force for good in the world, a husband, a father, a Packer fan, a pastor, a brother, a friend, is here, perhaps not only but primarily, because of advances in medicine. A method that was once impossible became his cure: that is what this is about.

For the next five months I will be working toward two substantial goals: training to complete the Nike Women's Marathon and raising four times that expense ($3950, no decimal) for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. I joined Team in Training because the opportunity to do something significant for others was as compelling as the potential personal accomplishment: both were challenges I was seeking. I will keep going because I know the cause matters to friends and strangers alike: every life is worth the effort.

Please help make a difference by donating, either through this link or by clicking on the badge at the top of the page.

An ass-centric (or is that ass-oteric) list of What Mary Learned in St. Louis

As a variation on my sporadic travelogue Top Tens, a list compiled from an old friend's return home from The Big City:

1. Corn husks are not for eatin'.

2. Sometimes you have to touch the bellybutton to get what you want.

3. Ass crack is back.

4. American League? Vote for the Canadians.

5. The International Space Station is, believe it or not, in Space.

6. Two shower heads are not, after all, better than one.

7. The bartender at The Tin Can does everything half-assed. Literally.

8. "I'm a brother, as you can see."

9. Cinco de Mayo is Spanish for, "the cab is never gonna come."

10. Something funnier, but I forget.

yard work

It's a yard work kind of day: breezy and warm enough, but not too--the first day without rain in at least a week--and a Saturday to boot. I hear mowers and trimmers and neighbors discussing mulch. So I look past the leaves newly shed by the neighbor's blasted pin oak, past the dandelions that have commandeered the cracks, and set out on my bike again.

Half a mile down the road, where I know the houses but not the neighbors, a dark-headed boy, maybe six, maybe seven, asks me a question from the top of the concrete drive:

"Could you please stop?" I notice his younger companion and her acoustic guitar, and I can't think of a reason to say no. As he shows me where to park my bike I look up to the picture window with an, "I am not a crazy person and your kid asked me to stop" expression, or at least I try. It seems these kids been spending some time undoing the landscaping by painting a selection of stones.

"Would you like a free painted rock?" I can't think of a reason to say no. The girl puts down her guitar, adjusts her hearing aid, and shows me what they've done, save the big one that's for grandma. I ask for a butterfly-ed rock that will fit in my pocket, and they are adorably pleased.

"Thank you for using our service," the boy says in farewell. He is surely welcome.