Four Thoughts, Mid-Convention

• Graciousness is perhaps the greatest defense we have against approbation.  It erases past bad acts more cleanly than confession.
• We Democrats can not stand on pragmatism alone.  It’s not the necessity of our platform that will compel the undecided, but the moral appeal of it.  We can ignore the plight of the returning veteran, the uninsured child, the planet.  We know this because we are ignoring them now.  The argument can not be that we must do something about these wrongs, but that we should do something about them.  It’s time for those better angels of our nature to come out of their long, deep slumber and join in civic discourse once again.
• Very few people over forty can look cool when they dance.  If they are holding signs, wearing funny hats, or dressed in sloganeering t-shirts, the likelihood of coolness seems to drop even further. 
• John McCain is frighteningly willing to steal other people’s voices and turn them into puppets:  Paris Hilton, Jackson Brown, Hillary Clinton.  All people who have appeared in his campaign ads, all people who have repudiated his cooptation.  Watch this.  A man who will steal another’s right to speak for themselves is a dangerous man indeed, and perhaps the least fit man we can imagine to hold the office of the President.

My Pet Dead Rat…

I saw it, dying, for the first time a month ago.  It had curled itself into a ball against a neighbor’s stone wall.  The dogs and I passed within inches of it, but the animals did not pay each other any mind.  The way it looked in the rain, cowered against the wall, was more o’possum than rat.  I thought then that is what it was, but I don’t remember thinking about it much at the time.  Only seeing it, thinking that it did not belong there no matter what it was, and hoping it would be gone the next time we walked this patch of sidewalk.

I saw it again a few days later; stiff and swollen with death in the little patch of grass between sidewalk and curb in front of a neighbor’s house.  This time the dogs noticed it alright, pulling hard towards the stench so they could roll around in it.  It was an effort to drag them across the street.  We walked only on the other side for a week.

Now it comes and goes, disappearing into tall grass and dead leaves for a few days and then somehow back on the sidewalk again.  I almost always notice it before the dogs get too close, although today Max was about to chomp off its head before I realized I needed to reign him in. 

I think about this rat a lot right now.  About how it must mean something, although I can’t think of what.  The dead rat has too much physicality to disappear into language.  Maybe next month, when the last of its fur is gone and it’s only bone chip and tooth, it will give itself up to metaphor.  But for now it stubbornly insists on its own right to be literal.  Real.

I know I should go and get the corpse and throw it somewhere that the dogs can’t get at it–but where?  Not in the garbage, certainly… the smell is still too strong and the garbagemen came yesterday, so it would fester for a week.  (How can so little flesh left on such dry bones still stink that way?)  Not in the garden, because it is a rat.  Had it been the possum I first took it to be, I’d have dumped it in the compost heap weeks ago. 

Poor rat.  Too much a pariah even to be fertilizer.  Too real for metaphor.

I have named him Habakkuk.

Apparently, Today is Celebrate Dzanc Books’ Best of the Web on your Blog Day!

And, because Dzanc is indeed worth celebrating–not just, but for me perhaps particularly, when they are bringing attention to great online writing–consider this a party.  If this were Facebook, I’d send you a virtual cocktail.  If it were Second Life, I’d put out a dance-machine and hire Trinity Serpentine to be the DJ.  But it’s not.  It’s just my blog.  So here is a recipe for a great cocktail you’ll have to make for yourself if you want to toast Dzanc’s great work. 

Abrupt Realization:

• 1oz black sambuca
• 1ox vodka

I can’t speak to the taste of the drink, but don’t you just love the name?

No Undergrads Were Harmed in the Making of this Blog Post…

One of my classrooms is no longer a classroom, but a locked storage closet for textbooks.  These must be very important textbooks, because neither the janitor nor the building supervisor has a key.  Even the ROTC guys, who really “own” that part of the building, can’t open it. 

So I taught outside, on old stone steps that lead to a walkway that doesn’t exist anymore.  I yelled over first-day-of-school traffic, with its beeping horns and the occassional squeal of breaks as someone discovers the idiosyncratic way in which we let our streets become one-way all of a sudden and with very little signage.  This is West Virginia.  If you aren’t from here, what the hell are you doing driving on our streets anyway?  The students were gracoius.  All of my students have been gracious and eager and interesting and funny and people I would like to know just for the sake of knowing them.

The more experienced GTAs tell me this is both impossible and quite obviously the sign of some strange sort of first-day psychosis.  I think they are wrong.  I gave an assignment to be turned in by Wednesday, and said they had the option of emailing these to me.  I already have half of them,  and they are interesting stories about complicated people who do lovely things.

I think the only conclusion that can possibly be drawn is that I got all the best English 101 students, either by some statistical fluke in the university’s registration program or (as I prefer to think) some unmeasurable kindness on the part of the universe. 

I am a lucky, lucky person.  Thanks, Universe!

Dinty W. Moore on Blake Butler on Literary Citizenship

Dinty Moore, nonfictionist, blogged about Blake Butler, fictionist, havng blogged ”in a most excellent fashion recently about the need to be a positive karmic force in the world of literary citizenship.”  So, in the spirit of the ethic of spreading the literary love,* I am sending you first to Brevity’s Creative Nonfiction Blog and hoping that you will go from there to Blake Bulter’s to read the original post in full.**

So, to continue the love chain even further, I’ll borrow from Bulter and post three things I’ve read in the last few days that I really enjoyed (it’s morning, I haven’t read three things yet today):

Tell Me Something by Michelle Cacho-Negrete in the latest edition of The Sun.

This Is Not Warm and Fuzzy by Noel Dunn in the latest edition of Fringe.

My Darlings by Renee K. Nicholson at The Cerebral Catalyst.

Pass it on!

 

*Yep, they are letting me teach Freshman English despite my twisty grammar and utter disregard for the conventions of rhetoric. 

**Okay, it’s also true that I am unable, as one of Lucy’s many parents, for force myself to link to Blake Butler’s blog post because of the title.  Be a good literary citizen, go there, and you’ll see why.  I know it doesn’t refer to MY Lucy, but still…

Wait, I’ve Made a Terrible Mistake…

I’m halfway through the two-week seminar that is supposed to make me ready to teach English 101.  I am not halfway ready.  In fact, I am much less ready than I was before I started this process in a room full of people almost all of whom seem young beyond my imagining and they have a good five to fifteen years on the freshman who will be walking into my classroom in exactly two weeks and one day.  See, I am reduced to panicky, run-on sentences and on the verge of paranoia.

I spend a lot of time on the couch, imagining what I will say on that first day.  I see myself as a frousy-haired, rumpled but kindly old woman who will remind them of their mothers–or, God forbid, their grandmothers–and win them over with lots of corny encouragement and sometimes homemade cookies because they are, after all, college freshman and so by definition broke and hungry.  Or maybe I’m the funky old lady who has been there and done that and wins them over by not being shocked when they forget to come to class because they’ve fallen in love for the first time since leaving home and couldn’t force themselves to crawl out of bed to make it to class for almost an entire week.  But probably I am not.  Probably I will just be some alien with a gradebook and a frown that they have to suffer in order to become physical therapists and computer engineers and novelists who will dedicate their first books to some other, better English professor they will have down the road.

English teachers are supposed to be cool, and I am so not cool any longer.  (If I ever was.)  I think I have made a horrible mistake.  Now excuse me while I go stand in front of the mirror and practice asking if you’d like fries with that.

Learning to Read…

 

We were playing Hide and Seek and I was under the porch.  No one ever hid under the porch because there were spiders and roly-poly bugs and I felt very brave as I rolled myself into a little ball and crammed my body behind the cement steps.  I heard the other kids get found or make it safely back to base.  The call went out, “Olly olly ox in free!”   I had won, which never happened, and usually the other kids wouldn’t even let me play because I was only five and still, they said, pretty much a baby.  I crawled out and marched over to Home Base, triumphant.

            Jennifer, who had been It and was the oldest, coolest kid any of us knew, looked at me and shrieked, “You are covered in cat shit!”

            “In what?”  I had no idea what shit was. 

            “Cat poop.  You have cat poop all over your jeans.”  Jennifer flipped her Marsha Brady hair over her shoulder and wrinkled her nose.  “No one hides under the porch because your cats use it as a litter box, you idiot.”

            I ran crying into the house.  “Mommy, Mommy, I am covered in cat shit!”

            “What did you say, young lady?”

            “I’m covered in cat shit!”

            My mother grabbed me under the arms, holding me as far away from herself as possible, and carried me into the laundry room.  As she stripped me, she scolded, “Don’t ever say that word again.  Where in the world did you learn a word like that?”  She gave me her Scary Mom look.  “Did one of the big kids teach you that word?”

            I knew my mother didn’t like Jennifer, who was in fourth grade and wore mini-skirts and had to live with her mean old grandmother because her father was a no-good-drunken-bum-who-doesn’t-seem-to-care-about-his-children-at-all.  So I sacrificed my father, who sometimes said bad words when he was on the phone talking business and anyway she couldn’t tell me I wasn’t allowed to play with my own father any more.  “Daddy says it.”

            “Well, it’s a grown-up word and little girls shouldn’t say grown-up words.”  She tugged a clean t-shirt roughly over my head and sent me back outside. 

            The game of Hide and Seek was over and everyone was standing around a dead baby bird they had found under the big elm tree in front of Jennifer’s house, poking it with sticks.  I walked over to Jennifer and kicked her.  “You almost got me in trouble.  You didn’t tell me shit was a bad word?”

            She looked at me like I was the stupidest, littlest kid in the whole world.  “Everybody knows shit is a bad word.  If you want to say it in front of grown-ups, you have to say it Op.”

            “In what?” 

            “Op.  It’s like a code.  You spell the word instead of saying it, but you don’t say the consonants, you make their sound and add –op afterwards.”

            Jennifer then studiously set about teaching me the difference between consonants and vowels, the sounds each letter made, and the curious “tch” at the end of the word bitch. 

            My mother had positively forbidden me to learn to read because, she said, children who learned to read before first grade became bored and didn’t learn good study habits.  She read a lot of parenting books; she was really afraid of screwing us all up and being stuck with a house full of idiot children who would drive her to a nervous breakdown.  But I didn’t know I was learning to read.  I thought I was learning to cuss without getting sent to my room to wait-until-my-father-got-home.

            I memorized how to say all the best words in Op.  Sop-hop-i-top.  Fop-u-cop-kop.  Bop-i-top-cop-hop.  My favorite was the melodious a-sop-sop-hop-o-lop-e.  It sounded like jalopy, which was what my mother called my father’s little purple MGB that was only big enough for one kid at a time and was the most glamorous thing anyone in our neighborhood owned.  I practiced alone in my room at night and used my copy Richard Scarry’s The Best Word Book Ever to reverse-engineer the way letters became words became stories.  In a week, I was reading Never Tease a Weasel to myself in secret.  By the end of the summer, I had chapter books hidden under my mattress and a notebook filled with my first attempts at writing.

            I was, indeed, a bored first grader who never learned good study habits.  I sat next to Cathy Wagner, who had also taught herself to read and was also bored.  Mrs. Goheen refused to call on either of us once she realized what was up.  “Well,” she’d say if we raised our hands, “we already know you girls know the answer.  Why don’t we let the kids who are just learning to read answer this question,” and then she’d call on somebody who would just sniffle and shift around uncomfortably. 

            “A-sop-sop-hop-o-lop-e,” I would whisper to Cathy. 

“Bop-i-top-cop-hop,” she’d answer.  We’d giggle behind our Big Chief tablets and roll our eyes, already in love with the transgressive nature of language.

Dinner Times

The homeless man in our basement sneaks upstairs once he’s sure we’ve gone to bed and microwaves a half-dozen Jimmy Dean Griddlecakes Sandwiches for his dinner.  The dogs jump off the bed and scratch at the bedroom door as soon as they hear him in the kitchen and they whine until the stench of cheap microwaved sausage has faded into a sort of damp, mildewy smell and he has gone back downstairs.

Kevin said, “If he lives in your basement then he isnt’ really homeless, is he?”

I think about this for a long time; months.  He is homeless because, if he is not, then my home is also his home and not just a place for him to stay while he goes through the SSI odessy.  And if this is his home, I can never say, “Okay, you got your first SSI check, time for you to move out now.  Good luck.  Take care.”  And I need to know that some day I will be able to say that, or I will come running down the stairs one night, no longer able to take the reek of his Stouffer’s Family Sized Meatloaf that will linger until the smell of the morning coffee overpowers it.

*   *   *

For our dinner tonight, I made a sort of cheap and dirty cassoulet.  White beans in a rich duck broth with ham from Mike and Donna Eisenstat’s farm, potatoes, leeks, and carrots from Reed and Kathy Evans, herbs from my garden and the one next door, and an artisnal sherry that my father gave us last year.  We ate it with a baguette from A New Day Bakery and Bûche Noire from Firefly Farms.  There was more than enough.  I could have, probably should have, invited the homeless man in the basement to join us.  For the first year he lived here, I often did.  But the quality of mercy has grown strain’d. 

It is one thing never to take responsibility for something.  It is something entirely different to put it aside once it becomes burdensome.  I am not generous enough to invite the man in the basement to join us at the dinner table, but I am also not so stingy that I would throw him back onto the streets.  It could take another few years for his SSI to come through.  We all know this now, though none of us did when this arrangement was first conceived. Until then, we are all just trying to hold on to the moral middle ground.  We gave up trying to walk the high road a long time ago.