Backpack Jack

The outlet mall at Flatwoods, WV isn’t very exciting.  The stores aren’t great—Tommy Hilfiger, whose clothes I won’t buy, is the only designer with a presence.  It is a good place to look for Christmas presents for newly apartmented, college freshman nieces and gadget-addicted (I’m sorry, I mean tool and I don’t mean addicted) husbands.  Plus, there is one of those Amish Bulk Foods stores that, I don’t think, have much to do with the Amish but do have lots of wonderful, bad-for-you sorts of things like bread-and-butter pickled beets and caramel-covered marshmallows.  So, I stopped yesterday on my way home from Thanksgiving in Huntington.

 

I got out of my car and heard someone barking at the top of his lungs, “…and all you God-damned Republicans are going to get what’s coming to you, all you fat fuck Jesus-freaks with your jacked-up pick-up trucks and…” Shit, I thought.  This is going to be someone I know. 

 

And it was.  Backpack Jack, who I met the first night I worked at Bartlett House back in the late 80s and who has been wandering in and out of my life ever since.  But then again, that’s what he does.  He wanders.  He labels himself a hobo and, if there is anything noble left in the call, he embodies it.

 

It seemed a civic duty to offer Jack a ride back to Morgantown; I’m a big fan of free speech, but I also think people should be able to bring their children to public places without being confronted by someone yelling obscenities.  Jack isn’t crazy, just bored and a little too in love with the idea of himself as an outlaw.  And, he told me, he had figured he wouldn’t get a ride to Morgantown that day and thought he’d just stand there yelling until the cops offered him a free place to spend the night.  Flatwoods doesn’t have a homeless shelter, and Jack says he prefers jail—fewer rules and no one who thinks they can save you.

 

The hour-and-a-half trip was like the world’s longest panhandle.  I guess Jack’s shtick is all he has left, because he kept it up long after I’d given him the five bucks he’d asked for and made it clear he wasn’t getting any more out of me.  That makes me sad.  Jack used to be more interesting.

 

We reminisced a little about his old running gang:  Cat Eyes, Big Al, and Steve who never did get a colorful nickname.  They’re all still on the road, although Jack says Steve was married for a while and is only just now de-trailered and single again.  We talked about the winter I had to cut through the duct-tape Cat Eyes used to keep his boots on to check for frostbite, and how sad it was that Big Al had ripped off a local shop-owner who is usually kind to the homeless and, as a result, wasn’t welcome in town by anyone these days.  It was a little like running into an old friend and a little like going back to a job I was no longer suited for, but mostly it made my car smell like unwashed man and wood smoke.

 

Still, it’s nice to live in a world small enough that I know the hobos on the road; when to stop, and when to keep driving.  The alternative—to always have to keep driving—seems both lonely and wrong.  I may be done letting homeless men live in my basement, but hopefully I will never have to stop offering them rides back to town.

Miracle Fruit

 

I am a complete fool for culinary curiosities.  The are  three jars of candied olives, a bottle of truffle oil, two different kinds of black rice, and several packets of instant pho in my kitchen cabinets right now.  For a few months, my friends Kevin and Sara had to avoid coming to dinner because I kept threatening to make chicken with truffles I had bought at TJ Maxx.  (When I finally opened the jar, they were dry, gritty things and I threw them away. I’m a sucker, but a picky one.)  

But Miracle Fruit is by far the strangest and coolest thing I’ve tried in a long time.  It’s a berry that (and this is just such a strange idea) has something called miraculin in it that bonds to your taste buds and temporarily keeps you from tasting the sourness of things.  

I bought my Miracle Fruit in tablet form on Ebay.  So, yes, just to clarify–I bought strange pills from an unknown person and let one dissolve on my tongue.  If you think this is the first time I’ve ever done that, you’re clearly a stranger who has just wandered over here from someplace a little more sheltered.  But anyway…  So, I let the pill dissolve on my tongue and then waited two minutes, as instructed by the few English directions on the box.  After two minutes, I took a giant swig of cranberry juice and almost spit it out because it was so sweet!  There was no bitterness it all.  So I tried orange juice.  Same thing.  Tastes like Sunny-D.  (So, yeah, gross.)  

“Well,” I thought, because I am prone thinking these sorts of things, “so what if it can make orange juice taste like Sunny-D?  Can it make lemon juice taste good?  I bet not!”  And then I liberally squeezed the plastic lemon until I had a good mouthful of juice.  (Maybe proof that all this dissolving-tabs-from-strangers stuff has been less than a great idea.)  And it wasn’t sour at all!  It tasted like those candied lemon wedges that sat on my great-grandmother’s coffee table.  (Again, not really a taste I’d go looking for, but you get the point.)

If you know me, you are probably going to get a box of these for Christmas, and maybe a few grapefruit or kumquats.  And you won’t believe me that it works as well as it does until you squeeze juice from your own plastic lemon onto your tongue

Changed

I feel like I’ve died and gone to America.

–composer Barry Franklin

I can’t stop crying.  I have been crying for five days now.  Every time someone says something to me that includes the words “President Obama,” I well up.  Jessie Jackson, Will Smith, and Oprah Winfrey cry, and I’m snot-nosed and red-eyed right along with them.  Colin Powell cries and–defends his right to cry–and I weep.  

Intellectually, I understand why I have been so invested in the Obama campaign, but until he won, I didn’t know myself how emotionally invested I was–not in his campaign, but in a dream of America that I pretended to stop dreaming some time during the Reagan years.  Or maybe it was after the The Cosby Show was cancelled and Cops debuted.  I can’t put my finger on it.  But it died when I was young enough that dreams were dying off by the dozens, and I don’t remember taking particular notice of it then.  

Now, in its triumphant return, I begin to wonder what other dreams I put aside that, instead, I should have worked toward.  It’s a scary, brilliant moment.  I am glad to have been here for it, and I hope I am up to the things it will ask of me in the coming months and years.  

 

The Revolution Wants Candy…

 

Hope comes knocking and asking for candy...

Last night, we had three Barack Obamas at our house.  The first was the teenage girl next door.  The second was the ten year old boy from down the block.  The third was someone’s father.

There were no John McCains, no Sarah Palins, and no George Bushes.  And we’re supposed to be a red state.

I will wait with the rest of you for the results of the election.  But I have seen the results of the primary:  two children, years away from voting,  dressed up on Halloween as the black man who, according to the poles, is most likely our next President.  

These children will grow up to be people who do not say, as people my age said for a very long time, “He’s a great candidate, but I don’t think even the Democrats will elect a black man as their Presidential nominee.”  They won’t say, as people I love have said as recently as last week, “It’s a shame, but this country isn’t ready for a black president.  He can’t win.”

They will have always known a black man can be president.  

The revolution has come.    Last night, it knocked on my door, along with a gaggle of Hannah Montanas and Darth Vaders, and held out its pillowcase for candy.

And then we were three…

The homeless guy in our basement is gone. He made a brief trip to the regional jail for an old, stupid thing and now, as far as we know, is staying with a loose group of friends, possibly out of doors. We’d asked him to move out before the incident; after two years, he was no closer to being able to live on his own than when we’d first taken him in, and it was clear to us that he needed the case management services that he could only get by living in the homeless shelter. No one was pleased with the solution, but no one–not even the guy in the basement–argued against it. If any good was going to come of his being here, it seemed likely it would have come in those first two years.

Scotti, Lucy, and I live in the house alone for the first time since our marriage. My niece lived with us for a while, and a Korean psychiatrist who was here as part of an international exchange program. For a few weeks last summer, there was a second homeless man on the back porch.

I love you, I really do, but don’t ask to stay with me while you look for a new apartment or decide if you’re going to leave your husband. I’m sorry, but the guest room is full of Scotti’s papers and, as soon as I’ve put a fresh coat of paint on the walls, the basement bedroom is going to be full of mine. I am not a person who can safely have empty rooms–I fill them up with people too easily–so we are naming each room in our house something other than “the guest room” or “the extra bedroom.” We will have Scotti’s study, and my study, and maybe even a dining room again.

Wordle…

I’m addicted to Wordle.  I think every writer should play with it now and again… it is a surprising and effective exercise to the see the “word clouds” that are generated.

Also, it’s one of those great writing-but-not-writing time sinks… for those days when I want to feel like I’m accomplishing something but, really, I’m lucky to have managed to get out of bed and down to the computer at all.

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.

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!

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.