HOME AGAIN, HOME AGAIN

Safely home again in Delaware, after several days that felt like a real vacation - even the two spent mainly sitting in traffic on the New Jersey Parking Lot, I mean: Turnpike.   My contribution to T'giving dinner was the gravy, which turned out spectacularly well.  G's fruit stuffing  (Dear reader, do you say "stuffing" or "dressing?"  This is a question I'd like to explore.  It must be regional.  G says dressing, I say stuffing.) was also heavenly.  We ate entirely too much, but that seems to be what it's all about. 

On Friday other members of G's family came out for a visit.  This included two small boys, so we all trekked over to the Eric Carle Museum.  If you don't have any small children, or grandchildren, or teach any small children, you may have been deprived of Eric Carle.  He has produced some of the most wonderful books for children that exist.  His illustrations are works of art, and to see the originals, be able to see how he achieves his effects, was probably more of a delight for the grownups in the crowd than for the kids.  There is an Art Room, where the current project is making squares (about 6 X 6 inches or so) of translucent paper into "tiles" for a huge mosaic, by pasting designs or pictures made from scraps and bits of colored papers onto them.  The finished squares all go onto panels that will hang in the windows of the Art Room through the holidays.  They are truly amazing - kids have vented creativity in wondrous and delightful ways.  Some of the grownups, and both kids, made squares to contribute to the work.  And had a lot of fun.

We took several lovely walks, ate leftovers, went to bed early and got up late, watched movies, did a little shopping - mine was all books at a wonderful bookstore called "Food for Thought."  It's a beautiful area, but I don't think I could take the winters.  On our way south yesterday, we stopped in Holyoke to have breakfast with friends from our Massachusetts years.  We'd been out of touch the past year or so, and catching up over quiche and coffee was heartwarming fun.  They can't take the winters much longer either, and are thinking perhaps New Mexico.  Which is our thought too, and having them close by would be a dream come true. 

This morning came much too early, after yesterday's Drive From Hell, and I've been working like mad all day.  So, for now, it's into my jammies to curl up and read a while. Then to bed, so I can make the End of the Semester Sprint in good form.

WE GATHER TOGETHER

The Holidays are rolling in with all their thunder, aren't they?  I made the mistake of doing a little shopping after my morning classes.  Oh dear, time to stop that.  Went to buy wine to take with us to Amherst, Massachusetts for the Thanksgiving feast.  We will leave tomorrow after my only class of the day (8:30 to 10:20, but it will probably end earlier than it should) to drive north with all the other crazies going over the river and through the woods.  In our case it's not to Grandmother's house (we ARE grandmother) we go, but to G's sister's house.  This is CR, the sister whose husband died in September, and as this is the first major holiday since then, we thought she might be very lost and lonely trying to figure out what to do.  We've been planning to take this trip ever since G came back from Massachusetts in September.  Other members of G's family will be getting together elsewhere in Mass. and will come west on Friday for a visit.  CR isn't ready for a full-scale family bash yet, but was delighted that we two would come.  It's about all she can deal with.

We love a roadtrip together, and really look forward to getting away from pokey little Delaware for a few days.  Amherst is a lovely college town, and closeby Northhampton is known as Lesbian Heaven.  It has a large population of Our Kind of Folks, with women's bookshops, cafés, music, and more.  We know the traffic on the way north will be monstrous, but - even after 23 years - we can talk for hours, and we see each other so little during the regular workweek that this will be a welcome togetherness. 

I want to wish everyone in JournalLand a restful, peaceful holiday.  Don't go shopping on Black Friday - stay home and play with the kids, read a book, bake a cake, watch a movie, take a really long nap.  It is my deepest hope that everyone has more to be thankful for than they can count, that the harvest of love and delight in your lives is bountiful and rich.  All the political despair, the things that are haunting us day and night, can be set aside while we look around and realize how fortunate we really are. As Lily Tomlin's character in Search for Intelligent Life says, we are all of us just specks in the universe.  In glacial time, this age is a blink of the eye.  Let's enjoy our time as specks: love, laugh, eat, drink, rest.  And return to reality next week.  I love the JournalLand community and I am so thankful to have you as my friends.  (And you, Tim, are a special case.  I'm so amazed and grateful for our long friendship, and its new life during this political season.) 

SATURDAY MORNING RAMBLE

Pre-Script:  If all you're interested in reading is John's Weekend Assignment, scroll down to the end of the post, paragraph six.  The rest is truly stream of semi-conscious ramble.  Of course, it's totally fascinating, but......

So, I've become a once-a-week journaler, it would seem.  Though I have made a couple of posts in The BiblioPhiles over the past week.  I thought once the election was over, I'd have more time in my life - but this proves not to be the case.  I'm instead devoting more time and attention to my Real Jobs, and that's a good thing.  Hard to believe the semester is almost at an end, but it is, with a truncated week for Thanksgiving, then only two full weeks after that.  Crunch time, trying to cram in everything that needs doing before I have to enter those grades into the system. 

And, my work with the after-school kids could easily take up any time I'm willing to devote to it.  They need so much, are eager for so much - so open, interested, interesting.  Yesterday we continued learning about Indians, Native Americans, with a film about young Indian PowWow dancers, a story about a historical young Indian's manhood ceremonies (most of these kids are boys), and pictures from a Dover coloring book of famous historical Indians.  I was a little worried about coloring as an activity, thinking they might feel themselves too old - but these are extremely sophisticated pictures, challenging to color, with biographical information included.  They were totally enthusiastic, wanting more than one apiece, wanting to take the book to the Post Office and make more copies.  Imagine that.  I made them more copies on the agency's machine, and they all ended up with three or four of them.  No one wanted to leave on the early bus, the whole group stayed 45 more minutes to finish what they were doing.  This is a wonderful age group (9 to 12), old enough to be interested in learning everything, young enough to be read to, to color, to not yet be jaded (or have to appear so).  When I was much younger and first teaching, I was interested in the Alternative School Movement:  John Holt, Spring Hill, etc.  I still think it was the right direction for schools, and some of it did filter in. Fridays will be our Alternative School days.  My next move is to ask the kids what they themselves would like to do with our Fridays.  After they finish telling me: "eat pizza, watch cartoons, go outside and play," they'll get down to the real business of letting me know some stuff they're really interested in.  And, goddamn it, we've got to get some money for field trips.  This is ridiculous.

Speaking of older kids (or, alluding to them), every so often during the week some kids from Sussex Tech High School show up to volunteer to work with us on homework help.  These are some fine examples of young people, let me say right now.  It's so good for the children to have them working with them, then after the work is done, playing with them.  I am a firm believer in learning through play - and have brought in math games, word games, card games, to occupy them in groups when homework is finished.  To have a cool big guy play sentence cubes with you is a joy and a treat.  Also an incentive to finish your homework and get it checked over.  Last week when we had two of these volunteers with us we ended up with a giant two-team Uno game.  Is this education?  Of course it is.  Strategy, planning, thinking skills, team work, getting along with others.  All important parts of education. 

Rambling.  Stream of semi-conscious drifting.  I can't talk about politics.  My main feeling about politics is nausea.  I begin each morning reading news: mainstream, alternative stream, beyond-the-fringe stream, and all of it makes me want to hurl.  Dude, where's my country?  Please, let me wake up from this nightmare soon. Our group that began last spring as Sussex County for Kerry is getting together after T'giving to discuss What Now?  Do we want to continue?  If so As what?  To what purpose?  etc.   My sister in D.C. is hosting a house party tomorrow for MoveOn.org to ask the same questions.  Delaware is a "blue state" only in the two counties north of us.  Here in Sussex county we might as well be living in, oh, I don't know - Arkansas?  Alabama?  The vote here went to Bush, and to all the other conservative, Republican, candidates.  Not one of the candidates we worked for locally won.  Not district candidates to the State leg, not the governor (though she did win in the state, thank goddess), not county council candidates.  Okay, no, two county council candidates did win, both of them entrenched Democratic GOB's (if you live in one of those elitist states, you may not know the acronym:  Good Old Boy).  So, yeah, now what?  Where do we go from here?  For me personally, where I go from here is to work within my own sphere, with those I can reach.  The immigrant community, the children of the immigrant community.  The group that formed here earlier this year over the incredible Christian intolerance that has manifested itself toward Jewish and Muslim children in our local school systems. I have not attended meetings of this group during the fall, and have lost touch.  But I intend to remedy that quickly. 

I watched Bill Moyers last night, as always - can he truly intend to retire the end of next month?  He was as spittingly angry over the events of the past week as I am.  See me not talking about politics?  Not talking about appointments and resignations, and House ethics rule changes, and Tom Delay and Condoleeza Rice and blowing up mosques and killing civilian Iraqui families and Donald Rumsfeld is still there and now we have AG as the AG?   No, I'm going to go read other people's blogs, and see them talking about politics.  See if anyone has had a stroke yet.

And while I'm rambling, I'm going to do John Scalzi's weekend assignment.  The topic is to discuss something for which you're actually grateful - but it's not one of those usual things, like family, health, a paycheck every now and then, food on the table, gas in the car.  And I do have one of those.  It's one that's so unusual it may sound unfilial, uncaring, callous.  At the time it happened I was anything but grateful; I was in fact devastated, ruined, my world torn to shreds.  It took me years to recover and fully function.  Now, however, I can feel a strange sort of thankfulness to my parents for dying when I was so young.  My parents were quite a bit older than most, they married older, had children older, and died when we were young, that is - young to lose one's parents.  I was 38, my youngest sister only 28.   My parents were really too young to die, and I hope to defeat my inherited genes and live a lot longer than they did.  My father, who died first, was not much older than I am now.  So, grateful?  you ask.  Yes, as I now see, and have seen for some time, my coeval friends struggling to take care of aged and ailing parents while coping with their own changing lives at the same time, I realize what a huge problem I was spared. That is what I am grateful for:  not their deaths - there is not a day of my life that I don't in some way think of and mourn my mother - but the chance they gave me to have this time in my life to move into my own aging, to enjoy grandchildren, senior discounts, take trips, etc., with selfishness and what grace I can muster.  One of our dear friends, who is ten years older than I am, has only this year been released from the tyranny of caring for a 97 year old father who in mind and personality had long since ceased to be the father she had known and loved.  Caring for him entailed leaving her job, partner, life, in New England to live with him in Florida for extended periods of time.   Other friends have parents with Alzheimer's, I see their lives now consumed with worry, grief, anguish.  I have been given a great gift, by those who gave me life to begin with - time in the later years to enjoy my own interests, activities and other people I love.  Even if I am currently still spending this time working, it is work I love, and to which I am happy to be able to devote myself.   So, Kathleen and Bill, wherever you are - I hope it's a better place in every way than this one, but thanks for what I have here now.  

SMALL CREATURES, ONE AND ALL

Okay, how's this for cute? 

It's Vixen, in all her perfect catness, sitting on the kitchen desk - which has become her dining spot.  Molly eats in the downstairs bathroom, up on the counter, and Honey of course eats on the floor.

My sister came out from D.C. on Thursday, as her daughter had the day off from school and only a half-day on Friday.  I had only my morning classes at the college, no afterschool program - so we had time for fun and frolic.  Not much frolicking on Friday, as it was a day of pouring rain, but Saturday we all spent outdoors at one thing or another. 

 With this child and a kitten around, who could stay gloomy?  She and her mom are lights in my life - it was a shining weekend, election or no election, rain or no rain.  We ate, drew, read, talked endlessly, worked in the yard, played with the beasts, slept long nights under down comforters.

 Here are three darling creatures on the couch - I'm surprised by how big Vixen looks in this picture.  Though Melissa was amused by Vixen, she remains loyal and true to Molly, whom she has loved with a passion since she first met her.  We had kinda sorta hoped Melissa and Vixen would fall in love with each other and Vix would go home with the girls.  But, no, a kitten's wildness is not what Melissa wants in a cat.  She likes the steady personality and rotund dependability of our old girl - whom we could never let move to Washington.  No, Molly will remain with us, as the queen of the house. As you can tell from the photo on the couch, she is beginning to accept the reality of the kitten.  Reluctantly.

I'll be back during the week, to read and post.  Renewed, refreshed, though still bewildered and somewhat lost.  And now there already begins a push to get Arnold elected.  Am I through the looking glass, or down the rabbit hole?  Is this a bad trip?  a bad dream?  Who is writing this script, anyway?

STRANGER, IN A STRANGE LAND

Although I currently feel that I am living in an occupied country, an alien in my own land - life goes on.  I made it through the week, taught my classes, worked with my afterschool kids on their homework assignments. On Friday afternoons we are supposed to be doing "enrichment activities" with the kids, since most of them don't have weekend homework.  So, this Friday I began a series of activities having to do with Native Americans.  Which is what I'll do for the next month, instead of the usual Thanksgiving propaganda about the wonderful Pilgrims sharing their bounty with the Indians.  They'll get enough of that crap in school.  Instead they'll learn how the white Europeans began what turned out to be a trend in American history, continuing to the present. 

The week was made both more fun and more difficult by the appearance in our lives of a kitten.  She had turned up at the home of a somewhat distant neighbor, the Presbyterian minister, who was giving her milk and hoping she'd go away.  She followed G and Honey (dog) home when they were out walking last Tuesday.  On Friday I took her to a cat rescue society, hoping to have her adopted over the weekend.  However.  When I got in the car to drive away - I couldn't do it.  Sitting on the sun porch watching the leaves fall, holding her in my lap and listening to her purr - these were the things that kept me from slitting my wrists Weds morning.  So, I went back in and said - never mind, I'm taking her home again.  We took her to the vet yesterday, had her tested for feline leukemia and AIDS, she got her shots and deworming meds.  She's entirely healthy, a beautiful little tortiseshell calico, her name is Vixen - and eventually Molly will stop hissing at her.  Or at least so we hope.  Honey thinks she's delightful, and it was because she fell in love with him that she pranced along and followed him home.  Pictures to follow.

Here, again, Mark Morford pours out the feelings in my heart in this most recent column:

Hello, Uranus? Got Any Room?
Must. Move. Away. Cannot endure more Bush. Soul about to implode. Right? Not so fast
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, November 5, 2004
I said it, you said it, pretty much anyone with a brain larger than a grape or a soul more nimble than a rock said it maybe a thousand times over.

And you probably weren't even all that drunk when you said it and maybe you were even a little more than half serious and maybe you said it just like this: If Bush somehow snags another election, if the unthinkable comes to pass and the Dubya neocon nightmare refuses to end, well, that's it. I'm outta here.

Done. Over. Gone. Moving away. To Canada. Or France. Latvia. Uranus. Anywhere, really, that doesn't have Bush as leader and that doesn't make me openly ashamed to be a citizen and that doesn't make me feel like a sickened disillusioned ulcerated outcast in my own happily divisive country every damn day including Sunday.

You want a place, you say, that doesn't right this minute seem to be working heroically to make homophobia and born-again fundamentalism and pre-emptive isolationist warmongering and environmental ignorance a national religion. A place where SUVs aren't considered minor deities and where gay people aren't loathed for wanting to slice a wedding cake and where brazen heavily narcotized denial in the face of a veritable mountain of presidential lies isn't the national pastime.

Tempting, isn't it? To just move away to a sunnier, clothing-optional utopia and wait for it all to be over, for the dark days to pass and the Shrub era to sink into the tar pits of history and the fog to finally lift?

After all, most all of us on the progressive Left feel we truly faced the dragon this election, and we put up a valiant fight and marshaled as potent an army of dissenters and intellectuals and moderates and liberal crusaders and feminists and enlightened activists as possible, considering.

And we supposedly had more of the youth vote and the disenfranchised single-female vote and the "Daily Show" vote and the Eminem vote and the celebrity vote and the humanitarian vote and the antiwar vote and the gay vote and the pro-choice vote and the Howard Stern vote and the immigrant vote, and still the dragon just sneered and hacked up another fireball of bogus fear and evangelical Christian self-righteousness and torched our glimmering sword of juicy hope into a smoking cinder.

And now, this. The nation has officially, stupefyingly handed the world's worst president a blank check to do whatever he and his cronies like, without fear of major repercussions or voter disillusionment or damage to an imminent re-election campaign, because there won't be one.

Which is to say, Bush now has no one to worry about now but his true constituents (hint: it ain't mainstream Repubs, or even the born-agains), no one to answer to but the CEOs and the energy barons and the military-supply corporations co-owned by his father, and nothing to guide him but his own deeply regressive, monosyllabic moral compass. Hell, why stick around for more of that?

But here's the catch. Here's the tough part to accept. Here's what everyone who's right now on the brink of packing their bags and checking the real estate prices in Vancouver has to know and has to have drilled into their disconsolate hope-crushed souls right this minute, before it's too late:

You cannot leave. You cannot drop the armor now. Why? Because you are needed, more than ever. You are mandatory to keep the energy flowing, the karmic vibrator buzzing, to keep the progressive and lucid half of the nation breathing and healthy and awake and ever reaching out to the half that's wallowing in fear and violence and homophobia and sexual dread, hoping to find harmony instead of cacophony, common ground instead of civil war, some sort of a shared love of a country so messy and internationally disrespected and openly confused its own president can't even speak the language.

After all, you don't hand over all your children the first time the flying monkeys bang on your door. You don't give up your dream house just because a bunch of gangbangers moved in down the block. You become a bit more wary and alert and you stock up on the superlative porn and the expensive wine and the deepened sense of true beauty and sex and love and hope and you hunker down and grit your teeth and dig in for the long haul, and you work on making your own goddamn garden more beautiful than even you could have imagined, because, well, the neighborhood -- and the world -- needs it, more than ever.

Look. No one said it was gonna be easy. No one said it was gonna be painless. And no one said it was gonna be quick. As I've noted before, the neocons have been planning this takeover for decades. The Bush regime, despite feeling like a massive indigestible incomprehensible fluke, is no accident.

The GOP is deeply entrenched and the razor wire is all around their compound and they are masterful at working the angles of fear and manipulation and of kowtowing to the least tolerant and least morally flexible segments of the population -- this is, after all, how Bush won a second term -- and hence they aren't about to just roll over at the first sign of outcry or dissent or a snowboarding senator, even if he's 10 times the man and a thousand times the intellect of the smirking lunk currently in office.

And besides, most hardcore Republicans would, of course, love it if you'd leave the country, and take your gul-dang gay-lovin' tofu-eatin' tree-huggin' pierced-labia values with you. They would love it, furthermore, if the libs in the morally shredded red states would split for the coastal cities and the major metropolises of America, all those godless heathen places where the neighbors won't yank the Kerry/Edwards sign outta your front lawn and chase you down and beat you with it and call it patriotism. Remember: bullies never deserve to own the playground.

And one of the most stirring e-mails I received during the outpouring of grief the day after the election was from a young female reader, "an artist, an intellectual and a Jew" who's been living in Mexico and who now says she's so enraged and saddened by the election's ugly outcome that she's preparing to return to the States ASAP, just so she can help, so she can join the resistance, keep the right-wingers from coming after our souls. Now, that's patriotism.

The bottom line: Don't disband the newfound army just because one ugly battle was lost. Mourn, commiserate, lick wounds, lick each other, drink heavily, spit out your stale gum of disappointment and pop in a fresh clove of laughter and spiritual heat and then regroup and sober up and take an even deeper breath and watch in hot wet spiritually emboldened amusement as the cosmic circus unfolds.

It's far from over. The tunnel is just a little darker -- and longer -- than we imagined.

Thoughts for the author? E-mail him.

Mark's column archives are here

MEMENTO MORI

If I were still a drinker, my head would be in the toilet for most of the day today.  As it is, I put my clothes on and went to give my morning class a test, with only my heart and soul in the toilet.  I couldn't teach, every time I opened my mouth I burst into tears - so it's a good thing I had planned a test.

There's nothing left to do but grieve and retrench.  I have never felt less like an American, never felt more ashamed of this country, never felt so bereft by anything political.  How I feel is exactly the way I feel when someone I love dies.  Grieving and retrenching may take some time.  I don't know what I'll do about journaling for a while.  Not much, I suspect.  I will read,  walk in the falling leaves (a lot), visit the children in the families, do my best at both my jobs. 

For someone who expresses our feelings particularly well, go read Mark Morford's column today. 

See you, after the waters are crossed.  And may the force be with us.

REALITY OR ABSURDITY? WHICH WILL IT BE?

I've noticed that many of my political journal buddies have added "member of the reality-based community" to the tag lines for their journals.  And I'm wondering where this expression began - did it begin with Ron Suskind's NYT piece on Dubya's faith-based madness, "Without a Doubt?"  That's the first place I came across it.  Did someone else coin it before Suskind?  I like the expression a lot, although it seems to posit that faith is no part of reality.  And I do think it can be, though certainly not in the way that our leaders are currently experiencing (or at least that's what they're telling us) faith.  Faith also includes a lot of doubt, something our leaders haven't yet acknowledged.  Of all the many things that infuriate me about this administration, and this current load of hogwash about a Christian Nation, the most infuriating is the way that faith and Christianity have become some bizarre sword and shield of inflexible morality and a basis for terrible inhuman actions and decisions. 

Were Jesus to get John Ashcroft, George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, et al, together in a closed room, I don't think he would be particularly gentle with them.  Same goes for most of the leaders of the Christian Right not actually sitting in Washington.  Likewise the talk show hosts spouting Christian Nation nonsense over the radio waves.  I think we'd hear the pissed-off Jesus who drove the money-lenders out of the Temple giving these guys a piece of his mind.

So, anyway.  Reality-based community.  I thought about adding it to my tagline here, too.  Then I read a swell article called Time to Hit the Barricades, on salon.com.  The writer, one Katharine Mieszkowki, posits the "unthinkable" - what will you do if Bush wins?  And then asks a varied group of bloggers that question.  It's a lot of fun, actually made me laugh a couple of times.  Get the daypass and go read it.  My favorite was the "nebbish in chief" of a blog called internebbish, who said "I think I will give everyone I know a lot of duct tape to try to hold their skulls together so when Bush talks their brains don't shoot out of the back of their heads."

In the group quoted was a Professor John-Paul Spiro, of a blog with the great name everything's ruined, who said he would no longer call himself a member of the reality-based community.  He would become a member of the absurdity-based community, and live in an absurd universe for four years.  I kind of like this idea, myself.  So - I am reserving my decision until after the election is decided.  Will it be reality I live in?  or absurdity and fantasy?  It all remains to be seen.  None of the people asked what they'd do for this article said they'd move out of the country.  And I myself have decided that I will stay and fight on.  My sister in DC told me the other day she'll be going for the molotov cocktails and matches if the Junta comes back.  She thinks anarchy is the only hope.