The 50th Anniversary gather and march in honor of The March on Washington for Jobs and Justice this weekend was inspiring and moving!
I cried when I saw Emmett Till’s cousin standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial with the parents of Trayvon Martin.
My heart connected to Myrlie Evers-Williams, widow of slain activist Medgar Evers. What an amazingly articulate and strong woman for someone of her age, 80! “Stand Our Ground – Aint’ I a Woman? – Strength of a Tree – This is Our Country…” I will not forget her words. She spoke to me, as a woman. Watch and listen to her. Well worth your time.
John Lewis! The only living speaker from the 1963 rally to return to the podium 50 years later.
We have another fight. 50 years late:. We cannot wait we cannot be patient. We all live in the same house. I am not going to stand by and let the Supreme Court take the right to vote away from us. Push and pull and make America what America should be. Listen to him:
Al Sharpton at the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington. Just do yourself a favor and watch it!
“When they ask us for our photo ID, take out a photo of Medgar Evers, of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, of Viola Liuzzo…” Rev. Al isn’t talking about voting fraud, he is talking about those who gave their lives for the right to vote.
Cayo Santiago, Chaucer and Change
As part of a “blog hop” for the Generation Fabulous site/magazine I am writing on the topic of Transformative Travel. (How I dislike that phrase, blog hop, there has to be a better one.)
Where do I start? I love travel. I grew up on a farm and Summer was not a time of vacations. It was a time of hard work, farming, gardening, raising young livestock, and making hay. I so wanted to be one of The Happy Hollisters who always seemed to be traveling somewhere together as a family. Wow. That blew my little Baby Boomer mind.
I had my palm read by my best friend’s mother as I was starting High School and she looked up at me and said with some wonderment, “You have the most developed travel line I have ever seen!” Farmer’s daughter, travel, yeah right. I figured back then the closest I would get to travel was someone in sales.
But life takes us on mysterious and unanticipated paths. I have traveled more at this point in my life than I ever would have ever thought possible when I was very young, and not nearly enough to slake my thirst for new places and spaces.
I lived on an island, Cayo Santiago, with several hundred rhesus macaques for a month of monkey-watching. I spent a month in Barcelona and Madrid. I awoke one morning after camping, with permission, to the sun rising between the pillars of Greek and Roman ruins at Empuries over the Mediterranean. I’ve taken the train through Britain and visited what was The Sweet Shoppe that Alice loved so long ago in Oxford, and been seated at High Table too, as well as been granted the privilege of turning the pages of an illuminated Chaucer. I’ve walked in Sherwood Forest and along the streets of Liverpool. I rode in a VW ‘bus across the United States with a boyfriend when I was in college and ended up stranded in Berkeley. I was a VIP guest standing just outside the hangars at Edwards Air Force Base with all the support staff, engineers, and politicos for the free-flight and computer test the first time a Space Shuttle disconnected from the 747 piggyback ride and landed on a dry lake bed at the base. My husband and I were married on top of a mountain. I have driven across the country by myself several times because I think it is fun. Pacific, Atlantic, Sea of Cortez, Caribbean, Mediterranean, and Great Lakes; I have had all of them lap at my feet. I am well-traveled by some standards. I am woefully mono-cultural and unworldly by others.
No one trip has had more impact on me than a trip that I took back to Indiana to care for my 92-year-old mother in her home at the end of her life. I was 49 when I arrived there. My daughter was a Junior in High School when I left Tucson for the drive to Indiana. Mom was infirm and had minor dementia, but she still was aware and most certainly still in charge of most of her faculties. 4 months later when I came back to Tucson, I had turned 50, my mother was gone and my daughter had figured out how to graduate a year early and had started college. I left as a daughter and came back as a matron.
Most people take such transformative trips, the distance traveled need be no more than down the road to a village church yard and back. Those travels when a change of state or status ensue are the most transformative travels we can make. These times of change when we travel between two statuses or roles are called “liminal” states and are quite powerful and dangerous in many societies. Physical travel often accompanies these rites-of-passage. I am not at all certain we can distinguish what is responsible for what when transformation co-occurs with a journey.
My Personal Who, What, When, Where, and Why of Blogging
I have written quite a few pieces and posts since I wrote the last post I published here, “I am Daddy’s Girl” as part of a blog hop for Father’s Day by the amazing ladies of Generation Fabulous. But I have not published them here. I did publish a piece on Medium. Writing as positive of a post as I could at the time wasn’t that hard. It is writing the negative that is difficult. The serious reflection I have been doing turned out to have been me going through a sort of journalistic checklist to see if I am missing any of the major elements of informed writing.
What?
It is not recommended that you be a cranky, bitchy blogger, not unless your wit is so powerful that it can frame the snark as humor, in which case you may soar to the top of mommy blogging charts. Perhaps that is why I have written predominantly about issues in politics, peace, tech, and information.
Who?
Reporting and essay construction can be tiresome tasks for most people. Personal reflections, sharing, and topical blogs are forms quite distinct from more formal expositions. Most blogs are more akin to a personal letter than a letter to the editor. My writing, or so I have decided, it most often akin to a letter to the editor with uncomfortably personal facts included. This is not by accident. I probably write for a population of about three readers in the whole world, if I write for people who are like me. But I write, and have always written, for several groups of people.
Where?
Ever since I wrote the post about how I am like my father, I have been struggling with where I have to go next in the writing of my memoir on growing up on the receiving end of medical child abuse. I so want the writing to be completed, and it will be, come hell or high water by the end of this summer. I so want to dedicate myself to other topics. I will of course spend time marketing it, and speaking about how I have identified and dealt with factitious elements and processes that are woven throughout my life. But I will put daily thought about things past behind me.
When?
But my understanding about the process I use to write will stay with me.
Why?
I find that nearly every piece of writing is can be attributed to one of these five motivations:
- It provides me with clarity.
- It may be of use to someone else.
- It may help someone recognize a situation that needs attention.
- It may help us all understand the complexities and consequences of “invisible” behaviors.
- Few other people seem to write well about perception and processes.
If you write a blog, do you ever ask yourself any of these basic questions?
I Am Daddy's Girl
Can you be a Daddy’s Girl by default? No one ever called me a daddy’s girl. I was not best friends with my mom either. Afterthought at best, and more accurately, an accident, that is what I was to my parents who in their 40s had an unplanned and unwanted fifth child. Me. A daughter after four sons and a nine year gap after the last son.
Rather obviously I would say, “No, I wasn’t that close to my mom but I didn’t default to Daddy’s girl.” And that is why I thought for the longest time that I wasn’t close to, or much like, my Dad.
Half my life ago, when I was in my late twenties my dad died. He had an inoperable brain tumor of the type that farmers who used insecticides in the 1950s often developed. He also had lung cancer from chain-smoking cigarettes. He was 71. Born in 1915, he grew up expecting to do great things beyond the little farming community not so far from the lake that still bears our family name. The Great Depression hit before he became an adult. Still he tried for far more than what the family tradition said he would be, a farmer, and maybe a minister. He ended up being a farmer, but not for lack of trying to be something else.
He first saw the big bad world on excursions from the very rural countryside of Indiana to Chicago to deliver bootleg liquor as a kid runner. He was the equivalent of today’s kid on the corner selling crack I suppose. His stories of his youth were riveting for a little kid like me to hear. My favorite was the time he told the city people with guns in the big black car where the old abandoned farmstead they were hunting for was. They stopped and asked him about finding the over-grown lane as he was walking along an old gravel country road. He found out at supper that John Dillinger robbed the Warsaw Bank earlier in the day. Or the stories of how his route for delivery of bootleg liquor included a stop for Billie Sunday whenever he was at Winona Lake. They were great stories and these were the tame ones.
He told me about the original land of the area, swamps that once existed on the spots where there were now housing developments, and how when he was a kid you could go there and hear the ghostly cries of unwanted newborns given to the murky depths, because for a hundred years of our local history, that is where girls who were in pregnant got rid of their unwanted babies. I didn’t doubt him. No one digs around in swamps. A lake might give up its secrets, but not a swamp.
Smart and a bit rebellious, he wanted to attend college and study history, but that was impossible. My grandfather had lost several of the farms he owned and worked and there was no way any money would be put into college. Dad wanted to pitch in the Big Leagues, but threw out his elbow too many times on his way to the Minors. He tried boxing, but he had a glass jaw.
As I age, I find that I know more and more of who he was because I find myself looking out at the world through eyes that see things very much like he did. None of my brothers had any interest in attending college. At least one of them turned down an athletic scholarship. I always just knew I would attend some sort of college. He was and I am analytical, look to cultural for behavioral clues, believe that patriotism is participation, love the complexity of living systems.
- Dad loved ancient history, I became an anthropologist.
- Dad lobbied in DC with his Farmer’s Union colleagues; I went to DC many times to work with CodePink, and other groups for peace, equality, and justice.
- He was a story-teller; I am a writer.
- He was a sad and angry man; I suffer from depression.
- He volunteered as a fireman and was active with the conservation board; I have had many public service volunteer roles.
I realize now, almost 30 years after his death, that I am more like my father than any of my siblings are or were. I so wish I had been able to know him after I came to know who I really am. My daughter was born 5 years after his passing. He never knew that I married a professor. He never knew that I “took in” every word he ever said in my presence even though we never “talked.” His retelling of Leviticus as dietary ecology for the North African desert, his talking about the books of the Bible, his discussions about how there is a need for hedgerows and crop rotation, and his tales of community reaction to the plagues of influenza when he was a kid; these all informed my view of the world more than he could ever know. But maybe he knew a bit of our similarity. He talked because he knew I listened.
My father gave me so much of the information from which I built my world view. I miss him. But have more than memories. I now know he tried to instill the best of himself in me through the sharing of his stories, perspectives, and dreams. I think he succeeded.
——–
Note: I go into much more detail about the complexities of growing up in a family riddled with mis- and lack of communication in the book I am writing about medical child abuse. In this post I have patched, abbreviated, and pieced together bits from a chapter about my dad. It may not hold together completely, but it has a sampling of the essence of my relationship and feelings about Dad.
#Father’s Day
Lack of Support Sucks
I've written about this before, so call me a whiner if you want to, but I have to vent and parse my options.
Building a business is difficult work. Writing content and building an online site as a business is hard work. Doing this without financial backing or personal support is exponentially more difficult.
Working at home is one thing; working without my own space while working around someone else's schedule is something else entirely.
Shutting out the memories of all the previous times I was without any personal or emotional support structure even as I am being reminded of them by this current lack of support structure is difficult and almost painful.
I am so damn brilliant and successful, so why do I have such trouble building a supportive network?
How do other women of my age begin to build a life support structure out of thin air?
How can I possibly build a business without the ability to borrow money or use credit? I am effectively unemployed outside of my start up. It is a long story involving age, non-marketable degrees, and living in a sub-minimum wage town, along with former health issues.
Stress, juggling conflicting roles and expectations, and never getting outside of my own head are my “want of a nail” issues.
So here is my mini-biblio-linko-graphy on:
Starting Up One's Life Again
Resources:
for business
- Small Business Administration
- Women's Business Centers Directory
- Women's Business Center (Southern Arizona) hosted by Microbusiness Advancement Center
for connections
Readings:
Watchings:
- Review of Gloria
I am tenacious and I am resilient, and I know how to find out what I need to know. Today it was reminders that there are resources available to me, that there are ways to make connections with others, writing that inspires and instructs, and films to enjoy and from which to learn.
Beatles, Basements, 45s, and a Dream about Row Boats
NaBloPoMo Has Me Writing About Crushes. WTF!
The prompt for today has me thinking back to when I was, hmm, let me see… Revolver came out in what year? 1966. August 5th to be exact. So I was 9 years old. I’d listened to other Beatles albums and 45s at a fairly well off friend’s house.
I know I listened to Rubber Soul there in her family’s rec room that abutted the furnace room and would have been called a basement in anyone else’s home, except for the long bank of windows that gave an amazingly expansive view of a beautiful deep lake in Northeastern Indiana. It wasn’t a basement in the typical sense as if you took the stairwell to the north side of the room it took you down past an entrance to a racquet-ball court at the bottom just before you exited the house at the base of the hill out of which the house seemed to grow. It was really a house that was on the top of a very big hill on the shore of a lake with one side of the basement wall exposed.
I also listened to Leaving on a Jet Plane, and Ballad of the Green Beret with her there. I played there several times and attended slumber parties there. Her mom was really nice and told me that she had once been a concert pianist in Mexico City. These people were so out of my league socially and economically that it was only the small size of our public school that allowed me to ever cross paths with them. But I liked the girl and loved the music collection that had probably been put together by her older siblings. Back then having a well off friend to visit was the Baby Boomer version of having an mp3 player.
So that is where I became acquainted with the music of the Fab Four.
I knew of them much earlier. I remember being in the living room and looking up over the top of my toy box at the TV Nightly News and seeing them descend from a plane after landing in the United States. They were special. I could see it.
The first album I ever saved enough money to buy, and was allowed to purchase, was Revolver. How my mother would not let me buy a copy of Two Virgins is for another day. I spent so many afternoons alone in my room in the upstairs of an old farm-house daydreaming about the future while listening to this album play on a little old record player, it was NOT a stereo, as the needle scraped away against the vinyl.
So it had to be around this time that I had my first erotic dream although I didn’t know enough about anything to really have it be erotic. In the dream, I was at a lake, a different one from where my friend lived; It was green, calm, and there were beautiful trees with mossy, low hanging branches. There was a row-boat, an old-fashioned, wooden, row-boat. It was not big enough for the Fab Four and me, but we all climbed in any way, and floated about the lake as though we were in some Victorian painting. It was so pastoral, romantic, and polyamorous. There was nothing overtly sexual about the dream, unless you consider Freudian symbology to be sexual. But it shall we say switched on the romantic circuitry in my brain.
I never did make up my mind which Beatle-boy I liked best, but John was my favorite bad boy. George was my political crush. And Paul’s cuteness was well… dreamy.
Later on when I was much older, like in 6th or 7th grade, I developed a thing for Mark Lindsay of Paul Revere and the Raiders. And my first crush for a real boy, well, that is for another post, maybe. It’s complicated.