A dark night in a cold spring
up the hill from town to bed
passing the church spire that
points at the heavens
as if to say: Look!
And up above, cold and silent,
a comet, tail turned towards the west,
racing, flying, standing still,
not to return in a thousand years.
You can’t make yourself small enough for most people. They want you to chop off bits of yourself, all the outlandish impulses, the outstanding ideas, the outrageous extravagances. Everything “out” must go, so you can fit inside your assigned box, your cubby, and their illusion of control. There is a norm and you must follow it, in every particular – every idea, every notion, every article of clothing, chosen to match this reduced image of yourself, this false image, the image that fits inside its square frame.
In the fairy tale, the evil stepsisters are ugly, and not above self-mutilation to get what they think they deserve. A royal servant comes with a tiny glass shoe and off comes a toe, a heel, to be able to ride off on a royal horse a princess. But the puddle of blood soon betrays her, and the price, though high, cannot buy her what she thinks she wants.
I have a confession to make. I am mean.
I’ve been in a denial a long time – decades, to be honest. How time flies.
I remember the first time it was brought to my attention, the first time I realized it, because it was the exact same moment I decided to Change. Only, I didn’t really Change, I just went into hiding.
I was not the kind of little girl who easily fits into what “little girls” are supposed to be – pretty, nice, pliable, outgoing and friendly, and a little bit dumb. I was plain and smart and shy and meaner than sin. The difference between who I was and who I was supposed to be became more apparent when I hit puberty, before anyone else in my class, and boys started to notice and comment and in return I pushed boys down concrete stairs, clawed them until they bled, and pelted them with knuckle-ball water balloons.
So picture that girl, in her tomboy pants and button-down shirt at a school dance, with giggling girls who are cute, and friendly, and a little bit dumb, who “like” boys, and I don’t, though I’m “supposed” to, and then some bitch in a poodle-skirt “accidentally” spills her Hawaiian punch down my butch button-down shirt, so I “accidentally” spill (okay, it was more like throwing) mine on her pink felt skirt, and then her legion of friends tells you: You’re mean. And won’t talk to you for the rest of the dance, which kind of sucked before the Incident, and definitely sucked after.
That shame, that ostracization – that right there was the proverbial straw. I can’t be mean, I thought, or I’ll have no friends, and twelve year-old girls need friends. So I promised to Change, post Hawaiian punch. I made a Vow.
The Vow was mostly a Vow of Silence. If I had an opinion, I silenced it. If I disagreed, I shut my mouth. If I didn’t like someone, I bent over backwards to be nice. Nice wasn’t kind, exactly – it was more like trying not to be offensive, like it was my problem if someone was a jerk to me. (This is rape culture, by the way – if you offend someone else, it’s not their fault – it’s yours. Their actions don’t belong to them, they belong to you, who clearly caused them.) My looks are offensive, I thought, my tomboy clothes – the problem with me must be me, and not with you, so I’ll change, I’ll make myself smaller, defer, talk softly, slouch. I will concur that I need permission to do any of the things I have denied myself in my attempt to be “nice” – to hold my own opinion, to disagree, to take up space, to dress the way I like, to be unattractive.
I learned my lesson too well. The only way to not cause offense is to be so small and unimportant that no one takes any notice at all.
But it’s hard to be so small, to be held in a straight-jacket of anger and frustration of never being yourself. Eventually a pool of blood forms around your feet, and you can play it like a victim, not responsible for the act of self-violence, or you can take off the goddamn shoe.
Yesterday, or the day before, I woke to a featureless, pale gray sky, almost white, and a dense but drifting fog moving over the landscape. I drove to work in it as it settled, snaked, shifted, lifted in places only to descend in front of me, nearly impenetrable, only the emergence of yellow headlights from oncoming cars to confirm the existence of the road.
In one pocket where the fog lifted, a massive bird flew across the road, so large, so close, that it took me a moment to identify it. A heron? Not thin enough, not elongated. A vulture? But vultures don’t have fan-like tails of bright white feathers, and neither a vulture nor a heron would carry in its talons what was clearly a rabbit, one limp back leg hung down.
It was, of course, a bald eagle, a bird usually seen at a distance, so that you forget — I forget — that sitting down it would reach my waist, like a massive dog, and its wingspan is nearly eight feet. It was a bald eagle, flying low through lifting fog, having caught a rabbit, somehow, through clouds my eyes could not penetrate.
I once saw an eagle — maybe the same eagle — eating roadkill, and made some analogy to the state of our nation. So what would the metaphor be now, this great symbol of our nation, almost unrecognizable when seen up close, showing itself to be more capable, more cunning, more powerful, than I had previously believed. Maybe that metaphor would give me hope, or maybe I would realize that not everything is what I want it to be.
We’ve taken our small knives
to your suffering and pain,
to the sick and dying,
carved sacrifice
into cowardice
offered in place of kindness
stones and
used them to whet a bitter
galling rage,
inflicted
a thousand
wounds
to answer
a thousand
unanswered
prayers.
We will be grateful.
Grateful that we are alive,
when the alternative is death.
Grateful for sunshine,
for a great conjunction,
for a Christmas or a solstice star.
We will be grateful
when we can laugh,
and sharing laughter,
remember joy.
We will be grateful.
All the long day
into the dark and silent night
We will be grateful,
we will raise our hands to bestow a blessing
and in doing so
be ourselves blessed.
We will be grateful, watching
the twilight hour and the emerging brilliance of the stars,
for what we have seen and
for what we have witnessed and
for every caring act and
for every small sacrifice.
We will be grateful, and
it will be enough.
I am a witch.
All clever and gifted women are.
Women who can hear their mother, Earth, calling out
which spell to cast,
which herb to pluck,
which path to take to avoid
stones and thorns and malice.
I did not want to be a witch.
I was told
and I believed
that men made the world, alone.
I was humbled and disgraced
and bowed my head
and obeyed.
Or tried.
Still
I could read
and books opened before me.
I could speak
and strong words came from me.
I could listen
and a sweet voice called to me,
over and over again,
and sang to me,
sweet music that felt like tears.
I am a witch.
I always have been.
I tried to pray at your altar of stones
but there was nothing for me there –
no song, no smile, no joy, no love,
no respect.
And yet
I know that I am strong,
deserving of respect
for myself and for my part
in creation.
I can summon a spirit,
cast a charm,
offer a blessing.
I can hear the great spirit singing,
and she’s calling
my name.
It’s hard to celebrate American democracy this year, since our system of governance gave us Donald Trump as president. I suppose it was only a matter of time. I remember being appalled when Jesse Ventura was elected. Or, in Florida, when the competent woman with political experience (Alex Sink) was defeated by the billionaire with shady business dealings and no government experience (Rick Scott). I suppose it was only a matter of time. I could have looked down the tracks and seen the train coming. It was a straight view into the future, no turns. But I didn’t want to see it. I looked straight at it and convinced myself it didn’t exist.
Is this it, then, or am I exaggerating? Everyone seems to think they live in end times, from the early Christians, who seemed to think that Jesus had died but was coming right back, to Y2K. I don’t suppose American democracy has ever lived up to its ideals, not from the beginning, when Thomas Jefferson wrote in his declaration that “all men are created equal” and then went on to buy and sell other men. They said slavery was a snake under the table, back then. Was that the fatal flaw, the instigation of our own fate as a nation? Calling someone three-fifths of a person? People with more property have always had a greater voice in our democracy, as true now as it was then. See most recently the Supreme Court case Citizens United, i.e., corporations are people. Not even three-fifths of a person! So there’s progress for you.
Maybe—no, definitely—I was very naïve. I believed in the words of the Declaration, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. I went to the National Archives to stand in the presence of those words, and maybe I would have covered my head for the honor. Those words are the United States, to me—but maybe that country has never existed in fact, and only exists inside that room, when you read those words, and outside of that, there’s never really been anything.
I know people have felt apocalyptic about our nation before, for instance during Jackson’s term. John Quincy Adams, who was serving in Congress, wrote in his diary that he felt the nation would end soon. How could it go on? The 1830s were marked by many incidents of mob violence, and the Nullification crisis, and as it turned out, it eventually progressed to civil war, so maybe he was onto something. And maybe we’ve never been too committed to this experiment, always sure it’s about to dissolve. As much as I like to blame Trump for everything, it’s also not our first foray into authoritarianism – see the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, or McCarthyism ca. 1950.
And don’t let’s leave out genocide. We’ve fallen so short of our ideals, it’s like no one even tried getting close to them. They covered their ears and sang “la la la!” and then put the Japanese in interment camps and black children in segregated schools and immigrant children in cages and … I’m sorry, I can’t go on.
So we’ve never been very good at being the United States, the United States of the Declaration, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. But with this past election, I started to think we had lost not only the will to be that country, but the ability.
We elected an insane, incompetent buffoon who hates and attacks at least two of the fundamental principles of our free nation – freedom of the press and the separation of powers. This doesn’t seem to be as much a road to violence as to chaos. We are leaderless. Say what you will about him, he’s incapable of leading. He is incapable of coherent thought. He is, to sum up, incapable. It’s as if someone put a bomb into the federal government, all three branches, but the bomb doesn’t kill, merely paralyzes and confuses. Amidst the noise and distraction, nothing gets done, except somebody wipes his ass with the Constitution and then plots treason.
So forgive me if I don’t feel like wearing a MAGA hat, holding a TIKI torch, and celebrating what we’ve become. How does the nation, and even the world, suffer by the loss of the ideal of the United States? Losing that – if you will – city on a hill? That exemplar to others about what we could be, a nation committed to liberty and justice for all? It’s a little like losing a religion – even if Gandhi was right in saying he had never met a Christian, can we still be Christians if we don’t believe in Christ? Who are if we don’t believe in the ideals of the Declaration, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights? Are we still Americans?
But maybe we were only ever pretending, and maybe that’s just a lesson we all had to learn: Pretending isn’t enough. Lip service isn’t enough. Fooling yourself won’t actually save you. We’ve lied to ourselves for so long, about so many things, and maybe it’s for too long, about too many things. The ugliness going on right now set fire to my ignorance. I can’t pretend anymore. And I don’t feel like celebrating.
We have a pair of local celebrities, who have their own website (which includes live webcams covering their every move for something like nine months out of the year), an avid, international fanbase, and a dedicated writer who blogs about their activities. This writer, God bless, turns even the mundane into dramatic. Everything this pair does rates a discourse about how noble and moral they are. Did I mention these local celebrities are bald eagles?
The blogger ran into a bit of conundrum when one of the bald eagles was hit by a car, injured, taken to a local animal hospital to recover … and when he had recovered and was returned to the field near their nest tree, his dear old gal had already moved on and found another. The new eagle defended the territory against the old male, and killed him. Rather than crying salty tears, the female … well, you know where this goes.
It was hard to turn this cold, callous move into something noble and moral. The blogger tried. He talked about “strength and freedom.” But that female eagle was stubbornly a bird, not a human. All his talk about the nobility of their actions and the depth of their feelings didn’t change what they were — unreflective, driven by instinct, unfeeling. In short, ignoble and shallow, more likely to kill than to show mercy. It was survival of the fittest, with no memory of when the weak were strong, and certainly no hallowed feelings about it.
This Valentine’s Day, love in our house is not measured with candy hearts, boxes of chocolate, or diamond jewelry. Oh no. The depth of my husband’s love this year is measured in rodents. Rats, that is. Dead ones.
One crawled into our garage and then found a way into the attic. We live in south Florida, so when I say “attic” I mean “space between insulation and roof that is only accessible through an 18-inch square panel over the dryer and where the mean temperature is approximately 150˚F.” There are no stairs, no ladder, and no reason to ever go up there, really. Unless there’s a rat.
My husband bought poison and also a “humane” rat trap (set with cheese, no less, like a cartoon mouse trap) that promised a quick and painless rat death. Also, it promised no mess – rat carcass neatly stuck in the trap for you to dispose of easily. He set out both in our garage. Of course, given these options, the rat chose the poison. The slow-acting, give-a-rat-a-chance-to-crawl-someplace-quiet-and-die-in-peace, poison. Die, and inevitably, rot. In the attic.
Have you smelled a dead, rotting rat? One that has found its way into the overheated attic before giving up the ghost? And one who had, just to prove what an unwanted guest he really was, invited a friend to the poison feast, a friend who decided to crawl behind the water heater in the garage before it died?
This is when partnership really takes on its meaning. I consider myself (he’d agree) the neater, tidier of the two of us, but that stench was never going to go away because of me. Crawl behind the water heater, searching for dead rats? Crawl into the attic, searching for dead rats? They have to stop stinking eventually, right?
But crawl he did, armed with a grab-claw (usually reserved for picking up dog poop) and the flashlight on his cell phone. Oh, and the shop vac. I’m never touching any of these things ever again. When he came back in, triumphant, having disposed of rat carcasses, out of love and gratitude, I suggested he burn his clothes.
So there you have it, dear reader. Sometimes love is not about candy or a trite poem in a greeting card. Sometimes it is about slowly fermenting dead rats permeating your house with fetid funk, and a man willing to brave that for you. Sometimes, that’s love. Here, here.
At least, that’s how it’s done in that classic film, Holiday Inn, with that classic actor, Bing Crosby, dancing and singing a classic Berlin ballad to the great man, “Abraham,” while in blackface.
Yes, it’s every bit as offensive as you think it is. Watch to the end for a special treat of actress Marjorie Reynolds in blackface, because Bing’s depiction wasn’t quite racist enough.
(You have to click on the link to see the whole thing – I really think it’s worth it. Or get a taste with the YouTube video – starts at 1:45)
So, happy birthday to President Lincoln. Had you lived, maybe your humor, warmth, and intelligence could have saved us from the following 150 years of segregation and racial oppression.
Or maybe, we only get what we deserve.
Experimental City 