It looked like nobody was going to be watching basketball this year until the players and management struck a 50-50 deal (meaning the players and owners will share the billions), and we had a five game bonanza on Christmas Day.
I didn’t do any basketball watching last year, either, except for a week: the NBA finals. I’m not a fan of either team (Dallas and Miami), but I’m especially not a fan of Miami. The hype generated by its acquisition of LeBron James as a member of the Three Musketeers (Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh being the other two), was enough to make even the most diehard fan jaded. Yes, even Mark, who loved basketball, had already admitted that the spectacle had defeated the substance. But I watched in his memory.
I gave up being a fan, meaning wanting a particular team to win, after the Pistons’ and Lakers’ great years in the late 1980s: I’ll never forget the on-court kiss of Magic Johnson and Isaiah Thomas. We loved Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Magic, James Worthy, Kurt Rambis, Maurice Lucas, and Michael Cooper (he came from New Mexico), Isaiah, the crazy Dennis Rodman, John Salley, and Bill Laimbeer. Mark stayed a fan through the Laker transition to Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant. The kids and I gave up after Bryant was accused of rape.
You could make a case for not being a fan of any sports team if you wanted to make criminal activity the criteria: the transition from the ghetto to the “show” (as they call it in that great baseball flick Bull Durham) has littered the playing field with adulterers, wife beaters, rapists, animal abusers, and even a few murderers. To be fair, a lot of them are guilty only of wearing silk suits and driving Mercedes Benz’s and Jaguars. I always marveled at Mark’s ability to disassociate sports, particularly basketball, from the criteria used to judge just about everything else in life: class structure, economic inequality, corporate greed, media misinformation, etc. While he knew the world of sports was complicit in all these machinations, he didn’t care, because he just got too much enjoyment out of watching the ballet of basketball, the gut wrenching physicality of football, and the beauty of the home run. Watching games he became just another fan, yelling in excitement over a great play, groaning with disappointment at a missed opportunity.
Mark and I bonded watching Monday night baseball years ago. These were the last of the Oakland A’s days, also the last time I got excited about a baseball team: Catfish Hunter, Rollie Fingers, Vida Blue. Then when the baby came along, one of us would cook dinner while the other one swung Jakob in his Tarahumara swing that a friend had given us. We hung it from a viga and tied a rope to its side so we could sit on the couch and swing it to and fro without it getting in the way of the TV. I sometimes still watch the playoffs and the world series, but once you lose track of who the players are you kind of lose track of the game.
The only football I watch is Friday Night Lights. A friend just told me that the only actor who actually played football is Landry, the Johnny come lately to the team and the ensemble oddball. Mark was a diehard Buffalo fan (his hometown), which was a kind of torture, even when they were winning (remember, Jim Kelly took them to the Superbowl, what, four times, and lost every time). I never really understood this about his sports nature, either. He knew perfectly well that the Buffalo Bills had nothing to do with Buffalo other than arbitrarily playing there, but he hung with them, and suffered with them, to the bitter end.
But back to basketball. I do appreciate the athleticism, the ballet jumps, and whirlwind speed the players display in every game, but without Mark to remind me, I just don’t watch and only tangentially know which team in each division is winning and how it looks for the finals. I’ll watch the finals again, just as I did last year, and hope that it’s not Miami or Dallas (or the Lakers). I can’t really say which teams should be there instead, but hopefully I’ll enjoy the spectacle: Marvin Gaye singing the Star Spangled Banner could redeem the show, but alas, that is not to be.
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Monday, December 5, 2011
Letter to Elizabeth, Number Two
I haven’t had time to blog much lately, but when I read your piece “On Breaking Two Taboos, Sharing, Playing Games, and Not” (elizabethtannen.com/blog), about a month ago I started composing this letter to you in my head. Now it’s in writing.
When I was in my carefree twenties (that’s a laugh, carefree maybe but, as I talked about in Letter Number One, full of existential angst), I remember having a conversation with someone about the “worst part of being alone” and all he could come up with was he didn’t like eating by himself. I went into a long discourse about how being alone denied one intimacy, being able to share your most heartfelt feelings with someone who actually cares to listen and respond to those feelings.
I ended up being intimate with Mark for 34 years, and yes, there was a lot of sharing and caring and listening, along with all the silence (comfortable and uncomfortable) that accompany a long relationship. Now, however, I am at the other end of the book shelf, alone again, without the intimacy I complained about not having in my twenties, but aware now of how complicated intimacy can be. I lost the only person in the world who paid constant attention to me, even if it was often critical attention. There will never again be anyone who knew me as Mark did, and in many ways I won’t know me as well either because I don’t have him around to fill in the gaps: “Who is that person?” or “Did we see that movie?” or “Which kid was it who called big trucks ‘hot zooms’?” Neither is he there for me to share the information only he and I were privy to, which makes it hard to validate a feeling or remembrance.
You don’t particularly appreciate this when you’re living it. Mark and I, as well as many other couples I know, were constantly jockeying for time alone, to have the house to ourselves so we didn’t have to answer to anybody or do anything we didn’t want to do, like cook dinner when you wanted to read your book. We’re not really wishing for singlehood, as we see our single friends wondering how it happened that they live alone, without the intimacy we’re complaining about. We want to have it all, actually: someone around with whom we feel completely comfortable and intimate when we want them around, and when we don’t want them around we want them to go away for awhile but know that they’ll be back.
When we lived in extended families or tribal groups or all those crazy communes in the sixties we had more than one person paying particular attention to us, which created its own problems, of course: lack of privacy, peer pressure, group think. It’s complicated, no matter how you look at it: living alone, living in a nuclear family, living in a group. We fumble along, complaining and compensating, rationalizing and resigning ourselves to circumstances that are both amenable to change and outside our control. I imagine you’ll experience it all over the next 30 years, like I have. All I can say is, buena suerte.
.
When I was in my carefree twenties (that’s a laugh, carefree maybe but, as I talked about in Letter Number One, full of existential angst), I remember having a conversation with someone about the “worst part of being alone” and all he could come up with was he didn’t like eating by himself. I went into a long discourse about how being alone denied one intimacy, being able to share your most heartfelt feelings with someone who actually cares to listen and respond to those feelings.
I ended up being intimate with Mark for 34 years, and yes, there was a lot of sharing and caring and listening, along with all the silence (comfortable and uncomfortable) that accompany a long relationship. Now, however, I am at the other end of the book shelf, alone again, without the intimacy I complained about not having in my twenties, but aware now of how complicated intimacy can be. I lost the only person in the world who paid constant attention to me, even if it was often critical attention. There will never again be anyone who knew me as Mark did, and in many ways I won’t know me as well either because I don’t have him around to fill in the gaps: “Who is that person?” or “Did we see that movie?” or “Which kid was it who called big trucks ‘hot zooms’?” Neither is he there for me to share the information only he and I were privy to, which makes it hard to validate a feeling or remembrance.
You don’t particularly appreciate this when you’re living it. Mark and I, as well as many other couples I know, were constantly jockeying for time alone, to have the house to ourselves so we didn’t have to answer to anybody or do anything we didn’t want to do, like cook dinner when you wanted to read your book. We’re not really wishing for singlehood, as we see our single friends wondering how it happened that they live alone, without the intimacy we’re complaining about. We want to have it all, actually: someone around with whom we feel completely comfortable and intimate when we want them around, and when we don’t want them around we want them to go away for awhile but know that they’ll be back.
When we lived in extended families or tribal groups or all those crazy communes in the sixties we had more than one person paying particular attention to us, which created its own problems, of course: lack of privacy, peer pressure, group think. It’s complicated, no matter how you look at it: living alone, living in a nuclear family, living in a group. We fumble along, complaining and compensating, rationalizing and resigning ourselves to circumstances that are both amenable to change and outside our control. I imagine you’ll experience it all over the next 30 years, like I have. All I can say is, buena suerte.
.
Friday, November 18, 2011
Stuff
For the past three weeks I’ve been dealing with my mother-in-law’s lifetime possessions, the story of her deliberate accumulation of things that become, to the successors, “stuff.” It was all acquired during the course of forty years in the same house in Buffalo, then ten in Santa Fe. I’ve tried to be respectful of what to her were treasures, not stuff, sending the china (I knew her for 34 years and I don’t remember ever eating off it), crystal, antique chairs and dresser off to the consignment store, gifts of art or pottery or jewelry back to those who gave them, especially cherished things to friends, books to the library, and much, much more to St. Vincent de Paul.
My mother-in-law, an immigrant from Poland whose family came to New York when she was six, grew up desperately poor in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. She told us stories of getting thrown out of her family’s apartment for unpaid rent, carrying their belongings down the street in a wheelbarrow. One of her siblings was killed in World War II; an older half brother became a successful businessman; her younger brother a professor at New York University; and she, after twenty years of secretarial work, went to college and earned a master’s degree in social work. She and my father-in-law, also a social worker who headed a United Fund agency in Buffalo, became solidly middle class and enjoyed a fully pensioned retirement—fueled by a booming stock market—of world travel and portfolio security.
They were also of the generation that bought Dalton china settings for twelve on a trip to England, Waterford crystal at the factory in Ireland, Tibetan thangkas in India, gold jewelry from around the world, pueblo pottery and turquoise jewelry in New Mexico, and art from a sophisticated group of Buffalo painters with whom they socialized.
But what really got me, going through the stuff, was the thought of my own children someday going through mine. What do I have that makes me so anxious? A set of red dishes my mother-in-law bought me for my fiftieth birthday? My clothes, mostly acquired at thrift stores? The art gives me pause, but they can give Terri’s paintings back to her, if she outlives me (or keep them, of course), and they took some of Mark’s work after he died. The John Wengers will probably find their way to those who knew him.
What seems to be upsetting me are the floor to ceiling shelves with books, that, just like the china, nobody wants. James Woods, in a recent New Yorker article, wrote about inventorying his father-in-law’s library in upstate New York and finding out that “nobody really wants hundreds or thousands of old books.” I may not have 400 books on the Byzantine Empire, but I have, due to Mark’s love of him, every book ever written by or about Jack Kerouac; every beat poet ever published; every 18th and 19th century English novel ever written (I know that’s an exaggeration: let’s arrogantly say every “important” English novel ever written); political philosophy from the Greeks through the Enlightenment to Karl Marx and the poststructuralists; and 20th century paperback novels that everyone else has, too. Mark already sold the first editions and collectors’ items to folks like Nicholas Potter (secondhand bookstore owner in Santa Fe) of whom there are fewer and fewer in business. My kids will want only a select few, just as I wanted only a select few of my mother-in-law’s. Even if the iPad and the Kindle don’t destroy the book business altogether, nobody is going to want my “old books.”
When I don’t have anything of interest borrowed from a friend or checked out from the library, I go to my shelves and find stuff, like this incredible passage from George Elliot’s Mill on the Floss, which I’ve owned for 20 years but never before read:
“I will not believe unproved evil of you: my lips shall not utter it; my ears shall be closed against it. I, too, am an erring mortal, liable to stumble, apt to come short of my most earnest efforts. Your lot has been harder than mine, your temptation greater. Let us help each other to stand and walk without more falling—to have done this would have demanded courage, deep pity, self-knowledge, generous trust—would have demanded a mind that tasted no piquancy in evil-speaking that felt no self-exaltation in condemning, that cheated itself with no large words into the belief that life can have any moral end, any high religion, which excludes the striving after perfect truth, justice, and love towards the individual men and women who come across our own path.”
How can you not stop and marvel at a passage like that. It speaks directly to my post-Marxist humanist pragmatic self (see eponymous blog post), which is tied directly to all these books on my shelf that no one but me wants. While I’m not quite ready to let them go, not ready to consign them to “stuff,” I think it’s time to start culling: slowly, carefully, selectively (based on some criteria I’ve yet to determine). That, instead of an estate, will be my gift to my children: one small shelf of books when it’s my time to go.
My mother-in-law, an immigrant from Poland whose family came to New York when she was six, grew up desperately poor in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. She told us stories of getting thrown out of her family’s apartment for unpaid rent, carrying their belongings down the street in a wheelbarrow. One of her siblings was killed in World War II; an older half brother became a successful businessman; her younger brother a professor at New York University; and she, after twenty years of secretarial work, went to college and earned a master’s degree in social work. She and my father-in-law, also a social worker who headed a United Fund agency in Buffalo, became solidly middle class and enjoyed a fully pensioned retirement—fueled by a booming stock market—of world travel and portfolio security.
They were also of the generation that bought Dalton china settings for twelve on a trip to England, Waterford crystal at the factory in Ireland, Tibetan thangkas in India, gold jewelry from around the world, pueblo pottery and turquoise jewelry in New Mexico, and art from a sophisticated group of Buffalo painters with whom they socialized.
But what really got me, going through the stuff, was the thought of my own children someday going through mine. What do I have that makes me so anxious? A set of red dishes my mother-in-law bought me for my fiftieth birthday? My clothes, mostly acquired at thrift stores? The art gives me pause, but they can give Terri’s paintings back to her, if she outlives me (or keep them, of course), and they took some of Mark’s work after he died. The John Wengers will probably find their way to those who knew him.
What seems to be upsetting me are the floor to ceiling shelves with books, that, just like the china, nobody wants. James Woods, in a recent New Yorker article, wrote about inventorying his father-in-law’s library in upstate New York and finding out that “nobody really wants hundreds or thousands of old books.” I may not have 400 books on the Byzantine Empire, but I have, due to Mark’s love of him, every book ever written by or about Jack Kerouac; every beat poet ever published; every 18th and 19th century English novel ever written (I know that’s an exaggeration: let’s arrogantly say every “important” English novel ever written); political philosophy from the Greeks through the Enlightenment to Karl Marx and the poststructuralists; and 20th century paperback novels that everyone else has, too. Mark already sold the first editions and collectors’ items to folks like Nicholas Potter (secondhand bookstore owner in Santa Fe) of whom there are fewer and fewer in business. My kids will want only a select few, just as I wanted only a select few of my mother-in-law’s. Even if the iPad and the Kindle don’t destroy the book business altogether, nobody is going to want my “old books.”
When I don’t have anything of interest borrowed from a friend or checked out from the library, I go to my shelves and find stuff, like this incredible passage from George Elliot’s Mill on the Floss, which I’ve owned for 20 years but never before read:
“I will not believe unproved evil of you: my lips shall not utter it; my ears shall be closed against it. I, too, am an erring mortal, liable to stumble, apt to come short of my most earnest efforts. Your lot has been harder than mine, your temptation greater. Let us help each other to stand and walk without more falling—to have done this would have demanded courage, deep pity, self-knowledge, generous trust—would have demanded a mind that tasted no piquancy in evil-speaking that felt no self-exaltation in condemning, that cheated itself with no large words into the belief that life can have any moral end, any high religion, which excludes the striving after perfect truth, justice, and love towards the individual men and women who come across our own path.”
How can you not stop and marvel at a passage like that. It speaks directly to my post-Marxist humanist pragmatic self (see eponymous blog post), which is tied directly to all these books on my shelf that no one but me wants. While I’m not quite ready to let them go, not ready to consign them to “stuff,” I think it’s time to start culling: slowly, carefully, selectively (based on some criteria I’ve yet to determine). That, instead of an estate, will be my gift to my children: one small shelf of books when it’s my time to go.
Sunday, November 6, 2011
Diary of a Bad Year: The End
This will be my last installment under the heading Diary of a Bad Year (two bad years, actually). It is signified by the death of Mark’s mother, from whom he was estranged when he died last year, on November 27. During this last year of her life we never discussed this estrangement, nor did we discuss anything that would force us into a place I did not want to go.
That being said, as she began to decline I did whatever I could to help, eventually moving her out of her house into a fairly nice residential facility, an “independent living” apartment. But once she made the physical move she essentially gave up: her increased dependency and loss of “control”, something she had hoarded all her life to compensate for a bad beginning, shut her down psychologically, emotionally, and physically. Her decline was dramatic: within three weeks of the move she required 24-hour care, and a week later she died.
Dealing first with Mark’s death, and now hers, has forced me to face my own mortality, which I’ve written about previously in other Diary of a Bad Year blog posts. But it has also forced me to think about not just the fact that I will die but how I will die. Not surprisingly, this is a topic that doesn’t generate much discussion in our youth obsessed society, but as we continue to live longer, buoyed by miracle drugs and interventions that may extend our life span but render us mentality and physically bereft, we better start doing some serious talking.
The so-called Death Panels that were a part of Obama’s health care reform package were quickly scuttled after that nomenclature stuck. In some more enlightened European countries there can at least be a discussion between the patient, family, and physician about “end of life” wishes, which is much more substantive than the health care directives we sign in this country saying we don’t want to be resuscitated if we’re already dying of cancer or heart disease. They don’t say anything about what our choices might be if we’re dying of old age and are so infirm that staying alive is cruel and unusual punishment. And the medical interventions that have gotten us to that state are also forms of cruel and unusual punishment. Two years ago I watched my beloved amigo y buen vecino slowly die of complications from diabetes, a stroke, and finally colon cancer. The last six months of his ordeal were in the hospital, where he was kept alive by extraordinary means, until finally he came home and said, “Ya basta, I’m tired and I’m not going back.”
While he had the wherewithal and presence of mind to refuse more hospitalization, that doesn’t really speak to the problem of those who are old and infirm and are ready to die before their bodies actually give out. There was a story in the newspaper the other day about a couple, in their nineties, who decided to stop eating and drinking because, like my neighbor, they’d simply had enough. They were kicked out of their retirement facility for taking this action. Let’s penalize those who actually make a decision to exercise choice, as opposed to default, which drains their—and everyone who loves them—physical, emotional, and yes, financial well being (the focus of Medicare on medical intervention rather than long term care is another story).
What about those who suffer from incipient Alzheimer’s, who are able to see what the future holds and don’t want to go there? What choices do these folks have who want to be the person they are instead of a person who will be unrecognizable to family and friends? Some would argue that as Alzheimer’s progresses you are unaware of the loss of identity, that it is those around you who do the losing, so that makes it OK. I don’t want my children to lose me. I’m their mother, the person with whom they share their most intimate thoughts, worries, and aspirations (caveat: I know there are tons of things they don’t tell me because it’s none of my business), but I am also a person they see in a larger context defined by my work, the way I choose to live, and how I treat them. When Mark’s mother was dying, what she talked about was not the present, her loss of control, what she suffered, or even those of us who were with her. She talked about her life when she was young, her parents, her brother who died in World War II, her youngest brother who she essentially raised, and her life with her husband, who died five years before her.
The image of the native Inuit putting the old person who can no longer contribute to society out on the ice floe remains very vivid to my generation. That is obviously not an option for today’s society (as well as the fact that there may not be many ice floes to put them on). So what are we supposed to do? I don’t have the answer, but if we can’t even have a conversation about it without a Death Panel label we are, as individuals, and as a society, complicit in what often amounts to torture.
That being said, as she began to decline I did whatever I could to help, eventually moving her out of her house into a fairly nice residential facility, an “independent living” apartment. But once she made the physical move she essentially gave up: her increased dependency and loss of “control”, something she had hoarded all her life to compensate for a bad beginning, shut her down psychologically, emotionally, and physically. Her decline was dramatic: within three weeks of the move she required 24-hour care, and a week later she died.
Dealing first with Mark’s death, and now hers, has forced me to face my own mortality, which I’ve written about previously in other Diary of a Bad Year blog posts. But it has also forced me to think about not just the fact that I will die but how I will die. Not surprisingly, this is a topic that doesn’t generate much discussion in our youth obsessed society, but as we continue to live longer, buoyed by miracle drugs and interventions that may extend our life span but render us mentality and physically bereft, we better start doing some serious talking.
The so-called Death Panels that were a part of Obama’s health care reform package were quickly scuttled after that nomenclature stuck. In some more enlightened European countries there can at least be a discussion between the patient, family, and physician about “end of life” wishes, which is much more substantive than the health care directives we sign in this country saying we don’t want to be resuscitated if we’re already dying of cancer or heart disease. They don’t say anything about what our choices might be if we’re dying of old age and are so infirm that staying alive is cruel and unusual punishment. And the medical interventions that have gotten us to that state are also forms of cruel and unusual punishment. Two years ago I watched my beloved amigo y buen vecino slowly die of complications from diabetes, a stroke, and finally colon cancer. The last six months of his ordeal were in the hospital, where he was kept alive by extraordinary means, until finally he came home and said, “Ya basta, I’m tired and I’m not going back.”
While he had the wherewithal and presence of mind to refuse more hospitalization, that doesn’t really speak to the problem of those who are old and infirm and are ready to die before their bodies actually give out. There was a story in the newspaper the other day about a couple, in their nineties, who decided to stop eating and drinking because, like my neighbor, they’d simply had enough. They were kicked out of their retirement facility for taking this action. Let’s penalize those who actually make a decision to exercise choice, as opposed to default, which drains their—and everyone who loves them—physical, emotional, and yes, financial well being (the focus of Medicare on medical intervention rather than long term care is another story).
What about those who suffer from incipient Alzheimer’s, who are able to see what the future holds and don’t want to go there? What choices do these folks have who want to be the person they are instead of a person who will be unrecognizable to family and friends? Some would argue that as Alzheimer’s progresses you are unaware of the loss of identity, that it is those around you who do the losing, so that makes it OK. I don’t want my children to lose me. I’m their mother, the person with whom they share their most intimate thoughts, worries, and aspirations (caveat: I know there are tons of things they don’t tell me because it’s none of my business), but I am also a person they see in a larger context defined by my work, the way I choose to live, and how I treat them. When Mark’s mother was dying, what she talked about was not the present, her loss of control, what she suffered, or even those of us who were with her. She talked about her life when she was young, her parents, her brother who died in World War II, her youngest brother who she essentially raised, and her life with her husband, who died five years before her.
The image of the native Inuit putting the old person who can no longer contribute to society out on the ice floe remains very vivid to my generation. That is obviously not an option for today’s society (as well as the fact that there may not be many ice floes to put them on). So what are we supposed to do? I don’t have the answer, but if we can’t even have a conversation about it without a Death Panel label we are, as individuals, and as a society, complicit in what often amounts to torture.
Friday, October 28, 2011
When You Got Nothing You Got Nothing To Lose
Bob Dylan’s iconic words carry several meanings. To those of us who decided (with the luxury of a middle class background) to live as leanly as possible, the meaning is literal: if you’re not part of the system, with a mortgage and credit card debt, when the system collapses you haven’t lost much. The other meaning, that when you’re poor and struggling and the system offers you nothing in the way of rising out of that poverty, you’re already lost.
Some of the folks who started Occupy Wall Street offer a third meaning. Many of them appear to be from recently achieved middle class homes—upward mobility from working class or minority assimilation—and aspire to professional work and home ownership—a piece of the American pie—albeit with a more sophisticated understanding of how that lifestyle is supported both economically and politically. Then they find out there aren’t any jobs doing what they’ve been trained to do, they can’t afford mortgage loans (and no one is building anything affordable anyway) because they’re deeply in debt from college loans. So what better way to spend the day than in the street with their cohort.
They are joined by an interesting array of other protestors, from all walks of life, including the working poor, college professors, union organizers, activists, and retirees. But the core group of folks, even with their different spin on “you got nothing to lose”, are the direct descendents of the protestors who were in the streets during the Vietnam war: people young enough and unencumbered enough to stay out there in the park day and night while a movement is created. Those of us who were in Washington D.C., Kent State, and every other city across the U.S. in the late sixties and early seventies keep saying to ourselves, “I wish I could be in Liberty Park, too.” But there’s the mother who requires 24-hour care, the house that needs to be ready for winter, the woodpile that needs to be split, and the animals that need to be fed and cared for.
The anti-war movement addressed all things that sustain a war of occupation: the imperialism of the war mongers, the military industrial complex, and the race and class distinctions that sent a disproportionate number of young men and women of color and low economic status to be killed. These power structures are still with us, and I suspect there’s plenty of conversation about them among the Occupy Wall Street protestors. But the overriding focus on the growing economic inequality illuminates Wall Street’s free market fetishism, which eludes the control of even the weakest regulatory oversight and defines an even more insidious hegemony than the war mongering political and corporate establishment we’ve been fighting forever.
I mentioned in a previous blog posting the conversation I had with a young friend who didn’t want to hear about what went on in the sixties, that the social network has supplanted the need for organizing in the streets. I’m sure all this twittering and tweeting is a lot less cumbersome than printing fliers on ditto machines, but there’s nothing like meeting your compadres face to face in a public space with a common sense of purpose. Maybe this time around, with their general assemblies, their consensus building skills, and the message on the wall “It’s the system, stupid,” they’ll avoid some of the internecine struggles that tore the New Left apart. Maybe not. But I’ve heard so many of the people interviewed in various Occupies around the country say, “I’ve been waiting for years for this to happen.” It’s impossible to keep cynicism at bay, without being part of an uprising of consciousness and spirit and action. (Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will—Antonio Gramsci.) I may not be there physically, but I’m there, one way or another.
Some of the folks who started Occupy Wall Street offer a third meaning. Many of them appear to be from recently achieved middle class homes—upward mobility from working class or minority assimilation—and aspire to professional work and home ownership—a piece of the American pie—albeit with a more sophisticated understanding of how that lifestyle is supported both economically and politically. Then they find out there aren’t any jobs doing what they’ve been trained to do, they can’t afford mortgage loans (and no one is building anything affordable anyway) because they’re deeply in debt from college loans. So what better way to spend the day than in the street with their cohort.
They are joined by an interesting array of other protestors, from all walks of life, including the working poor, college professors, union organizers, activists, and retirees. But the core group of folks, even with their different spin on “you got nothing to lose”, are the direct descendents of the protestors who were in the streets during the Vietnam war: people young enough and unencumbered enough to stay out there in the park day and night while a movement is created. Those of us who were in Washington D.C., Kent State, and every other city across the U.S. in the late sixties and early seventies keep saying to ourselves, “I wish I could be in Liberty Park, too.” But there’s the mother who requires 24-hour care, the house that needs to be ready for winter, the woodpile that needs to be split, and the animals that need to be fed and cared for.
The anti-war movement addressed all things that sustain a war of occupation: the imperialism of the war mongers, the military industrial complex, and the race and class distinctions that sent a disproportionate number of young men and women of color and low economic status to be killed. These power structures are still with us, and I suspect there’s plenty of conversation about them among the Occupy Wall Street protestors. But the overriding focus on the growing economic inequality illuminates Wall Street’s free market fetishism, which eludes the control of even the weakest regulatory oversight and defines an even more insidious hegemony than the war mongering political and corporate establishment we’ve been fighting forever.
I mentioned in a previous blog posting the conversation I had with a young friend who didn’t want to hear about what went on in the sixties, that the social network has supplanted the need for organizing in the streets. I’m sure all this twittering and tweeting is a lot less cumbersome than printing fliers on ditto machines, but there’s nothing like meeting your compadres face to face in a public space with a common sense of purpose. Maybe this time around, with their general assemblies, their consensus building skills, and the message on the wall “It’s the system, stupid,” they’ll avoid some of the internecine struggles that tore the New Left apart. Maybe not. But I’ve heard so many of the people interviewed in various Occupies around the country say, “I’ve been waiting for years for this to happen.” It’s impossible to keep cynicism at bay, without being part of an uprising of consciousness and spirit and action. (Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will—Antonio Gramsci.) I may not be there physically, but I’m there, one way or another.
Monday, October 10, 2011
Diary of a Bad Year: Mark and Steve
As the entire blogosphere knows, Steve Jobs died of complications from pancreatic cancer this past week. Although he lived for almost six years with a rare, “treatable” form of the cancer, it got him in the end. While the doc in the emergency room who treated Mark used Jobs as an example of everything that’s wrong with a medical system that provides every option for the rich and bankruptcy for the poor, not even a liver transplant and the best care money can buy could save him (see Diary of a Bad Year, February 13, 2011).
His death has elicited obituaries that run the gamut from the visionary genius “who knew what we wanted before we wanted it” to the capitalist exploiter who produced his slick products on the backs of foreign sweatshop workers. For me, however, his death elicited a resurgence of memories of Mark. It made me think about the disease itself and the differences in their treatment and their prognoses, but in a much more visceral way it made me remember Mark in his corporeality. Steve Jobs and Mark Schiller looked very much alike: tall, thin, close-cropped balding heads, graying beards, and dark brown eyes behind round wire rimmed glasses. When I saw pictures of Jobs in 2009, when the illness had made a thin man gaunt, I was seeing Mark.
I know nothing about the private Steve Jobs. He was seven years younger than Mark, but close enough in age to have experienced many of the same things. I don’t know if he loved Mavis Staples and Al Green, or Chet Baker and Thelonious Monk. I don’t know what his politics were: many capitalist entrepreneurs consider themselves liberals, especially those who came of age during the sixties and seventies. Mark’s politics guided his life from the time he helped organize his high school SDS chapter to his choice of where to live to co-founding La Jicarita News. To stir up the mix he’d declare he was the only Stalinist left standing, when in reality what we learned together about race, class, and absolutist positions in northern New Mexican made him a complex, thoughtful activist whose compañeros included loggers, Forest Service rangers, acequia mayordomos, and gasp, even a few environmentalists. His encyclopedic knowledge ranged through poetry, abstract expressionism, jazz, 19th century English literature, rock n’ roll (he always knew the names of the most obscure groups played on the oldies station, see Guilty Pleasures blog), the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act, and Spanish and Mexican land grants. He wrote many, many articles about the history and politics of land grants for La Jicarita News, as well as scholarly papers for the New Mexico Historical Advisory Board and the Natural Resources Journal. He was working on a book about the tenure of New Mexico Surveyor General George W. Julian, who was responsible for the loss of millions of acres of land to their rightful owners, which he was unable to finish before he died. I’ve collected the chapters he completed as scholarly papers or articles, and with the help of University of New Mexico professor David Correia, plan to finish that book.
Steve Jobs legacy is unparalleled. I have two Mac laptops and an iPod. My kids have iPhones and iPads. I also have many questions about the value of all that technology and disgust, but not surprise, about its production (see the NYT article about Mike Daisey’s one man show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” in the Sunday, October 2 issue), but that’s not what this blog is about. The Steve Jobs and Mark Schillers of the world who lived creative and intense lives and died before their time is sad, but what they did is what we have, tangibly and in our memories.
My son Jakob called to tell me that he’s planning on publishing a photo story about Mark, also triggered by Jobs’ death. He took many pictures of his dad over the years, and with Mark’s permission, some while he was sick. I started this blog the day before he called. Steve Jobs’ death, within a year of Mark’s and of the same disease, reminds us of our loss, and being the writers and photographer that we are, the need to express it.
His death has elicited obituaries that run the gamut from the visionary genius “who knew what we wanted before we wanted it” to the capitalist exploiter who produced his slick products on the backs of foreign sweatshop workers. For me, however, his death elicited a resurgence of memories of Mark. It made me think about the disease itself and the differences in their treatment and their prognoses, but in a much more visceral way it made me remember Mark in his corporeality. Steve Jobs and Mark Schiller looked very much alike: tall, thin, close-cropped balding heads, graying beards, and dark brown eyes behind round wire rimmed glasses. When I saw pictures of Jobs in 2009, when the illness had made a thin man gaunt, I was seeing Mark.
I know nothing about the private Steve Jobs. He was seven years younger than Mark, but close enough in age to have experienced many of the same things. I don’t know if he loved Mavis Staples and Al Green, or Chet Baker and Thelonious Monk. I don’t know what his politics were: many capitalist entrepreneurs consider themselves liberals, especially those who came of age during the sixties and seventies. Mark’s politics guided his life from the time he helped organize his high school SDS chapter to his choice of where to live to co-founding La Jicarita News. To stir up the mix he’d declare he was the only Stalinist left standing, when in reality what we learned together about race, class, and absolutist positions in northern New Mexican made him a complex, thoughtful activist whose compañeros included loggers, Forest Service rangers, acequia mayordomos, and gasp, even a few environmentalists. His encyclopedic knowledge ranged through poetry, abstract expressionism, jazz, 19th century English literature, rock n’ roll (he always knew the names of the most obscure groups played on the oldies station, see Guilty Pleasures blog), the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act, and Spanish and Mexican land grants. He wrote many, many articles about the history and politics of land grants for La Jicarita News, as well as scholarly papers for the New Mexico Historical Advisory Board and the Natural Resources Journal. He was working on a book about the tenure of New Mexico Surveyor General George W. Julian, who was responsible for the loss of millions of acres of land to their rightful owners, which he was unable to finish before he died. I’ve collected the chapters he completed as scholarly papers or articles, and with the help of University of New Mexico professor David Correia, plan to finish that book.
Steve Jobs legacy is unparalleled. I have two Mac laptops and an iPod. My kids have iPhones and iPads. I also have many questions about the value of all that technology and disgust, but not surprise, about its production (see the NYT article about Mike Daisey’s one man show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” in the Sunday, October 2 issue), but that’s not what this blog is about. The Steve Jobs and Mark Schillers of the world who lived creative and intense lives and died before their time is sad, but what they did is what we have, tangibly and in our memories.
My son Jakob called to tell me that he’s planning on publishing a photo story about Mark, also triggered by Jobs’ death. He took many pictures of his dad over the years, and with Mark’s permission, some while he was sick. I started this blog the day before he called. Steve Jobs’ death, within a year of Mark’s and of the same disease, reminds us of our loss, and being the writers and photographer that we are, the need to express it.
Monday, September 26, 2011
Christian Schizophrenia
The state (and I don’t mean Georgia) killed Troy Davis last Wednesday, a manifestation of what I call Christian schizophrenia. I could easily be talking about Muslim schizophrenia or Jewish schizophrenia or any number of religious schizophrenias, but right now I’m talking about the good old U.S.A.’s affliction.
People like Jimmy Carter and Reverend Al Sharpton represent one side of the schizophrenic code. They temper the hail and brimstone fervor of an “Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” with the “love thy neighbor as thyself.” They believe there is redemption in good conduct: society, as well as the individual, are responsible for creating an environment in which the human spirit can flourish and do good deeds. The death penalty allows no redemption. The commutation of Davis’ death sentence would have acknowledged his 20 years of self-improvement during his incarceration (or rather his 20 years of torture on death row).
The flip side of the schizophrenic code is represented by folks like Rick Perry, who as governor of Texas has presided over the execution of 235 people. As a fundamentalist Christian he’s definitely a “life for a life” kind of guy: no extenuating circumstances such as societal racism, poverty, or misogyny should ever interfere with the state’s license to kill. This license to kill is equated with God’s will.
Both forms of Christianity conflate justice and religion in their own perverse ways. While I admire many of the liberation theology priests and nuns who have devoted their lives to helping people around the world and who don’t want anybody killed in the name of God, they still believe there is a God to whose will we must submit. An NAACP leader outside the prison, right before Davis’s execution, said, when she heard of a rumored last minute stay, “We thank God, our prayers have been answered.” But then whoops, they decided to execute him after all: God’s will again. Within five minutes God had changed from the benevolent, merciful God of the Carters and Sharptons to the vengeful, unforgiving God of the Perrys. How schizophrenic is that?
I don’t know whether Davis was guilty or innocent, and the people (jury, lawyers, judge, guards, executioner) who participated in his death certainly didn’t know. Only Davis himself knew the truth. That he was put to death by state sanction (something different than the people) is tragic and inhumane. But the really unsettling part of this scenario is that the fundamentalist Christian schizophrenics (and complicity, the “love thy neighbor” schizophrenics) insist that this country was founded on Christian principles (they usually say Judeo-Christian, but that’s just a bone for AIPAC) and that these principles should guide every institution, not just the criminal [in]justice system. Its vengeful absolutism already determines the way many institutions are run: No Child Left Behind dictates that you teach kids to take a test and if they fail that test you punish the school by taking away its funding and firing its teachers. Now they want to punish all the old and sick people who don’t have IRAs, stock portfolios, or private health insurance because there is something sinful about these folks who haven’t achieved the American dream despite what Elizabeth Warren pointed out the other day, “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody.”
Fundamentalism has been around forever. But the increased fervor to make it the guiding “light” (darkness) of our combined lives when the Enlightenment is 300 years old, postmodernism permeates culture, and every prejudice the Bible holds dear is being smashed to smithereens is testimony to an even more insidious schizophrenia. It’s not endemic to the U.S., but when more than one of our presidential candidates is the face of this affliction it’s time to lock up the crazies instead of the criminals.
People like Jimmy Carter and Reverend Al Sharpton represent one side of the schizophrenic code. They temper the hail and brimstone fervor of an “Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” with the “love thy neighbor as thyself.” They believe there is redemption in good conduct: society, as well as the individual, are responsible for creating an environment in which the human spirit can flourish and do good deeds. The death penalty allows no redemption. The commutation of Davis’ death sentence would have acknowledged his 20 years of self-improvement during his incarceration (or rather his 20 years of torture on death row).
The flip side of the schizophrenic code is represented by folks like Rick Perry, who as governor of Texas has presided over the execution of 235 people. As a fundamentalist Christian he’s definitely a “life for a life” kind of guy: no extenuating circumstances such as societal racism, poverty, or misogyny should ever interfere with the state’s license to kill. This license to kill is equated with God’s will.
Both forms of Christianity conflate justice and religion in their own perverse ways. While I admire many of the liberation theology priests and nuns who have devoted their lives to helping people around the world and who don’t want anybody killed in the name of God, they still believe there is a God to whose will we must submit. An NAACP leader outside the prison, right before Davis’s execution, said, when she heard of a rumored last minute stay, “We thank God, our prayers have been answered.” But then whoops, they decided to execute him after all: God’s will again. Within five minutes God had changed from the benevolent, merciful God of the Carters and Sharptons to the vengeful, unforgiving God of the Perrys. How schizophrenic is that?
I don’t know whether Davis was guilty or innocent, and the people (jury, lawyers, judge, guards, executioner) who participated in his death certainly didn’t know. Only Davis himself knew the truth. That he was put to death by state sanction (something different than the people) is tragic and inhumane. But the really unsettling part of this scenario is that the fundamentalist Christian schizophrenics (and complicity, the “love thy neighbor” schizophrenics) insist that this country was founded on Christian principles (they usually say Judeo-Christian, but that’s just a bone for AIPAC) and that these principles should guide every institution, not just the criminal [in]justice system. Its vengeful absolutism already determines the way many institutions are run: No Child Left Behind dictates that you teach kids to take a test and if they fail that test you punish the school by taking away its funding and firing its teachers. Now they want to punish all the old and sick people who don’t have IRAs, stock portfolios, or private health insurance because there is something sinful about these folks who haven’t achieved the American dream despite what Elizabeth Warren pointed out the other day, “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody.”
Fundamentalism has been around forever. But the increased fervor to make it the guiding “light” (darkness) of our combined lives when the Enlightenment is 300 years old, postmodernism permeates culture, and every prejudice the Bible holds dear is being smashed to smithereens is testimony to an even more insidious schizophrenia. It’s not endemic to the U.S., but when more than one of our presidential candidates is the face of this affliction it’s time to lock up the crazies instead of the criminals.
Sunday, September 18, 2011
Guilty Pleasures
For anyone younger than 55 this posting is going to be in a musical foreign language. For those of us older than 55, it’s going to be a nostalgic tour of guilty pleasure (not the R&B of my Funky Soul blog).
Mark and I acknowledged our guilty pleasures to each other when certain songs came on the oldies station in Albuquerque that we’d listen to in the car when we couldn’t get anything decent on any other stations. I don’t know if other people our age also refer to these songs as guilty pleasures, but they know what I mean. (I have to acknowledge here that our son Max, who is 22, knows all these songs, too; from us or the oldies station, or both?)
Terri, my friend from Santa Fe, originally from Philadelphia, does, too. Although five years younger than me she never misses a beat (or title) when it come to pop music. She must have been listening at age eight. We were going to go camping last weekend up above Chama but it poured rain and I couldn’t find a housesitter who I could possibly ask to clean up my demented dog Sammy’s poop every morning (that’s another blog waiting to be written). So she came up to El Valle and we hung out yakking about this and that, watching the U.S. Open (Serena trash talking the umpire over her penalty), and eating. On Sunday we went for a hike up the canyon and then treated ourselves to brunch at the Sugar Nymphs, Peñasco’s own gourmet restaurant whose owners I sometimes sell produce to and drink a lot of mojitos with.
I can’t remember (my recurring theme) how we got started on guilty pleasures, a term she hadn’t before used but a concept she knew well. I started out admitting that I liked a couple of songs that were definitely pop, not rock, but had catchy enough beats that despite the inane lyrics got my toes tapping. Then she asked, “What else,” and I thought, I’m really going to be embarrassed to admit another guilty pleasure is “Brandi”, by a band called Looking Glass (I had no idea who recorded Brandi, I Googled it as I wrote this, but I bet Mark would have known) about this bar waitress named Brandi who’s in love with a sailor who’s love is the sea, not Brandi. I was just about to admit it when Terri blurted out, “Brandi.” I shot out of my chair and jumped up and down with delight.
When we got home we immediately went to YouTube and started playing all our guilty pleasures. We started querying each other about all those questionable pop/rock icons who actually had a good song or two: Rod Stewart with Maggie May, of course. Cat Stevens? (For those of you who don’t know who Cat Stevens is he started off as kind of a folk rock singer, then became more known for his writing, and finally became Yusuf Islam when he converted.) I knew there was a song of his I liked, and Terri actually had it on iTunes, but the song, The First Cut is the Deepest, was covered by someone else (Rod Stewart, among others, I just Googled that, too). Anyway, this went on and on and segued into other songs we had that the other one had never heard, like Johnny Cash and Joe Strummer singing Redemption Song.
After Terri left I remembered another guilty pleasure and e-mailed her about this particular embarrassment: Lying Eyes by the Eagles. Everybody has probably heard of the Eagles—they’re still out there touring with the same band members they started out with, I think. But Lying Eyes? This doesn’t jive with my criteria that a bad lyric song can only be saved by a good beat, or an edge. It goes: “Late at night the big old house gets lonely, I guess every form of refuge has its price. It breaks her heart to think her love is only given to a man with hands as cold as ice.” Or something like that. But the chorus picks you up and carries you along: “You can’t hide your lying eyes. And your smile is a thin disguise. I thought by now you’d realize, there ain’t no way to hide your lying eyes.”
Ahhhh. It’s just one of those anomalies I have to accept. When I’m in the car, singing “Brandi, you’re a fine girl, what a good wife you would be” at the top of my lungs, you just have to let it go and enjoy your guilty pleasures.
Mark and I acknowledged our guilty pleasures to each other when certain songs came on the oldies station in Albuquerque that we’d listen to in the car when we couldn’t get anything decent on any other stations. I don’t know if other people our age also refer to these songs as guilty pleasures, but they know what I mean. (I have to acknowledge here that our son Max, who is 22, knows all these songs, too; from us or the oldies station, or both?)
Terri, my friend from Santa Fe, originally from Philadelphia, does, too. Although five years younger than me she never misses a beat (or title) when it come to pop music. She must have been listening at age eight. We were going to go camping last weekend up above Chama but it poured rain and I couldn’t find a housesitter who I could possibly ask to clean up my demented dog Sammy’s poop every morning (that’s another blog waiting to be written). So she came up to El Valle and we hung out yakking about this and that, watching the U.S. Open (Serena trash talking the umpire over her penalty), and eating. On Sunday we went for a hike up the canyon and then treated ourselves to brunch at the Sugar Nymphs, Peñasco’s own gourmet restaurant whose owners I sometimes sell produce to and drink a lot of mojitos with.
I can’t remember (my recurring theme) how we got started on guilty pleasures, a term she hadn’t before used but a concept she knew well. I started out admitting that I liked a couple of songs that were definitely pop, not rock, but had catchy enough beats that despite the inane lyrics got my toes tapping. Then she asked, “What else,” and I thought, I’m really going to be embarrassed to admit another guilty pleasure is “Brandi”, by a band called Looking Glass (I had no idea who recorded Brandi, I Googled it as I wrote this, but I bet Mark would have known) about this bar waitress named Brandi who’s in love with a sailor who’s love is the sea, not Brandi. I was just about to admit it when Terri blurted out, “Brandi.” I shot out of my chair and jumped up and down with delight.
When we got home we immediately went to YouTube and started playing all our guilty pleasures. We started querying each other about all those questionable pop/rock icons who actually had a good song or two: Rod Stewart with Maggie May, of course. Cat Stevens? (For those of you who don’t know who Cat Stevens is he started off as kind of a folk rock singer, then became more known for his writing, and finally became Yusuf Islam when he converted.) I knew there was a song of his I liked, and Terri actually had it on iTunes, but the song, The First Cut is the Deepest, was covered by someone else (Rod Stewart, among others, I just Googled that, too). Anyway, this went on and on and segued into other songs we had that the other one had never heard, like Johnny Cash and Joe Strummer singing Redemption Song.
After Terri left I remembered another guilty pleasure and e-mailed her about this particular embarrassment: Lying Eyes by the Eagles. Everybody has probably heard of the Eagles—they’re still out there touring with the same band members they started out with, I think. But Lying Eyes? This doesn’t jive with my criteria that a bad lyric song can only be saved by a good beat, or an edge. It goes: “Late at night the big old house gets lonely, I guess every form of refuge has its price. It breaks her heart to think her love is only given to a man with hands as cold as ice.” Or something like that. But the chorus picks you up and carries you along: “You can’t hide your lying eyes. And your smile is a thin disguise. I thought by now you’d realize, there ain’t no way to hide your lying eyes.”
Ahhhh. It’s just one of those anomalies I have to accept. When I’m in the car, singing “Brandi, you’re a fine girl, what a good wife you would be” at the top of my lungs, you just have to let it go and enjoy your guilty pleasures.
Thursday, September 15, 2011
Letter to Elizabeth
Instead of posting a comment to your blog, Elizabeth (elizabethtannen.com/blog), I decided to write you a letter via my blog. In the olden days I would have written you on paper and put it in the mailbox, but in those olden days I wouldn’t have read what you wrote because there were no blogs. So round and round it goes, but as long as we’re still talking, it’s OK with me.
I was 28 a long time ago but I remember it well. It was a time of angst and instability, largely precipitated by the pattern set at Antioch College, which I attended for a short but intense time. We went to school for half the year and spent the other half on co-op jobs around the country, in three or six month rotations: rural New Hampshire, Berkeley, and Santa Fe for me. Even after I left, the pattern continued: Colorado Springs (where I was raised and went back to briefly); Cloudcroft, New Mexico; Bend, Oregon; Albuquerque’s South Valley; and finally (but not lastly) Placitas. My friends from Antioch were all over the place, set in motion just like me. I had several relationships, both going nowhere from the get go, and many flings. These were the days when Okies (corner of University and Central), Rosa’s Cantina (Algodones), and The Golden Inn (on the east side of the Sandias) provided a community of sorts, if drinking, dancing, and having a good old time with a bunch of other students, hippies, and assorted misfits counted as a cohort (I never used that word until Jakob started referring to his PhD class as one).
None of it assuaged my anxiety, which we all seem to share at that age regardless of the time and place. But what I want to say in this letter to you and many others your age who feel disconnected, unsure of where they want to be and with whom, things will settle into place eventually. It may take longer than you’d like it to, particularly now, in the midst of a depression, which our politicians euphemistically call a recession. It’s going to be harder for your generation than it was for mine—fewer ways to slip through the cracks with cheap rents, cheap gas, and an appreciation of the second-hand (it’s all boutique now).
You may end up someplace you never thought you would, and with “someones” instead of someone. A lot of it will be determined by you—what work you end up doing, where you do that work, or where you to want to be instead of where you find work—but a lot of it will be serendipitous (which is a more elegant way of saying a crap shoot). When I think back on how I ended up where I am, in northern New Mexico, in El Valle, I’m amazed. At 28 I’d never heard of the place. And it happened just like I said: some of it willed, choosing time over money (living in rural New Mexico), bad luck (leaving my home in Placitas because of gentrification), and good luck (knowing someone who lived in El Valle). I ended up with the same partner for 34 years, but he had already been married to his high school sweetheart, divorced, and had somehow found his way from Buffalo to Placitas, a route full of serendipity and dumb luck (finding me). You never know where they’ll come from or who they’ll turn out to be, these people you’ll have relationships with. But it will be VERY interesting.
So, it sounds like you’ve had a love-hate relationship with the crazy twenties and are ready to leave them behind and make your life a little more stable, which will hopefully make it a lot less anxious. You’re right that we tend to think of ourselves “on some sort of ascending path” but that the “better future” may indeed be false, particularly now. But I think, relatively speaking, that it will be better, at least on the personal level. Dan Savage founded the It Gets Better web site to let gays know that the social ostracism they suffer in high school or their early twenties will subside, that they will find the homes and relationships and work that most twenty somethings segue into in their thirties.
There will always be something to worry about, regardless of where you live, what you do, and who your family and/or friends may be (and for many folks friends are family). But you are not going to “revert to an older, lesser version of yourself”, regardless of the circumstances (even if it’s where you started out). It’s what you will be doing, who you choose to do it with, both personally and professionally, and how you go about making a home that determine who you are—even if in the end, none of us quite have a handle on exactly who that is. I often think back on all the stuff I did, the people I did it with, what I built and grew and wrote and thought. Someday you will, too. And it will have been a great ride.
I was 28 a long time ago but I remember it well. It was a time of angst and instability, largely precipitated by the pattern set at Antioch College, which I attended for a short but intense time. We went to school for half the year and spent the other half on co-op jobs around the country, in three or six month rotations: rural New Hampshire, Berkeley, and Santa Fe for me. Even after I left, the pattern continued: Colorado Springs (where I was raised and went back to briefly); Cloudcroft, New Mexico; Bend, Oregon; Albuquerque’s South Valley; and finally (but not lastly) Placitas. My friends from Antioch were all over the place, set in motion just like me. I had several relationships, both going nowhere from the get go, and many flings. These were the days when Okies (corner of University and Central), Rosa’s Cantina (Algodones), and The Golden Inn (on the east side of the Sandias) provided a community of sorts, if drinking, dancing, and having a good old time with a bunch of other students, hippies, and assorted misfits counted as a cohort (I never used that word until Jakob started referring to his PhD class as one).
None of it assuaged my anxiety, which we all seem to share at that age regardless of the time and place. But what I want to say in this letter to you and many others your age who feel disconnected, unsure of where they want to be and with whom, things will settle into place eventually. It may take longer than you’d like it to, particularly now, in the midst of a depression, which our politicians euphemistically call a recession. It’s going to be harder for your generation than it was for mine—fewer ways to slip through the cracks with cheap rents, cheap gas, and an appreciation of the second-hand (it’s all boutique now).
You may end up someplace you never thought you would, and with “someones” instead of someone. A lot of it will be determined by you—what work you end up doing, where you do that work, or where you to want to be instead of where you find work—but a lot of it will be serendipitous (which is a more elegant way of saying a crap shoot). When I think back on how I ended up where I am, in northern New Mexico, in El Valle, I’m amazed. At 28 I’d never heard of the place. And it happened just like I said: some of it willed, choosing time over money (living in rural New Mexico), bad luck (leaving my home in Placitas because of gentrification), and good luck (knowing someone who lived in El Valle). I ended up with the same partner for 34 years, but he had already been married to his high school sweetheart, divorced, and had somehow found his way from Buffalo to Placitas, a route full of serendipity and dumb luck (finding me). You never know where they’ll come from or who they’ll turn out to be, these people you’ll have relationships with. But it will be VERY interesting.
So, it sounds like you’ve had a love-hate relationship with the crazy twenties and are ready to leave them behind and make your life a little more stable, which will hopefully make it a lot less anxious. You’re right that we tend to think of ourselves “on some sort of ascending path” but that the “better future” may indeed be false, particularly now. But I think, relatively speaking, that it will be better, at least on the personal level. Dan Savage founded the It Gets Better web site to let gays know that the social ostracism they suffer in high school or their early twenties will subside, that they will find the homes and relationships and work that most twenty somethings segue into in their thirties.
There will always be something to worry about, regardless of where you live, what you do, and who your family and/or friends may be (and for many folks friends are family). But you are not going to “revert to an older, lesser version of yourself”, regardless of the circumstances (even if it’s where you started out). It’s what you will be doing, who you choose to do it with, both personally and professionally, and how you go about making a home that determine who you are—even if in the end, none of us quite have a handle on exactly who that is. I often think back on all the stuff I did, the people I did it with, what I built and grew and wrote and thought. Someday you will, too. And it will have been a great ride.
Monday, August 22, 2011
Diary of a Bad Year: Death or Philip Roth, I Can’t Decide Which
I write down ideas, sometimes as titles, as they occur to me in preparation for this blog. What on earth was I thinking when I wrote “Death or Philip Roth, I Can’t Decide Which?” Try as I might, I can’t remember. So I’m going to wing it and start writing free association about Philip and maybe my original thought will find its way to my frontal lobe and I’ll end up writing what I originally intended.
A few years ago Mark and I started a Philip Roth book club with Mark Rudd. He lives in Albuquerque and we live two hours away in El Valle so we conducted our conversation via e-mail. I can’t really remember (this is a recurring theme, obviously) what precipitated the formation of our club, but it didn’t last very long. We encouraged Mark R. to read the Zuckerman trilogy, Roth’s alter ego at his funniest, but before Mark got there he was turned off by the newer novels, like Exit Ghost, and then didn’t much like Zuckerman Unbound and The Anatomy Lesson either, so our club fizzled. Mark and I had trouble, too, with Exit Ghost, but I thought Roth’s struggle about telling the “truth” in one's fiction, which no longer has much meaning in the postmodern world of relativity, salvaged the book. He apologizes for railing about cell phones and about his audacity to still feel there is a right and wrong way to be in the world, which is certainly something I sympathize with. I guess his alter egos, who constantly struggle to get through all the bullshit to what is “real” (and the way he becomes the women who call him on his own bullshit), allow him to make the attempt while acknowledging that we all come to our analyses with our neuroses, prejudices, and unalterable histories. I went on and reread not only the Zuckerman books but Goodbye Columbus, which I thoroughly enjoyed, and Portnoy’s Complaint, but the Monkey bit was too much for me. Roth’s obsession with young women is his recurring theme; in the novels when he’s preadolescent or a young man himself, or even a middle-aged man who also appreciates middle-aged women, it’s OK. But when he’s an old man, as in the later novels, it becomes, as Mark R. put it, “embarrassing.”
But wait. I just made the obvious connection with death and Philip, whose mortality is staring him in the face (although I still don’t know why I said “I can’t decide which” in the title of my blog). He must be in his late seventies now (I just googled him; he’s 78). Olympia Dukakis goes around asking all the men she meets in Moonstuck for an explanation of why her husband, Vincent Gardenia, chases women. Finally she gets her answer from Danny Aiello: “Because he fears death?”
Mark died at 62, much too young, at least for those of us in the western world whose life expectancy is somewhere in the late 70s or 80s, to have to face one’s mortality. I now think a lot about my own. Even though I’m on life’s downhill side, the end of that slide wouldn’t be so much on my mind if it weren’t for Mark’s death and knowing so many others my age who also have cancer and other illnesses. As James Woods points out in his New Yorker article “Is That All There Is?”, even those who believe in immortality aren’t immune to fear and dread of death. He quotes Columbia philosopher Philip Kitcher: “If your life is directed toward nurturing others who need your protection and guidance, and if, unluckily, you die before they are ready to cope without you, the fact that you will be restored—and maybe restored to them in some entirely different state—is immaterial. Your project, on which you have centered your existence, has still been compromised by premature death.” I don’t think I’m particularly fearful, but I dread leaving my kids behind.
If Mark had lived we would still be publishing La Jicarita News, working on books, traveling, gardening, cutting firewood, pretty much everything we’ve always done, but my life has changed irrevocably. While I don’t go around chasing young men, I’m less attached to my work and what my contribution to society has been. I feel that maybe I should be doing some things I haven’t been doing seeing as how I, too, could be gone tomorrow. I’m not sure what those things are, but I’m thinking about it.
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Unplugged
Even in El Valle, at 8,000 feet, it’s been hot. So I planned to do some big-time weeding in my garden in the early morning when the hoop house throws some shade over my mess of bind weed, mallow, and grass. Instead, I spent that time trying to transfer information from my old laptop to my new used laptop (thank you, Jake Kosek) for all the editing jobs I’m doing, track down a UPS package that I thought was being shipped by the post office (see Marginalization blog), change the bank account on my electronic billing (my community bank got taken over by a multi-national), and answer a bunch of e-mails that needed answering. As I’m doing all this I’m keeping up a steady stream of complaint: I don’t want to be doing this, why am I doing this, computers are making my life more complicated (see The Scourge of Computers blog), not less, I can’t believe I’m talking to myself like this, I want to go back to my life before I had a computer.
I often think of my pre-computer life. I certainly was just as busy as I am today, but I was busy doing other things like building a house, raising children, fighting the Forest Service (a life’s work), gardening, knitting (I actually knit the kids and Mark sweaters and hats), writing stories (on the typewriter), fighting the developers (also a life’s work), and taking trips to Mexico and the mountains (see Productivity blog). I was younger, and had more energy, but it was also easier to generate that energy because my efforts produced something other than the busyness required to keep up with the bureaucratic bullshit that has taken over our lives.
Let’s take a closer look at the things I was doing that morning. Why in the world do I need two laptop computers? I have a hard drive back-up for all my important papers (two novels, a book of short stories, a memoir of my political activity in northern New Mexico, all unpublished) and other files, but you know how it goes: my old laptop is slow, it won’t run any of the constantly upgraded applications that Apple is constantly turning out so people have to spend more money to buy new computers, which means you have to buy one too or you can’t communicate and everyone tells you you’re a Luddite. After two sessions with my computer guru, Robin Collier, there is still stuff that hasn’t been transferred off the old to the new, and glitches that I’m still discovering on the new that make me run back to the old (or up to the old, as it’s upstairs and the new one is downstairs), cursing all the way.
Then I happen to look at my e-mail and realize that a package that I thought was mailed to me on July 27 and expected to arrive in three to five days was actually UPS’d to me and of course I’d provided the postal mailing address, not the UPS address. So I call the UPS center in Santa Fe (fortunately, the last time I managed to find the number, which is not listed in the phone book because they make you call a centralized number in anywhere U.S.A. that can only help you if you have a tracking number, I had the presence of mind to write it down) and give them the correct physical address (my mailing address is a physical address as well, but neither deliverer will recognize the other’s).
Moving on to the next distraction, I find myself once more on the computer trying to pay my credit card bill only to see that my old bank, the one I specifically chose because it was local, is still listed as the payer when it’s been taken over by some multi-national bank I’ve never even heard of because of the mortgage crisis. The new bank sends me about five letters a week explaining how this takeover is being handled and what I have to do and what I don’t have to do, which is change any electronic payment information because the new bank is going to take care of that. But of course it hasn’t and I’m worried that my payment won’t be correctly processed and the credit card company will charge me interest, which is usury, so I decide to make the change myself, which I can’t figure out how to do online, of course, so I have to call the credit card company and have someone walk me through it and then that’s done.
Lastly are the e-mails. Normally I don’t complain about e-mails. I know that some people get hundreds of them every day and end up throwing most of them in the trash. Of all the technological innovations associated with the computer I appreciate e-mail the most because it means I can impart information or ask a question or have a short chat without getting bogged down on the phone with certain friends who will remain nameless who think that anytime you call it’s an excuse to talk for an hour about much more than the purpose of the call. But you still have that nagging feeling that you need to read all those e-mails pertaining to your work or your political awareness and then like everyone else you throw them in the trash.
This posting is full of a lot of “see other blogs,” which may indicate that it’s redundant, but I think it’s more a reaffirmation of the need to chafe and complain and yes, even rant, about the bullshit we, the few and the privileged (see Some Things Are Relative blog) put up with, and really, promote, in this short time we have on earth. I remember a backpack trip long ago, walking the crest trail in the Manzano Mountains, thinking, I wish I could walk this trail forever and never go back. Sometimes it’s just all too much.
I often think of my pre-computer life. I certainly was just as busy as I am today, but I was busy doing other things like building a house, raising children, fighting the Forest Service (a life’s work), gardening, knitting (I actually knit the kids and Mark sweaters and hats), writing stories (on the typewriter), fighting the developers (also a life’s work), and taking trips to Mexico and the mountains (see Productivity blog). I was younger, and had more energy, but it was also easier to generate that energy because my efforts produced something other than the busyness required to keep up with the bureaucratic bullshit that has taken over our lives.
Let’s take a closer look at the things I was doing that morning. Why in the world do I need two laptop computers? I have a hard drive back-up for all my important papers (two novels, a book of short stories, a memoir of my political activity in northern New Mexico, all unpublished) and other files, but you know how it goes: my old laptop is slow, it won’t run any of the constantly upgraded applications that Apple is constantly turning out so people have to spend more money to buy new computers, which means you have to buy one too or you can’t communicate and everyone tells you you’re a Luddite. After two sessions with my computer guru, Robin Collier, there is still stuff that hasn’t been transferred off the old to the new, and glitches that I’m still discovering on the new that make me run back to the old (or up to the old, as it’s upstairs and the new one is downstairs), cursing all the way.
Then I happen to look at my e-mail and realize that a package that I thought was mailed to me on July 27 and expected to arrive in three to five days was actually UPS’d to me and of course I’d provided the postal mailing address, not the UPS address. So I call the UPS center in Santa Fe (fortunately, the last time I managed to find the number, which is not listed in the phone book because they make you call a centralized number in anywhere U.S.A. that can only help you if you have a tracking number, I had the presence of mind to write it down) and give them the correct physical address (my mailing address is a physical address as well, but neither deliverer will recognize the other’s).
Moving on to the next distraction, I find myself once more on the computer trying to pay my credit card bill only to see that my old bank, the one I specifically chose because it was local, is still listed as the payer when it’s been taken over by some multi-national bank I’ve never even heard of because of the mortgage crisis. The new bank sends me about five letters a week explaining how this takeover is being handled and what I have to do and what I don’t have to do, which is change any electronic payment information because the new bank is going to take care of that. But of course it hasn’t and I’m worried that my payment won’t be correctly processed and the credit card company will charge me interest, which is usury, so I decide to make the change myself, which I can’t figure out how to do online, of course, so I have to call the credit card company and have someone walk me through it and then that’s done.
Lastly are the e-mails. Normally I don’t complain about e-mails. I know that some people get hundreds of them every day and end up throwing most of them in the trash. Of all the technological innovations associated with the computer I appreciate e-mail the most because it means I can impart information or ask a question or have a short chat without getting bogged down on the phone with certain friends who will remain nameless who think that anytime you call it’s an excuse to talk for an hour about much more than the purpose of the call. But you still have that nagging feeling that you need to read all those e-mails pertaining to your work or your political awareness and then like everyone else you throw them in the trash.
This posting is full of a lot of “see other blogs,” which may indicate that it’s redundant, but I think it’s more a reaffirmation of the need to chafe and complain and yes, even rant, about the bullshit we, the few and the privileged (see Some Things Are Relative blog) put up with, and really, promote, in this short time we have on earth. I remember a backpack trip long ago, walking the crest trail in the Manzano Mountains, thinking, I wish I could walk this trail forever and never go back. Sometimes it’s just all too much.
Sunday, July 31, 2011
The Million Dollar Bone Mill
In an issue of the Santa Fe New Mexican last week there was an insert published by the National Union of Hospital and Health Care Employees, which is an affiliate of the larger AFSCME/AFL-CIO. The nurses and technicians at Christus St. Vincent Hospital in Santa Fe have been involved in protracted negotiations with hospital management over wages and conditions—safe staffing and experience—and as I write this union members are voting on the proposed contract.
The insert, as part of the union’s message to the public regarding the struggles of the nurses and technicians, includes a list of the salaries of “Officers, Directors, Trustees, Key Employees, and Highest Compensated Employees” of Christus. The CEO, Alex Valdez, makes a whopping $457,064 (and $148,122 estimated fringe benefits). But lo and behold, the highest compensation by far on the list belongs to my old friend Dr. Samuel Chun, an orthopedic surgeon, whose makes $935,275. He’s not really my friend, but I did see him as often as I see many of my friends when I was referred to him for treatment of a bone spur on the lower part of my thumb. After shooting me up with cortisone a couple of times, which did nothing to alleviate the pain, he proceeded to remove the bone spur, which he did quite well, as he appears to be an excellent surgeon (although he forgot to take a look at a mass on my palm while he was doing the cutting). But then the trouble began, which should have been included in my Diary of a Bad Year, except that it would have made it the Diary of My Two and a Half Bad Years and I wouldn’t have been able to use J.M. Coetzee’s title.
I wasn’t blogging back then but I've always done my best venting by pen so I sent him a letter. He never answered, of course, but now that I’m blogging I’m going repeat some of what I said in the letter. You never know, maybe someone who is considering orthopedic surgery will read this posting and decide NOT to choose Chun and NOT to contribute to his $935,275 compensation package.
After my cast was removed Chun’s office sent me to a physical therapist who specializes in hands and arms. I didn’t get any better: my thumb hurt horribly and my shoulder froze. I was treated by the actual physical therapist only once; subsequently it was by her aides, and nothing helped. I figured it was time to go back to Chun with my troubles, but each time you go see him you have to wait at least at hour for a 10-minute visit, so I procrastinated. When I finally told him my tale of woe he asked me if I wanted him to cast my thumb again. I told him no, I wanted him to figure out why it was taking me so long to heal. He offered to shoot up my shoulder with more cortisone, and I told him no on that one, too.
He told me to come back in another month, which I did, still miserable. This time he said, I want to consult with my partner who specializes in shoulders. So I made an appointment with this other orthopod (I waited for an appointment and then I once again waited in the waiting room). This doc asked me some questions, checked out the lack of mobility in my arm and hand and said to me, I want to go consult with Chun. I’d been there for all of 10 minutes. He came back into the room and said, I just talked with Dr. Chun and I think you have RSD. I asked, what’s that, and he said, it’s a syndrome that can be treated at the pain clinic with a “sympathetic nerve block”, meaning a shot of anesthesia in the neck. I didn’t like the idea of a shot in my neck but I was pretty desperate for a diagnosis, so I took him at his word. Fortunately (or unfortunately) I had the presence of mind to ask the technician to spell out the name of this diagnosis, which was Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy.
When I got home I did what anyone with a computer does these days: I went on the internet and looked up RSD. It was then I burst into tears. Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy, or Complex Regional Pain Syndrome, is a chronic pain condition or “continuous, intense pain out of proportion to the severity of the injury.” It can start in your hand and spread to include the entire arm. There is no cure, and no definitive drug or treatment procedure, i.e., the sympathetic nerve block that Chun’s buddy was prepared to order. On one of the internet sites the words “some people can have unremitting pain and crippling and irreversible changes in spite of treatment” especially stood out.
That was the end of my relationship with Chun and his partner, who I suspect makes a six figure compensation as well. I found another orthopedic doc in Española who looked at my medical records and the RSD diagnosis and said to me, let’s not go there. So I didn’t, and with the help of a good physical therapist and many hours of evaluation by the new doc I eventually healed. In my letter to Chun I suggested that he spend some of the money he was making (at the time I had no idea how much that actually was) on a patient navigator who could follow the progress of everyone who makes his or her way through the maze of his assembly line practice. But that kind of practice works efficiently only when patients are in and out the door. Once it was obvious that I was a malingerer, he wasn’t interested.
So that’s the story. The solution is simple: Christus St. Vincent can pay Dr. Chun and his cohort a salary just like it pays the nurses and techs who work their butts off to take care of all of us before and after the surgeons stroll in with the scalpels. If they can do it at the Mayo Clinic, they can do it in Fanta Se.
The insert, as part of the union’s message to the public regarding the struggles of the nurses and technicians, includes a list of the salaries of “Officers, Directors, Trustees, Key Employees, and Highest Compensated Employees” of Christus. The CEO, Alex Valdez, makes a whopping $457,064 (and $148,122 estimated fringe benefits). But lo and behold, the highest compensation by far on the list belongs to my old friend Dr. Samuel Chun, an orthopedic surgeon, whose makes $935,275. He’s not really my friend, but I did see him as often as I see many of my friends when I was referred to him for treatment of a bone spur on the lower part of my thumb. After shooting me up with cortisone a couple of times, which did nothing to alleviate the pain, he proceeded to remove the bone spur, which he did quite well, as he appears to be an excellent surgeon (although he forgot to take a look at a mass on my palm while he was doing the cutting). But then the trouble began, which should have been included in my Diary of a Bad Year, except that it would have made it the Diary of My Two and a Half Bad Years and I wouldn’t have been able to use J.M. Coetzee’s title.
I wasn’t blogging back then but I've always done my best venting by pen so I sent him a letter. He never answered, of course, but now that I’m blogging I’m going repeat some of what I said in the letter. You never know, maybe someone who is considering orthopedic surgery will read this posting and decide NOT to choose Chun and NOT to contribute to his $935,275 compensation package.
After my cast was removed Chun’s office sent me to a physical therapist who specializes in hands and arms. I didn’t get any better: my thumb hurt horribly and my shoulder froze. I was treated by the actual physical therapist only once; subsequently it was by her aides, and nothing helped. I figured it was time to go back to Chun with my troubles, but each time you go see him you have to wait at least at hour for a 10-minute visit, so I procrastinated. When I finally told him my tale of woe he asked me if I wanted him to cast my thumb again. I told him no, I wanted him to figure out why it was taking me so long to heal. He offered to shoot up my shoulder with more cortisone, and I told him no on that one, too.
He told me to come back in another month, which I did, still miserable. This time he said, I want to consult with my partner who specializes in shoulders. So I made an appointment with this other orthopod (I waited for an appointment and then I once again waited in the waiting room). This doc asked me some questions, checked out the lack of mobility in my arm and hand and said to me, I want to go consult with Chun. I’d been there for all of 10 minutes. He came back into the room and said, I just talked with Dr. Chun and I think you have RSD. I asked, what’s that, and he said, it’s a syndrome that can be treated at the pain clinic with a “sympathetic nerve block”, meaning a shot of anesthesia in the neck. I didn’t like the idea of a shot in my neck but I was pretty desperate for a diagnosis, so I took him at his word. Fortunately (or unfortunately) I had the presence of mind to ask the technician to spell out the name of this diagnosis, which was Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy.
When I got home I did what anyone with a computer does these days: I went on the internet and looked up RSD. It was then I burst into tears. Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy, or Complex Regional Pain Syndrome, is a chronic pain condition or “continuous, intense pain out of proportion to the severity of the injury.” It can start in your hand and spread to include the entire arm. There is no cure, and no definitive drug or treatment procedure, i.e., the sympathetic nerve block that Chun’s buddy was prepared to order. On one of the internet sites the words “some people can have unremitting pain and crippling and irreversible changes in spite of treatment” especially stood out.
That was the end of my relationship with Chun and his partner, who I suspect makes a six figure compensation as well. I found another orthopedic doc in Española who looked at my medical records and the RSD diagnosis and said to me, let’s not go there. So I didn’t, and with the help of a good physical therapist and many hours of evaluation by the new doc I eventually healed. In my letter to Chun I suggested that he spend some of the money he was making (at the time I had no idea how much that actually was) on a patient navigator who could follow the progress of everyone who makes his or her way through the maze of his assembly line practice. But that kind of practice works efficiently only when patients are in and out the door. Once it was obvious that I was a malingerer, he wasn’t interested.
So that’s the story. The solution is simple: Christus St. Vincent can pay Dr. Chun and his cohort a salary just like it pays the nurses and techs who work their butts off to take care of all of us before and after the surgeons stroll in with the scalpels. If they can do it at the Mayo Clinic, they can do it in Fanta Se.
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
Diary of a Bad Year: Invasion of the Bats
I thought maybe the noise from the air monitoring station that the New Mexico Environment Department put outside my house two days after the Las Conchas fire broke out would scare away the bats, but no such luck. El Valle is one of the LANL downwind communities where the ED has been monitoring the air, soil, and water—largely due to the efforts of Sheri Kotowski of the Embudo Valley Environmental Monitoring Group, which came into existence after the Cerro Grande fire, the first time smoke and ash polluted our agricultural communities.
I was hopeful that besides measuring the potential fallout of Isotopic plutonium, Isotopic uranium, Strontium, Americium, Beryllium, and heavy metals the monitoring station, which sits next to the southwest corner of my house where the bats come every evening to feed, would annoy them enough so they’d vacate the premises. But they’re obviously doing more than just feeding because not only didn’t they go away, they decided to do some exploring inside my house, just like they did last year around this time. I figure they’ve got nests in between the tin roof and wood ceiling where they’re taking care of the “pups”— what the mammologist at New Mexico Game and Fish, who I phoned in desperation, called them.
Apparently they’re getting in through all the little cracks—they only need a half inch—around the beams and stove pipe and ceiling boards up in the loft of my very tall house. When they made their way into the house for the first time last year they met their match in Jake Kosek, our Berkeley friend who’s spent a lot of time in el norte. He was here to help bring in the wood supply after Mark was diagnosed with cancer. We were just sitting around in the kids’ old bedroom, yakking—Jake, our son Jakob (also part of the wood cutting crew), Mark, and me, when the bats started zooming through the air above our heads. As I recall I ran screaming from the room, but good old Jake just laughed, turned down the lights so the bats would settle down (or settle up, as they hang on walls and beams, they don’t perch), whipped off his shirt, threw it over one of the suckers, and tossed it outside. The other bat started up, tried to fly out of the room, knocked itself silly, and landed on the stairs. To redeem myself I threw a T-shirt over the prostrate bat and tossed it outside as well. After Jake left I filled up every crack I could find with expandable foam and nailed lath over that, but there continued to be bats in the bedroom until the pups were fledged: every night I shut the bedroom door while they flew around the room. In the morning they were gone.
Right on schedule they were back again this year. Last night I saw only one flying around the upstairs bedroom but there have been more: two, three, a dozen maybe, after they pushed in the screen on one of the windows where they congregate outside. I quickly slammed the door and by morning they’d flown back out the window, which I closed for good. While I’m not particularly thrilled at having bats flying around my house, I haven’t vacated the premises, either. But it has limited who I can invite to spend the night. You can’t have the grandmother from Cleveland (the inside joke when referencing someone who has no idea what living la vida loca in northern New Mexico means).
I lucked out that their arrival this year coincided with Jakob and Casey’s weekend visit. Jakob is now on a mission to get rid of these “f*#!ing bats.” The first night he caught two of them in a shirt, but was a little too zealous and kind of crushed them in the process. They ended up outside, dead. The next day we went over every possible nook and cranny with more foam and lath. Then my neighbor Tony, who comes over most evenings to fill water containers from my well, as the water line to his trailer is busted and they’ve yet to determine where, told us that he could see where the bats were flying in under one of the beams. So Jakob and I put up the 30-foot ladder, he climbed up with foam and lath and plugged that hole with a vengeance. Then we went inside, crawled into the nethermost regions of the loft with our headlamps and masks, and plugged the same hole from the inside. I’m sure that if we’ve been successful in stopping the ingress and egress of the bats the animal liberationists who read this blog are going to charge me with animal cruelty, but I challenge any of them to share their house with bats, their gardens with gophers, and their chickens with pigeons before they put my handcuffs on.
I’m really ready for both the bats and the incessantly noisy air monitor to be gone. I’m also ready for the day-long buildup of rain clouds to unleash their blessings and salvage what’s left of my parched fields (the Temptations’ song “Oh how I wish that it would rain, rain, rain” plays over and over inside my head). In my 20 years in El Valle I’ve never seen it so bad. None of us in the southwest—or at least this generation— have ever seen it so bad. Perhaps the world has never seen it so bad. But that’s another story.
I was hopeful that besides measuring the potential fallout of Isotopic plutonium, Isotopic uranium, Strontium, Americium, Beryllium, and heavy metals the monitoring station, which sits next to the southwest corner of my house where the bats come every evening to feed, would annoy them enough so they’d vacate the premises. But they’re obviously doing more than just feeding because not only didn’t they go away, they decided to do some exploring inside my house, just like they did last year around this time. I figure they’ve got nests in between the tin roof and wood ceiling where they’re taking care of the “pups”— what the mammologist at New Mexico Game and Fish, who I phoned in desperation, called them.
Apparently they’re getting in through all the little cracks—they only need a half inch—around the beams and stove pipe and ceiling boards up in the loft of my very tall house. When they made their way into the house for the first time last year they met their match in Jake Kosek, our Berkeley friend who’s spent a lot of time in el norte. He was here to help bring in the wood supply after Mark was diagnosed with cancer. We were just sitting around in the kids’ old bedroom, yakking—Jake, our son Jakob (also part of the wood cutting crew), Mark, and me, when the bats started zooming through the air above our heads. As I recall I ran screaming from the room, but good old Jake just laughed, turned down the lights so the bats would settle down (or settle up, as they hang on walls and beams, they don’t perch), whipped off his shirt, threw it over one of the suckers, and tossed it outside. The other bat started up, tried to fly out of the room, knocked itself silly, and landed on the stairs. To redeem myself I threw a T-shirt over the prostrate bat and tossed it outside as well. After Jake left I filled up every crack I could find with expandable foam and nailed lath over that, but there continued to be bats in the bedroom until the pups were fledged: every night I shut the bedroom door while they flew around the room. In the morning they were gone.
Right on schedule they were back again this year. Last night I saw only one flying around the upstairs bedroom but there have been more: two, three, a dozen maybe, after they pushed in the screen on one of the windows where they congregate outside. I quickly slammed the door and by morning they’d flown back out the window, which I closed for good. While I’m not particularly thrilled at having bats flying around my house, I haven’t vacated the premises, either. But it has limited who I can invite to spend the night. You can’t have the grandmother from Cleveland (the inside joke when referencing someone who has no idea what living la vida loca in northern New Mexico means).
I lucked out that their arrival this year coincided with Jakob and Casey’s weekend visit. Jakob is now on a mission to get rid of these “f*#!ing bats.” The first night he caught two of them in a shirt, but was a little too zealous and kind of crushed them in the process. They ended up outside, dead. The next day we went over every possible nook and cranny with more foam and lath. Then my neighbor Tony, who comes over most evenings to fill water containers from my well, as the water line to his trailer is busted and they’ve yet to determine where, told us that he could see where the bats were flying in under one of the beams. So Jakob and I put up the 30-foot ladder, he climbed up with foam and lath and plugged that hole with a vengeance. Then we went inside, crawled into the nethermost regions of the loft with our headlamps and masks, and plugged the same hole from the inside. I’m sure that if we’ve been successful in stopping the ingress and egress of the bats the animal liberationists who read this blog are going to charge me with animal cruelty, but I challenge any of them to share their house with bats, their gardens with gophers, and their chickens with pigeons before they put my handcuffs on.
I’m really ready for both the bats and the incessantly noisy air monitor to be gone. I’m also ready for the day-long buildup of rain clouds to unleash their blessings and salvage what’s left of my parched fields (the Temptations’ song “Oh how I wish that it would rain, rain, rain” plays over and over inside my head). In my 20 years in El Valle I’ve never seen it so bad. None of us in the southwest—or at least this generation— have ever seen it so bad. Perhaps the world has never seen it so bad. But that’s another story.
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Diary of a Bad Year, Ad infinitum
I’m here in El Valle and it’s 90 degrees outside but I’ve closed all my doors and windows and have every fan I own running full blast (I only have two) so that I can breathe without coughing. The smoke from the Las Conchas fire above Los Alamos has settled over our valley for two days now, so thick it’s almost impossible to differentiate between smoke and cloud, except for the orange striations that spread across the plumes along the entire southern horizon. Ash particles so minute that sometimes the only way they are visible is when they are caught in cobwebs (or as my neighbor told me, on her white skirt), rain upon our downwind communities. So here we are, eleven years after the Cerro Grande Fire that burned 47,000 acres in two weeks throughout the Los Alamos area, watching and breathing a fire that has burned 61,000 acres in 36 hours.
The town of Los Alamos has been evacuated as the fire approaches from the south and west towards the mesa canyons full of legacy waste and the active Los Alamos National Laboratory technical areas that store nuclear weapons and waste. I’ve made an arbitrary decision that if the fire reaches Tech Area G, where waste containers sit in nylon tents waiting shipment to the Waste Isolation Pilot Project in southern New Mexico, I will load up my dogs and leave for Albuquerque to move in with Jakob and Casey. But really it’s just an excuse to stay here in El Valle as long as possible (I pity the poor Los Alamos residents who had to leave their homes as I curse those complicit in this nuclear madness) because I know I’ve already been contaminated by the radionuclides, PCBs, and other toxins that reside in the ponderosa pine, piñon pine, and mixed conifer forests that are now exploding fire balls, desiccated by years of drought and federal agency mismanagement.
I say “load up my dogs,” but this means somehow getting a seventy pound, 14 year old dog who can barely walk and a 10 year old cocker spaniel who is deaf and almost blind into my car and transporting them in 100 degree heat to Albuquerque. I already asked my neighbor, a former Los Alamos construction manager, if he will take my chickens and put them in with his brood. But why should he stick around to take care of my chickens when he should be getting the hell out of Dodge with his parents, of whom he is the caretaker (his dad, Orlando, figures prominently in my blog post “Will the Real Mayordomo Please Stand Up.”) The only place they might go is Española, where his brother lives, but as we saw in the Cerro Grande Fire, that town will no doubt be a smoke-filled hell hole as well.
When I venture out in the smoke to feed the chickens I see that a little water is coming down the acequia into my orchard, which I’m struggling to keep alive between a long rotation of 22 parciantes in a summer of drought the likes of which I’ve never before seen. I’d asked the mayordomo to let a little water come down from an irrigator up the valley, and his response was, “Go ask them.” I didn’t, but for some reason the water is there, so with a wet bandana across my face I manage to at least wet down my trees before the water disappears several hours later. As my former vecino Jacobo Romero said (in William deBuys book, River of Traps), “never give holiday to the water,” even if the fires are raging and this Diary of a Bad Year has become the Diary of the Bad Year That Never Seems to End.
The town of Los Alamos has been evacuated as the fire approaches from the south and west towards the mesa canyons full of legacy waste and the active Los Alamos National Laboratory technical areas that store nuclear weapons and waste. I’ve made an arbitrary decision that if the fire reaches Tech Area G, where waste containers sit in nylon tents waiting shipment to the Waste Isolation Pilot Project in southern New Mexico, I will load up my dogs and leave for Albuquerque to move in with Jakob and Casey. But really it’s just an excuse to stay here in El Valle as long as possible (I pity the poor Los Alamos residents who had to leave their homes as I curse those complicit in this nuclear madness) because I know I’ve already been contaminated by the radionuclides, PCBs, and other toxins that reside in the ponderosa pine, piñon pine, and mixed conifer forests that are now exploding fire balls, desiccated by years of drought and federal agency mismanagement.
I say “load up my dogs,” but this means somehow getting a seventy pound, 14 year old dog who can barely walk and a 10 year old cocker spaniel who is deaf and almost blind into my car and transporting them in 100 degree heat to Albuquerque. I already asked my neighbor, a former Los Alamos construction manager, if he will take my chickens and put them in with his brood. But why should he stick around to take care of my chickens when he should be getting the hell out of Dodge with his parents, of whom he is the caretaker (his dad, Orlando, figures prominently in my blog post “Will the Real Mayordomo Please Stand Up.”) The only place they might go is Española, where his brother lives, but as we saw in the Cerro Grande Fire, that town will no doubt be a smoke-filled hell hole as well.
When I venture out in the smoke to feed the chickens I see that a little water is coming down the acequia into my orchard, which I’m struggling to keep alive between a long rotation of 22 parciantes in a summer of drought the likes of which I’ve never before seen. I’d asked the mayordomo to let a little water come down from an irrigator up the valley, and his response was, “Go ask them.” I didn’t, but for some reason the water is there, so with a wet bandana across my face I manage to at least wet down my trees before the water disappears several hours later. As my former vecino Jacobo Romero said (in William deBuys book, River of Traps), “never give holiday to the water,” even if the fires are raging and this Diary of a Bad Year has become the Diary of the Bad Year That Never Seems to End.
Sunday, June 5, 2011
Post-Marxist Humanist Pragmatic
My younger son Max’s major in college first was economics, which he now declares a pseudo science, that segued to history, moved on to Spanish, and then reverted back to history only because it was too late to change to continental philosophy, which he discovered in his junior year. Whenever he’s home from school for a visit we have these long, complex discussions about how my thinking and being fit into the scheme of all things explored from Aristotle to Jurgen Habermas. While I wish he would sometimes leave the continent and travel to the subaltern, I like being prodded to go back and read a lot of people I either failed to read or didn’t read very well, to validate or challenge his assessment of me, which currently is a post-Marxist humanist pragmatic (but subject to change at any moment).
Mark and I, along with some friends, were going to participate in a Marx study group of Capital with David Correia, our friend and American Studies professor at UNM, but that fell by the wayside when Mark got sick. So I reread Part I of Capital, and then I took up David Harvey’s A Companion to Marx’s Capital. As Harvey emphasizes in his book, Marx was not at all a static thinker, as some would pigeonhole him as pertinent only to a time long eclipsed by global capitalism. Marx’s structural analysis of capitalism is conceptual, one that recognizes the transformative nature of its
process.
The “post” part of Marxism remains in step with his conceptual thinking as it expands beyond labor power and value in economic terms to the power structures that affect all facets of society: the civil rights movement, women’s liberation, gender studies, and the environmental movement. I entered Antioch College in 1969. The black scholarship students moved into a “black” dorm where whites weren’t allowed, turning the racial power structure upside down. The second wave of the women’s movement was soon to be in full swing, as writers like Susan Brownmiller and Shulamith Firestone moved beyond the call for equal pay for equal work to challenging the very nature of sexuality and patriarchy. Environmental politics was not some nice middle class recycling center but a head-on confrontation with corporate and global exploitation of resources and populations for profit and gain.
One of George Eliot’s biographers, Frederick R. Karl, refers to her as a secular humanist, which allowed her to abandon Christianity while retaining its “morality and ethics.” While she wasn’t very politically involved, per se, her life was a political statement for women’s emancipation and a challenge to societal norms. She lived with a married man, George Henry Lewes, for more than 20 years while she wrote her great novels (I’ve read Middlemarch at least three times over the years). I can’t come close to her erudition and sophistication, in a life of the drawing room company of Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill, but I like to think my humanism resembles hers: a belief that we, subjectively, as individuals, can strive for both a reflective, and exemplary life, and objectively, as a society, can create the conditions for everyone to flourish. While the stark realities of our unjust and undemocratic world challenge our ability to hold on to personal will, or to refrain from seeing it in nihilistic terms, we can, as Antonio Gramsci put it, maintain a “pessimism of the intellect” and “optimism of the will.”
The final component of my label—pragmatist—was the philosophical theory with which I was the least conversant. I read some John Dewey and analyses of other pragmatists, neo pragmatists, or neo-classical pragmatists (jeez, it really gets esoteric), but came to the conclusion that I take a little something from a lot of them: an ethics that accepts the notion there are “good” values that can be reasoned out; “informed practice,” or recognition that the means are the end; and that there is no disconnect between body and mind, just as there is no disconnect between intellect and environment. As a community organizer around issues of environmental justice, and caretaker of a garden, orchard, and hay fields, over the years I found the only way to keep going was to stay connected and to value what I learned and who I came to love in the process of cultivating, irrigating, organizing, advocating, and resisting authority. When Ike DeVargas and I sometimes fall into a lament over what “could have, would have, should have been,” he reminds me that how we worked together was the most important part of what we did— the means, not the end. In the obituary that Jurgen Habermas wrote for the philosopher Richard Rorty, (labeled a neopragmatist), who, like Mark, died of pancreatic cancer, he said: “Nothing is sacred to Rorty the ironist. Asked at the end of his life about the ‘holy’, the strict atheist answered with words reminiscent of the young Hegel: ‘My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.’”
Mark and I, along with some friends, were going to participate in a Marx study group of Capital with David Correia, our friend and American Studies professor at UNM, but that fell by the wayside when Mark got sick. So I reread Part I of Capital, and then I took up David Harvey’s A Companion to Marx’s Capital. As Harvey emphasizes in his book, Marx was not at all a static thinker, as some would pigeonhole him as pertinent only to a time long eclipsed by global capitalism. Marx’s structural analysis of capitalism is conceptual, one that recognizes the transformative nature of its
process.
The “post” part of Marxism remains in step with his conceptual thinking as it expands beyond labor power and value in economic terms to the power structures that affect all facets of society: the civil rights movement, women’s liberation, gender studies, and the environmental movement. I entered Antioch College in 1969. The black scholarship students moved into a “black” dorm where whites weren’t allowed, turning the racial power structure upside down. The second wave of the women’s movement was soon to be in full swing, as writers like Susan Brownmiller and Shulamith Firestone moved beyond the call for equal pay for equal work to challenging the very nature of sexuality and patriarchy. Environmental politics was not some nice middle class recycling center but a head-on confrontation with corporate and global exploitation of resources and populations for profit and gain.
One of George Eliot’s biographers, Frederick R. Karl, refers to her as a secular humanist, which allowed her to abandon Christianity while retaining its “morality and ethics.” While she wasn’t very politically involved, per se, her life was a political statement for women’s emancipation and a challenge to societal norms. She lived with a married man, George Henry Lewes, for more than 20 years while she wrote her great novels (I’ve read Middlemarch at least three times over the years). I can’t come close to her erudition and sophistication, in a life of the drawing room company of Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill, but I like to think my humanism resembles hers: a belief that we, subjectively, as individuals, can strive for both a reflective, and exemplary life, and objectively, as a society, can create the conditions for everyone to flourish. While the stark realities of our unjust and undemocratic world challenge our ability to hold on to personal will, or to refrain from seeing it in nihilistic terms, we can, as Antonio Gramsci put it, maintain a “pessimism of the intellect” and “optimism of the will.”
The final component of my label—pragmatist—was the philosophical theory with which I was the least conversant. I read some John Dewey and analyses of other pragmatists, neo pragmatists, or neo-classical pragmatists (jeez, it really gets esoteric), but came to the conclusion that I take a little something from a lot of them: an ethics that accepts the notion there are “good” values that can be reasoned out; “informed practice,” or recognition that the means are the end; and that there is no disconnect between body and mind, just as there is no disconnect between intellect and environment. As a community organizer around issues of environmental justice, and caretaker of a garden, orchard, and hay fields, over the years I found the only way to keep going was to stay connected and to value what I learned and who I came to love in the process of cultivating, irrigating, organizing, advocating, and resisting authority. When Ike DeVargas and I sometimes fall into a lament over what “could have, would have, should have been,” he reminds me that how we worked together was the most important part of what we did— the means, not the end. In the obituary that Jurgen Habermas wrote for the philosopher Richard Rorty, (labeled a neopragmatist), who, like Mark, died of pancreatic cancer, he said: “Nothing is sacred to Rorty the ironist. Asked at the end of his life about the ‘holy’, the strict atheist answered with words reminiscent of the young Hegel: ‘My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.’”
Saturday, May 21, 2011
Will the Real Mayordomo Please Stand Up
Fred called late one afternoon and quickly dispensed with the social chit chat.
”Orlando’s been taking all the water and says he’s not going to send a peon to clean the ditch because he’s the mayordomo.”
“He’s not the mayordomo, you are,” Mark said. “He knows we just made him mayordomo on paper because you don’t own any land and can’t officially be the mayordomo even if you really are because you do the job.”
“Then you tell him that. He won’t listen to me.”
Orlando is Fred’s uncle and he knows that Fred is the mayordomo, the one who directs the rotation of water among the irrigators in the village. Orlando was the mayordomo for twenty years until Tomás, Fred’s father, took over the responsibility. Then Tomás lost his leg to diabetes and it says in the bylaws of the acequia association that the mayordomo can’t be someone who has a disability and Fred was the only one left to do the job. But Tomás hadn’t put any of the land in Fred’s name and neither can you be a mayordomo if you aren’t a landowner. Mark and I were already the commissioners, the treasurer and secretary of the acequia, so we really needed Fred (Tomas could then be the third commissioner, as that didn’t require having two legs). The rest of the village irrigators, or parciantes, never came to the meetings and were happy to leave the administration of the acequia to those of us who had governed it for years, even if two of us were gringos, Tomás had only one leg, and Fred didn’t own any land.
“I’m quitting if Orlando doesn’t agree to send a peon to clean the ditch and pay him the $64 just like everyone else has to,” Fred said. From the tone of his voice Mark could tell he was offended that his uncle wasn’t acknowledging his status as mayordomo.
“OK, Kay and I will go talk to him. If he gives us any trouble we’ll just tell him that the commissioners have decided he’s not going to be the mayordomo, even if it’s only on paper. We’ll use someone else’s name to make it legal and you’ll continue to be the mayordomo.”
“He’s loco,” Fred said. “And he’s my uncle!”
That’s never made any difference in this crazy place we live. So Mark and I walked down the road to Orlando’s house the next morning to try and get things straightened. There was no answer at his place so we went down to his son Nelson’s house and there he was, sitting outside in the sun watching Nelson work on one of his cars. Nelson had a job at Los Alamos National Laboratory as a construction foreman and never worked the land. Orlando irrigated it all and ran a small herd of cows, like he always had, although the only way he could get around anymore was on an ATV that he called his caballo.
“Hola, vecino,” I said. “Como esta?”
“Bien, bien,” Orlando said, giving each of us one of those gentle handshakes that are typical of the viejitos of the villages of northern New Mexico.
We sat down on the bench next to him, out of the wind, and made chit chat for a few minutes until I thought it was time to talk about why we were there.
“So, Fred called us yesterday and says that you told him you weren’t going to send a peon to clean the ditch. He says you told him you’re still the mayordomo. You remember at the meeting we just put your name down as mayordomo for the record because Fred doesn’t own any land, but that he’s going to do the job, right?”
Orlando threw back his head and laughed and laughed.
“I really got him good, didn’t I?” he said.
“You mean you were just joking with him?” Mark asked. “I think Fred believed everything you said.”
“He don’t know shit about being mayordomo, pero if you say he’s the mayordomo then I guess I have to send a peon to clean the ditch. I already asked someone anyway.”
Mark and I grinned at each other. Apparently these guys joked with each other as much as they joked with us, to the point we never knew when they were telling the truth or not. But asking Orlando about taking all the water was trickier. He had a reputation for hogging the water when he was mayordomo and we didn’t doubt for one minute that Fred was right in that regard. But we did our best to stay on good terms with everyone and didn’t want to be the ones to call him on it.
“So, who has the water?” Mark asked diplomatically. “We’d like to get it soon so we can water the orchard.”
“It’s coming down, it’s coming down, what’s your hurry. Everyone’s always asking, where’s the water when they know it’s got to go all the way up before it comes down.”
Orlando was referring to the water rotation that started at the lower end of the valley, where each parciante took his or her turn watering according to how much land he or she owned. If you had a few acres then you had one water right and you got the water for 24 hours, in a good year of sufficient water, and if you had a bunch of land you had several water rights and got the water 24 hours for each right. So in order to calculate when you were due to get the water you had to know how many water rights each parciante had and how long it would take the water to move up the village until everyone had had his or her turn and then the rotation started all over again. Most of us, even Mark and I as commissioners, just let the mayordomo work it out and let us know when it was our turn. But when the mayordomo was taking the water out of turn it was a problem.
“Are you irrigating your fields up above?” I asked. “I didn’t see any water coming through your compuerta at the house.”
“Si, si, I have the water until tonight at six and then I let it go. That’s the way we do it, and Fred should just quit bitching about it and wait his turn.”
“He says that somehow things have gotten out of rotation and it should already be coming down,” I say.
Orlando laughed again. “He’ll get his water tonight, no problem.”
We decided to leave it at that, a fairly satisfactory resolution of the problem. Which was highly unusual. When it came to dealing with the acequia, solutions were few and far between. When someone wasn’t complaining about the water being taken out of turn they were complaining about someone taking too much. Or someone not closing his or her compuerta, the gate that allowed the water to flow from the acequia madre into the landowner’s field. Or not leaving enough water in the ditch so animals downstream could drink. Or not paying ditch fees. Or letting the water run down the road instead of in the field. And the ones they usually complained to were the commissioners, meaning Mark, Tomás, and me.
When we called Fred to tell him what Orlando had said, he answered, “He didn’t sound like he was joking to me. A ver, we’ll see if someone shows up to dig for him on Saturday.”
Orlando’s grandson showed up to dig for Orlando on Saturday, and Orlando showed up as well, to keep an eye on things. It took us half an hour to figure out who was digging whose derecho, or water right, as most of the landowners in the village hired local men and women to clean the ditch for them. They were either too busy to do it themselves, too old, didn’t live in the village anymore, or uninterested in having anything to do with the acequia. If you had more than one water right your worker had to clean a longer section than the worker digging one right. Fred was the man who laid out the sections, approved the work, and moved us up the ditch, all day long, with an hour off for lunch. By the time we reached the presa, or dam, at the river, the ditch had been cleaned of weeds, roots, garbage, and mud. When the water was released from the presa at the end of the day, it hurried down the ditch on its long journey back to the river, and ultimately, the Rio Grande.
Orlando met us at the presa at five o’clock on his caballo.
“How do you like the new mayordomo?” he asked Mark and me, as we lay on the ditchbank, resting.
“Fred did a good job, and he’s not as mean as you,” Mark teased.
“You got to be mean to get these cabrones to do any work. I bet there’s still jaras all along the ditch that you guys didn’t cut,” Orlando said.
“We cut all the willows,” I said. “And they were a real mess, believe me.”
“That’s cuz you got to cut them every year and not let them get too big and suck up all the water.”
“Well, vecino, we cut them every year when Tomás was the mayordomo, just like we cut them every year when you were the mayordomo. So what do you think about that?” Mark laughed.
“I think you’re all loco, that’s what I think, and I’m glad I’m not the mayordomo anymore,” Orlando said.
Just then Fred opened the presa so the water could flow down the newly cleaned acequia.
Orlando got back on his caballo and took off down the road.
“I bet that old son of a gun is going to go open his compuerta and take the water before anyone else, to hell with the rotation,” Fred said disgustedly.
“Oh well,” Mark said. “For now, there’s enough water for everyone. Just go close his compuerta at six tonight and start the regular rotation. If he complains tell him to talk to us about it.”
Fred shrugged his shoulders and went off to pay the peones who had worked all day on the ditch.
I looked at Mark and laughed. “Since when are we the arbiters of what is reasonable?”
“Until someone accuses us of doing something stupid and then someone else will have to straighten things out. Let’s at least rest on our laurels for awhile. It won’t last long.”
So we did.
”Orlando’s been taking all the water and says he’s not going to send a peon to clean the ditch because he’s the mayordomo.”
“He’s not the mayordomo, you are,” Mark said. “He knows we just made him mayordomo on paper because you don’t own any land and can’t officially be the mayordomo even if you really are because you do the job.”
“Then you tell him that. He won’t listen to me.”
Orlando is Fred’s uncle and he knows that Fred is the mayordomo, the one who directs the rotation of water among the irrigators in the village. Orlando was the mayordomo for twenty years until Tomás, Fred’s father, took over the responsibility. Then Tomás lost his leg to diabetes and it says in the bylaws of the acequia association that the mayordomo can’t be someone who has a disability and Fred was the only one left to do the job. But Tomás hadn’t put any of the land in Fred’s name and neither can you be a mayordomo if you aren’t a landowner. Mark and I were already the commissioners, the treasurer and secretary of the acequia, so we really needed Fred (Tomas could then be the third commissioner, as that didn’t require having two legs). The rest of the village irrigators, or parciantes, never came to the meetings and were happy to leave the administration of the acequia to those of us who had governed it for years, even if two of us were gringos, Tomás had only one leg, and Fred didn’t own any land.
“I’m quitting if Orlando doesn’t agree to send a peon to clean the ditch and pay him the $64 just like everyone else has to,” Fred said. From the tone of his voice Mark could tell he was offended that his uncle wasn’t acknowledging his status as mayordomo.
“OK, Kay and I will go talk to him. If he gives us any trouble we’ll just tell him that the commissioners have decided he’s not going to be the mayordomo, even if it’s only on paper. We’ll use someone else’s name to make it legal and you’ll continue to be the mayordomo.”
“He’s loco,” Fred said. “And he’s my uncle!”
That’s never made any difference in this crazy place we live. So Mark and I walked down the road to Orlando’s house the next morning to try and get things straightened. There was no answer at his place so we went down to his son Nelson’s house and there he was, sitting outside in the sun watching Nelson work on one of his cars. Nelson had a job at Los Alamos National Laboratory as a construction foreman and never worked the land. Orlando irrigated it all and ran a small herd of cows, like he always had, although the only way he could get around anymore was on an ATV that he called his caballo.
“Hola, vecino,” I said. “Como esta?”
“Bien, bien,” Orlando said, giving each of us one of those gentle handshakes that are typical of the viejitos of the villages of northern New Mexico.
We sat down on the bench next to him, out of the wind, and made chit chat for a few minutes until I thought it was time to talk about why we were there.
“So, Fred called us yesterday and says that you told him you weren’t going to send a peon to clean the ditch. He says you told him you’re still the mayordomo. You remember at the meeting we just put your name down as mayordomo for the record because Fred doesn’t own any land, but that he’s going to do the job, right?”
Orlando threw back his head and laughed and laughed.
“I really got him good, didn’t I?” he said.
“You mean you were just joking with him?” Mark asked. “I think Fred believed everything you said.”
“He don’t know shit about being mayordomo, pero if you say he’s the mayordomo then I guess I have to send a peon to clean the ditch. I already asked someone anyway.”
Mark and I grinned at each other. Apparently these guys joked with each other as much as they joked with us, to the point we never knew when they were telling the truth or not. But asking Orlando about taking all the water was trickier. He had a reputation for hogging the water when he was mayordomo and we didn’t doubt for one minute that Fred was right in that regard. But we did our best to stay on good terms with everyone and didn’t want to be the ones to call him on it.
“So, who has the water?” Mark asked diplomatically. “We’d like to get it soon so we can water the orchard.”
“It’s coming down, it’s coming down, what’s your hurry. Everyone’s always asking, where’s the water when they know it’s got to go all the way up before it comes down.”
Orlando was referring to the water rotation that started at the lower end of the valley, where each parciante took his or her turn watering according to how much land he or she owned. If you had a few acres then you had one water right and you got the water for 24 hours, in a good year of sufficient water, and if you had a bunch of land you had several water rights and got the water 24 hours for each right. So in order to calculate when you were due to get the water you had to know how many water rights each parciante had and how long it would take the water to move up the village until everyone had had his or her turn and then the rotation started all over again. Most of us, even Mark and I as commissioners, just let the mayordomo work it out and let us know when it was our turn. But when the mayordomo was taking the water out of turn it was a problem.
“Are you irrigating your fields up above?” I asked. “I didn’t see any water coming through your compuerta at the house.”
“Si, si, I have the water until tonight at six and then I let it go. That’s the way we do it, and Fred should just quit bitching about it and wait his turn.”
“He says that somehow things have gotten out of rotation and it should already be coming down,” I say.
Orlando laughed again. “He’ll get his water tonight, no problem.”
We decided to leave it at that, a fairly satisfactory resolution of the problem. Which was highly unusual. When it came to dealing with the acequia, solutions were few and far between. When someone wasn’t complaining about the water being taken out of turn they were complaining about someone taking too much. Or someone not closing his or her compuerta, the gate that allowed the water to flow from the acequia madre into the landowner’s field. Or not leaving enough water in the ditch so animals downstream could drink. Or not paying ditch fees. Or letting the water run down the road instead of in the field. And the ones they usually complained to were the commissioners, meaning Mark, Tomás, and me.
When we called Fred to tell him what Orlando had said, he answered, “He didn’t sound like he was joking to me. A ver, we’ll see if someone shows up to dig for him on Saturday.”
Orlando’s grandson showed up to dig for Orlando on Saturday, and Orlando showed up as well, to keep an eye on things. It took us half an hour to figure out who was digging whose derecho, or water right, as most of the landowners in the village hired local men and women to clean the ditch for them. They were either too busy to do it themselves, too old, didn’t live in the village anymore, or uninterested in having anything to do with the acequia. If you had more than one water right your worker had to clean a longer section than the worker digging one right. Fred was the man who laid out the sections, approved the work, and moved us up the ditch, all day long, with an hour off for lunch. By the time we reached the presa, or dam, at the river, the ditch had been cleaned of weeds, roots, garbage, and mud. When the water was released from the presa at the end of the day, it hurried down the ditch on its long journey back to the river, and ultimately, the Rio Grande.
Orlando met us at the presa at five o’clock on his caballo.
“How do you like the new mayordomo?” he asked Mark and me, as we lay on the ditchbank, resting.
“Fred did a good job, and he’s not as mean as you,” Mark teased.
“You got to be mean to get these cabrones to do any work. I bet there’s still jaras all along the ditch that you guys didn’t cut,” Orlando said.
“We cut all the willows,” I said. “And they were a real mess, believe me.”
“That’s cuz you got to cut them every year and not let them get too big and suck up all the water.”
“Well, vecino, we cut them every year when Tomás was the mayordomo, just like we cut them every year when you were the mayordomo. So what do you think about that?” Mark laughed.
“I think you’re all loco, that’s what I think, and I’m glad I’m not the mayordomo anymore,” Orlando said.
Just then Fred opened the presa so the water could flow down the newly cleaned acequia.
Orlando got back on his caballo and took off down the road.
“I bet that old son of a gun is going to go open his compuerta and take the water before anyone else, to hell with the rotation,” Fred said disgustedly.
“Oh well,” Mark said. “For now, there’s enough water for everyone. Just go close his compuerta at six tonight and start the regular rotation. If he complains tell him to talk to us about it.”
Fred shrugged his shoulders and went off to pay the peones who had worked all day on the ditch.
I looked at Mark and laughed. “Since when are we the arbiters of what is reasonable?”
“Until someone accuses us of doing something stupid and then someone else will have to straighten things out. Let’s at least rest on our laurels for awhile. It won’t last long.”
So we did.
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Elegy for El Valle
It is presumptuous of me to write an elegy for El Valle, my home for the last 20 years, when my neighbors and their parents and grandparents have been here for hundreds. But within the temporal context of my tenure, and the relational nature of my complaint, I’ll go ahead anyway.
I’ve written before about Tomás, the man who was our neighbor for most of those 20 years (he died a year and a half ago). In the eulogy I delivered at his funeral I said: “There is an unspoken law between us that any favor asked will be granted. It is based on an understanding that the favor will not be unreasonable, that it is necessary and not frivolous. Sometimes, because of our cultural differences, there may be a certain shaking of the head, a muttered, “those crazy gringos” or “that loco,” but we accede to the other’s wishes, and we write it off as what you do for a friend, pure and simple. I loved Tomás unreservedly, despite all the judgments I brought to bear. I hope he loved me the same way.”
Tomas was the unofficial mayor of El Valle, the Alpha Male of the village, and when inevitably challenged by some of the younger men who aspired to that role, responded as any benevolent dictator would: he proceeded to try to crush them with every power at his command. But benevolent is the operative word here: he asserted an authority that arose from the surety of what he felt was best for the well being of the community.
Now, as we (I’m an acequia commissioner) begin another acequia spring without his authority it’s like we’re dealing with an assortment of dysfunctional family members who we somehow have to appease while at the same time circumvent the chaos they threaten to unleash at any given moment. The situation is exacerbated by the loss of Mark, who as a commissioner for fifteen years learned how to balance Tomas’ power with his acuity. I long for Tomas to say, “Ya basta!” and lay down the law about who gets the water, when they get the water, who has a legitimate gripe and when they just have to shut-up. As it is, two parciantes are fighting over who is responsible for the capacity of their lateral ditch, which is outside the purview of the acequia commission but has drawn us in anyway because we’re trying to promote cooperation; a debate over a water right that is generations old and now divided into percentages that no one knows the genesis of; and payment of contract work for cleaning the ditch, which is something alien to the tradition of each parciante cleaning, or hiring someone to clean, the ditch communally, which we abandoned a year ago because none of the parciantes showed up and neglected to make sure someone would be there to do the work for them. There are now so many divided water rights among absentee landowners and family transfers that I can barely keep track of who I bill for what amount of money.
I got the water yesterday for my orchard and upper field. The first irrigation of the season is brutal; the lateral ditches have filled in with dead grass and debris, the water inevitably flows over the side of the ditch, and you have to run around hoeing and shoveling it free while filling “sackos”, or burlap bags with dirt to line the sides of the eroded laterals to keep the water moving toward what it is you’re trying to irrigate. It took me all afternoon to guide the run-off orchard water onto my garlic patch, so far the only greenery besides grass that I have in cultivation. Without Tomas, who made sure the manure was neatly shoveled out of the corral and into piles ready for delivery, and Mark, who once the manure was spread could rototill the garden at a moment’s notice, I am at the mercy of the current crew who may or may not have the tractor fixed or who may be so overwhelmed with wage labor work they don’t have the time or ability to help me, So the rest of my garden waits.
Tomas’s son just called and told me that his nephew and wife had a new baby and named him Tomas. That baby has big boots to fill. But it’s kinda like the Middle East around here: the days of dictators are over (even the benevolent ones), which is probably a good thing, but the future of acequia democracy may also be in trouble. Meanwhile, I’ll continue to take the water and as a commissioner try to channel Tomas as best I can: just irrigate when it’s your turn, close your compuerta when it’s not, and otherwise, callete!
I’ve written before about Tomás, the man who was our neighbor for most of those 20 years (he died a year and a half ago). In the eulogy I delivered at his funeral I said: “There is an unspoken law between us that any favor asked will be granted. It is based on an understanding that the favor will not be unreasonable, that it is necessary and not frivolous. Sometimes, because of our cultural differences, there may be a certain shaking of the head, a muttered, “those crazy gringos” or “that loco,” but we accede to the other’s wishes, and we write it off as what you do for a friend, pure and simple. I loved Tomás unreservedly, despite all the judgments I brought to bear. I hope he loved me the same way.”
Tomas was the unofficial mayor of El Valle, the Alpha Male of the village, and when inevitably challenged by some of the younger men who aspired to that role, responded as any benevolent dictator would: he proceeded to try to crush them with every power at his command. But benevolent is the operative word here: he asserted an authority that arose from the surety of what he felt was best for the well being of the community.
Now, as we (I’m an acequia commissioner) begin another acequia spring without his authority it’s like we’re dealing with an assortment of dysfunctional family members who we somehow have to appease while at the same time circumvent the chaos they threaten to unleash at any given moment. The situation is exacerbated by the loss of Mark, who as a commissioner for fifteen years learned how to balance Tomas’ power with his acuity. I long for Tomas to say, “Ya basta!” and lay down the law about who gets the water, when they get the water, who has a legitimate gripe and when they just have to shut-up. As it is, two parciantes are fighting over who is responsible for the capacity of their lateral ditch, which is outside the purview of the acequia commission but has drawn us in anyway because we’re trying to promote cooperation; a debate over a water right that is generations old and now divided into percentages that no one knows the genesis of; and payment of contract work for cleaning the ditch, which is something alien to the tradition of each parciante cleaning, or hiring someone to clean, the ditch communally, which we abandoned a year ago because none of the parciantes showed up and neglected to make sure someone would be there to do the work for them. There are now so many divided water rights among absentee landowners and family transfers that I can barely keep track of who I bill for what amount of money.
I got the water yesterday for my orchard and upper field. The first irrigation of the season is brutal; the lateral ditches have filled in with dead grass and debris, the water inevitably flows over the side of the ditch, and you have to run around hoeing and shoveling it free while filling “sackos”, or burlap bags with dirt to line the sides of the eroded laterals to keep the water moving toward what it is you’re trying to irrigate. It took me all afternoon to guide the run-off orchard water onto my garlic patch, so far the only greenery besides grass that I have in cultivation. Without Tomas, who made sure the manure was neatly shoveled out of the corral and into piles ready for delivery, and Mark, who once the manure was spread could rototill the garden at a moment’s notice, I am at the mercy of the current crew who may or may not have the tractor fixed or who may be so overwhelmed with wage labor work they don’t have the time or ability to help me, So the rest of my garden waits.
Tomas’s son just called and told me that his nephew and wife had a new baby and named him Tomas. That baby has big boots to fill. But it’s kinda like the Middle East around here: the days of dictators are over (even the benevolent ones), which is probably a good thing, but the future of acequia democracy may also be in trouble. Meanwhile, I’ll continue to take the water and as a commissioner try to channel Tomas as best I can: just irrigate when it’s your turn, close your compuerta when it’s not, and otherwise, callete!
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Who Are These People?
Whenever I’m in an upscale community (not a common occurrence), walking around looking at million dollar houses, I find myself asking, “Who are these people and where does all this money come from?” Right now I’m in Del Mar, California, in a house loaned to me by some homies from New Mexico who inherited it from their family. But who are all these other people, in their glass houses with ocean views, manicured landscapes, and shiny BMWs (I swear to God I haven’t seen one dirty car since I’ve been here)?
Who I actually see are the workers: gardeners, plumbers, plasterers, painters, general contractors, and dog walkers, busily keeping all this luxury afloat. The gardeners are all Mexicanos, pruning, planting, and watering all the lush vegetation that has turned these once barren hills (that’s when the homies’ family bought in) into paradise. In the mornings, as I walk along the windy streets in a circuitous path to the ocean I see some Anglo runners and dog walkers, most of them my age or older. Is this a community of retirees who bought in before the property taxes skyrocketed and who now benefit from Prop 13? Are they second home owners, so wealthy they can afford to hire all these people to maintain their houses for their two or three months’ winter stay?
Whoever they are, and whether their money is old money or nouveau riche money, I feel like an alien. Not only am I an alien in Del Mar particularly, but in California generally. Take today for example. I needed to put gas in my hosts’ car after driving it down the coast the other day to grocery shop. So I find out where the nearest gas station is and proceed apace. I make sure I know which side of the car the gas tank is on, and whether it has to be popped open from a release inside, and then I venture out. I pull into the gas station and there are all these instructions on the pumps about using your debit card or cash, which I intend to use instead of my credit card, but I’m already envisioning putting the money into the slot and seeing it disappear forever while I try to figure out how it actually connects to gas for the car. Fortunately, it also says I can pay inside, which I do. Then I go back to the car and pull the Regular Unleaded hose out and attempt to put it into my gas tank. But it has this weird accordion end on it, and try as I might I can’t get it to stay in the gas tank opening. Whenever I depress the delivery handle it just pops back up. I’m looking around in a panic thinking, maybe I’m trying to put the wrong gas in the tank because the pump says EC Regular Unleaded, whatever that is, but I see that all the pumps say that. So then I start looking around for someone to help me, embarrassing as that’s going to be, but remembering that I’ll never have to see this person again. But everyone who is working a pump is also working a cell phone and can’t hear me. Finally, I see a Mexicano worker put his phone away and I approach: “Habla Ingles?” I ask, and he answers, “ Poquito,” and I know I’m not going to be able to explain my predicament in Spanish. So then I find another guy, an Anglo this time, and I say, “I’m from New Mexico and I’ve never seen a pump hose like this and I can’t make it work in my gas tank.” Now I know I’m perpetuating a stereotype about New Mexicans, who already have enough trouble convincing everyone that we’re actually part of the U.S., but I’m desperate here. So he graciously comes over and shows me that you have to shove the hose into the tank until it locks and then dispense your gas. I keep apologizing and he keeps saying don’t worry about it but by then I’m completely frazzled and when I get back into my (their) car I pull out into the wrong lane and am forced onto I-5 going south when all I wanted to do was go to a gas station and fill the gas tank. I’m a perfectly competent driver under normal circumstances but now I’m a wailing banshee praying that there is am exit before San Diego where I can get off and find my way home without using up all the gas I just put back into the tank. And there is: Del Mar Heights, which brings me back to Camino Del Mar and the familiar streets leading up to the lovely bungalow that has been so graciously loaned to me by my New Mexico homies. As I’ve said before, maybe it’s best that I don’t leave home.
Who I actually see are the workers: gardeners, plumbers, plasterers, painters, general contractors, and dog walkers, busily keeping all this luxury afloat. The gardeners are all Mexicanos, pruning, planting, and watering all the lush vegetation that has turned these once barren hills (that’s when the homies’ family bought in) into paradise. In the mornings, as I walk along the windy streets in a circuitous path to the ocean I see some Anglo runners and dog walkers, most of them my age or older. Is this a community of retirees who bought in before the property taxes skyrocketed and who now benefit from Prop 13? Are they second home owners, so wealthy they can afford to hire all these people to maintain their houses for their two or three months’ winter stay?
Whoever they are, and whether their money is old money or nouveau riche money, I feel like an alien. Not only am I an alien in Del Mar particularly, but in California generally. Take today for example. I needed to put gas in my hosts’ car after driving it down the coast the other day to grocery shop. So I find out where the nearest gas station is and proceed apace. I make sure I know which side of the car the gas tank is on, and whether it has to be popped open from a release inside, and then I venture out. I pull into the gas station and there are all these instructions on the pumps about using your debit card or cash, which I intend to use instead of my credit card, but I’m already envisioning putting the money into the slot and seeing it disappear forever while I try to figure out how it actually connects to gas for the car. Fortunately, it also says I can pay inside, which I do. Then I go back to the car and pull the Regular Unleaded hose out and attempt to put it into my gas tank. But it has this weird accordion end on it, and try as I might I can’t get it to stay in the gas tank opening. Whenever I depress the delivery handle it just pops back up. I’m looking around in a panic thinking, maybe I’m trying to put the wrong gas in the tank because the pump says EC Regular Unleaded, whatever that is, but I see that all the pumps say that. So then I start looking around for someone to help me, embarrassing as that’s going to be, but remembering that I’ll never have to see this person again. But everyone who is working a pump is also working a cell phone and can’t hear me. Finally, I see a Mexicano worker put his phone away and I approach: “Habla Ingles?” I ask, and he answers, “ Poquito,” and I know I’m not going to be able to explain my predicament in Spanish. So then I find another guy, an Anglo this time, and I say, “I’m from New Mexico and I’ve never seen a pump hose like this and I can’t make it work in my gas tank.” Now I know I’m perpetuating a stereotype about New Mexicans, who already have enough trouble convincing everyone that we’re actually part of the U.S., but I’m desperate here. So he graciously comes over and shows me that you have to shove the hose into the tank until it locks and then dispense your gas. I keep apologizing and he keeps saying don’t worry about it but by then I’m completely frazzled and when I get back into my (their) car I pull out into the wrong lane and am forced onto I-5 going south when all I wanted to do was go to a gas station and fill the gas tank. I’m a perfectly competent driver under normal circumstances but now I’m a wailing banshee praying that there is am exit before San Diego where I can get off and find my way home without using up all the gas I just put back into the tank. And there is: Del Mar Heights, which brings me back to Camino Del Mar and the familiar streets leading up to the lovely bungalow that has been so graciously loaned to me by my New Mexico homies. As I’ve said before, maybe it’s best that I don’t leave home.
Friday, April 8, 2011
Diary of a Bad Year, continued
Marriage, or a long-term partnership, is in part a power relationship (see Marriage post), and ours was emblematic of how that power shifts and flows through the many years of individual and relational change. For some crazy reason—part masochism, part curiosity, I guess—I started reading a book by Rafael Yglesias called A Happy Marriage that was a fictionalized account of his wife’s cancer death. I’d read Yglesias many years before, and I must have seen it on the new bookshelf at the public library, but what possessed me to pick it up at that stunningly complex moment I don’t know. Once I started, however, I couldn’t put it down, and while I faced the latest manifestation of Mark and my relational shift I became intimately involved in the details of Yglesias’ topsy-turvey marriage and their descent into cancer hell.
Although we arrived there along different paths, Yglesias’s marriage and my partnership had settled into a less confrontational pattern, where jockeying for power had receded in the face of a need for peace and calmness between us as we came to terms with diminishing returns in the rest of our lives: less intensity in our political work, less need to prove ourselves artistically, and less parenting as our kids were fledged. We, like they, looked forward to some time to do things we hadn’t done in awhile, like work on projects for our own enjoyment, visit our friends more, see some places we had never seen (albeit for us on a marginal income). But then we entered our separate reality, which manifest in both spacial and temporal terms.
As Mark’s illness progressed, the past, present, and future took on entirely new meaning. He couldn’t look forward to anything (no becoming in Nietzchean terms). To look back was an exercise in too much painful nostalgia. So his life became the present, which meant a focused attention to the details of his health/illness with little room left over for attention to much else. He had to center every fiber of his being on his being. I began to lose him incrementally as the intimacy of our relationship, in which we shared a common history and a current engagement, began to recede. While he was very solicitous about my health and the burdens placed upon me due to his illness, he really had little interest in anything that didn’t relate to being in his illness.
Everything we did, and everything we took into consideration, revolved around what was possible for Mark. He didn’t want to see anyone but family and a few close friends. I had to diplomatically erect barriers between him and everyone else who wanted to see him or help me or at least demonstrate their concern. To minimize direct contact but maintain some connection I set up a list-serve where I periodically posted e-mails letting folks know how Mark was doing, being careful to supply just the bare facts about the latest results of a CT scan, another trip to the hospital, or the onset of diabetes (once his pancreas was compromised he couldn’t produce insulin): a supply of information that didn’t invade a privacy that was never explicitly outlined to me but that I implicitly understood. What he thought and felt and experienced with me and the kids was not for public consumption. I had to restrain a friend from setting up a Caring Bridge web site for Mark, something definitely not in sync with who we were and how we wanted to be in the world. I’d seen too many sites that elicited too much tortured comment that perhaps filled the needs of those doing the commenting but would certainly not fill ours.
A couple of weeks before Mark died I sent this e-mail to the list-serve, apologizing for the long time between postings: “I find it’s increasingly difficult to write these updates. It’s almost as if Mark and I are in a separate reality (I use the term ‘reality’ in all its subjectivity, although as a pragmatist I have to assign some meaning to it). Illness, and cancer in particular, does this to people’s lives. Although I am by profession a writer, I haven’t really wanted to write about what it’s like to face Mark’s terminal diagnosis or the day to day details of his decline, partly because it’s already been dealt with by so many other writers and partly to protect Mark’s privacy.” Now, four months later, I am writing, but I hope that what I deem is “for public consumption” means something to my readers and respects the dignity of Mark’s life and death.
Although we arrived there along different paths, Yglesias’s marriage and my partnership had settled into a less confrontational pattern, where jockeying for power had receded in the face of a need for peace and calmness between us as we came to terms with diminishing returns in the rest of our lives: less intensity in our political work, less need to prove ourselves artistically, and less parenting as our kids were fledged. We, like they, looked forward to some time to do things we hadn’t done in awhile, like work on projects for our own enjoyment, visit our friends more, see some places we had never seen (albeit for us on a marginal income). But then we entered our separate reality, which manifest in both spacial and temporal terms.
As Mark’s illness progressed, the past, present, and future took on entirely new meaning. He couldn’t look forward to anything (no becoming in Nietzchean terms). To look back was an exercise in too much painful nostalgia. So his life became the present, which meant a focused attention to the details of his health/illness with little room left over for attention to much else. He had to center every fiber of his being on his being. I began to lose him incrementally as the intimacy of our relationship, in which we shared a common history and a current engagement, began to recede. While he was very solicitous about my health and the burdens placed upon me due to his illness, he really had little interest in anything that didn’t relate to being in his illness.
Everything we did, and everything we took into consideration, revolved around what was possible for Mark. He didn’t want to see anyone but family and a few close friends. I had to diplomatically erect barriers between him and everyone else who wanted to see him or help me or at least demonstrate their concern. To minimize direct contact but maintain some connection I set up a list-serve where I periodically posted e-mails letting folks know how Mark was doing, being careful to supply just the bare facts about the latest results of a CT scan, another trip to the hospital, or the onset of diabetes (once his pancreas was compromised he couldn’t produce insulin): a supply of information that didn’t invade a privacy that was never explicitly outlined to me but that I implicitly understood. What he thought and felt and experienced with me and the kids was not for public consumption. I had to restrain a friend from setting up a Caring Bridge web site for Mark, something definitely not in sync with who we were and how we wanted to be in the world. I’d seen too many sites that elicited too much tortured comment that perhaps filled the needs of those doing the commenting but would certainly not fill ours.
A couple of weeks before Mark died I sent this e-mail to the list-serve, apologizing for the long time between postings: “I find it’s increasingly difficult to write these updates. It’s almost as if Mark and I are in a separate reality (I use the term ‘reality’ in all its subjectivity, although as a pragmatist I have to assign some meaning to it). Illness, and cancer in particular, does this to people’s lives. Although I am by profession a writer, I haven’t really wanted to write about what it’s like to face Mark’s terminal diagnosis or the day to day details of his decline, partly because it’s already been dealt with by so many other writers and partly to protect Mark’s privacy.” Now, four months later, I am writing, but I hope that what I deem is “for public consumption” means something to my readers and respects the dignity of Mark’s life and death.
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Diary of a Bad Year, continued
Once Mark was admitted to the hospital, via the emergency room, when he could no longer keep any food down, they biopsied the tumor, which was malignant. It was, as we had previously been told, at the head of his pancreas and therefore nonresectable, or inoperable. The surgical oncologist came into Mark’s hospital room to tell us—the kids and I were there—while a drug addict in the next bed kept moaning for medication and turning up the TV to unbearable levels. He glared and muttered at me when I turned it down every time I passed by. Once the surgeon left after giving us the bad news they moved Mark to a private room. I remember going back to Jakob and Casey’s house about ten that night and collapsing on the bed in the guest room, sobbing, while the kids sat there helplessly with me.
It took nine days in the hospital to get a stent put in his duodenum with an endoscope so he could eat (it took two tries). Everyone there was incredibly kind. We made friends with all the nurses, the aids, the interns, the housekeepers, etc. and heard all their stories: how many kids they had; what school they were attending to improve their situation; where they were born and raised; how they liked (or hated) their job. You don’t have time to make friends with the doctors; you only see them when they have news to deliver (I never did see the gastroenterologist who put the stent in).
Chemotherapy was scheduled once we could get our insurance company’s approval. Mark was initially given dispensation for treatment at the UNM Cancer Center instead of Presbyterian Hospital, which was his medical insurer, because of the specialized surgical team at the Cancer Center. Once it was clear that surgery wasn’t an option, we had to again get approval through Presbyterian for oncology treatment. That took about a week, and I was grateful for the time. Mark was able to eat, albeit a restricted diet (no fresh vegetables, chewy meat, or anything that could conceivably get stuck in the stent), and gain a little strength before starting once a week chemo treatments.
We’ve all heard the horror stories about chemotherapy (and seen them, if you follow the HBO series Breaking Bad, ironically filmed in Albuquerque): losing weight, losing hair, throwing up, spiraling down. Mark’s physical well being improved, however: he gained some weight, never lost any hair (he didn’t have much to begin with but what he had stayed on his head), never threw up, and maintained the energy to go for a daily walk. After a few months of weekly chemo, if he felt well enough, he even drove himself down to Albuquerque for his session, spending the night at Jakob and Casey’s or even driving himself back the same day. Max had made the decision to take a leave of absence from college, and stayed in Albuquerque, so he was there with Mark when I wasn’t.
Every six weeks we both went down for a CT scan to monitor the size of the tumor and see the oncologist for an evaluation. (By the way, all those TV shows and movies where they show cancer patients going into the oncologist’s office for a consultation are a complete fabrication. Those docs run from exam room to exam room and barely have more than 15 minutes for a look at the lab work, a quick physical check-up, and to answer a few questions we manage to squeeze in. Then it’s off to the races.) We tried to make it festive, and had dinner with the kids, watched movies, and spent many hours in front of the fireplace on cold, winter nights.
Amazingly, Mark was also able to pay considerable attention to his intellectual work. For many months during his illness he edited and serialized in our non-profit community newspaper La Jicarita News an article he had written concerning the adjudication of land grants in New Mexico. The article was intended to be the introduction to a book dealing with this sordid period in New Mexico’s history, where indigenous people were dispossessed of millions of acres of land that had been granted them by the Spanish and Mexican governments. Titled “Brief History of American Imperialism” it chronicled early American expansionism, Manifest Destiny, the Mexican-American War, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and racism in the New Mexico Territory.
Not only that, but he spent two or three hours several days a week spread out on the floor of the bedroom finishing the article evaluating the effect George W. Julian’s tenure as Surveyor General of the New Mexico Territory (1885-1889). He had received a grant from the New Mexico Historical Records Advisory Board to do the research and writing in 2009, and he finished the work by the spring of 2010.
So from about October through April Mark had a pretty good run. Then, as we headed into late spring and early summer, and as my work in the garden and fields intensified, his work to stay alive became all encompassing.
It took nine days in the hospital to get a stent put in his duodenum with an endoscope so he could eat (it took two tries). Everyone there was incredibly kind. We made friends with all the nurses, the aids, the interns, the housekeepers, etc. and heard all their stories: how many kids they had; what school they were attending to improve their situation; where they were born and raised; how they liked (or hated) their job. You don’t have time to make friends with the doctors; you only see them when they have news to deliver (I never did see the gastroenterologist who put the stent in).
Chemotherapy was scheduled once we could get our insurance company’s approval. Mark was initially given dispensation for treatment at the UNM Cancer Center instead of Presbyterian Hospital, which was his medical insurer, because of the specialized surgical team at the Cancer Center. Once it was clear that surgery wasn’t an option, we had to again get approval through Presbyterian for oncology treatment. That took about a week, and I was grateful for the time. Mark was able to eat, albeit a restricted diet (no fresh vegetables, chewy meat, or anything that could conceivably get stuck in the stent), and gain a little strength before starting once a week chemo treatments.
We’ve all heard the horror stories about chemotherapy (and seen them, if you follow the HBO series Breaking Bad, ironically filmed in Albuquerque): losing weight, losing hair, throwing up, spiraling down. Mark’s physical well being improved, however: he gained some weight, never lost any hair (he didn’t have much to begin with but what he had stayed on his head), never threw up, and maintained the energy to go for a daily walk. After a few months of weekly chemo, if he felt well enough, he even drove himself down to Albuquerque for his session, spending the night at Jakob and Casey’s or even driving himself back the same day. Max had made the decision to take a leave of absence from college, and stayed in Albuquerque, so he was there with Mark when I wasn’t.
Every six weeks we both went down for a CT scan to monitor the size of the tumor and see the oncologist for an evaluation. (By the way, all those TV shows and movies where they show cancer patients going into the oncologist’s office for a consultation are a complete fabrication. Those docs run from exam room to exam room and barely have more than 15 minutes for a look at the lab work, a quick physical check-up, and to answer a few questions we manage to squeeze in. Then it’s off to the races.) We tried to make it festive, and had dinner with the kids, watched movies, and spent many hours in front of the fireplace on cold, winter nights.
Amazingly, Mark was also able to pay considerable attention to his intellectual work. For many months during his illness he edited and serialized in our non-profit community newspaper La Jicarita News an article he had written concerning the adjudication of land grants in New Mexico. The article was intended to be the introduction to a book dealing with this sordid period in New Mexico’s history, where indigenous people were dispossessed of millions of acres of land that had been granted them by the Spanish and Mexican governments. Titled “Brief History of American Imperialism” it chronicled early American expansionism, Manifest Destiny, the Mexican-American War, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and racism in the New Mexico Territory.
Not only that, but he spent two or three hours several days a week spread out on the floor of the bedroom finishing the article evaluating the effect George W. Julian’s tenure as Surveyor General of the New Mexico Territory (1885-1889). He had received a grant from the New Mexico Historical Records Advisory Board to do the research and writing in 2009, and he finished the work by the spring of 2010.
So from about October through April Mark had a pretty good run. Then, as we headed into late spring and early summer, and as my work in the garden and fields intensified, his work to stay alive became all encompassing.
Thursday, March 3, 2011
Power in the Middle East
We all watched with joy and a certain amount of trepidation as the citizens of Egypt rose up in revolt against the Mubarak dictatorship. Seeing, and listening to, so many articulate (speaking English, no less) and passionate people from all walks of life demanding an end to the corruption and poverty that pervades Egypt after thirty years of totalitarian rule allowed us to focus on hopeful feelings rather than fearful ones.
Now that the military has reasserted its control (remember, since 1952 the military has essentially ruled the country), promising a transition to a freely elected government, the fearful feelings start creeping in. As much as I try to ignore what I’ve learned regarding institutionalized power, I can’t help but worry about how that transition will take place, who or what will be the beneficiary, and whether it will translate to a “democratic” government. I put “democratic” in quotes because I’m not sure what that means. If the U.S. is taken as an example of a functioning democracy, where citizens participate in “free” and “fair” elections, we’re in trouble. All you have to do is look at the incomes of our elected officials, or the billions of corporate dollars used to elect them, to remember that it’s the elites who run the country.
Michel Foucault is the go to guy about how society has transitioned from sovereignty, the rule over a territory, to governmentality, or the rule within our institutions, or “micro-power structures.” Unfortunately, in modern western democracies, this form of governmentality often takes the form of neoliberalism, based on the predominance of market mechanisms and of the restriction of the action of the state. We now live in a globalized society, and the revolutions in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and perhaps the entire Middle East, will unfold in that context.
There is no comparison, of course, between the lack of personal freedom and dire economic situations in the Middle East and the U.S. If the people there achieve freedom of speech, assembly, and the press, and slave wages and benefits are improved, their lives will be enormously better. But if the revolution is “highjacked” by the neoliberals, rather than the Islamists, we will see, just as we are seeing in this country and in Europe, an institutionalized divide between the rich and the poor and an assault on government’s basic function in society, that of providing access to basic needs and services. While the divide between the rich and poor in Egypt is already enormous (and already neoliberal, to a certain extent), will global capitalism just allow better access to a more efficient system of exploitation than the one perpetrated by the U.S., which has long worked behind the scenes in that country to ensure both political and economic dependency.
I went to the rally on February 22 at the Roundhouse in Santa Fe to show solidarity with the public employees and teachers in Madison, Wisconsin who are under assault by their Republican governor who wants to do away with collective bargaining. Private unions in this country have already been eviscerated, so now the neoliberalists are after the public unions like AFSMCE and teachers unions. The ultimate goal is to put more money in the hands of the corporate elite, and unfortunately, they’ve not only been successful in this goal but through the “power of consent” have convinced many of the working class that their interests are the same as the capitalists.
But the thousands of protesters in Wisconsin, those of us supporting them on the streets of Santa Fe, and many of the protesters all over the Middle East, understand that it is power imposed by economic coercion. We must break free of that control in the western world if there is to be any hope of breaking free in the Middle East. But in the meantime, off with their heads!
Now that the military has reasserted its control (remember, since 1952 the military has essentially ruled the country), promising a transition to a freely elected government, the fearful feelings start creeping in. As much as I try to ignore what I’ve learned regarding institutionalized power, I can’t help but worry about how that transition will take place, who or what will be the beneficiary, and whether it will translate to a “democratic” government. I put “democratic” in quotes because I’m not sure what that means. If the U.S. is taken as an example of a functioning democracy, where citizens participate in “free” and “fair” elections, we’re in trouble. All you have to do is look at the incomes of our elected officials, or the billions of corporate dollars used to elect them, to remember that it’s the elites who run the country.
Michel Foucault is the go to guy about how society has transitioned from sovereignty, the rule over a territory, to governmentality, or the rule within our institutions, or “micro-power structures.” Unfortunately, in modern western democracies, this form of governmentality often takes the form of neoliberalism, based on the predominance of market mechanisms and of the restriction of the action of the state. We now live in a globalized society, and the revolutions in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and perhaps the entire Middle East, will unfold in that context.
There is no comparison, of course, between the lack of personal freedom and dire economic situations in the Middle East and the U.S. If the people there achieve freedom of speech, assembly, and the press, and slave wages and benefits are improved, their lives will be enormously better. But if the revolution is “highjacked” by the neoliberals, rather than the Islamists, we will see, just as we are seeing in this country and in Europe, an institutionalized divide between the rich and the poor and an assault on government’s basic function in society, that of providing access to basic needs and services. While the divide between the rich and poor in Egypt is already enormous (and already neoliberal, to a certain extent), will global capitalism just allow better access to a more efficient system of exploitation than the one perpetrated by the U.S., which has long worked behind the scenes in that country to ensure both political and economic dependency.
I went to the rally on February 22 at the Roundhouse in Santa Fe to show solidarity with the public employees and teachers in Madison, Wisconsin who are under assault by their Republican governor who wants to do away with collective bargaining. Private unions in this country have already been eviscerated, so now the neoliberalists are after the public unions like AFSMCE and teachers unions. The ultimate goal is to put more money in the hands of the corporate elite, and unfortunately, they’ve not only been successful in this goal but through the “power of consent” have convinced many of the working class that their interests are the same as the capitalists.
But the thousands of protesters in Wisconsin, those of us supporting them on the streets of Santa Fe, and many of the protesters all over the Middle East, understand that it is power imposed by economic coercion. We must break free of that control in the western world if there is to be any hope of breaking free in the Middle East. But in the meantime, off with their heads!
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Mothering
Everyone is in a complete tizzy over the Chinese-American mother who wrote Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother about the strict and expectant raising of her two daughters, presented as a philosophy in direct opposition to contemporary American mothering where the child is the center of the universe and can do no wrong because that would lower his or her self-esteem.
But I don’t get it. Since when did the millions of mothers over there in China who are struggling to feed their families from subsistence farming or sending them off to work in factories 10 hours a day become Tigers? And since when do the millions of mothers here in the U.S. who work all day and then come home to cook and clean have time to be soccer moms?
This is all nonsense because of course we’re talking about the privileged few. China may have a Confucian culture that cherishes education, and this country a Protestant ethic that believes anyone can lift themselves up by their bootstraps and succeed, but without a discussion in the context of class these mommy wars (it’s always mommy wars, not daddy wars) are irrelevant. So I’m going to talk about mothering—and fathering—from a different point of view: just a regular Jill, the female equivalent of a regular Joe, trying to raise her kids in a loving, nurturing environment while at the same time make a living and have a life (more than a room, Virginia) of one’s own.
Mark and I, as I’ve talked about before, chose time over money so our kids essentially had both of us as almost fulltime parents. When they were younger we each had part-time or seasonal jobs that allowed both of us to parent together some of the time and at least one of us to parent all of the time. While there were days in their infancy when I wanted to run screaming out of the house to the nearest bar, the Konrad Lorenz argument that infantile features trigger nurturing responses in adults and that this is an evolutionary adaptation that helps ensure adults care for their children seems pretty accurate. They were so cute, loving, and interesting that for the most part I didn’t feel constricted or confined by spending a lot of time with them. I often viewed the rest of my life—writing guidebooks for a living, fighting the Forest Service over inane management decisions that impacted the community, and fighting the developers who wanted to smash the community—as obligations, not engagements, even though they were all of my own choosing.
When the kids were older we worked at home, so were both around during the difficult pre-adolescent and adolescent years when they didn’t particularly want us around. But things changed over time for us as well, as we got pulled into more interesting work or more intense struggles and we didn’t have the time, or the interest, really, in being as intense caretakers as we’d been. I can’t imagine trying to exert the kind of attention and influence the Tiger mother describes on children who start functioning more independently while we parents get on with our lives. We always expected our kids to do their schoolwork (even though a lot of it was just busy work) and get good grades (so they could have that illusory option of Harvard or Yale), we became more of a consultant than a programmer in our kids’ lives.
Jakob was just here to visit and told me how scared he was as a kid of the attack rooster when he had to go out and feed the chickens (we gave him an attack broom). We once left Max behind in the forest (momentarily) when he threw a fit about cutting one more tree to load into the truck for firewood. This was how we traumatized our kids instead of how the Tiger mother did, calling one of her daughters “garbage” when she made her an unexceptional hand-made card, or Lang Lang’s father did hanging him upside down from their apartment balcony when he told him he wanted to quit playing the piano. (Or am I getting that story confused with Michael Jackson and his hanging baby? I know Lang Lang’s father did something terrible to him). So who’s the worse for wear? It’s hard to say, but in terms of finding their way in the world, my kids haven’t done too badly, despite the fact that they can’t play the violin or the piano—well, that is; Jakob asked that he be allowed to quit taking lessons for his 14th birthday present. Sometimes you just have to let it be and hope that everyone, including your kids, can just have a life.
But I don’t get it. Since when did the millions of mothers over there in China who are struggling to feed their families from subsistence farming or sending them off to work in factories 10 hours a day become Tigers? And since when do the millions of mothers here in the U.S. who work all day and then come home to cook and clean have time to be soccer moms?
This is all nonsense because of course we’re talking about the privileged few. China may have a Confucian culture that cherishes education, and this country a Protestant ethic that believes anyone can lift themselves up by their bootstraps and succeed, but without a discussion in the context of class these mommy wars (it’s always mommy wars, not daddy wars) are irrelevant. So I’m going to talk about mothering—and fathering—from a different point of view: just a regular Jill, the female equivalent of a regular Joe, trying to raise her kids in a loving, nurturing environment while at the same time make a living and have a life (more than a room, Virginia) of one’s own.
Mark and I, as I’ve talked about before, chose time over money so our kids essentially had both of us as almost fulltime parents. When they were younger we each had part-time or seasonal jobs that allowed both of us to parent together some of the time and at least one of us to parent all of the time. While there were days in their infancy when I wanted to run screaming out of the house to the nearest bar, the Konrad Lorenz argument that infantile features trigger nurturing responses in adults and that this is an evolutionary adaptation that helps ensure adults care for their children seems pretty accurate. They were so cute, loving, and interesting that for the most part I didn’t feel constricted or confined by spending a lot of time with them. I often viewed the rest of my life—writing guidebooks for a living, fighting the Forest Service over inane management decisions that impacted the community, and fighting the developers who wanted to smash the community—as obligations, not engagements, even though they were all of my own choosing.
When the kids were older we worked at home, so were both around during the difficult pre-adolescent and adolescent years when they didn’t particularly want us around. But things changed over time for us as well, as we got pulled into more interesting work or more intense struggles and we didn’t have the time, or the interest, really, in being as intense caretakers as we’d been. I can’t imagine trying to exert the kind of attention and influence the Tiger mother describes on children who start functioning more independently while we parents get on with our lives. We always expected our kids to do their schoolwork (even though a lot of it was just busy work) and get good grades (so they could have that illusory option of Harvard or Yale), we became more of a consultant than a programmer in our kids’ lives.
Jakob was just here to visit and told me how scared he was as a kid of the attack rooster when he had to go out and feed the chickens (we gave him an attack broom). We once left Max behind in the forest (momentarily) when he threw a fit about cutting one more tree to load into the truck for firewood. This was how we traumatized our kids instead of how the Tiger mother did, calling one of her daughters “garbage” when she made her an unexceptional hand-made card, or Lang Lang’s father did hanging him upside down from their apartment balcony when he told him he wanted to quit playing the piano. (Or am I getting that story confused with Michael Jackson and his hanging baby? I know Lang Lang’s father did something terrible to him). So who’s the worse for wear? It’s hard to say, but in terms of finding their way in the world, my kids haven’t done too badly, despite the fact that they can’t play the violin or the piano—well, that is; Jakob asked that he be allowed to quit taking lessons for his 14th birthday present. Sometimes you just have to let it be and hope that everyone, including your kids, can just have a life.
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