Tag Archives: life

What-aged?

life, ,

When we’re kids, we have little understanding of age. We understand that some kids are older than us, and some younger. We understand that adults get to do what they want and tell us what to do. We understand that some people are old. But exactly what all those mean is very vague.

And we want simple categories. A teen-ager is anyone aged 13 through 19, right? First graders are 5 or 6, right? So how old is a parent? How old are grandparents?

I was the oldest child in my family, and my parents were teen-agers when they married. My paternal grandparents had been 20 & 18 when they married, and my dad was their oldest, as well. My mom’s parents married similarly young, and while she was their second child, they were still quite young when she was born. That’s one reason most of my great-grandparents were around as active, alert adults throughout my childhood and teens.

My middle school basketball coach had been one of my dad’s high school buddies. His oldest son was in the same grade as I was. My middle school wrestling coach, on the other hand, had been my dad’s high school wrestling coach. Yet, his oldest son was only one grade ahead of me in school.

When you’re in middle school, you understand that adults can keep having children into their 30s and 40s. You can understand that the coach’s son who was only a year older than me had two sisters, both more than 10 years older than he was, and therefore coach could be both the parent of a middleschooler and the grandparent of one or more small children at the same time. But when you’re younger, the notion that parents can be a wide variety of ages isn’t even on your radar.

I had an example closer to home. My Mom’s baby brother (half-brother) is only three years older than me. So, one of my uncles was a senior in high school when I was a freshman in high school.

A friend of mine from college had a bad habit of hitting on high school girls. It was only a bit embarrassing when we were in college, because we weren’t that far out of high school ourselves. But when he kept doing it into his late twenties, it was getting more than a little disturbing.

But I don’t have much cause to talk. When Michael and I started dating, I was 37 and he was 27. He’s ten years younger than me, the same difference I was finding disturbing when my friend was lusting after those high school girls.

Obviously, a ten-year age difference isn’t that big of a deal when the younger person is indisputably an adult, or course.

One of my great-grandmothers was a 28-year-old widow with two small kids when she married my great-grandpa… who was only 16 years old at the time! Of course, that was nearly 100 years ago, and a 16-year-old who had been working as a ranch-hand full time for several years was not considered a child. And they stayed together for the rest of their lives, very happy together.

Then we have that much-abused term, “middle-aged.” It used to mean 50-ish, or more broadly 40-60. Men were expected to have their “mid life crisis” during the 40-60 time frame, for instance. It was sometimes defined as the third quarter of a typical lifespan. Medical and mental health people have started shifting the definition up, as life expectancy increased. I noticed a lot of people shifting it the other way, referring to anyone in their 30s as middle-aged.

I keep catching myself referring to one of the neighbors as a kid. He’s coming up on thirty, he and his girlfriend have lived together next door for more than five years. He works, pays his own bills, and is otherwise a fully functioning adult. He’s one of the most responsible people I know. When he and his girlfriend moved in, he just looked way too young to be getting his own apartment, so part of my brain pigeonholed him.

I don’t want to be that old guy who calls everyone “kid” or “son” and so on. I still feel weird when a stranger calls me “sir,” for goodness sake!

When it IS broke…

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Many years ago—I think it was just before Ray and I moved in together (thus, years before Ray got sick, years before the chemo, years before he died)—I called Ray to confirm when we were next getting together.

He was crying.

It took a few minutes to get the story out of him. He’d been on his way out of a store, and he stopped to hold the door open for someone. Another person ran by on the sidewalk, bumping into Ray and knocking his shopping bag to the ground, which was followed immediately by the sound of breaking glass.

Ray had just purchased some sort of glass sculpture. I don’t know what it was of. All Ray would tell me that it was “beautiful, just beautiful.” But it had been smashed to a million pieces, he said.

I asked him what store it had been, so I could go buy him another one. But that just set him off worse, because it had been a present for me. He repeated how beautiful it was, and that he couldn’t afford to buy another one, and the person who had caused it to be smashed hadn’t even stopped to say he was sorry.

Nothing I could say or do made him feel better. And there was nothing anyone could do at that point. If we were living in a Lifetime movie, maybe the person who had knocked the bag from his hands and kept running, waving dismissively when Ray called out, would have encountered us again, and there would have been some kind of amends making.

But we don’t live in Lifetime movies. Sometimes bad things happen, and we just have to live with them. Ray got over it. Life went on.

I was reminded about that incident this week when I found another present from him broken.

I don’t know how it happened, for certain, and probably never will.

It begins a few weeks back when we were having a mini heat wave. We’d had enough hot days (for our climate) in a row that we’d decided to put the window fans up. During the summer we have mounted window fans running in the kitchen, the computer room, and the bedroom. Depending on which side of the house and what time of day it is, they’ll be either blowing fresh air in, or blowing hot air out.

So the second day the fans were going, I found a print on the floor. It’s a large piece of art our friend, Sky, made a few years ago. It’s a reclining courtesan in a green and blue kimono. It isn’t mounted in a heavy frame, it’s just matted. It’s 18 inches by 22 inches, so it isn’t a huge life-size portrait, but it’s large.

It hangs in our bedroom on the south wall. After I confirmed that Michael hadn’t taken it down for some reason, I decided that it must have been knocked down by the wind. We had fans in the window on a thermostat, and we’d forgotten to turn off the standing fan when we left for work in the morning. It had been a little windy that day. I figured there must have been some inopportune gusts of wind that knocked it off.

Never mind that it is nowhere close to the window, and other similarly lightweight pieces are hanging on the wall Closer to the fan. I figured either the wind angle had been just right, or because all of the other simply matted pieces are smaller—they hadn’t had enough surface area to catch enough wind force to bring them down.

Then this week, I found something else on the floor. In exactly the same spot the picture had landed. A resin “sculpture,” about 10 inches tall, which had been on a shelf about a foot below the picture.

Ray had given me the sculpture about a year after we moved in together. It’s an odd thing: a fairy tale castle built impossibly on a pair of rock spires coming up out of the ocean. At the time Ray gave it to me, I think he said that it reminded him of something I’d written. I didn’t remember writing about that sort of castle, but I write both sci fi and fantasy, and I tended to talk to him a lot about ideas I hadn’t yet turned into a story, so maybe it was something in one of those.

But this gets us to the part of the earlier incident that I could never tell him. Ray and I had very different tastes in decorating. We both tended to like very different kinds of kitsch (and yeah, sometimes my tastes are extremely kitschy). So when he said the glass sculpture which I never got to see was “beautiful,” I knew that there was more than a slim chance that I might have thought it hideous.

This resin thing isn’t hideous, but it’s not the sort of thing I would have ever bought myself. Even for only a quarter at a garage sale. So, even with his explanation that it reminded him of something I wrote, I didn’t quite understand why he thought I would like it.

I’m quite certain some of the things I gave him elicited the same reaction. Sometimes you think someone will like something, and you’re just completely wrong.

I haven’t kept every knick knack and tchotchke Ray ever got me. His family members asked me for some of them to remember him by. I gave a few others away to friends who expressed an interest. One particular friend, Kats, suggested when I was agonizing, about a year after Ray died, over a bunch of things that I really didn’t like but couldn’t bear to just toss, that I mail them to her (since she’s as much of a packrat as I am). She said she would find them good homes. We both knew that she would probably toss most of them, and that she was prepared to lie to me if need be about how she’d kept them all. But sometimes you need a little help deluding yourself when you’re being irrational.

This castle, though, I kept. I can’t really say why, because I don’t like it for itself. Neither do I dislike it. It’s just every time I look at it, I think of Ray trying to explain to me how it reminded him of stuff I wrote. Ultimately, it reminds me of the journey we both went through trying to learn to understand each other better.

So when I found it on the floor, broken in several places, I was more than a bit annoyed. Also, confused. I had an explanation for the picture falling down two weeks ago. This was something else. It’s too heavy to have been blown over, at least inside the house. The only other thing I found disturbed was a small plush Tigger that had been near it on the shelf. And one of the fragments that broke off was embedded, at a really weird angle, into the wooden bedstead. If it fell off the shelf, bouncing off the bedstead is almost a certainty, but it just looked odd.

We don’t live in a house, but rather a triplex. On the other side of that wall is the neighbor’s kitchen. A previous tenant had a tendency to slam the cupboards a lot, and sometimes it would make the pictures shake on our side. I haven’t heard anything like that with the couple that have lived there the last few years, but if it’s happening at a time of day when we’re not around, I wouldn’t hear it, would I?

It would be simple enough to glue the castle back together if I could find all the pieces, but I can’t. On the other hand, it’s just a silly tchotchke which, truth be told, I haven’t looked at at all in the last several years except when I decide to clean up that end of the bedroom. It’s just a thing, not a person. I should just get over it and move on.

And I will. But I don’t have to like it.

“So, why isn’t your husband here?”

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I’m sharing a table at the vendor’s room of EverfreeNW, a My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic convention.

I love going to conventions. I love going to conventions in order to spend time with friends who I don’t get to see as often as I like, to see and occasionally buy cool and odd things, to get away from mundanity for a few days, and sometimes to learn new things. Because I am a big introvert, I don’t really do well at the kinds of convention activities where one is required to interact in an open-ended way with a lot of strangers.

Oddly enough, I have discovered that the best way to see all the cool costumes, nifty artwork, and so on, while avoiding too much stranger interact is to staff a table at the convention and try to sell stuff. This may sound like a contradiction, but the structure of the dealer’s den means that generally I am only interacting with strangers in a limited number of ways. I am usually simply answering questions about the merchandise at the table. I’m not a hard-sell kind of guy. I will try to make eye contact and smile or greet people who are looking at the merchandise, but then I let them make the next move.

It is easy to spend the time when people aren’t asking questions writing. The last many years I usually have either my Macbook or my iPad with a bluetooth keyboard. Previous years I would have a notebook and a pencil. I wrote the first draft of one of the funniest, horror/epic fantasy/Christmas ghost story cross-over pieces ever entirely by hand in a dealer’s den in Chicago one con, for instance.

I got a lot of writing done on the first day of EverfreeNW.

I also had a lot of cool conversations. One of things I’m selling are a bunch of our duplicate 2-inch vinyl pony toys. We bought several extra boxes of them last year to do our pony-themed Christmas tree. So I had a box full of them which people were picking through looking for their favorite characters. One woman kept holding up some of the obscurer (“background ponies”) characters and asking me their names. I had to confess that I don’t recognize a lot of them, either.

At one point I said, “I’m sorry. My husband knows the names of most of the background ponies, not me.”

“Why isn’t your husband here, then?” she asked.

I pointed to the enormous line of hundreds of people waiting for registration. I had been hearing stories all day that people were waiting in line for hours to buy their memberships. I said, “My husband is on registration staff. I don’t know when I’ll see him again.”

“Oh, yeah, you may not see him again until the con is over.” She went back to looking at the ponies. “I must say, even though they’re being slammed, the people who waited on me were all very nice and helpful.”

She bought about half a dozen ponies.

Several other fun conversations were with younger kids about buttons. My husband has recycled a lot of the packaging material for some of the pony toys by turning them into pin-back buttons. The buttons are popular with lots of folks, but the kids seem especially enamored of the buttons. Most of the conversations centered around which is their favorite character, and what the best picture of said character was that we had on a button.

I noticed that the younger kinds most liked the inch-and-a-quarter size. Though the slightly older ones would pick the small buttons, then realize that the price was the same for a big one, and go looking for a large one with the same character. Because the buttons have been made by cutting out pre-printed packaging, we seldom have the exact same pose in both sizes.

One girl tried to talk her younger sister into switching to a bigger one of the same character. “No! This one’s better!”

Can’t argue with that!

Second Notice? Really?

life, ,

Even though I pay almost all of my bills online, I have so far resisted the offers of the various services and agencies I have to send regular payments to to go “paperless.” Getting the bill in the mail reminds me to set up the payment. And given the unpredictability of email spam filters, I’m just a little nervous about relying on email notifications solely for my mail.

Before you start composing a comment telling me how to add an address or a domain to a whitelist, let me remind you that first, I’m a tech writer in the telecommunications industry—I have been part of the development team for products that process email; I understand about whitelists, I do.

The problem is that sometimes someone at an upstream provider will change the way a filter works. Or the company sending me the notification may make a change in the way emails are sent. And sometimes spam filters are just glitchy. I just recently had an incident where three messages were sent to me within a few days from the same sender to my account. The middle of the three was snagged by the spam filter, which made the third message a bit confusing. When I found the missing message and compared the header information in it to the two that got through, they were all identical.

So, for now, I’m sticking to paper for bills.

It seems, however, as more and more of us do most of our communicating on line, that the junk mail people are sending out twice as much junk mail, hoping somehow to get our attention. And they are going to greater lengths to make the junk mail look like something other than what it is. “Official documents enclosed” or “Response required by (date)”

There has always been some junk mail like that, but it seems to be getting worse.

And then there is the not-quite-junk-mail. I contribute to a number of causes. I’m a bit random about it. Each month after I set up all the payments for the bills coming due, I’ll ask myself, “Who haven’t I give a donation to in a while?” And so I’ll log into the web pages of a couple of these causes and make a small donation.

During election years I wind up throwing a lot of these donations to either candidates who have done something I think justifies my support, as well as a few of the more general party organizations. I’ve been doing this for years, and have gotten used to receiving mail from all of these organization asking for a new donation on a regular basis.

I’ve noticed that at least two of the party-affliated committees have begun to send out requests for donations with phrases such as “Second Notice” and “Final Notice” printed in red, which makes one think it’s an overdue bill.

But it isn’t an overdue bill. They have set themselves an arbitrary target by an arbitrary or semi-arbitrary deadline, and the previous month’s plea for a donation said something about, “Help us achieve the important goal of raising $XXX,XXX before the next filing deadline!” And if you haven’t sent in any money, then you get this so-called “second notice” saying, “We told you how important this deadline is, but we haven’t heard from you!”

It’s a donation! One of the ways that donations differ from bills is that a donation doesn’t have a deadline. A donation is voluntary. A bill is an obligation. I signed up for some service (electricity, cell phone, internet, what have you) and agreed to pay an amount on a monthly basis. There is a deadline because it is an obligation. If I don’t pay the obligation when agreed, then certain penalties will apply, possibly including having the service turned off.

But if I don’t meet this wholly made-up deadline for your fundraising goals, I’m not skipping out an an obligation. I have no obligation to donate.

Grrrrrrr!

Why I watch the parade

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First, because it’s a parade, and people do some pretty astounding things when they march.

I watched my first Pride Parade before I marched in one. I was barely out to anyone at the time, and I wasn’t even sure what the parade was. I had seen (usually lurid and shocking) pictures in the papers and during the very brief coverage that would appear on the evening news.

I suspected those representations were highly inaccurate, but I had heard a few conflicting descriptions from gay people I knew.

What struck me most about that first parade was how unexceptional most of the people looked. Oh, yes there were some outrageous costumes, and some people bared a bit more skin than you would normally see on a summer sidewalk, but the vast majority were far more fully clothed than a typical beach crowd.

I understand why a lot of people think there’s a lot more nudity at Pride Parades than other events. It’s mostly because of the men. Our society is so heavily patriarchal that we don’t notice all those women in revealing clothes, provocative poses, and suggestive angles used in advertising, television shows, and the like. Women are allowed to show off their legs, a little cleavage, and much more, to show just how beautiful their bodies are. No one blinks at all the near nudity of women on floats in the Seattle Seafair Family Torchlight Parade, for instance, or the Tournament of Roses Parade, or the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade—it’s there! We don’t consciously think about how much of the world is geared around appealing to the sexual desires of straight men.

We are not used to men putting themselves on display in the same way. So when the float covered in go-go boys goes by, instead of realizing that it’s no more nudity or sex appeal than what you might see on, say, the Miss America float in the Tournament of Roses Parade, we’re too busy freaking out at the Naked Boys (who aren’t actually naked)!

But what really struck me that first time, was how ordinary so many of the people looked. The various hobby-based clubs marching by in their matching t-shirts, throwing candy. The men and women, mostly in shorts and short-sleeved shirts, walking in a group with their dogs on leashes. The political groups with matching t-shirts chanting their slogans. The groups with kids—lots of the queer couples and their kids—marching with whichever group they were with. Plus lots of church or other religiously affiliated groups and lots of amateur sports leagues.

There were a multitude of costumes, many feathers, copious amounts of glitter, and a lot of rainbows. The outrageous costumes sometimes had some sort of political message. But often they were just things like big crazy headdresses that you weren’t sure what they were meant to signify, but it was rainbow colored!

Then after all the groups with their banners and fliers and sometimes matching t-shirts had passed, the parade just kept going, just lots and lots of random people. It took a few minutes for us to figure out what was happening. I learned later that it’s a tradition that’s gone from the very first Pride March in 1970 on the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. After the parade passes you, you step off the curb and join it.

And that’s why some years I watch. The reason for the parade, ultimately, is simple visibility. We’re here. We’re your daughters, your neighbors, your sons, your co-workers, your friends, your siblings, or your parents. We’re not mysterious monsters lurking in seedy clubs, we’re the person in front of you at the check-out line in the grocery store, or the two gals sitting in that next pew at church, or the grey-haired guy trying to read a label on a bottle of cold tablets in the pharmacy, or that kid on the skateboard going past your bus stop, or that guy sipping a coffee at Starbucks while laughing at something on his computer.

We’re here, we’re everywhere, we’re real, and we have lives just like you.

I watch so that the people who are being brave and marching in their first parade will be seen and cheered for. I watch so that group of teen-agers (half of them straight and there to support their bi, gay, and lesbian friends) will get the applause that their costumes deserve. I watch so the guy who was up all night gluing sequins on his and his boyfriend’s costume will get the cheering that work deserves. I watch so that the older couple walking together holding hands will be seen and their love acknowledged.

I watch so that the ones whose families rejected them and told them never to come back will know they have another family, and we’re clapping for them right now. I watch and applaud so that the trans* gals and trans* men know they are seen for who they are and we think they’re beautiful, wonderful, and I am proud to call them brothers and sisters. I watch so that the ones who are carrying a photo or wearing the name of a deceased loved one will know that we see their grief and share it. I watch so that the straight parents who have spent countless hours explaining to friends and relatives that their queer kids have nothing to be ashamed of, and yes they are very happy, and no those things you’ve heard or read about their health and lifespan are all myths will know their efforts are appreciated by the whole community.

I watch so I can see and be reminded of just how big and wonderful and diverse and amazing our community is.

And finally, I watch so that as the last official entry goes by, I can see all the people who aren’t part of a club or organization who, just like me, stood on the sidewalk cheering and applauding.

And I cheer and applaud for all of them until finally it’s my turn to step off the curb and say to the world, “Me too.”

The opposite of shoving

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I told a story earlier this week about someone freaking out at a picture of my husband on my desk many years ago. Now I want to tell you about a completely different experience.

It was some years later. The company had grown, been bought by a giant corporation, split in two, and the division I worked for was sold off to another big company that set us up to run semi-independently. They hired some new people to fill out the most decimated departments. One of the new people hired was a young computer engineer, fresh out of college from Eastern Europe.

One day shortly after he joined our company, Eduard, the young engineer, was setting up my account in the new bug tracking system, showing me how to log in, and so forth. So he was looking over my shoulder while telling me what to do next. When we finished, he pointed to the photo frame on my desk. It was in a very similar location as the previous picture had been. Many things had changed since the previous experience with another engineer. Ray had died, and I had since met, fallen in love with, and now lived with Michael. My office was in a different building, the equipment and furniture were different.

So the man in the picture, the picture frame, the desk, and so on were all different. The only thing that was the same was that I still kept the picture at a spot where I could see it, and where other people could usually ignore it.

He asked in his heavily accented voice: “Who is… Is that your, uh, husband? Partner? I don’t know the word.”

I told him it was my hubby, Michael, and that I never knew what word to use, either. Boyfriend, partner, husband all had difficulties back then.

“Does he work in computers, too?”

I explained that he did computer support for a number of clients, and also worked for a computer refurbisher.

“How did you meet?”

I briefly told him about the science fiction convention where we’d met.

“It’s good to have things in common. I met my wife in the hiking club in college. We both love climbing mountains.”

And so I asked him a few questions about her. It was a simple, brief, very human conversation.

Over the course of the next few years we worked on a lot of software products together. Eduard and his wife had a couple of sons. He started organizing snowboarding excursions for the other employees. He bought a motorcycle and started riding it in to work (and organizing long groups rides with others on summer weekends). He rose to a management position. He was one of the smartest, nicest people I’d ever worked with. One of his best traits was that he accepted everyone at face value, more concerned about getting the job done right than worrying about whether who was the “proper” person for the job.

I can’t tell you how many engineering managers I’ve met who pigeonhole non-engineers the moment they meet them. They assume all tech writers know nothing about technology (and don’t really want to know), but only worry about things such as Oxford commons, split infinitives, and making text look pretty. With that sort, any time I made intelligent comments on specifications, or suggested workable fixes to problems, they would look at me as if I’d grown and second head and ask, “How do you know about that?”

Eduard wasn’t that way. When, for instance, we had to resurrect some old functionality in one codebase that hadn’t been used in many years, and I started explaining about how we had sampled which parts of the digital signal, he just started asking questions about the technology. It wasn’t until the end of our discussion that he asked how I knew it so well. When I told him I’d been the software tester on the project when we’d first developed the functionality, he just nodded and asked if I’d be willing to explain it to the engineers who had to re-create the functionality, and was I willing to review test plans.

Then one June Monday I was in the office, busy because I had some big deadlines looming. I had heard on the news about a late season blizzard that had struck nearby Mt Rainier days earlier, and how rescuers had had to retrieve two climbers who had gotten caught in the storm. One of them hadn’t survived.

It was quite a shock when I learned the climbers were Eduard and his wife. They were very experienced climbers. It had just been one of those times when nature reminds us just how small we are. They had had to dig in to take shelter, and as the storm raged on, Eduard had wrapped himself around his wife, using his body to shield her from the worst of the cold. He saved her, but it cost his life.

And that’s how this queer middle-aged man, from a very low-church Southern evangelical background wound up standing in a very high church, orthodox funeral mass surrounded by teary-eyed co-workers in the very unchurched Northwest a week later.

He had been raised in a culture that was much less gay-friendly than ours (which still isn’t terribly), but I had never felt the slightest hint of judgement or awkwardness from him. He had treated the discovery of my husband’s picture completely matter-of-factly, and any other conversations that drifted into family or related topics remained that way. He approached the world with an open mind and an open heart.

Because of the anniversary of the Stonewall riots, and the annual commemoration in many places with a Pride Parade, I always end up writing about gay rights or people who oppose them even more often than usual during June. But for the last few years, June also makes me think about Eduard—a straight guy with a wife, kids, and a predilection for adrenaline-pumping hobbies—who had reacted exactly the opposite as that other engineer upon seeing a simple picture of a man on my desk. Whereas the other guy had taken offense and demanded that I be punished and forbidden to have the picture in my office, Eduard had asked how we’d met.

I hold out hope for the day when Eduard’s open-hearted outlook on the world is the norm from straight guys everywhere.

Daddy issues

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I usually avoid writing about Father’s Day.

Lots of people have great dads. Some people have more than one awesome dad. Why should I ruin their special day to tell their awesome dad just how great he is by talking about the other kinds of dads? So the few times I have written anything about the subject of Father’s Day, I’ve instead focused on my experiences with my awesome grandfathers and my wonderful great-grandfather. Because they were great and awesome, and I consider myself extremely lucky to have had them in my life.

But I’m not the only person who did not have a great dad. I’m not the only person who cringes when certain statements or stereotypes of fatherhood are trotted out with the implication that every single father who ever existed was a shining paragon of wisdom, hard work, and sacrifice. I’m not the only one who has been chastised (sometimes by complete strangers) with statements like, “He’s your father! Can’t you at least show a little gratitude for the things he did right?”

Besides, reminding people that bad fathers exist actually makes all the great dads more remarkable. It reminds us that being a good father is not automatic, it doesn’t just naturally happen, and it isn’t easy. Being a good father takes work. Those fathers who are great, awesome, and wonderful deserve to be appreciated and loved and praised for the remarkable people they are.

Bad fathers come in many forms. When I was young, my father was verbally and physically abusive. That abuse resulted in broken bones or wounds requiring stitches on more than one occasion. The abuse was always worst when he was drunk, and he seemed to be drunk an awful lot. After my parents divorced, Mom, my sister, and I moved 1200 miles away.

Dad remarried and started a second family. A series of accidents led him to admit he had a drinking problem, so he joined AA. Certain relatives kept telling me that he had changed since getting sober. He was a completely different person, they said, and I should give him another chance. He never sounded any different on the phone, or the couple of times I saw him in person afterward, but they were around him more often than me. I don’t know whether I just wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt, or if I like to believe that everyone is capable of redemption, or maybe I just prefer stories with happy endings, but for a while I told people that he’d straightened his life out and I wished him well.

I eventually learned that the abuse never stopped. The alcoholism was never the cause, it was just the excuse. There was a period of over a year where at least one of his other kids had restraining orders out on him, forbidding him from being around his own grandchildren without supervision. In the few conversations we have now, he still holds all the racist, misogynist, and generally angry opinions about everyone else, blaming everything wrong in his life on other people.

Yes, he has some good points. He kept a roof over his families’ heads, put food on the table, and helped out when certain kinds of problems arose. He is capable of the occasional gesture of affection—sometimes coming through in surprising ways. But those things don’t make up for the abusing, the controlling, the blaming and shaming, or the refusal to take responsibility for the damage he causes.

I don’t hate him. I fear becoming him. I was definitely on the road to becoming him at one point. I’m glad that I had friends who were willing to stand up to me and tell me I was turning into a verbal bully.

Counseling help. Friends who pointed out when I backslid, but remained friends, helped. Coming out of the closet helped an incredible amount. All that energy expended hiding who I was, plus the fear of being discovered, and the anger about the presumed rejection was like an over-pressurized boiler ready to explode. I seem to have avoided that path, though I still worry about it. Any times when certain tones of voice come out of my mouth, for instance.

Dad’s issues are different than mine. I know some of the sources of his anger and resentment. I’m sure there are more extenuating circumstance than the ones I’m aware of. It does give me sympathy for his situation. I sincerely hope that someday he finds a way out of them and into a place of peace. I do wish him well.

I don’t hold massive grudges against him. Truth be told, I seldom think about him at all. I think it’s sad that we don’t have the kind of relationship that we’re supposed to be thankful for on this day especially.

But I’m glad that many other people do.

Recalling

life, , ,

I was listening to a story on NPR years ago. An author had set out to write a book about his immigrant grandparents. Among other places, he traveled to the village in Northern Ireland where his grandparents had lived before immigrating.

He visited an infamous tree in a field just outside of town. It was infamous because once when his mother was a little girl, a “local boy” who was involved in one of the Irish Independence movements, had been lynched in that tree. And for many days afterward, the local British soldiers stationed guards on it round the clock, to prevent anyone from cutting the body down and giving the young man a proper burial.

The author’s mother, grandparents, and aunts and uncles had all told the story many times. His mother had a particularly moving way of describing herself as a small child, clutching her own mother’s hand as the stood in the tall grass, close enough to see, but far enough that the soldiers would ignore them. His grandmother had agreed, even explaining how she had argued with some neighbor about whether her daughter should see such things.

The author was able to verify all the particulars of the young man’s lynching, his long delayed funeral, and so forth. It was that tree, in that field where it had happened. There was only one problem with the identical story that all of this relatives who had been there told. The young man had been lynched exactly 6 days after the author’s mother was born. So, while it was possible that his grandmother had carried her new born baby out to the field to see the atrocity, there was no way his mother could have remembered it. And certainly, as a six-day-old infant, she would not have been standing on her own two feet in the tall grass, clutching her mother’s hand.

The author realized that what must have actually happened is that some years after the incident, his grandmother had taken his mother, her young daughter, out to the field in question, to look at the empty tree and hear the story of the horrible thing the soldiers had done. It’s quite possible there were several such trips, before the family left Ireland and moved to America. The description his mother had heard from her parents, other older relatives, and neighbors, of the body hanging in the tree with the soldiers standing guard, had evoked a vivid image, which his mother had interposed onto her actual memories of visiting the field.

And the grandparents and other relatives similarly modified their own memories when, over the years, they would tell the story to new acquaintances, and the author’s mother (first as a young girl), would interject her own recollection of the day. The first few times perhaps one uncle might have said, “Really? I thought you would be too young to remember,” but our memories don’t have timestamps on them, and it’s easy to lose track of exactly how long one event (the gruesome death of a neighbor) took place after another (the birth of a niece).

The author wound up talking to a lot of experts on memory, and instead of writing a book about his ancestors, wrote a book about memory, and how it grows, mutates, and reshapes itself to fit our perception of the meanings of our life.

I had my own rather dramatic experience in realizing that I had edited my own memories. I have a couple of friends, J and K, that I have known for over thirty years. When I first met them, they had recently broken up after having dated for a while, but they were trying to keep it amicable. Over the years they were both part of a large group of my friends that attending sci fi cons together and participated in related activities. For a while, J lived in California. During that time, K started dating L. K and L broke up. A few years later, J had moved back to Washington, she and K started dating, and eventually married.

Some years after that, I was telling another friend about this particularly funny event that had happened at a sci fi con, and mentioned both J and K’s parts. J didn’t remember the incident at all. I told a few more details, K chimed in with some supporting evidence. J admitted it sounded like something she would have said, and we moved on to another topic.

And then it hit me. Feeling horrified, I turned to J and said, “Oh, I am so sorry…” She started laughing, because she figured it out from the look on my face. It hadn’t been J experiencing the fiasco with us, it had been L. I apologized probably a bit too profusely, because J laughed and said that K did the same thing all the time.

I spent a while afterward trying to remember those couple of years when K had been dating L and also hanging out with our gang. I could only recall four incidents, total. All of them were ones which, from my perspective, exemplified L’s worst personality traits. I couldn’t recall one single incident in which she was not being pretentious, condescending, or disdainful.

I know that can’t be accurate. No one is awful all the time, and K would never be comfortable hanging out with someone who was, let alone nearly getting married to her. Obviously, I made the decision that K’s involvement with L had been a mistake of such proportions that I wished it hadn’t happened. And my subconscious has dutifully excised any pleasant memories of L from my memory. Any memories that have been kept, have had J substituted for L, in accordance with the other judgement I came to that J and K belong together and always have.

It was disturbing when I first realized it had happened. I still find it disturbing that I have to wrestle with my own memories when talking about events with these friends. I can make myself remember that it was L, not J, in the one story. But it makes me wonder what else in that memory has been emphasized, or obscured, or maybe borrowed from some other similar experiences.

It’s scary to realize just how unreliable one’s own recollection can be.

Telling

writing, , ,

Whenever we tell someone about something that happened to us, we’re telling a story. Humans tell stories to make sense of the world. And even when we think we are just recounting what happened, we’re actually making dozens of unconscious editorial decisions—emphasising some details, omitting others—to put a particular spin on the events in order to give them meaning.

For example, one morning I was a little early to my bus stop, and I decided to run into the drug store next to the stop to pick up one item. I thought I had enough time. But there was only one clerk working check out, and an older gentleman in front of me had a small number of items, but a huge number of coupons, and his transaction took so long that I missed the bus.

One time when I told that story, I gave a summary similar to the above paragraph, and concluded with a self-depracating comment of how silly it had been for me to risk missing my bus, when there was another drugstore close to my office where I could have stopped after getting downtown.

But the day of the incident, I was annoyed about missing the bus, so that night when I told the story, I went into great detail about how the man in front of me had argued and fussed with the cashier over every single price that rang up, and which coupons were expired, which ones applied to a slightly different item than the one he had, and particularly the long discussion he had with her about one bag of holiday-themed Hershey Kisses® that he was certain he had a new coupon for at home, and why she should let him have it at the lower price and how when she refused, which meant he berated her for a while before finally ordering her to keep the bag behind the counter because he was going to walk home, find the coupon, and come back.

And before he walked out the door he came back three times to interrupt her attempt to check my one item out to warn her about not putting that bag of candy back on the shelf.

Both accounts are absolutely true. But they sound like very different events, don’t they?

Because the day it happened, I was upset about missing my bus, and so the meaning of the events was how another person’s stubborness had messed up my day. Later, as I was walking past the second drugstore one morning after getting off the bus, I realized that the earlier incident had been my own fault for not thinking things through and planning better.

Same events, different perspective, different stories…

Growing vegetables in the dirt

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“Because I’m an old Southern woman and we’re supposed to wear funny looking hats and ugly clothes and grow vegetables in the dirt. Don’t ask me those questions. I don’t know why, I don’t make the rules!” —Louisa “Ouiser” Boudreaux, Steel Magnolias

I’m not really from the south. The small town where I was born (and where Dad had grown up, and several of my grandparents lived) was in the northwest corner of Colorado, but oil had been discovered there just before the Great Depression. When certain foreign powers suddenly needed to buy a lot of oil during the 1930s, the quickest way to get oil flowing out (and money flowing in) was to hire and move a whole bunch of experienced but out-of-work oil workers from the south. A few decades later, by the time I was born, nearly ever single person who lived in the town was either from the south, or their parents were. Even though my dad’s work caused us to move around between lots of small towns in Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Utah throughout my grade school years, our attendance of Southern Baptist Churches kept me in a sort of virtual south throughout.

Of course people who grew up in and live in all parts of the world grow vegetables in their yards. Yet, I can’t help but feel that the reason the last few years I have felt the need to at least grow a few tomato plants in containers, is because of the “rule” which the character in Steel Magnolias states. Even when I casually mention it, I don’t say “I’m growing a few tomato plants in containers.” No, what comes out of my mouth, if I don’t stop myself, is a drawl that sounds just like my Dad or Grandpa, “I got a couple tomatuhs growin’.”

When I was a kid, because we moved around a lot, we seldom had a vegetable garden of our own. But I spent at least part of every summer staying with either my grandparents or great-grandparents, and usually got drafted to help with theirs. Living in the city most of my adult life, I haven’t usually had a yard of my own to turn part of it over to growing vegetables. My gardening skills are spotty, at best, therefore.

In our current place, there is a small yard shared with the other households in our building. With the landlady’s permission, I’ve been planting flowers in two small beds in addition to several planters on the porch and a couple of hanging pots.

I started two years ago with one tomato. I had a large plastic pot that I had previously house a rubber tree indoors for many years. At the urging of a friend the previous year I’d tried to grow scallions in it, to no avail. I had a better luck with the tomato, getting about a handful of cherry tomatoes a week for the latter half of the summer and early fall. I spent a lot of time worrying about what the overnight temperatures were in the late spring and summer, moving the pot up against the brick house in the evening if I thought it would be too cool over night, then back out where they could get full sun during the day.

Last year I bought two more containers. I had two different breeds of cherry tomatoes and one grape tomato. I didn’t fret so much about temperatures in the beginning of the growing season. There was one point when we had a lot of sunny days, where I overdid it with the watering—when you over water, tomatoes start splitting open on the plant. I did not get three times as many tomatoes as the previous year. And the least productive plant was the grape tomato.

Just starting to produce!
Just starting to produce!
So this year I’m trying one cherry tomato, an heirloom yellow tomato that is supposed to produce small round 7-ish ounce tomatoes, and another that’s supposed to produce slighty smaller red oblong tomatoes. All three have started to flower, but only the cherry has started to show any fruit.

I’m looking forward to eating some fresh tomatoes. Three plants is probably our limit, since Michael doesn’t like tomatoes. I would have liked to get a few more than I did last year, but don’t want to get to the point where I’m needing to give a lot away.

Of course, I do get a craving for my grandma’s green tomato relish from time to time. Unfortunately I never learned her recipe, so if I did find myself with a bunch of green tomatoes, I’d be trying someone else’s recipe. And I’m not likely to have enough to experiment much if I did. So I probably ought not to think about that.

Of course, you only need a few small green tomatoes to fry up a mess of fried green tomatoes. And I know exactly how to make those.

Now that’s a taste of the south that I could really go for.