Why Poetry?

This is the follow-up to yesterday's post.  All the poems which were read at the event are listed at the end of this post.

Have you been wondering why the poet is not the bread or the knife?  I've been wrestling with the concept since Sunday afternoon, when I celebrated the 50th Anniversary of The University of Arizona Poetry Center.  Billy Collins was there, and so was Samuel Chlepka.  Classmates from my epic poetry seminar were in the audience, as was the director of the program and the President of the university.  I sat 4 rows from a former US Poet Laureate, and it's only because they begged us not to take pictures that I can't share the physical feeling.

It was a very well-behaved audience; the movie lauding the Poetry Center ended and we all sat quietly, not wanting to disturb the silence.  The 5 presenters entered stage right, passing the podium and finding their places on 5 folding chairs.  These poetry readings don't seem to go in for much in the way of set decoration.  There wasn't even a potted plant on the stage.  Then, again, Robert Frost spoke from the same stage 50 years ago at the dedication ceremony for the Poetry Center, so who am I to complain?

I wonder if Republicans like poetry?  There were references to mourning an election outcome and the plight of illegal entrants which received warm applause.  But that was a very small portion of the afternoon; politics were less important than culture for a brief and wonderful moment.  It wasn't as hard as I had feared it would be, a fact that Billy Collins mentioned in his introductory remarks.  saying that "People say they don't read poetry because it is difficult, but it is difficult because people don't read it."  I suppose it's like anything else, the more you do it the more facile you become.  The Big Cuter explained his making quick work of assignments which took his high school classmates an inordinate amount of time by telling them that reading, like lacrosse, got easier the more you practiced.  I'd always assumed he'd read for the sheer pleasure of the experience; how could I know that he was also practicing for law school?


The poet went on to say that being difficult is a good thing, that the reward is commensurate with the effort invested, and that not everything has to be a James Patterson quickie.  I reveled in the murmurs of agreement from the audience.  These were people who would not settle for mediocrity, people who were willing to work for their preferred outcomes.

David Fitzsimmons, editorial cartoonist and political pundit featured in our local paper, read his three poems first.  He had us laughing about bears chasing campers and the futility of trying to protect oneself, for, after all, people get hurt by safety pins.  Howard Altman, a poet from New York by way of Canada, took us down a darker, sadder pathway, as we cleaned up after the war and imagined the death of a daughter's father as they shared a quiet moment fly-fishing in the river.  Without the laughter, the audience shared the pauses and the sighs.  We were connected in the silence.

Have you read Interred with Their Bones?  It's a Shakespearean mystery and the author, Jennifer Lee Carrell, brought her classicist's sensibility to the stage next.  Gerald Manley Hopkins and Alfred, Lord Tennyson were denser than the others' selections, but the language was so grand that I let it sweep over me and stopped worrying about following the content precisely.  I was traveling with Ulysses and being blown by Hopkins' wind and the fact that I was lost in the moment must have been part of the original intent, don't you think?  Ms. Carrell's mother says that her daughter has five degrees in fairy tales, and that's how I heard her telling the stories as she read her choices.  Of course, Billy Collins says that all poets write about death and that majoring in English is majoring in Death so maybe there is more than one truth to following a literary path through academia.

Ernesto Portillo, Jr, is a popular journalist in both the Anglo and Hispanic local scenes, and, true to form, he introduced politics and immigration and read in Spanish and I was reminded that we were in Tucson, after all, and that multi-culturalism is under attack by so many folks here that I should just relax and open my mind to the newness and strangeness of it all.  And I was rewarded by Alberto Rios's love poem to his grandmother's long long hair, which reminded me of my grandmother's long long braid, and which put me in a very nice place, indeed.

Then Billy Collins read... and read... and read... and it was all his own work and it was wonderful. He wrote from the perspective of a dog who'd been put to sleep, and he riffed on the names of condo complexes and the inanities of conversations between teenage girls in between reflecting on his parents and aging and language.  Fogetfulness made me teary as his words brought G'ma to my heart, and then he was a young camper making a lanyard for his mother and every heart string of every parent was tugged and woven together, just as his lanyard was crafted.  Just as with a lanyard, we didn't know what practical purpose the afternoon would serve, but we loved it anyway.

I wish you could have been there with me.  It was really quite special.
*******************
POEMS READ AT THE 50th ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA'S POETRY CENTER ON SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2010:

• A Poem Written by a Bear (Billy Collins)
• Social Security (Winch)
• The Laughing Heart (Charles Bukowski
• Elegy (N. Treadway)
• The End and the Beginning (Howard Altman)
• The Prune Tree (Howard Moss)
• Ulysses (excerpt, Tennyson)
• Moon Folly (Fanny Sterns Davis)
• The Windhover (Gerard Manley Hopkins)
• The Illegal Alien (a corrido written by a Tucson high school student)
• A Chance Witnessing (Alberto Rios)
• In the Strong Hold of Her Thin Arms (Alberto Rios)A

AND BY BILLY COLLINS:

• Litany
• Grave
• What She Said
• Oh My God
• The Death of a Hat
• The Dog on his Master
• The Revenant
• The Golden Years
• Adage
• Feedback
• Forgetfulness
• The Lanyard
• On Turning 10

Voting With G'ma

This series of reprinted posts is a tribute to my mother, Esther Tamara Rukasin Annis, who died on December 5, 2013. 

Fresh posts will resume sometime soon.  For now, I hope you'll spend the time with us as we remember our mom.

It's election day.  I took myself to my polling place and walked right into a voting booth (after proving that I was who I said I was by presenting my driver's license) and was finished in 3 minutes.  It was vaguely unsatisfying. 

The room was empty except for the poll workers and me.  It was lonely voting without another citizen to share a smile and a civic connection.  A low turn out is probably bad news for the candidates and issues about which I care, but that wasn't what was going through my head as I inked in my choices.  Instead, I was wondering about the lack of respect for the privilege of being a citizen of these United States of America which obviously exists in this precinct.  The franchise was fought for and suffered for and cherished and treasured and it's not that hard to find the polling place and still there were no lines, no fellow citizens, no camaraderie.  There were the elderly worker bees supervised by one younger woman just sitting there, waiting for someone to help.  It's not a very exciting job, but today it looked more dismal than usual.

I left the gym at the Y after commiserating with the ballot-drop-box-worker about the lack of enthusiasm I was able to muster for this voting experience, and then I went over to the pod-castle to help G'ma with her ballot.  Yes, it was an Early Ballot but we were late getting to it.  Amster's law offices held a Proposition Party last week, and I had to wait for that input before I could properly advise G'ma on the myriad issues we were asked to decide upon.  Pizza and garlic twists and an hour of laughter and insight stood me in good stead; I knew what was behind the ballot initiatives and I knew where I stood on those issues.  I was able to make a good argument for the opposing side, and TBG thought enough of my decision making prowess to ask me for a list of who and what were appropriate decisions.  We often disagree on the issues; this year his distaste for the Republicans here in Arizona led to our votes being identical.  I can't remember when he didn't vote for at least one non-Democrat.  Of course, most of our Republicans are more Tea Party types than Lincoln types, a division which should be interesting when/if they end up in Congress.  Wondering what the Republican Caucuses will sound like next January kept me occupied on the drive to the pod-castle.

G'ma's first reaction to her early ballot was "You just fill it in for me"..... but I don't reinforce laziness so I waited a minute or two for her to forget why she was sitting next to me on the couch before I reintroduced the ballot.  This time, she was ready to play.  Though her initial reaction was to vote for all the Democrats (like any lefty from the 1930's she's a die-hard liberal and do not try to get her to change), she listened to my description of the candidates, pro and con, before she colored in the circles next to her (Democratic) choices.  Since our Republican candidates are uniformly against spending for education or health care and seem to be incapable of putting two sentences together to make a paragraph, my synopses of their positions had us both laughing out loud.  John Huppenthal is running for State Superintendent of Education on a platform of speaking English and discipline in the classroom.  "With a switch and a scowl?" asked G'ma as she filled in the dot next to his opponent.  I was surprised to realize how many of the Democrats had served on school boards before running for higher office.  I was equally surprised to see how many of the Republicans had not gone to college, or even high school.  A GED means something, but not as much as sitting in the classroom and finishing with your peers.  "What does he know about education, then?" she wondered, while voting for his opponent.  There was the joy in voting for a nice Jewish girl married to an astronaut (Gabrielle Giffords) and the disgust in being unable to vote for the local school board. 

Neither of us had received any information at all about that race - no phone calls, no door to door meet-and-greets, no mailers outlining the issues and the positions.  It's times like these that I miss living in Marin.  Our politics were truly local there; when 13,000 voters comprise the electorate it was  hard to ignore a race.  Everyone was concerned about everything - quality schools equaled high property values and well-heeled residents to shop in the local businesses which drew tourist-trade from the well-protected open spaces surrounding the community.  Here, I have a general sense of living in the Amphitheatre School District but not much beyond that.  My friends with school age kids do and don't use them, but no one seems too concerned about them, one way or the other.  I could exert some effort and figure it out for myself, but I am tired of being responsible for the education of other people's children when those people don't care enough to try and involve me themselves.  There are a lot of voters without a specific-child-related-interest who live in this District.  I can't believe it hasn't occurred to anyone that we might be a significant voting bloc.  In similar situations in the past, G'ma used to look for the one's she knew, then the Jews, then the women and then the Democrats.  We knew none of them, none were obviously co-religionists, and voting for a woman seemed downright sexist, even to G'ma's 87 year old self.  I should have called Mommy Crayola and asked her advice, but I didn't. We left those circles blank.

Then came the Propositions.  She's not against ObamaCare (which is now an epithet but which, I predict, someday will be said with as much reverence as Medicare) and she's a Union girl from way back, and anything with which Karl Rove might be connected is definitely not something she wants, no matter what that might be and so we were able to cut through the first third without much discussion.  Medical Marijuana?  "They want to tell my doctor what he can prescribe for me?" came right before she winked and said "And if someone wants to get it he'll get it anyway, right?" and I reminded her that a doctor had suggested it for her as an appetite enhancer while she was recovering from bilateral broken ankles and we wandered around the fact that she has "no memory at all of that" before we voted in favor of prescription pot and moved on to refusing to allow the legislature to sweep monies from voter approved funds for early childhood health and education and open space and trust lands into the general fund.  The argument that this would offset raising taxes to meet the budget deficit held no sway with my totally engaged, completely focused on the task at hand ("what's the next one?") maternal unit.  "And then we have no open space and kids go without..... hmphfffffff" and there was that face again, the one with the lips pursed and eyebrows knitted and the whole thing drawn into the center like a furious prune and believe you me you do not want to be on the receiving end of that look.  My mother filled in those circles with venom, with fury, with distaste for the idiots who could conceive of such a thing

and my heart was bursting. 

I knew she was in there.  I wasn't even peeved that she was sucking her dentures around in her mouth ("Gross Mommy!!  Stop It!!!" and she just smiles and does what she wants and I shrug and move on).

Nope, not at all.  We were involved and invested even if no one else seemed to be.

Thank you, suffragists.  

Helena  Hill Weed, Norwalk , Conn.    Serving 3 day sentence in D.C.  prison for carrying banner,      'Governments  derive their just powers from the consent of the  governed.'

 Thank you very very much.


And thanks to Bunionella for the photo and info on the suffragists

(First published November 3, 2010)

Try a Little Poetry

So, you don't like poetry, eh?  How about this one, by Billy Collins?  I had hoped to embed the video of 3 year old Samuel Chelpka reciting it, but the embedding code has been disabled so you'll have to click here and open another tab and listen as you read along

Litany

You are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker,
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.

However, you are not the wind in the orchard,
the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.
And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.
There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air.

It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,
maybe even the pigeon on the general's head,
but you are not even close
to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.

And a quick look in the mirror will show
that you are neither the boots in the corner
nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.

It might interest you to know,
speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,
that I am the sound of rain on the roof.

I also happen to be the shooting star,
the evening paper blowing down an alley
and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.

I am also the moon in the trees
and the blind woman's tea cup.
But don't worry, I'm not the bread and the knife.
You are still the bread and the knife.
You will always be the bread and the knife,

not to mention the crystal goblet and--somehow--the wine.

Did you like it?  It's accessible, written in plain, modern day English, and it's just hard enough to be worth your while without being so difficult that you turn away in disgust.  

But if that one is just too long for you, how about these 9 lines, taken right from the girls walking in front of you at the mall:

Oh, My God

Not only in church
and nightly by their bedsides
do young girls pray these days

Wherever they go,
prayer is woven into their talk
like a bright thread of awe

Even at the pedestrian mall
outbursts of praise
spring unbidden from their glossy lips.

If that doesn't make you smile next time you hear one of them cry out in praise of the lord while listening to a friend's recital of her date last night, well, I'm not sure that there's much hope for you at all.

Tomorrow's post will tell you why I am such a poetry fiend today.  I don't want to overwhelm you with too much to think about right now.

A Tribute to Leonard Slye

I started this blog with a post called Good Names, which ended like this:

I'm living the cowboy songs I loved as a child.

Roy Rogers is a good cowboy name.

My very favorite vacations, ever since I was little, have included a stop at a Frontier Town. There I could watch fake shoot-outs and see saloon girls and be startled by gunshots that were louder than they had any reason to be.  On a road trip at the end of the last century,  I drove the Little Cuter and our traveling mom-and-daughter companions to distraction with my pleading that we delay our arrival in Las Vegas so that we could visit the Ghost Town right next to our campground outside of Barstow.  It would only have taken an hour and I would have been so happy.  

Can you tell who won the argument? 

It makes me very glad to live an hour from the town of Tombstone, which has exactly the same buildings on its main street today as it did when the Earps rode into town.  I wear my cowboy boots and wander down the center of the dusty main street or listen to my heels on the boardwalk fronting the hucksters who are there now and who were kinda sorta the same there then.  The attitude hasn't changed a bit,  and that is a good thing.

No one knows why some of them are crested

I've been in the modern cowboy world in Benson, about 30 miles south of Tucson.  Last week I sat next to the pastor of a church in Cave Creek, where cowboys still tie their horses up to the rail in front of the saloon on Saturday night.  

There was an inordinate amount of horse poop on the trail this afternoon, which was almost the cause of a most unfortunate accident as I snapped this crested saguaro near the trailhead just off Camino del Cerro.

I'm living my cowboy dream.

yes, there was just one set up to feed 350 people

So, it shouldn't surprise you that spending the night with gunslingers and dance hall girls from Old Tucson Studios while eating chuck wagon bbq would make me smile.

G'ma and I were at the Fall Fiesta fundraiser at Tohono Chul, the desert botanical garden park and education center just a mile or so from home.  The weather was balmy and we couldn't stop smiling.

The buffet line moved very slowly, but we were too clever to be duped by rules and regulations.  Everyone else waited patiently at the tables for the serving to begin.  G'ma, her walker and I took advantage of two very comfy folding chairs right next to the chuck wagon and there we sat, she looking frail and unwilling to walk back and forth, and I sitting with my arm around her chair.  When they began to carve the tri-tip, we were the third and fourth mouths to be fed.  I'm still trying to figure out where those other two people came from.......

I'd left sweaters on two chairs and we wound our way around the gazebo and up the path and G'ma was just motoring along, no complaining, no pausing, just lots of happiness bouncing from her face to the faces of those we passed.  There was one beautiful blond woman sitting at the table when we came to claim our places, and she was glad to see that our garments were not orphaned.  Within a few minutes the other 3 seats were filled and the fun began.  Kathy the Beauty and Tim, her husband, hailed from Colorado and Nadine had moved from South Dakota to Tucson, and her brother, Bob, had followed soon after.  The six of us had nothing in common except, as the Beauty pointed out, a love of music and the desert.  We ate and laughed and ate some more.  G'ma kept up with the conversation as it swirled around from Pirates of Penzance to WNYC's radio broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera to the real reason we had all come out that night.

The Sons of the Pioneers, legendary singers of American cowboy songs, were returning to Tucson just for us.  They'd been regulars every winter for as long as anyone could remember and then, one day, their venue closed and they were gone to Branson, Missouri.  I choose to believe that they were sincere when they begged to be asked to return to their roots.... the group was founded here in 1934.  

And what a history they have.  Festus from Gunsmoke once sang with them.  The winner of both the Texas and The World Fiddling championships is a member of the group today.  Was he good?  He won the world fiddling championships, people.... he was great!  Other members have played with George Jones and Johnny Cash and their 3000 song catalog meticulously maintains the same sound that G'ma heard when she was a teenager, swooning over Roy Rogers, who, after starting life as Leonard Slye, was one of the three founding members of the group. 

There were silly jokes and funny little stories and The Orange Blossom Special, Streets of Laredo, Tumblin' Tumbleweeds and Just a Closer Walk with Thee before they Carried us Back to the Lone Prairie.  The bass player's prodigious belly was a character all its own, and when Ricky Boen called a kid up from the front row to help him out on a song,  well, we all just went with it.

 

Yes, the kid is holding the bow and yes, the world's best fiddler is moving the instrument against the rigid bow and yes, the music was unbelievable.  The fiddler is blurry in the picture because he was moving around the bow, dancing and smiling and generally having a grand old time.  Can you see the man in the peach shirt behind them?  That's Luther, Ricky's dad.  He's been with the group for 41 years. 

Eventually, the show was over and it was time to go home.  It was 10pm and we'd been outside for 5 hours.  We'd made new friends

We were having a totally Tucson evening, the six of us, with our walker and our walking boot and our wheelchair and each of us with someone we loved .... and each other.

and G'ma had added to her repertoire of coolness -- she got her first wristband that night

and I had a fine time reminding her of its purpose and her hipness over and over and over again as we waited for the food to be served.  There's a great picture of her surrounded by saloon girls and a cowboy who called her Ornery G'ma from Brooklyn and kept her going with one liners ... and going... and going..... but she hates how she looks in photographs and it was all I could do to get her to agree to have this one posted.  

There's just one last thing:

Did you know that Cole Porter wrote Don't Fence Me In? 

I bet you'll never sneer at Cowboy music again, now that you know that fact.

******

I wanted to add some embedded video to this post but the SotP's are pretty strict about their copyright.  I guess when you're the original you must be ever vigilant.  Click over to their website and you can browse to your heart's content.  Try it.... you'll like it.

New Clothes

I went shopping this afternoon.  I was in a neighborhood with stores containing interesting clothes (there aren't that many) and I had time and energy.  I wasn't hungry or thirsty and I didn't need a bathroom.  No one was waiting for me.  I had no excuses nor reasons to avoid the temptation.  The seasons are changing and my wardrobe needs refurbishing.

Let me clear - needs is a relative term.  I, like most of you, could get through the rest of my life without buying anything but replacement underwear.  I have sweaters and t-shirts and long sleeve shirts in a variety of fabrics and styles.  There are corduroy pants and jeans and one remaining pair of black wool slacks where the button and the button hole are actually able to get up-close and personal.  My changing shape has led to an interesting and immediate sense of the power of gravity; my weight is within 5 pounds of where it always is but the sizes have shifted.

Oh, my, have they shifted.  I remember when Banana Republic resized all their clothing.  Suddenly I was wearing a size 4.  I hadn't worn anything that small since college yet there I was, a mother of 2,  snapping the waistband of a pair of size 4 khaki pants.  I've always thought of that moment as the grown-up's version of don't-worry-honey-mommy-will-make-it-better: Feel like you're gaining weight?  Don't worry, we'll just rename the sizes on the garments and you'll be just fine.  It annoyed me then and it annoys me now.  If I don't have the clothes to remind me to stand up straight and pull in my abs I'll be a round ball of protoplasm before the year is out.  I have a bell-weather pair of jeans (don't we all?) and when they start to tug I know it's back on the treadmill I go.  There's a wonderfulness to being a gym rat that may not be obvious to those of you who eschew those sweaty confines:  gym clothes have elastic waists and are very very very forgiving.  With an old XL t-shirt over the top I could weight 200 pounds before I noticed a difference.  I don't need the manufacturers being co-dependent.

So, there I was, at Main Gate on the campus of the UofA on a Sunday afternoon.  The adjacent college town area is two blocks of eating (cold cereal, pizza, sushi, gyrosand burgers and cupcakes) and beauty enhancements (waxing, cutting, piercing, tattooing, shampooing, perfuming, etc etc etc) and shopping.  There are national chains and local boutiques and most college coeds must be rail thin because there was nothing that would possibly have fit on the bottom half of my self.  

Not a thing. And I'm not that big.  But that was okay with me, because I had my skinny jeans and cowboy boots on the bottom half of myself and getting them off and then on again was really more than I was interest in doing.   But there were some lusciously soft and surprisingly reasonable tops hanging from the rods and for them my jeans and boots were perfect.  I bought three for less than $100, including tax, and I rolled them up in my purse so "No, thank you, I don't need a bag.  There's too much packaging in the world, anyway,"

Insert gnashing of teeth and groans accompanying the Cuters plaintively pleading me to stop..... "MOM, why do you always have to say that???"

After 15 minutes I was done.  I really liked everything I bought I each item seemed to be worth the price I paid.  Tucson's celebrating The Day of the Dead tonight, and the white-and-black-facepainted revelers were as happy as I was.

I now have an updated winter wardrobe.  I bought new earrings in Sedona last month and I'm getting a haircut next week.  Let the holidaze begin -- I am ready.

While Sitting on the Patio

 

I'm waiting, once again.  My hosts,  C&B had to work this morning,  and we were up and out the door before 9.  Of course, my luncheon with the Dean isn't until noon, so, here I am, under an umbrella beneath the palm trees at the Royal Palm Resort having breakfasted on an egg white vegetable frittata in the company of many little black birds who were searching for crumbs.

 

The Royal Palm is an old and elegant establishment, and I'm thankful that they ordered up a soft breeze for me this morning.  

Hi, guys!  Now you are semi-famous!  You are on the internet!

The worker bees wear black vests and pants and white shirts and they sport gold nametags.... it feels like Laurel in the Pines, where my grandparents took me for Passover when I was 11. 

 

Sophisticated and refined, with a classy patina that only comes with age, everyone is smiling and helpful and I'm a happy girl, here at my mosaic topped table in the outdoor foyer.

I know, a foyer is an inside entry corridor according to the dictionary, but this is Phoenix and it's 86 and sunny in November and an indoor foyer just wouldn't make any sense at all.  I'm reminded of the Big Cuter's first day of school in California, when he was reprimanded for running in the halls.  "But, I'm outside!  This isn't a hall.  I'm outside!"  This western living takes some getting used to.

There's a convention of lanyard wearing middle aged white men and a group of older woman accompanying a bride-to-be and there are gardeners and waiters and yet it's peaceful and serene. 

I do not understand the need to play background music in the public areas - I moved from my comfy lounge chair when Steppenwolf's Born to Be Wild began blaring from the speakers surrounding the pool - but I've found a table with quieter muzak and I'm trying to ignore the distraction.  I could run Pandora on Nellie the Netbook, but I don't want to add to the noise quotient.  

There is free Wi-Fi out here on the red stones and I'm smiling at the conventioneers as they go inside for their meeting.

Phoenix feels different from Tucson in so many ways.  There's a sophistication that we miss 100 miles south.  People are uniformly more well-dressed here, and that's not only at the resorts.  The crowd at Postino last night was young and old and there wasn't a pair of sneakers or flip-flops in the house.  No one was over-dressed, but they had taken care to look groomed.  Usually, I am comforted by the lack of a dress code in Tucson; last night I was cosseted by the neatly turned out Phoenicians.

This hotel speaks to the fact that Phoenix is more of a city than is Tucson.  There's a sense of moneyed history here (the hotel was built as a private home in the early 20th century), and the blending of the old and the new is well-expressed.  Take a look at what I saw in the public areas today:

 

These light fixtures were hanging from the railing going up to the restaurant.

 

 There was a lot of tile art on the walls and on the floors.

This girl made me smile.

 This desk is in the lobby.

 The sun has moved over the top of the archway, and I've moved around my table to another chair. 

I'm having a very nice morning, waiting to be entertained and enlightened and fed.  It's been a pleasure to share it with you.

Sitting and Waiting

I don't wait well.  I can feel the minutes ticking by, one by one, inexorably marking the time I could have been doing something else.  The issue is exacerbated by the fact that I am always early.  If my companions are on-time I've already been there for a while, examining the wallpaper and listening to the conversation of others.

Having friends who are also early presents its own set of problems.  If she's waiting for me when I pull into the parking lot I feel guilty for making her wait - even if I am 10 minutes early myself.  Miss Marjorie and I encounter this issue every time we hike together.  It makes us laugh, but I still try to arrive before she does.  I've failed the last few times .... but I'm still trying.

TBG also believes in timely arrivals.  This is usually a good thing, since I firmly believe that a shared pace makes for a happy life, but there have been issues.  Leaving for the airport with the Cuters invariably led to an argument: if we were to depart at 8am he was in the car, behind the wheel, having pulled out of the garage at 7:45.  And there he sat, waiting patiently...... or what passed for patience ...... tapping his fingers on the steering wheel and wondering where the rest of us might be.  And where were we?  We were brushing our teeth before putting our toothbrushes in our suitcases and we were checking to be sure that Smoochie, the Little Cuter's stuffed pooch, wasn't hiding under her bed but was safely tucked in her carry-on, and we were turning off lights and grabbing a final drink and making a last run to the bathroom and then I was able to stop and think of what I'd forgotten.  This process was not made any easier by the knowledge that Dad was in the car already.  After a while I began to clarify our time-line.  Did he want to be driving by 8am or was 7:45 really more comfortable for him?  All I needed was a specific time frame; we didn't need to best one another by being first to the car.

Daddooooo exhibited the opposite behavior.  G'ma would herd the three children into the back seat of whichever Ford we were driving that year and then she'd begin to holler.  "Where are you?" she'd cry.  He was never watching television or indulging in other time-wasting behaviors.  No, he was just putting the finishing touches on a project in the garage, or loading the remaining leaves into the trash bin, or checking to be sure that the shingles he'd replaced were still adhering to the wall, or he was talking to the neighbors or..... or..... or..... it didn't really matter.  We were waiting, and he was delaying.  Until my sister decided that he was the oldest case of undiagnosed ADD we just imagined it was a power play. designed to make us all recognize that he was the most important member of the family.  Mostly, it was another reason for our parents to argue.  Not surprising, just routine, but upsetting nonetheless.  We never missed anything, but we were often just in time.  I'm sure that's why I'm such an early bird as an adult.


We've dropped friends who were always late, and we've remained friends with people who otherwise annoyed us because we knew that they would never make us late for a movie.  The Norwegian is  never early, but he is always on time.  He checks his car doors and his trunk and his pockets and the ambient temperature and energy and he used to make us crazy until we realized that this was just his own way of being there.  We have never missed a movie or a dinner reservation or been too late for a party or a rally because he was dallying.  He's slow but not tardy, and that is an important distinction.

I tend to race through life.  It's an effort for me to stop and smell the roses (okay, the creosote..... we don't really have roses growing by the side of the road in the desert southwest).  I'm always wondering what's next and I'm in a hurry to get there.  There's something to be said for taking things slowly, I guess.  I don't rush while I'm hiking; I look at the flora and the vistas and the trail bed and I take pictures and I breathe deeply.  But that's a different issue than the theme of this post -- being on time doesn't mean that you have to rush, it just means that you have to plan.  And I am a very good planner, even if I'm not a very good waiter.
*****
I am waiting as I type this post, sitting in the lounge of The Sanctuary, waiting to have dinner with the Dean of the College of Human Ecology at Cornell University.  I'm an involved alumna, and he's in town for a meet-and-greet with big donors (one of whom I am not) and I've been invited to dine and chat over food in one of Phoenix's fanciest venues.  Of course, I arrived an hour early.

Another Exhortation

 From Roger Ebert's Journal, thanks to The Little Cheese for the link.

Don't Forget to VOTE!!!

If you don't vote, then I don't want to hear one word of criticism or complaint or praise or commendation out of you for the next 2 years.....6 if you're talking about the U.S. Senate.

Regarding Sanity in the Polity (the final version)

Blogspot decided to publish this on Sunday when it was an unfinished opus.  

Today's post is what was meant to be.

 

Our American narrative has been in need of tending lately.  Conformity on both ends of the spectrum has brought our nation of immigrants to a condition I'll liken to carving a london broil which has been cooked on a brand-new bbq.  You don't know where the hot spots are, nor how evenly the entire slab of meat will cook, so you end up with burnt edges and a raw center.  Nothing is quite right, but you've taken a long time to get there.  You can't throw it away; it's too expensive and it's all you have for dinner.  But you're just not happy.  Not happy at all.

As John Stewart said on Saturday, when you amplify everything you hear nothing*.  I drive past signs telling me that Jesse Kelly Is Lying and that Gabrielle Giffords cut $500 billion from your Medicare and while yard signs have never been know for the subtlety of their message this year's crop seems to be more vitriolic than usual.  Is it true that Nancy Young Wright Supports Education or that she Voted for Cuts for Disabled Students?   Everyone is screaming at me and facts are in short supply.

Yes, Rep. Giffords voted to bail out Wall Street with your money but she did so when George Bush was president.  And we still have a functioning economy, something I am not so sure I would be able to write today had our banking system imploded.  There is nuance needed here.  

Jesse Kelly ends his television spots by encouraging me to keep believing in America.  But whose America does he want me to love?  His, where doors are shut in the face of newborns denied citizenship because their parents are undocumented?  Anchor Babies are no longer enough to keep families from being deported; the suggestion that a child should be held responsible for the misdeeds of her parents seems vaguely un-American to me.  Yet this is his narrative, his piece of the American story, and he served in Iraq so who am I to question his allegiance?

And that's just the point.  I'd like to believe that there can be animus without enmity*, that we can agree to disagree, that we can figure out how to position the meat on the grill so that nobody ends up with a charred end.  Or if they do, it's because they like it that way.  And one more thing - the charred end piece has to remember that undercooked center, because it is part and parcel of the whole.  We are united states here in America.  There were vast religious and cultural and ethnic differences between the colonies but somehow they managed to find common ground.  Was it perfect from any perspective?  Probably not.  But it was a start.  And the compromise was strong enough to hold these disparate American narratives together for century upon century.

It's nice to be reminded that we work together every damn day*.... and that's a good thing.

Perhaps that is a position from which we can start to build a more useful narrative.

and yet somehow the VFW, that bastion of liberalism and socialism, is supporting her.

* thanks to John Stewart's Rally to Restore Sanity speech, 10/30/10

Bonus Post - Rally to Restore Sanity

I wish I'd been there.  Monday's post will have a report from our National Correspondent, IntrepidCat, unless something fun comes up and she blows me off.  Til then, listen to John Stewart's speech at the Rally today.  If you don't want to listen to the whole thing, I excerpted my favorite sentences below the clip.

Stay sane, denizens. 

"We are in hard times - not end times"

"We can have animus without being enemies."

Our 24-hour-news-media-overload forces us into a situation where "we amplify everything and hear nothing."

"....the exhausting effort it takes to hate."

"The image of Americans reflected back at us by the media is false.... it's like looking in a fun house mirror."

And if you only want a minute or two to get the feel of it, go to 8:48 and watch the cars merge as you listen to Stewart explain how "we work together every damn day."  

It will make you feel better about America and Americans. 

At least it did for me.

HAPPY HALLOWE'EN

FROM MY BURROW TO YOURS!

created with the help of Mr. 5 & Mr. 7

And now for one I didn't create, but which makes me laugh out loud. Would that I had the nerve thought to do this: 

And finally, some interactive fun can be found at one of my favorite places on the web these days. 

ENJOY THE WEEKEND!

Insurance Will Cover It (Part II)

Click here for the first post in this series.

 I'm going to assume a certain knowledge of the facts for this post.

The bills have stopped pouring in.  I've been filling in the credit card information in the little boxes printed on the back of the invoices and using the return envelopes with the little glassine windows and some of the Heifer International return address labels and my self-stick Forever Stamps.... all feeling vaguely 20th Century in this era of on-line banking.  I can't remember the last time I wrote a check for anything.  

While the bills have stopped flooding the mailbox, the phone has been busily ringing.  Amidst the political robo-calls and surveys with obvious built-in biases today I received a call on behalf of the Billing Department of The Hospital.  Okay.... this bill has been in my house for 6 days.  Two of those days were Saturday and Sunday and for 3 of those days I was out of town.  They couldn't really think that the payment was overdue, could they?  And what did on behalf of mean, anyway?  Had they sent the bill to collections already?  

"Before we go any further, let me ask you something, Sir.  Are you in The Hospital's Billing Department?"  Yes, he was and he was only wondering if there might be a supplemental insurance policy which we had forgotten to provide during our visit to the ER and how was I planning to pay the remainder? 

Once I climbed off the ceiling, I was able to listen and hear him say that he was in no way trying to collect the bill at that moment (thought he'd take my credit card if I wanted to be done with it right then - which I did) but was only trying to help.  If I'd overlooked an insurance policy that might help me with the bill, he'd be glad to file the paperwork.  I took a deep breath - he was a very nice kid and it was obviously the script from which he was forced to read that was making me nutty - and I remembered the demographics in the ER that night.  We were the youngest people by a decade or so.  I was frantic and distracted; I can only imagine what I'll be like when I'm 80 and dealing with children pretending to be doctors and nurses who breeze in and breeze out without identifying themselves or asking permission to stick tubes and needles in the writhing patient.  I forgave the young man, said that there were no other insurances we could dun, and then was surprised to hear him ask me to detail my complaints about the care we'd received.  He typed, I talked.

Attitude, information systems glitches - these could be laid at the door of The Hospital and lay them there I did.  But as our conversation went on I had an epiphany.  We really hadn't needed the ER at all.  The primary care physician needed to see an x-ray and then, perhaps a CAT scan.  The fact that the urologist had done both two days before meant nothing.  Those results were in another office, owned by another practice and it was after 3pm and anyway they wanted their own and on and on. 

Had I thought to ask why we were being sent to the ER (I thought he was so sick that he needed immediate hospital based care because his symptoms were worsening and it might not be pneumonia) I hope I that I also would have had the presence of mind to make further inquiries regarding the use of the existing x-rays.  If the urologist was able to diagnose pneumonia when his area of expertise is somewhat lower in the human anatomy, then why wouldn't any competent radiologist be able to do the same?  If the pictures were available on-line (and why weren't they or couldn't they be made available that way since the urologist read them on his computer?) why couldn't a radiologist and the doctor in whose office we were sitting confer and diagnose and prescribe and send us home directly?  We used resources and spent time and money unnecessarily.  

If there's a better argument for streamlining the sharing of information I'd like to hear it.  For now, I'm sticking with this experience.

Given that there's a bias toward tried and true in our doctor's office (one of the many reasons we're leaving his practice) it's not surprising that this smooth flow of data does not exist.  The fact that he was willing to expose the patient to invasive rays rather than making an effort to obtain the test results directly makes us just a little nutty, now that we can look at it in retrospect. But still.... sending us to the Emergency Room? We were in his office, which exists in a kind of surreal zone of medical practitioners and the laboratories which support them; 3 miles of professional condominium suites and hospital units and lots and lots of x-ray and scanning machines spread in equal distances north and south of his suite.  Why didn't we go to one of those out-patient places?

I am glad that the patient was treated with IV antibiotics that night, but I wonder if he recovered $11,000 faster than he would have had the tests been read and the medicine prescribed that afternoon?  My hunch is - probably not.

So where does the responsibility for this debacle lie?  I'm referring to the enormous waste of time and energy utilized to diagnose a problem which didn't require the facilities of a hospital based emergency room.  Should I have questioned the suggestion that he go to the ER?  I don't think that I would want to be remembered as the woman who interfered with proper medical care.  On the other hand, would it have been inappropriate to wonder aloud about the reasoning behind the decision? 

Should there be a triage station outside the ER?  Broken bones and stopped hearts would go to the front of the line, but perhaps there ought to be a not-really-that-sick bay for those who are mistakenly sent to their doors.  What is the hospital's responsibility in this situation?  Do they need to do more outreach to the physicians in town, reminding them that other resources exist?  Or would that interfere with the hospital's bottom line? 

I realize that I am woefully ignorant about many things which attach themselves to this incident.  Are Emergency Rooms centers of profit or loss for a hospital?  Are the physicians employees or private contractors?  How did I let things spiral so far out of control?  One thing I know for certain - there has to be a greater level of trust than currently exists between the physician and this particular patient.  So much of what went on was frightening and fast and we were floundering because we didn't know what was going on, nor why.  I think that it's time to make the switch to G'ma's gerontologist - that 30-something Birkenstock wearing Blackberry toting 21st century caregiver.  That is one piece of this puzzle over which I have some control.
*****
More will follow in this series - including a further dissection of the bill itself.