PTSD and Me

This story has a happy ending.  Read the follow-up post published Nov. 13, 2017

We boarded early, thanks to our Allegiant credit card perk, and placed our suitcase in the bin right overhead. My very anxious flyer husband had a moment of panic he didn’t need when he reached up to retrieve his book and couldn’t find our bag.  

The flight attendants had moved our suitcase to an overhead bin several rows back, according to the woman seated behind us.  They never told us. He found the case and moved it back over our seats only to have it moved again, without warning, and replaced with someone else’s bags by the same two flight attendants.  We watched them the second time.  

At neither time did they explain the move, or notify us that they were relocating the bag.  They just did it. There was no indication that the original location, the one right over our seat, was inappropriate - no sign, no verbal warning, nothing. 

Normally, that would have occasioned a grimace and a question.  But it was Monday, and the news was filled with yet another murderer with an oversized weapon and an undersized ego, this time killing people at prayer.  All those families living through TBG's nightmare, joining the club of survivors and their loved ones, crying on the screens in the airport, on the front pages of the newspapers, bringing my husband right back to the Emergency Room in January, 2011.

PTSD is a recurring visitor, set off by loud noises or young men in hoodies passing on the street.  Sometimes, the trigger is more obvious, like a mentally ill man with a gun he shouldn't have had shooting up people who were gathered together for a quintessentially American experience.  It inflames every nerve ending, heightens the fight-or-flight response, sends shivers and sweats up and down and all around the body.  It's no fun at all.  It's also very difficult to control.

And so, instead of passing it off with I can't believe they did that, he stewed.  He grumbled.  He clenched and unclenched his fists.  Calming down was not an option.  He was raw, and they were the target.  He said nothing, but he was pissed.  The flight attendants said nothing, either.

When it was time to serve drinks, these same two ignored our row, though they served the people in front, behind, and across the aisle.  They never asked if we would like anything. They just pushed away.   Our seat mate asked me to press the call button. One returned, snarled as she clicked off the dinging, heard the elderly lady’s request for a snack, snapped “We’ll be back,” and left without further service or comment.  

My seat mate was hungry and confused.  My husband was incensed.  I was a puddle of angst.  Were our reactions over the top?  Probably.  But we were in full PTSD mode, and were in no mood to be calm.

Eventually, the flight attendant returned and when my seatmate asked about being ignored, she retorted with “We had to move the cart."  

We love flying Allegiant. We do it all the time. We tell our friends that it’s worth the drive from Tucson to Mesa. We’ve never had anything but delightful, friendly, thoughtful service until now. Allegiant has a warm place in my heart, since it brings me to my grandchild in South Bend.  This experience, on that day, was anything but lovely.

Being ignored is unpleasant. Being dismissed is just rude.  If this had happened on the ground, in a restaurant, we’d have gotten up and left, after talking to the manager.  That was obviously not an option for us in the air.

A bit of courtesy retraining, reminding them that information is the most important currency when traveling, that consideration and thoughtfulness make for happy customers  seemed to be in order.  While safety is obviously their first and most important concern, polite treatment of paying customers is important, too.

And so I began to type.  Most of the verbiage in this post is from the email I wrote, letting my fingers carry off some of the steam pouring out of my ears.  I didn't send it.  Writing it was enough. I didn't want to explain that those of us in The Club that No One Wants to Join are viscerally affected when yet another mass shooting is on the news.  There was no way to convey that, while their service was atrocious, our reaction was over the top and yet completely understandable.

The world is a dangerous place.  Most of the time I can ignore that fact.  Most of the time I can go about the business of daily life, passing off the occasional bump in the road with my ongoing mantra - At least I am here to experience it.   But when the situation is exacerbated by real life events that echo our own trauma, all bets are off.

I still think that they should have told us that they were moving our suitcase.  I don't know that I needed to be peeved about it for a 4 hour flight.

PTSD..... the gift that keeps on giving.

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

We took the South Shore Line from South Bend to Chicago. The round trip cost $27.  Eastbound, our conductor called for our attention before imparting detailed instructions on the do’s and don’t’s of train travel. He asked if anyone had any questions, and paused to give us a chance to respond.

We took an Uber from FlapJilly’s house to the South Bend Airport for $25 plus a generous tip because Antonio was super cool.  We spent a lovely 25 minutes talking football and relationships and admiring the entrepreneurial spirit.

Less than $300 got us to and from FlapJilly and her parents, via Allegiant Airways and a trek up and down I-10 at either end.  And now, at the end of all that coming and going, I can barely keep my eyes open.

All those miles, filled with all that love.  I’m going to have very sweet dreams tonight.

SOFA CHICAGO

Seret took me to the Structural Objects Functional Art and Design Fair on Navy Pier .

Visiting art with an artist .... I was in heaven.

In no particular order, here are some of my favorites.

Tableware was on display in all shapes and colors.

I stared at these curves, marveling at the handles and the spout .

This set was made out of paper.

There were a series of faux grade school reports.

This was my favorite.

Portraiture had a big presence, with faces created in three dimensions.

These little guys were part of a larger set which came from Korea.

There were MFA students presenting a project representing light and space.

It's pool noodles over bent metal.

I'd have bought it were they selling it.

These little glass teapots live encased in glass.

There were several iterations the theme, but these were my favorites.

He's carved from wood.

I know.  He looks real.  I almost spoke to him.

The work with glass stopped us in our tracks.

I imagined this as a pair of sconces.... very expensive sconces.

The insides of these gondolas were all different.

These are look open don't they?  

In fact they are shaded glass and flat.

The photo doesn't do justice to the depth of the paint on the canvas.

It looked like it was lots of fun to create.

I wanted to try it, myself.

This is called Industry.

I think it's a phallic submarine.

The woodcarvers' guild was well represented.

This is so delicate, it looked like it was about to float away.

At the end of a long aisle, there was this:

and this:

I couldn't stop giggling.

These sculptures were shimmery, lifelike, intricate, and filled with history and culture.

I spent quite some time communing with Hanuman, my favorite monkey.

There was a gallery filled with instruments in every color imaginable..

The gallery lighting made photography a challenge, so here are some close-ups.

And then there was this, the first thing we saw when we walked in.

It was a wonderful afternoon.

We wished we had unlimited funds.

We'd have brought all of this home, and more.

Old Friends

We've known the groom since playgroup, in the early 1980’s.   The bride is a new and worthy addition to our crew.  Their nuptials this weekend are a lovely coda to our annual Halloween With FlapJilly Adventure; it was kind of them to schedule it so conveniently.

TBG and I will take the train from South Bend to Millennium Park in Chicago, avoiding driving through the toll road and Stony Island and city traffic. We qualify for the Senior Fare; round trip travel will cost less than a tank of gas.  Public transit makes me smile. 

The affair is in the Loews Downtown Chicago; we’ll travel by elevator from our room to the party. That’s a perfect commute. No need for a hat or gloves or a coat to defend my black tie outfit from the elements.  With a few alterations, TBG’s tuxedo Now looks quite study; we haven’t gotten this dressed up in a long time.

One of the advantages of old age combined with bullet wounds is the right to wear flats. Black patent comfort will complement my fancy strapless dress and glittery jacket. I broke out the onyx jewelry which I reserve for special occasions, although I debated bringing G’ma’s rhinestones. The drippy dangle earrings were heavy on my earlobes when I wore them while packing.  If I couldn’t bear them for an hour I decided not to torture myself for an evening.

Glamour, glitz and comfort.  It’s going to be a perfect weekend.

Distracted

Foreign tourists mowed down by a fanatic.

Presidential tweets excoriating our judicial system.

My Rubber Stamp Representative, who votes with Trump 96% of the time, is deemed too liberal by her fellow Conservatives.

It was 38 degrees when I drove Little Cuter to work this morning and it rained on us with cold, hard drops when we walked to the car after dinner.

I could be annoyed, depressed, aggravated, peeved. I could be righteously outraged.




But there's this little person with the biggest personality who serves as a perfect distraction.

The world is going to hell in a hand basket, but it’s pure background noise.

Grandchildren..... better than Ativan.

Halloween At FlapJilly's House

Our Tucson neighborhood does not measure up to the minimal standards of Halloween-ing.

There are no decorations.

There are no trick or treaters.

There is no candy waiting patiently on doorsteps for random requests.

And so, TBG and I travel to the midwest for our fix.

Little Cuter and SIR have the best house.

I stayed behind to man the candy station, while the kids and the husband and the pooch took off to acquire sweets and share the joy.

There was a slow and steady stream of littles

and bigs.

The need for a coat was overwhelmed by their need to show off the costumes.

I was more than happy to share my fire pit.

Some came in wagons, holding tight to Moms and Dads.

Some were happy to be terrifying all by themselves.

The strangers were wonderful, it's true, but those I knew were even better.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg rolled the streets of Northern Virginia

and Wonder Woman protected the home front with style and panache.

All the love, all the joy, all the smiles warmed me more than the fire pit or the five layers of clothes I was wearing.  

Apologies

Yesterday was the first time since 2009 that I’ve forgotten to post my thoughts for your consideration. TBG and I are visiting FlapJilly and her parents and other grandparents and her cousins and, I must be honest and admit that I totally forgot to write to you.

Mea culpa.  Mea maxim culpa.

FlapJilly is all consuming, from  hide and seek that got Grandma in the coat closet with my legs stuck above the boots and umbrellas to stuffing her mouth full of delicious and gigantic grapes. She is delightful company, but the company is impossible to ignore. She’s charming and demanding and right  now she is refusing to go to sleep.

She’s overstimulated and overtired and overindulged by her maternal grandparental units, and, perhaps, we’ve aggravated the situation. There is a minuscule amount of guilt on our parts, we must admit. There is something delightfully decadent about making her happy.

Can you blame me for falling into her orbit and out of yours?

Apologies

There are apologies, and then there are apologies.

Mark Halperin, author, talking head, 52 year old Harvard graduate,  says that he understands from these accounts that my behavior was inappropriate and caused others pain. For that, I am deeply sorry and I apologize.  

I'm sorry for the women in his life if it took five others to bring to his attention that which they have been watching forever.  I'm bothered by the men in his life who watched and said nothing.  And I'm annoyed that time will pass and he'll be back after his mea culpas have been swallowed up by the next sexy story.  

Bush the Elder, former President, groped two women at a photo shoot.  His spokesman released this statement:

At age 93, President Bush has been confined to a wheelchair for roughly five years, so his arm falls on the lower waist of people with whom he takes pictures. To try to put people at ease, the president routinely tells the same joke — and on occasion, he has patted women’s rears in what he intended to be a good-natured manner. Some have seen it as innocent; others clearly view it as inappropriate. To anyone he has offended, President Bush apologizes most sincerely.

In her dotage, G'ma, who never told a blue joke in her life, began to leer at the young male aides at the Old Folks Home.  Her younger self would have been appalled.  That younger self was expert at the Oh dear not again, Daddoooooo eye roll, the same one Barbara Bush gave Heather Lind when she heard, once again, that bad joke, that unfunny joke, that reminder that her husband was just a little bit off.

Do I understand him because it's familiar or because I think it's generational?  I wonder if it's the reverse aging that comes toward the end, when your parents regress and become your children, replete with 3rd grade potty humor? 

I'm not sure why.  I believe the one, and I'm skeptical of the other. They were both wrong. Why I am willing to accept the sincerity in one case and not in the other remains a mystery.

Something in the Air - A Snippet

Joseph was kicking a sturdy red bucket.  They were determined kicks, fueled by the furious expression on his face.  He never came close to hitting anyone; his kicks were precise and focused.  He was looking for an escape valve for something that was boiling inside; the girls and I decided that he must have had a bad morning at home.

I'm a little off center myself, now that our President has declared Jeff Flake's take down a personal victory, now that no other Republicans have backed him up or disputed the President's story of his victory lap at lunch.  There's a Bannon backed candidate for his seat; the mainstream alternative seems to be my own personal Congresswoman, Martha McSally, who is a Rubber Stamp Republican, voting with the President 95.9% of the time even though Trump lost our District by 4.9%. 

I twist and turn and get no place.  I wonder if Joseph has a red bucket I could borrow.

Jeff Flake

I had another post planned for today, but evens go ahead of me and here I am, once again, bemoaning the sorry state of American politics.

Jeff Flake, my junior Senator, is trading in complicity for..... hmmmmm..... a run for the Presidency in 2020?  His remarks on the Senate floor are worth reading in full, but here are some of the pieces I liked the best:

I rise today with no small measure of regret. Regret, because of the state of our disunion, regret because of the disrepair and destructiveness of our politics, regret because of the indecency of our discourse, regret because of the coarseness of our leadership, regret for the compromise of our moral authority, and by our – all of our – complicity in this alarming and dangerous state of affairs. It is time for our complicity and our accommodation of the unacceptable to end.

Well, you don't hear that every day.

He called them all out for being complicit; it's every bit as powerful as SNL's Ivanka Trump perfume ad, and every bit as true.


My soon-to-be-former-Senator went on.

But we must never adjust to the present coarseness of our national dialogue – with the tone set at the top.

We must never regard as “normal” the regular and casual undermining of our democratic norms and ideals. We must never meekly accept the daily sundering of our country - the personal attacks, the threats against principles, freedoms, and institutions, the flagrant disregard for truth or decency, the reckless provocations, most often for the pettiest and most personal reasons, reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with the fortunes of the people that we have all been elected to serve.

I wonder if he's been listening in to my dinner conversations over the past 10 months?  Petty.  Having nothing to do with .... the people (he's) elected to serve. He sounds like TBG and me, changing from the news because it's spoiling our digestion.

There's more. He's finally come to the point at which those of us who've been paying attention for a long time began:

With respect and humility, I must say that we have fooled ourselves for long enough that a pivot to governing is right around the corner, a return to civility and stability right behind it. We know better than that. By now, we all know better than that.

Yup, he is what he is and he's not going to change, neither sooner nor later.  This is a man who brags that he has never said I'm Sorry.  Such hubris is, as Sen. Flake goes on to say, quite dangerous:

When we remain silent and fail to act when we know that that silence and inaction is the wrong thing to do – because of political considerations, because we might make enemies, because we might alienate the base, because we might provoke a primary challenge, because ad infinitum, ad nauseam – when we succumb to those considerations in spite of what should be greater considerations and imperatives in defense of the institutions of our liberty, then we dishonor our principles and forsake our obligations. Those things are far more important than politics.

He is talking about the soul of not just the Republican Party but of the Republicans themselves.  They are so busy keeping their jobs they are forgetting to do their jobs.  

 Leadership knows where the buck stops. Humility helps. Character counts. Leadership does not knowingly encourage or feed ugly and debased appetites in us.

Leadership lives by the American creed: E Pluribus Unum. From many, one.

We were not made great as a country by indulging or even exalting our worst impulses, turning against ourselves, glorying in the things which divide us, and calling fake things true and true things fake. And we did not become the beacon of freedom in the darkest corners of the world by flouting our institutions and failing to understand just how hard-won and vulnerable they are. 

I still think he's wrong on guns.  I still think he's wrong on reproductive rights.  I still think his votes on Repeal and Replace were misguided.  I think that his book was the first shot and this is the second shot across the bow of I'm Running for President. 

Right now, though, I really don't care.  Right now he's standing in the well of the Senate decrying the desecration of our American values by the man in the Oval Office, a member of his own party, a demagogue with a Twitter feed.  Right now, that constitutes bravery.

I'm proud of him today.

 

TEDx Sedona, 2017

The license for Sedona's TEDx project is held by a friend of Seret and Mr. DreamyCakes.  They were flying in from Chicago.  Sedona is a lovely drive from Tucson.  I missed my friends.  The decision to attend was an easy one.

It was a good decision.  There were allusions to avenues of thought I'd never considered before.  There was laughter and there was sorrow and there were gasps of surprise, of outrage, of disbelief.  The speakers were seated in the audience, were available at dinner before and lunch during and dinner afterwards.  They were out on the patio, wandering around, eager to engage the audience.  It was communal and stimulating and very, very real.

There were young women out to change the world.

Zoe Wild, a former Buddhist nun, a whirlwind, an unstoppable force for good in the world. entranced us with tales from the coast of Lesbos, where she and her team braved frigid waters and darkness and rocks to guide boats carrying refugees to shore.

Following their progress to the camp which would house them, she saw an opportunity where others saw despair.  Shifting the paradigm from crisis to progress, from charity to solidarity, she and her team took on the roles of city planners.  Why not create a big city, they wondered?  One Light Global built a community center, a school, gardens and gathering places.  Instead of disparate humans seeking shelter from a storm not of their own making, One Light Global looked at the residents as members of the community, as beings with skills they could share.  A tool sharing program soon created areas for small businesses to grow, for crafting sessions to develop into community support groups, for a sense of doing for themselves instead of being on the receiving end of charity.

Be bold and revolutionary with your participation to enact change

Deesha Dyer applied for a White House internship when President Obama was inaugurated.  She had to be a part of his team, even though she didn't have a college degree.  A full-time job followed the internship, along with her promise to finish her degree.

She did that and rose to become the White House Social Secretary.  Stunned by her own transformation, she resolved to share the wealth of knowledge and experience her opportunities has opened for her.  She and friends founded beGirl.World.  After two years of study together, 14 girls from Philadelphia traveled to Paris and London.

They traveled on passports secured with the help of beGirl.World, taking an airplane, not a rocket ship as someone had posited.  The notion of Europe was that distant to those girls.  They had never known anyone who traveled the world; that's for white girls, they said. After their experience abroad, the girls are going on to college, to the Peace Corps, and, they hope, back to places far and wide.

Again, it wasn't charity.  It was inclusion and sharing experiences and a conscious effort to make these girls citizens of the world.

Deesha made an interesting point:  You think nothing is wrong when everyone is the same.  Those girls didn't feel deprived; they knew no one who ventured overseas, who had a passport, who dreamed of climbing the Eiffel Tower (the real one, not the one in Las Vegas).  Without that opportunity, they really didn't know what they were missing.  Deesha showed them that it was out there, and attainable, too.

It was easy to feel good about the world after listening to what these two had to say.

A Short and Strident Rant

The executive editor of the New York Times calls outing Bill O'Reilly and Harvey Weinstein the newspaper's biggest stories of his tenure, the ones of which he is most proud.  I can't decide if I'm okay with that. 

Certainly, the stories needed to be told.  Convincing the accusers to speak publicly was a coup others had tried and failed to accomplish, according to Rachel Maddow.  But the New York Times published the Pentagon Papers, igniting all sorts of things .... the end of a war, the end of a Presidency. 

I'm not sure that men will stop behaving badly.

In the meantime, if I have to watch their female announcers wearing cocktail dresses cut down to here with hemlines up to there, then I want ESPN's male announcers to stand beside them in black leather pants, shirtless.  I'm looking for equal opportunity exploitation. 

I Made a Grown Man Cry

OFA asked me to shepherd a group to Congresswoman McSally's office this morning.  We were a small but vocal band of three retirees, each with a story to tell.  OFA does provide fact sheets with talking points; our voices amplified them with a personal point of view.

Bill talked about gun safety and DACA and his experiences in the field.  JannyLou talked about insuring a loved one with Type 1 Diabetes before and after the Affordable Care Act.  The Congresswoman's staffer nodded and sighed and took notes.  He was properly sympathetic and bemused by a system that forces long time partners to skip marriage in case health care costs should bankrupt their family.  He heard what they were saying. 

I asked him if he'd visited the Gabe Zimmerman room in Congress, the one dedicated to Gabby's staffer who was killed on January 8, 2011.  After all, Gabe was employed in the same capacity, meeting with constituents, before he was murdered by a Glock wielded  by a man even the United States Army didn't want to equip with a gun. 

By this point, his pen was down and his eyes were locked on mine.  I was on a roll.

Next time you're sitting next to your employer, my Congresswoman, ask her why she is not interested in keeping you safe.  If I were your mother, I'd call on your behalf.  I was sorry to shock him, but getting shot myself was pretty surprising; it can happen to anyone, anywhere, even in front of a Safeway on a sunny, Saturday morning.

He volunteered that he was driving the Congresswoman to an event this weekend.  He looked a little green around the gills as he said it.  I pressed on.

She's MY voice in Congress, and I don't think she is listening to me.  I told him about my op ed and her response on her telephone town hall and about my repeated, unsuccessful attempts to ask for an explanation.  I reiterated that her vote was a personal insult to her community, an insult exacerbated by the fact that her vote wasn't needed to pass the legislation.  She was tone deaf to her constituents, at least the ones who know me, or know of me, or of any of the others in our circle of horror.

We talked about the Venn Diagram of being-one-step-away-from-a-gun-violence-victim/survivor, about how many people are invited into the club no one wants to join each and every day.  We talked about Las Vegas.

And then we were back on insurance and the fact that I would have been uninsured and financially devastated had I been responsible for my medical bills before the ACA abolished lifetime caps and exclusions for pre-existing conditions.  He was aghast.  His face, already blanched from pea soup to vaguely nauseated, was white. 

Yes, uninsured after participating in democracy, with a 9 year old by my side.  Injured while being a good citizen, just as Gabe was killed while working to enhance my experience, at the side of an elected official.  Injured while waiting in line with those who didn't agree with Gabby at all, and were there to tell her so.  I told him that being scared to meet with people is not the way to make us feel heard, that shaking hands and paying attention would be a good start.

I paused, took a breath, and told him that I felt disconnected from ....

"YOUR representative," came out of his mouth, strangled by emotion. 

She may be one of 435, but she's my one.  She's all I've got and she's not hearing me.  Will you tell her, asked JannyLou? 

We all took a breath.  We shook hands, he took our picture (to be uploaded to the OFA site), and promised to pass along our comments.  As we left, his face had regained a rosy hue, though his eyes had the look as he bid me goodbye.  He definitely heard us.  Whether we can make a difference or not on the larger stage, I do not know, but today we made a small dent. 

After all, I bet he didn't go into work today thinking that his was a dangerous job.  I bet he goes home with a different mind set.