Spare Change in Later LIfe ...

Been a long time!  I am back, older, retired and needing to download the conclusions of a long  life in which I have usually felt, primarily, really confused ...


I'm going to start with a rapid download device ... Writing a poem a day in April.  That will be hard; I've done enough of this to know it, but April is the Fertile Month, didn't someone say, so there's no point in not giving it a try!

Perversion in Education

These days, Republicans hate teachers. I guess this is so true that my teacher mother might change her long Republican allegiances if she was capable, after hours of watching Fox News, of independent views. She isn't very capable of this; none of her experience in the first half of the Twentieth Century suggested to her that independence was desired or even tolerated in women. Indeed her female relatives that tried for independence were treated with great brutality. I can't blame her for choosing aggressive adherence to tradition as her way of getting through.

But this hating of teachers ...

I think I understand it, as a matter of gender politics. (Male teachers are still the exception; no one, I think, takes them very seriously as Alpha Males and men in this country are measured against the Alpha.)

I suppose that is part of the hate: Non-Alphas, if long-time teachers, will have better retirements than many businessmen of middling talent. Zounds. The world set on its ear. Wrongness of the Universe.

But teaching is a female profession, and the real, unforgiveable, offense is that Women, if long-time teachers, will (in this brief window of time) have better retirements than many businessmen of middling talent. This cannot be allowed.

Of course even the malignant usually need more than one reason to justify the virulence of such hate, and that additional thing is: Women are accustomed to teach values; always have been.

Here, I think, is the real offense. It was tolerable in past times for women teachers to teach values to young boys, because the profession was so rigorously segregated and under-compensated. Even young Alpha Boys knew that the patriarchs they would someday join out-ranked the female teachers. Even subjected to the authority of women while they were small, young Alpha boys could plainly see that they would, almost without effort, eventually out-rank all women in authority of all kinds. With a modicum of effort, boys-become-men could be pre-eminent in ranks women could only enter on their backs, by marrying.

Heady, sexual, stuff, and their Alpha fathers must have reminded them of it often in those conversations that in those days no one ever had with their daughters: The conversations where the fathers explain to their sons the difference between the real world and the fantastic images of equality, courtesy, fairness and artistic achievement inculcated by Women in their Schools. I know my father did, and he was among the kindest and best of men, but he knew wealth was available only to the tough (not to say ruthless). He saw his kindness as a disqualifier, no matter how deep his personal commitment to it.

It is these men that are the enemy. They see how useful amorality and ruthlessness are in amassing wealth and THEY DO NOT WANT THEIR SONS WEAKENED IN THIS BATTLE BY WOMANISH VIEWS.

It was perhaps tolerable that under-paid women and teachers would train the young in these ideas, and of course these ideas are useful in employees. But Alphas raising Alphas need these ideas terminated, or restricted to education of followers. The rich who want to teach their young to lead do not want any mistakes made; and respect and fair wages for teachers send entirely the wrong message.

For Tim's Mother

There she was, and wasn't -- not
the kind of mother I wanted (and had),
crouched over a note-pad, writing.

She was a different kind of mother, social,
active, stylish, made of a friendly heart,
and with a light touch; she never thought
I needed amending, and maybe thought of me seldom at all
but that I liked, stretched out beneath that canopy of bright leaves ...

She was a mother tree, broad not deep,
but what strength that takes!
calling in to question what we could possibly mean
when we sometimes criticized.

I miss her today.

Stylin' on Christmas

Christmas! Heart season in the Heartland. Surrounded by snow and colored lights, I am sinking into it like a rich piece of cheesecake, and tonight I ate that too.

Tonight I also listened to a whacked panel of Religious Professionals parsing the New Testament and trying to correct rhetorical inaccuracies. Oh my.

My own faith is an old one, Eastern Orthodoxy, not very inclined to compromise the heart of the story -- shepherds, wise men, virgins, Son of God.

Tonight for the first time I thought it might not be strictly necessary to insist on the fundamentals. I do take them for true but if I didn't have Mary, Joseph and Jesus -- my honored acquaintance! -- to people my faith, then I still think it would be the same. The part of me that believes lives in dangerous terrain where the sense of God-with-us is always at the right hand. I don't know whether I could say that this is "Bigger than Jesus." Who am I to say it, and how could I possibly know?

But whatever it is, it is very, very big; bigger than parsing those ancient stories. Even the best retellings miss the heart-pounding part of the living moment, not to mention much of the most convincing detail. And what is really important is not how God chose to transmit the message -- His choice, not mine, after all -- but whether I am listening.

And when others hear, if they hear it differently, maybe that doesn't matter too much either, as long as they hear it. It's important news: God is Right Here! The parsing is just a reflection of human personality styles; never take it for more than that.

{ In fond memory of Mervin Freedman, who taught so many how to study that quicksilver, "personality" }

What Would Jesus Do About Those "Death Panels"?

I am pretty clear about how I'd like to die.

First of all -- later, much later; but if I had my preferences, not as late as my father, who suffered through a long dementia. Now he was the quintessential brave man and he soldiered on, even with increasing sweetness, as his disease progressed. He was enough himself that he knew what was happening at each sad stage. I would rather not have to bear that burden as long as he did!

I think though that at the far end of the journey, he could no longer figure out how to surface from the confusions that pulled at him. It seemed like that to me, and it seemed that he chose then to dive off the cliff into that dark night, cooperating fully with what was coming. He showed no sign of fear, and when I think about it the same words always come to mind: He died expeditiously.

I am not expecting that much fortitude from myself, and I hope I don't have to watch my mind shatter in stages as I go, but I would like to meet the process with what faculties I still have. I hope for a short illness, a little time to see the Reaper coming, and prepare; and then to die in the daylight, preferably in sunlight, to see what It Is, that last experience in a body's weight of sensations that I have pulled along with me through life.

I'd like a short illness, not too many pain-killers and quiet.

What I don't want is: To be still taking vitamins and cholesterol meds at the end, or that high blood pressure stuff that seems a little silly in the face of multiple organ failures.

I don't want to be in the throes of chemotherapy, or to die after consuming an expensive course of treatment or a grossly expensive series of tests. I hope my doctor sees my death coming too, and after he tells me, revises my meds to avoid wasting them on vain struggle.

I REALLY don't want to leave my widower a huge hospital bill that he can't pay, for treatment no one expected to restore me to a decent, aware life.

Are you hearing euthanasia here?

Not so much. I have taken gravely to heart the Christian insight that it is our mortality that forms our whole being. I believe it and I am, in that small sense, not afraid of it at all. After a life brimming with kinesthetic awareness -- I may have been a lawyer, but I used to dance -- I could not love my physical being more, nor be more intensely curious about that last grotesque experience. I see this as a former dancer's way of thanking God for the gift of physical life, and if I want to go to it by a more direct path than modern medicine wants to offer me (not talking suicide here; just judicious selection of alternative therapies) I will not have the duller of my purported co-religionists stepping in to tell me that I must cling to life in some other prescribed way instead.

I have taken to heart as well the American Dream; and I will not be denied the right to direct my own passing, as much of it as God leaves to me that is!

{ Shame on Sarah Palin and Charles Grassley for lying (Sarah) and dissembling (Charles) about things like this, the Things of God. }

Queen Anne's Lace

I see my last post was in winter.

Some things don't change. The weather has continued odd. The financial crisis has worsened.

Some things do change. One thing to note is: Even in a "Cold Summer," lots of things grow well. Grass grows nicely when it's wet -- never fully reliable in Wisconsin any more, but most of this summer has been adequately lubricated.

Weeds almost grow better in the cold; profusion, really. I think they must be more cold tolerant than what we Europeans brought with us. Anyway, they grow, while tomatoes hang sullenly green or refuse to fruit at all and corn pushes skyward without cobs. A cold green paradise without appealing foods till the berries thrust up in mid-summer, and suddenly the richness began -- swollen blueberries, a rich garnet setting of mulberries on every mulberry tree and the Queen of All Berries, the tangy and succulent raspberry.

After that, I sensed it -- the crops are beginning to come in and though I longed for richer things, I can see that the land is productive even if not quite in what I prefer.

The truth is that what I prefer in Summer is Heat, yet here on August 15 was the first of the Hot Summer Nights we need before the next winter sets in.

I guess there were a few before, although I know it wasn't many. Maybe 5. Every time it got hot, a front came in and the temps rocketed back down, but there were those few nights. I missed most of them, busy with work and long commutes.

Tonight though I finally had the time to take a walk, in air thick with moisture, leavened only with an insistent breeze.

I tell you, it's not enough. I'll need a month of these -- not likely, either! -- to be ready for the annual freeze-up, and yet I felt myself opening up and threatening to be lost in the sheer physicality of friendly temperatures, in the human body range. A suggestion that the moisture in the air and the water in my veins and skin might well find a way to merge and give me for a moment a god's-eye glimpse of how it all hangs together on earth.

All the beautiful things amid their tragic short endings. Me thinking that even if I died tonight, I couldn't say it was a life cut short. All the muscles still work well enough too, and the aches and pains are far from overwhelming for my age. Luckier than I have had a right to ask; I think luckier even than I ever did ask after my short list of demands on the universe was met when I met my husband.

I think I have a summer spirit, easily pleased, here in this frosty land; and I think that will have to remain our little secret because my business, really, is sterner stuff.

I am a financial lawyer, after all.

But in this late summer, when Queen Anne's lace pushes up joyfully on every untended bank and the garden begins to gallop toward harvest, I've got a secret that most of the time I don't even dream of: It is enough.

Someone May Need to be a Weatherman After All

A weather report while I wait: Birdsong outside this morning! I had forgotten that was gone. Saw my first ducks and geese fly in about 10 days ago; had forgotten that they were gone but the set-down approach to landing is distinctive. I saw some pairs first, and then one "v" form in the sky. Eventually the sky will be laced with them, like pencil marks in the margins of a book.

And red-winged blackbirds in the field! I forgot that they were gone too. My mother says they're just flying through, and will summer further north. All these realities you notice and soak in from the land around you.

A social security judge flew in from Pasadena for hearings though. It was about 12 (F) degrees at mid-day. My attorney-girlfriend said the judge appeared simply stunned by the weather, and it has been a black, heavy sort of winter, the melting snow laced with dirt. Snow flakes themselves are a kind of tonic; heavy, melting drifts, not so much.

My friend shared her story of snow-shoeing to work in December after one of the blizzards. She's guessing the judge will never forget it, or maybe will forget it at once because it just doesn't seem real.

A lot of people are going to lose their homes. Our loan broker "knowledge workers" sold products that otherwise solvent people are never going to be able to pay; much less the grandiose dreamers who bought the adjustable products.

Where's the rage? We're raging against neighbors who might get better deals than we do if they slide into foreclosure? It makes more sense to rage against the bureaucrats who are giving those deals, yes, but where is the rage against the "small government" / "tax cuts will cure cancer" crew? I think I have never seen anything as amazing as the furtive bands of republicans surging through the weeds, muttering "Bush betrayed us and Obama is not a citizen ..."

Oh, man; I just heard a crane call, a much bigger sound than the other birds! Spring then, too early and less secure than we all thought. There are things here worth saving; where is the rage? Where are the brains?