EACH ACCORDING TO HER NEED

Warm egg yolk dripped onto crispy corned beef hash: Saturday breakfast delight.

When I moved to SF in 1978, I lived collectively with dykes in a railroad flat where we did total income sharing. I got a job frying doughnuts right away and was bringing home $100 a week for four days of hot labour, which was very good pay. Rents were still cheap, and my income going into the kitty helped out flatmates who were not so fortunate in their employment. After we paid bills, bought our shared food, and purchased monthly Fast Passes for each of us, we had $5 each per week as running around money, which we'd distribute to ourselves each Friday.

It doesn't sound like much, but it was plenty. A lot of museums and cultural events were free. Hanging out at the wimmin's bookstore could take hours on a Saturday. Poetry readings were 50 cents to maybe a buck 50 for all day. Arthouse movies were a buck. Wimmin's music events were seldom more than two bucks. And for a treat, I could go to the Artemis and get a great bowl of corn chowder with baguette for $1.50 plus 50 cents tip. I could hear Robin Flower or Trish Nugent or Woody Simmons while eating dinner surrounded by dykes in a space where male conditioning was not coddled.

I think the lesbian cultural push toward collectivism taught me more about class than any amount of academic courses could have. And it set our revolution apart from anything which has followed. We failed, of course, but learned extremely valuable things in that failure. Especially about our conditioning as girls, what to keep and what to relearn. If you don't examine your conditioning by honestly claiming who they had shoved you to be by age six, how on earth can you find and follow an ethical liberation path?

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ELIZA OPHELIA HILL STAFFORD

This is a photo of my great-great-grandmother Eliza Ophelia Hill, born 1858 in a cane-growing region of Florida. She witnessed the Civil War as a child. Her father Jimmy "Cane" Hill fought in the Confederacy and after the war named his youngest son Rebel.

When she was 12, the family sailed from Florida to Galveston and traveled by wagon to North Texas, settling in Montague County. There at age 17 she married George Austin Stafford, a kind and bright man who farmed but also worked as a homespun inventor. He lost his left arm as a boy in a threshing accident, and devised many tools to accommodate his disability, including a combined spoon-knife-fork for the one-handed diner.

Eliza bore 14 children over the next 25 years, including a final set of twins. Four of these children died in infancy or toddlerhood.

George retired in his 60s and they moved to Sour Lake, Texas. Wives and mothers don't get a retirement. Eliza outlived George by 15 years and died at the age of 92 on the Gulf Coast. Just found this photo of her today. I cannot accurately guess her age, considering what she lived through.

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FAIRY BREAD

Thanks to Tammi's valiant efforts to keep the fridge and pantry organized, I now have a chart I can refer to when asking someone to locate an item. But that has not taken care of the problem. This morning, when asking the fill-in attendant to create breakfast and lunch, I kept track and she spent 22 minutes claiming certain items (tomatoes, already cooked pancakes, bread, roast beef) were not there.

In particular, she kept digging into the freezer, which is something Debra also does, not being to differentiate between fridge and freezer. I've learned to hear the difference in which door is being opened and kept shouting "NOT the freezer, the baby carrots are in the FRIDGE produce bin!" In each case, I would not relent and began insisting she bring me, for instance, every item from the produce drawer or every ziplock with a leftover in it. Then, suddenly, she'd be able to "find" what I was asking for.

I don't know what else to do. I had canned chili for dinner last night and saw Debra's face light up when I asked for that as dinner. It wasn't thoroughly heated through, but whatever. I feel like giving up on eating fresh dinners. Tammi is already worked to the max. She left me with prepared food which others have either trashed or spent an unconscionable amount of time denying it was there. I try to just be grateful I am eating at all -- three years ago I could only afford to eat every other day, and when I lost mobility, for six months I ate only from packages. Things have definitely improved since then.

Honestly, it does stir up being a hungry, helpless kid. I reacted then with anorexia, funneling my food to my little brother so he got enough, refusing to take a full share so maybe Mama would eat the leftovers on my plate instead of smoking cigarettes to kill her own hunger. It's insanely hard emotionally for me to ask for real food.

One time Daddy's check didn't come (we later found out because he had cashed it himself and decided we could wait until he came home with it) and we ran out of anything, even beans or greens from the garden. Craig went to stay at a friend's house, Mama holed herself up in her bedroom with books, and I was left to deal with Bill, who was five at the time. I was nine.

We slipped around the back of a few house to the orange trees of an old man who let them rot on the limb, and I picked a box full of them. Back home, whenever Bill began complaining about hunger, I'd peel or slice an orange and make up stories about what we were eating (venison brought down by Daniel Boone's gun, hard tack on a ship sailing around the Horn, space grub on our flight to Mars). As the days wore on, it got harder and harder to distract him, and then he got diarrhea from nothing but oranges. At the end of the third day, Daddy came home and Mama emerged to have a huge fight with him. As they raged, I took Bill out to Daddy's car where there were always cheese crackers and Tom's peanuts in the glove compartment.

But I can no longer afford to skip meals. Indeed, it is now past time for my own lunch. Have to take a sugar and eat a couple of bites. Once I do that, the hunger kicks in and I can eat normally. Pushing through usually does the trick.

Except when Margot is here, I don't have to use any tricks at all, or worry about food in any regard. Not yet resigned to her absence. Gimme a couple of weeks.

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SHOW ME YOUR PAPERS

Over the last two days I had to track down all of the supporting documentation Texas demands in order for me to receive assistance for poor folks to pay Medicare premiums. These are the same documents I have submitted to them several times in the past to get food stamps, attendant care, etc -- but now they want a whole new set. Plus my bank statements for the past three months, etc. A massive stack of papers and receipts had been "tidied" up by one attendant, so I had to root through more than one box for them to be found and returned to the file I had begun before hospitalization. I have now sent those dozen sheets, plus the 19 page application, with Tammi to be copied before mailing off.

All of it information they (a) already have somewhere and (b) have complete access to already online, since in order to get any services you have to sign off rights to privacy to your bank account, IRS records, etc. This is so cost ineffective, it's ludicrous. The POINT is not to eliminate fraud, the point is to discourage applying, especially if you were not literate or had cognitive problems. Think vaginal ultrasound and you understand the Republican mindset.


Tammi has to stop by the store as well, so that eats up all her time this morning. Maria had offered to do the copying/mailing errand, but Tammi offered once I got the papers together and I said let's get it done instantly. I still have tamales left for later, and I think I can talk Rosemary through sticking a pot roast in the oven tomorrow.

I also have repeated calls in to the Visiting Physician service to try to get care lined up for the Medicare switchover. So far, I have not been called back by the intake person, which is a little discouraging. I did have a good chat yesterday with Jennifer, the super social worker with Total Health Partners. I told her about the risk of the next five months, until (presumably) I get assistance with premiums and copays, and she said she'd put it in my chart, make sure they could be available for emergencies, adding I could keep calling her in a pinch even after they relinquish my care on April 1. A big relief to hear.

She recently went to a weekend workshop on diabetic nutrition (she is pre-diabetic and her son has Type 1), and she learned that it's been discovered if you cook red potatoes in their skins and eat them cold, as in potato salad, they somehow do not have the glycemic hit of potatoes in all other forms. She's verified it with her own son, and I am definitely going to try it out. I love potato salad made the Maggie way.

Emily and her intern are coming for a visit next Wednesday, and I hope to have the transition MD in place by then. Still hate losing her as my doctor. However, their services need to go to other as desperate as I was before Medicare finally arrived.

I was depressed for a day or so about the delay in rehab, PT, and guaranteed coverage for expensive items. I lost sleep and my sugars began spiking upward. Then one night at 4 am I went through the entire worst case scenario, and figured out even if Texas denies me coverage and takes away my food stamps to boot (which they have done in the past when I applied for other things and failed their criteria), thanks to Margot, donations and the feds, I can squeak through. SSDI and Medicare are mine to keep. Well, unless the Teabaggers take over, but I'm safe for the next year. I will be skating on paper-thin ice, and things like rehab or a scooter would have to be fundraised for; however, it is do-able. The old risk of being swept away has altered. I still face (chronically) the chance of institutionalization with loss of attendant care, and I hate how expensive this relationship is on Margot. But I needed to see the shift in risk terrain. I've been thinking more clearly since, and certainly have been able to sleep.

And my reward today is the arrival of a small packet from Marj, with a mushy card and two maps, one of Great Britain's inland waterways and the other, decades old and so battered as to require restorative taping, of the wider Birmingham area from perhaps the middle of last century, full of detail and before "urban renewal". This will be vastly helpful in my genealogical reseach of the area. Maps shine light where nothing else can. My librarian sweetheart knows just how to thrill me. My coming afternoon will be cartophilic.

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THE HOUSE ON HUGO STREET

(Bill and I in the front room of our house, 1965; I am in pajamas and robe, sick with asthma as usual, but have put on a dress-up sombrero; Bill and I are holding our chihuahua between us)

In July of 1964 my family moved to a small South Texas town where my father's boss had rented one of the few houses available on the white side of town. There was another house, a brick one built in the 50's, that he rented for his own family.

The house allocated to us had been built at a time before electricity was commonplace in structures. Each room had central fixtures originally meant to burn gas for light. They had been retrofitted, clumsily, to hold electric light bulbs, and as well an outlet had been run to one wall of each room stapled to the outside of the original drywall. The floors were ancient bare wood, the windows rattled in their casings with weights long since fallen away inside, and the pipes thundered when a tap was turned. There was a fireplace in each of the rooms which opened off the wraparound front porch, but the chimneys were not usable and instead gas heaters were jammed into the hearths. The interior walls had never been painted, there were no keys to any of the doors, and a single clawfoot tub had separate taps for hot and cold, the hot water having been added after the house was built.

Care which had not been expended on the interior had instead been lavished on the yard, which was vast and bounded on both sides by lots wild with vegetation of that region. The yard had a small orchard of red plum trees, a grape arbor, a palm tree, magnolias, two salt cedars, a long hedge of oleanders in two colors, a riot of poinsettia beside one chimney, a bearing orange tree, and an enormous fertile vegetable garden. The giant oak at one edge was overgrown with morning glories, and there were so many large climbing trees I could hide in branches for hours on end. There was a chicken coop, an old barn with a horse stall, several prickly pears, a saw palmetto, and thick stretches of St. Augustine in the front yard, wildflowers in the lots, and even a lightning-struck tree whose trunk housed a bee colony.

Despite being given a corner of the dining room as my space, I still felt like we at last had a real house, with high ceilings, original wood trim, and that glorious yard. Compared to the tiny renthouses or 10x50 trailer we had lived in for years, I felt like we had landed in a place where I could take pride. A decent house.

That summer I turned nine. Before the end of the year, I would write my first poem -- sitting in the top of one of those trees in the back lot -- and discover what being a lesbian meant, realizing that must be what I was. When my father's work once again left the area, my mother would decide to keep us in that town, allow my older brother to finish high school in one place, trying to push my father into seeking different employment which paid a living wage for a family. She grew steadily more hopeless and ill in that house, as did I, and my older brother ramped up his emotional and physical torture of me to eventual sexual assault.

Still, I loved that house, the structure itself, the old and solid feel of it, the decades of nurture evident in the yard. We stayed there four years, an eternity in my family, and only left when I betrayed my mother by siding with my father when he came home with yet another demand that we move, this time to Brazil. I betrayed her because I realized I would die at the hands of my older brother if I did not find a way to get away from him, and another continent while he was in college -- avoiding being drafted -- seemed enough distance to save my own life.

During that first year, however, I rode with Daddy as he went to talk with his boss, receiving the news that his job was being relocated again. I was in the front seat of the car, watching Daddy's jaw work as this boss spoke to my father with condescending apology, adding "At least now y'all can get out of that dump you're in."

That's all I remember, that line. On the drive home, my father silently daring me to say a word so he could take out his anger on me, I risked remarking "He called our house a dump."

"It's a shithole" my father said viciously. I shut up.

There were a couple of girls who tried to be my friend while I lived there, and I accepted their advances cautiously. One of them, Lisa Dillard, called me her best friend. But I never once let her inside my house, and that affected our closeness. At least, my sense of shame did.

Years later, I listened to my Great-Aunt Lee talked about growing up in the rural community where my mother's line spent five generations, she said "We were all poor, but we didn't know it. We knew we didn't have money, but not that we were poor. I didn't find out until I went to college on a scholarship, and that's when I learned shame. I've always been grateful I didn't learn it earlier."

I knew exactly what she meant. Shame is something others teach you, and it's much easier to resist when you are older at its first lesson.

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FOOD GLORIOUS FOOD

(Me and Bill, Summer 1964, Houma, LA)

I watched Avec Eric which focused on how he and his restaurant funnel food to the soup kitchens of NYC. He taught a veggie fried rice recipe to a group of poor women (mothers and grandmothers, you could tell) using the ingredients that were being handed out free that day, while they ate bowls of what he had already prepared. He said he cooked exactly the same for them as he did for people coming to his "luxurious" restaurant hoping for a food "experience", and I believe him. I began crying, watching their faces.

I was often hungry as a child, hungry on an unpredictable basis, and eventually I gave up on eating. I knew very well my mother was only eating once we were done, if there were leftovers at all, and that influenced me. My older teenaged brother was stealing food from my toddler brother's plate, so I compensated Bill's losses with my own food. There were other factors -- my chronic asthma, the medications I was on, and eventually, a deep sense of wanting to vanish or die in order to get away from my older brother. But what the Bush regime chose to euphemize as "food insecurity" rather than hunger mostly is what influenced my avoidance of eating.

It drove my mother nearly out of her mind.

My liberation at 12 included a return of appetite, but by then my eating habits sucked. It wasn't until lesbian-feminism in my early 20s that I learned real nutrition and how to listen to my body. How to love my body and give it what it needs. It's been challenging because of my hormonal and metabolism damage (some from those asthma drugs as a child, medical pharmacology with no brakes on yet.) I revert to not eating very easily. Sometimes people don't believe that because of how fat I am, or think I must be binging at other times, but I don't binge, and I don't often overeat.

By the time I arrived at the hospital a year ago, I had lost 85 lbs. without meaning to from a combination of poverty and intestinal blockage. My electrolytes, potassium, etc were very off, and I was given supplements most of my hospital stay. Once I had money coming in, I researched nutritional deficiency intensively and created a supplement regimen for myself that includes potassium, vitamin D in large amounts, calcium, magnesium, zinc, antioxidants, vitamins B, C, and A, coenzyme Q, all natural from a great supplier. After two weeks on these, I could tell a difference, especially with regard to the potassium and vitamin D deficiency.

But the daily well-balanced, no salt, always-with-milk infusions from Meals On Wheels has made a sea change in whether and how I am getting hungry. I feel balanced in a way I've not been in years. (The constipation is a direct, temporary result of pain meds.)

However, I am now, deep-down afraid of going hungry again. I am afraid it will somehow come around once more (Republicans in charge), and I am not sure I can tough it out one more time.

I'll work on it, of course. I will particularly try to clear out all the grief I feel about my mother, an orphan during the Depression who grew up in a "food insecure" family, having to watch her children go hungry. It's an injustice I can never remedy, she's long gone, but the pain residue rests heavy on me and I need to scrub it all away, even if it means losing some connection to her.

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ANOTHER FORM TO FILL OUT

(Can she bake a cherry pie, Billy Boy, Billy Boy...)

Thanksgiving was not a strong family holiday when I was growing up. There's a number of reasons for that. One is that while my mother adored turkey, the rest of us would rather have chicken, ham, or that rarest of proteins on our table, some version of beef. Another was that splashing out for a big meal was frequently a hardship on Mama's budget, especially in the tense month leading to Christmas.

A third factor is that my father did not reliably make it home for Thanksgiving. He often was tagged (or volunteered, I can't say) to be part of the crew who worked out in the field through that week. Mama would be depressed and our dinner was perfunctory.

Another reason I learned about as an adult was the general antipathy toward Thanksgiving in white Southern culture as a Yankee holiday shoved down our throats during the Civil War. Most of the older folks in my family were ambivalent about it -- as children, they had grown up around folks who had once been Confederates. The actual first feast of European colonists on American soil had been prepared by our Southern forebears long before the Pilgrim mythologized version.

Once I became politicized, it was also a holiday whose lies were unsupportable by me, and I took comfort in protesting Thanksgiving, as I boycotted the Fourth of July. But that sort of choice is much easier when it actually is a choice: When you still have family, when you have other community to turn to, and when a shared meal is not a rare luxury.

This morning, the Meals on Wheels volunteer left me a form to sign up for a home-delivered Thanksgiving meal on that Thursday. Deadline is November 17th. I must guarantee I will be home to receive the meal.

Well, no problem there. I'll be here and ready to eat. But I am having a definite emotional reaction toward the idea of signing up for it.

The shame of charity, of being the kind of person given institutional kindness by strangers. (How did I get here? For so many years, I was on the other end, one of the givers.)

The idea of eating a generic, mass-prepared meal with no choice over the menu. I mean, I don't much like pumpkin pie and almost any other kind of pie is preferable to me. Plus the love of dishes prepared by folks you know doesn't usually come in the MoW wrapping.

The fact that I will still eat alone, on paper plates with plastic utensils. There will be no leftovers for late night sandwiches or creative assemblages by others under the roof with me. This is not actually new, I haven't had a shared Thanksgiving meal in at least five years, once I stopped making tremendous efforts to make it happen, only to have friends announce they were leaving town to visit family or "just needed to get away" for that weekend. No matter how close you are to folks, it feels virtually impossible to ask them not to leave you. And, even then, I did lay myself bare to the mother of one family I was supposedly enveloped among, only to have her make plans without me and simply keep it secret until the last minute, then blame me for the guilt she felt. She needn't have bothered, I blame myself first most of the time anyhow.

I do have visitors who will be here that week of Thanksgiving, one or maybe two sets of travelers from the Northeast whom I very much want to see, and I thought that had more than covered the holiday for me. Until I got the form and had to think about the day in particular.

It's a free meal, and I don't have the room to say no to that. My alternative will be to have something microwavable I have arranged for in advance, possibly more to my liking (pot roast? lemon pie?) but still eaten solo. And, I have to admit, the possible sympathy/pity of the volunteer bringing my meal on that day jerks me up short. I hear my mama's voice in my head: "We don't let others feel sorry for us." Her reason for rejecting what little assistance might have come our way during my childhood.

She was wrong, I know, but the residue is packed in around my heart.

So, I'm simply sharing what I'm struggling with. I'll take it to my counselor, perhaps write my way through it (in my books, nobody cooks or eats alone unless they choose it), and find the choice which offers the most chance for redemption. I bet there are some of you out there facing similar questions.

Lemon chess pie, that's what I would ask Mama to make. And a cherry pie for Bill, of course. With her sage cornbread dressing alongside the roast and new potatoes. Sweet tea, fresh green beans, and jellied cranberry with the can ridges still visible. Bill would say grace, roaring "Good spuds, good meat, good god let's eat!" and making his predictable jokes about sweet 'taters as "poot roots". Then some stupid sports thing on TV while I fell asleep on the couch, face pressed into the cushions, remembering how Mama always said "Wonder what the po' folks are eating today."

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DAILY UPDATE 11 SEPTEMBER 2010

Again only seven hours of real sleep and now once again a slight stomach ache after breaking my fast, so I'm waiting it out before taking meds and pushing the body. Slow start. Plus I dreaded about an ex (again). Still I went to sleep considering the excellent late-night sharing with Pamela and thinking about creative options, and I am feeling good about my life.

To answer another friend, I don't know how I stay so sane and clear except that the alternative is a greased chute to death. I know that firsthand. And please don't put yourself even metaphorically in that "I couldn't do what you do" camp. It doesn't make me feel better about what I do, it makes me feel separated from you. Imagine doing what I do and stay here with me.

I don't know which I am more ravenous for, human company or nature.

I'm trying to think and write about atonement today. But I keep being distracted by wondering what will be said about me, honestly and in private, when I die. I have really hurt people I love along the way, I have failed grievously, I have been afraid and stupid and mean. Where I have seen my errors, I have at least taken the repeat journeys to apologize and undertake change. That is all the comfort have when, like last night, I can't find an easy quilt of sleep.

One of the quality-of-life issues I'm dealing with now is that I've had to stop taking the pain medication I've been using since I left the hospital ten months ago. It's only one a day, but my physician doesn't want to renew the prescription without my coming in for a check-up, a physical act I cannot manage right now. Maybe once I get a hospital bed -- which I cannot afford and have no insurance to cover, but I'm on a waiting list for a free one which does show up every few months. A hospital bed will dramatically alter my bed mobility and ability to do exercises semi-weightbearing, which with another long push of work will mean I can transfer and get to a doctor's office, maybe even move around on my waker again. So there is light somewhere down that tunnel.

In the meantime, no more generic Lorcet. (Doctors don't make house calls, especially for uninsured patients.) So two days ago I switched to Tramadol. It has some effect, it's definitely better than nothing. But it's not taking care of all the swelling and stiffness, for sure. And with my current GI issues, Naproxen worries me. I'm back to living with a higher level of chronic pain. I know how to do it, I'm very good at it. But it does dim the spark a tad.

And right now, until my belly settles down, I can't take the Tramadol, even. In an hour I can have some bread and fruit, and get all the meds on board. Maybe I should have postponed writing this until then. The content would be different, definitely. However, today it is as it is.

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HOW IT'S GOING

I am great in emergencies. I not only can think of the right thing to do, I can instantly come up with a creative solution particular to that crisis. I have been through serious car wrecks where I was the rescuer, blood stauncher, counselor, and advocate all at once, on the spot. I once found the emergency kill switch on a Sears escalator when a toddler riding on it got his foot caught and mangled in the stair-fold mechanism, holding that child and keeping his mother from hysterics as we waited for the paramedics. (Which is why I avoid escalators now.)

I think much of my skill comes from growing up poor. You face the unfaceable and stay thinking or things go much, much worse for you. I count as my kind the folks from the Cypress Street Projects, one of the poorest and "most dangerous" neighborhoods in Oakland, who poured out of their homes when the 580 freeway beside them collapsed onto itself in 1989. They assembled makeshift ladders, ropes, anything they could use to clamber up 30 feet of concrete pillars into the narrow gap where crushed cars filled with screaming people were starting to burn.

By the time official first responders were able to find a way to the wreck of a roadway, those folks from the projects had already saved most of the survivors, getting them to relative safety, comforting traumatized children, giving drinks of water, starting to joke about how scared shitless they had been. Nobody took their names or did a news feature on these heros, because they were too poor, too black, some of them too clearly high and pissed off. But I know what they did and how they did it. It was much like any other day, really.

But as well as being a child of my origins, I am also a class traitor. I have sought out and absorbed the intelligent remnants maintained by other classes, I have loved and made allies across the divide, and one thing I have learned is that living in adrenaline mode kills you fast. So when I have a breather, even if it is only ten seconds long, I have tried to take it, make the most of it.

Thus, after the paramedics hauled away that sobbing toddler and his mother from Sears, with her looking beseechingly back at me as if I was part of their family and should be accompanying them, I had to sit down on that Berkeley sidewalk because my legs would no longer hold me up. I sobbed and shivered violently, letting myself feel what I had just witnessed, "processing" as my little brother Bill would say with such intense scorn. Bill who died at 42 because the male raised-poor approach finally ran out of any rope at all.

I began running out of rope myself in 2005, and as resource after resource dried up, I eventually, finally, became hopeless. A few folks hung in there with me, although nobody knew how really bad it was for me. Now the pendulum is swinging the other direction, and I am (tiredly, dutifully) using my out-of-immediate-danger time to face how close to immolation I came. I'd much rather eat sugar and watch Youtube and write cryptic poetry that doesn't pass my own Tell test.

But living to be old means I clean up what I can when I have a chance. And the trail of mess goes all the way back to infancy, to betraying my mama by admitting how she failed me, to betraying my family by telling their nastiest secrets, to facing those of you who are clean and educated and making good choices with the hope that I am worthy of you choosing me, too. Fake it til you make it.

Because sometimes you can't save yourself, and you'll have to say yes to others crawling through the debris to reach you. And you have to love yourself to say yes. Loving yourself is the ultimate revolution. You can't do it and live in fear or isolation.

And, you know me -- I write about it as I go along. Tell until your lips are chapped, that's my credo. Thank you for listening.

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FOR THOSE OF US WITHOUT A GATED HIDEAWAY

Jill Cozzi's post at Brilliant at Breakfast acted as a final spark for me today. In "So Long [Gulf of Mexico], And Thanks For All The Fish", she begins:

I hope you all have had a chance to enjoy a tropical beach at least once in your life, because the days of sitting on pristine sands, looking at turquoise water and enjoying a dinner of fresh-caught fish are over, thanks to the oil-soaked greed of the Bush family and their cronies, the complete selling out of America to corporations, our own sense of petroleum-based entitlement, and Barack Obama's insistence on playing nice with greedy bastards.

Read her post for the details.
So I'll share here some of my not-quite-all-the-way-finished thoughts:

If you ardently believe in imminent Endtimes (count on it, in fact)

AND/OR if you ardently believe wealth is meant for only the elite few and there is not enough to go around, certainly not for the unworthy

AND/OR you are hopeless about human nature being inherently decent

AND/OR you secretly know climate change means hundreds of millions will die before the end of this entury unless a stop is put to the lifestyle which accrues you and your friends wealth and power

If you have this kind of damaged, defeated, christianist, white supremacist, male dominated worldview, you will easily decide to loot what is available for looting as you prepare your compound in Paraguay with its own private and pristine water source that will not be affected by the desertification of much of the globe.

You will easily decide rendering our own ocean unfit for anything BUT drilling is a logical step, a hedge against coming oil wars, because those who depend on fishing and nature are expendable segments of the population.

You will all speak the same language -- which we can interpret, if we are only willing to admit it -- and you will slyly allow things to go past the point of remedy. Beginning with the more unbeloved of our national coastlines.

Katrina and Rita response now appear as dry runs.

This is what I'm thinking. And I can read it also in the post of Jill, whom I trust.

But I am not hopeless, and I will not give up. They are wrong in ALL their beliefs, and I will not let them frame the question or close my mind to possibility. It can just as easily become the event that sweeps our elite from all decision-making over our lives. We can imagine that occurring, and whatever we can honestly imagine is a potential reality. Because, in fact, WE are in charge of our own perspective, and we are not stupid. Deceivable but not stupid, and that is the critical difference their class training has missed.

Not stupid, and we have a means of speaking to each other from the heart.

Rest up, allow yourselves to have a truly joy-filled weekend if you can, but rest up in any event. Talk with you soon.

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PALIMPSEST

A bit of a hard night going to sleep, physically, but slept long and solid.

I dreamed I was in the second or third story of a huge, beautiful old house, shabby but in good shape, that was mostly an archives. I was working in a room with a massive library table covered with my writing and art projects. Kate Clinton had just arrived. [Note: This is because of something I read about her right before I went to sleep.] She was stuck in our town unexpectedly and a friend of mine had asked me to put her up for the night. It turns out I owned this house.

I gave Kate an upstairs empty bedroom, told her where the kitchen was, and returned to my writing project. I felt shy around her, didn't know much about her. She kept asking me questions about that I was doing that felt interrupting to me. I began to feel defensive about the fact that I wasn't famous yet for what I've done with my life, that my writing isn't very published, I have no academic credentials, my activism isn't credited out there. I wanted to argue the working class viewpoint but she had on expensive clothes and kept making clever jokes, and I didn't know if could translate.

It was dusk, and I stood, preparing to leave the house. She asked me where I was going. I knew I should be a better host, ask her out to dinner, but I was going to eat at my favorite diner and I didn't want to share it with her. Instead I lied and said I was going somewhere else to get materials for my writing project.

My large sketchbook lay open on the table, thick paper filled with handwriting and color pencil drawings. She reached for it, to read it, and I reached to take it away from her. She said "What is this, a palimpsest?" as I woke up.

After I was awake, I coudln't come up with any clue in my head as to the meaning of palimpsest. I turned on netbook and looked it up:

Noun
Etymology: Latin palimpsestus, from Greek palimpsēstos scraped again, from palin + psēn to rub, scrape; akin to Sanskrit psāti, babhasti he chews
(1) : writing material (as a parchment or tablet) used one or more times after earlier writing has been erased
(2) : something having usually diverse layers or aspects apparent beneath the surface

WTF? All yesterday evening I kept thinking about how the one writing goal I most want to accomplish before I die is a complete memoir -- not the pieces I keep writing but an organized, coherent autobiography. I also kept worrying about my disability doctor visit next week, what the exam will show, how I nearly passed out last time, and the fact that I only have enough money from donations to pay basic bills, meds, food and Barbara for 30 more days. After that, it's patchwork again, only with me less mobile and strong than ever before. I don't think I can commit to the writing I want to do while this fear hangs over me. I feel bad about it, like I should have done more before now.


Type rest of the post here

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FOCUS, TRINITY

(Bill David Barnett, age 2.5, and Maggie, age 5, trailer park in Pecos, Texas, summer 1961)

Today my little brother Bill would have turned 51.

Which means he's been dead almost 9 years. Can't quite understand that.

He was waiting for health insurance to kick in at his new job: We'd watched how medical costs had starved our family when we were kids. So instead of being saddled with a "pre-existing condition", he lay down alone on that green-and-white striped couch and watched TV as a heart attack rolled on into cardiac tamponade and he bled out into his chest.

Universal health care for every human being, no questions asked, without profit linked to medical choices. Now. Get rid of any leader who caves, no matter what other distractions they toss up. The alternative is ongoing pointless death.

[Cross-posted at Group News Blog.]

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HUNGRY

(Maggie Jochild at Bean Hollow Beach near Pescadero, California, i980)

HUNGRY

When Liza found out I had lost 85 pounds over the last two years without knowing it, certainly without trying to, she instantly said "No wonder you write about food all the time.' Indeed.


I have been starving in many ways. Fat people are as often malnourished as thin folks in our culture, especially if they are lower income and urban. Post surgery, my electrolytes were persistently abnormal, and they began giving me daily potassium and magnesium sulfate. The surgeon put me on a 2200 calorie diabetic diet -- I don't have diabetes but good insulin control promotes wound healing. I listened to my own cravings and for the first few days of eating solid food I stuck to veggies, cranberry and orange juice, and potatoes plus bananas with every meal. I couldn't get whole grains or avocados, the other items I was jonesing for. The kitchen dutifully limited my carbs but I never reaxhed my calorie limit.

After a week, when I began hard-assed physical therapy, my craving switched to protein and milk, and I ordered accordingly: I was starting to replace muscle. I asked for a comsultation with the hospital dietitian. When she arrived, I told her I wanted to know how to best address the specific malnutrition I had been living with for more than a year, assuming I could afford to buy fresh produce and seriously complete grains as I prefer in my diet. I also asked for a print-out of what I'd ordered through the meal service the past week with nutritional breakdowns I could study.

She had no idea what to do with me. She agreed that living as I had been on a poor person's diet, I should have gained rather than lost weight (my saving habit, I bet, is my inisitence on brown rixe/whole grains). She kept trying to turn our discussion toward calories instead of nutrition. Turns out the kitchen did not keep or report patients' daily meam records, and in the end, she urged me to go on an 1800 calorie a day diet, even after I flatly reminded her that 95% of all weight-loss diets fail and I had only become fat after I began dieting as a young adult.

I told her I loved my body, and after how it had just pulled through for me, ill-conceived calorie counting was not going to be how I rewarded myself for living. She left after giving me a print-out of a diet that relied heavily on white flour and caffeine as "snacks".

Fortunately, just as she was leaving, the Good Doctor came in. He recognized her and asked me how the visit had come about. I explained I'd requested it and gave him a thumbnail of what she'd said. A very nondemonstrative young man, he leaned over me and touched my arm to say "For countless reasons I'd ile to see you thin but PLEASE don't consider dieting, not for months until you are healed." Yet another reason why we call him The Good Doctor.

I stopped dieting during the same general stage of my life when I stopped hurting others via sexual messes. My weight plateaued for a decade, until my orthopedic disabilities drastically altered my mobility and I began living in pain. I gained to another plateau -- partly because in the advice of every expert I consulted, I returned dairy products to my diet. (Kinda need that calcium and minerals when bones are going whackamole.) I'd been the same size for a decade until this recent change.

The second oncologist who saw me this hospitalization, the one called in when pathology of my removed appendix revealed an occult carcinoid tumor, was wise enough to do an exam and take a thorough history of me despite the tumot's clean margins and staging indicating that carcinoma was neither a metastasis nor had it metastasized itself. She understood my level of weight loss, unintentional though probably the result of bowel strangulation and malnutrition, still warranted investigation to consider the idea of cancer elsewhere. In the end, she reassured me that as far as she could see, I had totally sidestepped death. Her face was so delighted: I bet she doesn't get to say that very often.

In contrast, I still remember the sneer on the face of the white gay male physician I saw at the free clinic in San Francisco in 1981 after having been flattened by fever and severe shortness of breath for a week. I was 25, unemployed, and broke, but my roommate Renee finally got me dressed and walked me two blocks to the nearest clinic in the Mission, paying the $12 office visit demand herself rather than let me waste precious oxygen answering their income questions. She also came into the exam room with me, thank g*d, because before even taking my temperature or listening to my chest, that doctor said "So, how long have you been overweight?"

I gaped at him, wheezing audibly. Renee said "She's not here for her weight, she's here because she's burning up with fever."

He turned on her. "Clearly her main problem is obesity, that's what we always see in here." At that point I was at most 25 pounds above the "ideal average" for my height, thick with muscle from walking everywhere.

Renee was slight but a working class Jew who was well-versed in fat liberation. In fact, she was who introduced me to the theory, and I'll love her forever for that fact alone. We shared our household food and she regularly ate circles around me. She stood up and raised her voice to demand that I be examined and treated for what was wrong with me, not given a lecture about obesity. An x-ray revealed advanced pneumonia, and a sputum culture eventually diagnosed me with Valley Fever. Antibiotics cured me and I avoided doctors for a long time after that, until I got insurance and searched until I found physicians I trusted.

Renee and I were in the habit that year of putting Alix Dobkin's latest album XX Alix on the turntable every evening when we got home from our respective jobs or meetings. One of my favorites was the haunting "Separation '78", which begins
Liza, you look more like your mother every day
Counting your calories, my how your body's changed

(Yes it's the same Liza as in my opening paragraph. We were not yet friends, although it's hard to see how we missed connecting back then it seems to have been an inevitability.)

Alix and Liza were lovers who became founding figures in lesbian-feminism, and because Alix's songwriting was frequently autobiographical, Liza's life was very public even when it wasn't through her own art and publshing. Liza was zaftig, buzzed her hair, defied fashion constraints -- including those dictated by dykes -- and had been a role model to me for years by 1981. I understood damned well that if Liza was paying attention to how she ate, it was in no way an attempt to be the kind of slender sex object dictated by heterosexual norms.

I also knew -- all of us who followed Alix's music knew -- that a couple of years earlier, Liza's beloved parents had been killed together in a freak accident. My own mother was still alive, but I felt keenly the poignancy of Alix telling Liza she looked like her mother. Our generation was mother obsessed, positively and negatively. Even more evocative was the fact that "Separation '78" is a love song written about their break-up, again very public. I wept the frst time I heard Alix sing the chorus, with melancholy and hope interlaced:

Going our separate ways
We're on our own
Trusting that only love will come between us

Thus, you can perhaps imagine my shock when I attended a live concert by Alix that year and from the all-lesbian audience came a chorus of boos when she sang her opening lines above about Liza. Alix was visibly startled but far too professional to drop a note, even when boos broke out again at the next verse

Everyone's noticed your new grey hair
Clearly, my darling, I put some there
And my head is carrying its own share
We're an aging pair

After the concert, I talked with one of the women who had booed (not a friend of mine) who said any reference to weight loss was fat oppressive and the grey hair lines were age oppressive. I argued vehemently that noticing changing bodies is not inherently oppressive, and in particular we had every reason to trust the process of Alix and Liza as individuals. Or, to quote a remark Maria Limon made last week when she visited me in the hospital, "Can we just put down the pitchforks?"

I don't know anybody who thinks completely rationally about eating. Or money. Or sex. Do you?

I'm in mid-stream here. I'm hungry for protein as I write this but probably won't go make the tuna sandwich I really want because my pain pills didn't come and that trip to the kitchen might as well be a hike up Bernal Hill used to be. I'll nurse my cranberry juice and wai till morning. At least Ihave this link to you all, typed in my bed on a netbook Liza bought for me and arranged for Maria to bring me in my isolation. Some empty spaces do get filled with just what we need, sometimes people listen and stick up for you and tumors get found in time and love lasts. Let's keep talking. As they say in the crip community, "Not dead yet."

> (Publicity photo for Dyke: A Quarterly, circa 1976; editors were Liza Cowan, left rear, and Penny House, front second from right; also in right front is Alix Dobkin; photo courtesy of Liza Cowan)

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GOING HOME TODAY

(Mary Jo Atkins Barnett and Maggie, 1955, passport photo for going to India)

When I woke up from the RT shakiing my shoulder at 7 a.m., the Roches were singing in my head "We're going away to Ireland soon" with muted glee. It's been three weeks today since I was admitted, and I cannot account for a lot of that time. My Narrative has defiinitely been interrupted. A lot of memories wade in and out like scenes from a bad 60's "message movie".


Everytime I think about getting out of here, my chest relaxes a little and I breathe better. It will be hellishly hard on my own but no one will be opening my front door without my choice, and no more small talk, which is to conversation as WalMart is to small town main street commerce. Pajamas and keyboard, that's enough for me. (grin)

One thing that has emerged as my attention returned is that my attraction to folks who are looking for a place to tell their troubles has spread up and down the hall, apparently. I'm a better listener than I am storyteller, but at home I have a stopcock to control who dips into my well. Yesterday I earnestly told Erlinda, the tech of techs, how much everyone here admires her quick learning and leadership. She was clocking out for the day, but stayed at my bedside for half an hour to tell me what it was like raising her three abandoned nieces the past 9 years. Honestly, it's a tale I'm honored to have heard, altered my appreciation for others ever upward -- but what is it I do that inspires others to confide in me? In Erlinda's case, I wanted to hear. Otherwise, I am not even watching the daily reruns on cable of "Grey's Anatomy" -- my own body and midstream ordeal is swallowing the lion's share of my focus right now, and as Stuart Smalley would say, "That's okay."

Yesterday as I was warshing up (as one tech says it), I examined the altered corpus Maggie carefully. The blown IV sites and JP drain scab will go away entirely, I think. But the contours of my front are permanently rearranged -- large capstone bulge gone, everything listed to the right, and a wicked ruck from just below my breasts through my navel like the Hayward Fault when viewed from Mount Diablo. There'll be no problem saying "Yep, that's her" if I wind up mangled on some CSI slab.

Surgeons go directly to the source of an issue and tend not to deal with the aftereffects. This is seen as more efficient, as all versions of Henry Ford compartmentalization are now revered as most productive. I always question this ethic but especially now, as I hear the muttered resentment techs have toward nurses (who say "call a tech" for ass wiping) and the sullen obeisance nurses display toward doctors who breeze in and out far more obliviously than even the most gritty TV drama depicts. When we added making a profit to the work of caregiving -- and especially Reagan's permission to be greedy as an America ethic -- we created the monster that our government is currently too feckless to tame.

Thanks to Jill Cozzi, by the way, for reminding me of the excellent meaning of that word, feckless.

In contrast, a Quaker man, Sean Carroll, is arranging for a CarShare to get me home after my discharge today, since he doesn't own a vehicle. He's already done all the shopping I need to be safe-ish at home , except for the correct size diapers, which will arrive via FedEx tomorrow -- although at least 1/3 of all American women weigh 200 lb. or more, this hospital doesn't stock diapers that go beyond that size, nor would they research finding them for me. Thank g*d I was alert enough and able to get online to meet my own basic dignity needs.

You know, lesbian-feminism of the early 1970s is where I first encountered the concept of political correctness, and it's never been a joke to me. At bedrock, political correctness is about striving to express respect and kindness according to cultural values which may vary from the ones you were raised with. Respect, privacy, pluralism: arch enemies of the fear-based Right.

I don't know why, but for the last 24 hours a particular memory has been popping into my head, as it did just now. It's my first memory, and occurred when I was around one year age. We were living in Kolkata and I was out for the day with Nilmoni, my ayah. We were in what my mother called a rickshah, which was in fact a horse-drawn cart with a single horse. We turned into a street clogged with a mob. Nilmoni began shouting at the cart driver to get us out of there, but we were already being surrounded and horses have to be turned, there is no reverse gear. I was in her lap, held tight, and she put one hand over my face to block my vision. I tugged at her fingers ineffectually, then discovered if I opened my eyes I could see between her slightly spread fingers. I went still, watching with interest.

The crowd was all Indian, which was normal to me, I thought I was too. It was all male, and they were angry, but I wasn't worried because I was with Nilmoni. They were holding aloft, above their outstretched arms, two items: a round of bread and a man, passing them toward one side of the street. The man was struggling, wild-eyed, shirtless. It was intriguing to see an adult passed around as easily as I was.

At the side of the street was a two-story building with outside stairs to an upper landing. The stairs had no railing but the landing had a wooden frame around it. A rivulet of the mob swirled up the stairs and the flailing man was passed upward from arm to arm. Someone on the landing had a rope which was tied to the porch. As the man reached the landing, the other end of the rope was knotted around his neck. With a roaring surge, matched by Nilmoni's shrieks at our cart driver, the shirtless man was thrown over the railing in a small arc. He slammed against the side of the building and a seond later reached rope's end. He scrabbled frantically at the stucco wall with fingernails and feet to find a purchase. Before he could, our cart finally turned out of view. I tried to turn my head to watch but Nilmoni held me fast.

I didn't understand what had happened, and there is no negative emotion in this memory, only excitement about curious adult behavior. It is vivid -- the bright sun with dust in the air, hoarse shouting, Nilmoni's smell, and the look on the face of the shirtless man, his dark sweaty skin and the visible ribs on his torso. Years later, when I was six or so, I began telling my mother about the memory to ask her what it all meant; I thought of it often. She sat down heavily in her kitchen chair, her face horrified, repeating "My god, my god."

She knew the incident. Nilmoni had told her about it when we got home that day. They were both reassured by their belief I hadn't seen anything, and did not want to discuss it with me. Mama said the man was from the untouchable class, still a strong practice in 1956, and he had stolen the round of bread.

Now I have two versions of the memory, my original and the unspeakable horror of what actually occurred as Mama gently explained it to me later.

Sorting out this cacophony we call life takes up all our time. I'm going away to Ireland soon, will be home tonight, and can resume my sift in solitude. Aching, incontinent, exhausted, in a mess of a house, but with just me and Dinah to accommodate. There is peace and wonder to be found in any situation, even death, they tell us. I'll write again as soon as I can.

The Roches singing "The Troubles" in 1983

[Cross-posted at Group News Blog.]

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THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS

(Card created by Liza Cowan in 1983 for her company, White Mare)

My second semester at North Texas State University, I signed up for a speech class to get rid of my "hick" accent. NTSU suffered from an inferiority complex in general, not being part of the UT system, and aside from its music degree and the honors program of which I was a part, every department I encountered there went out of its way to put down anyone seeming too rural or provincial. I'm sorry now I took the speech classes. I think the way I talked was probably lovely, rich and full of colloquialisms which do still come to me. My vocabulary was stellar and my grammar impeccable, thanks to the women in my family. The accent was no indicator of my intelligence or education.


But I was still in the closet about my class background, so speech cleansing it was. As part of that course, we had to learn a "piece" and declaim it with two or three other students -- not really a performance, no sets or props, but still on stage and with all attention focused on pronunciation. Ironically, we were encouraged to select from an assortment of dramatic works, and my little group chose A Streetcar Named Desire, full of florid Williamsesque accents and linguistic contrivance. I was given the part of Blanche Dubois, mostly because the other girl in my group flat-out refused and I was too shy to actually insist I couldn't possibly do it.

It was agony for me, in every regard. I got by, I think, because I had of course memorized my lines and that was half the grade. Also, the boy Tim who had the Stanley Kowalski role was a 90 lb. weakling with long blond hippie hair and a faint voice. What we really should have done is traded roles, me and Tim. Instead, the rest of the class managed to not laugh at us and the bored TA gave me an A mostly because I did shed my accent by the end of the year.

I loathed Blanche. The one line of hers that I appreciated was "I have always relied on the kindness of strangers", with all its lie and misdirected meaning and gender subterfuge. It actually comes up in my head often.

The last few weeks, it's been a mantra. I am relying on the kindness of strangers for survival. No sarcasm and no manipulation here, just frank reality.

It's hard to describe. I'd call it a state of grace, except that's such a christian reference. It does have an awe-some element of fear, and a sense of responsibility whose parameters I cannot completely scribe without encountering shame, still. (I'm working on it.)

I think about the choices I've made along the way which brought me to this place, and try to see the power in it. But there's also circumstances beyond my control -- at least, some of them are, but sorting out which are genuinely random and which are the result of my class training to assume helplessness is another sift I'm having to do.

Some of the changes from last month to now are intense, and mostly expressed in my body. I'm sleeping solidly, and waking up without panic. I'm eating real food, usually two meals a day, with fresh fruit and vegetables and whole grains making the bulk of it, instead of bologna and -- well, I don't want to say. Eating two meals a day instead of one or none has altered my chemistry and energy. I can "afford" to think about certain issues now, afford to do more around the house, afford to let myself cry.

Even more pronounced has been the change in my dreams. For three months before hope came my way, I had been dreaming several times a week that I was living with my family of origin again, one or all of them. I was usually the age I am now, but they were younger, during the years when we were in crisis and crammed together without community or sanctuary. These nightmares revolved around me trying to get space (literally), like a corner of a room to call my own, freedom from hostility, find a door to the outside, get to a phone, land a job, always juggling my needs against those of my mother and little brother (if they were in that dream). I would wake up feeling wretched. I couldn't go right back to sleep, so my sleep cycles had become two and three hours long. A bad cycle to be in.

No more. I have always had strong dreams, full of symbolism and creativity, and these have returned without any appearance of my family. Hallelujah.

Often I've come in, rested and fed, to my computer and begun writing about what I'm feeling and thinking. I haven't been finishing these pieces, because the future still seems open-ended to some extent. Here's one such effort:

"It's been months since we had cat treats in this house. Dinah had given up looking for the canister on the shelf next to my computer monitor. But with the grocery money available last week, I felt it possible to spare $2 and buy some Whisker Lickins. When I pulled the package from the grocery bag in her presence, she didn't register any recognition. However, when I popped the seal, her sense of smell brought her memory back in full force.

Since then, she's been unctuous and abnormally attentive. In fact, night before last, she crawled under my comforter and slept with me -- not in actual physical contact, which would have been strange enough to make me call 911, but still within reach if I so chose. It was startling, and made me realize, once again, how much I miss having a pet who is affectionate. Dinah will Allow Me to stroke her back, and that's it. No cuddling, no adorable reaching out. When she wants my attention, she licks my arm but that's not an expression of love -- she knows full well I don't like it, and it gets me to notice her. Negative feedback is fine with her."

Here's another uncompleted start:

"I just ate a huge bowl of frijoles negritos and brown rice, garnished liberally with garlic, onions, and peppers. And a couple of taquitos on the side. Excellent breakfast -- the only thing I'd add is cantaloupe, but tis not the season, alas.

The rice came out perfect, may I say. I set the timer and did not lift that lid, no matter what. Most days I can't resist a look. Positive reinforcement like this wars continually with a cook's fear of scorched pans. I wondered, how did people make perfect rice before the days of timers or see-through lids? I bet someone out there knows the answer. My best guess was that they set something to bake or rise at the same time which took exactly 45 minutes to look right, and when that was done, they knew the rice was done, too.

I once worked in office of six other women who were all on the no-carb, high-protein diet. Breakfast for them would be a small sirloin and half a pound of bacon. Lunch was equally obscene -- they had permission to avoid apples and carrots, for instance, because of their "carb count". Then, around 2:00, they'd start jonesing and talking feverishly about french fries or pancakes. Eventually pretzels would be sneaked out from someone's desk and they'd all have a few, then whine the rest of the day about how they had failed themselves. Meanwhile, their breath peeled paint from the walls and the gas was ignitable.

I brought in my brown rice, my roasted blue potatoes or Red Bliss, my quinoa and amaranth and stone-ground corn meal with pintos and squash. I tried to explain to them how whole grains are often nearly whole foods, why it was that massive peasant populations worked sun-up to sun-down on nothing more than rice or potatoes or whole wheat bread. But I was fat and refused to feel shame about it, so I was the leper who lived in an unclean hut."

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The plain truth of the matter, I don't know how to thank you all. I really don't. Except to maybe show you (keep showing you) who I am, to keep doing the work I think I was born to do, and to keep holding out hope in the particular way I am able to -- a skill nobody else in my family possessed.

We still have a little way to go before I'm out of serious peril. Jesse is doing miraculous work, over at Group News Blog, raising funds for me -- here's his most recent post. In order to get some of the state-supplied services I must have to be safe, I have to undergo another round of doctor visits (to get documentation) because it's been too long since I had a complete examination. This means funds to pay for it out of pocket, plus transportation, plus assistance. Next month, maybe. Social services in Texas were shredded by Bush and have not been restored since. But I'll find a path through this swamp, now that I can eat and sleep and not fear eviction.

My mind keeps going to all the ways I've done extra for others, all my life. I'm not sure if this is me trying to convince myself I deserve this help, or if it is a way to give me common ground with all you out there who are choosing to send me love in the form of dollars. I had a friend for a few years who had severe environmental illness, such that she could not work, could not do her own dishes or housecleaning (no products safe enough), could not fill her truck with gas, had to wear a mask out in the world. I would go by her house after work and wash her dishes for her, get her car gassed up, go with her on necessary errands out in the world to keep her company and remind her she was not a freak, no matter how people looked at her.

I've wiped adults who've crapped themselves, help change catheter bags, talked people out of suicide, made meals and washed clothes and hauled groceries and been the person you call when you have to put a pet to sleep. I've done none of it for money, all of it for love, and I've done way, way more than my share. When I was mobile and seemingly able-bodied, I never stopped doing a little more than my share, every single day. When I saw someone panhandling, I gave 'em a buck. If it was a woman or someone with a kid or a person of color, I gave 'em half of what I had in my pockets, even if they reeked of booze or huff: So what if they're an addict, half the people I've known have had some form of addiction. That's between them and g*d. I've had people I love become homeless, you don't choose it any more than you choose falling off a cliff. And when I handed them the money, I touched their hand, their arm, I looked them in the eye and said "I hope this helps."

Was I paying it forward, then? Did I know, or suspect, or fear I'd reach where I am now? I honestly can't answer that question, but it keeps coming up.

I have a few memories of being a baby and toddler in India, of walking the streets of Kolkata in the arms of Nilmoni and her friends, the nuns who worked with Mother Teresa. I don't remember meeting Mother Teresa, though Mom told me I did, many times. I do remember feeling happy and safe with these women, that what they/we did was talk to people, all day long. Listen to them and talk back to them as human beings. I was glad to be not just with the sisters but with all the other people, the beggars and lepers and starving -- we were all the same, all good and doing our best. There was never any tension in these street scenes that transmitted itself to me. Life was good, even when it wasn't.

So, perhaps that is the source of my choices, my strength, my commitments. Or maybe, as one energy worker told me, I'm simply unusually strong.

Whatever --I'm glad to be alive. Glad to have found another way to keep writing my letters to the world, even as I live separated from you against my will. Glad you are out there and decided to reach my way. I'll keep writing, letting you know how things are.

Bless you.

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HOME IS WHERE, WHEN YOU HAVE TO GO THERE...

(Maggie's mother, older brother, and father, circa 1949, Bowie, Texas bus station)

I've been missing my father, wishing I could talk with him. He's been dead two years, and it's only in the last couple of months that I've begun missing him. Especially on Thanksgiving, and I expect it will hit me again on Christmas.

He wasn't always home for Thanksgiving with us. I'm not sure how many Christmases he missed, beyond the last one my mother was alive. Mostly he was not there for birthdays. Mama made them holidays without him. I never missed a Thanksgiving or Christmas with Mama, despite moving out to California, and I never missed them with my little brother Bill, either, until -- well, that's the story I mean to tell, here. Somehow.


Bill and I were three years apart in age. He was an accidental pregnancy, and honestly, it showed in how my parents treated him. Not overtly, but the difficulty his needs brought to our already strained family was evident to even him. Kids who grow up with that knowledge have a hard time, you can't convince me otherwise. I believe it played a (small) role in his early death. My wanting him was not enough: What he needed was to have been welcomed, in a way he was not, by my parents.

We're not supposed to admit these kinds of things about our families. Especially in working class families, where any admission of being fucked up is going to be used against us, proof that we deserve our poverty and hard life. They are all dead now, except for me, so I'm not betraying them. At least, not directly.

When Daddy washed out of the Army Air Corps right before the end of World War II, he drifted around for a while, then got a job doodlebugging. His boss told him it was not a fit occupation for a married man, because it paid little and meant moving every six weeks to three months. Daddy assured the guy he had no intention of getting married or having a family. Six weeks later he met Mama, and five weeks after that, they got married. Daddy didn't tell her about the reality of his chosen occupation. She figured it out slowly, on her own, by the time my oldest brother Glenn was born two years later.

But it was 1948, and folks didn't get divorced. And Daddy kept saying he'd get promoted, moved up into an office job, where we'd stay in one place. Join the middle class, or at least the illusion of middle class that office workers have. In the early 1980s, shortly before she died, Mama told me she'd figured out all the ways Daddy had kept himself stuck in the field work which was what he really loved. He wasn't comfortable around men in white shirts with soft hands. He didn't feel good enough to do labor that didn't involve getting sweaty and making loud jokes with other men. He was thrilled to have escaped the farm, and grunt seismology felt respectable enough for him.

So we lived rootless, in trailers or crappy rent houses, except for the two times Daddy convinced Mama to let him take an overseas hitch, where the pay was good and Daddy got to push around brown people. Mama handled all the work of keeping us a family, not perfectly (not even close to that) but using every last bit of juice she had. I worshipped her, as did Bill. And she worshipped me back, flagrantly preferring me to my brothers.

My older brother Glenn was the only child for almost eight years before I was born. He was furious at my arrival, furious at my father's absence, furious at our inability to be anything more than working class in a good year. When I was four, he began coming after me. By the time I was nine, it was sexual as well as all the other ways he could think of to hurt me. He was 17 then, the local high school quarterback, massive and dangerous. Mama was too tired to see what was going on.

At least, that's the story.

I'm not going to tell you any details except this: I did what I could to keep him from going after Bill. I did whatever I had to. Because of this, Glenn said I wanted what he did to me. And Bill, as a toddler until the age of 8 when Glenn finally moved out of the house, was eaten up with guilt at my sacrifice for him -- even as he let me do make it for him. It was the only way we knew to stay alive.

(Bill and Maggie, summer of 1964, Houma, Louisiana, with chihuahua Chico)

I planned for me and Bill to have all our adult lives together, to grow old as brother and sister.

Mama had four heart attacks before she finally died of the fifth one, when I was 28 and she was 56. Once I got to college on scholarships, she and I collaborated and wrote a resume for Daddy (I checked out a book on how to do it from the university library). We got him a suit and I typed letters for him on my Olivetti portable seeking job interviews as a consultant in the seismology field. He was sullen and self-sabotaging, but eventually, in spite of his crap, he got hired on making four times more than he ever had. I was able to leave Texas knowing Mama was financially secure. The last six months of her life, they even bought a house.

The day we buried Mama, Daddy said to the three of us "I know you kids would rather it have been me that died than her." None of us said anything. I feel terrible about that now.

I was the only one in the family, I think, who was able to mourn Mama without conflict. She and I had talked over everything before she died. In 1980, she flat out asked me if Glenn had molested me -- a truth I had thought I'd never be able to tell her because of her precarious heart condition. I answered honestly, and she and I worked out the mess between us. She also asked me if I thought Glenn's three kids were at risk, and I said absolutely, of course they were -- the oldest already showed profound signs of damage. She decided she wasn't up to confronting Glenn, so she sent Daddy to do it instead. Five years after she died, I found out that Daddy had fucked it up in his predictable way. He asked Glenn about it, Glenn said I'd made up the whole thing because I'm a man-hating lesbian you know, and they had a beer together. Daddy came back and told Mama that Glenn had agreed to go into counseling, it would all be okay.

Less than a year after Mama died, Daddy married a woman fifteen years his junior, a divorcee with three kids who was trying to get her master's degree in dance theory. Glenn went into a rage, saying Daddy was dishonoring Mama's memory, and cut off all contact with Daddy. I thought it was very clear the two newlyweds were playing a game of mutual exploitation, but my Aunt Sarah, Mama's sister, gave me a stern talking to and said I had no right to judge my father's pursuit of happiness if it had no impact on me. I could see she was right. I made friends with my stepmother and talked Bill into doing the same. No skin off my back.

She of course left him as soon as the bust hit Texas and he fell behind on house payments. She'd gotten her Ph.D. by then, and married an insurance salesman six months later. Daddy couldn't believe she gave up on him. Some lessons come late. He sold away his pension and most of Mama's belongings before he finally lost the house, too. At 65, he had only Social Security and a broken down red van to his name.

He moved into a shitty apartment complex a few blocks away from Bill and got a job as a security guard, mostly because it gave him a chance to carry a gun. He had few people skills, had never built community or made friends. It was just me and Bill in his life. Bill was on his second marriage and, for the time being, clean and sober. My own partnership of six years fell apart brutally. I began driving up to Irving regularly to sleep on Daddy's couch and listen to him talk over his life.

We became friends. I don't have an excuse for the choices he made, but I really do understand them. Male conditioning, living as a child in the Depression on a 40-acre Oklahoma cotton farm, coming from Fundamentalists, and never breaking out of the bottom working class all left their mark on him. I had a 36 hour limit on the time I could stand to spend with him, but that meant a weekend where he wasn't alone, that was good enough for him.

The first Thanksgiving we had both been dumped, I told him I'd drive up after work on Wednesday and cook for us. Bill was going to spend the holiday with his wife's family, so it would be just me and Daddy. Traffic was a bear, so I didn't stop along the way and buy groceries as I had meant to. Still, there was a Whole Foods not too far from his house, I'd check in with him and then brave the crowds.

When I arrived, however, I discovered he had already done the shopping. He had a canned ham (not the good kind), a box of stuffing mix, canned peas, canned corn, canned cranberries, a loaf of white bread, and a store-bought apple pie with a crust like MDF. He was extremely proud of himself, thrilled at providing for us and please that I was going to "cook it all up" for him. I didn't have the heart to go buy real food. I searched through his pantry for things I could use to make it more palatable, finding zilch. Parkay, no spices except salt and pepper, no frozen fruit or veggies, no flour, not even canned soup except for one of chicken noodle.

So, I made what I could, pulled out the good plates and silverware instead of the paper stuff he used, cleared the table of six months of clutter, and we had a sit-down meal that was one of the worst I've ever put in my mouth, nutritionally speaking. But memorable in the glow on his face. We talked for hours, watched Lawrence Welk, and he went to bed happy.

I cleaned the kitchen, then, and scrubbed down the toilet. Daddy had never bothered to lift a lid or even bother to aim. When I was a teenager, I had seethed at this daily dose of male urine, and sometimes I deliberately left bloody kotex or tampons on the floor beside the toilet to make my point. But he left it to my mother to clean up. And now me, if I was going to use the same bathroom for the weekend.

He began looking for another wife fairly quickly, and went through the rude awakening of discovering that now he was truly broke, he had no chance at all with women younger than him. He began going to bingo night at senior centers, and eventually found a woman five years older who owned a house, had a small savings, and thought he was funny. They got married without him finding out she was a serious alcoholic. Violet was an amiable drunk, but she started on vodka first thing in the morning and kept at it all day. Her short-term memory was nonexistent. Still, she cooked and cleaned, they had a little house to watch TV in all day, and he promised he would never, under any circumstances, let her get put into a nursing home.

I made friends with Violet as well, and continued to come up for weekends. I was bothered, however, by that fact that conversations with my father vanished. For one thing, he hadn't told Violet I was a dyke and insisted I not tell her, as she was hardshell Baptist and barely knew homosexuality existed. For another, while he didn't drink with her, he spent all day talking on her level and his ability to construct even a simple sentence deteriorated. He acted like having to think about complex issues or delve into memory was an imposition. I let it go. I'd had a father only briefly, and only kinda sorta. I still got to see Bill when I visited, and at least my father wasn't about to be hungry.

Bill and I talked a lot about our childhoods. To be honest, I was usually the one who brought it up; he would rather have watched ESPN in peace. But he did share his memories and his interpretation of them. The memories matched, the interpretation didn't, and I found relief in both.

One memory Bill told over and over again concerned the Thanksgiving when he was 10 and, for some reason, Glenn had gone with us to eat with our grandparents in Oklahoma. Glenn was about to be married, to a woman from an upper middle class family bristling with doctors and lawyers, and after that he seldom had much to do with us. Which was fine with me, though it always pained my mother to have been abandoned for reasons of class. Anyhow, the day after Thanksgiving, Bill went into the kitchen and cut himself a slice of leftover pumpkin pie. Glenn had trailed after him, looking for somebody to torment. Bill put the plastic wrap neatly back over the pie and returned it to the refrigerator, an imperative in my grandmother's kitchen. When he turned back around, his piece of pie had vanished except for a small wedge of crust. Glenn was sitting in a nearby kitchen chair, smirking and chewing. Glenn had stolen food from us all our lives, a favorite putdown.

Bill set aside anything he might want to say, pulled out the pie and cut himself another slice. Same thing happened, of course: When he turned back around, his piece was gone and Glenn was almost choking, trying to swallow it down and laugh at the same time. But Bill snapped. He doubled his little boy fist and socked Glenn in the face as hard as he could. Glenn's chair went over backward onto the kitchen floor.

The retaliation was severe, of course. Glenn dragged him, his mouth covered, out the garage and beat the shit out of him in places where the bruises wouldn't show. But that was the last time Glenn stole food from him. Bill's eyes would glint when he told that story.

When I was 26, Bill went to Glenn and told him if he ever came near me again, for any reason, Bill would kill him. By that time, Bill was an inch taller than Glenn and wider in the shoulders. Like all bullies, Glenn only picked on those weaker than himself. He stayed away from me. But long before that, I'd made it clear I'd kill him, too, if he bothered me. Still, I was deeply moved by Bill finally being able to defend me, returning the favor.

On holidays when I drove up, I usually did the cooking, sometimes with Bill's able assistance for the meats. I'm a good cook and I enjoyed it, and it was also a way to make sure the food was healthy. Plus, staying in the kitchen usually kept me away from trying to make conversation with Violet, who was in the habit of repeating the same remark every seven minutes or so all day long. I have a hard time with dementia, I'll admit it.

The second Thanksgiving after Daddy married Violet, I slept over at Bill's house that he and his wife had managed to buy with an FHA loan. The excuse was that I could get up early to start Christmas dinner. Instead, we sat up late playing Risk and watching a Princess Di special on TV.

The next morning, Daddy and Violet showed up around 10 a.m., which was late in the day for Daddy, who liked to rise at dawn. Violet was lit to the gills, and Daddy, for once, had decided to join her in her morning vodka and orange juice. He was tiddly, is how I would describe it. Bill was watching golf in the back room, and his wife was on her computer. Daddy and Violet pulled stools up to the kitchen bar and decided to hang out with me while I cooked.

I had planned an elaborate, 12-dish meal which all needed to come together at the same time, and I was already overheated and stressed. I'm not the sort to chat while I'm multitasking. But the drinkers, of course, were very chatty. The problem was that Violet was in repetition mode. Every seven minutes, the same conversational gambits were replayed. Her focus that day was on how I was making the green beans. I had bought fresh haricot vertes, leaving them whole except for snapping off the ends, and lightly braised them in butter, shoyu, and Chinese hot sauce, with a sprinkle of sesame seeds. Violet had clearly never seen anything like them before, and she kept asking (every seven minutes) why they looked the way they did, sitting in their bowl on the counter nearby.

Four times I explained the recipe to her. The fifth time, I snarled over my shoulder "The recipe is exactly the same as I told you the last goddamned time."

There was a wounded silence behind me. I glanced around. Violet was in profound shock, and Daddy looked belligerent. I said "Excuse me, I have to cool off" and I strode to the front door. It was about 15 degrees outside, but I didn't bother with a coat. I sat down on the front step and tried to slow my thudding heart.

After half a minute, I heard the door open and felt Bill ease himself down onto the step beside me. He lit a cigarette, took a big drag, tried to blow the smoke away from me, then lay his massive arm over my shoulders and said calmly "Well you fucked that one up."

We laughed our asses off. When I began shivering from the cold, I said "I don't know how to go back in there and face them."

Bill said "Ah, shit, she won't remember it by now. Daddy's the only one who's going to remember to be offended, and fuck him."

He was right. Violet had refilled her go cup and asked me brightly how come the green beans looked so different. I explained it to her patiently as I resumed mashing yams, and Bill, chuckling, returned to his golf tournament.

The next year, Bill's second wife had left him. He arrived at Daddy's house on Christmas morning with a bottle of Goldschlager, which he slammed down on the coffee table and said grimly "After every gift, we each take a shot." I declined, but they went after it and it was actually a hilarious day.

Two years after that, Violet died one October morning as they were getting up. Daddy had managed to keep his promise to her, allowing her to live at home until she passed. Daddy inherited the house and her savings. At Christmas, he mailed a check for $8000 to Glenn, asking to make up. Glenn's second marriage was failing, he'd been fired one too many times to find work easily, and he decided Daddy's offer was just what he needed. He called Daddy from the road in California, asking to come live with him. If he drove straight through, he could be there by late Christmas Day. Daddy was ecstatic.

He came into the guest room where I was sleeping and woke me up to tell me that Glenn would be there in a day, to celebrate Christmas with all of us. He said we were to all be nice to each other, for his sake, and in particular I was to not bring up in any way all the abuse Bill and I had suffered at Glenn's hands. We were to act as if nothing had ever gone wrong.

I stared at him in disbelief. I said "I can't possibly agree to that. I won't make a scene, but I'm not going to lie about what he did."

"Then you'll be the one making trouble. The rest of us want to be a complete family again" Daddy said.

I called Bill and we talked it over. In the end, Bill said he couldn't give up on Daddy, no matter what the conditions were. He was still trying to get the love and approval he'd never had as a boy. He said he didn't blame me if I couldn't hack it, we'd still see and talk with each other. I told Daddy I wasn't going to pretend, and he said I should go, then. I packed my bags and left at 8:00 on Christmas morning. Bill came over to see me off.

Glenn moved in permanently to Daddy's house. When I lost my mobility and my job, Bill came to visit me, including in the rehab hospital after my knee was replaced. Daddy never did. I called him every week, where I'd have to listen to how great Glenn was and the latest jokes he'd told Daddy, which I invariably had to interrupt because they were obscenely racist.

Bill's anger built slowly but perceptibly. He blew up increasingly easily when on the phone with me. He kept saying "I don't know how to do this without you here". I felt bad, and kept taking it to counseling, but kept coming up with the same answer: I'd give visiting a try as long as I could be honest. But Daddy kept saying that was out of the question.

A year later, Bill lost his job, I think because of anger issues. He had trouble finding a new one, and when he did, he failed his screening drug test. I didn't know that at the time; he told me he just didn't like the fuckers. It took him a month to land another interview. He managed to pass their drug test, I'm not sure how, because his friends and ex-wife later told me he was using cocaine regularly. By then, he was in default on his truck payment and had lost his insurance.

He had a heart attack, it now seems clear, while he was mowing his lawn. He went in to lie down and eventually called Daddy, saying his chest hurt. Daddy convinced him it was probably just from pulling the mower cord. When I talked with Daddy a day later and heard about it, I immediately called Bill and told him to go the ER. He said he didn't have insurance, and I said they had to treat him anyhow, if it was cardiac (and given our family history, it probably was) they could treat it and he could blow off the bills. He said the pain was getting better, he thought it really was a pulled muscle. I said I'd call him the next day to check on him. I then called his third wife at her job and told her to get him to the doctor.

He didn't get help. Instead, he went to Glenn and confessed his drug usage, saying he was scared it would show up in any medical test and he'd lose his new job. Glenn tore into him, calling him a loser for taking drugs, and said he didn't want to hear any more about it.

The next morning, Bill called in sick to work and told his wife he was exhausted, he just wanted to sleep all day. He lay down on the couch, a golf game on TV, as she left for her job. When she came home at 2:00 that afternoon, he was stiff and cold. The coroner said it was complete cardiac tamponade. The heart attack, whose pain had undoubtedly not only continued but increased, eventually tore open the pericardial lining around his heart and he bled out into his chest. I hope he was asleep when it happened, because my own doctor told me it was an agonizing way to die.

I went to Bill's funeral, driven by a friend. I did not speak to Glenn there. Daddy went home with Glenn, and the rest of the family had a wake at Bill's house. Bill's friends refused to speak to Glenn or shake his hand. It was the last time I saw Daddy.

A few months later, Glenn told Daddy about his last conversation with Bill and begged forgiveness. Daddy called me, suddenly realizing what he was living with. I stayed in touch with him, calling him and listening to him as best I could. He died one morning sitting in his recliner in front of the TV. Glenn found him. Four months later, Glenn died alone in the same house.

I'm not sorry for how I hung in there, and I'm not sorry for when I drew the line. I'm especially not sorry I made a choice different than Bill's. I'm alive, and he's not, and I believe the reason is that divergent choice we made.

I miss Bill every day. But it's odd to now, finally, be missing my father. I'm not sure what it means, except that we are all human and, given enough time, humanity is all we remember.


[Cross-posted at Group News Blog.]

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