TanaLunar Notes

2008-09-29T05:46:00.000-07:00

The Unbearable Lightness of Sarah...

As a thinking female citizen in our society, I am cringing at the selection of Sarah Palin. We must remember that this is the first executive decision of the proposed next President, John McCain.

Sarah Palin, to me, presents the conflict between male libido and intellect, mixed in with the agendas of the extreme right. She's the perfect selection of a man who does rank women first by their attractiveness, and second by their 'pleaser-ism.'

All branding of the two Republican candidates as 'mavericks' aside, these two cannot win the election without Bush's Republican base buying into them, and without convincing the supposed 'swing voters' to pull their levers or push their chads or mark their electronic touch screens in their favor.

And so the supposed maverick John McCain has caved to Bush' base and has also elected the perfect running mate to confuse everyone about the 'progressiveness' of selecting a female nominee who also happens to be a very attractive loose cannon, however strongly she acts as his cheerleader.

Most of the men in my life have admitted that their first visceral reaction to Palin was positive. She's pretty, thin, energetic, enthusiastic, and speaks loudly (although they'd tire of this pretty quickly). They gave her a closer listen than they would have if she'd looked like Barbara Bush, and better than they did to Hillary Clinton's many stump speeches. This moment's hesitation, when their radical Left politics were suspended to give a pretty girl a look was exactly what McCain needed to create interest in his dull, grey, flagging campaign.

And, to a large extent, it worked. Many men (and Republican women) bought in to the notion that Palin energized the Republican cause and could lead McCain to the White House in a way that his own descending star could not. It reminds me of Anne Rice's vampires who need new blood to warm their own veins so they can act like the living.

Fortunately, the smart men in my life quickly righted themselves and shook off the mystique woven by Palin in her early days during the RNC and just afterward. Long before she stumbled in such obvious ways, these men had withdrawn their attention from her as a possible world leader. She just surprised them with her perkiness and gumption, served up in a feminine package. For a moment she was that dream girl: gorgeous and interested in 'male' interests; the little woman behind the great man; the cheerleader; and the prodigy. A Stepford Wife version of a national figure.

But I've heard from enough other supposedly smart men that they're still buying into this. And some women who are confused into thinking that she's the first progressive female option in a new millenium.

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I have a wonderful, progressive aunt down in Orlando. Her achievements are too numerous to to list here. She has been the 'first woman' many things. To my extreme pleasure, she's a great networker and she believes in Obama.

In her network, however, she includes many Republicans and I have been privy to their political comments in the past few weeks. It's alarming how low their IQs are on this issue. It is their hope for a continuance of the old status quo and the relief they feel that McCain shook things up with the selection of Palin that causes the positively giddy emails they generate.

They feel that a real forward-moving step has been achieved in adding a female to the V.P. ticket, without any concern for which female. Palin fits a "Legally Blonde" profile (yes, I know she's a brunette) that contradicts everyone's impression that only a staid old grey-haired politican can fill the role of V.P. candidate. She 'proves' that you can have a beehive, designer glasses, and a manicure and still hunt moose and serve as V.P. as long as you're feminine enough not to threaten the good ol' boys who still run things in the Republican party.

Her lack of resume for the job ahead (and if McCain wins, Palin is only a malignant melanoma away from the Presidency) is frightening. One bard has suggested that those who really run the decision making of the White House -- not always the President -- want Palin in office because they expect McCain to not make it through a first term, and they'll be able to control Palin as easily as they have George W.

This is deep, dark conspiracy theory, but since 9/11 anything seems possible. Palin in the White House should scare all Americans right down to their own manicures and beehives. This is a time in the world when the very best intellects and body politics will be necessary to dig us out of the multi-faceted miasma Bush has dug us into (also too numerous to list here) and bring us into to the thinking and technologies of the 21st Century. McCain looks too far back into mid-Twentieth Century ideas to carry us forward, down to his citing of Reagan as a source for inspiration.

My progressive aunt has suggested that everyone vote earlier than election day in case there are Republican shenanigans again on election day. That way, instead of standing in line to vote ourselves on that day, we can volunteer to watch polling places in dicey locations where shenanigans might occur. We might not be able to prevent them from occurring, but we can call police and the Supervisor of Elections on the spot, and act as 'fair witnesses' to what goes down.

Shenanigans during voting goes all the way back to the beginning of our nation. Political maneuvering is in our lifeblood. We need to get over the shock that it occurs and work pragmatically to see that it is minimized. Republicans pull no punches in doing anything it takes to win elections. They know it is a war between ideals and strategies, and they aim to win at any cost. Karl Rove is still in the mix, and they have old Republican warriors to pull out of mothballs should they find it necessary.

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But, election day dirty tricks aside, we still have McCain's choice of a lightweight V.P. running mate on the ticket confusing the American public.

While she is not the right woman for the post at this time or any time, I want to be clear that it is not because she is a woman that she is unqualified. Hillary was more than qualified. Many other female politicians -- Republican and Democratic -- are qualified. In fact, we need female intellects at the highest levels of our society, guiding the way toward peace and safety, and toward the far horizon. Women, who bring in all new human life, have a huge stake in the decisions of when to war or not, how to spend or save, and which direction to point our world in, are completely necessary to the future of our nation.

And Sarah Palin, as a human being, has great value. She is just not the heavyweight that we need, not a player, and not really a leader. Maybe in the quirky state of Alaska with earmarks to spend on infrastructure. But for the nation and in the world we really face? I repeat the worlds of Gloria Steinem: "Not this woman. Not at this time."

2008-05-11T22:12:00.000-07:00

The War on Drugs is War on Our Children...

I am terribly upset at the death of Rachel Hoffman, a young woman of Tallahassee, who was used by the Tallahassee Police Department to set up a sting operation with drug dealers.

I don’t care if she dealt light drugs, heavy drugs, or whatever. It was horribly inappropriate for older adult male cops to force her into a situation where she was put at risk in order for them to arrest more drug dealers. It resulted in her death, and guilt rests with the police.

I’ve heard from convenience store clerks that TPD officers are claiming that her death was her fault because she didn’t do exactly what they told her to do.

Look, she was 23 years old and scared. She’d had two recent arrests and had been given a few days of jail time, which scared her. She had plans for her life beyond Tallahassee. She was untrained for anything as technical as a sting operation out in the woods with drug dealers by herself.

I am 55 years old, and I could not pull off such a thing. I would be so afraid that I would broadcast my true mission to criminals, who are alert and wary of sting operations. I’m sure this was true for her.

The police need to take 100% blame for this disaster, not blame the young victim. They are trained in the machismo activities of police and military. Young girls, especially young girls with drug issues, are not trained for this highly dangerous and technical work.

Her parents didn’t know she was exposed to this. Her lawyer didn’t know. She was sent to buy drugs heavier than she dealt or used. She was sent to buy a handgun from the same criminals. She was abducted and killed. The cops knew exactly who to look for and found them shortly after they fled from the crime scene. If they knew this much about the two criminals, why did they need the young female decoy?

This war on drugs is war on our children. Whether black or white, middle class or poor, the crazy laws birthed by the Reagan Administration are the wrong approach to the drug situation. As with so many other regressive laws and customs in our prison and police systems, instead of treating the problem, they are amplified in the zeal to win more trophy arrests, to validate the system.

As a mother, an educator, a business owner, a member of the Tallahassee community, I am sick at heart and outraged at Rachel’s death. It was so unnecessary. We’ll never know all the facts, but we should. We should examine this custom of using small-time drug dealers to bring down bigger targets and decide to not allow the police to do this.

Today was Mother’s Day, and I thought of Rachel’s mother all day. I didn’t know Rachel and I don’t know her mother. But I feel the pain and sorrow of every mother who loses a child unnecessarily. Rachel was a beautiful young woman with life ahead of her. What was she doing in the woods with criminals? Was she more afraid of what the police would do to her than the criminals?

This war on our children, in the guise of the War on Drugs, must end. We must become rational in our dealings with drug criminals. We must treat those with drug problems, not expose them to dangerous criminals with harmful intent. Let trained police do their own undercover work. It’s never appropriate to ask our children to do it for them. The police were completely inadequate to protect Rachel once they had sent her into the arms of killers. Shame on them for demanding this terrible price from her.

It does not matter that she was a college graduate. Mature people everywhere understand how immature a 23-year-old still is. Just getting ready for life. Not that wise yet. When I think of a whole battery of older men demanding this from her, my heart goes cold with fear. All I can think is that they were willing to sacrifice her to this extent, to do whatever it takes to meet their own goals. They are sworn to protect the community, and she was a member of the community. Would they send their daughters, sisters, girlfriends, wives into such danger?

Being a marijuana dealer does not train you up for such police work. Sting operations even go wrong when trained police are doing them. Much less, unqualified young adults with no background or training.

There is no mistake she made in the situation that excuses the police from responsibility for her death. They owe all of us a huge admission of their own wrongdoing and a huge apology and a huge promise to not use our children this way again. And the family needs to win a civil lawsuit and receive some level of punitive compensation for the loss of their daughter. It's unfair to them and they will never experience closure. I'll keep them and Rachel in my prayers.

2008-04-29T20:26:00.001-07:00

Dear Sister:

What can I say? It’s been too hard, these past nine months. Far harder than necessary or reasonable. We are both burned out and now find we don’t fit into one box where we must operate.

We each have dreams, responsibilities and duties. I’m leaving too much to you right now. I don’t feel good about it, but now the busy month has come and I must march through the processes which lie there. I promise, at the other end of the month, to find my way back to the responsibilities I share with you.

There has always been something fundamentally askew, akimbo, out-of-kilter in our family. Some cruel streak that makes us fight hard and not find our way back to each other. This has caused us all trouble in the world: Mom, in her disastrous relations with everyone; you, in your serial dysfunctional work situations; me, in my mixing it up with some I should be natural allies with. A family curse handed down generationally.

What I don’t share is the cognitive disorder piece. I do share the emotional fragility piece, and the skill and willingness to fight for a little while when I find myself in dicey situations. But I no longer have the stomach for it. The first whiff of conflict and I want to flee. No winners and losers, just flight. I make the decision again and again to take flight; to lick my wounds; to try to find my way back to strength and clarity. To avoid opportunities for fresh hurt.

I think it’s the 20 years of RC I churned through. I think it’s two decades of discharge on all the pain. I no longer participate in the practice of RC, but I love that it’s stamped me, changed me, permanently. I don’t quite go back to the time before.

The time before... where I see my family members... When I was on the RC journey, I tried so hard to share the good I was getting from it. It was seen as more of my flakery. In truth, I see the connections between things others try not to see and call flakey. But RC and other practices were wise stuff. I never wanted the religiosity, the ceremony... but I wanted to change. And so my perspective is no longer what my family wanted it to be. I escaped.

I walk through a war-torn territory that is my family’s history. They are rooted to it and function out of it. They so carefully set up their controlled territories. Some want deathly quiet and mucho television to numb on. Some want to be entertained. Some want to feign independence while forcing others to do their bidding.

Yi yi yi... and I am nowhere near perfection, myself. But I am a little happier and a little closer to living my dreams. And, coming from where I come from, that’s something.

2008-04-09T05:28:00.000-07:00

Supernova

The last years before my father's stroke, he burned so brightly we could hardly look at him. He expanded, increased velocity, heated up, inflamed the landscape. He lost his radar for how he affected others, in his zeal to share all the things that were churning through him.

He was always a spiritual being and he read deeply on Christianity and spirit. Never a fundamentalist, nor a biblical literalist, he was nevertheless full of love and energy for the message of Christ. Eager to see God when this life was over.

His invisible stroke a year ago, disappeared the man we knew. He morphed into a new form, one absent of spiritual questing and intellectual curiosity. A man who always had at least five books going at once now does not read. He read his last book, a Christmas present from my sister, Treasure Island, in January. Then he watched the movie. And he was done.

I try to offer him his beloved poetry and opera, offer to acquire any artistic/cultural thing he might enjoy. He tells me he's 'content.' I ask him what that means and he says, 'a simple existence.' And when I ask him what that means, he says, 'I cannot express it.'

I pray this means he's reached nirvana, a state of zen. The state of grace the religions promise, but which we never really see on earth. He's been stripped of most of the human things: the trouble-making, the provocative. Sometimes he has a day when he's playful. My mother insists he's improving.

But sometimes to me he is the living dead, so far from the man I've been close to my whole life that I don't know him. Just a nursing home patient I help to take care of. I cart him to doctors. Sometimes out to dinner. I wonder when to start pushing for a wheelchair, as I pushed for the walker. He quit falling when he got that.

Every day I have to remember to say goodbye. In my memories, there's a huge population of those I've said goodbye to. All my childhood homes have been torn down. My grandparents gone. Uncles gone. What I have is today. Just today.

2008-02-20T21:57:00.000-08:00

On Turning 55...

In a few weeks, I will hit what my husband calls 'double nickels,' an age I have suddenly realized is no longer my 'early 50's.' I always feel so asleep at the wheel re: things like this. I just do not know I am not 22 or 35 or even 45, for god's sake! 55! This cannot be true.

Even as I care for my elderly parents, and see evidence of everyone else I know moving up in age, it seems surreal. But, true it is.

I think one of the things that is confusing is that, no matter how old we all get, we still struggle with each other as if we were decades younger.

I complained to an old communal housemate of mine how the cooperative household we'd shared in the '70s had spoiled me for working with other households or community groups. We were so egalitarian and got so very many things right! It's been long comedown to deal with the ordinary world again. The co-op house I lived in and the co-op air I breathed in the '70s, when I was in my 20s were not without their struggles, too. But there was the sense that we were moving toward a common good; that the struggles were worth the effort because we were giving birth to a new world -- or at least new lives for ourselves.

Now, it seems that the struggles are redundant and draining of our life force. Do we really get anywhere at all?

I hardly recognize my life anymore. My original family has moved closer than they've been to me in decades. My child is a grown man. My stepchild is nearly grown. My husband's career has changed again. I've opened a new brick-and-mortar business, and I'm on the elder-care team for my parents.

I find myself wanting to do something very exotic for my 55th b'day. I want to see the aurora borealis in Alaska! I want to feel real winter and stand on the edge of the known universe and watch that waving curtain of greenish light overhead. I want to see if I'm one of the ones who can hear it! I want to see the arctic winter night. And feel the pioneering spirit of Alaska. I think that if I could do that, I could enter the next phase of my life in fine shape and ready for whatever lies ahead. Maybe I should give that to myself as a present.

2008-01-26T20:49:00.000-08:00

Updates...

Let's see... After many annoying tests, it was determined that my father had a stroke awhile back, before his move to my town, and the possibility of an aneurysm. He continues to do fairly well, but still not animated or social. He obsesses a bit with worry. My mother's health has improved and she's healed from her bad fall when she first moved here. Most of her pain was a bad sprain and once that healed, she was much better.

The gallery continues to develop. Businesses teach you the market. Our toughest challenge is our hidden location. It's hard to keep overcoming that. But we think our advertising is working and that word is getting out that we're there.

My suddenly-widowed friend has survived past quite a few anniversaries and reports that while she still has tough days, she also has good days again, too.

I had a meeting with myself last night. I'd noticed that I was spiraling downward with worry and misery, which isn't my usual attitude. I made the decision to improve my attitude and face my challenges more positively. I had a much better day today.

I really don't love travel that much anymore because it's so disruptive. I have a hard enough time keeping my activities linear enough to get to everything I need and want to do. But I had a lovely time away for two days with my husband.

Tomorrow, as God is my witness, I will work long hours in my studio and keep my linear ideas flowing. It's late, and I must accomplish much!

My dear Irish friend sent me a really nice Starbucks gift card! Spiritual fuel to keep me going. Thanks for the good thoughts.

2007-09-02T22:24:00.000-07:00

Brokeback Ma...

My mother fell backward in her new garage the other day, creating a compression fracture in her lumbar spine. It was horribly traumatic to watch my mother falling against her car, down onto concrete while I was helpless to reach for her.

There is small stoop in the garage and my sister and I hired a friend to install a safety rail. But she stepped onto the stoop 90 degress to the rail and so grabbed air as she fell. Bad as it was, thank God the car was there and its door was shut. She bounced against the springy-ness of the metal door rather than clonking her head onto the concrete.

But the small of her back folded and then went down. I had to struggle to get around my father on his walker to get to her. I remember him saying, "We need help; we need help." And me saying, "Who is there to help?" just before I got to her and tried to keep her on the ground. For, like an injured wild animal, her instinct was to rise up and get away. I went to her and held her in place and told her to wait a bit before rising so we could take an inventory on her injuries and determine whether she should rise. I could only hold her back a little while. When she could not rise up directly, she crawled to the safety rail and pulled herself up. I asked her to wait there until we reassessed her in that position. At that point, a neighbor came running into the garage. Dad had called him.

Ever since that day, Mom's whole life has changed. Because they are new to town, we are still figuring out doctors. This is a whole long story I don't want to dwell on here. But, suffice to say, that we finally got her to first a walk-in clinic for xrays and then to an orthopedist.

She's now in a back brace whenever she's out of bed. It was nightmarish to leave her x 3 days to help in my sister's move up here. Family members worked shifts to make sure my parents had help, but it's infinitely better now that my sis and her husband are living in the house.

When Labor Day finally passes, I will be able to call the ortho again and request a home evaluation from a physical therapist. My sister is bolder about getting Mom up from bed to walk a bit. And, after being really "on" for six weeks, I am able to step back a bit and let my sister lead in many things.

This is not to say I'm abandoning anyone. I still plan to do many important things. But, perhaps racing back and forth across town continuously is coming to an end. They'll be cooking food there at last and the many small ministrations will come naturally from those in the home. Soon, my sister and I will discuss how to split some of the responsibility. I have some ideas, but will be happy to hear hers, too.

Meanwhile, my own life and business have been languishing a bit. I need to return to them. I'm extraordinarily tired. My sister has a month "off," to get established here and get many things done. But it's shake-and-bake time for me. The gallery opens this Friday. There's a bank account to open, lots of pricing to be done. It's a bit surreal. Staying human in the midst of all of this has meant just finding a way to flow.

My own art is on the back burner for now. I'm an elder caregiver and gallery owner. Art from my hands will return later. When I do get the chance to make jewelry, it goes well. So I'm reassured that I'm not forgetting how to do things.

Progress is occurring on all fronts, and I'm grateful.
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2007-08-17T20:20:00.000-07:00

Miners...

The idea of "clean coal" as a viable "alternative fuel" instead of a frightening, high-risk effort to procure more fossil fuel is something we must get real about. There's probably no way to produce a safe mining industry at the 100% level. Men who go down into the mines are amazing, but we must find new ways to generate industrial-strength electricity and new jobs with decent wages and benefits to the working class. Bundling those needs in this way puts miners at an unfair risk.

Gaea, our earth, is like a living organism. She expands and contracts, shudders and shakes. Some mining accidents are the result of less-than-perfect mining management. The one going on today probably was not. Seismic activity collapsed the mine's entrance and now geologists in that state are seeing a slow-motion collapse of the whole mountain. Whether it was weakened by having its coal removed, I don't know. But it's been determined that continuing the rescue effort is like "throwing good money after bad": killing and injuring more people while trying to save the trapped miners.

And we don't even know where they are or if they're alive 11 days after the initial mine collapse. It seems unlikely. And it seems like the worst sort of nightmare to live through, or experience vicariously. So terrifying and so sad. The earth as coffin... Lights would have long since burned out.

No one to blame, except for the whole society -- a society dependent upon the burning of fossil fuels.

But, re: the rescue effort... Glad the decision isn't mine. It's no-win. Higher authorities than the mine president are now making decisions. There's some controversy: some of the miners are Mexican nationals. But the larger, more pragmatic reality is that we don't have the technology to hear that deeply underground and we don't have the strength to hold back collapsing earth at that magnitude.

So, weep and mourn. Give thanks if you don't mine coal; if your children don't. Put pressure on our politicians to put pressure on our energy industries to develop renewable, safer fuels sources.

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2007-08-12T22:36:00.000-07:00

Coasting...

With my business partner and friend, I journeyed back to the Mississippi coastal villages and New Orleans last week. It had been 20 months since my last visit to those regions. I first went in about 8 weeks after Hurricane Katrina, and then again about 4 weeks after that.

On those trips, the devastation was overwhelming. There's little I can add to what the media provided. Except to say that it was different in person. It lacked the news show theme songs, the celebrity newscasters and the commercials. It was just quiet and desolated.

What has been erased along the Mississippi coast is human architectural history at the waterfront. From Biloxi to Gulfport to Pass Christian to Bay St. Louis, most of the historic antebellum architecture was wiped out by wind and surge. Remember, a 50-foot wave slammed into this area.

One can really see what a difference it made to be behind a primary dune system. Only those structures still stand. The dune took most of the energy of the surge.

The land there is very flat. And on 99.99999999% of all days, the Gulf of Mexico there seems as flat and harmless as a back bay, and nothing at all like the open big water that it is. A large hurricane makes it traitorous. The other days lull the populace into denial.

The recovery we saw consisted of: massive debris cleanup; live oaks who sprawling limbs had been stripped away now putting forth green leaves and branches; a few new and disposable high-rise condos built upon land so historic that one almost wishes for another surge to carry them away.

I predict that if the scientists are off a bit in their former prediction that we're in a new 40-yr hurricane cycle that will bring us more Katrinas, that investors and developers will slowly creep back to redevelop that area. But if they are right, and these two years since Katrina are the anomaly before the storms, I predict the developers will hang back.

That open land at the edge of the Gulf is nearly irresistible. Green now, with weeds growing at the sites of former mansions, the empty lands provide a view not seen in nearly 200 years. A developer's dream, the erasure of old development making way for the new. But it comes with a price. Howling winds, slamming seas, and death. Everyone still there is a survivor.

New Orleans has always been a different story. And while its main avenues and high ground are looking pretty recovered, taking a wrong turn and going around a block reveals the truth behind the facade. Still, I'm grateful for the facade. All small towns develop their main streets first, an economy grows, and then the rest of the town.

One bit of good news is that my activist friend over there -- one who has effected much positive change over several decades in that city -- may yet find a way to force the reopening of the Charity Hospital system. If he succeeds, the city will regain an important part of its infrastructure: medical care for the indigent and trauma care for everyone.

My business partner was slammed with a sudden migraine and before analgesics began to work for her, I went through some moments of hell realizing this was happening in a city with no infrastructure. If it had turned out to be more serious, I would have had to strategize some way to carry her to another city far enough away from Katrina's devastation that a hospital would have been available. Thank God it didn't come to that. But it caused me to realized that I wouldn't live there with children or old people. It wouldn't be safe. Likewise, I wouldn't want to be in an accident there, or cut myself seriously.

The good news is that the artists of that area are recovering. Many restaurants have reopened. Whole Food Market has reopened on Magazine Street. The French Market is undergoing improvements. Barring another attack on the levy system, the city will largely come back. But, like the Mississippi coastal villages, a lot of disruption has occurred, a lot of people are dead, and a lot of history has ended. What replaces all of that remains to be seen. Pray that something authentic survives.
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2007-08-12T21:30:00.000-07:00

At Midnight...

I was dead asleep on the couch a little while ago, when my husband awakened me to go to bed. So I went to brush my teeth and, as such things often do, a working-mystery my mind has been chewing on seemed to be suddenly solved.

My parents recently moved to my town. For a decade, I'd hoped they would and had actually given up hope when my central Florida family had a change of heart and decided to make this rather arduous, strenuous move.

I'm glad they're here, but it's too late now for anything but a family-provided nursing-home sort of care. My children are grown now, and I'm at that stage of life -- that little wedge -- between raising one's children and one's own decline into old age and all that that implies.

Several of my friends have already lost a parent or two, and one has lost her husband. And so I am not among the first to have the experience of seeing parents advance to late stages of life, even in my group of close intimates.

My father was always a dynamo. I speak of this in the past tense because that man has already gone. My father survives right now, physically. He is not bedridden and he is conscious; he is not in dementia. In fact, his once vibrant intellect still hangs onto pragmatic information, which he communicates to me each time I see him.

But he is so back in there, as to be utterly transformed. Several years before my 26-year-old son was born, Dad suffered a mysterious ailment in his kidneys which resulted in a form of rhumatoid arthritis that attacked his right knee and almost destroyed it. Long story short: nothing worked shy of a too-late total knee replacement. Painful physical therapy was avoided and so his leg never recovered its former movement. But his life recovered and his professional career continued for many years, until he retired.

Even in retirement, he was a dynamo. He spent a decade exploring all of his creative talents. He dug out old manuscripts of novels he'd attempted in youth and finished them. He wrote and published a fictionalized account of a moment in his family's history. He explored the skill of colored pencil drawing and produced copious portraits and landscapes. He went with my mother to England. He attended an Episcopal men's Bible study group for more than a decade, rising early every Thursday morning, and studied most of the Bible and all of the scriptures. He decided to not call himself "Christian," but instead "a follower of Christ." He also attended a Friday morning men's breakfast group in Ybor City, driving himself there until he moved to me. His condo benefitted from his friendly personality and his construction expertise, even when it sometimes reeled from my mother's intense energies and intrigues.

He taught my son, his only biological grandchild, to fight and to shoot a rifle -- skills I would have left out of his boyhood; but which Dad felt all men should know. And this actually added to my son's amazing humanity and taught me a lot about the confidence men get from knowing how to protect their families.

He taught me to: love people, exercise my intellect, sail competitively, draw, trust myself, and to be a confident woman.

As I sat across his dining table from him earlier today, I looked into his eyes. Suffering from multiple health issues now, his eyes are no longer his eyes. I couldn't even see the blue. I encouraged him to take on the disipline I've had to learn, of washing my eyes each morning and night, so his eyes would become clear again, maybe.

When we saw his new doctor two weeks ago, his kidney infection had returned. His former doctor had provided one more Rx for a med to combat the infection. But the new doctor may be sharper than the old. An unannounced referral slip arrived in the mail, sending him to a urologist. I think she'll look deeper than the former doctor, who did nothing but write scripts and avoid diagnosis.

I don't know... maybe he was seeing something and didn't want to rock the boat. Maybe he didn't see anything. All I know is that Dad suffered two unusual incidents in the past months, both putting him on the floor and helpless. Neither event sent him to the hospital, but similar events in the future surely will.

His former perky personality is sleeping now. It's hard for him to form words. He has little energy for communicating. After years of studying everything, I believe that his mind is simply in a zen state. He stares into the middle distance; not even at the TV or out the window. I ask him if he has pain, and his answer is always no. When I ask him how he's doing, his answer is always, "pretty good." He sleeps away his days. He fears leaving his familiar surroundings, his bathroom, his bed. But he'll go out several times a week for Mom's sake.

She has a certain kind of denial in all of this. I have to pop her balloon occasionally, to make her come back to reality because she strays easily. But I try to not pop it too often because it may be getting her through this. What 82 yr old wants to be a major caregiver?

But when I looked into Dad's eyes earlier tonight, it added to the mystery I'm walking around questioning: What's happening to you? And where have you gone? Will we find out something terrible that has been missed, and cost you your survival?

Brushing my teeth and not thinking about anything, I was suddenly hit with the knowing that it's bad; he's very sick. Those were not merely unwell, old eyes. They were the eyes I've seen at life's end; in cancer wards. Pupils open so widely that I almost see the retina; the vacancy. I pray he's telling me the truth when he says there's no pain and he's doing "pretty good."

When he was much younger, I think he worked on the concept of dying. He took a spiritual journey through Christian theology and arrived at peace. Now that he no longer has much intellectual curiosity, our lifelong conversations are over. He doesn't look at email much. He's gentle, but not dynamic. I think his gaze is in the next world.

These realizations tonight awakened fear and sadness. I don't know what's ahead. I have a lot on my plate. It's awhile before my sister arrives here to live. I'm doing the best I can to keep all boats afloat. Trying to parse out the real needs and see that they're met. Trying to keep my own livelihood afloat.

With my father gone from his old ways and with his future so uncertain, I begin to enter that new land where one outlives one's parents. My father has always been a bit of a life raft. He warned me this day would come and I thought we all had more time. I don't know why. I'm not so young and he's very old. Mom is actually a younger 82 than he is. And I realized tonight that the reason for that is that he's very sick and is sailing away from us.

Such a father he has been. Not so much a nurturing parent. And certainly no saint. But a person who took big bites in life, dared big, achieved much, and showed me how to do the same. His chi was phenomenal.

I've often said that when Mom goes, the world will lose a great catalog of what's going on with politicians and celebrities. But when Dad goes, a bountiful little loving man will simply leave us. Leaving behind a legacy of mid-Century buildings in the Tampa Bay area, a legacy of a man who tried many things, and a legacy of a man who took the stuff of his DNA and family history and wrote the next chapter.

A pre-feminist man who knew, nevertheless, to set his daughters free to discover their own power. Who hired early female architects in his architectural firms. Who was the coyote, the trickster, the one with the sparkle in his eyes.

That's what the world has lost in this new phase: a man who had fun and worked hard in life, and exercised his creativity in all respects. I shall miss him. I miss him already.
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2007-07-15T21:40:00.000-07:00

Back Again...

It's been nearly a year since posting. It's been an intense and interesting year. Two prior businesses giving birth to a third, learning real business skills, thinking big...

Feeling the frustrations of working groups and their dynamics. It was useful to check in on another such group online to see that my group is not alone in their fits and starts. Learning to hand over some of the responsibility to another facilitator and trusting that things will progress even more effectively under the tutelage of someone with fresh ideas and not so burned out.

Soon to be marketing at a more comprehensive level than before. Wish I had that MBA I've fantasized about. Oh well, instead I'll work on an actual business. This is the first time my business and I myself have not been exactly analagous. I have a partner now and I love cooperating with her to see how far out and creative things can get.

The shape of my life is changing in still more ways. Family members are joining me in my hometown in north Florida. My aging parents will now live out their lives near me. We cannot keep them safe from dying, but we can keep them close and help them when the time comes. My one sibling is wearing down under the strain of helping them by herself. We will soon be a team around them, and together.

With the growth of the business and the moving of the parents, I've kept my head down to produce. I've not been as in touch with the news as I usually am. That's a very weird sensation.

I have lived the most fractured of lives, and yet I value the notion of stability and continuity. A paradox, to be sure, and one that I am dedicated to ending.

...............................

A close friend of mine became a widow late last year. Now I'm reading a novel about a widow, that my friend recommended. The parallels between my friend and the character in the book are striking. I have been observing in her and in others a special insanity called grief that comes to stay when such a devastating loss occurs. It's like one can just not process all of the meanings of the loss.

I want to wrap arms around my friend and soothe her and move her quickly through the months and years of pain she has and will experience. Give her goals and timelines and all the other "wrong" things. It is so restimulating to see a worst fear come to pass, so stunning in its impact. Everyone handles shock and loss in unique ways. An immovabe fact brought her sudden segue into an unplanned chapter: her husband died. He was dead man walking. A massive stroke one morning and gone two days later. They gave her no hope: none of the news was good.

And then came the aftermath. It's all been aftermath. And it's all been about her life, her loss. Being way too careful with her when I want to scream: "I lost something, too. I lost you, my lifelong friend who is now someone I don't recognize or understand. I want to heal you so I can have you back." But she has no reason to heal. Her child is grown, her parents gone, enough wealth to barely work. No one to get out of bed for. No expectations from anyone to get up and make something of the rest of her life. You have life left, make lemonade.

And she may, some day. Her husband's death made us all face our mortality in a new way. It was a stunning death, at least on the day it began. I'm sure that events caused post-traumatic stress syndrome for her. She was up close and personal with the destruction of the one she loved.

She doesn't talk about this. She experiences it as a lack of him in her day-to-day life. She's been a great believer in friendships and has many. But, on the family level, she is very alone. An only child born to older parents, who then divorced. Who then had only one child.

My own life is cacophanous with many family members. Commitments and activities pull me from any reverie that might set up. I am busy, busy, busy. Maybe it's how I avoid constant confrontation with mortality.

But a member of my community also died of a similar stroke last week. The undertow reached up and took another one down. The community is reeling. Some pockets of this community have experienced unfathomable loss. Children have died in numbers I never experienced in my own childhood. There have been fatal car and motorcycle accidents. Diseases have done their work. There have been deaths from extreme adventures. And even losses of soldiers in Iraq. Perhaps because we know so many people, we can see the panorama.

A few years ago, a teenaged boy's life ended against a tree in my neighborhood. I didn't know him and I was away when the accident occurred. I came home to a new shrine to him, built on the tree. A wailing, screaming mother memorializing his life on the tree that ended his life. All of the holidays were commemorated there. On his birthday, there were balloons and cards. Tinsel at Christmas. Wreaths at Easter. It drove me crazy to have to experience this mother's agony, however vicariously. I wanted to be sensitive, but I am the mother of two sons -- one I brought to earth with my own bodily efforts, the other I have raised for another -- and the reminder of my worst fear confronting me each time I left my home was agonizing for me. I thought of leaving a book about recovering from the loss of a teenager sealed in a ziplock baggy nailed to the tree.

I did nothing. I sat in witness to the mother's need to go slightly insane from the loss of the one whom she, through her bodily efforts, brought to the earth.

If we are not numb, we do not handle this well. If we are not stoic, grief will take us as a tsunami. It will wipe out our villages and change the landscape. We will land on a new planet after the event. But the air we breathe and the gravity we count on will still be in play and the world will want us to become normal again as quickly as possible, so it can have us back.

2006-08-17T22:17:00.000-07:00

Two Henrys…

About five or six years ago, after my father-in-law had passed away but my mother-in-law was still living in St. Augustine, we took her to see a play at the Limelight Theatre. It was a one-man play by an actor who reenacted the life of Henry Flagler. It also featured two female singers who performed turn-of-the-20th-century music which Jackie knew. She loved it.

Flagler, of course, was the other industrial magnate who developed Florida. Being from the Tampa side of the state, Henry B. Plant was the “original” to me.

The parallel lives of these two men who came down from the North to take advantage of the opportunities jungly Florida afforded at that time are amazing.

At the end of the Flagler play, there was a question period and I asked the actor – still in character – about what he thought of Henry B. Plant. His comments led me to believe that Flagler thought Plant to be a midget up against his own great achievements. This was stated with a twinkle in the actor’s eye.

Tonight, Glen and I attended another presentation. This was a one-man show reenacting the life of Plant. It was not a musical presentation, but it did feature a very interesting slide show of old Florida: Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota, and Miami before and during the very early years of the 20th century.

The Plant show did mention Flagler quite a lot, and the actor led me to believe that the relationship between the two men was competitive, but also more developed and friendly than the Flagler show did. In fact, he said that Flagler had served on one of Plant’s boards of directors, for the railroad line that ran from Sanford to Tampa.

Both men not only brought the railroads to the state for the purpose of luring industry, development and tourists’ dollars, they also each built a beautiful resort hotel: Flagler’s Ponce de Leon Hotel and Plant’s Tampa Bay Hotel. Both exist today, but as private universities. Both have unusual architecture for their locales.

Turns out this was because they, being built in the “jungle” during the Victorian Age, needed to offer extreme high-end culture to their patrons in order to lure them at all. They needed to create spectacle as destination – a tradition that’s been emulated in Florida ever since!

When Flagler served on The Plant System’s BOD, he voted against Plant’s proposal to build the hotel and said it could never succeed as a tourist resort because his own hotel had already captured the entire market with that idea. Plant proceeded anyway, and tourists did come, and it was nice. But it never saw black ink. Flagler was right. At that time, there was only a large enough market for one such resort. And the fact that the Ponce was completed first and stood near the Atlantic Ocean gave it primacy.

I was able to tell the actor/professor that I went to H.B. Plant High School and had taken my SATs at his former hotel. I also asked him – in character – what Davis Islands had looked like during his time. He replied that it was mostly a spit of land until Davis came along in the early 20th century and made it a success. Selling land he pumped up from the bay’s bottom, Davis made $3 million in three days! But although Davis Islands has been an ongoing success, Davis himself died penniless.

Interestingly, Davis reproduced some of his Davis Islands success over on Anastasia Island in St. Augustine, with the neighborhood known as David Shores. It is reminiscent of some parts of Davis Islands.

And, also interesting, is that Glen grew up in the land of Henry Flagler and Davis Shores, on an island, while I grew up in the land of Henry B. Plant, and on Davis Islands. In two lives otherwise unlike one another’s, and two temperaments unlike one another’s, the histories of our hometowns on either side of the state create “bookends” and make some sort of statement about the lives of two native Floridians who happened to get together in the modern age.

Alligators, humidity, mosquitoes and biting gnats, hurricanes… these are not the elements that caucasian, northern Europeans usually gravitate toward. But the two Henrys opened the wilderness – for their own profit, of course – to the rest of us and built the foundation of modern Florida. St. Augustine and Tampa are two of the best parts of the state – along with beautiful Tallahassee, of course. But that’s a different story…

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2006-06-12T18:58:00.000-07:00

Don’t Look Here…

Don’t look here for:

Brevity/succinctness -- To me, a big problem in modern society, and especially in the media, is our predilection toward the sound bite

Political correctness -- I don’t obey the rules

Demure coyness or flirtation -- This is one female who’s really over it

The shyness of maidenhood -- I don’t intend to hide in tiny spaces

Thematic unity -- I’ll spit out whatever’s on my mind; my blog is one place in the cosmos where I don’t have an editor

Christian Fundamentalism, or any other kind of fundamentalism – I claim the right to explore alternatives, or not

Scientific proof -- I stand with the poets and see where mind and matter touch

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Back to art, the center of my life…

Today I torched and hammered metal. Fabricated copper trapezoids with a sense of humor. These will be linked into a neckpiece and shipped to Portland, Oregon, where my “jewelry porn” photographer will work his magic.

I’m racing with a timeline. In these few precious production days before I lift off for Milwaukee, we now have perhaps-hurricane Alberto sliding in our general direction. Life is always complicated. Hurricanes never figure into my jewelry fantasies, and yet I dodge them all the time.

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Last week, I worked with grout and embedded swirls and stones into the back sides of copper box beads. Both sides of these pieces contain surprises, and each is tactilely different. They add a certain ruggedness to my work. Dreaming in barbed wire and tarnished copper and rust, with the gleam of silver here and there. Some private language speaking.

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The business side of my business is going surprisingly well. I’m pleased to find that I’m learning something about this part, too. And satisfied to find that macro-economics reaches my world, and that my work ripples out into the world.

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I want to say something about super-volcanoes and giant meteors, and how in actuality we are between a rock and a hard place. About why we should develop sustainable agriculture even if it’s going to be incinerated. About why to be moral, even if it comes to naught.

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And I want to say something about sticking to issues and not attacking personalities. Attacks hurt. And say nothing good about the attacker. I dare you to step in close and experience love and respect. I dare you to disagree with me, respectfully. I dare you to offer up ideas that cause growth in us both. And I dare you to try to be as real as I try to be.

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2006-04-10T15:20:00.000-07:00

Judas: Dialogue with Dad...
[An ongoing conversation with my father re: things political and religious... My response occurs earlier than his initial message, so read down to his message first.]

Response from Tana: I think that almost none of the characters or characterizations revered in "traditional" Christianity hold up to the scrutiny of history and time and science. Christianity is a creation myth of a religion, with mystical aspirations. As we now know from the Dead Sea Scrolls, Nag Hamadi, and other alternative gospels and writings, there were earlier and smarter -- and more physically possible -- versions of the story of Christ and its meanings than the one handed down through Roman Catholicism and its offspring, the various Reformations. I believe that current forensic sciences, deeper studies of history and ancient languages, and other resources in the Age of Information are revealing the silliness of the essential story as held by believers. The Church has been all about politics and manipulation from the get-go. Lovely as Italy is, never forget that it is essentially corrupt in all things and princes and popes are the real story of this country's religion.

I think these new historical revelations, mixed with forensic science, are exactly why the Religious Right is so uneasy with science and history, choosing instead to perpetuate the convenient, but unbelievable faux history of Christ and the meanings of what he said. There is so much seminal evidence that he spent time among the Essenes, the Gnostics and other mystical sects of Jews in the ancient world and absorbed the best of their teachings and included them in what he tried to leave behind. The Communion itself is an Essene ritual. But the Christian Church never credits such things pre-dating Christ's use of them.

I personally believe that he was a special human of immense insight. I personally believe that he accessed God in a way that we each can, if we are gifted enough to do so. I personally believe that he -- and other mystics and prophets -- spoke in code to try to "mail" their knowledge down through time. I think their knowledge has been ambushed and corrupted by other agendas and passed on as the Real Deal to silly people incapable of doing their own critical thinking, or seeing with their own eyes, and understanding the meanings of the original messages. Through no fault of their own. The story was revised so it would work as a centralized religion. The Church withheld information from the masses on all levels -- through intentional and non-intentional means. And the educational level of the world's masses, at large, has not been great yet. Religion itself has been a huge impediment to real education. From the Scopes trial, to creationism, to "intelligent design," to the Bush administration and Falwell and Ashcroft, et al, we see this attempt to keep the veil in place even in today's world.

No wonder there's a plethora of espionage fiction written by the likes of Dan Brown and his predecessors, casting the Catholic Church in the same light at the KGB, the Nazis, and other "evil empire" organizations. This whole loop back into Fundamentalism and anti-science rhetoric has been confusing to me. I'd thought I was living in a rational and modern, if not morally perfect, society. But these past 6 yrs have revealed to me that I live in a society of irrational, magical thinkers who no more understand real faith than the man in the moon. The Universe is so much smarter and more awesome (to use an overused word) than the creation myth of Christianity or Judaism or any other religion. Religion held up in a world of pre-science, but it does no longer.

I personally believe that there is huge intelligence in the Universe, but it's not caught up in an earthbound mythology. Fortunately, the earthbound mythology hasn't had any influence on the actual reality of the Universe. We are its children and it's a closed system. It's essentially benign and not the result of intentional, organized evil. It has an essential nature, and we are part of that. We might get eaten by a sabre-toothed tiger, but that is not organized evil, only hungry nature. As Annie Dillard wisely wrote: "This is a chomped and nibbled world." In all likelihood, God exists mostly in bacteria, which seem to be the catalyzing force for evolution. Not only do bacteria winnow out the weak from the strong, but they evolve us. When we survive, we change.

I think Judas was doing what he was asked by Christ. Christ wanted to make his myth according to his own recipe to the extent that he could. Judas didn't last very long after "betraying" Christ, as I understand it. He hanged himself before the day was done. I think Christ was not necessarily chaste and celebate, and so it is likely that the Magdalene was a close consort. Whether she was his wife, I don't know. But it was unusual at the time for a woman to be so close to a man w/o marriage. In India and the Far East, they report that the two Marys traveled to their land, along with the Virgin's son, after the time of the crucifixion and "ascension," and taught in their lands. They have a shrine to the Virgin, which is reported to be her grave.

I think the story I most believe is this: Christ was crucified and upon the cross given a drug by mouth by his friends that would not only comfort him but would also mimmick death. I believe that the man who provided the crypt and some of the apostles arrived early to take his body down. I believe he looked dead many hours earlier than most people died from crucifixion, and they were able to take him away and place him in the tomb in a shroud. I believe that not everyone involved in preparing his body for permanent burial was in on the secret that he was not dead. I believe that his injuries from his torture and crucifixion and the drug were difficult to bear, and that when he awakened and was released from the tomb he was spotted by a few people and told them to stay back. I believe he looked terrible, "changed." And I believe that after he was seen that a few of his friends hid him effectively so that he was not seen again -- so that he could heal enough to leave the area forever. If he'd been spotted by the Jews or Romans, they'd really have killed him on the spot. So he had to leave, but not before communicating to a few apostles re: what they should do. I believe that he hid in the general area long enough to encounter Paul. And then I think he went to the East forever. The East has stories of him after the time of his crucifixion in the Mideast, and he was seen with two women, one of them his mother. They taught and performed healing along their way. And that he eventually died in the East.

The story of Mary Magdalene making her way, pregnant, into the south part of ancient France and having her daughter pass along this royal bloodline is interesting. But it's in conflict with the story above, which I believe more. Unless she eventually peeled away and made her own way west... It's hard to square the two stories.

But I look for stories that can occur within physical laws. There are miracles of illusion and miracles of healing, and perhaps even of apparent deaths being reversed. I don't think Christ would have been any less holy for what he was trying to teach and show, had the story been truthful. Being touched by Christianity in my childhood and in my family, and in my society, I do feel a relationship with Christ and speak with him daily and feel there's a great deal of power there. I think that love is a constant act of forgiveness, and Christ changed the world the most by modeling forgiveness. Many of the other religions were about exclusivity and retribution. Christ's message was about forgiveness. I have an imperfect understanding of him, but this I do know.

So I, for one, am glad that they're digging up hidden scrolls in a time when scholars can take a good look at them and add them to the mosaic of our understanding. Piecing this together with the Deep Space work of science will finally bring real knowledge to the human race. We need radical change in our consciousness, not mere revision of a failed story. Reenacting the failed story is enslavement. Sometimes I think the Bush administration and its ilk would be happiest with a return to the feudal time of the Dark Ages, when kings and bishops ruled and the people were just part of the landscape. Americans, of all people, need to integrate science with history and move forward into the future with real knowledge. And not let Catholicism and Fundamentalism hold us back any longer. I believe in a secular morality more than a church-enforced faux reality. And I thank God that our society still retains enough free speech that you could watch a special on Judas. Now, if millions more would open their minds, too...

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Message from Dad: Judas Iscariot, long reviled as history's quintessential betrayer, was [according to the newly translated Coptic Gospel of Judas] actually the best friend of Jesus and turned him over to authorities only because Jesus asked him to.

The document, on display in Washington, found in the 1970s but only recently translated, revealed only this week by the National Geographic Society, considered by some to be the most important archaeological find of the last 60 years, purports to record conversations between Jesus and Judas in the last week of their lives---conversations in which Jesus shared secrets not known by others of his disciples.

"You will exceed all of them for you will sacrifice the man that
clothes me."

"Step away from the others and I shall tell you the mysteries of
the kingdom. It is possible for you to reach it, but you will grieve a
great deal."

Jesus also reveals that Judas will be despised by the other
disciples. "You will be cursed by the other generations---and you
will come to rule over them."

This Coptic script was ruled heretical by the EARLY CHURCH leaders because of its disagreement with the conventionally accepted gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Most copies were destroyed. The sole known copy lay hidden in the Egyptian desert for nearly 1,700 years before it was discovered by looters in the 1970s. The authentication and translation of the document will produce "a short-term sensation," said Rev. Donald Senior, president of the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, but its "impact on the lives of ordinary believers is going to somewhat minimal." Biblical scholars, however, hailed the new text because of the insight it will provide into the exceptionally turbulent period when competing ideologies sought to stake their own claims to the Jesus story. The Judas Gospel was originally written in Greek about 140 after Jesus and Judas died. The current manuscript is a copy of the original text translated into the Coptic language by a professional scribe in a group known as the Gnostics. Extensive analysis of the paper, ink, writing style, and text all indicate the copy was made about A.D. 300.

"He's [Judas] is the good guy in this portrayal," said Bart Ehrman, a religion professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "He's the only apostle who understands Jesus."

---Paraphrasing the Los Angles Times

2006-02-18T11:10:00.000-08:00

Illness…

It’s been said that if you don’t have good health, you don’t have anything. While not exactly true – many are surviving and experiencing their blessings with less-than-perfect health – it certainly feels true when a virus comes to town.

I knew this one had gotten me several weeks ago, when first one side of my throat felt stabbed and then the other side settled into a more generalized sore throat.

Two days earlier, I’d eaten lunch at a local burrito shop and noticed, only after I’d ordered and become committed to staying there, that the order-taker/cashier was sniffing and sniveling with a red nose. Clearly, she was descending into the special hell that is flu. I tried hard to keep my distance from her, but I could only do so much about that. After my food came, I moved far across the dining room from her, but then she came out into the dining room to a table near mine, and put her head down into her hands. The co-dependant mother in me almost insisted that she go home that minute to take care of herself and to avoid exposing others. I crossed myself when I left and took some Zicam up my nose and prayed that I’d dodged a bullet.

I tried to keep from obsessing on my exposure to her illness and did pretty well. But, two days later, a freezing rain came to town. I worked for several hours in my studio and then decided to get some lunch. Then the rain came, but I needed to go to the grocery. Once I’d shopped and loaded my car, I came home to cook. After dinner, I noticed the first symptoms of illness, and I knew it would be a Big One.

The upshot is that this is not the sickest I’ve ever been. But I have relapsed twice since the original onslaught. I’m not sure I caught exactly what she had. There were certainly other exposures to run into. Until my second relapse, I did not have chills and fever. My sore throat lasted only the first 24 hours. But the congestion and sinus involvement has tired me, made it hard to breathe, kept me drained and spacey. After the first five days, I felt I was getting over it. And then it took me down again, a clone to the first chapter. And then I felt I’d beaten it again, and it took me down again. This third time has been hardest.

I’ve had to relinquish my normal life. I’ve had to hand the reins over to my body and illness to dictate when to sleep and when to wake. When signs of a bacterial secondary infection finally showed up, I knew it was no longer just viral. It was time to start using naturopathic “antibiotics.” From my father, I have inherited a deadly allergy to medical antibiotics, and so I cannot resort to them. Goldenseal, garlic and Echinacea must stand in. I come off all dairy. I sip fenugreek seed tea for expectorant. Eventually these, and my strong constitution, overcome microbial invaders. But it takes awhile. I usually go through laryngitis, and I’m certainly heading into that now.

What troubles me is not just lost time in my life, time when I need to be working hard in my studio and getting ready for spring shows. Nor the personal discomfort of illness, which everyone experiences sometimes. What troubles me is that bird flu pandemic might be on its way across the globe and as a profit-driven culture, we are often driven to keep working, shopping and interacting with others when we are contagious. I don’t know the cost of man-hours lost from colds and flu each year, but it must be extremely high. Our work ethic keeps us going out until we can no longer. And therefore we continue to expose others and also to risk exposing ourselves to still more microbes right when our immune systems are already challenged. I’m as guilty as the next person, although I think about these things.

As a mom, I’ve been pretty good at teaching my sons to notice when they are challenged or ill, and to drop in their tracks and begin taking care. I need to pay more attention to this myself. And we as a nation need to discuss this. In a time when we’re addicted to antibiotics as the solution to everything, we may fail to realize that we are exhausting the use of antibiotics by taking them too often. To defeat strengthened microbes, the antibiotics keep getting stronger. Some are almost at the level of chemotherapy now. Researchers predict a time when they no longer work and we are plunged into a pre-antibiotic world with tough, resistant microbes to plague us.

I think it should become a cultural value that people with colds and flu do not go to school, to work, to church, to sporting events. We need to quit glorifying as “heroes” athletes who push through injury and pain to win their pennants, while ignoring the screams of their bodies. There are certainly times when we should push through minor discomfort and illness, but as a cultural norm, we are risking the health of our population. “Normal” colds and flu are bad enough. But when the really bad ones come, our patterns and habits will run contrary to our real interests if we don’t drop in our tracks, isolate ourselves, take care of ourselves, rest enough, and really get well before venturing out into the world again.

To fail to grasp this simple lesson will be to our peril.

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2006-01-28T22:28:00.000-08:00

Afghans…

I’ve just completed my fourth wild afghan. In a time when knitting is so popular, I do crochet. Still, I work with yarns.

When I was a girl, the Jewish grandmother across the street from where I lived taught me to knit and needlepoint. Later, in my twenties, I taught myself to crochet from a little booklet.

Over the long years since then, I did try my hand at some needlepoint. I wanted to break the boundaries of needlepoint, to color outside the lines. Usually, needlepoint is a very civilized medium, following patterns with clear rules. I wanted to transform it into something fun and unexpected. So I taught myself textures and shaped stitches and approached unprinted canvases with the intent to go wild on them. I found myself still trapped within the confines of a flat grid surface, but I broke new ground with color and abstraction. Somewhere, I still have those strange canvases.

When hair wraps became popular in the early 1990s, I was in the early days of my jewelry business, learning to market the things I was making. I was a vendor in New Orleans’ French Market. It was a tough living. Going through the lottery for available spaces when certain vendors had rows and rows of booths already locked up… Dealing with those famous New Orleans floods, from which I learned to use waterproof plastic bins for my display and wares. In those days, I had no booth tent at all and stood in the sun and rain -- and occasionally even snow, trying to stay hopeful that enough people would buy my jewelry that I could afford to go home to make more.

In that environment, I began to notice the pirate hair wrap vendors. The hair wrappers in New Orleans needed no French Market booth. They needed only a blanket or small stool and a box of embroidery threads and some beads and a scissors. And bravery and talent. I met one wrapper whose work I admired and traded him some jewelry for a lesson in how to do wraps. He reluctantly revealed his secrets of successful hair wraps. It was my thought to supplement my jewelry income with wraps when I needed to.

I remember that when I first learned how to do it, it was very frightening to do wrap in someone’s hair. Touching them so intimately and having to please them with something they’d be living with for many weeks, wherever they went, whatever they wore, was nerve-wracking. But soon I got the hang of it and learned to break the designs rules of the other wrappers. For one thing, I owned a car and could get out to Wal-Mart to buy threads. From my background in painting, needlepoint and from embroidering blue jeans in my teens, I was familiar with the soft, multi-ply threads and wasn’t afraid to use them in unusual but beautiful color combinations. I recalled my macramé and knotting skills and incorporated texture into my wraps. I found tiny strips of leather to add. And because I already worked with beads in my jewelry, I had a great advantage with them, too.

The day came very soon when I had a list of clients for many hours on any day that I set up my camp stool at “Hippie Hill,” an edifice right across Decatur Street from the St. Louis Cathedral. On a particularly busy day, when there were many other wrappers there, I had a list of clients longer than I could fulfill in a long work day. I suggested to some that they use another wrapper, but they refused. One admitted to me that I was the only wrapper there that she would allow to touch her, plus she loved my wraps. I think that was the moment I realized that I was succeeding. In a time when a long hard day in the French Market selling jewelry would net me $100, I’d make $800 doing hair wraps! I’d never worked a job that brought tips before, but now I did. And they added to my income.

Hair wrappers always faced the dilemma that their craft was not allowed in society. I did not fully understand this when I started. They faced a Catch-22 in that they were illegal because they were not licensed, but they could not get licensed because they were not legal. They simply were not wanted. And because of this, there was no way to assure that you could do business all day. Nor was there a way to pay sales tax. The cops would arrive to shut us down, but we’d reopen as soon as they went away. One Mardi gras day, “Hippie Hill” was blocked and so I and several other wrappers simply moved all over the Quarter doing wraps wherever we could.

At the end of the season, I ceased going to New Orleans to vend. My life moved on and I was tired of the street-vending life. The cops were growing more vicious and some wrappers were being jailed. “Hippie Hill” was redesigned so it couldn’t serve as a hair wrap location. And the fad began to fade. Sadly, I folded my shop and came back to Florida, where I attempted to do wraps in different settings, getting busted each time. Fortunately, never seriously.

I’ve concentrated for many years on the jewelry business. It, too, has its ups and downs. I think I make beautiful stuff, sometimes seriously beautiful stuff, but it is folly to think this business will ever behave with the security of even the most menial job. It must be reinvented each season. Art shows have no loyalty to me and I have to scrabble my way along. Last year, I added crochet to my creative activities. I often make simple wooly scarves, but now I have also completed four wooly afghans. They are alike and different. They are wonderful. The first I gave to my parents for Christmas. The second I took to Melanie in Vermont. The third I am keeping for my own living room and the fourth – which I finished tonight – is for sale in my studio/gallery. It is the largest and heaviest of them all.

I will try to stop for now and get back to the jewelry business. It is almost Valentine’s. And now that the fourth afghan is finished, I’m eager to dive into beads, which will lead to metals.

I have not been so up and out lately. As I’ve said in other essays, artists are tired in January. But I am so grateful for being allowed to live the creative life and to make beautiful things. When I leave this world, I will leave behind a body of weird, strange and gorgeous things in several different media. I’ll not have inspired the world with my own great beauty; nor impressed people with star quality or sex appeal. But perhaps I will cause them to stop for a moment to see what my hands have made, and they’ll know something of me, and something of themselves. This is my way of expressing love for the world, for materials and processes, and for people, whom I love very, very much.

2006-01-23T17:23:00.000-08:00

Hibernation…

Every year, once New Year’s is past, I try to go into semi-hibernation for most of the month. In truth, I have things to do. One huge January project is always creating a spreadsheet for the year just ended. I know, I know… I’m a ludite. This really should be done on a computerized spreadsheet each month. But life moves so fast and on so many synchronistic levels the other eleven months of the year that I afford myself the relief of not doing much bookkeeping until January.

I just can’t see the year when it’s underway, the way I can see it when it’s ended. Not all the facts are in. I understand abstract things in very concrete ways.

Artists are tired in January, especially crafters who exhibit in art shows. I run around like a maniac from Labor Day until New Year’s. These days I not only travel to art shows, but do many local shows plus run my own studio/gallery. My family life and couple life are demanding. I try to be there for friends and colleagues. I put on the show that is Christmas in our family. I try to match speeds with my husband, as one of his rare weeks off rolls around, and we travel between Christmas and New Year’s.

I’ve always wanted to have my cake and eat it, too. I come to the fork in the road and try to take both paths. I try to do things well. I try to master everything. I try to remain human in all of my busy-ness.

I think I mostly balance it as I prove the theorem that if you want something done, ask a busy person. But I am trying to live deeper and richer. And I’m trying to stay in hibernation until the last possible moment, when deadlines again raise their heads and I must produce. That time will arrive soon enough. Until then, I work at home, doing taxes with the TV on. Then I go to the grocery and bring home the ingredients for the evening meal. I’ve added Weight Watchers and the gym back into my regime. I celebrate the early birthdays. I travel to Vermont and then home again, where it’s really not winter, although it really should be. I miss my two oldest friends a lot, and fantasize living near them: in Vermont or above Atlanta. My friend in Vermont has identified my loneliness for me, and I agree.

When I moved to Tallahassee thirty years ago, my life was filled with people and community. But now I have raised my son and restarted my life a few times, started my second business (the first being graphic design/publishing, when I was younger), and have realized the importance of my own family in my life. I’m not yet an empty-nester because I remarried a younger man with a younger son, who’s only now turning 17. My own son is twenty-five. And soon I will be fifty-three. Is it later than we think?

For some, the end came sooner than expected. Katrina and Rita took some away; the random fatal accident took others. The landscape is changing. My relationship to time is changing. My father reveals himself as a mystic, and I think sometimes that there’s a touch of that in me as well.

Among those still surviving, connections are growing stronger. We realize that we need each other. We realize that in some ways it’s always a tsunami and we must try to hang onto one another. We realize that we must remember to smell the flowers, notice the grass under the snow, do more good things than bad, and love each other despite our imperfection. “Love is a constant act of forgiveness,” a wise one has said. And it is true.
……………………………………………………………….........@

2006-01-18T22:02:00.000-08:00

Subtraction…

Today I learned that Nell Ruth, mother to Craig and mother-in-law to Ann, was suddenly killed in a car accident two days ago.

Nell Ruth was a consummate consumer and a shopaholic to the extreme. She also twinkled in her friendliness and was an older, female version of her son. She was generous and adventurous and had had her moment of controversy in the past. She’d lived past that and had gone on.

Leaving the Birmingham, AL, area several years ago, she moved to her husband and his family in Arkansas. He runs a duck-hunting facility and she’d learned to live the more rural life.

Today Ann called me with the news. I could tell, the moment I heard her voice, that something was up. She had a tone I’d never heard before. We spent a moment just chatting a bit before she told me about Nell Ruth.

Accidental death is so sudden and unexpected that it is impossible to process it immediately. First comes the shock and then tears. And then the mental arguments as the brain tries to sort things out and make sense of them. Then back to shock, back to tears. The cycle is endless.

Nell Ruth is thought to have been killed instantly. An oncoming truck dropped something that came through her windshield. Witnesses will soon correct the story. Early details are sketchy. Except for the fact that she is gone.

Ann and Craig were on the road to Arkansas when Ann called me by cell phone. They were heading to the memorial service up in Arkansas, then back to Natchez for the burial.

I knew Nell Ruth. I stayed with her several times when she still lived near Birmingham. I thought she was adorable and though I had only seen her once since she moved to Arkansas, I shall miss her in this world.

I worry and grieve for Craig. Such a young man, to lose a mother he was so close to. I shall hold him, Ann and Nell Ruth in my heart.

………………………………………………………..@

2006-01-18T06:32:00.000-08:00

Crystal Wintertime…

I have just returned from my first trip to Vermont in winter. My friend, Melanie, has just moved up there. Mel and I have been constant friends since we met in ninth grade. As a child and teenager, she had visited Vermont several times as a friend to a young girl of the same age.

During our college years, Mel moved to Vermont and lived there several times. Then she went on to San Francisco, where she gave birth to her daughter. She and her then-husband moved back and forth between San Francisco and our hometown of Tampa several times, until she finally alighted there for fifteen years. There, her daughter finished her childhood and became a college student and a worker in retail.

Last year, Mel decided to return to Vermont. And so in August, she did. She bought a wonderful house on a small mountain just outside of her small town. In record time and on a small budget, she and a helper quickly renovated the house and by mid-autumn Mel’s current husband and she had moved their four cats and a dog into their new home.

I have been missing Mel. Though Tampa and Tallahassee are about five hours apart, Mel and I saw each other often. She and Terry would come to see us, and we’d go down there. We often celebrated near the holidays together. On any day, either one of us could jump in a car and visit the other. Vermont is a lot farther away! And so I had not seen her since last summer.

Her reports to me on her new home, her new life, all sounded good. And, when I visited, I saw that it was true. She and I both love cold weather and hate the heat. She has a lot of experience in snow and ice, and I am a Florida novice. But I am a natural in winter weather, though figuring out snow.

In the short time I was there, the weather changed a lot. When I arrived, it was warming and there was a January thaw. We drove around to see small towns and to eat a great lunch in an old mill town. By the middle day, it was raining, then frozen rain fell, and then a whole lot of snow. On Sunday, when we had to drive two hours to my plane, we were out earlier than the snow ploughs and the roads were heavy in snow and ice. But their car was heavy and equipped with snow tires and Terry is an experienced snow/ice driver, and so we were fine and I got to my plane on time.

The visuals of New England in winter are so exotic to me. Snow crystals on windows, the spiraling flurries of snow – with some snowflakes looking like torn bits of tissue, while others look like tiny specks, and the delicious cold like ice cream for the body were a veritable Christmas twelve days after the holidays. On the middle day, when the precipitation was falling and changing, I stayed in the house all day. I read my book, took a nap, watched the weather. That night, Mel and I found ourselves alone in the living room together. No good TV to be seen, I turned my back on the screen and faced Mel and we hung out together as we have not in many years. I think this was my favorite moment of the trip, and it was a trip of many special moments.

Thank you, Mel, for the wonderful time you showed me and for welcoming me to your new home. This completed a cycle for me, though I know I will be back. I think I was grieving my loss of you in my state, in my region. I don’t know how much I will see you in the future, but Glen and I are definitely plotting our summer voyage in your direction. I hope I see you many more times while we are both still on this earth.

I am still here, still in my life and in my ruts. I’m still in semi-hibernation, down here in the South. Having burned myself out in late 2005, I still need some mental rest. It is sales tax time and that will segue into IRS time, and so I’m busy reconstructing my business’ year in numbers. I am waiting for my muse to reawaken and lead me into new production. I have some personal projects to begin, too. It’s nice to rest after the frenzy of the holiday season.

And, while it is cold-ish these days in Tallahassee, it is much warmer and greener than Vermont. I used to be the more “northern” sister in our relationship, while Mel sweltered in the Tampa area. Now it is I who inhabit the constant-summer zone. I can take it in winter, though not in summer. Vermont, in my first winter visit, was a good test for me as to whether I would actually like real winter. I missed the super-cold temperatures that were arriving just as I was leaving to come home, and so I don’t know whether zero degrees with a wind chill on top of that is something I would relish. But I loved what I experienced, and real snow that lasted overnight and piled up and stayed was a thrill.

I love Melanie and hope that our individual changes as we live our lives do not carry us apart. It’s been an “until death do us part” friendship thus far, and I pray it will survive until the end. Vermont is a new opportunity for me to explore a new and unfamiliar realm, and to explore myself. Glen looked hard at a legal job in Vermont, which would have started just prior to 9/11. When that fateful day occurred, I was grateful that we’d not just moved to a strange new world, alone. Now that I’ve been on the ground there, I realize that it would have been okay.

So, Vermont, I will return. I can’t wait to visit the Adirondacks this summer and drive eastward into Vermont. I want to crawl all over that region and memorize it. I plan to study its history and geology before we go. It is the land of my literary dreams. The great white north calls, just as Scotland and Vancouver call. Cold, serious regions of sturdy and sensible people who still have fun.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….@

2006-01-02T07:06:00.000-08:00

Paradox: New Orleans…
1/1/06

One thing I really get about New Orleans, pre- and post-Katrina, is her desire to be all things; to have her cake and eat it too. I suspect that New Orleans is a Seven on the Enneagram: an intelligent extrovert who wears her feelings on her sleeve; who offers succor and gives back interesting new directions. One could always be anyone s/he wanted to be there.

Her history of paradoxes continues... New Orleans is a tale of two cities. There is the city of utter devastation. And there is the city that is coming back. Life is not fair, and this is also true of how the city will likely recover – in the parts that do recover.

It is necessary to tour the devastated areas. One cannot understand from media images. To stand in the landscape is to finally comprehend how large and strong Katrina was and how many things went so wrong in the city on the day that the storm struck.

It takes only a day for the eye to develop a sophisticated discernment about the devastation. One learns to recognize wind damage, surge damage, tsunami damage from breached levies and then from rising water. All with the aftermath of mold and toxicity.

As you drive into New Orleans across Lake Pontchartrain into the east part of the city, you reach East New Orleans and then the Lower Ninth Ward. The water that you cross is very close to the Mississippi Gulf Outlet and it is across this water that Katrina’s eye wall swept, striking Slidell and the Mississippi coast as well. And it is across these low lands that storm surge and high winds swept. This is still miles east of New Orleans proper. But it is Orleans Parish.

Friends report that in the late 1950s and early 1960s, white flight took white people to East New Orleans. Marsh was filled in and new neighborhoods were built, with modern construction. A new city sprang forth, complete with shopping centers and other commercial facilities that support modern life. This development did not repeat the charming characteristics of the inner city. There is not a coffee shop on every corner. It is not a pedestrian community. When black people began to also settle in this large area, white flight moved west, across the city, into Metairie and other towns in Jefferson Parish. Jefferson Parish forms the other half of the crescent between the lake and the river. There, those committed to white flight affected taxation and rules of living that tended to maintain a barrier against black folks.

East New Orleans and the Lower Ninth Ward suffered several different onslaughts during Katrina. First came the storm surge and high winds from the east. Then came a seriously breached levy along the Industrial Canal that appears to have formed a “tsunami” as unfathomable volumes of water poured through the levy. These forceful waters annihilated blocks and blocks of residential neighborhoods, leaving them as destroyed as the Mississippi coast. And then the water rose and there was flooding. It is these neighborhoods, among others, that people cannot go home to.
I am reminded of the need I’ve seen in people who have loved ones go missing, presumed dead. They need to see the body. They need to know what happened. They need someone to bury. They need the answers to their questions. They need to grieve and shake and retreat for awhile. And then they can reconnect to something about their lives and move forward again. It is a special hell when the body is never found and the questions are never answered. And it is my prayer that the fact that people can now go back, unescorted, into the Lower Ninth Ward, to record in their brains and in their cameras what has happened. As nightmarish as it is, it is never as nightmarish as the images we might invent if we don’t get to see the reality. The reality is, after all, concrete and finite. Our imaginings can be unlimited.

Lakeview, the area near UNO, and Gentilly and Pontchartrain Park are still silent and ghostly. In three weeks, it seems that fewer houses are being actively gutted in those areas. Perhaps they’re moving past that phase and into the waiting phase. Waiting for FEMA, insurance and the Red Cross help. Waiting to decide what to do with their properties. Waiting to figure out what to do with the rest of their lives.

How does one answer that question? I’m very glad it’s not mine to make right now. The city is coming back in spots. We ate great food, rode a bike in Audubon Park, shopped for beads, foodstuffs and souvenirs, saw shops open and celebrated the survival of so many businesses in certain areas of the city. There are invisible lines across New Orleans, magical delineations. On one side, life can be normal. Diners can enjoy fine meals and supply other material needs. On the other, it is as if Mount Vesuvius has exploded, spewing fine white powder over cars and buildings. No one is home there, and the cars are mere fool-the-eye props that lull you into a false feeling that people are home and all is well. The people are not home and may not even be alive any longer. The scratchings on their exterior walls are a mysterious code left by search teams in languages as mysterious as forgotten, ancient languages. No Rosetta Stone guides our understanding.

There will be an archeology in the future. Precious mementoes will be revealed in the muck, in a future time when seekers dig to find what happened to a lost civilization. It has always been thus. These are biblical times and the Old Testament had nothing on us.

And so the paradoxes of New Orleans are the memories I am left with. Three weeks between trips has been enough time for many new gains to be made. And yet there is a permanence to the destruction. There are too many homes damaged. There is a diversity of ideas about what to do next: bulldoze or rebuild? Stay or leave? If you still have your material home, do you still have an economy available to you to support your mortgage?

And yet things will come of this process. Art will come. So will food, music and poetry. These are a proud people. Black and white, they will follow an organic process, back to the promised land. As David reminded us: It’s still the Big Easy. The clutter and destruction make what is left seem all the more precious.

@@@@@@@@@@

Visibility: Zero… The Mississippi coast

This time we saw the Mississippi coast’s destruction in daylight. Three weeks ago, I’d seen it at night as I found God’s Katrina Kitchen. On that night the kitchen tent gleamed in darkness like a warm Christmas beacon. A warm place to eat and socialize in the cold night.

On this day, we dropped down from I-10 along the eastern shore of St. Louis Bay, through De L’Isle and down to Pass Christian. We were shocked to find devastation miles and miles inland, where marshes touched solid ground. Destroyed homes and trailers lay strewn on both sides of the highway down to the Gulf’s edge.

Coming from the west to the east, we saw many antebellum homes in splinters. The white sand beach looked like a moonscape. All the way from New Orleans, we’d been traveling in a white fog which made it impossible to tell sky from sea, and now we could not tell white sand from sea from sky. A surreal, milky white landscape. Flat sea, deceiving us about what she can really do when provoked by strong hurricanes.

On the day when the Gulf blew onto the land, the surge in this area was maybe 30-50 feet high. We realize that Katrina was a daytime event. People had their eyes open. It was probably very dark that day, but it was not the night we imagine in our nightmares about it.

I revised my evaluation of this area, seeing it in the daytime. Except for a few antebellum homes that were lucky enough to sit on rises and survive, EVERYTHING has been devastated along the shore. Destroyed buildings hulked in the white landscape. In a beach town as overbuilt as anything in Florida, there are only a very few buildings surviving that can have continued life.

Residential neighborhoods, chain fast food restaurants, motels, casinos, even the First Baptist Church and goofy golf are shredded.

In our day, we traveled from New Orleans to Ocean Springs, MS, a distance of more than 100 miles and the devastation of Katrina was wider than that. It continued to Bayou La Batre, to Fairhope, AL, up into Mobile, and swept over Dauphin Island. Ocean Springs experienced a lot more loss than my first visit there revealed. The town itself survived, perched upon its rise. But its low-lying waterfront neighborhoods are as hard hit as any. Homes are missing.

In New Orleans, it has been my policy to spend my tourist dollars. They’re going to be spent somewhere, and that city needs them to be spent there. In Mississippi I cannot find anywhere to drop my money on necessities.

God’s Katrina Kitchen is still functioning. In the daytime, it is a red and white circus tent. Still full of dining tables and happy servers cooking foods for anyone who wants to come in for a hot meal. I did not find Jennifer again and so do not know how the gift event went. But now their large lot is shared with a giant clothes closet and a groceries closet. Free for the taking, the food is distributed in one tent while clean clothes on hangers are displayed on clothing racks. Both the survivors and those who serve them are beautiful. People from the Right and the Left, as evidenced by magnetic car signs and bumper stickers, work side by side in service to the survivors. It does my radical, liberal, progressive heart good to see right-wingers serving those who have lost so much, instead of merely trying to stop abortion. It is humbling to me to see their warm hearts matching pace with my own instincts.

On this white, foggy day, the Gulf coast is enshrouded in a cloud. This creates an intense, small world that seems safe from the forces that roared ashore on that day, taking with them the security and way of life for brave souls who dared to live beside the open water. I cannot tell where their future will be. It is their story and not mine. I am not so rooted to place that I would stay anywhere, despite what it handed me. We are all from old families and mine has long lived at this latitude. But so many homes have faded from my life already, that perhaps I’ve learned to not latch onto place despite its legacy. Perhaps I don’t buy into permanence all that well. I envy those who do, in some ways. Who have had the luxury to do so. Me, I’m more nomadic by nature, although I live in one place. But Katrina has really taught me that Joni Mitchell was right and you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. With the belly of the Gulf coast so very damaged, something is gone. I’m glad I’m one of the lucky ones who move around a lot and that I saw it all before it was over. I bear some of the memory of what was and I try to tell it to all I see. Anyone who will listen will get a story or two about all of this from me. I don’t yet know how to help a lot more than that. But I knew as soon as the storm was over that I would start going into Katrina’s path, trying to figure it out. My dear, dear region… I cry for you. But someday I will move beyond just crying, hopefully becoming part of the crew who strives to lift those downed communities from the sand.

@@@@@@@@@@@

Paradox: New Orleans…
1/1/06

One thing I really get about New Orleans, pre- and post-Katrina, is her desire to be all things; to have her cake and eat it too. I suspect that New Orleans is a Seven on the Enneagram: an intelligent extrovert who wears her feelings on her sleeve; who offers succor and gives back interesting new directions. One could always be anyone s/he wanted to be there.

Her history of paradoxes continues... New Orleans is a tale of two cities. There is the city of utter devastation. And there is the city that is coming back. Life is not fair, and this is also true of how the city will likely recover – in the parts that do recover.

It is necessary to tour the devastated areas. One cannot understand from media images. To stand in the landscape is to finally comprehend how large and strong Katrina was and how many things went so wrong in the city on the day that the storm struck.

It takes only a day for the eye to develop a sophisticated discernment about the devastation. One learns to recognize wind damage, surge damage, tsunami damage from breached levies and then from rising water. All with the aftermath of mold and toxicity.

As you drive into New Orleans across Lake Pontchartrain into the east part of the city, you reach East New Orleans and then the Lower Ninth Ward. The water that you cross is very close to the Mississippi Gulf Outlet and it is across this water that Katrina’s eye wall swept, striking Slidell and the Mississippi coast as well. And it is across these low lands that storm surge and high winds swept. This is still miles east of New Orleans proper. But it is Orleans Parish.

Friends report that in the late 1950s and early 1960s, white flight took white people to East New Orleans. Marsh was filled in and new neighborhoods were built, with modern construction. A new city sprang forth, complete with shopping centers and other commercial facilities that support modern life. This development did not repeat the charming characteristics of the inner city. There is not a coffee shop on every corner. It is not a pedestrian community. When black people began to also settle in this large area, white flight moved west, across the city, into Metairie and other towns in Jefferson Parish. Jefferson Parish forms the other half of the crescent between the lake and the river. There, those committed to white flight affected taxation and rules of living that tended to maintain a barrier against black folks.

East New Orleans and the Lower Ninth Ward suffered several different onslaughts during Katrina. First came the storm surge and high winds from the east. Then came a seriously breached levy along the Industrial Canal that appears to have formed a “tsunami” as unfathomable volumes of water poured through the levy. These forceful waters annihilated blocks and blocks of residential neighborhoods, leaving them as destroyed as the Mississippi coast. And then the water rose and there was flooding. It is these neighborhoods, among others, that people cannot go home to.

I am reminded of the need I’ve seen in people who have loved ones go missing, presumed dead. They need to see the body. They need to know what happened. They need someone to bury. They need the answers to their questions. They need to grieve and shake and retreat for awhile. And then they can reconnect to something about their lives and move forward again. It is a special hell when the body is never found and the questions are never answered. And it is my prayer that the fact that people can now go back, unescorted, into the Lower Ninth Ward, to record in their brains and in their cameras what has happened. As nightmarish as it is, it is never as nightmarish as the images we might invent if we don’t get to see the reality. The reality is, after all, concrete and finite. Our imaginings can be unlimited.

Lakeview, the area near UNO, and Gentilly and Pontchartrain Park are still silent and ghostly. In three weeks, it seems that fewer houses are being actively gutted in those areas. Perhaps they’re moving past that phase and into the waiting phase. Waiting for FEMA, insurance and the Red Cross help. Waiting to decide what to do with their properties. Waiting to figure out what to do with the rest of their lives.

How does one answer that question? I’m very glad it’s not mine to make right now. The city is coming back in spots. We ate great food; rode a bike in Audubon Park; shopped for beads, foodstuffs and souvenirs; saw shops open and celebrated the survival of so many businesses in certain areas of the city. There are invisible lines across New Orleans, magical delineations. On one side, life can be normal. Diners can enjoy fine meals and supply other material needs. On the other, it is as if Mount Vesuvius has exploded, spewing fine white powder over cars and buildings. No one is home there, and the cars are mere fool-the-eye props that lull you into a false feeling that people are home and all is well. The people are not home and may not even be alive any longer. The scratchings on their exterior walls are a mysterious code left by search teams in languages as mysterious as forgotten, ancient languages. No Rosetta Stone guides our understanding.

There will be an archeology in the future. Precious mementoes will be revealed in the muck, in a future time when seekers dig to find what happened to a lost civilization. It has always been thus. These are biblical times and the Old Testament had nothing on us.

And so the paradoxes of New Orleans are the memories I am left with. Three weeks between trips has been enough time for many new gains to be made. And yet there is a permanence to the destruction. There are too many homes damaged. There is a diversity of ideas about what to do next: bulldoze or rebuild? Stay or leave? If you still have your material home, do you still have an economy available to you to support your mortgage?

And yet things will come of this process. Art will come. So will food, music and poetry. These are a proud people. Black and white, they will follow an organic process, back to the promised land. As David reminded us: It’s still the Big Easy. The clutter and destruction make what is left seem all the more precious.

@@@@@@@@@@

Visibility: Zero… The Mississippi coast

This time we saw the Mississippi coast’s destruction in daylight. Three weeks ago, I’d seen it at night as I found God’s Katrina Kitchen. On that night the kitchen tent gleamed in darkness like a warm Christmas beacon. A warm place to eat and socialize in the cold night.

On this day, we dropped down from I-10 along the eastern shore of St. Louis Bay, through De L’Isle and down to Pass Christian. We were shocked to find devastation miles and miles inland, where marshes touched solid ground. Destroyed homes and trailers lay strewn on both sides of the highway down to the Gulf’s edge.

Coming from the west to the east, we saw many antebellum homes in splinters. The white sand beach looked like a moonscape. All the way from New Orleans, we’d been traveling in a white fog which made it impossible to tell sky from sea, and now we could not tell white sand from sea from sky. A surreal, milky white landscape. Flat sea, deceiving us about what she can really do when provoked by strong hurricanes.

On the day when the Gulf blew onto the land, the surge in this area was maybe 30-50 feet high. We realize that Katrina was a daytime event. People had their eyes open. It was probably very dark that day, but it was not the night we imagine in our nightmares about it.

I revised my evaluation of this area, seeing it in the daytime. Except for a few antebellum homes that were lucky enough to sit on rises and survive, EVERYTHING has been devastated along the shore. Destroyed buildings hulked in the white landscape. In a beach town as overbuilt as anything in Florida, there are only a very few buildings surviving that can have continued life.

Residential neighborhoods, chain fast food restaurants, motels, casinos, even the First Baptist Church and goofy golf are shredded. Three large casino barges have been heaved from water's edge for more than a football field, landing on buildings on the far side of U.S. 90. Block after block, mile after mile, in splinters and shreds.

In our day, we traveled from New Orleans to Ocean Springs, MS, a distance of more than 100 miles and the devastation of Katrina was wider than that. It continued to Bayou La Batre, to Fairhope, AL, up into Mobile, and swept over Dauphin Island. My friend, Ann, reports that Cape San Blas near Port St. Joe in Florida, experienced damage.

Ocean Springs experienced a lot more loss than my first visit there revealed. The town itself survived, perched upon its rise. But its low-lying waterfront neighborhoods are as hard hit as any. Homes are missing.

In New Orleans, it has been my policy to spend my tourist dollars. They’re going to be spent somewhere, and that city needs them to be spent there. In Mississippi I cannot find anywhere to drop my money on necessities. These people need the things that money buys, but maybe not the money itself. They have no economy and nowhere to spend. We saw not one gas stations functioing, not one food outlet. They are dependent upon the offerings of charity.

God’s Katrina Kitchen is still functioning. In the daytime, it is a red and white circus tent. Still full of dining tables and happy servers cooking foods for anyone who wants to come in for a free hot meal. I did not find Jennifer again and so do not know how the gift event went. But now their large lot is shared with a giant clothes closet and a groceries closet. Free for the taking, the food is distributed in one tent while clean clothes on hangers are displayed on clothing racks. Both the survivors and those who serve them are beautiful. People from the Right and the Left, as evidenced by magnetic car signs and bumper stickers, work side by side in service to the survivors. It does my radical, liberal, progressive heart good to see right-wingers serving those who have lost so much, instead of merely trying to stop abortion. It is humbling to me to see their warm hearts matching pace with my own instincts.

On this white, foggy day, the Gulf coast is enshrouded in a cloud. This creates an intense, small world that seems safe from the forces that roared ashore on that day, taking with them the security and way of life for brave souls who dared to live beside the open water. I cannot tell where their future will be. It is their story and not mine.

I am not so rooted to place that I would stay anywhere, despite what it handed me. We are all from old families and mine has long lived at this latitude. But so many homes have faded from my life already, that perhaps I’ve learned to not latch onto place despite its legacy. Perhaps I don’t buy into permanence all that well. I envy those who do, in some ways. Who have had the luxury to do so. Me, I’m more nomadic by nature, although I live in one place now. But Katrina has really taught me that Joni Mitchell was right and you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. With the belly of the Gulf coast so very damaged, something is gone. I’m glad I’m one of the lucky ones who move around a lot and that I saw it all before it was over. I bear some of the memory of what was and I try to tell it to all I see. Anyone who will listen will get a story or two about all of this from me. I don’t yet know how to help a lot more than that. But I knew as soon as the storm was over that I would start going into Katrina’s path, trying to figure it out. My dear, dear region… I cry for you. But someday I will move beyond just crying, hopefully becoming part of the crew who strives to lift those drowned communities from the sand.

2005-12-08T22:48:00.000-08:00

[Note: This missive was written on 12/9/05. My life became so busy in the days and weeks leading to the holidays that I literally could not get back to this report, or even edit it until today, 1/1/06. Since this report was written (and stored in draft form... I make no promises that its spelling and grammar are perfect...), my husband and I have gone back to New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf coast, into the path of Katrina. In an upcoming report, I will detail that trip and the huge gains made in the past three week in New Orleans, and the continuing stagnation in the Lower Ninth Ward and in Mississippi. --tana]

Back from the Edge of the World…

12/0/05

So, I followed a dream/idea and drove to the Gulf coast of Mississippi yesterday, laden with art jewelry and other beautiful gifts from my artistic and generous friends. I left I-10 and dropped south to the coast, where U.S. 90 runs right along the beach. I was west of Biloxi and east of Pass Christian, at Long Beach. Had Katrina not come, had it not damaged this area almost beyond repair, I would have been in an art show in Pass Christian this past September, staying in a hotel in Long Beach. Now that strip of sand is only sand.

Biloxi and its uprooted floating casinos lie to the east of this area and an armed guard prevents tourists from turning toward that gambling town. The Beau Rivage Casino promises to lead the way back to an economy dependent on gaming. But these gentler communities to the west of Biloxi are still host to hundreds of people attached to the land, however damaged or disappeared their former homes may be.

God’s Katrina Kitchen stands as a beacon in the sand. Offering hot meals and a warm place to sit on a chilly December night, it also offers a friendly community. Church people cook and serve the food and run the programs that care for the homeless and disenfranchised. It’s a warm experience to be among them, workers and recipients alike.

I took with me great gifts and found the perfect organizer to distribute them at their upcoming “Santa” event this Saturday. The gifts fill a former void – things mostly for women, carers of bodies and souls.

I’d left home without a clear plan. Just knowing something of the Mississippi coastal villages, I felt that I would be led to the right place. The fact that it happened so quickly, so smoothly, gave it a meant-to-be quality. I feel blessed to have the friends that I do, and to have met up with Jennifer at God’s Katrina Kitchen. She took the gifts from me and placed them into her car’s trunk for safekeeping until Saturday. Mission accomplished. As natural as anything.

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Toothpicks, matchsticks...

Then I drove further west to see what I could see. I found a few antebellum homes still standing, with lights on, with people living in them. A night of miracles.

One can measure the effects of the hurricane winds and surge by the disappearing homes and foliage one finds near the water’s edge. Inland, there’s some wind damage, some downed trees here and there. But two blocks from the once-raging sea, there’s nothing. Foundations. Stubs. The storm peeled back human habitation as it roared ashore. How the antebellum homes stand intact, I know not. But those that do are the very ones burned into memory from earlier trips, and the ones I wept for on August 30th. To see them standing, lit from within, brought full-body relief to me. A small piece of our architectural heritage surviving.

I could not follow the roads out of there. Everything is covered in white sand, coating details as a heavy winter snow coats the details. Making the landscape unrecognizable.There are no street signs remaining and so I could not find Menge Road, another road leading north from the coast. After searching in vain, I turned around and returned to I-10 on the road I'd come down on. And jumped onto I-10 and headed to New Orleans.

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Nuclear winter in New Orleans...

I truly did not know what to expect, kinesthetically. The beloved 18th century city of my dreams and now my nightmares. I knew that images on TV could not convey the total landscape. It’s the nature of media to show the same limited images again and again, while missing the scope of the destruction. Anderson Cooper’s doing the best job he can for CNN and Katrina, but a lot is not being said. And there are the technical limitations of any camera. I knew I had to place myself in the landscape to really understand.

A week ago, bankers from Boston were toured around the ruined Ninth Ward. They had come in hopes of learning how to bankroll the rebuild of the area. But I'd heard that the scope of damage was beyond their imagining.

And here are some of the images and impressions I received last night and today…
I have been driving into New Orleans day and night for the past 20 years. Last night, I drove over the I-10 bridge from Slidell to East New Orleans. They cannibalized materials from both spans to make one complete span (remember the pictures of every chunk of pavement missing from the support pilings?) and there’s one lane of traffic moving in each direction, without a concrete barricade separating one lane from oncoming traffic.
As I drove westward into East New Orleans, it was already quite dark. And I could see no lights on in the city! The entire area was dark, from the Gulf Outlet of Lake Pontchartrain to the North Shore of the lake. Absence of manmade light made it possible to see the last remnants of a winter’s sunset in the far distance, a sight I’ve never seen in the urban landscape.
The marshy wetlands near Irish Bayou, the wildlife refuge one encounters for the first many miles on the city’s side of the interstate bridge, are decapitated. Gone are the graceful black willows and roadside brushes, torn up by winds and surge. Litter lies strewn about. No street lamps light the way on this stretch of the interstate. Cars that failed their drivers sit akimbo, left behind in the rush to flee Katrina.
East New Orleans is a complete ghost town. Several large new car lots, acres of pavement and new cars covered in a white silt are parked in orderly lines that go on and on. A complete shopping mall sits abandoned, its Dillards store dark and gutted. A google-plex cinema and a Toys R Us are abandoned. Miles and miles of apartment complexes are dark and nothing moves. Not one person living there or guarding property. Not one light. Until Katrina, East New Orleans housed a population bigger than that of Tallahassee.
As my car climbed the tall “high rise” bridge over the now-infamous Industrial Canal (the canal whose breached levy flooded the Lower Ninth Ward), I see very few lights throughout the city. Off the front left corner of my car stands the Central Business District (CBD), devoid of so much lighting as to be unrecognizable as the New Orleans I have seen hundreds of times from this vantage point. I cannot pick out the Super Dome. Even the bridge over the Mississippi River (called the GNO – Greater New Orleans bridge in my time there, and now called the Crescent City Connection) seems to have only about half of its lights on. But, its frail lights arc the Mississippi River and gives me my first definition of the once-familiar landscape.
Miles and miles of darkened neighborhoods lie below me in all directions. I barely smell the coffee roasters of yore – and even the hints of coffee roasting may be either a permanent odor stained on the concrete below my wheels, or only in my memory. I cannot tell if I’m making it up. Wishful thinking.
No ships or boats seem to be moving in any body of water. No planes seem to be flying overhead. The city is asleep, in a flood-induced coma.
Traffic is less intense than I have ever seen it. I easily make my way onto I-610 and exit down the ramp to Paris Avenue. At the bottom of the ramp, no cars challenge my progress in any direction. But two large motor boats are strewn beside the street like giant children’s toys abandoned on the shoulder of the road. I can’t figure out where two such boats may have come from, since we are not right by any body of water. Were they used in the rescue effort? Did they float off of driveway trailers? Did they float all the way from the lake? That they have just been lying there for weeks makes me feel uneasy, and I know they portend many things to come.
As I turn left onto Paris Avenue and go under the interstate, formerly busy shops sit dark and shuttered. One roof has slid off the building onto the concrete below. I realize that I have now officially entered the hurricane/flood zone at ground level.
I travel to a dark intersection unencumbered by traffic signals or street lamps. Weird. This street is usually so busy. I turn right onto Gentilly, toward the Fairgrounds which has seen decades of the New Orleans’ JazzFest. The several crazy, diagonal intersections also have no traffic signals, but stops signs on tripods are placed to remind drivers of which of these crazy streets have the right-of-way. I stop each time, and when I am past the last of these, I turn right onto Trafalgar Street, where David and Vera live.
I have never been to this house. They bought it only a year ago. They had one year in their new house – after waiting until their fifties to buy their first home – and then Katrina struck. On the eve of Katrina, they departed, taking one car and their giant English sheepdog. They were gone for a month, and they have now been home two months. They have seen massive improvement and cleanup in the city, despite my disbelieving eyes.

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Their small house, which sits on a slight rise in the land, and atop two rows of concrete blocks as a foundation, did not go underwater. The flood waters rose under their house but did not hit their floorboards.
Their house sits like a shining jewel in a dark landscape. No one else has come back to their neighborhood. Some houses are being gutted. Two FEMA trailers have been installed. But their house has a decorated Norfolk pine at the front steps, leaning crazily like Charlie Brown's tree, and a wreath on the door. The house shines, with its polished floors, its lace curtains, its funky N’Awlins charm. They know they are lucky, to a point. Materially, they have lost far less than most other New Orleanians. But they have lost their economy and their community and their identity, and those things that are least as important as material things. And they suffer survivors’ guilt.
I sleep well on the guest futon in their front room. The city is preternaturally quiet. Only an occasional car cuts through the neighborhood.
In the morning, we tour the city. I have always made a particular circuit around the city. They have always lived in Mid-City and I have nearly always stayed with them. We follow something of this path on this day. But first David drives us to where the two lakefront levies broke. The London Avenue canal was breached in two sections and its floodwaters flowed east and west, wiping out neighborhoods for miles around. We slowly make our way up and down, back and forth, in a grid that reveals the extent of ruin in this area. Floodwater stains mark the depth of where the waters settled. The water level was likely higher, with the stains defining where the water dropped back and settled. Spray paint markings are everywhere, announcing dead bodies inside, or not; dead cats inside, or not. It is one of these houses where the two corpses were found just this week, despite markings claiming the contrary. Maybe some of these markings have no meanings, because maybe no one has entered some of these houses since August 29th.
We see piles of debris and workers in haz/mat suits and respirators. I quickly roll my window up, realizing that mold resides in the debris piles by the curbs. Up and down the streets we go. We encounter no one but workers here and there.
There are signs everywhere advertising services to gut house, to abate mold, to haul trash in a day… Signs hang everywhere. There is no one to read them and no one to request the services. Debris piles seem to have materialized independently. David and Vera assure me that many, many tons of such debris has already been hauled away. But there’s always more.
We drive over toward the 17th Street canal. Water is still running from the levy through a yard and into the street. Not a significant amount. Not enough for another flood. But certainly enough to signal that all is not yet well with the levy. Today’s Times-Picayune contains the most updated graphics diagramming the flood. Remaining residents study each new generation of graphics, each new explanation, trying to absorb exactly what happened to their city, and why.
It was all human error. The levies were not built correctly. Concrete walls stand on top of earthen berms. Beneath the concrete walls, there should be 20-foot metal walls down inside the berm. Instead, there are only 10-foot walls down in the berm. Before water breached the concrete walls at the top of the levies, it had already undermined the berms themselves, pushing tons of soil as water tunneled beneath the metal walls. As the tunnels emptied themselves of soil, the concrete walls swayed like crooked teeth, allowing water to rush through. This caused a new breach over the top of the levy. And tons of water flowed through these neighborhoods, until the water pressure within the lake was equalized with new water pressure on the city side of the levies. Only then did the flooding stop.
All around the city, the levy system was built to protect New Orleans. And all around, the city is ringed with higher ground. Those living near the breached canal levies felt safe because they had built on the higher ground near the levies.
We all thought the city had dodged the Katrina bullet. We knew things were bad in Slidell and Mississippi, and below New Orleans. We awakened to a feeling that the city had again missed a direct hit. And this was true. The eyewall, and therefore the strongest surge, hit further east. And we know what that did to the areas struck. But for two days, Katrina has been pushing water ahead of itself and raising the water level in the lake. Because of its counter-clockwise spin, water was pushed downward into the city’s canals. The lake levies held, but the canal levies did not. A question is: Who was responsible for engineering the canal levies? And this does not begin to discuss the breaches in the Industrial Canal, which connects Pontchartrain with the river…
City Park is decapitated, in large measure. It has become a campground for squatters with nowhere else to live. The city imagines charging campers $200 per month for this service. The former glory of City Park, the last remaining plantation left mostly natural, is damaged, if not destroyed. We only skirted the park, but I could see downed trees and flooded soil. The 17th Street canal’s flood crossed the park.
Carrollton Avenue was a war zone. Closed and boarded shops, obvious signs of looting. Nothing open. All the way to Claiborne Avenue, the end of the line for the street cars, everything is askew. Boarded shops, broken glass, no life. At Claiborne, the street cars are missing, but some of the businesses are open. Some restaurants, some galleries. But not the sushi bar, where I introduced Glen to sushi a decade ago. Not the drug store where we bought a blow-up mattress, slept on it during JazzFest and then returned it when the show was over. Not the Camellia Grill, the famous 24/7 breakfast place which typically saw lines out the door and down the block; where you were lucky to get seats at the counter. Not La Madeleine.
Hanging left onto St. Charles Avenue, things began to seem “normal” for the first time. There’s tree damage and some signs of house damage, but some of the mansions now display their gorgeous Christmas decorations. A few cafes are open, but not Copeland’s on the parade route. After eating at a breakfast café, we angle toward Magazine Street. It’s pretty normal there, too. The same all the way to Canal Street. The site of the most publicized looting, many businesses are boarded up but many are now opening.
We travel across Canal Street and into the Quarter, down Bourbon Street. All of the bars and strip joints appear to be open, although it’s still only 11:30 a.m.
We drive around the Quarter. Parking is crowded, but traffic is minimal. The old La Marquise is gone. The Cathedral and the museums beside it are fine. There was no flooding in the Quarter. But business is sparse.
Central Grocery is open and I’m eager to buy Italian condiments and a muffalatta to take home to Tallahassee.
We cross Decatur Street to see a gallery where Vera sells some of her ceramic pieces. Then we walk toward the French Market and it begins to rain. When we arrive at the farmer’s market, where for decades (maybe generations) food vendors have hawked their foods, there is no food and no vendors. Was the food taken after Katrina? Far down through the building, we can see that the non-food vendors appear to be open. But it’s too rainy to walk down there and so we head to our car.
David makes one swipe up Frenchman Street in the Marigny. Like the Quarter, it appears to be mostly fine.
Then we travel up Esplanade, where mansions stand abandoned but intact. There have been some fires in this area, but mostly these grand old houses do several things right: they anticipate the possibility of flooding and so are built of cedar wood, and they’re elevated. But the people are gone and spray paint marks their exteriors. The neutral ground is scarred with many efforts at debris removal.
We drive to Crete Street, where David lived for 25 years. This is where I lived with him in the late ‘80s. Vera lived there a long time, too. Until Katrina, they kept one last apartment to store David’s collections. Their landlord has not been kind to them, wanting David to remove many tons of things that went underwater, refusing to return the security deposit. After weeks of removing the collections that didn’t show mold, David has come to the end of his work there, leaving the rest of the job to the landlord’s new team of workers. Justice. The loss of the deposit in exchange for leaving the rest of the work to paid workers. I think David came out ahead.
This is the blow-by-blow journal of this trip. On the way home today, I stopped in at Ocean Springs, MS. My online research, in the desperate weeks after Katrina, had convinced me that Walter Anderson’s museum and original works were largely undamaged by the storm. But David had other information, saying that he’d heard that 90% of the works had been damaged.

The story is that there are two collections. The museum’s collection is fine and the museum is open. The family’s private collection was moved to a vault, and the vault was breached. This collection has been taken to the university in Jackson, MS, for drying out and restoration. It’s in a climate-controlled vault and, when the money is raised, the restoration will be completed. Walter Anderson’s work is that of an important, but little-known 20th century American artist. Part impressionist and part surrealist, his colors are gorgeous and his shapes fascinating.

This whirlwind loop through Katrina's deadly swath helped me gain perspective on the situation. I need to go back again, and again, and watch the region come back to life. Right now, the city of New Orleans is like 10 minutes after the Rapture, where it seems bodies flew up into Heaven, leaving behind material things. Leaving those things in a ruined, changed state. Leaving tourists and residents left behind, or coming back, with many things to see and think about.

Old New Orleans has largely survived. Historic development, before the age of earth moving and fill dirt, was, of necessity built upon natural higher ground. Knowing that the old city flooded all the time, structures were often built off the ground. Support structures were built of cypress wood, resistant to rot and mold. And so these old technologies worked again, and New Orleans did not lose all of its architectural history. It is the "modern" development of the city that had no defense against rising floodwaters and was the most dependent upon the levies. Ranch houses built upon slabs, built on the low ground, near the lake, are the worst hit. For miles, these working class and lower middle class neighborhoods sit molding in the aftermath.

This is not a popular position to take, but I feel it would be best to either tear down those neighborhoods and sections of the city that proved they could not survive, or to implode them right where they stand and create newer, higher fill and rebuild atop that. Simply rebuilding the levy system and returning to the old ways of doing things seems like denial to me. With rising Gulf waters predicted in the next 90 years, New Orleans will become a fortress island, probably unable to support and sustain its former population.

I feel those who lost their homes, who lost everything, should be compensated and "re-housed." But not in East New Orleans, not in the Lower Ninth Ward, and not along the Lakefront or any other former cypress swamp or brackish marsh. Nature intended that zone to be a wetlands buffer and it is man who has pushed back its wilderness nature. Perhaps a higher ground in a rural area of Louisiana could become Nouveau New Orleans. Familiar architectural styles could be built and old neighborhood communities could be encouraged to come back together. Such a new community could be designed to replicate important remembered accoutrements of the past: coffee shopes, corner markets, corner bars. New Orleans culture could be encouraged, with foods and music. New Orleaneans proved to be resilient in past centuries. They put together a functional culture despite the great crime and poverty they were forced to coexist with. Perhaps, given a new chance, a new settlement could be built so that inhabitants could comfortably and safely relax into just living and plying their trades. Certainly in a country that can give us faux New Orleans tourist towns in Florida's Panhandle, we can provide a living neighborhood for people who have been displaced and not allow them to move back into harm's way.

New Orleans itself is predicted to survive, but to become a much smaller city. This will likely be good for the area in some ways. It was man's folly to build communities on fill dirt in the path of great storms, ringed by faulty levies. Perhaps now we can redevelop it more appropriately. I say this with a grieving heart, only guessing at what the displaced inhabitants have lost. I don't think they can go home again. But perhaps we can give them a new city, and that new city can have a sister-city relationship with old New Orleans, one that will rise from the fires and flood-waters.

2005-11-21T07:09:00.000-08:00

Political Correctness…

Lately, it’s been occurring to me how often, before the current administration took control, we progressives were battered by the label “politically correct.” When it was applied to us, it was always confusing. We do hold out a vision, a hard line for forward movement: toward greater fairness and civil rights, for better use of the planet and its environment, for greater freedoms, and for more fun.

Now I see that when the Right lobbed that label in our direction, it was a stealth weapon designed to undermine our credibility and to try to set the stage for their eventual religious/emotional/warlike coup. Their one brilliant stroke was to define the few values various groups on the Right shared in order to unite and exploit them. This is their great achievement, and one that the Left could rarely achieve. In all of its diversity, the Left often conflicted with itself and did not bring about the sort of consensus that Carl Rove orchestrated on the Right in 2000. This orchestration, added to the shenanigans of the 2000 election, was the perfect formula to bring them to office, to begin their Sherman-like march to the sea. Stomping on our progressive dreams and salting the ground, their fervor has wrought much destruction that will be hard to undo and put back in order so that humanity can begin to progress again.

The tragedy expands when we realize that it is the U.S. that should be leading the way and not committing wars to keep the oil agenda in place and power in the hands of men like these. What we have today are the values this collegial body has always held, in organized form. Their true agenda has been to centralize and control scarce resources and ride them on down. They’ve bided their time and found ways to frame their ideas that sound like good, conservative thinking.

Some claim that George W. Bush claims to hear God, and that he’s a convinced Christian. I say, “Malarkey.” But it’s a great cover story for him. As an unrepentant, unrecovered alcoholic who has transferred other addiction behaviors onto a pseudo-religiosity, it’s been the perfect organizing cover. Cheney, in his cold, reptilian cunning, has not had need for this cover. He’s the master of the “double-double-unthink,” looking at the color purple and declaring it golden. Together, along with their advisors, they’ve helmed our nation as if it is their own personal buccaneer ship.

When the current Bush administration first took control, the drumbeat for war began – well in advance of 9/11 – and it became unsafe to be a progressive. Now, only narrow, conservative, “Christian,” “patriotic,” and centralizing behaviors were politically correct. It became unsafe to speak out against what had occurred. But all critique of their program to shut down the great gains in human and civil rights, in environmental policy, and economic success was initially deflected. It should have been labeled as a new “political correctness.”

Let one politician, movie star, rock star, or other luminary speak out against what the administration is doing in Iraq or on the ground here, and the big guns of the administration are immediately on camera working to discredit the critic and to get their pernicious vision back in place. They know their house of cards cannot stand once a critical number of American citizens awaken to their smoke-and-mirrors game, and so they must stamp out every critique. Only in the story of Hurricane Katrina and the administration’s failure to respond to it effectively then or now has revealed the true priorities of this administration. They have robbed Peter to pay for Homeland Security, at the expense of disaster response. Even ordinary Americans, including those who are on the Right, cannot be in denial about this great misalignment of resources and concern. But the reality is that this administration has failed at everything we want to stand for, succeeding only in their rhetoric.

The great sorrows of America is that we operate on the myth that what’s good for us is good for the world; that we can import all the IQ that we need and don’t have to educate our own citizens very well. In fact, we have allowed the courses that foster good critical thinking skills to dwindle away. We spend our educational dollars trying to remediate our students – all of them – to become proficient in the three R’s, but not to be able to put actual ideas together. There is a parallel between enforcing a skill set designed to make good warriors and worker bees and the sports and entertainments that have so captured our attention.

The arts are disappearing, and so is our society’s appreciation of anything not immediately action-filled or entertaining. NPR and PBS are under constant attack, and even Right wing infiltrators have done their dirty work there. Replacing Great Books and discussions at the dinner table is the onslaught of computer/video games, wall-to-wall IPOD and other isolating technologies that dumb down the great fountain of young intelligence and prepare them for unending war. These will form future citizens who cannot analyze political or cultural situations, or act in their own interests outside of the war agenda the society comes to hold.

I watch my otherwise peaceful 16-year-old stepson choose to act on his addiction to virtual street fights, battles and space wars instead of developing a normal, feet-on-the-ground social network. To get him to read in any other genre, or to discuss the issues of the day, causes war or great sulkiness at the dinner table. Will he vote for future Bush-like administrations, or be able to think clearly about what is good for humans in a changing world?

I remember great battles at the dinner tables of my youth, too. But they were fostered by great political passions. When I brought the first strains of feminism to our table, I remember my father’s emotionally violent reaction. My timing wasn’t very good. He was a hardworking architect who gave up his personal life to make his way in architecture and to support his family. My early and awkward analysis set off all of the feelings of an aching, risk-taking father. And set the tone for our relationship for the next 36 years of our relationship.

We have had many political battles since that moment. We didn’t get along in the Nixon or Reagan years. I have always been solidly progressive and outspoken. And he has sampled most of the dishes at the political banquet that has been our culture. But we have arrived, mostly, at the same place at the table. I think that today we disagree only on the issue of gun ownership and the place of guns in our society. He owns guns. I don’t.

But, what a great process. Great minds may disagree. But if political correctness – especially the version enforced by the Right – is what must prevail, then this organic, strengthening, enlightening, growing process can never take place. And many things are lost.

Fathers and daughters cannot struggle toward a real understanding, not only of their own relationships, but also of the world, of the universe. If it’s not safe to really be ourselves and say what we think at that moment about the Big Things, then human society –fundamentally – does not work.

Despite our differences, my father did not try to silence me and I refuse to be silenced by Bush’s administration, none of whom is one bit smarter than the people in my own life. In fact, none of the people in my own life would take us into a war precipitated by double-double-unthink. Uninsulated by great wealth and not holding an agenda to control the world – but instead to see what the world holds for us – it would never occur to real, working people to make false reasons to send their young into battle for nothing.

The underlying reality of this administration and their ilk is, as the world’s oil runs out and gets harder to bring to market, they will try to ride it down by keeping energy and political power in their most centralized forms. They long ago abandoned their own conservative principles in favor of this new version of world domination. They will send our children to their wars to buy a little more time. How different are they from other despotic regimes?

While the Left did not see what was coming – we took the beauty of our inclusive plan for society as being so self-evident that everyone would eventually buy in, and got too cozy and comfortable with our own leadership roles, that we failed to believe in the sensibilities of those who do not seek enlightenment and improvement on human society – and the Right wing leaders seethed beneath the surface, waiting for their own chance to act on plans made in secret university societies.

We citizens must come to understand what has happened. We have been hijacked and the resources of our nation have been stolen, for their efforts at world domination. Oil is the currency of that global struggle, because oil controls all transportation, all home economics, and all industry. Control the fuel that runs the world and you control the world.

The oil men now in charge of our government and acting in our behalf on the worldwide stage are taking a huge gamble with all that is human. They are setting the tone for the future to come. Unless we awake and un-elect them and turn back the tide, we are hapless in the face of their agenda. They speak of Christianity and patriotism and the good of America, but they do not act on the real meaning of those ideals. They act on their own interests. This is a plan cooked up by oil men and their allies, who have waited a lifetime for this opportunity.

It took allying with the sleeping religious groups to get into office, and while the Right wing religious voters must be appeased, I believe they truly do not understand how they have used as pawns. Sadly, this unholy alliance enforces a new political correctness upon us all.

Our best hope is that their façade is cracking now. With a terrible three more years to go before we have a chance to replace this administration, we must continue to speak out and critique their silliness – and their true intent -- however settled and authoritative it may appear.

When they say that the Democrats have no ideas, they are wrong. They have been successful in undermining and destroying our progress on those very ideas and ideals already in motion when they came to office. They’ve spent great effort to dismantle, one by one, the great gains that had been made toward peace, a safe environment, a healthy economy, intellectual freedom, science, human rights, and love and joy in these past five years. Hopefully, the core of these will survive even this destructive administration and we can get back onto the path of righteousness and good will when this nightmare ends. Pray that it ends in time.

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2005-11-12T18:51:00.000-08:00

A Prophet Not Accepted in His Own Country…

It is the observation of my husband, who, along with me, is suddenly interested in the metaphysics of quantum physics, that Jesus’ miracles were not observed nor accepted in his hometown. But in other lands, they were, and are reported upon in the Bible.

Why is this? Was he not capable of producing miracles in his homeland? Or were the people there not capable of observing them?

If the postulate that atoms exist in organized form when we observe them, and only exist as potential, or as waves, when we do not is accepted, then perhaps it can be said that his fellow citizens could not turn their attention toward the miracles, to observe them. When he traveled to the wider world and arrived there fresh, the new people he encountered could observe them. Perhaps they had no prejudices against observing them.

Haven’t we all had the experience of not being seen or respected in our own “country?” When we cut out teeth in a community, slip and fall and pick ourselves up again and struggle on, perhaps we build into the minds of our observers a sense that we are not credible. At least not yet.

It would be interesting to observe whether having a new start on life, going to a new “country” where we arrive more wholly formed already would allow observers to experience our own “miracles.”
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2005-11-06T08:17:00.000-08:00

Journaling/Dreams…

More and more, I dream of buying land above Atlanta, in north Georgia or Tennessee’s Upper Cumberland region, with Chattanooga as the “big city” I relate to from afar. Less and less, do I see that Florida is the place for my dreams to come into reality.

Although it has been my birthplace and my home state for all but two years of my long life. My Scottish ancestors came to north Florida in the 1800s, and so I am an actual “native,” as much so as a European can be. But, with hurricanes, threats of coal plants and bombing ranges nearby, the exploding population and development, and the heat, I cannot see myself locked here and growing old.

I feel I have one more Great Adventure in my soul. One more relocation. My best friend, Melanie, moved herself and husband, four cats and a dog, to Vermont this season. And, while I am not as well resourced as she, I realize it is possible for me to move in the direction of my own dreams, too.

The Southern Highlands call to me. My mother’s ancestors settled there and lived their lives there. Her parents were the ones to come to Florida during her early adolescence, and while she remains in Central Florida, she understands the pull the Highlands have to me now.

It’s as if it’s been my destiny to grow up in Tampa/north Florida until now, and now it is my destiny to move toward the ancestral grounds of my mother. She is the one to notice that.

Do I want to leave the Tallahassee community, where I have lived for 28 out of the past 30 years? No, not completely. My grown son is here and the majority of my important friendships are here. My husband’s career is here and my stepson’s high school life is here.

But this area is exploding with people in my field, dividing the small market into ever smaller pieces. Without a true craft heritage, it is taking a long time for such consciousness to develop. I hope I have done my part in nurturing that consciousness.

In the Southern Highlands, great craft schools abound. I want to explore them all. Great folk art galleries and art shows abound, and I want to participate. I want to see skylines of Appalachian Mountains rather than be hemmed in by trees. I want the ratio of summer: winter to shift in favor of longer autumns and springs and less summer. I want to get out from under the humidity zone that is seen as a physical line in the sky as I approach the Gulf coast from the north. I want to leave the no-see-ums that have awakened an environmental illness in my skin. My very skin needs escape from this rainforest. I want to look upon new things, hear new accents, and experience new ways of relating.

I am not happy in the land of Carl Hiaasen, Edna Buchanan, Dave Barry. They revel in the craziness of this state, but John Sayles is the one who got it right in his movie, “Sunshine State.” A state running on the logic that is land development is crazy. They’ve figured out a way to make the money up front, and they make it again when hurricane breath blows their fragile concoctions down.

My life has taught me the lesson that when we’re young adults, we should search the continent for the place where the climate and culture satisfy our souls the most. Have our children there; because it is there we will likely be for the next 20-30 years, maybe forever. Children link us to land like nothing else. We may blow as tumbleweeds until they come, but when they do, we root to place so they can grow. Children need to be the chaotic ones, while their adults remain strong and constant.

But as my own son approaches the age of 25 next month (!), I find I want to be a jellyfish and not a live oak now. At least for a little while... It’s an honest process. I have been domestic goddess for many, many years. I sense what time it is in my own race. I am afraid, but I have always faced fear down in matters like these, have been brave, have jumped off the cliff with no parachute in sight. And have landed softly on my feet, running.

This is the image the feminists advised when I was in my twenties, in the late 1970s, and it has worked. This time, if I let fly, I want to stay connected to the good things in my life now. I want to open a gateway for Glen, Phillip, Kevin and Kelly to add to their lives a foothold in the Southern Highlands. No one has to disrupt their lives now. But they can come when they are ready.

And so I am studying the map to see where the perfect spot for me might exist. Can I get back to Tallahassee in a comfortable day? Is it near enough to the mountains without having to deal with winter reality each day? Is the culture there enlightened enough? (I would not do well in a serious Bible-belt setting!) Has it escaped the greedy capitalist/developer’s ax, and will that be true for the foreseeable future? I want an enlightened Third World culture in the heartland. (And this is what Tallahassee felt like to me when I arrived 30 years ago.)

Glen and I have often remarked, as native Floridians, how much we have seen destroyed and rebuilt in the image of Disney in our home state. Native beaches that are now wall-to-wall condo, in defiance of everything natural and good. We cheer when these things fall before hurricanes. But they are rebuilt. Every tourist state has a Gatlinburg or Panama City or Daytona Beach. Babylon. The question is: is it contained to just one small area? Will the cancer grow? Or will we finally learn to cherish what is unique and natural in each small area and preserve that? With the new development of the Big Bend region and the Emerald Coast, we are seeing the last great preserves in our state go.

I see the day coming when our last cub leaves the den to begin his own life. He’s a wonderful cub and our home will remain stable until he graduates from high school. We hold the expectation that he will attend college, and we are waiting to see what form that will take. He is currently earning the grades that will earn the Bright Futures scholarship and allow him to attend Florida colleges at a discount to us. Our older son did this, too. This is one of Florida’s upward trend decisions, to develop such a scholarship, and we are lucky to have offspring capable of taking advantage, through their hard work.

I see the day coming when it’s decision time again in my spouse’s career. For the foreseeable future, he’s content with what he is doing. I see the day coming, however, when his life becomes less structured and stressful and he reinvents himself in a new landscape. I hold that possibility out for him. If we land in a new region that is more satisfying and lucrative for me, we can depend less on the rewards of his career for our living.

I am happy to work and I work hard. Now I need to work smart. One more year of evolution and strategizing and I hope to rise to a more polished and coherent level. I can feel artistic things awakening; more complete thoughts ahead. I am tired, already, from my convoluted holiday show season. A little more to go, and then I will rest in a way that comes only in the holidays, only in winter. Recharge. And ready myself for spring.

And so I hope that buying land in the Southern Highland or lowlands is an investment in our future, in a time not so far away when things will naturally change. A segue into the third act of our lives, with a rootedness that invites our children and possible grandchildren into a home anchored in the land of our ancestors and our nation. Our craft and our law. Our recreation and our love. Our future and our history.

Yes, the mountains are calling.
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2005-11-06T05:39:00.000-08:00

Sometimes We Give Up What’s in the Way…

My mother-in-law suffered a stroke last week. Interestingly, despite her physical frailty from other causes, the stroke has taken only her ability to understand information through her eyes and some of her memory.

Always an avid reader, she can no longer read, or at least recognize letters and words, nor connect to what those symbols on the page mean. She is not blind. She suffers no paralysis, no verbal slurring. And, according to her eldest son – my husband’s brother – she still understands information arriving through her hearing. And she still understands what’s going on in the world.

Jackie is a consummate introvert, requiring little attention but enjoying the company of loved ones in small doses. Highly intelligent, she enjoyed a long career as a public school classroom teacher. The mother of three sons, she has been content to bask in their individual successes. They have brought her many grandchildren and many more great-grandchildren, in a multiplying effect. Both she and her deceased (and wonderful) husband, Giff, sprang from small families, and so the large family they have become in the modern age is a great joy.

She has loved playing board games (as does my husband), Scrabble and bridge on the computer, and doing the newspaper’s crossword puzzle until very recently. She and I have traded mystery novels in recent years. She likes hers grittier and I like my nice and safe, more about place than suspense, with the violence episode well in the past of the action. We have laughed about her having a greater spine for suspense than do I.

She has looked on, in great interest, over the development of my evolving career as a jewelry designer. I have often bought beads when visiting her, and she has always enjoyed exploring them, reveling in their colors and textures and asking eagerly what I plan to do with them. She has seen my work move forward, in fits and starts, as I’ve grown from mere beader to capable metalsmith, attempting to marry my two artistic loves: stone with metal. She has been one of my cheerleaders in the world.

And she and I have not been afraid to go up against one another, in this past decade. She’s not all sweetness and light, and neither am I. But we have not dissolved into conflict, despite differences (such as where we stand on Glen’s ex-wife, or our thermostatic incompatibility). And over this decade, we have developed mutual admiration for each other, I like to think. Two very different kinds of women who cannot be lumped into one female stereotype. We are both world citizens. In her frailty, quietness, and light touch, I have found great strength.

Some years ago now, when Giff passed away, Jackie seemed so very frail that we all wondered how long she would live into the future. She has surprised us and she has surprised herself. A lifelong smoker, she has brought our attention to the fact that it has not shortened her life.

And so now, as the late hour of her life approaches, I stand stage left holding my breath. Again, knowing that neither of us is all sweetness and light, I hear that she’s angry at her new situation and doesn’t want to work hard to regain what has been taken from her. Another insult from ageing and inevitable mortality. Have we not earned better than this? In recent years, she has asked for so little: just to read, to dream, to live in her little daily routine, to know that the many family members springing from her are well, to follow the news a bit and to enjoy storms when they come. She loves to step outside and feel the wind as it shakes the treetops.

She has a faith, of a sort. She defied her anti-Catholic father and attended Catholic services as a girl. She has an open mind and open heart on such matters. She wonders deeply on issues of faith. She practices forgiveness. And the last time we visited with her, she brought up her own last battles with her own racism. One last sliver of it that she has not been yet able to eradicate. This was one of the bravest conversations I’ve ever experienced with anyone. She gave no excuses, no justifications; just wondered at it, at the edge of the cliff, as if she were afraid to make that one last jump into holding no fear and no prejudice.

I have had an amazing mother-in-law. I pray that she passes gently into that sweet night where, surely, Giff waits in anticipation of receiving her. Theirs was a great love, and they have missed each other terribly. We will be sad to let her go, but it is in the nature of things. The deal that is struck. We come, we last awhile, we use ourselves up, and we go. Some of us leave a mark. Some of us walk lightly on the land and leave as quietly as we came.

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