Living on Paul's Time

Don't wait. Time is indifferent to how it passes, how it fills. It would as soon be full of sorrows as joy, pain as pleasure, boredom as thrills, Netflix television as Schindlers List, Trump as Sanders. Do now what you need to do, if that is scour your toilet or quit your job or call youtr father. Ask the questions to which you need answers or at least need perspectives that will help you to your own answer. Did you mean to hurt me? Is Facebook connecting us or dividing us? Have I done all I can to save the planet for our children; have you?

When is the time right? When the rain stops? When I have reached the age of safe retirement? When the travel restrictions to a country are removed and trade begins? When I reach voting age, drinking age, car rental age; what age is the age that death may come? Paul died yesterday. He was my age. He was my friend. He was one of those wonderful people that slip into the world practically unnoticed and make it better. He not only had a constant stream of ideas, he pursued all of them. A few days before he died, he returned from Tasmania. Tasmania. What the heck was he doing in Tasmania?? Well, having beers with the locals, that's for sure. And probably hiking and camping and looking for any navigable current of water he could float. I'm really glad he didn't die in Tasmania. But that is the only polite thing I have to say about losing him.

I want Paul back. I wanted to beg him out to Wisconsin this summer, so I could show him my new town, ride its bike paths, talk about urban planning and land use ideas, drink beers in the sunshine and walk home with me singing and Paul laughing, because we both grew up in conservative Lutheran homes where everyone sang off-key and no one ever cared as long as you showed up in the pew every Sunday, spit spot clean and shiny.

After I heard the news about Paul I went and stood in a hot shower for about a half hour, crying. I live alone, so it's kind of feels silly walking around the house sobbing to no one; the shower allows for solo sobbing almost as well as it allows for solo singing. Then I pulled out a bunch of old photo albums from the shelf in the study, craving a picture of Paul. But we didn't take pictures back then, when I lived in the same small town that now will hold Paul's lifetime forever in its history. It wasn't the time it is now, when every meal and every evening with friends is touted on Facebook and Instagram so the rest of us are conscious of everything we didn't enjoy last night. But Paul would never have bothered to write any of this; he just wouldn't care. He wouldn't have seen what you had for dinner last night or what play I went to see and what I thought of it; Paul would have been simply enjoying his one wild and precious life, live and in person, strumming his banjo, talking with friends, finishing up a landscape blueprint on his computer before someone else walked in the front door of his ramshackle old house that of course he had designed himself but never finished and certainly never cleaned. Paul lived every day, every minute.

So don't wait. The right moment is whenever you can. I mean, you can't take that trip if you don't have a passport or you can't afford the ticket or your dog needs you. You can't win a race if you don't train or paint a picture if you don't have paints. But life can be short. Life can, in a wink, be done. I am never going to see Paul again. Despite our shared upbringing as Lutherans, neither of us is going to walk around in the clouds singing and laughing again.

I haven't posted anything in this blog in years. I may not post again for years. I don't know. I don't care. I had to write. And now I have to go and see if I can change the flights I was going to take this week to some that will get me instead back to Durango. 'Cause the time is now, always now, and that's where I need to be, now.

Mother's Day 2011

A lot of my friends this weekend seem particularly intent on demonstrating to everyone within cyberspace that they are brighter and better than the rest of us. Yep. They're all waving the flag of political right-onness. Mother's Day was started by a trio of women who were more interested in celebrating women's commitment to peace than their ability to appreciate flowers. Still, one might note, a flower was chosen as the symbol of this: a red carnation.

I value peace and justice. I value mothers. And though I can't actually verify this and don't actually care to even try, I do suspect it's true that those of us who know what it's like to raise a child, to value another life more than you do your own, are those who know better than anyone else the yearning for peace in the world. Few mothers, after all, outlast their children. Those who do feel no joy in this.

But I am so tired of the people I know who seem to think they are better than those outside our little intellectual circles on the political and artistic left. I was raised by people, well-meaning people, who were convinced they were better than almost everyone else in the world, and I'm done with that as much as I can be.

Send me flowers, take me to brunch, feed me chocolates, or plant gardens with me. There is no way you might propose to commemorate Mother's Day with me that I would not find wonderful and full of meaning. You don't have to make it politically right. Just smile at me and say you love me.

Five Minutes of Rain Ranting

It's been raining without end. Things are feeling grim. The girls next door are actually beginning to tire of going outside under charming umbrellas after school; water rushing down the curbside gutters has begun to lose its appeal. I have not heard that needlessly optimistic line, "Well, at least we don't have to water the garden" for at least two days now. The dehumidifier in my basement is humming like the Fourth Tenor, all day and all night, minus the tuxedo. Last night it woke me up twice, just clearing its throat, apparently.

Me, I need sunshine. My whole being seems to shrink into a shell in a siege of dreariness like this. I don't care about getting wet. I just care about color and in order to have color you need to have light.How many shades of green can there be? Swarms of mosquitoes are rubbing their larval hands in glee at the prospect of blood ahead. The fish are not biting. The lakes are all roiled and muddy, and it's not really safe to go out in a boat. Great bloated bodies of preternaturally large carp loll near the shoreline of the beach behind my house.

This is not April. This is June. I attended a sermon on detachment this Sunday, but it's not helping me to let go of the deep seated disdain I feel for anyone who says with an inappropriate sense of brightness, "If you don't like the weather here, just wait five minutes." These are people who have never lived elsewhere. The weather here is as stolid as the denizens. It has been raining for days. Things do not change here. Winter is cold and too long. Summer is humid, almost to the hour. Rain hangs on for days. Fall is perfect sometimes.

Anyone who has lived here for more than 20 years should go somewhere far away. That means beyond Illinois or Iowa, Michigan or Minnesota.. At least once. And don't eat at any chain restaurants when you go, including the restaurant inside the Holiday Inn, even if they are serving prime rib as their special, maybe particularly if they're serving prime rib. Go. Go now.

Protecting Brains That Matter

I have an incredible friend, a new friend really, though I've known her since we were both smart and generally winsome high school classmates in Appleton, Wisconsin. Today, we are still both smart and generally winsome, I think it's fairly safe and true to say, and we are lucky enough to have rediscovered each other, which I think will almost certainly be a help in getting through the second half-century of life both of us statistically have before us. My friend has indisputably done far more with her innate intelligence than I have; I'm a petty civil servant, and she's a nationally renown neuropathologist. If I dwelt on that statement, I might feel gloomy, so I shan't. Instead, I'd like to talk about what my great new/old friend is doing.

She is doing her best to save brains. You may have seen articles about her work, because it's gained a lot of media attention over the last two years. In fact, a few days ago, she e-mailed me to tell me she'd just finished meeting with the former Surgeon General and the Commissioner of Football, wondering why, given this undeniable achievement, she still felt like the Hometown Girl from Appleton. Yes, she's the one, pretty much the Original One, who's started everyone talking about what's happening to all those professional football players who disappear from the playing field, who get dropped from everyone's roster, after suffering a few too many concussions.

What's happening? Well, they're suffering. Their brains are damaged. You can read about it in the archives of Time and the New Yorker and the New York Times or see my friend interviewed on any one of several network news magazines; the story's been everywhere. It's a sad, sad story, well-told by my friend and dismayingly well-documented. As a result of her ground-breaking work, you can bet there will be changes in the world of professional football and, if we're really lucky, within the world of amateur and youth athletics, too. It had to start with the stars, I guess, because the stars are the ones who command media attention. But eventually, maybe our children will benefit; eventually, maybe we will even stop encouraging our soft-skulled children to play games that simulate violence.

I remember when my son was in grade school. He, along with all his miniscule, adorable friends in the privileged environment of a wealthy little town in the foothills of the Colorado Rockies, had been "playing" soccer and "competing" in gymnastics ever since they were all extra-miniscule, super-adorable toddlers. By "playing," I mean standing out in the middle of the soccer fields holding hands with beautiful Rachel, engaged in earnest conversation until an errant black and white ball came flying down the lawn and rolled into the oblivious duo. They looked at each other in wide-eyed wonder and then exulted, loudly enough for all the adoring adults on the sidelines of the abbreviated field to overhear, "We hit the ball!!!"

But in third grade things got serious. They, the boys at least, were deemed big enough and tough enough for YMCA football. Well, Ben wasn't; his nickname at the time was "Stick," due largely to his uncanny resemblance to a toothpick with a wide-mouthed grin pinned lopsidely on top. But his male classmates were, some of them, and soon there was a retinue of 40-pound wonders outfitted in all the regalia of the all-American game. Soon afterward, the mom of one of the new pigskin passers confided to me over regulation coffee, "Susan, I don't think I really like the football deal. The coaches yell at the boys. They shout at them and make them feel bad."

Turns out that wasn't the worst of it.Turns out the yelling is actually the least of what's wrong with having 8 year old boys tackling each other on the hard ground of a Colorado playground. Turns out those big, ugly helmets don't provide adequate protection for the brains we need to read the contracts we're signing and the exemption clauses in our Income Continuation stipulations and our health insurance policies. Turns out nobody really gave this much thought, until my friend the neurologist who loves football and the men who play it came along. She is pretty much their guardian angel it turns out, not just their biggest fan.

Thank you, my friend. Now if only the rest of us would do our part. Like telling our children to jump rope instead of playing football. Really, it's the least and the best we can do.

Talkin' 'Bout My Generation

This week, my old friend Glenn Silber came back to town to premiere a brand new documentary, Labor Day, a film of last fall's Obama campaign as seen by the members of the SEIU labor union members. But before we sat down in the Barrymore Theatre to see what we wrought in the great year 2008, we got to indulge ourselves with a look backward at what we did forty years ago here, with a 30th year anniversary screening of Glenn's first major documentary, the Oscar nominated War At Home.

I almost didn't go. A few weeks ago, during the Wisconsin Book Festival, I went to hear the very mini-panel of Bernadine Dohrn and her husband Bill Ayers ostensibly addressing the subject of their newly published book, Race Course Against White Supremacy. Believe me, it wasn't the "catchy" title that lured me in; it was simply idle curiousity, combined with simple idleness on a pleasant evening in October. That event made me feel so uncomfortable with my generation that I wasn't sure I could suffer a second gathering of gray headed liberals. There's just something in me that gets indisputably fidgety when a large lecture hall in an elegant arts center is full of old white people nodding their heads in unison in a discussion about racism. My generation has not only become hyperopic in middle age, we are way too often dismayingly myopic. It is not a good combination if you seek to see anything at all clearly.

But the night of the film showing was a beautiful night, so I clamped a light on my handlebars and set off for the theater. Two hours later, with a fresh copy of the DVD tucked into my bag, I pedalled home. My mind was full. My spirit felt as fresh as a child's. To be spinning my pedals with one pants leg rolled up and my hair bunched in a messy ponytail only made me feel more joyful and young and full of a sense of potential.

To watch The War At Home again was to remember not only that I was some teeny little part of a genuine change in consciousness forty years ago but to realize that my participation in it was both smaller and more important than I ever before realized. I came into this movement late, right before we pulled our troops out of Southeast Asia. The events on the Madison campus that Glenn documented in his first major movie all happened before I came to live here, most of them before I was even in high school, some of them while I was still a scrawny, buck-toothed blonde girl in braids, going door to door in Appleton, Wisconsin handing out literature endorsing Barry Goldwater at my dad's behest. I became involved in the anti-war protests just in time to learn how tear gas burned, just in time to experience the fright and, yes, the thrill of being chased down dark streets on the first wet nights of fall, hiding behind bushes and hoping the lights of the squad cars and riot vans wouldn't find you.

I got to know all of this. It changed my life and my generation uneradicably and radically. And now we are, most of us who shared this experience, old and gray and slow; our bellies sling over our beltlines just a little; our beltlines are a little too high to ever be fashionable again. We are old, and the battle scene has changed to Afghanistan and Iraq and Pakistan. Despite the little group of stalwart souls who stand mutely on street corners in college towns like Madison and Boulder once a week, dressed in black and holding up signs of steady antiwar protest, the movement is over. Wars are now religious rather than political, and we are slow and scared and uncertain, about almost everything except what we did as students at the tail end of the sixties. And I am jubilant riding my bike home tonight because finally I know who I am, finally I know what I believe.

Thirty/forty years ago, my peers and I were justified to protest. What we did was great, and we changed the world at an accelerated rate not usual to the course of history. But I didn't really know what I was doing. I was reacting. Looking for something, really anything, to replace the ruling tenets of my parents' lives. I'd lost my Christianity, and I needed something to believe in, some community that willingly enfolded me just as I was. The movement, and particularly its men, gladly embraced all comers, particularly perhaps young blondes who had successfully endured orthidonture.

What I didn't yet know was that beliefs could be rational and heartfelt and deep. I had been raised as a fundamentalist Protestant and fundamental to this is acceptance without questioning, without knowledge or proof. I made pretty much the perfect follower. But thirty years of life has a way of altering us. I am no longer such a good follower. In fact, I've been accused of being ornery, recalcitrant, and even snobby. I feel strong and calm about my values; they feel as much my own as my shadow, but more substantive.

And I can ride my bike in the middle of the night singing songs without worrying about what anyone will think of me, post blogs without caring how the world regards me. This is who I am. The movement of which I was a small part is a large part of me but not all of me. How nice to live long enough to feel this way.

I am a pacifist. I want everyone to get to live long enough and well enough to get to feel this way. And I ain't gonna study war no more.

We Are the Walrus

As fall lurches in its irregular, irrevocable paces toward its grim successor, Sister Winter, I am spending doleful moments every morning staring bleakly at the contents of my drawers and closet. There are not enough warm clothes in the world to keep me warm through the coming season, I'm afraid. I wear so many clothes through the winter that those I meet during the next few months are invariably surprised in the summer when I finally reveal my real corporeal contours some. "Oh!" I've heard so many times it seems just a part of greeting summer, "I had no idea you were so slim!" In winter, I resemble those huge seals and sea lions lounging around under the long wharf in Santa Cruz harbor.

Not so most of the young women on campus, though. Where I have been dismayed all during these last warm months at the veritable acreage of naked female flesh that confronts me in every classroom and every stroll across the summer resort we call the UW, where I have occasionally found myself experiencing just the teeniest appreciation for Muslim women who don the burka, now finally one would hope that falling temperatures and increasing rainfall would compell something that might pass for modesty. Or at least prudence.

And yes, the short skirts that barely cover the buttocks are, by and large, gone, replaced by longish tunics that are stretched tightly over plump derrieres. The plunging necklines are, to my relief, now often camoflauged by scarves draped with attractive looseness but real functionality. Legs are almost routinely covered, in many cases by leggings that seem just a little tighter than the wearer's own skin. Jeans, too, are worn with something beyond simple snugness, with crammed-in flesh literally exploding where the low-rise "waistband" ends. I find myself looking with relief at the slobbiest girls, those who sluff around campus wearing sweatpants that drag through the wet leaves and suggest they have probably been slept in for at least several days.

Apparently, I've become a prude. Perhaps I always was, though I can remember (vaguely) several swimsuits that would indicate otherwise. I don't know exactly when this condition surfaced, but I suspect it was about the time youthful "fashions" began showing me first the younger generation's underwear, then eventually cracks and cleavages from all parts of their bodies that I really didn't want to confront at every street corner and right across my desk. Or perhaps this is a generational inevitability, given that my peers and I spent our own youth wearing washed out workshirts and flannels and jean jackets so shapeless that my own grandfather once looked in genuine puzzlement at my mom and asked in helpless confusion, "Isn't she a girl?"

I have nobly resisted, so far, the urge to yank up slouching pants and the more wicked companion impulse to yank them down. I have not scolded a single young woman for exposing breasts with as much nonchalance as I let show my crow's feet or the bags under my tired, old eyes. I have reminded myself innumerable times that every generation has its own way of irritating its elders. I have even tried to justify it intellectually, to persuade myself that there's a legitimacy to the argument which no one but myself has ever posed to me that we should not be distracted or distressed by our flesh; that like certain tribes in equatorial Africa, nakedness should not be construed as any kind of sexual intention.

But I have failed. Nakedness in the northern Midwest in our first world society is sexual. And more than that, it is overwhelming. It is overwhelming, in part, simply because we have so much more flesh than people in equatorial Africa; we are fat and we are crammed into clothing that is too small for us, and it is not that we cannot afford larger clothing, it's that we (and of course I use this plural rather figuratively here) have persuaded ourselves that this is fashionable. Yet I haven't seen a single ad promoting fatness and low cut clothing on the runway reveals nothing but ladders of rib bones.

Is it the fact that most of us can't be this skinny that resigns us to being fat? Breast size across the world is getting larger, even once we discount the fact that manufacturers of brassieres are changing their definitions of bra size to make women think they are larger than before. Girls are maturing a lot earlier and it seems that the accretion of body fat that begins at puberty now keeps increasing all the way through the child-bearing years. Is it our diet? Is it the hormones in our beef? Is it some sort of evolutionary advantage? Will women float better when global climate change forces us all back into the water of the sea? Are we heading toward becoming walruses and sea lionesses?

I am. Because I'm bundling up for winter and going shopping for more long sleeved thermals and turtlenecks and thick-knit sweaters, plus some socks that are so heavy I'll have to buy new shoes one full size larger. I'm the egg woman; I'm the walrus.

The Fall Lure of Memory

This picture was taken a little less than a week ago. It was such a clear, sunny day that I took off from work and drove away from the city just to walk through the woods in the hills on a weekday, when the only other people in the big state park were a few elderly couples picnicking on the shore of the lake. Once I went further than 100 feet from the main parking lots, there was no one; the elderly have to content themselves with sights set close to their cars.

And so I walked through the woods. This may seem unworthy of note, unless you know how unwoodsly a person I am. Squirrels terrorize me. The thought of a bear out bumbling for berries is enough to freeze me in my tracks even at midsummer. Bear scat. Is that bear scat? Does a bear scat in the woods and to what jazzman's staccato rhythm? Even a scampering bunny can make me turn in another direction. "Oops. Excuse me. Sorry. Didn't know this path was taken." But on this gorgeous day, I was determined to remain undaunted, a feeling only periodically undermined when a leaf would flutter earthward, just out of the alert line of my ever-vigilant vision. You may find this hard to believe, but the sound of one leaf falling to the earth can actually seem as loud as an elephant's footfall to the heightened senses of the leary.

Fall. I suppose if you lived in some unfortunate place that had no preponderance of deciduous trees, "autumn" would suffice to name this season. "Fall," it's interesting to note, is not commonly used for the season anywhere but North America. Here in the Midwest, it's the only word that fits. Here, the falling leaves rule. The best childhoods have memories that combine the parental ritual of raking very vaguely in the background of gleefully jumping in the resultant leaf piles. Forty, fifty, sixty years later, the smell of leaves in the sunshine brings back a memory of leisure and play that not even the now assumed chore of raking can render weary. I know. I just came in from raking.

But now, as a grown-up, despite those delicious memories of carefree times and happiness, I know what fall truly is. It is the last dance. It is the end of playtime. It is the last chorus of birdsong, the last splurge of color; not even sunrise and sunset will dress as bravely come the cold of fast-approaching winter. Pallor is just around the corner; my own skin already has less tint. Last night the big tree in front of my house, the one with the fairy house tucked between its protruding roots, that tree in one night shed almost every single one of its leaves. I know. I just raked them.

Raked them carefully into as high a pile as I possibly could in the little square of ground that passes for my front yard, being careful to pull out any sticks that came with the fallen leaves, making sure no animal waste was raked into it...just in case some passing child has need of leaping into some random pile of irresistibly colored fall leaves.