Elizabeth A. Havey's Blog, page 23
October 7, 2018
October Thoughts, Change: Juan Romero and Sarah Smarsh
Change resides within us. We are protoplasm in constant change. And when we meditate on the word we often have mixed feelings–a child growing taller, a college student finally passing a worrisome class, a new job, a new house, marriage–change, a moving forward. But the other side of the change-coin can be connected to loss. Change doesn’t always have to be about death, but it is about the need for adjustment, for possibly “seeing” our lives in a light not as bright and exciting as youth, but possibly a softer, calmer light. But we are all constantly, though at different rates, experiencing change.
I need to cling to the positives about change today. To have hope that empathy will fall on people’s shoulders like the leaves that are beginning to let go. We all need to let some things go–fear and anger, and our inability to listen.
JUAN ROMERO and ROBERT F. KENNEDY
Juan Romero has died. He was 68. Twice I wrote about the busboy whose life was profoundly changed on the night of June 5th when Robert F. Kennedy was shot in the Ambassador Hotel. Kennedy was walking through the kitchen, only to be felled by an assassin’s bullet. Juan Romero, who wanted to shake Kennedy’s hand, became the person who knelt and held the dying man’s bleeding head. “I wanted to protect his head from the cold concrete,” Romero told Steve Lopez a reporter for the LA TIMES. Lopez kept in touch with Romero, an update he reported on this past June 3, 2018, revealed the night still haunted Romero. He told Lopez: “I want to go back to Arlington Cemetery and just say ‘Hi’ and explain that everything is going good and I’m grateful for his involvement in my life and that I will always respect his effort for social justice. And to say that …I’m sorry I couldn’t do more for him.” Romero did marry, have children and later divorced. He often left flowers at a monument in a downtown San Jose park that honored Kennedy.
Maria Shriver, former first lady of California and niece of RFK, said she had wanted to send a thank you note to Romero. “I always felt a great deal of empathy for him…because of how difficult it was for him to move past that. So God bless him. It’s hard to know why someone gets put into a situation that they’re locked in forever. But as I see it, he was locked into an image of helping someone.” It was poignant that Ms. Shriver used the word empathy. In my mind, Romero’s name and Kennedy’s will be forever linked.
HEARTLAND: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth
The author of this new book is Sarah Smarsh, a journalist who grew up in rural Kansas. She stated emphatically: “The American Dream has a pice tag on it. The poorer you are the higher the price.”
Growing up, Sarah endured the direct effects of a wide range of economic policies: farm subsides, banking deregulation and education cutbacks. Smarsh writes: “If you live in a house that needs shingles, you will attend a school that needs books.” Smarsh does not invoke the term “white trash” as a badge of honor. She questions her own “whiteness” and also rejects the term “white working class” as divisive and harmful. She explains the racist implication of government aid programs. She won’t let us look away from the unconscious biases that separate people of color from the very idea of opportunity. Some of her ideas and statements:
Our society “imbues whiteness with power…using it as shorthand for economic stability.”
Our economy is designed around the idea that whites aren’t supposed to live the way we force black and brown people to live, thus identifying “white trash” as a separate class means they received disproportionate visibility, over and above what we give to nonwhites facing the same (and worse) economic hardship.
When our society erases the needs of communities of color, that glorifies white poverty and exacerbates the oppression of others.
Smarsh is not interested in the pity of elite leftists who might label her “needy.”
Smarsh states plainly that the conflicting lesson of poverty is that “society’s contempt for the poor becomes the poor person’s contempt for herself.”
Reviewer Leah Hampton in the LA TIMES writes: You may think you have read this book before. You haven’t. This is not THE GRAPES OF WRATH or HILLBILLY ELEGY…This is a tough, no nonsense truth, and telling it hard…and refers to “wasted generations believing in ‘trickle down’ economics, leaving us standing outside with our mouths open praying for money to rain.”
But in HEARTLAND you will find a recounting of “deep progressive roots” in Smarsh’s community, where women’s rights, abolition and pro-labor sentiments shaped her story. Identifying with the legacy of women’s suffrage, Smarsh put herself through college and her education led her to a political awakening and a career in journalism.
THE REVIEWER’S CONCLUSIONS
Leah Hampton, the women who reviewed HEARTLAND, has the same background as Smarsh and some potent advice for us:
At a time of national reckoning about endemic misogyny, HEARTLAND does some serious feminist consciousness raising…rural voters might be the very group that halts our country’s slide to the right. There is rich soil in America’s fly-over states, and if we follow Smarsh’s path, we will find families like mine and the author’s, full of sensible, resilient women who many be disenfranchised, but who are also uniquely poised and equipped to aid in the revolution , and in our collective liberation.
Photo: THE LA TIMES.
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September 30, 2018
In Praise of Those Who Honor And Care for Women
It’s amazing to me how uninformed I was, I am and still could be. And that’s in reference to what I believe or at the very least what I try to understand pertaining to: WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A FEMALE LIVING IN THIS CULTURE.
I am gobsmacked at what I still don’t GET–that women, though they fight and speak out and work as hard or harder than men, aren’t there yet. That many men are either afraid of us, don’t understand us or have a brain that refuses to put us on the same level as men. We are second class citizens or liars or chattel. We are here for only one purpose–having their babies. Men can abuse us, call us liars–and when confronted with the fact that we are as intelligent and savvy as they are–or more so–men do what they can to push back. And in some cases, crush us. (see recent hearings regarding someone wanting to get on the SCOTUS)
MALE COURAGE THROUGH THE AGES…
So let me praise those that have honored women: husbands, fathers, brothers and sons who are eager to engage us in conversation. Who rely on our ideas and decisions to help them in their lives. Who honor our bodies, allow us to walk out in the world, but are there to protect us or fight for us ONLY if we need them to. In other words, they give us the freedom we so deserve and desire. We are not precious plants. We are bone and blood, sinew and muscle, brain cells and beating hearts–just as they are.
Writer Joseph Conrad stated: “Being a woman is a terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dealing with men.” Irony and quite a bit of truth.
Charles Malik: “The fastest way to change society is to mobilize the women of the world.”
Albert Einstein: “The woman who follows the crowd will usually go no further than the crowd. The woman who walks alone is likely to find herself in places no one has ever been before.”
AND Mark Twain: “What would men be without women? Scarce, sir…mighty scarce.”
Twain always told the blatant truth with a twist of irony and humor. So…
LET’S TAKE A CLOSER LOOK
Twain, of course, was eluding to women giving birth, women having pain, women enduring. Dr. Jenna T. Nakagawa recently wrote in her piece: OUTRAGE AT HOW THE HEALTH CARE SYSTEM “CARES” FOR WOMEN that:
I rudely joke to myself that it’s the fact that our genitals are all internal which makes access to care so difficult.
Thus a metaphor for some situations this female physician has witnessed in her care of patients. Example: this female patient who presented with hemorrhaging two weeks after giving birth. Dr. Nakagawa saved the woman’s life. She writes:
It did not take long for my relief to give way to anger. I imagined her delivery. I imagined her pushing through pain and her bravery as she embraced a newborn. I imagined her terror when she, at home by herself, began to hemorrhage and begged a family member to watch her children so she could call an ambulance. I thought about how she trusted her delivery provider, how, in a developed country — where there are prenatal clinics, sonograms, hospitals, blood banks, operating rooms and skilled healthcare personnel — no woman should ever die of a postpartum hemorrhage. This one, who did everything right, almost did.
Then Dr. Nakagawa considers the broader picture: I wish I could blame it on the media, but the entire culture within health care is also at fault. Many of our patients don’t see a gynecologist or start prenatal care because they aren’t aware they could be seen without health insurance. A pregnant woman can’t have a clinic visit and sonogram in the same day because insurance won’t cover it. A mother is dropped from her plan because between caring for her children at home and working two jobs, she couldn’t make her appointments on time. Birth control doesn’t need to be covered by employee health insurance. And of course there is the ongoing debate about abortion…
Dr. Nagakawa concludes: Health care is more business than anything else and serves everyone poorly. Men and women are different, so they react differently and are poorly served for different reasons. But the system also poorly serves (clients) based on geographic location, mental health, and even financial status. Those who are poor don’t receive basic care that would provide significant benefit and those who are relatively wealthy tend to get “overmedicalized”. The only people who will get any where near the appropriate care they should are cranky and demanding physicians and some nurses.
I want to believe and do believe most days that we are MOVING FORWARD. People are engaged on many levels and want their male and female children and grandchildren to have the benefits of freedom, education, healthcare, engaging employment–all those things that proclaim a good life.
FINAL THOUGHT: Want to help? It’s relatively easy. Start by HONORING AND CARING FOR THE WOMEN IN YOUR LIFE.
ART: thanks to NPR. And thanks to KEVIN MD.com
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September 22, 2018
The Person “With” The Condition Has the FIRST & LAST SAY…
Sometimes I just have to write about something to get it off my chest. So here goes. Recently, while talking to a friend, I caught this person up on my life and how my husband was doing. John was diagnosed with cancer in his fifties–CLL, Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia.
SCARY STUFF
I am a nurse. Thank God. Because though I did not put in decades working in a hospital, when my husband was diagnosed, my knowledge served us well. Any blood cancer is tricky with much science to learn. At his diagnosis neither of us were familiar with the disease. I looked it up in my Medical/Surgical Textbook. “These patients usually live about five years.” Then I looked at the copyright date. The book was seven years old. Medicine and scientists work on a fast-track. I breathed again, this statement no longer held any weight. And I was right. John is doing great as I write this.
So back to the friend conversation. After a minute or two of sharing with her how my husband was doing, then she replied, “Well, it’s like having diabetes.”
This was a phone call. I couldn’t think straight. (I can now.) This person said something about the chronic aspect of the disease and somehow the phone call ended after that.
CLL IS NOT LIKE DIABETES. IT IS CANCER.
Yes, diabetes, especially Type One, is a life-long struggle for many people. I taught diabetes education when I worked at the health department in Des Moines, Iowa. I actually wrote the program. And as I age, I am carefully watching my diet because I could develop Type Two. BUT–it’s not cancer.
I don’t believe that diabetes, on a regular basis, requires any of the following–cancer does. And cancer patients–please speak up!
spending time in an infusion center getting chemotherapy;
worrying about side effects like losing your hair–all your hair;
trying to remain a responsible employee in a responsible full-time position during weeks of therapy and treatment;
having Pet scans and blood draws over and over again;
taking numerous prescriptions to fight viruses and bacteria and when traveling taking all of those medications with you and often wearing a mask on airplanes; because your immune system is forever compromised–that’s what CLL and other leukemias do, mess with your ability to fight infections;
searching for clinical trials to save your life and then flying to another state every quarter to stay in that clinical trial; (It did save his life.)
discovering that your labs are going south, so soon your treatment won’t work and you’ll need something else.
another search for a new therapy while the cloud of the diagnosis forever hangs over your head;
Okay, I could go on and on. Bottom line: a cancer diagnosis changes your life. And it sometimes ends it. I still miss my friend Sue who died of ovarian cancer.
A cancer diagnosis also changes the lives of your family. It just does. And I welcome my readers to chime in here. And I salute ALL my family. They are awesome.
THE BOTTOM LINE
In conclusion, what this post is about is the following statement: WHEN DISCUSSING YOUR CANCER WITH ANOTHER PERSON, YOU HAVE THE FIRST and THE LAST SAY. You are living it. You know the ropes. And don’t be shy. I sucked at responding and I don’t want you to suck at it. And I welcome any story you might want to share that hurt, that pissed you off or made you want to scream. Because the final bottom line in dealing with cancer, is belief in your strength and your decisions–belief in them EVERY SINGLE DAY.
P.S. Here are two links to posts concerning CLL. This one discusses how virtual friendships online helped my husband and me and could help you. Click here.
This post recounts that in-between period that cancer patients and their family often find themselves in. You don’t know what is going to happen, but you just try to hang on.
Finally: below are posts about diabetes!! Diabetes Strategies You Maybe be Missing
Diabetes Mnemonic for Grocery Shopping
Do You Have Occasional Low Blood Sugar?
Thanks for reading. I look forward to your comments.
ART: Icon Finder Thank you.
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September 16, 2018
Senior Care Options for Your Aging Parents
As our loved ones age, it’s important they get the care they need to stay healthy and to lead fulfilling lives. There are many different senior care options available for aging parents, and it can be a daunting task to choose the best one that suits their needs and yours. This overview of different senior living options and the types of care they provide will help you when faced with this often inevitable and confusing decision.
Independent Senior Apartments
If your parent, aunt or uncle is still mostly independent, but could benefit from living with other seniors and having access to more resources on site, then senior living apartments may be a good fit. These apartments are designed with seniors in mind, have comfortable safe-living spaces and encourage community. They are typically available for both singles and couples. Many senior living communities offer optional resources for their residents that will actually improve their individual health situation. An on-site gym, access to transportation and a variety of community social activities are some examples. Many apartment complexes also provide pet friendly senior living, though that option requires that the resident be able to live independently.
Assisted Care Facilities
Though assisted care facilities help residents with their ADL’s, activities of daily living, they often do not provide medical care on site. Assisted care caters to residents who need help maintaining a daily schedule, while still allowing them a level of independence and the ability to makes choices that they can handle. There are often two types of assisted care facilities – smaller, private residential care facilities and large assisted care facilities. They basically provide the same services, but have different settings. Each assisted care facility provides residents with a comfortable room, three meals per day, help with ADL’s like bathing, dressing, grooming, walking, and cleaning. They often offer transportation–a bus that takes groups to the theatre, church or shopping. Enjoyable individual and group activities that enrich seniors’ lives change the flow of a resident’s day, and often encourage maintaining a hobby or participation in activities like book clubs, card games or music appreciation.
Private residential assisted care facilities are run by caregivers and usually have less than 10 residents at any given time. They are homes that are converted to be suitable for seniors, so they are excellent for seniors who want a smaller, more personalized facility that really feels like home. However, they don’t always have as many amenities available as larger facilities, and sometimes don’t provide as much privacy as larger facilities. A larger assisted care facility will usually have more amenities and more standardized care on site, but don’t have the cozy, comfortable feel of living at home. It’s up to your senior to decide what makes the most sense for them.
Memory Care Facilities
Memory care facilities are similar to assisted living facilities, but they provide services that are specifically designed for seniors with dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, or other memory issues. Some memory care facilities provide medical assistance on-site, but many do not. It’s important that you ask questions when looking for a facility for your senior. In addition to helping the patient with daily tasks, memory care facilities help make daily living less confusing. The spaces are designed to be secure so they won’t overwhelm patients. Memory units are usually locked units.
Skilled Nursing Facilities
For seniors who need full-time medical care, skilled nursing facilities often provide the best, most comprehensive services. A skilled nursing facility provides your senior with access to doctors and nurses around the clock should they need it, as well as assistance with ADL’s as you would find in an assisted living facility. Skilled nursing facilities provide the most comprehensive care for seniors dealing with chronic illness.
Continuing Care Retirement Communities
Continuing care retirement communities are the most expensive of all senior care options, but also provide the most comprehensive care. CCRCs provide lifetime care for seniors, ranging from independent living options to skilled nursing. Seniors sign a contract, usually either for life or for a certain number of years, and their care is adjusted throughout their stay to suit their needs. CCRCs work well for couples when one person needs more care than the other, because they often allow them to stay together while still getting the care they need.
At-Home Care
For seniors who want to remain at home with family, there are many at-home care options available. Local caregiving agencies provide personalized care to help seniors maintain a healthy daily routine while living at home. A caregiver might arrive daily for bathing, for some meals or for an outing–a walk if the senior is able or in a wheelchair to go grocery shopping or out to lunch.
With so many care options available for seniors, it is becoming easier to find options that will help you care for your aging parent or relative. When making an appointment to tour a facility, ask to speak with someone concerning the cost. Know your financial situation, make sure that you or your parent can afford this facility, even if they have a long term care policy–which doesn’t usually cover everything. You want the best for your senior, but it is essential that you consider finances in the process. If your senior is transitioning to retirement or struggling with health issues, it may be time to start considering his or her finances and visiting the senior care facilities in your area.
This post was written by Holly Klamer. She loves to write on issues related to seniors, aging and retirement and is a frequent contributor on many blogs and online publications.
Photo: CozyRetire.com
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September 9, 2018
TEACHING YOUNG WOMEN about that “EVENTUAL” EXAM
I think I failed my daughters in some way. And again, it’s because that way wasn’t paved for me either. I’m talking about their first gynecological exam. I rack my brain to remember if we talked about details. I don’t think we did. One of my daughter’s said the exam she had in college, at the Women’s Health section of the Student Health Building, was just “okay.”
In retrospect, that’s not good enough for me. But I know what was on my mind when I began to send my two daughters, who were four years apart, off to college—birth control—and not sexually transmitted disease or the gynecological exam. Wrong of me.
WE TEACH AS THEY GROW
A little history first. I loved raising two daughters, have fond memories of one finding a tampon and asking me what it was. She was three. I said it was for moms and kindly took it away from her. I tried always to be discreet about my period—cramps or fatigue, more bathroom trips. But children are smart and when the same daughter found a tampon that I had set aside—she handed it to me at the bathroom door, “Here Mom.” What do you say? Simply, “Thank you.”
In middle school, they both saw the proverbial “feminine film,” girls separated from the boys to learn about menstruation. Do they still do that? I hope so. In some families those topics, which should be discussed, are not. But in education today, they are also cutting back on the friendly school nurse.
In seventh grade, my eldest had a sex education class. I did call the teacher (this was a private school) and protested some of the information that would be covered. She basically told me to put on my big girl pants. These were things the kids were already talking about and they needed to have the true information. She was right.
Of course, when middle school began for each of our daughters, my husband and I sat with them and told them about sex. We used the exact same book and gave a loving presentation. But even if your children grow up in the same household, they are their own person. The oldest had no questions. Was eager to go back to whatever she’d been doing. When it was the second daughter’s turn, she had many questions. Our son? My husband laughs and said he told us about sex. Well—not true, but a great joke.
BECOMING SEXUALLY ACTIVE
When our first daughter left for college, I said right out that if she wanted to have sex, to please use birth control. I did not go into sexually transmitted diseases. I should have. She told me that she had listened to everything I ever taught her and to trust her. I did. She called me once asking me about symptoms that pointed to her having a urinary tract infection. I mentioned what often caused them, knowing she was now sexually active. Okay, normal and healthy.
Where I failed was a discussion of the gynecological exam. I think they both had an okay experience. I remember mine—not comforting, all the doctors in the practice males. I left the exam upset, because after writing the script for my first packet of birth control pills, he set up a time table which meant I would menstruate the day of my wedding! When I protested, he basically said, “You women need to figure these things out.” I never went to that doctor again, and my sister-in-law figured out how to work around the when-to-start-the-pill dilemma. YES, we women can figure these things out. Yay for women!
WHAT YOU NEED TO TELL YOUR DAUGHTERS…GRANDDAUGHTERS
After the recent explosion at the University of Southern California where young women finally revealed the mistreatment by a Dr. Tyndall during their gynecological exams, I want to share the following information.
A routine gynecological exam for someone younger than 21 doesn’t usually include an internal exam. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) recommends an initial screening at the gynecologist office from age 13-15, only to establish trust between patient and doctor. That would include a general exam of weight, height and blood pressure. The visit might include a discussion of heavy periods or painful cramps. A breast exam and an external genital exam could be done, and if the patient is under 18, an HPV vaccination to prevent the possibility of future infection. An internal exam with a speculum is routinely not necessary for women under the age of 21. However, it might be needed if: the patient has abnormal bleeding, is sexually active, or she needs to be tested for sexually transmitted diseases (STD’S). However, most can be detected through a urine sample.
A doctor SHOULD WEAR GLOVES at all times during an exam. Here is where it would be helpful for a mother or grandmother or aunt etc, to explain exactly what will happen: lying on the exam table, putting feet in stirrups, the doctor examining the vagina and cervix with lubricated and gloved fingers of one hand, his or her other hand pressing on the abdomen.
The doctor should also explain what he will do and what he is doing. A chaperone can be present. ACOG explains the reason for a chaperone (usually a nurse): she can provide more information and reassure the patient.In some circumstances it is the patient’s right to say that one is not necessary. For young women, I think one should always be there.
Physicians will ask about the patient’s sexual history but should NEVER make provocative remarks about that history or her genitalia. Questions about a patient’s general health can also accompany the exam. The doctor might ask whether the patient has questions or concerns and if she has experienced any potential exposure to sexually transmitted diseases.
Areas of a women’s body that are NOT being examined should always be covered.
If during the exam, a woman feels that SOMETHING IS NOT RIGHT, she should immediately say so.
And if a woman feels she has been abused during an exam she should:
Trust her gut;
Report it; At a university, she could report it to the head of the Student Health Services. Because of Dr. Tyndall, former patients are reporting their experience with him to the Bureau of Victim Services in LA.
Understand Talk to her friends to help understand what happened.
Talk to Others Maybe she will need an attorney.
Persist Seek justice for herself and in doing so, help others.
Thanks to the LA TIMES for the above information and writers, Colleen Shalby and Soumya Karlamangla PHOTO: Provision Health & Fitness
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September 2, 2018
Looking Back: The Emotions of Moving
(This is an older piece, but the feelings are still on target)
Seeing a moving truck hurtling down a neighborhood street used to make me think of new adventures: new houses with new rooms to explore, new gardens to plant, new roots to set down. But after spending six months selling my home of 17 years and buying another, I now see things differently. The experience is not all pleasant. In fact it is downright wrenching.
Houses become part of the family. They hold you and keep you warm and let you hide from the problems of the world. Yes, they throw you curves once in a while when the basement takes in water or the garage door refuses to open. But mostly, a house can become another child, someone you care for day to day. I would often say aloud when driving out of the driveway for a vacation or a long weekend: “Goodbye House, be good.” As in, resist some spark of electricity or broken toilet, whatever.
Because we decided to sell our house ourselves and not hire a realtor, I learned much about myself, about the things in the house that were precious to me, and about how strangers react to those things. I learned that I’ll never be a realtor! One perspective client was eager to have her three dogs sleep in the blue and white nursery that it took me months to wallpaper and prepare for my son’s birth. Another complained because my very clean home had a window sill in the kitchen that needed some touch-up painting. (I told myself she was reacting to the “super clean” house she had walked through. She’d decided to find SOMETHING to complain about.) Another prospective buyer, on seeing a photo of my husband so handsome and smoking a pipe, start to laug, “Who’s this? Hugh Hefner?” Ah well. I had to just keep smiling. I had to dissemble. I had to sell my house.
I also learned that I don’t ever want to be honored with a HOUSE WALK. I’ve had one every Sunday for the last two months. No fun–no fun at all to have people poking and peeking into your life.
And so as the days passed and the FOR SALE sign remained in the front yard and so did the routine of every weekend getting out the posters and sticking them in the ground at the corner of our block to entice drivers to stop by. And so, I was probably losing it. “Come on, House, ” I said aloud one morning. “I know it’s hard, but you have to let us go. You can’t fight us on this. The decision is made. I’ll miss you, I promise I will. But please give us a break.”
And so one family and then another made us an offer and after more phone calls and discussions, a contract was finally signed.
But elation was absent. I walked around my home, looking at my rooms, touching a curtain, straightening a bedspread, knowing it would be difficult to pack all our treasures. And our memories. After all, here we conceived two children. Here we read stories, tickled babies, kissed warm blonde heads. Here we gathered family, some of them now gone. Here, here, here–in this house where we have lived for so many years.
My friend Julie had moved a month before. “I had to leave the room during the closing,” she confessed. “I felt stupid crying about a house.”
And then one day everything got packed up. The moving van came. I again thought about those years of peaceful family living as I walked through one more time. I wished the same joy and peace for the new family. I wished that they would hear the mourning doves, smell the marigolds on the evening breeze, hear the neighbor’s dog back as a token of peace and security before drifting off to sleep.
Then we were in the car and going down the driveway for the last time. “Goodbye House, be good.”
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August 26, 2018
Where I Should Be: A Writer’s Sense of Place
Titles can’t be copyrighted, so I am using most of one created by Native American writer, Louise Erdrich. The piece is from The New York Times Book Review of July, 1985. It is wrinkled and worn. That’s okay. The words are what matter.
Yes, it’s the words. Ten days ago my computer died. All I could think about was THE WORDS. All my notes, the newest version of my novel, other pieces and novels stored on my hard drive. I’ve been a fortunate person, only losing personal items in a major flood years ago: scrapbooks of clippings about Queen Elizabeth II; form letters from Buckingham Palace, the White House. And books, so many soggy books. But when you think you might have lost hours of words—but my data was saved. Thanks Geek Squad.
So I am back in my place, writing about my place, allowing the scenery and the sounds of my life that are part of me to fall onto the page.
WRITING IS ALWAYS ABOUT PLACE
Erdrich writers: In a tribal view of the world, where one place has been inhabited for generations, the landscape becomes enlivened by a sense of group and family history. …a traditional storyteller fixes listeners in an unchanging landscape combined of myth and reality. People and place are inseparable.
When I read these words, I realize they are welded to my novel which takes place in a northside neighborhood of Chicago, that could be Rogers Park, near where I went to college. I say, could be, because novel writing allows imagination to alter things. When my novel begins with the main character (MC) not wanting to move from that neighborhood, I can relate to the twenty years I lived on a tree-lined street south of Chicago, where hop scotch squares filled the sidewalk and your bike was really the pony that took you round and round a few Chicago blocks. And in the first few pages of my novel, I strive to take you to that place in my memory that might carry you to something similar. Because PEOPLE AND PLACE ARE INSEPARABLE.
She pushed on, feet slapping on sidewalks, one cement square worn, another fractured—prickly weeds breaking through—the familiar straight-on Chicago blocks of her Near North Side neighborhood. Step on a crack? Break your mother’s back… Change was endemic to living, and it was happening here, block after block, street after street, yet the place still familiar, like lines on her palms: the brick house whose roof collapsed, needing a year for repair; its frame neighbor whose garage burned down, never rebuilt; the row houses on Lawn Avenue, most in need of paint, all ornamented with containers of scarlet geraniums, planters of white petunias. After all, it was past Mother’s Day, planting time. And the house on the corner of Lawn and Lunt, a warped “Welcome” sign on the door of its disintegrating summer porch—screens never washed or repaired, rips increasing to be penetrated by bees and mosquitoes as well as slanting sleet.
I can sit at my computer in Southern California and unite myself once again with the sounds, smells and experience of a great part of my life. As Erdrich writers: Our suburbs and suburban life may be more sustaining and representative monuments than Mount Rushmore.
DO YOU THINK ABOUT PLACE WHEN CHOOSING A BOOK?
Many readers follow patterns in their reading choices. They read everything by authors who write about the Outer Banks or New Orleans, New York City, New England, Great Britain, Nazi Germany, Russia. Eudora Welty writes about PLACE in fiction, begging for some permanence to sustain that fiction: It is only too easy to conceive that a bomb that could destroy all traces of places as we know them, in life and through books, could also destroy all feelings as recognition, memory, history, valor, love, all the instincts of poetry and praise, worship and endeavor, are bound up in place.
The ability to read a poem, watch a film, or even see a film clip of a news event means more to us, stays with us–if there is recognition of PLACE–either that specific place, or in fiction, one that haunts, brings back memories, places you on the sidewalk where the screens of a porch require repair. Or pulls you in so that for the time you are reading you say: Here I am, and where I want to be. Erdrich insists that a writer must have a place to love and to be irritated with. She writes: Through the study of a place, its crops, products, paranoias, dialects and failures, we come closer to our own reality. It is difficult to impose a story and a plot on a place. But truly knowing a place provides the link between details and meaning. LOCATION, whether it is to abandon it or draw it sharply, is where we start.
Yes, we all start someplace and often we take that place into our hearts when we move or leave our beginnings. But they stay with us. In airplanes we can escape gravity, but when we look down, we cannot escape the need to identify with some place on the earth–a place either big or small that rises up to hold us so that we call it home.
Reading a work of fiction can pull you into another world, but that story will not resonate, will not hold you if there isn’t something within the tale that you have already felt or experienced. There must be a touchstone to your reality or experience to keep you reading: the Chicago sidewalk, the New York skyline, the openness of the hero, the strength of the heroine, the sorrow or joy that ends the tale. So please, keep reading. Writers depend on you.
Photo Credit: I don’t know. Probably my brother John or one of my “always-taking-photos” beloved Aunts.
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August 21, 2018
Why Not Try a Short Story
Writing fiction has been my passion for decades and took hold when I was home raising my children. It was a time when women’s magazines, Redbook, McCalls, were printing short stories written by women. I could do this! So I set my desk in a corner of the den, bought a decent electric typewriter and before my children awoke each morning, I squirreled away an hour to craft some stories.
Not surprisingly, the strength of my stories increased when I rooted them in the emotions and conflicts of my own life. I published some in little magazines, later moving on to novel writing.
Retirement has allowed me to make writing my focus and to polish everything in my writer’s toolbox. Short stories stem from a reader’s desire to experience the rise and fall of the story arc in one sitting. Nathaniel Hawthorne published his collection of Twice Told Tales in 1837, probably the first known book of short stories—though not all of them were short!
Prior to this, in 1836, Charles Dickens found great success when he serialized in magazines and newspapers his novel The Pickwick Papers. Critics have said that at that time there was no insinuation that the work would lose quality when presented in so commercial a fashion—that came later. Dickens’ work was popular and thus must have affected the rise of shorter pieces of fiction.
Then and today it can be very satisfying to experience a character’s struggle right through to the denouement in a short period of time. Our life styles—working men and women, tired at the end of the day, a list of to-dos drumming in one’s head—has added more credence to the experience of completing a story in one sitting—or rather, propped up on pillows in bed. Short work fills a need. When creating a short story, the writer works with the same elements that make up a novel—but there is some tweaking.
The story will most often have one main character who is also the POV character—you experience the story through the eyes of this character. In my story collection, A Mother’s Time Capsule, the average number of characters in each story is three—most interactions occurring between two of the three. My longer stories have four or five characters, the POV character encountering the others briefly. The longest story, Angel Hair, based on the old tale in Robert Browning’s The Pied Piper, has as many as eight characters. A writer could create a short story simply using one character. Length: that is up for debate, ranging from . 30,000 words to 10,000. There is also flash fiction and other newly created forms that can be as short as 500 words. The shorter the more difficult.
Short stories are not only limited to characters but also to passage of time, while novels often span years, even decades. My stories Pumpkins, Thaw, Windows and Making Change take place on the same day—though to enrich content, there are references to the past. When Did My Mother Die? takes place over a year’s time—but the trajectory of the story moves in a straight line.
Plot is essential even in short fiction, and focus must be endemic. Get in and get out. But regardless of its short length, writing the short story is not simple. I can speak directly to this dilemma as some of my stories were taken from novels in progress. Someday It Will Be December required lots of editing and rethinking of the material to create the emotional arc the story demands. The first sentence has to grab the reader: In the depths of July, Claire Emmerling began to think about sex. Constantly.
Or from Angel Hair: The coffee gathering at Liz Grimm’s house was the first time anyone had been out in the small New England town of Hamilton since Pia Piper was fired from the local preschool, accused of fondling a boy-child in her classroom.
In Thaw, I use a quieter beginning that will build to the heartfelt emotions of the story:Her landlord said maybe she’d imagined it. She doesn’t think so. They argued about the age of the townhouse, the condition of the roof. She was late for her shift and had to hang up. “You’re the one with squirrels in your attic,” he had yelled at her.
Endings? They tantalize, inspire or make you weep. Endings are part of the reason I fell in love with the short story form. In high school, I read J.D. Salinger and John Cheever. After college, it was Ann Beattie, Alice Munro, Bobbie Ann Mason and Raymond Carver—they all published in The New Yorker Magazine.
In a novel, lots of things happen—often because of a complicated plot structure with twists and turns the reader does not expect. In the short story, something has to happen, or at the very least you have to feel that something has happened, though often it’s a small movement, a brief change, a symbolic gesture. But the brevity of the text reflects a smallness that in actual living is truly gigantic, monumental. Ann Beattie in Running Dreams, leads you into a world with few words—but at the end—wow! The soccer-punch. The narrator reflects on losing her father to cancer when she was only five. This is the last paragraph—the father is bending over in pain, to help put on his daughter’s gloves.
I remember standing with him in a room that seemed immense to me at the time, in sunlight as intense as the explosion from a flashbulb. If someone had taken that photograph, it would have been a picture of a little girl and her father about to go on a walk. I held my hands out to him, and he pushed the fingers of the gloves tightly down each of my fingers, patiently, pretending to have all the time in the world, saying, “This is the way we get ready for winter.”
This is so lovely, the main character finding closure in this simple remembrance of her father’s love. I surveyed the endings in A Mother’s Time Capsule and discovered that I often use a symbolic action to pull the story to its closure. In Someday It Will Be December, Claire is uncertain about being a single mother. The ending finds her lost in a place she is familiar with: But she raised her head and walked on. She would reorient herself. She would find her way.In Fragile, Tess is a fearful mother. The ending: Tess stops. She listens, the words of her children falling on her with their weight of wonder. And welcoming all of it, she holds them, keeps them like a charm her two have hung gently around her neck.
Though novel endings are often muscular and dramatic, short stories present the conclusion using a quieter voice, though you know and feel that something profound has truly happened. Happy Reading.
Photo credit: Pinterest
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August 6, 2018
Our Most Precious Gift…Free Speech
My mother grew morning glories that spilled onto the walkway…
Dear Readers,
This week I am celebrating one of my children and thus my time for this essay is limited. But every time one of you responds to what I say, I AM GRATEFUL. And more and more I relish, applaud, am grateful for FREE SPEECH. Just imagine where I would be if I lived in a country that scanned my every word and maybe came to the door for me. FREE SPEECH is a gift we all need to celebrate every day. It doesn’t matter if your thing is recipes or film reviews, or telling jokes or sharing videos. Free speech flows in the USA like the morning glories in the photo. YOU SAY WHAT YOU WANT in the United States of America and not fear that someone will try to stop you. At least not yet. I just saw a video of ICE taking a man out of an elevator by force. The man was not allowed to show his papers. ICE did not show theirs. WRONG.
So let’s make a point of every day, in this great country, that no matter how someone else’s words might not fit with yours, that person has a right to say it. You have a right to say how you feel, what you believe.
RECENT LETTERS TO THE EDITOR, LA TIMES
The following are excerpts. This reveals that the LA TIMES will print both sides. Newspapers believe in freedom of the press–usually. I confess, they are selective. But that doesn’t mean that my letter will always be printed or that the opposing view will too. Space creates limits.
This phrase (enemy of the people) has been used by the most notorious of world dictators in the Soviet Union, China, Nazi Germany and even in the United States under Richard Nixon…Any time a journalist in the U. S. or abroad is harassed, threatened, harmed, imprisoned or even killed, those Americans who actually believe in the freedom of the press will recall the insidious characterization of reporters by (this administration) to their everlasting shame.
Democracy demands an informed public, not one that is titillated or pandered to. Trump evidently sees democracy and the rules of law as mere impediments.
The media have been on an unending campaign agains the president. The bias is breathtaking. They desperately need a devil’s advocate, someone to challenge what they say before it goes public.
FREE SPEECH IN ALL ITS GLORY
Being a writer, I have published some of my work and spend much of my time, writing, teaching myself how to become a better writer and exposing myself to THE BEST. All of this comes under the heading of FREE SPEECH. Unlike Russian writers or those hounded and persecuted in other countries, I don’t fear the use of my words. Literature, essays, poetry–all forms are available to me. Thus to end this piece today, I share two poems with you. The first appeared in a recent issue of TIME MAGAZINE that included many essays about our southern states. This poem is so awesome, I wanted to share it.
FOREDAY IN THE MORNIING by Jericho Brown, a Louisiana native and the author of The New Testament and Please
My mother grew morning glories that spilled onto the walkway toward her porch
Because she was a woman with land who showed as much by giving it color.
She told me I could have whatever I worked for. That means she was an American.
But she’d say it was because she believed In God. I am ashamed of America
And confounded by God. I thank God for my citizenship in spite
Of the timer set on my life to write.
These words: I love my mother. I love black women.
Who plant flowers as sheepish as their sons. By the time the blooms
Unfurl themselves for a few hours of light, the women who tend them
Are already at work. Blue. I’ll never know who started the lie that we are
lazy,
But I’d love to wake that bastard up
At foreday in the morning, toss him in a truck, and drive him under God
Past every buy stop in America to see all those black folk
Waiting to go work for whatever they want. A house? A boy
To keep the lawn cut? Some color in the yard? My God, we leave things
green.
The second poem it the work of Billy Collins, our poet laureate from 2001-2003
DECEMBER 1ST
Today is my mother’s birthday, but she’s not here to celebrate
by opening a flowery card or looking calmly out the window.
If my mother were alive, she’d be 114 years old,
and I am guessing neither of us would be enjoying her birthday very much.
Mother, I would love to see you again to take you shopping or to sit
in your sunny apartment with a pot of tea, but it wouldn’t be the same at 114.
And I’m no prize either, almost 20 years older than the last time
you saw me sitting by your deathbed. Some days, I look worse than yesterday’s oatmeal.
Happy Birthday, anyway. Happy Birthday to you. Here I am in a wallpapered room
raising a glass of birthday whiskey and picturing your face, the brooch on your collar.
It must have been frigid that morning in the house just before dawn
on your first December 1st at the family farm a hundred miles north of Toronto.
I imagine they had your wrapped up tight, and there was your tiny pink face
sticking out of the bunting, and all those McIsaacs getting used to saying your name.
Thanks for reading. Enjoy our gift of FREE SPEECH.
Photo Credit: Gold Country Girls Blogger
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July 29, 2018
Speaking Out Through Art
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice
Few of us ever enjoy going to a wake or a funeral. No matter your religious persuasion or that you might not have one, standing before sorrowing people who have lost a parent, child, husband, wife, best friend is never easy. What to say? Or it could be you standing there, greeting people, feeling terrible loss. But we are meant to communicate about our feelings when we soar with good news or when we crash with bad.
My mother was brave at wakes. She always found time to hold the hands of the grieving, to share words of encouragement. Her actions leapt from her own loss of my father when she was young and had children to raise. BRAVE. That’s what she was, always speaking to those grieving, raising it to a kind of art form.
WHAT WE SHARE AS HUMANS
Being brave almost always requires that we step out of our own protective shells and say something. Make a point. Often the receiver of the words or the reader of the book or viewer of the art–is taken aback. Shocked. But as moments pass, understanding can form. We all share one thing: our human bodies, alike in so many ways; our human nature, propensity to laughter and sorrow. There isn’t one of us on earth that doesn’t understand physical and psychic pain. YES, there are many degrees. But with empathy, we can go to the deepest depths, even if we have been favored with a life that did not bring us horrible pain or mental desperation.
ART AND ALL ITS FORMS
One other thing we might say about humanity is that it likes to forget. That’s why wars continue to plague our planet. But during such times ART rises up. People create. After every war there are nonfiction and fiction books, poetry and visual arts in its many forms awakening the world AGAIN, to the horrors of war. And in our culture today, we have museums to help us remember.
These buildings become hallowed and sacred ground as they present the stories of the dead and those that survived. All the lives of humans on this earth have a story. And so if you walk through the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., you remember, even if you didn’t live during that time but only read about it. History teaches. So does art. The presentation of a real railroad car used by the Nazis has power. So do all forms of art that shake us, remind us. The power might be quieter, but it is there.
A NEW MUSEUM, A POWERFUL REMINDER
Washington D.C. is memorial city. There’s the Viet Nam and Korean War Memorials; the Martin Luther King and Franklin Roosevelt Memorials. These shine alongside the Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson and World War II memorials. (I’m sure I’m forgetting some!)
And now there are even more. The National Museum for Peace and Justice recently opened in Montgomery, Alabama. Attorney Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, is credited with its creation. Quoting here from an article by Larry Bleiberg: “The six-acre outdoor memorial features 800 weathered rectangular steel boxes hanging beneath an open canopy. Each box represents a county or jurisdiction with a documented lynching between 1877 and 1950 and lists the names of largely forgotten victims in each county, such as Henry Smith of Lamar County, Texas, who was accused of killing a white girl, and then tortured with hot irons and set on fire in front of a crowd of 10,000 in 1893.There’s also Elizabeth Lawrence, lynched in Jefferson County, Ala., in 1933 after scolding children for throwing rocks. And thousands more.The information comes from the Equal Justice Initiative’s multiyear study that documented more than 4,000 lynchings, which the researchers call racial terror killings.”
MORE STATISTICS
victims were usually grabbed by mobs, hung or drowned;
hawkers sold refreshments
gawkers claimed sections of clothing or body parts
often postcards were printed
WHAT YOU WILL EXPERIENCE
As you enter, the steel boxes at first hang at eye level. But as you proceed through the monument, the wood floor slopes down, so that soon the monuments are suspended above, forcing you to look up. Eventually you are looking at a vista of hundreds of rusted slabs hanging overhead, like bodies. You are now a witness of this brutality.
Bryan Stevenson states: “Our memorial will become a report card about which communities have owned up to their history and which haven’t.” A half-mile away you can visit a small Legacy Museum which has been built in a former slave warehouse. There it presents a hologram on slavery and argues that lynching took place to control and terrorize African Americans after the emancipation.
Such a legacy also involved Jim Crow laws that legalized segregation and continues to this day with the mass incarceration and police brutality toward African Americans.
A final moving display features an interview with Anthony Ray Hinton who was exonerated in 2015 after 28 years on death row. Last month Oprah Winfrey selected his autobiography for her book club. Winfrey is also involved with a second museum in her native Mississippi, The Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson, MI. Information here.
A TESTAMENT TO THE PURPOSE OF ART
I recently exchanged messages with a fellow writer, Natalia, who struggles like me and many other writers to share our ideas and to find people who are eager to read them. I responded to her post, writing this:
When we write our stories, our novels, we write about the people we know, the joys and sorrows that color our words and ideas. I want to know about your life, the stories you are able to share. If I am published, I would hope you would read how my life filters through my characters and the lives they are leading. We are human beings and our stories speak of struggle that leads to victory or change; sometimes decisions that lead to disappointment. But all stories are presented to our readers in the hope that our words will touch their minds and hearts. EMPATHY. But as you say, we must feel that human bond whether there are tears or many smiles. I write and read fiction to connect with others. It fills me up. Some people? They haven’t opened their eyes yet. They refuse to see. So—we keep writing.
FINAL THOUGHT
I hope in your travels you might stop at a museum, discover the lives of others, contemplate history, use what you learn to make this a better world.
Remember what Pat Conroy wrote in THE PRINCE OF TIDES: My wound is my geography. It is also my my anchorage, my port of call.
PHOTO CREDIT: LA TIMES
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