Barbara Stoner's Blog, page 4

Happiness Was

I was perfectly happy once. I know because I wrote it down. I was 34 years old in 1977, had two children in whom I was very well pleased, and lived in a house on a farm that I loved. My possibilities seemed endless with no pressure to become anything but other than what I was becoming.

I was happy in my marriage of 8 years. It was, I wrote, not “one of those good marriages where you agree on everything and always like and respect each other and hide a host of grievances under a façade of modern love and understanding. We fight at the drop of a cat or a coat or a spoon or the baby or whatever. [And yet], even when he drives me straight up a tree, every other man looks impossible. I am so glad I’m not married to or living with or dating anyone other than [the man I married].

“I am so glad I am not single and thinking about men and sex and new relationships. It takes so much energy, so much time. When would I crochet or weed the garden? When would I read or study or work crosswords or Springbok puzzles? I’d have to fix my hair. Well, I wouldn’t have to but I probably would. All that ugly, time-consuming single insecurity would creep up on me. I’ve been single twice before. I’ve been single single and divorced single. You can have it.

“I’m a housewife in the women’s movement. Happy as a clam I am. Where do I go from here?”

Reader, I divorced him.

Mother Love

I think, but I don't remember, that this piece of writing is entirely fiction. That is, I don't remember hearing it from my grandfather or anyone else, for that matter. I was working on a story based on a vague memory of my great grandmother's funeral. This piece didn't make it into the story, but I must have been thinking about including it. The names are all the same as my great aunts and uncles - or mostly, anyway. And I might have heard a story about a Lutheran minister refusing to confirm a group of kids that had gone square dancing. And cards were the devil's own gateway to hell for my Norwegian Lutheran ancestors.

So, with apologies to everyone now dead and gone to whatever reward they merited, here is a bit of family history, and if it isn't quite true, I suspect it is true enough.

"Well, she's gone. She was a righteous woman if there ever was one."

"Pastor Clausen looks nervous."

"He's probably afraid she'll sit up and criticize his eulogy."

"Remember when she insisted that he refuse to confirm those kids that had gone square dancing?"

"I remember the day mother found a pack of cards behind the coal box in the cellar. She stood us all up and demanded that the one who hid the cards step forward or we would all get a switching. Well, nobody would admit to it, and she got out the switch and started in, one by one, from Henry on down. She switched Henry and then she switched Lloyd and then she switched me. Well, those had been my playing cards and I was scared, but I figured that a switchin' divided up would be better than one big switchin' all by myself. 'Sides, Henry and Lloyd had known all about it. I brought 'em home and we all hid out in the cellar and pretended we was playing poker, like the men down at the store, you know.

"But there stood Isabel and Mamie, just crying their eyes out already, Isobel so thin you know, backing up in a corner, and Mamie just a little chunk of a thing. Well now, you know Mother couldn't think that the girls had anything to do with it, but she was laying hands on Isabel already and I just couldn't stand it anymore, so I said, "Ma, don't switch the girls. It was me. Ben Tolly down at the store gave me a deck of old, worn-out playing cards and I brung 'em home. I'm sorry, Ma. Don't whip Isobel and Mamie." And you know what she did?

"She said, 'Oliver. Only God can forgive sins. Only God can save others from sin. Maybe you did it. And maybe you're trying to save your sisters. If it was you brought those playing cards into this house, you are guilty of sin. If you're lying to save your sisters, you are guilty of a double sin.' And she whipped the girls anyway and then she whipped me again and I had to go without supper for a month.

"I can't look at a deck of cards to this day without running a hand over my behind."

The Fam II

Upper Right: Three grand nephews
Lower Left: Father, daughter, granddaughter
Upper Center: Nephew
Upper Left: Niece and Partner
Center Left: Two Sisters-in-Law
Lower Right: Niece and Partner
And in the Very Center: My Daughter and Nephew-in-Law Victor

And that's just the immediate family that made it to Chicago in June of 2021

I'm so in love with them all!

Whatcha Gonna Do About It?

Assad’s guaranteed election victory in Syria shows how badly U.S. policy has failed.

That was the header of a newpaper piece – WaPo or NYT, I forget which – written in the last week or so, and it made me wonder, not only about Syria, but also about Palestine. Palestine and Ukraine, Iran and Afghanistan, Israel and Belarus, Russia, China, Taiwan – the world at large and everything that is going awry with it.

And my question was: What in the hell can we do about it? About any of it?

We have the most powerful military in the world, but at this point it’s rather like being all dressed up and nowhere to go. I cannot think that Biden will send us back into Afghanistan, no matter the rise of the Taliban. How can we face off against the Russian buildup on the border of Ukraine? We might be able to send a battle ship or two into the Straight of Taiwan, but China will see that as an act of war. Are we ready for a shooting war with China? What can we do to stop Israel from building settlements on the West Bank? To convince Iran to agree to a new deal? To extract a dissenter from Belarus? There is absolutely nothing we can do to overturn the Syrian election.

But, you say, there is soft power. We are, or have been, or might yet be the greatest economic power in the world. Surely there are carrots and sticks that can be applied here and there to great effect. Well, sure. But China and Russia are now first world countries and are able to apply their own brands of soft power. The United States is no longer the only rich guy in town. More importantly, we are no longer to be trusted.

Not too long ago there was an Iran Nuclear Treaty, and a Paris Accords Global Warming agreement and a few others I can’t at the moment recall. Once those agreements would have been seen as gold. Not now. Trump whipped them out of the Resolute Desk and resolutely tore them to shreds practically before our very eyes.

I would like to think that the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris is a sign that we have returned to sanity and that henceforth our word is once again gold, but that sort of thing depends, to a degree we haven’t had to consider before, on one defining element of our democracy: the peaceful transfer of power. The Morlocks we have created by long years of neglect, by lack of services, opportunity and education, are armed and dreaming of revenge.

They have packed the statehouses and, to some degree, the houses of Congress. They are relatively few but fierce and capable of doing great damage. Their actions appear foolish to most of us, but I have to wonder how the plethora of recounts will contribute to the feeling that there is something there to be found. And if it isn’t found, isn’t that a sign in itself that something is wrong? Because there simply must have been fraud. It is the only explanation they can believe. And finding none, well, that just proves it. Doesn’t it?

And given that, who is to say that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are the leaders of the future? Who is to say that a successor will keep their word?

There are very few sticks that work anymore. Bullets bring more bullets and sanctions hurt people with the least power. Carrots – particularly the carrot of being allowed into the world economy as equal partners, as people worthy of trust and friendship – that is perhaps the juiciest carrot of all, but who is to say that the U.S. will not once again play Lucy with the football?

Much of this will depend on what happens over the next couple of years. Can a Congressional Special Hearing do what a 6/1 Commission might have done? Can a couple of Democratic Senators be persuaded to do the work needed to prevent a mass gerrymandering before the midterms? Can we stick together through the Jobs Bill, at least, in the hopes that a rising economy will bring with it the boats of the forgotten? And can we address the blatant inequalities that have been a systematic plague through the centuries?

Because it is if, and only if, we can prove to the world at large that the U.S. is capable of cleaning its own house and of making certain that the word given by one U.S. President will be upheld be her successor, will it be possible to exert our soft power when and where it is needed. I can only hope that day will not come too late.

Tags: Politics

In the Daisy Field

One of my favorite pictures of my son from the old farming days. Love the way the shadows of the daisies play on his shirt front.

Take Your Change

Changing clothes is a pain in the neck. I mean, I’m already wearing clothes but they won’t do for whatever else is on the itinerary. So I have to pick out an “outfit,” take the clothes I’ve got on off. All the way off. Put the new clothes on. And off I go. Yeah, I know. Easy peasy. Still, a pain in the neck. Why can’t I go everywhere in sweatpants and tee-shirts? Why do I have to change?

I vividly remember the summer when I was twelve. That was the year I got my first period. It was also my last summer of climbing trees. There was a marvelous mulberry tree in our backyard – I think I’ve mentioned this before. It grew beside a fence, which gave me a leg up into the first crotch, and from there all the way to the top. I could take a book, and when the mulberries were ripe I could eat all I wanted. A ripe mulberry tastes like nothing else in the world. Ripe mulberries, when picked, dissolve into a formless mess. You can’t make mulberry pies. But a ripe mulberry fresh from the tree is ambrosia.

So I would take a book, climb as high as I could, and sway back and forth in the top branches pretending I was riding a horse, and come down with both book and me covered with mulberry stains.

That fall I started Junior High School – what we now call Middle School – 7th grade. I was a pretty if skinny child. Some of the boys in my class I noticed were kind of cute. And before I knew it, I stopped climbing trees.

I remember this because one afternoon I spent some time thinking about it. Thinking that it had been a few weeks before I had gone up the old mulberry tree. That I had nearly – horrors – forgotten about it. And I remember thinking that I didn’t want to forget about it. I never wanted to stop climbing trees. I did not want to change.

But I did. I hated it, but I did. Later that fall, I tried to climb it again but it just wasn’t the same. I was too big. Too tall. I didn’t fit well. Climbing no longer felt like the easiest most natural thing in the world to do. It felt awkward. Even uncomfortable. I never climbed it again.

We all think and talk about the difficulties of adolescence, ascribing it to various changes in hormonal levels of one kind and another – I’m sure that plays its part (see above where I start noticing cute boys) – but I’m not sure we pay enough attention to the hardest part of growing up. Change.

Change is hard. We stop being who we once were and become someone else, and we don’t know who that other self is. We’re not sure we like her. We remember liking the kid we were, but that kid doesn’t even exist now except in memory. We can’t even climb a damn tree.

I’ve gone through another change in the past 15 years or so. I’m growing old. Oh, I went through plenty of changes as an adult – a topic for another time – but for the most part those were changes I chose. Reinventing oneself is a continual process from adolescence onward until change comes that can’t be reinvented and I don’t mean menopause. I was still dancing at Dead shows well after menopause. I mean giving up on not looking or feeling 35 for the rest of your life.

I mean getting used to your old face without makeup – because you can’t see well enough to put it on without your glasses and you can’t put on makeup with glasses on. Something has to go. I mean going to a concert with old friends and realizing that you can’t dance anymore. Your back hurts and your feet can’t spell out the rhythm. You run your fingers over the papery wrinkles on the back of your hands and think boy! They look old.

And then, if you get your mind right, you stop fighting it and grow to love it. Like leaving adolescence behind. I still miss the girl who used to climb trees, but I finally met the woman who could fall in love or in lust or in just a little liking. I met the woman who could give birth to a son and a daughter. Who learned to play pool. Who graduated from college with a magna cum laude. Who found the Grateful Dead and learned to dance like nobody was watching. It was kinda like climbing trees.

I met the woman who could hurt when she didn’t mean to and be hurt and survive. The woman who made a home for herself and others. The woman who eventually wrote and self-published three novels. The woman who drove around Britain by herself. Twice.

And now I’m getting to know the old lady with the artfully wrinkled hands who, because she mothered a son who forgave her grasshopper ways, has a room of her own. Who has danced and loved and been all over and back again. Who has no more need to be who she once was, anymore than she needs to climb the maple tree in the back yard, but she remembers and loves them all.

Change came for me and I resented it, every damn time. I don’t even like to change clothes. But change will have its way. You will remember the taste of a mulberry and the way you moved at a Dead show. But you don’t need them anymore. Your hands are beautiful and will become more so. For everyone who has unwanted change thrust upon them, something better is ahead. Take it when it comes along.

Snow

I love snow. I love it literally and metaphorically.

I love watching it fall past the window. I love the way it makes sharp edges soft and square shapes round. I love the way the wind sculpts it into dunes that rise like soft meringue against the houses, the foothills created when the snowplow passes, rising against the tree trunks like little glaciers.

Snow is an adventure.

Snow is discovering that it is knee-deep between the porch steps and the hanging bird feeder and thinking, “I can do this.” And then I do. The feeders are filled, and I am shaking off snow just inside the back door, feeling flushed and shiny and oh so satisfied.

Snow is going to the store before the guys come to clear the driveway. It is discovering that long oven mitts are better than brushes at clearing off the windows. It’s gunning the car down the driveway in case the berm from the plow has iced up and then tapping at the brake on the turn when the car goes whee into the street. It’s fishtailing back up the drive and rolling into a perfect stop in the garage. It’s the grin on my face when I find I can still do that.

Snow is beating your way through the blizzard that has come on an icy wind until you reach the safety of the grocery store doors. It’s being puzzled that not everyone is as flushed with excitement as you are.

Snow is comforting. When the winds of November sweep the last leaves from the trees and beat the cold rain against your windows, you shiver as you look out upon the desolation that comes with the fading of the year. But when the first snow falls, it falls like feathers and surrounds the house with a white comforter that calls for hot chocolate and a good book on the couch with your grandmother’s afghan throw wrapped around your toes. Now, when you look out the window, you see that the snow has thrown a blanket over the earth, protecting it until the warm winds come again.

Snow is fun, too, but I am no longer young. I never got the hang of skis, but I had a pair of snowshoes I liked. I’ve camped in the snow. I’ve climbed above the treeline in snow. I remember making snow angels and having snowball fights when I was very young, and have an adorable picture of myself in a blue snowsuit, but I don't like cold. If snow has a downside, it’s the cold. The upside of that, of course, is that you can always get warm. Coming in out of the cold and getting warm is fun.

And how do I love snow metaphorically? Most of the metaphors I can think of are in the text above. Comforter, blanket, adventure. Snow covers a multitude of sins. Snow reveals the bare essence of things not noticed before. Snow is an invitation, a challenge, a promise. Snow seduces.

I am drawn to snow scenes on book covers, jigsaw puzzles, TV shows. Books I’ve read because: The Snow Queen, The Snowy Day, Snowcrash, Snow Falling on Cedars, The Snows of Kilimanjaro and, of course, Snow.

Snowy jigsaw puzzles are, um, difficult. But oddly comforting. Because.

I once watched a whole season of an unrenewed show called Low Winter Sun because it promised me snow. Also Lenny James, but nevermind. I’m currently watching Snowpiercer because. My heroes in A Song of Ice and Fire are all Starks from Winterfell because. Fargo, Fortitude, Northern Exposure. I do not watch Snowfall. Snow is great stuff. Cocaine is boring.

Currently my house is blanketed with more than two feet of snow. I hate to see it go. Back in Seattle, where we never got two feet, the rare snowfalls settle beautifully on trees and gardens for a day or so and then creep silently away in the night. In Wisconsin, my two or three feet get plowed into towering drifts of four, five, even six feet which, as no new snow falls, become covered with exhaust sporting, with evaporation and melting, delicate but somewhat sinister frills of black lace.

It's not even the end of February and we are having an early thaw but this will pass in a week or so. There’s still time for another big snowfall or two. I can only hope.

Letters from the 80's

Letters

9 October 1985

We left Seattle on Thursday last for San Francisco. Two days later we were crossing from Keystone on Whidbey to Port Townsend and teasing each other – “I told you San Fransciso is *south* of Seattle.” It is Wednesday. We are still at Studio Eremos on Alabama in the Mission District. We have made all the proper pilgrmages (Haight/Ashbury, City Lights), touristed Fisherman’s Wharf, eaten ethnically (Mexican, Chinese) and driven around and around and up and down. We have done San Francisco on a frayed shoestring, but it’s been great. Now I want to go home and change clothes.

Monday 23 February 1987

Dear Leah:

Well, here it is, the 23rd of February l987, one week into my 44th year and 13 years away from the year 2000 when the future is supposed to arrive. Do you see anything coming yet?

I know this is no great consolation to you, but I’m not sure I know what I’m doing either. I still think I’m going to write. This letter is the first thing I’ve done in weeks. The last was the letter I wrote my brother just before Christmas trying to console him on his divorce. I think I told him how great things can get if you give it time. Last year I lived in the house of a 300-pound crazy man. This year I have my own room and a desk.

(It’s now more than a week later). My latest job at the U is data processing for the Husky football people selling seats for the new Husky Stadium that fell down last week. I just got my ears pierced. I’m still in love with the bartender. My pen is running out of ink. It’s far too long until the next long weekend. Things are going very well and I’m more confused than ever. Is this a crisis or just the nature of things?

31 March

Spring and warmth have broken out. It could get up to 70 again today. Seattle is blooming all over. There’s a large flowering quince and a forsythia right outside my window. I still don’t know most of the plants here. I remember talking to a friend of mine one Friday night about why I still don’t really feel at home here and finally I said that I missed knowing the trees. In the Midwest I’d always known who all the trees were and here too many of them are still strangers.

Pain

“A little pain never hurt anybody.”

That has been a mantra of mine for as long as I can remember, which at 77 isn’t always as far back as it used to be.

What I forgot about, until recently, was that a lot of pain actually does hurt, and it is not only me but some websites in the know that put sciatica on a scale with childbirth and passing a kidney stone. I have the fortune to be familiar with all three and I can testify like a born-again Christian to the simile.

I had a minor accident in August that punched in my car’s left hindquarters (patched up with a kind of accident saran wrap) and slammed the driver’s side door on my left leg. “That’s going to hurt later,” I remember saying as I climbed out of the car swearing at my own stupidity. It did, but it hurt in the “never hurt anybody” category. Painful, but I could still walk so what the whatever? Nothing was broken, there was a nice purple hematoma that faded as September drew nigh, and then it seemed all was back to normal.

Not so fast. Sometime in late September the sciatica kicked in and escalated to the point of asking my doc to represcribe some rather strong Ibuprofen. In other words, it was starting to hurt. The Ibuprofen helped until it ran out and I was reduced to an old remedy: Xtra-Strength Excedrin and left-over Vicodin from some dental adventures.

Then it got bad.

Sciatica is a condition in which the sciatic nerve becomes trapped in a wad of enflamed flesh, in this case as in many cases the bulging spinal discs of the lower back. My lower back had been complaining for years, with the kind of pain that didn’t so much hurt me as tell me it was time to go sit down now. I am of the opinion that my stupid little accident had become one of those cascading events in which the sciatic nerve, the longest nerve in the body, just couldn’t quite get over itself and took its complaint to the home office in the discs of the lower spine, where it was upgraded to a crippling event.

First, the pain insisted on an embarrassing imitation of Igor, Dr. Frankenstein’s lab assistant (movies only). Not only did my left leg not want to support my weight, it also felt strangely numb from the knee down. Coming in from feeding the squirrels their breakfast, I led with it over the threshold and collapsed. Not a good sign.

Next my left thigh began an escalating sort of ache that ended with me groaning out loud with the pain, crying no, no, no, no, no, and swallowing way too many OTC pain pills which did not do the job.

I messaged my docs asking for Vicodin. They asked to see me.

So, several X-rays, a CT scan, an MRI, and a steroid shot later, they finally settled on a workable drug cocktail which actually seems to work. So now I’m finally down to “a little pain never hurt anybody,” because it hasn’t gone away but I’m not crying “NO” to an unhearing universe anymore either. So even if it’s not exactly a happy ending, at least it’s a somewhat cheerful bandaid, and I can hobble on my way once more.

Here's the thing about pain. About the kind of pain that causes you to cry, silently or not so, to an uncaring universe. It’s true that a little pain never hurt anybody, but a lot of pain really hurts. It’s debilitating. In my case, the effort to get up to do anything at all was most often just too much. It hurt to lie down, it hurt to stand, it hurt to sit, it hurt to turn over in bed, it hurt not to turn over in bed. It hurt like the bloody dickens.

I couldn’t write. I’m supposed to be following a little girl who was turned into a fairy on an adventure through her backyard, but although I saw her disappearing into the grass and can imagine her hearing a lawnmower in the distance, those images disappeared into the pain. Severe pain makes everything impossible. From getting your own banana from the kitchen to having a moment’s thought about anything at all. Pain becomes the world.

At least, I joked on FB in a rare lucid moment, now when I say I feel your pain, I mean it.

It does seem a bit relevant that these moments of intense pain happened to me in 2020, although it may be a bit over the top to compare it to the pain of the nation as a whole given the thousands of people who have lost loved ones, who have cried silently or not to an unforgiving universe, “No, no, no, no,” as they watch a YouTube video of a father or a daughter slipping into the river of no return. I have experienced intense physical pain, but theirs will not be comforted with three capsules of Gabapentin a day.

For the survivors, this morning a nurse in New York was given the first dose of our first vaccine. Today is also the day the electors meet to affirm Joe Biden’s rise to the presidency. Hope looms, as I like to say. Even for those thousands who have lost, there must be some hope that even if they continue to suffer the pain of irreparable loss, they need not continue to suffer the pain of a country reduced to a shambles. Pieces may be picked up and reassembled into a new picture that resembles the United States of America.

And that’s a hope worth limping into.

Grampa IV

...

By the summer of 1980 I was divorced, graduated, and living on Camano Island in Washington State where I'd run off to after graduation with a guy on a Harley Davidson Sportster all the way from Green Bay, Wisconsin. The farm was sold. The kids were with my second ex. My folks and I weren't getting along again. I'd divorced the best husband I could possibly ever hope to get, left him with the kids and run off on a motorcycle. My mother was crushed. My father was disgusted. My folks didn't come to my (magna cum laude) graduation and my mother addressed letters to me as Mrs. Barry Stoner for years. I didn't hear from them much. My grandfather was in a nursing home. They couldn't handle him around the house anymore.

Early one summer morning of that year I was awakened by the phone ringing. It must have been around 7, 7:30 or so. I lay in bed waiting for it to stop ringing. It didn't stop. Finally I went to answer it. It was mom.

"Honey, Grampa died last night."

"Oh, mom, no. Really?" Like my mother would kid around about this.

"Yes, honey. He went peacefully in his sleep."

I think I said something about it being too bad, but maybe it was time for him to go and so forth and so on and all the time I was numb. My grandfather had been alive my entire life. I was used to that. I couldn't get unused to it. Mom was agreeing with me and we were saying all the correct things, and then finally she broke down.

"Barbie, my daddy's dead."

Just for a moment then I saw my mother as a girl, as somebody's daughter, as somebody sort of like me, and it was overwhelming. I cried and she cried and things weren't all better after that but thery were a little bit better. I hung up and went back to bed. My boyfriend rolled over and said, "Who the fuck was that?" And I said, "It was mom. My grandfather died." And he said, "Why'd they have to call so fucking early?" and rolled over and went back to sleep. Not much later on, I realized that was the point when I began to leave him.

Years before, after my grandparents had visited the farm, I started to write him a letter. The letter turned into a poem, and years later I read it at his grave when we sprinkled my parents' ashes over his and my grandmother's graves.

Dear Grampa:

I came out of the barn tonight

And I was tired and depressed.

It was raining, and we hadn't gotten the maple taps in,

And the dump was closed early.

Nothing was all the way done for the day.

I kept forgetting where I'd put things

And what I was going to do next.

But I came out of the barn after chores

And stood there in a square of barn light

In the rain,

And the spring rain was falling on my spring land.

My animals were warm and well fed

And the sap was running.

A duck webbed by and wobbled over the barn sill

And I was very very happy and very well and strong.

I thought about you.

I thought maybe you have this feeling

That if you could only get home, you'd be all right.

That you're confused because the landscape has changed,

And you're deaf because no one can tell you,

And blind for there's nothing familiar to see.

But if you could get to the home place

You'd have very important work,

Like taking out the ashes

And bringing in the cobs and coal.

You'd know where to cross the river

And all the trees would be in the right places.