Laura Crossett's Blog, page 10

Locks

For many years, I carried a keychain with a key to my grandmother’s house (which was never locked), a key to the house of some old family friends, and a key to whatever dorm room or apartment or I was living in at the time (which was also rarely locked). Sometimes I had the keys to the apartments or houses of other friends, or places where I was house or petsitting. Notably absent from this list, even during the times I lived there, was a key to my mother’s house.

From the ages of seven to eighteen I went every summer but one to camp in Maine. A counselor would pick me and other campers arriving then up at the airport in Portland — my flight always arrived in the late afternoon or evening — and drive us back to camp, where my trunk had been shipped and was waiting for me in my cabin. I’d dig around in my pockets and my carry on bag for my trunk key. I’d try to remember the last time I’d seen it or used it. Not to lock the trunk — it locks automatically when the lock falls into place. But surely, surely this year I’d remembered that I always had this problem. But I hadn’t. I couldn’t find the key, and I’d go to the dining hall for a knife and force the lock open. I still have that trunk. The last time I locked it was in November 2010, when I was packing to move back to Iowa. I was sure I had the key. I’m sure I do, still, somewhere, but I don’t know where, and my skill at popping open the lock with a knife is gone.

I have the key to the u-lock for my bike but not the u-lock. There’s a cord with a MasterLock currently locked around my bike handles, but I don’t have the key to the MasterLock, though I have some keys that I think perhaps go to another padlock that I can’t find. I have small appliances without cords and and cords without appliances, containers without lids and lids without containers. Along with the detritus that all but the most skillful of us collect over a lifetime, I seem to have acquired a particular talent for missing pieces.

There is not much you can do with such a life but make art from it. Even that is suspect, of course. No one in her right mind could stand to read a story that began “My life has consisted of locks without keys and keys without locks,” and you’ll notice that I did not start this story that way, although saying you lack a key to your own mother’s house may sound even more maudlin. (Sorry, Mom.)

Motherhood has many gifts, but it will rob you of any illusion you might have had of independence and competence like a thief in the night. A more enlightened person than me might regard that as a gift, too, and come to Jesus, or at least Hillary Clinton, on the subject of it taking a village to raise a child.  I am not that person, though (despite having found Jesus long ago), and I resent the things I no longer am able to do for myself due to lack of time or energy or talent or strength. I regularly broke into my own house as a child, climbing in through windows or piling things up so I could climb up to the back porch and get in through the porch door. I cracked that trunk lock open with nothing but a ten-year-old’s strength and a table knife. I hiked miles alone in the wilderness in Wyoming and trained myself one summer to ride up the Benton Street hill in Iowa City. These seem, in the face of attempting to install a child bike seat, like simple pursuits, things I could do on my own, things that required no tools save the ones that were to hand and no strength but that I had or could develop in myself.

I often believe once I’ve found the first line of something that it will write its way to an ending, and often it does. When it doesn’t, I tend to abandon it as a failed start, an idea that doesn’t have an essay in it, or one that I haven’t found yet. I’m not sure what the ending here is, except that there isn’t one. We are always who we are, and I will likely never find my trunk key, or never learn to keep track of it. I may start to tell people that it, and everything else I’ve lost, are sitting on a ledge on the south rim of Oregon Basin in Park County, Wyoming, having fallen out of my pocket with my old car key that, to the best of my knowledge, is sitting there still, though the car is long gone, and the wind and the sun and the snow have doubtless faded the keychain, a small rubbery piece of plastic in the shape of a cow that said IOWA and LAURA.

Mythical Land

England’s not the mythical land of Madame George and roses

It’s the home of police who kill blacks boys on mopeds

And I love my boy and that’s why I’m leaving

I don’t want him to be aware that there’s

Any such thing as grieving.

Sinead O’Connor, “Black Boys on Mopeds”

[ full lyrics ; YouTube ]

I didn’t know this Sinead O’Connor song until my friend Steve posted (or rather bumped) it on FriendFeed yesterday. Like most people who aren’t terribly musically aware, I knew “Nothing Compares 2U” because the video was everywhere when I was sixteen and “Last Day of Our Acquaintance” because it was on a mix I inherited from a former roommate of a friend. Surely I heard the rest of the album at some point, but not so that it stuck in my head. Not until yesterday.

Yesterday people were listening to the song because of Margaret Thatcher.

Yesterday I was listening to it on repeat in part because of Margaret Thatcher and in part because I have a baby and in part because I talked to a kid recently who didn’t have enough to eat and in part because I worry a lot about race relations in the town where I work and the town where I live. But I was listening to it on repeat most of all because I realized it was the song I was looking for — the one that explained an idea I’ve always had about England, about the world, even. But I’ll start with England.

I grew up on English children’s books (like Salman Rushdie, I believed that going to boarding school in England might be like moving into one, though unlike him, I was not disabused of this notion by actually attending an English boarding school). Before Harry Potter, that meant Narnia, of course, but also The Wind in the Willows and The Five Children and It and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Tom’s Midnight Garden and The Secret Garden and The Sword in the Stone. Many would be quick to point out that there are poor children in some of these books and bad things in almost all of them. But they all too have a strong heaping of England’s green and pleasant land. They look back to a past (where, as TH White writes, “the weather behaved itself”). Those that despair often look for a coming again.

My awareness of the news as a child was, like most children’s, spotty, and informed by what I was exposed to (CBS and NPR and Time magazine and the local newspaper) and my mother’s reactions to it. I knew that Mikhail Gorbachev was preferable to Ronald Reagan and that the reforms of Lech Walesa were better than those of Margaret Thatcher, but I couldn’t have told you why. These beliefs were there, in the background, not primary to my understanding of the world nor of great interest, but present, like buildings you pass every day but have never been in.

Instead I walked along hoping that the mists would part, hoping that there was a garden behind that wall, and that someday I might see it.

There wasn’t, though. The mythical land was there, but it was the land of imagination. The land around me was what it was: full of broken concrete, ugly houses, fences. I was doing okay, but other people were not. I’m not sure if I knew that first or if music helped me see it, but Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car,” I realized, was a song about a world that existed, that I held some responsibility for, and “This Land is Your Land” was a song about a world we could aspire to, not a mythical one.

But what of England? Did England exist? It seemed to me it must be odd to live in a place where everything was old, where everything that people came to see was something that was dead, something that didn’t exist anymore, something you could never hope to live up to. I was grateful to be an American: we’d wiped out our history, it was true, and we’d built ugly things in its place, but at least no one expected anything but vulgarity from us. We might still surprise people.

When I got to college, friends played me the Smiths. Most people think of their music as being about mopey adolescent angst and unrequited love. I thought it was that but more than that, I got a glimmer that these people were singing about the very problem I’d identified. “The Queen is Dead” was about the way the world felt; “How Soon is Now?” was a question about life, not just love; getting a job as a backscrubber was what one might aspire to.

Later I heard the Clash and the Sex Pistols, later still I read about the effect of Thatcherism on Northern England. Later still I heard and repeated jokes about New Labour being like New Coke. A couple of weeks ago I started reading Rushdie’s Joseph Anton, where I read about his hopes for boarding school in England and the realities he found there.

I got older, in short, and I read more, and more things connected. And yesterday I listened to “Black Boys on Mopeds” again and again and again, because it was a song about this world I inhabit. And then I thought about my son, and the books he has yet to read, and the things he has yet to discover, and I wondered if I should stop.

Ordinary Linens: A Remembrance of Jody Wallace, 1923-2012

This is, more or less, the eulogy I delivered at my grandmother’s memorial service on Saturday, September 22 at Plymouth Place in La Grange Park, Illinois.

A load of ordinary linens consists of two sheets, two big towels, two to four small towels, four or more pillowcases, and four or five shirts. That makes a large load, which should be set to wash warm and rinse cold, and to which should be added between a third and a half a cup of Calgon, soap, and a half to three quarters of a cup of borax.

When that cycle is finished, the load should be set to run again, this time cold wash, cold rinse, with some diluted Calgon and one half to three quarters of a cup of Borateem. Add one half to two thirds of a cup of Downy to the fabric softener container and fill to the plus sign with water.

If I tell you that this was one of the simpler of my grandmother’s laundry routines (clothing went through three wash cycles; washcloths went through such machinations that I was never entrusted with them), you will think either that she was a domestic goddess or that she was crazy. Those of you who visited her any time in the last twenty years or so would know that the former was not the first descriptor that would come to mind. Her penchant for collecting things — magazines, newsletters, catalogs, recipes, movie reviews, book reviews, lists of foods that people liked or didn’t like, lists of groceries to buy, lists of things to do, lists of lists to make — meant that her house was never tidy and made one think that her lifelong paranoia about candle flames might in fact be a good thing.

But in another sense, she was the most domestically gifted person I have ever met. If domesticity means not orderliness but hospitality, then surely it is her old house at 126 Sunset that should grace the covers of magazines, clutter and all, for it was there that people were received, one and all, as the most cherished of guests.

My grandmother often told me that when she was growing up, her grandmother’s house was the most deathly boring place on earth. She had to go there with some frequency, and, she said, there was nothing to do. I am sure that in that era of “children should be seen and not heard,” she and her brother and cousins were not supposed to be doing anything, but I got the impression from talking to her that they were not even really meant to be seen. She vowed that her house, when she had grandchildren, would never be like that.

And it was not. When my cousins and I were growing up, one could, on any given day at her house, be assured of a meal served primarily on toothpicks (because any small child, my grandmother believed, could be encouraged to try new food if it were served on a toothpick). (And they were fancy plastic colored toothpicks, so one could, for instance, request one’s food entirely on pink toothpicks.) There was the glass topped coffee table, which contained a turtle that moved if you looked at it and that on very rare occasions might be opened up so that you could handle the treasures inside–the plastic model airplanes that Delta used to give to children on its flights, a piece of a clear rock that doubled whatever you put behind it, a desert rose, a figurine from the World’s Fair in Chicago, jeweler’s glasses, a tiny pot with miniscule dried flowers, a piece of fool’s gold that seemed altogether real and a piece of meerschaum that seemed impossibly light, and a dozen or more other objects of great fascination. The basement contained lead pellets that could be hammered flat into coins and then imprinted with letters, and the attic held all the Oz books, a Dutch door perfect for presenting puppet shows, and a pool table.

The house was the site of innumerable games, experiments, entertainments, and disasters. The first pizza my mother ever had was ordered by my grandmother for members of the high school newspaper staff after they’d been hard at work rather late at night on another issue. For my uncle’s winter camping experience with the Boy Scouts, she sewed and quilted sleeping bag underlays of unbleached muslin and two layers of heavy duty aluminum foil by hand. The summer my mother got married, my grandmother and anyone else she could rope into the project, including her cousin, then a PhD student in mathematics at the University of Chicago, painted matchbook covers with flowers to match the napkins for the reception. (There were also a certain number of unauthorized experiments, such as the time I drew on the wall with lipstick and the times my uncle rigged up mood lighting in the kitchen.) Visiting children were afforded an equal measure of amusements — my friend Rachel specifically remembers the game my grandmother designed just to entertain her twins when they came to visit as toddlers, and my friend Caitrin could tell you about the letters my grandmother helped her daughters write to Santa after they moved so he would know where they lived, and the letters she wrote, as Santa, back to them in reply.

So yes, my grandmother was in fact a sort of domestic goddess. She was also sort of crazy. At least, I assume she believed that if she told anyone else she once dealt with a casserole that had gone bad by burying it, dish and all, in the backyard, they would think she was crazy. I did not think this when she told me when I was twenty-seven and living with her. I thought it was genius. Future archaeologists will, I suspect, just be puzzled.

My grandmother once said that she supposed if people were to remember her, she would hope they would remember that “I could be amusing.” I’m sure everyone here remembers that well. I’d like to offer, however, a few other things you might remember from Jody’s life:

That it’s almost always a good time for milk and cookies
That dumping a bottle of ketchup over someone’s head is, on very rare occasions, an appropriate disciplinary measure
That eggs will continue to cook after you take them off the heat
That all people — including children — are entitled to bread and roses, too
That the smallest gesture has the power not only to make someone’s day but to fix itself — and you — in their memory, as surely as my grandmother and all her gestures are fixed in ours. We remember her housekeeping not because it was good or bad, crazy or sane, but because she did it — because she cared.

Single Motherhood and Ice Cream

We all know Republicans hate single mothers. (Dude, I’m not even going to provide you people a link for that. You’ve lived through at least a few decades in this country, right? That ought to be enough. If you need help, just Google Dan Quayle Murphy Brown. Trust me.) I had no idea until quite recently that single mom was a controversial term even among those who claim it.

By most definitions, I think, I am one, although the more I read on that comment thread, the less sure I am. But let me break it down for you: I’m not married, I have a kid, we live without the kid’s father. So that makes me a single mom. Of course, he helps out a lot, as do a lot of other people, which makes me perhaps not a totally single mom. I rarely feel that way, anyway.

But this is not a post about reality. This is a post about feelings, which only occasionally match up with facts.

Once in awhile I feel sorry for my single mother self. You know, when other people talk about their husbands handling bedtime, or bringing home ice cream. But mostly, I regret to say, I feel smug. Smugness is not a superior emotion to self-pity (in fact, I’m pretty sure smugness is but a subdivision of pride, putting it at the very top of the seven deadlies). But it sure as hell feels a lot better.

Oh, you poor married people whose spouses are away at a conference and thus making you handle bedtime solo! I do that every night! You say you had a hard time traveling with the baby? I did a trip with the baby by myself! And I had my period! I did it all! Backwards, and in high heels! (Oh, fine. That last part is a lie. I can barely stand in high heels, despite everything my grandmother tried to teach me.)

And when I do have help (as I often do), I tend to get resentful. Why are they not doing more? Why, in fact, are they not doing EVERYTHING? After all, I do everything. I put the baby to bed and feed him and change his diapers and get up with him, usually several times. I play with him and take him around on errands. I give him baths. I sing him songs! I tell him stories! I leap tall buildings at a single bound, with my baby in a sling! Why are they not doing ALL THESE THINGS? SIMULTANEOUSLY?

I can give you an earful on my opinion of American maternity leave and prenatal care and childbirth practices and utter lack of affordable daycare or support systems for parents. Google any of those phrases and I bet you’ll come up with arguments as cogent as any I could make. And all of those things would certainly improve my life, and I’ll continue to fight for them. But in the meantime I have this funny talented tiny human to take care of. And I have a lot of help.

So as the election season progresses this fall, you can expect me to look more and more smug. I’d apologize, but really, smugness is what I get. It’s what I get when I look at the politicians of the world and think, “Oh yeah? Try MY job for a day. No? Well, while you’re out, could you get me some coffee ice cream?”

Class Notes

Several times a year a postcard — now an email — shows up imploring me to submit news to my college alumnae/i magazine. Once or twice I’ve thought of doing so, and so sometimes the email sits in my in box for a week or a month, and later, when I decide to clean out the inbox, the deadline has passed, and I delete it until the next time, when the whole process repeats itself.

I read the Class Notes section of the magazine with zeal, although I don’t know why. Unlike, say, the tabloids at the supermarket checkout, there’s rarely anything juicy in them, although I suppose also unlike the tabloids, what they contain is largely true. People go to school and get jobs and promotions and get married and have babies. A surprising number of them seem to bump into each other while on vacation. I went to college on the East Coast and then returned to the Midwest, with a sojourn in the West. I pretty much never bump into anyone.

Yesterday, though, my baby boy, six months, one week, and one day old, started sitting up. He was sitting at daycare when I came to get him, and when we got home he sat some more, and I smile and laughed and cried to see it, and then I began to think how odd and wondrous it is that I have a child, and about all the things that have happened. So here it is, my entry, far too ungainly for a chipper phrase in the Class Notes. In the fourteen years since I graduated from college…

I have lost forty pounds and gained twenty-five.

I have lived in four states, six apartments, a trailer, and four or five houses, depending on how you count. I have moved my belongings a total of fifteen times.

I have also had four or five boyfriends, depending on how you count, which is really depending on how I count, given my mood on any given day.

I have earned two master’s degrees.

I have racked up credit card debt and paid it all off and racked up student loan debt and paid most of it off. I prefer not to think about mortgage debt.

I have had four cars and four bicycles.

I have had more jobs than I can count, from office temp to college instructor to dog walker to librarian. I have never waited tables.

I have also been unemployed, mostly during economic boom times.

I have been arrested intentionally once and never otherwise. I am more proud of the work that I did that led to my getting arrested (and the work I continued after that arrest) than of just about anything else I have ever done.

I have maintained or neglected a website for thirteen years.

I have never been married.

By the same token, I suppose, I have never been divorced.

I have been paid for some of my writing, but I still write for free.

Once I spent a month at an artists’ colony.

Once I was hospitalized for five days on a psych ward.

Once I ran out of gas.

I have had five cats, two of whom are still with me.

I have had four computers, two of them new.

I have been to five weddings. I have been to many more funerals and baptisms.

I have a six-month-old baby boy who just learned to sit up.

 

Barf vs. Barf

for Tom

On the morning of May 17, 2011 I sat down to my breakfast and coffee. It was my very favorite late spring breakfast — yogurt and granola with strawberries and blueberries. I lifted a bite up on a spoonful, put it in my mouth, and gagged. The whole concept of breakfast was making me want to hurl for the second day in a row. I drank some coffee. That seemed okay. I looked at my breakfast again and decided to throw it out before I actually did puke. I drank some more coffee. I thought.

On the morning of May 17, 2012, my not-quite-four-month-old son had his breakfast (or what passes for breakfast, and all your meals, if you are four months old) and promptly did throw up. Then he beamed. Then he spit up again. Then he looked terribly pleased with himself. Normal people (at least normal people in my experience) hate barfing, but this baby loves it. Throwing up is one of the highlights of his day, along with grabbing his toes, kicking, and reading the warning sign on his mobile.

It’s funny how life changes. I’m back to yogurt and granola and fruit for breakfast, although I keep thinking I’m going to have to give it up, or at least the fruit part, to save money. These days I usually eat it in my office after I get to work because I spend the rest of the morning feeding the baby and cleaning up his barf. For awhile there, I was considering marketing a new conditioner based on breastmilk, baby formula, and children’s Tylenol, pH balanced in an acid bath. But no one has really said anything about my hair looking great lately, and somehow I’m not really sure I could replicate the results anyway. I felt like puking all the time; my son does it all the time. But somehow it’s all worth it in the end.

Worries

Things I worried about before I had my baby:

That I would not love the baby.

Yes, really. I worried about this. Hysterical, isn’t it?

That the cats would hate me.

Because, you know, my mother’s cat didn’t speak to her for weeks after I came home. And they loved my pregnant belly. In fact, they loved it so much that they liked to use it as a launching pad, and thus whenever I went in for a prenatal appointment, anyone who didn’t have cats would be totally alarmed by the scratches. And they never knew me not pregnant — I got them when I was six months along.

That I would not be able to breastfeed.

I had a breast reduction when I was 21 and they basically told me I wasn’t ever going to be able to breastfeed. Since I was not ever planning to have children, this did not seem like a problem. I was just excited not to have bra straps digging into my shoulders and to be suffering the various other indignities of the well-endowed.

My breastfeeding anxiety took the form of a peculiar sort of avoidance — I didn’t sign up for a breastfeeding class because I was afraid that people would just look at me oddly, and yet I read all of The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding, which, so far as I can tell, is a book designed to make just about everyone feel like shit, and particularly people who have to work for a living.

That my house was going to be overtaken by baby crap that I didn’t understand.

People kept telling me I needed things with strange and inscrutable names. “Oh, you need a pack-n-play! Do you have a pack-n-play? I have a pack-n-play you can have?” WHAT THE FUCK IS A PACK-N-PLAY? Or a Boppy? A bassinet is different from a crib? Really? I was supposed to register for all this crap, and I didn’t even know what half of it was. As far as I knew, I just needed a place for the baby to sleep, a carseat for him, and a bunch of clothes for him to sully with various baby effluvia. And diapers. I am not even getting into the nature of clothing. I barely knew what a onesie was before I inherited a bunch of them.

That I would never go anywhere or do anything ever again.

Because, you know, you can’t possible put a child in a car or on a plane or take him for a walk.

That the child would grow up completely fucked up because of his weird family situation.

I’d go into this, but it’s too complicated.

That the baby would grow up to like sports.

Things I worried about after I had my baby:

Measurements.

When we were in the hospital, we were told to measure the amount of supplemental donor breastmilk the baby took in milliliters or ccs. I was also supposed to record how long he nursed and rate five or eight different aspects of breastfeeding on a three point scale every time we tried. Oh yeah, and we were supposed to try either every two hours or every time the baby seemed interested, depending on who the nurse was that shift. Then we left the hospital and the doctor wanted supplement measured in ounces. Then he got his vaccinations and was supposed to get Tylenol in milligrams, but there were two different concentrations of Tylenol. Then it turned out that there was INFANT Tylenol, which is different from CHILDREN’S Tylenol. Really, there’s nothing like getting a call from your daycare director when you’re at work informing you that you have been giving your child the wrong medicine.

I know that I once did nine hundred math problems about all these different kinds of measurements every year in school, but I have completely forgotten all about them, and thus I stand there at midnight staring uncomprehendingly at bottles and syringes and labels. Oh, and every time I take the boy’s temperature, I have to look up normal human temperature ranges on my phone. Every. Single. Time.

Napping.

Good Lord but this baby hates to nap when he’s with me. He only likes to nap at daycare. This all seemed fine until I started reading about how OMG YOUR BABY HAS TO NAP.

That I would not be able to breastfeed.

Well. I can some. But not very much, especially not since I went back to work. I pump 2-3 times a day and get an ounce if I’m really lucky. It’s sort of hilariously pathetic. I sit there in the staff bathroom* and desperately try to shake the little drops that accumulate into the flange into the bottle because I don’t want to waste any of it.

That I really ought to have a landline even though I can’t afford it.

Because, you know, what if my cellphone dies? Or the power goes out and I can’t make calls over my computer? Or someone is here looking after the baby and doesn’t have a phone?

That the baby will grow up to like sports.

I am sure I worry about other things, too. I worry that I am forgetting some really clever thing I meant to put in this post. I worry that there are typos because I am a terrible typist and I have barely slept. That I am not entertaining enough for the baby. That I am fucking him up irrevocably by my very existence. You know, the usual.

But so far at the end of every day, we are both still alive, which I suppose is about the best way you can measure success.

*Yes, I am pumping in a bathroom. I tried using the Friends of the Library room downstairs, which was fine, except that then they periodically need to use it when I need to pump, and then one day a woman got the other key and walked in on me. “I’ll be done in about 8 minutes!” I said, gaily. “Oh, I don’t mind!” she said, and came on in to start book sorting. And then she proceeded to talk to me. So now I pump in the very well appointed staff bathroom, where there is a sink and where nobody ever bothers me. I do have an office, but it has windows to the outside and floor to ceiling window that faces into the staff room, so it’s just not quite the thing.

Too Many Martyrs, Too Many Apologies

I once asked a black man in a hoodie for his identification.

I am not proud of this.

I am less proud because the man in question turned out to be not only someone I knew but someone I worked with, and our job was working campus patrol at my college. It was the night of a big party on campus, the sort of thing where there was a lot of free beer and a lot of other stuff floating around that was probably free if you knew the right people. I was working patrol that night, and one of our jobs, as always, was to get non-students off campus after dark. I saw two people walking toward me from off campus with hoodies pulled down over their faces, and so I asked them for ID. Anthony raised his head up and gave me a look of death. I apologized. Later I confessed what I had done. But to this day every time I think of it, I think of what my drivers ed teacher used to say when we made mistakes: Don’t be sorry, just don’t do it.

I thought that was terrible advice for people like me who were forever mistakenly turning right instead of left. I think it’s the best summation I’ve ever heard of how we need to deal with race relations in this country.

On Monday night I took my nine-week-old son to my town’s Million Hoodie March. It was held on the same pedestrian mall where I’ve been attending rallies since I was fourteen years old. Going there often makes me feel very, very old, which is a common side effect of living in your hometown as an adult, especially if you then have a kid.

There was a crowd when we got there. The days when I used to count people at rallies are over (we used to joke that you had to count yourself, or take the police count and triple it), so I’m not sure how many exactly, but it was in the multiple hundreds. What impressed me was not the size, though — I’ve seen smaller and larger over the years — but the make up. I said to my friends when I found them, “I was going to say this is the most racially diverse rally I’ve ever been to here, but actually I think it’s the only racially diverse rally I’ve ever been to in this town.”

There were plenty of usual suspects there — people like me who are prone to going to rallies and accosting you with quarter sheets on street corners and standing around with signs or candles or red tape over their mouths. But much of the crowd was made up of what I am afraid people around here often refer to as “people from Chicago.” That means black people, of course, but more specifically it means “black people who are not like us.” And “us,” sadly, means people like me.

In a demographic sense, that’s true. Different socio-economic background and work experience and education and religious affiliation and all sorts of other little boxes you can check on forms. But that’s stupid, because they also are like “us”: the “people from Chicago” may be from Chicago, but now they live here, and that means we are all Iowa Citians and we all bear responsibility for our community.

This rally was different from others I’ve attended in another way. It was quieter. That doesn’t make sense, give the level of outrage over the events that inspired it. But I think it was quite out of respect and out of despair.

The problem with racism is that there isn’t an easy legislative solution. We’ve done most of the work of enacting the legislation that ended separate but equal and the denial of voting rights and so on. Those things still exist, of course, but that’s a problem of enforcement, not a problem of the law.

If you are upset about the death of Trayvon Martin and you want to find something tangible you can fix, you will have to look hard. Changing laws like the one in Florida that allows almost anyone to plead self-defense for any reason, or no reason at all, would help prosecute the killers, but it wouldn’t stop the killing.

You can’t legislate attitudes. You can hope to outgrow them. You can think you’re above them, that you aren’t poisoned by their presence, but you’d be wrong. This very blog post is poisoned by them. I can put all the scare quotes I want around “us” and “them” in an attempt to convince you that I find these categories false, but I have still written them down. And that means I’ve thought them. And that means, well, that means I can say I’m sorry all I want, but I still did it.

I don’t have a solution to that. Perhaps one day my son can help find one.

Control, Part Two

There’s been a Your eCards thing floating around on Facebook for the past week or so. Maybe you’ve seen it. If you’re reading this, the chances are good that you have. It’s a young woman talking to a young man, both carrying their school books in the traditionally gendered fashion. “I see, so if I don’t have sex with you, I’m a prude bitch, if I use the pill, I’m a slut, if I get pregnant, I’m an idiot and if I choose abortion I’m Satan. Yay.”

I haven’t said much on the whole subject of birth control of late beyond hitting the Like button next to people’s Facebook statuses on my phone because, well, I’ve been a bit busy with my not-quite-eight-week-old baby. But it doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking about it.

I know very little about computer programming, not even enough to be dangerous. But I do know that much of it is based on what in Latin and Greek we call conditions — if then statements. Some of the conditions have wonderful names. Future more vivid was always my favorite; sadly, there’s a future less vivid, too. The conditions in the statement above are just ordinary present tense conditions, and they are presented, implicitly, as a series of ors. The young woman can be a prude OR a slut OR an idiot OR Satan.

I am a human being, not a computer program, and I live often in a subjunctive mood, in a series of ands, not ors. What does it say if, for instance, I used birth control AND I got pregnant? If I got pregnant AND considered abortion? Am I an idiot slut bordering on Satanhood? I should get that on a tshirt. Or perhaps I should put it on my resume: Education, BA, MFA, MLIS; Employment: Adult Services Coordinator, Branch Manager, Youth Services Assistant, Graduate Instructor; Other: Idiot, Slut, Honorary Satan.

The other thing I know about computer programming is that it is inherently full of bugs. Things work but not quite right. If you have a smartphone and it seems as though the apps are asking you to update them every other week, well — many of those are bug fixes. But fixing a bug often begets another bug, and so on. Sometimes the bugs are errors in the code — forgotten symbols, typos, and the like — and sometimes they are errors in the programmer’s thinking, breakdowns of logic or sequence, strange workarounds that stop working.

What I know about human beings is that we are complicated. We are not easily sortable. We cannot be legislated. We are created, gestated, born, and nourished through a tremendously messy process, one all mixed up not only with bodies and precious bodily fluids but also emotions, frequently complicated, messy ones.

There have been innumerable brilliant responses to the latest attack on women’s health and women’s reproductive rights. But even they are mostly predicated on the kind of logic that dominates the ORs of the comic. We must be able to control our fertility. Using birth control means being responsible, not being a slut. I believe all that. But I also know that control is something we in fact have very little of. I was responsible; I still got pregnant. The result is the baby now sleeping in a sling on my chest, and I would not trade him for the world.

When I became pregnant, the public debates I had participated in about women’s reproductive rights since I was a teenager no longer seemed relevant to me. Not because I believed that I lacked choices, or that I was not entitled to them, not that I will not still campaign with all I’ve got to preserve those choices for people. What seemed irrelevant was the idea that any body of men — and they are mostly men — sitting in any government chamber in any statehouse or capitol could have the foggiest notion of what I was going through, or that they had any right to know, or any right to decide or dictate.

A woman’s control of her own body is limited, even to her. It should never be limited by anyone else.

Luck

I sometimes wonder if the experience of playing Sky Masterson in a production of Guys and Dolls is enough to give you a lifelong boost, or if instead everything after that is kind of a letdown.

My high school put on a production the spring of my freshman year, and of course I had a huge crush on the guy who did play Sky Masterson, who was tall, dark, and handsome (and sang a hell of a lot better than Marlon Brando, although that’s not really saying much). I tried out but did not get a part, there being few roles suited to fat girls with marginal acting skills in that show (singing “House of the Rising Sun” at my audition was, in retrospect, perhaps also a poor choice — I thought I had a rendition down pretty well, but the expression on the face of the director would suggest otherwise). I then had high hopes of getting to be in the pit orchestra — I’d been offered a spot, even — but then it turned out that the score had no viola part. So I had to settle for sitting in the audience. I went the last night, because that was always the best show. (Our theatre was so small that the swing choir had to hold two shows a night for two nights in a row in order to accommodate everyone. It was always best to go to the last show on the last night, because it had the best special acts and it also invariably had the most insanity, like the time all the guys came on stage without their socks on and the director stopped the show to make them go back and put them on.)

It was fabulous.

Well, no, I’m sure it wasn’t. There were a few less than great performances; I knew that even then. But Nathan Detroit was good, and Sarah Brown was good, and Adelaide was amazing, and — well, I’m probably still not in a position to give a fair assessment of Sky Masterson. When you are fifteen years old and grew up on MGM musicals and the senior guy you have a crush on is singing “Luck Be a Lady” and throwing his whole body into it — well, let us just say that your critical faculties are not exactly fully engaged.

Years later I ran into him at a party. He was still tall, dark, and handsome, but I didn’t recognize him until he introduced himself. I was riding rather high by then — recently accepted into a supposedly prestigious graduate program, writing a newspaper column, making new activist friends. It wasn’t the sort of party where you sat and caught up with people. I got invited because I knew some of the hosts, a group of guys who swallowed fire and lay on beds of nails and so on. They all lived in an old house on Dubuque Street, and the place had been decked out as an ongoing art installation for the party — the part I remember was a room filled with old televisions, all tuned in some fashion so their screens displayed a different, vibrant color. Somehow, though, the word “party” had drifted down to the dorms nearby, and so by the time I got there, the place was packed half with art students and activists and half with guys with identical haircuts and Abercrombie tshirts looking around confusedly and saying, “Dude. . . where’s the keg?”

So I don’t know how Sky Masterson was doing by then. According to Facebook, he seems to be doing well now — married, kids, good job, etc. But that moment when he recognized me and I did not recognize him threw me off and continues to do so. I always thought that certain kinds of success could insulate you from whatever other turns your life took, that somehow, if you’d had that kind of moment even once, that kind of “Glory Days” moment where you hit the ball or made the run or sang the solo or simply looked dazzling for one evening of your life — I thought if you had that, it would last. It would define your life from then on.

I was wrong, of course — even the Bruce Springsteen song makes it clear just how wrong I was, but I hadn’t really listened to it then. I was twenty-four and still waiting for that moment to come, unaware that I was living in it already.