Friendship as Democracy / Sense and Madness

by Lucy S.

In the previous post, I wrote: "I know the problems with positive thinking because I find myself in the same patterns of depression and optimism at times. These emerge from certain barriers to autonomy and equality."

They can also arise from a lack of not only acceptance (important), but friendship. I don't need a multitude of close friends, and I'm fortunate to have "enough" people in my life (as if such a thing is measurable; don't we always need to leave space for another close friend?). At any rate, it's never that simple, especially if we venture into new life situations, and need or want to become part of a larger group. I can end up feeling like that kid I was who moved over and over again in the school years to face classrooms in which others knew each other, but did not know me, the outsider. (This is the skewed perception of the new kid in the class who has no way of knowing if others are also new and feel like outsiders, too.)  If this is a group that I can take or leave, as has been the case with some homeschool groups or even activist groups over the years, then I may feel down if I don't feel that I fit, but I can decide to move on. But if I'm immersed in an organization, institution, or group (simultaneously formal and informal) that is more fundamental to what I am working on and working for, then friendships or the lack thereof can have a huge effect on my mental outlook. And friendship is itself deep acceptance.

I'm still trying to understand how this fits into a material basis for understanding my situation. I think relationships are somehow material, even if they can't be eaten or literally keep us warm in cold weather.  Of course, it's easy enough to see that people who care about us often DO give us material care, and we do the same, whether because help is needed or for the joy of sharing.  But the emotional sustenance we offer one another -- the affirmation that, yes, you are worth being with, and, yes, you find me worth being with (in person, by phone, in print); the various forms of communion and support -- this can have such an effect on us that it blends into our physical experience of our lives.

Rightly or wrongly, my decision to continue in certain endeavors has been largely based upon whether I can develop meaningful, deepening relationships with people who are part of those endeavors.  If I can't, I'm not necessarily bitter or down on their goals, but I can't figure out how to "live in" those groups, how to really settle in as more than a "visitor." And at times, the difficulties in forging healthy relationships signify problems that go deeper than me. It is easy for people in groups to affirm for one another that the group is fine if they feel happy with it. If someone else has a problem with an aspect of it, that must be due to something wrong with that person, because "after all, all of US are fine with it, right?"  This may be true. And in an informal group of friends, it may not matter if some people are a good fit with each other and someone else isn't, in that particular group.  But for organizations doing social, political, and/or educational work, the mutual affirmations that all is well, and and the conclusion that any individual who doesn't sing along with this refrain must be wrong - this can be an obstacle to growth - not just organizational growth, but also the psychological and intellectual growth of people in the organization.


One of the poems I read with Sean and Ryan today was Emily Dickinson's 620, or as it's first line says, "Much Madness is divinest Sense."

Much Madness is divinest Sense -
To a discerning Eye -
Much Sense - the starkest Madness -
'Tis the Majority
In this, as all, prevail -
Assent - and you are sane -
Demur - you're straightaway Dangerous -
And handled with a Chain -

It seems like a dilemma.  If we have a discerning Eye, we will recognize what is considered Madness by the Majority to be the divinest Sense, and the Majority will see Sense as unarguably Mad.  This seems to be at odds with a faith in radical democracy -- the real kind of democracy, where we actively shape our lives and the places we live in and the relationships we have with others, individually and collectively (instead of voting for which candidates in two parties can join a small number of people who dominate us in pursuit of their own interests). But in a group or society committed to treating people with respect, recognizing their dignity, and wanting the well-being of everyone, maybe more Eyes would grow to be discerning, and maybe Chaining those who don't assent so easily would not happen. Maybe extended dialogue would become the norm.  Maybe top down, hierarchies produce this Mad conformity, so dangerous to those deemed Dangerous by it -- those who do not assent, but instead question and challenge.

Friendships themselves, if they're healthy, seem to me to model radical democracy on the intimate scale.

I'm still turning these things around in my mind.  I am not one of the "always already" converted when I decide to step further into an organization, institution, discipline, or group of any kind.  Nor do I put much faith in what we think of as "common sense" - whether our own or that of a Majority around us.  I know no other way to work toward greater insight and genuine commitment to convictions that will stick than to think hard, talk with others without being afraid of saying the wrong thing (within reason - treating people with respect), read, let some time go by, and keep doing these things, chipping away at what is Madness until what is Sense emerges more and more clearly.  And I can do that best of all in relationships of friendship.

***

On the other hand.... What I have been struggling with lately is the tension between valuing relationships of friendship and valuing broad scale alliances among people who do not share the same beliefs about everything, even about things that I or others see as important issues.

But maybe even here, the lessons of friendship can inform these broader alliances, especially if in the term "friendship" we include our adult relationships with extended family. I have a large extended family and group of (often interwoven) friends, and these for me have been my sustained "community," in that, as with communities in one geographical location, we are going to have different personalities, interests, beliefs, and even goals, but our strong ties of relationship teach us continually if we let them, and become their own kind of convictions. Our mutual well-being can become a common-cause.  Maybe this can also be the case in our alliances which seem grounded in other goals.  Our reasons for coming together may be to form or sustain unions, or educational experiences (institutional or grassroots), or to stand for tenants rights or prisoners' rights, but if we don't have some commitment to care for each other and to our sustained mutual well-being, those alliances cannot be broad enough OR deep enough to grow and to last. 

Cruelties of Positive Thinking

by Lucy S.

I might be changing how I write a lot of these posts.  I started off putting some of the essays I'd already written on here, and then writing posts that I would work on - not nearly with as much careful crafting as my essays, but still, in a very different way than I write emails (more on my email writing later).  But I am starting to question the 'voice' in the blog posts and a larger ideology that comes through - this sense that I am preaching and prescribing, maybe, or conversely, a deep insecurity that I undoubtedly grapple with but which isn't as global as it may come across in my writing.  The ideology is part of a larger ideology that I feel is becoming so pervasive in our society -- the inability to 'hang out' for long periods of time just talking, letting the conversation meander all over the place, falling into comfortable silences at times while each person just  rests and thinks without pressure, talking about ideas and stories that matter, but not as definitive means to an end.  So I'm going to start writing in here for a while - at least to try it - in more of a 'hang out' mode, writing to see where it takes me. 

I also am working on some formal writing projects, so I need this to be an easier writing experience.

Today I had reason to think about why the call for people to "be positive" pisses me off so much sometimes. One of my extended family members, Nicole, messaged me to say she's feeling overwhelmed, that she misses her kids, that she can't help thinking at times that if only her ex wouldn't have started on meth a few years after they got together and become abusive and untrustworthy, everything could have been so much easier now. She said she tries to stay positive, but it's hard. And she does try to stay positive. I see her messages almost everyday on FB about what a beautiful day it is, how she is blessed, how thankful she is, and so on.  Child protection services took her kids when she and her ex split up. I don't know every reason for this, but she says that it's in part because she let him be around the kids when he wasn't supposed to be allowed around them because of his meth addiction.  They also lost their apartment when they split up. The kids are in foster care; she sleeps on her cousin's couch; and she has visitation with them.  She is working at in the bakery section of a major grocery store in California making $10 per hour, as many hours as they'll give her.  Getting her kids back depends on getting a place, the judge says, but it's hard to understand how she can ever afford an apartment on this wage.  How is thinking positively supposed to resolve these economic issues?

I got to talking to Justin, my oldest son, about the difference between Nicole's grandmother's situation of 35 years ago and her own.  My aunt Marian left her spouse in the later 1970s because he had been physically violent toward her for years and she couldn't take it anymore.  Marian had a good union job in Torrance back that paid very well - a shipping facility. By the 1980s, Marian made $20 per hour - and she was not at all wealthy on that. She was raising three kids; renting a two bedroom apartment in another part of the greater L.A. metro area - Rowland Heights; didn't get child support from her ex-husband; drove a used car for her long commute; they had almost all dinners at home - basic foods, nothing gourmet.  (I know; they were one of the many places I lived for varying lengths of time in my teens after I left Lancaster.)   I was talking to Justin about the basic differences in their lives being so determined by these material realities. If Marian had been forced to work for the 1970s to 1980s equivalent of today's $10 per hour, she could not have rented the apartment for her and her kids or lived with the autonomy she managed. Would she have even left her chronically abusive husband?  If so, would she have been forced to live with my grandparents for years?  If a judge had taken her kids away and made getting her own place a condition for getting them back, could she have managed it?

There is a profound cruelty in expecting Nicole to "think positive!!"  Inside the relentless demand for that shiny peppiness is an idealist ideology that pretends that it is Nicole's attitude which determines her success or failure in this system, rather than these material realities which are far larger than her.  And the individualizing of this "positive thinking" becomes a buffer between us and the healthy anger we need to realize that we are cornered by this system and that we can only solve these things in any broad way by uniting with others to demand higher pay and better conditions of work and life - or going even further, dramatically changing out society.  Meanwhile, the situation Nicole is in IS overwhelming.  Monumental effort is needed just to get her kids back - not only effort, but luck.  From my perspective, it seems almost impossible.  I've taken up a collection in our extended family to pitch in some to help her get into an apartment, but even if this helps, how will she keep up with the costs of living month in, month out, on those wages?  If she succumbs to depression under these conditions, is she to be chastised for her "negative attitude" and for "complaining"?

The point isn't some kind of condescending pity for Nicole here, but to say it's time to stop this "positive thinking" and call this bullshit out for what it is.  The way out of the cycles of hyper-positivity and sobbing depression is, I think, sustained anger at the system putting us in these situations and the people who prop it up by pretending that it's normal and beneficial, and that we are the dysfunctional ones.

I don't need to turn Nicole or anyone else into a saintly lamb in order to say this.  I am not saying that we don't need to protect kids sometimes from dangerous living conditions with their parents, either. But the material realities of her life smash her down and keep her kids separated from a mother who loves them and is not herself a danger to them.

Granted, I can't just tell Nicole that she'd might as well give up and go roll herself into the ocean. There are no good surrender terms in this society, so we're forced to keep trying under even brutal conditions. So we get cornered - economically blackmailed - into having to pump ourselves up enough to look for jobs, market ourselves as a product (as depressing and degrading as this often feels), go to work, and try to maneuver in the system enough to survive and grab what freedom and happiness we can.  But we sure as hell don't have to think positively about this bitter reality.

I know the problems with positive thinking because I find myself in the same patterns of depression and optimism at times. These emerge from certain barriers to autonomy and equality.  I wrote to a friend about some of this today, about how my writing is too often "framed in a position of weakness."

 It's about how I'm "getting better" or "struggling" or "feel confused" or "need help."  .... It's like trying to crawl out of slickly sided container, throwing yourself at it in bursts of optimism and then sliding back down into insecurity.  

Make that sliding down into pain, fear, desperation for affirmation, corrosive insecurity at times.  At the same time, there is always far more than these binaries.  As soon as I sit and talk with someone for any length of time - really talk, laugh, relax - these falsities crumble and I am back again in the full world, where I don't need extra special help.

I also wrote:

Sometimes I try to figure out the best way to understand my own situation and self.  If I go with a Marxist understanding, the material realities are that I can't support myself in this economy, that I have years of college education, both in the past and in finishing the BA and now the Master's, and still can't.  I don't want my education to just be for that purpose. But I want work, and I want the autonomy that I think an adult in this society should have (and that some do). My position in academia feels so precarious, just hanging by the one thread right now of the one class I will teach.... I'm thrilled about doing it, but I am afraid, too. 

Acknowledging this doesn't solve my problems, but it is far more genuinely healthy than the artificial highs of "positive thinking."  More on this again next time.

The End: Labor to Be

by Lucy S.

Implied in the title of this blog is the act of giving birth. I was thinking about this in literal and metaphorical terms when I started this back in January.

I was trying to find ways to articulate the many conflicted feelings I have about the work of bearing children – pregnancy, birth, caring for them year after year – with that work both devalued in terms of the person doing it deserving material compensation from her society (U.S. and many others), and hyper-sanctified as being above such concerns.

We’re bombarded with a multitude of stereotypes about ‘good’ mothers and ‘bad’ mothers.  (And there are mothers who hurt their children badly. But as umpteen feminists have pointed out so many times, there is not this kind of intense focus on fathers.) What is a ‘good’ mother, anyway? What is a ‘good’ parent – whatever their gender or sexuality?  What is a ‘good’ caregiver in other scenarios – a ‘good’ teacher, infant caregiver, or caregiver for someone differently-abled who needs extra assistance (for various reasons)? 

What is a ‘good’ person?

That last question brings me to the more metaphorical implication of the blog’s title, alluding rather obviously to the act of giving birth to ourselves as individuals and as groups (small, large, and massive).  As clichéd as the metaphor is, so many of us are seduced by the idea over and over throughout our lives.  I remember when I last lived in California embarking on a 500 day journey – one I constructed in my journal, which would find me somehow transformed by the end into someone better. I had specific changes in mind, and some of them worked out, while many did not.  But I don’t think health and love (of our self, of each other, of the myriad creatures and elements that surround and make up our particular lived existence on this planet) come from these end-oriented constructed interpretations of our existence. 

We’re all on our way to becoming older, and then dead – but then we get into the whole question of our final ‘end’ and whether that is some kind of eternal life – as reward or punishment or reunification into nirvana – or whether it is ceasing to exist as any kind of sentient being.  I don’t want to wade into that debate. I just know that there is never going to be another July 27, 2013 morning, in which the kids, our own or those of others, and everyone we know, are precisely these ages, and this exact blend of us and others and events exist in these exact relationships with one another.

Someone sent me an email today saying that she bet it feels good to be done with school.  I know she means well. But being ‘done’ doesn’t feel good, other than the relief that I didn’t fail to finish, which is itself embedded in the construction of learning as various ends to check off rather than as fluid and intrinsically meaningful. The statement from my master’s adviser that I was most profoundly thankful for was when he said I’m always welcome to sit in as a member of a class he’s teaching if I’m still in this area. I will take him up on that, I think. I didn’t go to school in order to get to something else. Yes, I LOVE that I will actually be able to finally teach college classes, but what I want is to be a teacher and learner all my life. And to be a writer, a painter (me and my palette knife and oil paints, just for the love of it), a food grower and maker and eater, and a multitude of other actions made into nouns.  I’m in no rush to be done with processes that are to me life itself.

To think that other way would destroy my ability to so utterly be in these days and the later days of this year, when I will teach a college class. Should I be glad for that fall semester to hurry and be over as well? Why would I want any of these experiences and efforts to be over? So that I could hurry and get to – what?

Yet I’ve struggled with so many anxieties since I went back to school in 2009 and even more in graduate school.  And I struggled with them again while writing the syllabus to try for the teaching job, and while preparing to guest-teach at a friend’s class (which went well – I LOVED it), and even in connection to the extended union organizers’ training I went to recently. This morning, I was thinking that maybe the problem is trying to not feel the anxiety, wanting it to be over, struggling against it, instead of just living it. Why is it wrong if I have a million doubts about myself and others, and worry that people won’t like me, and question what some people are insisting on and question myself for questioning them (out loud or in my head)? I yearn for steadiness, it’s true, but maybe the steadiness is in being all I am at any given moment.

I don’t labor to finally bring myself into existence, and no one labors to later bring their kids into existence in all the years after that literal birth. (Even in giving birth, fighting the inevitable pain tends to cause more and prolonged pain.) We are existing right now. And laboring to bring some better society into existence some other time keeps us from enacting it now.

I think we labor as life itself, and it is the blockage of that labor-as-living which robs us and others of part of our full human experience. I'm thinking that this is what one of my friend has meant when he’s told me so many times that writing is a process, that I don’t have to view everything I write as a perfect end-point (which it never is, while imagining it that way has contributed to my more debilitating anxiety too many times). I am also thinking that this is the meaning of the story of the man who weaves his song into his baskets and refuses to mass produce them, the story my friend Amir wrote about. (http://labor2beardown.blogspot.com/2013/02/assembly-line-logic-amir-hussain.html  So much in this society pushes us to be alienated from our own labor, and when so many are economically blackmailed into working in jobs we’d never work in otherwise, how can we not be alienated from that labor?  But the labors that spring from our own desire to create and to take care of ourselves and each other are the ones that are bound to our essence.  

Carmen

by Lucy S.

This is a glimpse -- through my lens -- at the woman who calls me her fifth daughter, who I call my other mother, a woman who has been laboring for a long time.

In her mid-70s, Carmen still works, as she has worked almost all her life. A large part of that work now consists of caring for her mother Nieves, who will turn 104 this August.  They live together. The state pays Carmen a small amount to provide that care, based on the number of hours they allot. They allot less hours than they used to, though the care her mother requires has increased rather than lessened. The state has been cutting back its funding for many things. The state pays this because Nieves has no assets and qualifies for some care-assistance. Nieves’s mind is still strong, even now. But standing and walking are very hard for her; she can’t manage them for long. She needs help with most aspects of living. Carmen also still does alterations and other sewing for people, and sometimes she takes care of kids.

Carmen emigrated from Colombia in June of 1964 without her husband and three very young children. Her brother and his wife had already come, and that helped her obtain the U.S. permission to immigrate. She immediately got work at a sewing factory in L.A. In October, her spouse and son and daughters joined her. Soon her mother and father also moved to the U.S., leaving one brother in Colombia (who would decades later come for their mother’s 90^th birthday as a stunning surprise to Nieves.) Carmen kept working and had two more daughters.

She tells me for the first time that when her youngest daughter was four, she was taking classes to learn more English and pass the citizenship test, and a Japanese man taking the same classes was interested in her. He was teaching her the Japanese alphabet. “He was cute,” she tells me. Another time, on a visit here in 2005, she told me that there was someone she was in love with as a teenager in Colombia, but they were kept apart. Then, and again today, I was struck by the untold stories in the lives of people we know, even those we know so well – sadness and ghosts of yearnings and quietly cupped memories – unexplained smiles and stares into untranslatable distances of their own pasts, which can only be conveyed so partially. Carmen says that one day, her two older daughters came and called out to her, and the man said, “You have kids?” and she said, “I have five.”  It wouldn’t have developed into any kind of romance anyway. She had her children, and she was married, and she lived on the same property as her parents. It was only that she felt a little glad talking with this man who showed that he liked talking to her.

Carmen became a citizen in 1973, while they were all still living in East L.A.

In 1975, they moved out to the Mojave Desert town of Lancaster, where I met them. Gloria became my closest friend, and her sister Ana (eleven months younger than Gloria) also became one of my closest friends. I’d spend the night there, sleeping on a pile of blankets on the floor between their two beds. I always sat up talking too long, keeping us all awake. One time, Gloria said she was so tired and couldn’t stay awake anymore, and wanted me to just go to sleep, and she swung out her arm in frustration, accidentally slamming my mouth. She gasped and said she was sorry!  The three of us started laughing.  I always had too much to say and not enough time to say it. I learned so much there. Carmen taught me how to hold silverware properly. I used to grab it inside of my fist, and she would take hold of my hand tightly and make me hold it between my fingers and thumb, the way most people I know hold forks and spoons, and it gradually took.

In those days, Carmen still worked at a sewing factory, and she expected her daughters to have dinner made by the time she came back from work. Sometimes she came home with bandages around her thumb from sewing so quickly that she ran the needle through it. And it was hot in the factory during the summer. Her husband was self-employed doing small construction jobs, but the work was sporadic, and unlike her, he didn’t know English, which made it hard at times to get people to hire him. Carmen was the primary economic support of the family.

In my teens, I lived with them for a while. Carmen still worked at a sewing factory.  She laughed a lot and teased me (always, she has). But at times, when we went to parties and came home too late, we’d find her sitting on the living couch in the dark crying. Back then, we thought she was only overreacting and trying to make us feel guilty. What did we know then about the disasters someone can imagine happening to those they love?

Carmen tells me that she was taking classes at the community college when one of her other daughters got pregnant at 17 – classes in math and English composition and swimming.  I never knew she took those classes.  She says she gave up on classes after her daughter got pregnant because she felt so depressed. I think of how, if we’d known this many years ago, we might have dismissed her feelings with a terse logic: “Why? What does that have to do with it? Why would you stop going just because of that?” But now I say, “Oh… Yeah… Depression can do that.” And she says, “Yes.” 

I remember the baby shower later, and how Carmen seemed happy about the pregnancy by then. In recent years, she's often watched the boys of that baby boy born in the 1980s.

Later she went back to school to learn computer skills. In the 1990s, a friend helped her get a job as a materials handler for a company that made antennas for the U.S. Navy. Finally, she was making good money - $11 an hour.

Things were looking up when her husband died of a massive heart attack at 60. Around that same time, her company laid her off because they were relocating to the maquiladora area of Mexico to pay workers $1 an hour.  Soon Carmen moved to Florida to live with one of her kids and the family, helping take care of the babies. She later took a job with a wealthy family to be their nanny, on call almost all hours of every day. Finally, she returned to California to work as a live-in nanny for a single father, waiting until she was old enough to collect Social Security, then waiting a few more years for Medicare. She finally managed to buy an older small home for $115,000 when mortgages were easier to obtain and rents were skyrocketing. She has held onto it.

Carmen is one of the strongest people I’ve known. She’s 4 feet 8 inches tall – maybe less by now, with age – and she doesn’t look particularly strong. But she has lived all of these years, taking care of those who needed taking care of – kids, an extra “daughter,” grandkids, parents, and many other people’s kids. She can sew just about anything without a pattern. I love to watch her construct clothing or other fabric goods.

During one of my visits a few years ago, her mother Nieves (Abuelita) said to me in Spanish something with the word “fin” (“end”) in it, and for some reason, not listening well, I thought she said something about “fin de semana” (weekend). I smiled and said, “¿Qué? ¿Cuándo?” (“What? When?”) Carmen let out a delighted high-pitched laugh. Ana laughed, too, and told me that her grandmother had said it’s going to be the end of her life soon. Even Nieves laughed at the absurdity. Nieves has been saying that she’s going to die soon for decades. Today I told Carmen that I just heard that the oldest woman alive (or known oldest) is 115, and that maybe her mom will become the oldest later. She happily agreed.

Carmen tells me that if she knew how to drive, she’d take college classes now. She says it’s good to exchange ideas with each other, and good to be learning something. I tell her I must take after her, and she smiles over the phone lines and says, “Yes.” I do love to learn, as she does, and I do have five kids, too. But she’s worked so hard all these years, and been structurally kept out of college classes in too many ways. That is her loss and most of all, it is all of our loss. I’m one of the lucky ones who knows her, and even luckier that she is my “other mother.” Others should be so lucky. We need her voice and her ideas, even or especially at this point in her life. 

Reading with Sean and Ryan as of Early July 2013

I said in a recent post that I’d put this list up. For now, this is what we’ve been able to come up with of the readings we’ve done together in recent years. There are many more books they’ve read on their own or with each other or their brothers. We’re currently part way through Willa Cather’s My Ántonia and Zitkala-Sa’s trilogy about her experiences in the Indian boarding schools.  I am putting up the list in case it is of interest or of use to anyone.  I just love reading, and so it is what I’ve shared with my kids.

Sometimes they have chosen the books. Once, with Ender's Game, we were reading with a homeschool group. Mostly, I have found or known of the books, and I've asked if they were up for making this or that the next one. Or sometimes I just have said that I want to read them a particular book. Lately, we are trying to have enough copies so that they're reading along in their own copy. Or we may take turns reading out loud. 

I wish the list were longer. I wish I’d started reading poetry with them long ago. I don’t know what I was thinking.  It is only recently that we started to read one new poem a day and re-read the one from the day before. And then when I was in the throes of writing the syllabus for the class I will get to teach in the fall, our reading slipped again, as it has so many times. I wish we’d read far more short stories, too. And I know there are things we've forgotten to list.

I will add that they've read almost all my long essays from graduate school, and I've read excerpts of a lot of other things to them. I love reading to them. I feel so fortunate to have my kids to read to.

I will repost the list in early August. Maybe what I will do is post it once a month, noting what the newest readings were for the past month. 

Books

Adams, Richard Watership Down (me and Ryan)

Blanding, Michael The Coke Machine

Bradbury, Ray Farenheit 451

Card, Orson Scott Ender's Game (one only in the series)

Carson, Rachel Silent Spring

Dawson, George. Life Is So Good
Dickens, Charles Hard Times

DiCamillo, Kate The Tale of Despereaux

Dodson, Lisa The Moral Underground

Douglass, Frederick Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Fleischman, Paul Seedfolks

Funke, Cornelia Inkheart books (three)

Habila, Helon Oil on Water

Hochschild, Adam Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery

Jimenez, Francisco: (trilogy) The Circuit; Breaking Through; Reaching Out

Jacques. Brian Redwall (books)

Jaffee, Daniel Brewing Justice: Fair Trade Coffee, Sustainability, and Survival

Kingsolver, Barbara The Poisonwood Bible

Klein, Naomi The Shock Doctrine

Lapierre, Dominique and Javier Moro Five Past Midnight in Bhopal

L’Engle, Madeleine Wrinkle in Time series

Lewis, C.S. Chronicles of Narnia series (all, me and Ryan; Sean up to book 2)

Lowry, Lois The Giver

Lowry, Lois Gathering Blue

Lowry, Lois Messenger

Lowry, Lois Number the Stars

More, Thomas Utopia

Nix, Garth Keys to the Kingdom (me and Ryan)

Peck, Dale Dritfhouse books (two)

Peck, Robert Newton A Day No Pigs Would Die (me and Ryan)

Philbrick, Rodman Freak the Mighty and Max the Mighty

Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter (book 7 together) (4-7 me and Ryan)

Sinclair, Upton The Jungle

Sinha, Indra Animal's People

Skye, Obert Levin Thumps (five)

Stowe, Harriet Uncle Tom's Cabin

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Hobbit

Twain, Mark The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Short Stories and Essays

Chesnutt, Charles “Po’ Sandy”

Chopin, Kate “The Story of an Hour”

Hawthorne, Nathaniel “The Birth-Mark”

Hawthorne, Nathaniel “The May Pole of Merry Mount”

Hawthorne, Nathaniel “The Minister’s Black Veil”
Hughes, Langston. "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain." 

Irving, Washington “The Adventure of the German Student”

Irving, Washington “The Legend of the Moor’s Legacy”

Irving, Washington “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”

Irving, Washington “Rip Van Winkle”

Poe, Edgar Allen “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”
Zitkala-Sa "Impressions of an Indian Childhood"
Zitkala-Sa "School Days of an Indian Girl" 

Poetry

Dickinson, Emily."Because I could not stop for Death" (479)
Dickinson, Emily. "Hope is the thing with feather" (314)
Dickinson, Emily. "I felt a funeral in my Brain" (340)
Dickinson, Emily. "I like a look of Agony" (339)
Dickinson, Emily. "I'm nobody! Who are you?" (260)
Dickinson, Emily. "Much Madness is divinest Sense" (620)
Dickinson, Emily. "There's a Certain Slant of Light" (320)
Frost, Robert: “Home Burial”

Frost, Robert: “Mending Wall” 

Frost, Robert: “The Road Not Taken”

Frost, Robert “The Wood Pile”

H. D. excerpt from “The Walls Do Not Fall”

Heaney, Seamus. “Digging”

Hughes, Langston. “I, Too”
Hughes, Langston "Theme for English B"
Hurston, Zora Neale. "How It Feels to Be Colored Me"

Komunyakaa, Yusef: “Sunday Afternoons”

Owen, Wilfred. “Dulce Et Decorum Est”
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. "England in 1819"  
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. "Ozymandias" 

Thomas, Dylan “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night”
Whitman, Walt. "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry." 

Whitman, Walt. "I Hear America Singing" 
Williams, William Carlos “This Is Just to Say That”

Williams, William Carlos “The Red Wheelbarrow”

Free Thoughts on the Fourth

by Lucy S.

This post is not about U.S imperialism or any of the ironies inherent in celebrating “Independence Day” as almost all of us in the U.S. live so utterly dependent on the very undemocratic corporations for that old trio, “food, shelter, and clothing,” as well as other needs or deeply entrenched wants.

I am sitting outside in the late morning in the last hour of shade on our back patio, writing in a spiral notebook, free of my computer for the moment. 

Part way into the previous sentence, the phone rang and it was my cousin, Johnny. We talked for about 45 minutes, and then he said he had to lay down because his stomach was hurting him. He asked me to call tonight. “Just call me,” he said, “because it gets so hectic over here that I forget to call you.”  And I walked back out to pick up my pen again, my poetry book sitting untouched. His here and now consists of excruciating pain in his stomach. My here and now feels like paradise.

In 2007, my friends (family they are, really), Gloria and Martha, visited and helped us dig out a pond in half a day, with another minuscule pond above it from which water falls into the larger one. Then for two weeks, I worked sporadically, placing rocks, moving them until they felt right and sounded right to me and to anyone I had there, looking and listening.

It’s still in the 70s, though just now, walking around to take pictures which might convey some of this better – right now it was a little hot in the sun. But really, it is a perfect morning – as I am experiencing it, if I don't think about anything hurting some of the people I love.

Johnny and I hadn’t talked in weeks. I was worried, but kept forgetting to call at the right time.

After 17 years in a California state prison, he finally was allowed freedom from prison again. He was released. We rejoiced. Most of all, I know that his mother – my aunt Dolores – rejoiced, and so did his daughter. His daughter’s little girls were too young to know to rejoice, but they quickly became attached to their 49 year old grampa who they had not known before. Many others in the family rejoiced. I was, and am, thankful for long phone conversations that we could just sink down into for as long as we wanted. At times, I feel as though Johnny has been resurrected. Or I feel as if he has come home from a long war.

And he has. He has come home from one of the “War On Drugs” prisoners of war camps, also known as the U.S. prison system. David Simon, creator of the renowned cable TV show, “The Wire” says that the U.S.’s “war on drugs” is in reality a war on poor people. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/25/the-wire-creator-us-drug-laws Like other wars, it is profit driven. Simon asserts that the wealthy businesspeople have figured out how to “monetize the poor,” not as exploited laborers in this case, but as prisoners in profitable criminal justice systems. http://www.theroot.com/multimedia/david-simon-war-on-drugs  Attorney Michelle Alexander, in her book The New Jim Crow, makes a compelling case that the war on drugs is a war on people of color.

Johnny is both poor and a person of color. He receives $200 a month in general relief money and $200 a month in food stamps. He is Mexican-American, born in the Pomona area of Southern California, where he has lived most of his life – except for the bulk of those 17 years in prison. Johnny looks like a cholo, and he was one at one time, but now he is a 49 year old man trying to adjust to the house and family and society he was removed from when he was 32. He helps his mother, and she is his main day to day companion. He doesn't drink and is determined to stay clean, he says. He works on the house, cleaning and doing yard work wearing himself out because he begins these labors already so worn down. He insists on mowing the neighbor's lawn because he says the neighbor helped his mom and dad when his dad was sick, and Johnny wants to show them his gratitude. 

He talks about wishing he could get a job, but he’s sick. Today, he told me that part of him looks like an old man. He says his stomach feels bloated and that his arms look so thin, that the skin on them looks old to him. He has been sick, so sick that he went to the Emergency Room the day before yesterday, where the doctor told him he could have died. Eating a burrito at Knott’s Berry Farm two weeks ago gave him food poisoning. His mom and the others with them got sick, too, but it hit him far harder because his body is under such attack.

In 2011, he became ill with Valley Fever, a chronic disease carried into people by breathing in its fungal spores in the dirt which the wind blows into the air. Some people are minimally affected. Others experience chronic degeneration over time as the disease hurts the liver, lungs, and other parts of the body. The clinical name of Valley Fever is Coccidioides . The Centers for Disease Control say it is “a fungus found in the soil of dry, low rainfall areas. It is endemic (native and common) in many areas of the southwestern United States, Mexico, Central and South America.” http://www.cdc.gov/fungal/coccidioidomycosis/

Valley Fever is on the rise, and no one seems to know why. Most people in the U.S. have never heard of it, though they know of West Nile disease, which is far less prevalent. One NPR story from May of this year describes how it has affected some particular people and goes on to say:

Diseases that don't have a high profile also struggle for funding. Consider this: In the past 12 years, the National Institutes of Health has granted valley fever just 4 percent of the research funding it has directed toward West Nile virus. But valley fever has afflicted about four times more people than West Nile, with thousands more going undiagnosed. Valley fever has killed many more people, too. http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/05/13/181880987/cases-of-mysterious-valley-fever-rise-in-american-southwest

Valley Fever is particularly rampant in some California state prisons. The federal medical receiver has ordered the state of California to move many particularly at-risk prisoners from these prisons. California’s prisons are so overcrowded from the “War on Drugs” that its officials do not quite know where to put the prisoners if they move them. The state has known since at least 2006 about this Valley Fever risk in some of its prisons. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/29/valley-fever-prison-outbreak_n_3178843.html

Johnny was held in one of these at-risk-for-Valley-Fever-prisons until later in 2011, when he was finally moved to a rat-infested prison in Southern California, where the wiring was faulty, sometimes causing overhead lights in prison cells to catch fire while those locked inside screamed for help. And, he has told me, some of the guards there, as with the other prison he’d come from, enjoyed throwing "a small guy or a gay guy" in a cell with some of the meaner, more dangerous guys and leaving him there for a while as they walked away with the guy screaming for help.

At least the Southern California prison he was finally moved to later in 2011 was at low risk for contracting Valley Fever. But the move came too late for him, in more ways than one.  He had waited so long to be moved from a prison up north. Then he could be near his family. The move kept getting deferred. He had waited to see his dad, who was going downhill rapidly from a neurological disease. My uncle was too ill to make the trip that far, but he’d promised to go see Johnny once they moved him closer. And then my uncle died that year. I flew out to my family and from the house, I talked with Johnny on the phone a few days after Thanksgiving, listening to him cry, unable to do anything to help him. He of course missed the funeral as he had missed so much else in all the years locked away.  And by then, he had already contracted Valley Fever from the other prison, so the move came too late for him in that regard as well.

Johnny often struggles to breathe when I talk with him by phone. He can’t seem to get enough air.

Since he got out, everyone wants to take him out to eat, to have barbecues with him at parks, to plan outings.  They want to take him out into the part of the world that they believe he especially missed while in our government’s POW camp for poor and/or nonwhite people.

Johnny and my aunt Dolores were supposed to fly out here to visit, but he is afraid to until his health stabilizes, and I am afraid for him.

I suppose this here, this patio, my experience here, is part of the world I believe he missed out on. I suppose I am like the others who love him in this way. I want Johnny and Dolores to come here so I can somehow heal them with the sound of the water falling, so like a stream, and the sound of the bird calls, and all of this upper Midwest green, and flowers and vegetables and berries. I imagine us all being healed with long conversations that we can just sink into deeply, and crying and laughing, and food from our garden and other food from local farms.  Everything I eat.  Johnny drinks too much soda, I think, and they both eat too much fast food, I think. In this sense, I always think I know better. I always want to save them, to heal them on multiple levels. I so desperately want them to be fine.

Johnny does not live a flat-line life. During every call, he makes me laugh and makes me cry, often with the same story. This time, he made a reference to an earlier story he told me about his primary care doctor. The earlier story was that he was there on one of his continual appointments and she said, “Why is your blood pressure still high? You told me that if I had to drive with your mom, my blood pressure would be high, too, but this time she didn’t drive you, so what happened?”  He told me that she is one of those doctors who physically reaches out to her patients to comfort them.  He answered her by saying, “Well, you know, you keep on rubbing my knee and I been incarcerated for 17 years, you know?”  He said she laughed. And he laughed when he said it. I could hear the smile in his voice throughout this story. I laughed, too. I love the mix of Johnny’s raw honesty and his almost old-fashioned courtliness. And I loved that doctor in that moment. Bless this kind woman with a good sense of humor, I think, smiling while my eyes water. And damn this system for locking him away so long that he told his wife to move on years ago, and so she finally did. Damn them for stealing so much of his life from him.  Johnny said he told the doctor she looked too young to be a doctor, and she said, “How old do you think I am?” He said, “About 27.” She laughed and said, “Thanks! I’m 35.” Bless this woman one more time. And bless her for trying to make him well or at least more well than he is.

I ordered a bottle of Kyolic garlic capsules for him. This is my usual long distance response to illnesses I cannot heal in my loved ones – ordering something that may help, and talking to them. If we just keep talking, they will be okay, I sometimes think. Garlic is supposed to be good for fungal and bacterial infections. He says he can’t eat a clove a day, as some people with Valley Fever say they eat. They say it helps them. Part of me wants to say, “Just eat the clove, damn it; who cares if you like it or if you smell like garlic?! It might help you get better!” But I would never say that to Johnny. Johnny treats me with such warm respect, and I cannot treat him with anything but respect. And so I told him that I’ve ordered it and that the capsules won’t make him smell like garlic, and to be sure to take three a day, and he said he will.

It is Johnny’s first 4^th of July at home, outside of the prison, free in some sense, even as the fungal spores of the POW camp occupy his body. He said that he and his mom would probably just kick it at home, away from the heat. He needs to rest. He's in too much pain to do much else. And the pain of those I love occupies my would-be idyllic morning.  I would not have it otherwise. Happy 4^th, Johnny.  Love from your cousin more than 2000 miles away in another part of "the land of the free and the home of the brave." 

I Am a Teacher

by Lucy S.

The last time I wrote here, I was on my way to an interview to find out about teaching my very first college class next fall.  It went better than any other job interview I’ve had, and he asked me to begin work on a syllabus to show him that I could create this for that composition / literature course. I came home thrilled that I really had a chance!!  I worked on the syllabus until Friday, pretty much from morning till night, though some of my time was spent writing to a good friend about all my doubts that I could do it and so many fears and old negative memories that came flooding back at certain moments.  And yet, as I worked at it, it was such a joy. It felt like what I have been waiting for most of my adult life.  In those days, I was actually turning into a college teacher.

This morning, the professor who interviewed me emailed me back to say that he was offering me a section to teach. I will really get to teach there.  All day, I’ve walked around with a big smile.  I’m so amazed, so profoundly thankful and happy that I will actually get to teach there. 

Years ago, during my first semester at Antelope Valley (community) College in California, I knew that’s what I wanted to do. And for so many years, I carried that aching hope within me. It’s hard to understand what our psyches do when we want something so badly and the time comes when it is so close, and everything seems to hang in the balance. Yesterday, I could feel my mind already trying to think of other things to want – trying to not want THIS so unreservedly.  But I couldn’t substitute something else. I could only wait.

In the post about homeschooling and teaching, in which I wanted to know why my experience teaching my kids wouldn’t count as ‘real’ experience, I anguished over why it shouldn’t count, and I proclaimed that I would ask this professor why it shouldn’t count – or if it could. But in the end, sitting there talking with him about why I wanted to teach the class and what I imagined for it and my own abiding interest in the writing process, I didn’t ask about counting my homeschool-teaching experience. I know him from an independent study course we did, and I realized that it would somehow not do justice to my experience with him to ask that question – even to ask it in a less aggressive way. Sometimes, we have to trust people, trust them deeply.

I have always had times when I stumbled in this regard, not trusting those who deserve that trust. But then I also do get up and run forward to trust again.  We do so often come through for each other, really. Once again, I am thinking about what my friend Dan always says; “Try for everything – make others tell you no.”  This advice has served me well.  I recommend it with all my heart.

From September to December this year, I will be a teacher teaching a composition course on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings. We will talk about literature and the writing process and why these efforts matter.