I am a Bad God

It's a scandal--our yard.  It's clear we're not good at this--this edge-of-country life.  The fence line has grown up in willy-nilly volunteer trees--weedy Hackberry, undisciplined Locust and the sneakiest weed of the tree family--Maple with it's baby-haired pistils raining "helicopter" seeds that sprout in the gutters, weighing them near a breaking point.  I don't mind....much.  I am an Émigré to the green.

This is a semi-country life is somewhere between "All Creatures Great and Small" and "Winter's Bone"--neither simply idyllic nor only brutal but, somehow, both.


Through my view to the west I see an expanse of green that backs up to the 600 sq. foot domicile of my next door neighbor to the East, Mrs. Beal.  On the East side of the house, 1/2 acre of woods buffer between our driveway and our "next door" neighbors.  Strewn about beneath that tangled canopy of sycamore and hickory draped heavy with wild grape vines--thick as a carpenter's arm-- are old car parts, empty cans, even a bathroom mirror and a rusted remnant of long forlorn vehicle.

Warren is my neighbor to the back--across a steep ravine valley--and owner of the creek and cows that meander at the bottom of my "back yard."  He says the kids with little to eat once gobbled the onion-like Ramp plant; its aroma permeated the children's bodies so pungently that the schools tried to prohibit Ramp eating.  Now Ramps are a delicacy in East Coast Nouveau Cuisine. In our valley today, it's Ramp Creek that's flooded and whooshing with the sound of distant applause, swollen with rains that topped off and left sloshing my garden pond. The frogs and goldfish nudge curiously at new contours.

I am a Bad God.

I create the world and it languishes—so loved ,

yet so rampant,  overblown.  The bees in the Comfrey

startle me—swarming and furious in their work.

Even waters befuddle:  How much muck is good—

sheltering the tadpoles, lending humus

to the water lily?   How much is dreck—

forcing fish from depths to sun scald, tannins toughing

silken pools to murked burlap?

As a gardener I may be a bad god, but, as a resident,  I am a refugee. Landscapes are languages we live in--their features become articulations of our psyches...or do our psyches become articulations of our landscapes?  I fled the insistent debate and clipped diction of city life and now I am mouthing my way into my version of heaven.  A patois of greens--emerald to chartreuse, khaki to olive to lime--splay across my living room view. Still parched for this even after 18 years,  I gulp in the vision:  Tight furls of fern nestle among last autumn's fallen gold and the Redbuds blink fuchsia through verdant tangles of verging wild raspberry.  Ivory Dogwood's petal heart shaped hands open to misted air. Goldfish flicker and glint in the cool pond depths while the scarlet of the Cardinal startles out from the fence brush.  Jorge Luis Borges once told me that he preferred English to his native tongue: "There are so many more words," he marveled wistfully, "so many more choices because of all the conquerors, conquests and immigrants it has adopted."

The language of this land is my retreat, my hospital, my home. After failing abysmally to grow anything in the ruin of city soil, over-shaded by ancient mulberries and mined with the detritus of a century's worth of peeled paint, cinders, broken glass and household pourings, here I am an overwhelmed amateur in a buoyant garden nearly overrun by gangling woods.

I don’t weed well;  I prune even worse. 

Raspberry threatens renegade action, Maple

seedlings are insurgent, even the butterfly bush 

becomes woody and indelicate.

My neighbors were flabbergasted when I took down a perfectly good chain link fence that stretched across the front yard.  Their notion of tidy is a bit slash and burn, which--I admit--might improve my odds against immanent honeysuckle takeover.  They've been amused by my Tibetan prayer flags, too--one young teen even asking if they were some sort of new Nascar thing or what?

Across the street Manny's girlfriend before last, the second (or was it third?) one after his wife left, asked shyly about my sunflowers. She looked a bit startled when I said they were volunteers sprouting from the fallen seed from the bird feeder.  The next spring they had a few out front as well and I felt an oddly worried pleasure--did I start something?  And, if so, what? 

Is it cruel to feed the chickadee and goldfinch?

 For the hawk shadow thrills me--above

like a benediction

before the kill.   

I have two garden ponds.  The first I put in simultaneously along with digging up two-thirds of the 25 foot wide x 200 foot long front swath of yard.  My second husband--a new resident of the house--called it Mom's Folly.  It was a seething mud-pit for over a month until I could haul in pea gravel for paths, gather the humus to sculpt mounds for planting (unamended soil is so clay-laden we can make pots of it). It looked pretty tidy, nearly British, for that first year.

Now the paths have been overtaken by an array of greenery and the gardened part is a riot of surprise perennials, the encroaching sprawl of Rose-of-Sharon, other invasive. That's probably when I crossed the good ol' girl line in the neighbors' view, when I dug holes in the ground, lined them with rubber, water and goldfish and let the rest of it go pretty much the way it wants. It appears that holding back the wilderness takes a level of force I'm not skilled at or keen on--chainsaws, burnings, chemicals.  We don't even rake.  

The glaciers forgot or could not defeat the trunk

of bedrock beneath this local land.  Elsewhere--

rolling fields east and west, loose black soil north;

fertility beckoned and, like the aboriginal

of every invaded land, the trees fell quickly

and forever,  Corn and soybean geometried

sheared lands.  Not here.

The benefit of my land management pacifism is that we are surrounded by creatures--Red-wing and Cooper's hawks drift in the updraft, goldfinch, chickadee, nuthatch and titmouse flash from feeder to bush to branch.  Deer meander through now and again along with raccoon, wild turkey, fox, rabbit, coyote. There are pairs of cardinals, robins, and mourning doves I swear I recognize along with the summer hummingbirds with their scarlet neckerchiefs, musketeer dueling amongst throaty blooms.

Don’t get me wrong; I know all this nature will kill me.  The hawks picked off my chickens one by one and the coyotes snatched my neighbor Huck’s prize rabbits, angering him enough that he learned a coyote call.  One night he drove up and down the road, unworldly warbles emanating from his truck, a rifle in his lap. My home will disintegrate soon if we don’t root out the damp, cut disruptive roof-line lilac, bolster the tilted retaining wall.  As natural as is spring profusion so is the inevitability of decay.  Rust never sleeps.

Here the horizon heaves with Paw-Paw, Black Walnut,

Hickory, Persimmon, Wild grape snaking through it all--

the Celtic knot upon the letter of the limb.  Across each

acre, ravines and rock surprise us, resist us.  Here

we scrabble for a living.  The land does not easily yield.

Nevertheless as an immigrant, an asylum-seeker--I am a nature patriot.  When I first moved here, I would wander into the woods and perch on a rock for hours.  Even with the junkyard remnant in sight, I would marvel.  I was a woman rescued from a desert trek that had collapsed, parched and dying.  In the middle of Indy, both of my young children gasped, dependent on the the asthma nebulizers to keep their airways open. We had a bullet hole in our ceiling and even my Impatiens died from lack of light in the shadows of close-set houses.

We were "urban camping" as my husband put it--and that meant waking up to drunks on the porch on Sunday mornings and possums sneaking through the unsound roofing, along with soot-stained rain. I'm not sure when or how I came to a decision point to move away, but when I did it felt like an act of will and it took everyone in our lives helping us to move from city chaos to country chaos.  But now here, I'm not sure if I'll ever belong...or should.

The Reverend Billy Talen street activist and teacher from The Church of After Shopping says this about the "wilderness" and the Western European conquest of it: Our "gods" were...

"...supposed to defeat Appalachia, and the Ohio Valley after that, and the Mississippi and the Great Plains and Rockies and the Golden State and the Moon, but the Promised Land receded into the distance like a white whale the size of pixel. The pillar of fire that was supposed to get us home – the GPS was on the fritz. And then our Eden caught us from behind. It turned out to our surprise that the Promised Land was never in front of us. The Promised Land caught us from behind because it was an inside job, the seeds and eggs and screaming birds. There is an Eden inside us, and we know there is."

When I first moved to Sanders, my neighbor through the west wood was a mother of triplets, daughter of the farmer behind us.  This edge of country living had long lost any appeal for her; she dreamed of quick trips to the grocery and houses with no hidden wildlife scurrying in the eaves.  We would take walks up and down the road and over to her father's farm, attempting to trim our shape, share book reading lists and commiserate on child-rearing.  We could sympathize in so many ways except how we felt about living here on our road.  As a native--born in a house that didn't have running water 'til later, trudging to the local school full of ramp-scented country-kids--she seemed tired, longing. And me?  I was smitten.   


Even so, I love

it all with the eye of a mother who

only sees the original child, 

with the heart of a lover who only  knows

that she loves, not how to, or why.

My neighbor did move into town and I'm still here, years later. Ambivalently fluent in country, she quickly acquired the syllables of a small city life. Ambivalently fluent in city, I still clumsily cobble together my pidgen translation of these woods, despite their cavalier treatment of my yard. Right now, night has misted in, mercifully blurring my homesteading neglect, allowing cool breath through the windows. Peepers have begun to trill, their waltzing vibrato punctuated with the banjo bwonk of bullfrog and the occasional shusssh of late home-comer's tires on rain soaked road.  Perhaps I'll never be good at this--always speaking country with an accent--but for now, I'll revel in this Promised Land's creole sounds within me,  "belonging" in my own temporary way.

There is still some mystery here:

the peculiar moaning of the wind, even

on a still night, the yipping of coyotes

said to appear in ghostly gatherings

silhouetted against the neighbor’s open

field.

This rock is rooted to a time when only

the wind evolved and coyotes were just a dream within

the wind’s dark eyes and we were but a phantasm,

a haunting beyond even the wind’s imagination.

 Photos by Mark Beebe



"I am a Bad God" and "Bloomington, Indiana--Thanksgiving Night" by Julia Heimer Dadds
Reverend Billy's Easter Sermon: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/note.php?note_id=10150171825821912  uploaded April 24, 2011
                                                                                                                

Pass/words

SHIBBOLETH

One didn't know the name of Tarzan's monkey.
Another couldn't strip the cellophane
From a G.I.'s pack of cigarettes.

By such minutiae were the infiltrators detected.

By the second week of battle
We'd become obsessed with trivia.
At a sentry point, at midnight, in the rain,
An ignorance of baseball could be lethal.


The morning of the first snowfall,
I was shaving, Staring into a mirror nailed to a tree,
Intoning the Christian names of the Andrews Sisters.
"Maxine, Laverne, Patty."
                                      Michael Donaghy, Poetry*

"Pass" is an interesting word--it's extraordinarily versatile.  One might say that the word "pass" is passing strange (a fun yet archaic phraseology).  I can pass as in a lane, I can pass on having some of that haggis (thanks but no thanks), pass a class, a kidney stone, muster.  I can complete or dodge a pass, as well pass by, through, over, around. I can pass away.

In a racialized world there are people who pass for being of a "race" that might otherwise not be assigned to them. The use of that meaning of "passing" is commonly associated with African Americans describing folks passing as white and is documented in 1935. It originates in use as in "pass oneself off as" in 1809. In other words, when we pass as we internalize a movement through and around our identity in order to project something altered and outwards as our identity. Concerns around these notions of "passing" was especially acute in 19th century New Orleans, where the extraordinary confluence of cultures and colors produced such human variety in appearance that it altered the racial vocabulary throughout the nation and the era.

Sometimes at the gate we must offer a "password."  But once we pass and enter daily life,  there is the shibboleth--the test of pronunciation that gives lie to one's belonging or estrangement.  In the biblical passage the pronunciation of the the word "shibboleth"*** by refugees from a war was the marker of belonging; know it and live, mispronounce and die.  In old New Orleans the shibboleths had names like "octaroon" to denote degrees of racial complexity (and expected accompanying social behavior)and gens de couleur libres, free from the start and rendering moot the simplistic shibboleth of skin tones adding layered challenges of historical and linguistic interplay.  In old New Orleans one wanted to speak with an accent, be fluent in French. 

These ideas--passing for, passing through-- checked me when I recently visited the city of New Orleans.  In order to make the most of that visit I felt I needed to remember how I carried myself in a former life living in downtown Indianapolis.  I needed to pass for/as (at least) a street-wise visitor, someone not worth messing with as I wended my way through a French Quarter festival.

As my city ways came back to me, I reflected on my fear of the city as a kind of "stuck-up-ness"--an estrangement tinged with judgment. The term "siddity" surfaced--a term taught to me by the elder African American women I worked with when I lived in downtown Indy.  These women were old enough that many remembered crossing the Mason-Dixon line with family to find work during the Depression and World War II.  

These women knew the siddity--folks who denied their past and put on airs, viewing as lesser the very people who helped them get their new positions in life. Someone who's siddity is nervous about remembering where she comes from, tries to claim belonging in world she's moving to not from.  Siddity-ness claims this displaced belonging in a way that renders that already impossible belonging even more impossible. The siddity are "faking it." This leaves the siddity people without belonging. Labeling someone siddity carries its own smugness, as well, being breezy in its tone of knowing that the siddity ones lose what is most precious--belonging anywhere--in the end.

As a white gal, I might have no business looking for the siddity in me; there's no belonging for me in the lexicon of African-American social life.  But this white gal found it useful to learn what I could from a new world of racial awareness.  I was dropped into the midst of a racialized high-school when I was 16. (That I could make it to 16 without a lived racial awareness points to my white privilege.)  This once near-suburban school in Indy had recently been white-flighted into a majority black population.** And I had just moved there from another city. The layers of reaction/interaction, denial and disavowal around this population shift were confusing and fascinating. Besides learning not to "cut my eyes" at anyone (looking too long or closely), I also learned to listen to the unique languages around me; my inner poet was inspired by the sly lexicons and spoken rhythms of my African American schoolmates.

I don't remember hearing the old fashioned word "siddity" until working with the elders. I was a stranger in their strange land, too--a young white mother working with grand-parent-aged African American women and men. So they patiently explained things to me, like siddity, jazz and gospel music, and how to get by in hard times (the little, really important things).

They taught me that it was considered rude to pass by a black person on the street without making eye contact and saying "Hi.  How are you?"  That was a revelation.  The white practice of a curt nod, or even aversion of the eyes--essentially what's considered polite distance in the white city world--is, or at least was (I've been small town/rural for a while here), considered cold and stand-offish in the black city world.  The office manager once explained it to me:  If you're black--even if you're different from one another in many ways--you share the way the white world treats you because of your skin tone; you recognize a related, even familial-flavored humanity in one another...in a world that otherwise won't. 

As the poem above notes, in times and places of heightened hostility, knowing the right words, the nuanced signal, might keep you alive. "The devil is in the details:"  Our signaling of threat, of dominance or privilege, rests in the gesture, the eyes, the cant of the body; these are the signals that get us through the checkpoint.   Indeed, with a new awareness of how the others might prefer to be addressed on city streets, I travelled through Indy, D.C., New York and Boston, with a different eye to and a different greeting for the people around me.  But our belonging is carried in the details--the pronunciation, knowledge of baseball, musicians and singers--these are the things that allow us to settle in, cleared of deadly label "infiltrator." 

There are plenty of "wanna-bes" (wanna belong) for black culture and other cultures, as well; but, unlike wannabes,  infiltrators refuse to recognize that their belonging is born of hospitality. No, the infiltrator is pretending, is trying to pass, without having lived the belonging. The infiltrator tries to appropriate the language and the music of the language, both, without so much as a "thank you." How much of our life is now infiltrated?  These day the market seems to appropriate any and all cultural gifts to sell us back our belonging.  Rappers--just recently the outsiders raging against the machine, cleverly sampling the past and spinning it on its head--now provide the soundtrack for car commercials.   

We think in generalities, but we live in detail.

(Alfred North Whitehead)

Our belonging lives in how we roll our "r," the elongation of "ah," the how-to's of the minutiae--how to pour the tea, offer bread, unwrap the smokes.  That our belonging rests in such knowledges is dangerous if they become life/death shibboleths--for how can we ever master all the details, know the names of all the icons?  And which gesture, pronunciation, knowledge is the one to know? There are shadings and details as multiple as individuals.  We traverse through belongings, fluid and nomadic "selves" absorbed to greater and lesser degrees, into the various fabrics of daily life. Today we may pass as American, or Latina, big-city or rural resident; tomorrow's checkpoint may find us suspicious. 

The poet above knows finally, as he looks into a cold mirror, that even he is an infiltrator at some level, needing to practice, in the ultimate alienation of war, the most mundane of details so that he might pass, pass through this impossible test of belonging. As I walked  through a strange city--my head full of memories, my feet moving toward new belongings--I knew in my heart how temporary "I" am--defined and outlined by my accent and skin tone, my carriage, my clothing, my breasts, my stride.  Some day I may not speak in the right way at the right moment and then where will I belong?  Will my very life be forfeit?

Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.              (Bertrand Russell)

So we do this, we aspire to pass if it gains us a life (as it does for the defeated or the oppressed, besieged or bereft, the seeker and the beginner) and we seek to root out the infiltrator (and yet, we are infiltrated most insidiously by structures and economies), even while knowing we might ourselves fail in the belonging someday.  Do we gain a better belonging in not allowing the refugee in?  Is passing such a sin?  When does passing betray our past life and peoples and when is it simply the seeking of a new life in the name of having life at all?  A password is a secret word to get us in somewhere we might otherwise be locked out from.  It overrides our surface appearance, the perceptions of the gatekeeper, confirms our belonging through an agreement of shared knowledge.  But the shibboleth, the shibboleth will catch us out once we are nearly inside. The shibboleth is the stare at our accent or dress, how we address our child, wear our hair. "So cool" coos the rural white girl serving the ice cream to my son's African American/multi-racial girlfriend. She grimaces when we get to the car, "It's just so...I don't know...Why always about my hair?" "It's really about your skin?" I venture.  "Yeah," is the quiet reply.

Like the warrior poet in the mirror, we know that the shibboleth does not serve us, does not serve our life in the long run. It points to the sweetness of belonging--the cadences of particularity but uses them to exclude, even to kill.  If we realize belonging, at best, is shifting and temporary, could we begin to recognize the refugee, the newcomer-- even those "passing"-- in ourselves?   In the long run,  I think we are all refugees, immigrants and strangers, learning to pass... and our checkpoint is on the nearing horizon. 

Pictures:

"checkpoint charlie by night" from the old Berlin Wall site, by open mindedly

"Wheat near Nemrut" Ferrel Jenkins 

The Unilever Series: Doris Salcedo

Shibboleth

Tate Modern, Terbine Hall

9 October 2007 – 6 April 2008

photo Suzy Bower (http://suzybower.wordpress.com/tag/shibboleth/

 

*Vol. 152, No. 6 (Sep., 1988), p. 342 Published by: Poetry Foundation

Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20601768

**I mix my term usage because "black" was the preferred term at the time I gained racial awareness. Because I was initiated into my lived racial understandings when the term "black" was the empowering label, it feels more "true" or respectful to me to use that term. However,  I agree that African-American is more accurate and appropriate (unless Haitian or Caribbean-American, of course) even while ultimately finding racial labeling problematic, however necessary at times.

***the actual meaning of the word "shibboleth" is the head of a grass that contains the multiple seeds, a head of grain.   There is some irony in this, I think, given the deep meanings of grain, of bread, and the life-sustaining pluralism of the seed head.

  

Shibboleths of City Siddity

The last waftings of New Orleans are drifting off my psyche leaving stranges traces: I visited somewhere entirely unfamiliar and, through that, my own past.

I was anxious about visiting-- felt I was a stranger entering a strange land, attending a huge conference in a big and culturally unfamiliar city.  The first night there I went for a walk to remember my big city ways.  I moved to my current semi-rural home from the middle, and I do mean the middle, of Indianapolis, so I once had city-wise ways.  

Each city has it's own flavor and NOLA has perhaps been both romanticized and demystified in uniquely striking ways.  That is a different topic. I had fears. Uniquely bad things can happen swiftly and sometimes invisibly in cities. When I lived in Indy, there were gangs on the hoof not far from my house and skirting clumps of young men could be a skill and a gamble. Crowded, tourist-laden streets are important to local economies that operate both on the surface and, more ominously, beneath it. And a woman alone is always aware of a special vulnerability.  Suffice it to say that there must be something intriguing there because I left with a sense of its livability, even though everything in me wanted to say "no! never!"

But was my fear somehow born from a place of privilege, an lens of outsider assumption? African American's have a word for this attitude of false superiority--siddity. One of the layers of meaning in that term, is that siddity folk come from the same place but act like they don't.  I was once a city gal, walking down borderland streets and yet here,  I was literally on the border of the French Quarter and did not venture into it until my 2nd day there. When a colleague posted pictures of his forays on Facebook,  I noted that I hadn't even visited and he offered to walk me into that world.  It was lovely.  The world of the Quarter itself (in festival mode) was, yes,  full of--as a cabbie put it later--the 3 P's (pourings, piss, puke)--all of which were disgustingly aromatic and ubiquitous, but the waft of music was masterful and the art--everywhere.  My guide and I wandered through, getting acquainted, keeping time to blues, admiring architectural tableaus.  We found an Edward Hopperian diner serving plain ol' breakfast and savored cool air, hot coffee, new friendship.

That small stroll gave me the gumption to wade through the festival and then across a quieter swath of old neighborhoods to attend a crawfish boil the next evening.  Again, as a solo woman, I set a certain pace, wove through the crowd with assurance and then strolled with a purposeful step through the quiet back streets.  My walk of two miles across the French Quarter left me with a nostalgia for the architecture of past centuries, surprising me with its ghosts--like muted lullaby strains crooned by a lost grandmother.

I re-experienced how the middle of city can have surprising corners of serenity.  It's the hidden places--the back streets, the alleys and the "empty" lots that are populated with  welcome sunlight, needed shade, shelter from the traffic of vehicle and human.  Strangely sacred spaces emerge in the midst of the most industrial of spots.  Indeed, the spare haiku of empty railroad track, the twilight warehouse stoop, the drowsy rusted scaffold-- feel like chapels in the city's storm.  And Sunday mornings can have an unworldly peace in the middle of an urban center.

When I lived in Indy, I did a backward commute--I drove over 40 miles to an outlying town in a bedroom community and, somewhat ironically, did social work there.  In the course of my work, I sometimes rode with the sheriff's department to accomplish a visit.  One time a deputy exclaimed, upon hearing where I lived, "Do you sleep with a gun under your pillow?!"  I found that comment (and the mindset it revealed) both amusing and insulting. 

Thinking we're better is usually siddity.  And me thinking that the dangers of New Orleans are any worse than the dangers of rural Western Monroe county is just plain siddity once I acclimatize.  A stranger in a strange land is always in danger.  But there are usually more friends than enemies wherever we wander...if we don't get too siddity about it.  The guy selling me pralines in the little shop took the time to commiserate about obnoxious motorcycle sounds and confided his dismay at how they overrode sublime live cello music the day before.  He even shared the name of the cellist when I revealed my love for cello sounds.  We shared a connection about things that matter--traffic, rudeness, cello music.

As my last captain's log entry pointed out, trauma happens in any neighborhood.  Indeed, my job in that pricey outlying suburb was Child Welfare and--contrary to the ridiculous occasional exclamation from the ignorant--YES, the rich and privileged do abuse and neglect their children (They just have better lawyers).  So murder and suicide happen in the lovely rural hills and they happen in crowded city neighborhoods and it's usually all about love and despair in the small world of family and friends.  Despite the hauntings of the drive-by shooting--the worst fear of a lawman anywhere is the "domestic dispute."

I lived in the middle of Indianapolis in a neighborhood bordered by a schizophrenic pathwork of gentrificition and gangs. One night the kids from next door--all six of them--showed up bundled in their winter coats to troupe up our stairs and sit in a silent row on our couch to wait out a particularly violent fight between their mom and her boyfriend. She and I had chattted now and again beacuse her lone boy-child, Jonathon, tended to play with my son. She told me of her struggle to find work, the blessing of her church people, and the wonders of imbibing aloe juice (I suspect she was hoping I'd participate in her fledgling business selling said product).

That mundane pause in our usual passing by perhaps allowed enough human trust for her to send the kids to me for safety in a bad moment. As they sat there, utterly still, politely refusing to take off their coats, I checked with the kids about whether they had been in danger (no), if they ever had been (no) and if they thought I should call the police (no). I didn't.

The police derisively referred to my neighborhood as "the swamp" and tended to treat most of us, even when victimized, as if we were swamp creatures that would be better off devouring each other. Factor in that this family was African American and I just couldn't bring myself to seek such dubious "assistance." One time all the tools, my husband's lifeblood and the source of our income, were stolen from his locked truck. The neighbors behind us said they knew who stole them but were too afraid to say. The police didn't even blink.  That's just the way it was.

So I wonder about Jonathon just as I worry about the children of the suicide couple down the road.  Jonathon is an African American male in a large city in the midwest;  his prospects are not good.  He grew up poor, but churched, loved but a little isolated, handsome, but--to the police--just another black kid running loose on the downtown sidewalks.  I don't even remember his last name or what kind of music he liked.  I do know that, when we went to the movies, he was fearless in the face of Jurrasic Park's Tyrannosaurus Rex.  My son and I had to move to the back of the theater and hide our heads in each other's arms.  Johnathon just sat there, stoic, amused, in the very first row as a monster roared out, in huge 2-D splendor.  3-D adult survival is proving difficult for my 23 year old son, how much less or more so for his old friend?  

The thin line between alienation and privacy wavers indistinct and maddening no matter our environment.  The answer is not evident to me on how to find it, cross it with timely kindness, respect it with dignity. How do I keep the siddity part of me settled down and the down home part of me open to insight and real human connection?  Are there ways for me to listen to the praline guy, to connect with Jonathon, to reach Susie when we nod in passing that will grow my soul, that will allow their souls to grow, too, in that moment of connection? 

Sanders Death Trip part II

"The sky is red, and the world is on fire, and the corn is taller than me

And the dog is tied to a wagon of rain, and the road is wet as the sea
And sometimes the music from a dance will carry across the plains
And the places that I'm dreaming of, do they dream only of me?"


Tom Waits & Kathleen Brennen Waits Whistle Down the Wind


My last post was about a neighborhood tragedy--one where, within months of each other, a mother and a father both killed themselves, leaving two young teens behind.  Like the Wisconsin Death Trip book and movie, the mundane-ness of our surroundings somehow foregrounds the small signals of tragedy. Examples of this heart-rending everyday-ness include her use of the tub to try and keep the disaster tidy and his trip to the nearby lake with his kids and a bag of Long John Silvers fish just 24 hours before those same kids found his body. Something about the domesticity of the tub, the fish 'n chips fast food at the lakeside evokes a pathos that seems unbearable. 

Despite the sensationalism of these losses, I am actually more interested in the surrounding "mundane." The mundane is the opening--the one plain book amongst the others; but when we notice it, when it is touched, the door to a secret passageway swings open, the sharp air of what was hidden in plain sight waking us up. Mundus--the Latin root for mundane--means world. 

The antonyms for mundane (per Merriam-Webster) are "heavenly, non-temportal, unearthly....."  I object. It's not the definition I object to but rather the allusions in how we use it.  When we label something "mundane" it has a whiff of debasement about it, of the rote--that which is not worth deep consideration.  Boring, actually, the mundane is boring--like doing the dishes. Indeed, it is the chore of washing dishes that is presented  in the Merriam-Webster as an illustration of "mundane."  The domestic, as ever, holds sway as the exemplar of what is trite, not allied with spirit (heavenly), entwined with time...Perhaps we are so ambivalent because it is bound to time--ticking us towards our mortality.

For if no one does those dishes, well then, suddenly the world is not quite so mundane, is it?  We get insect problems, critters, perhaps even officials called in to deem a household unfit for habitation.  The daily, mundane chores are the stitches that hold the garment of daily life together.  And the seamstress is so often female.  Take away the mundane and beneath we have crisis.  Is the mundane a mask?  Or is it something more, something holy or heavenly after all? 

I am sorry to say I did not hear about Susie's suicide until just last month, 2 months after the fact.  It created a crisis for me, to know that someone I cared about had taken her life and I didn't even know it.  She and I were nodding neighbors.  We all nod to each other as we drive up and down the street, here.  A wave is best, sometime just a lift of the finger from the steering wheel.  There's a elaborate system of manners about pulling over to let each other through: the road is so narrow that most times two cars simply cannot pass. 

Susie and I talked and plotted at one point to get rumble strips on the two lane main road that drivers--despite vicious twists and turns--seem to view as a highway.  Our children crossed that road to get to their school bus.  And our neighborhood road's juncture with this county road is a blind one--we gamble out lives everytime we pull out. So, we thought maybe folks rushing through needed to be alerted: They might round the corner to a dead stop, a line of kids crossing in front of them like some many ducks in a carnvial game. 
After our successful calls to the county, Susie and I always had a little smile for each other in addition to the nod.  But the "do not disturb" field around her was strong.  I always had a sense that her home life was not sweet.  I glimpsed the kids' father all of about 4 times in 17 years.  Susie did all the yard work, all the transporation, all of the visible child  and pet care. She hung the laundry out to dry year 'round--a raw job in our damp winters.  A gal I knew who lived next to them said he had some crazy ideas--something to do with alien abduction. What I saw from my passing-by was a woman living a suppressed life--a woman not allowed  to say much or do much.  But this is a strong "live and let live" neighborhood..  Like that laundry hung close in the vast wind, our little string of homes line up against open rural space, exaggerating our sense of frontier. So here in Sanders, the careful distance between our lives never seemed that strange.  It's bad manners to pry. Now I wish I had.

Susie's family owned the turn of the century limestone gas/grocery building at the corner of our street.  Though the building is throughly shuttered, the vintage gas pumps are still embedded out front. With the architectural lines of a rum-runner's Buick, these pumps were once artfully rusted to a soft blush of sepia.  One day, a few years ago, they were suddenly painted in bright strips of red, blue and white--some sort of effort to restore them? Perhaps a 9/11 patriotic gesture? Frankly, to me, the effect was hideous.  But such is the aesthetic of Sanders folk.  I never took a poll, but I'm betting I'd lose out in my assessment of improvement/not improvement.

Though I never saw her at it, I've alwasy been certain it was Susie's doing to paint those pumps with present-day paint.  Maybe she wanted to cheer the busstop.  I kind of think that paint represented a claim on time--she was pulling on the thread of the past, a past where her family's patriach was the prinicpal just up the streeet, a past where neighbors talked a bit more, walked a bit more, (probably fought a bit more), stopped by the store for some bread and a pack of smokes.

It's the little details that we dismiss that, in the end, break our hearts--telling the small story of lives:  A sunset echoing anguish, a crumpled fast food bag, the dog held in place by the weight of rain, the music drifting from a place we can't quite reach, ancient gas pumps translated through paint.  We dream our dreams separately. And yet, we all seem to dream.
After the paint job, I kept watching for something else to happen around those pumps, maybe the station doors to get glass on them again.  Flower pots on the steps, maybe. Despite the  impossible reuse regulations, I've always dreamed of it being renewed into a little neighborhood store--coffee for tired neighbors, candy for clamoring kids, gossip gently traded.  Now the house is empty, too. Fallen off the porch are two big pots of mums turned dark brown and lying on the ground, side by side. Something in me sobs at that simple sight and mundanely wonders who bought them and why.  Did she have one last hope of making things nice before the holidays came?  Before she climbed into that plain tub on Christmas eve, pulling the trigger on the year, on time, ending it for once and all?

For a closing, you can give a listen to the song below, closing your eyes to nod  with me one last time to Susie--leaving the husband, the children, the busstop, the laundry, the lot of us....to whistle down the wind.
Tom Waits (click to link to the song)