Thursday, September 20, 2012

Snow globe

While I was up in Ely for two nights I slept quite well. Home for two nights and just getting my usual three hour stretches. Aside from the cats, the difference is the absolute blackness of the north woods, so dark, and the street and security light pollution that I thought I've learned to live with. Time to do some serious shopping for blackout curtains.

So many thoughts swirling around me as I lay there trying to fall back asleep. It was almost like being in a snow globe with partial essays falling down like glitter. What to write about? Spirit cards? Breaking the rules? Hibbing? Driving? Anniversaries? Politics? Indignation? Gratitude? Helplessness? Art? Literature? Friendship? Diabetes? Diet? Television? Electronics? Electricity? My daughters? Compassion? They are all interesting to me. And as my sister once pointed out to me in a card she sent, "Everybody is entitled to my opinion."

One thing that is getting my goat and I can't seem to let go of is taxes. My dad used to say he never minded paying taxes because it meant he was working and making an income. In 2010 I was fifty-eight years old and unemployed. I had to withdraw ten thousand dollars from an IRA to get by until I got a job. The penalty was about thirty percent or a little above three thousand dollars. Those are the rules of retirement accounts and there was no getting around it. What killed me was having to withdraw another three thousand to pay the taxes.

Then I find out that the Romney's were able to deduct $77,000.00, yes, seventy-seven thousand dollars, approximately twenty-five times the amount I was taxed on a measly ten thousand, for a horse.  Mrs Romney has MS and riding a horse is good therapy. Not taking Old Brownie from the livery stables for a ride, no these are the expenses for maintaining an Olympic calibre dressage horse. I have a friend with MS and she is having a terrible time getting approved for physical therapy. Not only is dressage an "alternative" therapy, they are able to deduct it on their taxes.

My last boss said I did not think rules applied to me. Oh yeah, they apply. But why don't those same rules apply to the privileged? Now, now, Carol... the rules for early withdrawal of funds from an IRA is not the same as a legitimate medical expense such as training fees for a thoroughbred horse used for therapy. And then, this arrogant man has the nerve to insult me. I am the 99% and I am the 47% and I am angry. How can I insult him in public the way he has insulted me? (Yeah, that would show him!)

I try to live my life by the Golden Rule. I want to treat others as I want to be treated and just can't wrap my mind around mean-spiritedness. I remember asking one of my little girls where she learned to be selfish? She didn't get it from her father or me. (Of course she was only five or so and outgrew it and is now a fine, generous, human being.) Driving home from Ely on back roads I was struck with the emptiness of the land. It was very green with Simpson's type of fluffy white clouds on a blue sky. Why do people have to live in shanty towns all over the world when there is so much abundance here? But what would they do here? Damned if I know. I drove through Hibbing, MN, Bob Dylan's home town and saw why he would want to leave at the first available minute. So truly, I have no answers. 

The glitter has settled, the globe is almost still. Those other thoughts will have to wait for another day. 



Friday, September 14, 2012

And Everything Is Going Fine

Last night I watched a posthumous production about Spaulding Gray called And Everything is Going Fine. I truly loved watching bits and pieces of his filmed monologues that covered several decades. I saw a man with a unique talent for storytelling that combined, laughter, pathos and charm. He'd suffered a terrible car accident and while physically improving, had gotten more and more depressed. He disappeared two months before they found his body floating near Brooklyn. They think he jumped off a Staten Island Ferry. I just looked up his obituary from 2004 and this sentence struck home for me. "In a 1980 show, Mr. Gray spoke a line that may well have summed up his life and career. ''It's very hard for me,'' he said, ''not to tell everybody everything.''

That is true for me, too. I remember taking the girls to an event where we sat with another family. The mother and I got to talking and one of the other children said her mother had to talk to everybody. My girls agreed that their mother did that too. The consensus among the children was that we were odd. The mother and I had a fine old conversation. If I could remember whole conversations the way Spaulding Gray did, or make up new ones like Garrison Keillor, I would be a story teller. There are some very funny (and off color) anecdotes about my folks in their older, uncensored years that would make a great stand up act. But I will never do it. I like telling stories though. I like working through the physical details and coming out the other side to what I think it means. What do I need to learn and can I share it with others? That is why I blog.

I like people and I like learning about them and seeing how they work. Even people I have known for years can surprise me. I think I first went to S.R. Harris Fabric Outlet about fifteen or twenty years ago. I bought polar fleece for throws that I was making for Christmas presents for daughters, niece and five nephews. This was before I learned about cutting fringe and I actually blanket stitched around all of them. I did it in August while the girls were at camp and endured the summer heat and having my lap covered with fleece while I worked. No air-conditioning, of course. The owner of the warehouse was a real pill, crabby all the time. I used to avoid him if possible. Today he was jolly, making jokes and the life of the party, so to speak. I introduced him as the owner to the friend I was with and he said, "Not any longer!" He had given the business to his son, who frankly looked a bit haggard. Just not being responsible for those millions of yards of fabric had freed him to be the nice guy he wanted to be. Amazing.

Also amazing was my friend. She needed to recover some couch cushions, had brought a swatch from her sofa and found her fabric in about ten minutes. I could not believe it! This place has thousands of rolls of upholstery fabric, to say nothing of every other kind of cloth, leather, fake fur, fleece, you name it, they have it, piled high to the ceiling. I wanted her to look at all the options and she did spend another while looking but when it came down to it, the oatmeal colored ultra suede was her choice, and at $8.49 per yard a real steal. My usual mode of shopping at S.R. Harris is to walk around and get overwhelmed and leave. But she was one pointed, knew what she wanted and would not be moved.

How can one look at a garden and say one flower is more beautiful than another? How could I look at silk and not want it all? I started thinking scarves for presents, no, I'd go into business and become the hand made silk scarf queen! Then I saw an exquisite sheer silk with little clusters of french knot embroidery. I looked at that roll and saw every few inches a cluster of the knots, all done perfectly, and all done by hand. Then I saw the same pattern in a celadon green with matching embroidery. The next roll was yards and yards of tiny french knots running across in rippling stripes. I turned it over to see how it was done and my heart nearly broke. Could you imagine the woman who sewed each perfect knot in a never ending task? I could almost feel the toughness of her calloused fingers as she plied her needle for hours. I could almost feel her back aching. That silk was marked $40. a yard. It was on sale at half that. How much did she make for all that work? It wasn't the price of a retail yard I am sure. I mentioned how upset seeing that beautiful fabric made me and someone more prosaic said that at least that person had work to feed her family. I hope she does make enough to take care of her family and that they aren't in want.

Getting back to telling everything, I had a long conversation with one of my daughters this evening. We were talking about facebook and the implications of social media. She warned me about checking my privacy settings, etc., which I have done. The other point she made is that in some states employers will not only check what you have posted, they will also ask for the password to your facebook account. I am an open book and don't really care if people can see what I have posted, but if it came to that, I would erase my account and refuse to work for that employer. I believe in the right to privacy, even if I am open about my life. If I was a candidate and asked to talk about religion or sex or anything I don't feel has an impact on the office, I would tell them that I have the right to privacy. When they asked Bill Clinton about Monica Lewinsky he should have asked them why they needed to know. When they ask President Obama about his religious views he should tell them that it is private.  Mitt Romney is invoking his right to privacy in not releasing his tax returns. Of course that pisses me off because that does have an impact on how he would govern. Am I a hypocrite? I don't think so, if he shows me his... I'll show him mine. A fun time would be had by all.


Saturday, September 8, 2012

Tea bagged, ugh.

Today I made nicey-nicey to an unpleasant woman at work. I've worked alongside her on occasion since January and she has never been very friendly. But you know me... always willing to try again. This morning I told her my daughter was having a baby in March and that I was really looking forward to it. Instead of saying congratulations, or asking if we knew the gender, she asked if she was married. Four years, I told her. She then went on a rant about "family values" and morality, that marriage is between one man and one woman and she even had a bumper sticker that said that. I asked if she opposed civil unions and she got real nasty about what people did in the sight of God. I tried to tell her I have a bumper sticker, too. She did not want to hear what I had to say and stormed off in a huff. I wrote her a note that said my bumper sticker reads: God Bless The Whole World, No Exceptions.

Blech, I felt icky. I wanted to brush my teeth and went to the ladies room to calm down. When I got back to my kiosk there was my note, returned in a pamphlet. It was a copy of the United States Constitution. The sticker on the back showed it was from the Tea Party.

Lots of things went through my mind. Freedom of speech, mine as well as hers. Freedom of and from religion. Separation of church and state. And hubris, bloody, bloody hubris. I am even willing to grant that she has a right to believe God wrote out what she should do and I am even willing to believe it is true... for her. But her rights stop at her life. She can espouse what she believes God thinks of the way she is living, but can't begin to tell me what God thinks of the way anyone else is living.

There are so many people in this world living moral lives. Some follow a religion and religious leader, some muddle through on their own interpretation of the Golden Rule. Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. There is a quotation about the Devil citing scripture.  To me it means anyone can take anything out of context and make it suit their arguments. I am not a Biblical, Talmudic, or any other scripture scholar. But I know what feels right to me and it isn't exclusion.

In the Old Testament we are taught to be stewards of the land and treat workers with dignity. We are taught laws for living a moral life. In the New Testament we are taught that God is love, Jesus reminds us that we are meant to take care of each other, to go into our closet to pray, and many things are done in his name that he does not acknowledge. We are told to take the log out of our own eye before pointing out the mote in someone else. Paul of Tarsus reminds us that it doesn't matter what we say if there is no charity and love behind it.

I don't pretend I know the answers for everyone. I know that I must allow others their own opinion even if it is noxious and unfathomable to me. I know I have to make the effort to understand and accept people in any stage of their evolution.   I don't say what God sees or thinks because my mind is finite and the Creator is infinite. I can only lead by example and that takes me to task. Am I judging the morality and outrage of the Tea Baggers by the same standards I want to be judged? The answer is yes. I want to be judged as kind and helpful and doing what I can to improve the space around me.

God Bless the Whole World, No Exceptions. (Even unpleasant people? Yes!)

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Searching for the corpse

On Labor Day a mouse was seen on the glass and screened porch of the condo. The cats were quite interested but I shut them in and opened a screen door for little mousy to escape. Later I closed the screen and let the cats out onto the porch. I said I thought it had gone and besides it couldn't get over the tall step on the sliding glass doors. Both John and Eri said it could. I'm not sure where it went to hide but last night, as I sat on the bed to change clothes I saw it limp into the bathroom with Little Mister and Piper following. They weren't exactly chasing it, more like having an adventure, a scavenger hunt, if you will. What to do?

As a child I lived on the eighth floor of a well-built concrete building. All I needed was to see one tiny mouse in the hallway to give me the heebie jeebies every time I had to walk to the incinerator chute for years and years. On another note, our quarter mile square development did not allow dogs and we would run, screaming "rabies" anytime we saw a stray or lost dog. And if it were to approach us we would run away as fast as we could. These days I truly think you could keep a goat there and if it helped keep the grass in shape management would allow it.

As a younger woman, I remember calling my husband to breathlessly tell him in detail about the mouse playing hide and seek amongst the shoes by the door. I needed shoes to run away, but the mouse was there. What a quandary. I finally signed off when I realized it was voicemail and I wasn't talking to anyone. Eventually my walking partner came over and rescued me but my husband kept that voicemail for months to enjoy a good laugh. And my older daughter still reminds me of the time she had to dispose of a dead mouse I found under a phone book.  Over the years I taught myself not to look at the little half digested corpses the cats would leave behind. The big man could deal with it.

The first thing I did last night was to turn off the lights to hallway and bathroom and then close the door and sliding glass window in my room. I did have compassion for little mousy but it wasn't enough to save him or her. (Why do I always think of mice as he?) He really wasn't frightening on the porch or leading the parade, actually kind of cute. I put the fan on high and went to bed and made sure to put on slippers this morning before opening the door.

Where is the corpse? Where is the mutilated little body? Where is a live mouse hiding? O mouse, where art thou? There are chairs with skirts and a platform bed and all kinds of bags and piles of stuff to hide under. And yet I am calm. Really I am. If the mouse happens to run across my foot while I am writing...  all bets are off. As it stands there are only three options; it is dead and I will eventually find a corpse, or it found it's way out, or it is hiding somewhere and the cats will sniff him out. There is a fourth alternative, but it is so wacky I know there is a million to one chances it will never happen. That is if a brave person comes over searches all the nooks and crannies and finds the beastie for me. I can pay you in juicy, delicious, watermelon.

Sometimes I do miss being married. This is one of those times. (I am woman, hear me bleat.)