Again: The Boston Marathon Tragedy

It's that place again. That place where my immediate environment is peaceful and clean and quiet

and something horrible has happened somewhere else. The radio tells me, my computer tells me. Something horrible has happened somewhere else.

There's nothing to cry about in the immediate environment but I am crying and trying not to cry. A child's voice in my head is wailing "I don't want to go!" Some part of me is hysterical -- No no no no no no no -- angry and grief-stricken.

Two crushing dimensions of this moment:  this is familiar. It kills my heart that this kind of horror is familiar to us now. I am listening to the radio, announcers reference 9/11, Oklahoma...  

And the senseless-ness. I crave some logic, some explanation. There is none. It hurts that there is no logical reason for this horror.  My mind reels, my heart hurts. Senseless, familiar horror.

And there's no escape from the pain. It's a crazy thought but I think I wish I didn't know. I wouldn't feel like this if I didn't know.

Letter to a Neighbor

Two tidbits from this day that feel quintessentially "small town" to me.

1

Two days ago, in conversation with an acquaintance who lives here, I mentioned, casually, that I'd recently taken a stroll around the grounds of one of the town's "houses with a name". The house is for sale. I'm not buying a house; just seemed like a good time -- building is unoccupied -- to snoop around.

This morning I received an email from the real estate agent handling the sale, offering to show me the property and letting me know the property is also available for lease.

How did she know my name? How did she get my email address? Small town....

2

I'm on my way out now and will stop at a neighbor's mailbox to post the following note:

Monday, April 08, 2013 

12:50 p

  Dear Neighbor

 My name is Alex Mercedes and I live at _________. We've never met but I am writing to ask your help.
 Since moving here last August, I have found _________ to be a tranquil, comfortable place to live. Although I miss the social interactions among neighbors that I enjoyed in other places, I’m mostly happy with life in our neighborhood.
 There is one little issue:  your dogs. I regularly walk by your house and most of the time, if the dogs are outside, they begin barking wildly when I walk by. I have not complained about the minor inconvenience of this repeated assault or being required to step into the street to pass your house. Usually, the dogs stay near the house and stop barking once I am past.
 Today, however, one of the barking animals actually ran up to me, coming within 3 feet though I was, as usual, walking down the middle of the street. I stomped my feet and yelled and took a few aggressive steps toward him/her and s/he retreated. As I continued toward my home, s/he approached again to within three feet.
 I’m asking your help to stop this annoyance.  If it’s a matter of carrying doggie treats for your animals, please let me know.  I’ll pick some up. If it’s a matter of being introduced to the animals so they no longer feel threatened, please contact me and we’ll arrange a time for me to stop by. If you have other ideas about how we can improve this situation, I am open to suggestions. My contact information appears below.
 Thank you for your attention.
 Ms. Alex Mercedes
Telephone:  2xx-xxxx

 I know:  this could happen anywhere but it feels very small town to me today.

The Grace Matrix

What a wonderful day!

Totally unexpected, a day like this, in Holly Springs.

Usually, if a day begins with an alarm-clock prompt I'm off to an iffy start. I prefer waking up on my own and, most often, an alarm clock means I will spend the day doing something I have to do for money. Today I needed an alarm because I stayed up too late last night (online backgammon...a second addiction...just what I need).

I set it for 8:45 for a 10:00 appointment to hook up with the Preserve Marshall County and Holly Springs group to clean slave quarters in preparation for next week's Pilgrimage and Back of the Big House tours.

I could not get out of bed immediately. A dream had worn me out in the too-few hours of sleep I snatched between 3:30 and 8:45.

I lay there long enough to allow the dream to drain; then I got up and made coffee. Did NOT turn on the computer. I was able to reach full awakeness, remember to pack the rakes and brooms, work gloves and water bottle in the car and be the first one to arrive at Craft House where we were to gather before heading out to finish last Saturday's work at the McCarroll Place before moving to the Magnolia to deal with the quarters there. Nothing here is more than 10 minutes away. It does make commuting easier, wherever you're going. No traffic and short distances.

At Craft House, the kids were finishing breakfast in that eat-a-little-play-a-little way that kids do on Saturday mornings. Amelia is 4 (though she is as tall as many 6-year-old girls I've known); Towns is 2 (also tall). Such dear children. I said "Good morning, children" when I entered the kitchen. Amelia dropped her eyes and hid behind her hair. Towns, a full-on Redhead, stuck out his lip and whipped his head around to look away from me -- and make sure that I witnessed the gesture.

"Say 'good morning' to Miss Alex," Dad instructed. Neither child complied. I was hoping we could move through that apparently obligatory power-play so many parents feel they must make when I meet their children. It's usually well-intentioned and definitely not abusive but it reminds me of my own childhood in a small town, being forced always to perform in public according to adult conventions and etiquette. The world looks and feels so different to children than it does to adults. Whenever possible, I prefer being with them when they're allowed to move through the world at their own pace in harmony with their own rhythm of engagement.

By the time I left 20 minutes later (the other members of our work crew called; they had gone directly to McCarroll's and would not being stopping at Craft House), Amelia and I were chatting and playing with Rainbow -- a little brown-skinned female creature in a pink and purple wheeled vehicle, one in a series of characters named for flavor treats at Hansen's Sno-Bliz in New Orleans. "I love her! She's brown like me!" I said. When I told Amelia how much I loved Hansen's and New Orleans, she directed my attention to the azalea bush outside the kitchen window, dripping in Mardi Gras beads. She'd helped create the display.

Towns is obsessed with pirate stuff and recently had a birthday. He wanted my full attention on a lunchbox-style "treasure chest" he'd received as a gift but he preferred I didn't actually hold the box. When his attention shifted to something else, Amelia retrieved the box and brought it to me -- partly moved by generosity, partly by her big sister sense of proper behavior and partly because she's a little envious of the box and wanted a chance to handle it herself.

Towns also had a book about pirates which included lyrics (but no recording) of a pirate song. I made up a tune on the spot and launched into a pirate-ly performance. Both kids were riveted. When I finished, Mom and Dad were laughing. Dad said, "Alex I have to hand it to you. They didn't ask you to stop singing. They always tell me to stop singing. They only had eyes for you." I responded that among all the children I've ever sung to, I have never heard a child say "Stop singing!" All the kids I've known love singing. Listening to it or singing along. And I love singing with and for kids. They give all of themselves to the experience and express their total enjoyment with none of the self-consciousness that so many adults suffer around making music.

*******

At the McCarroll place, it was just grunt work executed at a a comfortable pace in beautiful weather. Last Saturday we worked in pouring rain. Today I picked up a thousand (exaggeration) beer bottles, two (true) Wal-Mart bags of human feces, 500 (exaggeration) empty Doritos and Fritos bags and a ton (yes, exaggeration) of other kinds of trash scattered about the grounds. Working with a 60-something married couple -- warm, non-proselytizing, hard-working, easy-laughing residents of Holly Springs (!) -- and Chelius & Jenifer, we
made the place ready for next weekend.  As we worked, and during a little break we took before forming a caravan bound for Magnolia, we talked about the mayoral race. It felt good standing in the sun with other people, talking about life in "our" town.

Over at the Magnolia, more work. More talk. F&G own this great pink antebellum home where the film Cookie's Fortune was shot. A church group was touring the mansion while we worked on the adjacent slave quarters. I washed windows and confess they looked great when I finished.

Both last week and today, cleaning up the slave quarters, I felt close to the unknown Africans in America who had lived in the building. Standing on the dirt floor at McCarroll's Place, I pondered who had stood there, perhaps in the same spot, 150 years before I arrived. I thought about how Sojourner Truth never journeyed south of the Mason Dixon line. While one black woman who, like Amelia's toy, maybe looked like me stood in this dirt dealing with her life as a slave, Sojourner  (who also looked like me) was living a very different kind of life. A free woman by her own exertion, traveling and advocating for racial and sexual equality, in song and word. They would have been unaware of each other's existence as particular humans but perhaps aware of each other as passionate notions ...

For the last 20 minutes at Magnolia, more standing in the sun with people who live in "my" town. An uncommon sense of ease. A distinct awareness that we were getting to know one another, an awareness of that as a process, and also awareness of how relaxed and genuine the whole thing felt. F&G have a 7-year-old daughter and want to hire me to give her piano lessons.

I went home to clean up and put the tools back in the shed. Examining the new lawn mower (old-fashioned human-powered style...love it) I noticed a nut was missing its bolt and decided to go to the hardware store to purchase a replacement and then on to Christ Church for some piano time.

I actually entered the store, interacted with the clerk -- including a conversation about the best oil to use on the mower blades, returned to my car, drove to church and played piano for two hours before realizing that my pants were completely split open in the back! I had a vague memory of feeling coolness back there earlier in the day....good grief! Walking around town with my butt hanging out and unaware of it!

Back at home, after mowing the backyard, I dined on the last of a magnificent batch of potato salad I threw together earlier in the week (gave half of it to my neighbors down the way the morning I made it) and listened to Shannon's (McNally) latest CD, "Small Town Talk." I met her for the first time at the meet-and-greet last night and she gave me a copy. Lo and behold! I really like the CD. (You should look for it and get it. She is Holly Springs' claim to fame right now.) And I really like her, too.

So the picture:  homemade potato salad and MS-made music on a Friday night after an alarm-clock-launched day of picking up other people's shit, hanging with kids, playing Debussy well and walking around town with my butt out. And it all adds up to one of the best days ever in this town I've complained about so much. I have no explanation for this. It's just more Grace. Yesterday it came as an explosion of light and sensation; today it's just standing in the sun with neighbors, sweat on my brow. "I once was lost..."

Flooded with Grace

I had two bursts of insight tonight, one of them touching closely on my friendship with C________.  I emailed him that the insights had come like "Literal 'bursts' I felt in my body, in my brain, in my thought stream."

Searching Google Images for something to embed in this post I found this:

Photographer:  Karen Hutton,
Check out her website. I like this artist!
http://www.karenhuttonphotography.com/Pages/About-Karen/21724226_53tHvt

Which I strongly encourage you to "click" on to view it best. And then urge you to follow the link in the caption and check out this artist.

After describing each of the bursts to him, (I won't do a full description here; only say that one of them brought a keen awareness of Grace in my life and provoked a profound and total sense of Gratitude, with an intensity I don't remember ever feeling before.) I closed my message to him:

I want to say

1. Thank you. The grace that suffuses my life manifests also through you: friend, partner, patron, memory-holder. Thank you. You are a blessing unto my life.
2. Whatever we need to talk about, there is space to talk about it. We can be in Light together. Trusting. Giving and receiving. Breathing. Opening opening always ever leaning to a fearless field beyond...

Love

People are near-frantic with hunger for Light in their lives, desperately searching for a way to become who they're supposed to be, seeking "enlightenment."

And often enough
there is no need to keep searching
Grace is here
you have arrived
This is the place and the time
Whether you believe it or not
True believers would say "God is everywhere. Stop looking for Him."

Found this image at http://tippingsacredcow.com/2012/12/attributes-of-god-omnipresence-2/
and found the article attached to it...uh, thought-provoking.

And We're Off

Meet and Greet at The Smiling Phoenix, the soon-to-open coffeehouse, last night to introduce mayoral candidate Kelvin Buck. It was soooo good to get out of the house and drink a little too much wine and hang out peacefully in a room with other humans.

I mingled. I made mental notes. I am not a student of American politics so a lot about political process baffles me. Here's what I have 24 hours later:

• 90% of the conversations, no matter where they started, wound back round to and ended with Race.
• Kelvin summarized the electoral decision as "If you're okay with the way things are in Holly Springs, vote for my opponent. If you're dissatisfied and want a new direction, vote for me." 
• There were two or three "white" people to every "black" person in the room. I learned during the evening that when the candidate took the mic and talked about "all of us working together" it was a euphemism for racial harmony and what he was NOT saying was that race relations in Holly Springs are part of The Problem.
• Finally met Shannon McNally. She provided music for the event. Best part of the night was hanging with her and Jenifer (wife of the husband/wife team that own the coffeehouse), comparing notes about Life in Holly Springs.
• Casual follow-up investigations today on the streets of Holly Springs reveal that some people did not attend last night fearing reprisals by the current administration should Kelvin lose the election.
• A reporter from the local paper dropped by. I was standing near the front door when she came in and watched her walk through the room, stopping three or four times for brief conversation, and leave less than 10 minutes after arriving. There were no other representatives from "the press" in attendance.
• There is support here for launching community theater.

I had the opportunity for a few minutes of one-on-one with Kelvin and asked him during the open Q&A to summarize the three big differences between his vision and that of the current administration. He's a nice man. I would not go so far as to characterize him as the lesser of two evils because, well, he's a nice man. Though I was not impressed or fired up by the vague, generic platform he outlined, I could sorta feel his heart as we talked. I can and will vote for him in May but it's not clear to me that his election will bring about great change here. But it may be change enough to make continued residence here possible for me.

As I listened to his comments and the questions that followed I became aware of how tricky it would be to run for office, here or possibly anywhere in the state. I had the clear sense that if one spoke with too much eloquence or specificity or passion, the community would not "like" them, would view them as alien and likely not vote for them. On the question of Race, for example, there was vigorous applause when he talked about "all of us working together". Likely if he'd been more specific -- talked about, for example, the divide between the college (the president's wife was present but not her husband) and the townspeople or the white-black divide or the segregated schools or severe economic divide -- his remarks would not have been applauded and some folks would have taken offense at such plain spoken truth.

So. You go with what you have sometimes, I guess. I'll trust that, as a native, he knows better than I how much change and how much "telling it like it is" the community will tolerate. 

In Other Words

The following transcript from a conversation I had this morning with a librarian at the public library illustrates why things take so long in the South.

"Can you tell me where the books by William Faulkner are shelved?"

"What?"

 "I want to read some Faulkner. Where are his books shelved?"

"I'm not sure...  Do you want books by William Faulkner or books about William Faulkner?"

"I'd like books by Faulkner. Do you have any?"

"Well, if we do, they're either over there in the section called 'Fiction' under the "F" for Faulkner or else they're over in the Classics Section over there. We have a Youth Classics Section and an Adult Classics Section and if he's over there, and not in the Fiction section, he'll be in the Adult Classics section."

"OK. Thanks."

I found nothing in the Fiction section by Faulkner. In the Adult Classics department I found three books and chose As I Lay Dying. At the checkout desk with the same librarian, I asked:

"Are patrons allowed to renew checked out books?"

"You can renew books. That's okay. You have to come in and renew the book here at the desk or you can call us on the telephone and renew the book over the phone. You can only renew one or two times but you can do it in person here at the desk or you can call us on the telephone and do it that way. If somebody else wants to use the book, though, or if it's a new book or something like that, then you might not be able to renew it. It just depends if it's new or somebody is waiting to read it. You can just ask us and we'll check to see if somebody else wants it and then you can't renew. But if nobody else wants it, then it's okay. You can renew it again.

"OK. Thanks." 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Was It Good for You?

The news media watch economic indicators closely. Dow Jones. NASDAQ. S&P 500. Jobless claims. Trading futures. With no money to speak of and slim possibility of that status changing, these indicators are not hugely interesting to me. These reports mean more to people with money -- or those who aspire to having money...or those for whom money ranks high on the list of Quality of Life indicators. Money moves like a moody, big-footed, many-legged shaggy beast on the planet. It's not easy or simple to track it's movements. Good thing there are some smart people dedicated to the task -- for those who care a lot about money.

The Quality of Life indicators I observe (but feel inadequate to track) most closely have to do with how us common folk interact, our decision-making (and other) thought processes and, especially, how we resolve interpersonal conflicts.

Tests results over the last 30 years suggest I am an "introvert". I wonder how early in life such an orientation is developed. (I also wonder about the flexibility of the orientation; I take the tests every few years, just to see if I'm changing.) For certain, I was a shy child with a complex, active inner life. My mind was full of questions. I fell asleep wondering what animals dreamed about.

My mother worked full-time training me away from shyness and introversion. She stressed the importance of what other people think of me. Change of underwear was critical in case some accident landed me in an emergency room where, apparently, medical personnel would judge me harshly otherwise. Good posture was the way to let other people know I had self pride. Clear enunciation at an easily audible level, with full eye contact, demonstrated intelligence and breeding.

The objective seemed to be the development of a public persona that read as an unquestionably clean, intelligent, upstanding and, ultimately, employable.

Like many adult women, I continue to hear my mother's voice in my head. There's an impressive durability to the messages. For example, despite sincere and strenuous effort for many years, I have been unable to erase the "You'll never be pretty but at least you're smart" section of the internal broadcast. The effects of this message include a fluctuating but ever-present physical self-consciousness -- alone or in the presence of others -- and a recurrent hopelessness about my possibilities in a world where beauty regularly wins over intelligence.

One message on regular rotation in this internal programming was always particularly confusing. I didn't "get it" when I first heard it and it still sits uneasily in my consciousness. "If you're the only one who sees it that way, you're probably wrong." The first question this message provoked was "Why?" or more specifically "How does that work? How does an idea become consensus?" and "Where are the lab notes, the incontrovertible documentation of the research process that resulted in proof that "truth" requires majority opinion?"

The message is an argument for conformity. It expresses disapproval of introversion. It created -- and continues occasionally to create -- identity conflicts for me, triggering that "Is it just me?" feeling in a variety of situations.

"From Where I Stand"
Photographer:  Eliz Sarobhasa

This past weekend I hosted a house guest who is also a "friend." I set the word in quotation marks because while we have maintained contact even when we lived in different cities and shared laughs and "been there" for each other in some "hard" times, the relationship is marked by a recurrent conflict that, for me at least, compromises the deep, abiding embrace that defines Friendship. Though the conflict feels complex, I have begun to wonder if it only presents as complex on the surface; it there isn't some simple, fundamental diagnosis that has, so far escaped me. I have a niggling suspicion that perhaps it's just that we don't actually like each other.

What's observable is her tendency in conversation to preface her responses with "No..." or "It's not that (whatever I just said)" or "That's not the point." On her last morning here, I confronted her about what I called a knee-jerk inclination to cancel my ideas. We've had this conversation before over the 6 or 7 years of our acquaintance. On Sunday, as in previous episodes, we came to no conclusion. She says she only uses the cancelling language when she perceives my statement or question as "regressive" or "judgmental" or inaccurate or calling into question something that "everybody" already agrees on.

I asked if a prefacing statement like "That's not the way I see it" would serve the same purpose. I suggested that such a preface would open a space for the presentation of her own ideas without striking  mine. I don't see the necessity to cancel ideas that differ from mine. Can't we just add our own to the mix, let things that don't match sit side by side?

As in previous attempts to talk about this, she was somewhat irritated by my concern. This is not uncommon. Whenever I turn to an analysis of how we talk to each other, I'm regularly accused of being too picky or unnecessarily analytic. "You know what I meant!" they reply with exasperation.

Surely I'm not the only person experiencing this. Surely she's not the only person with this linguistic proclivity.

I say "surely" with no supporting statistics. No one is measuring or tracking this stuff. I'm convinced it affects Quality of Life. But no one is tracking this stuff...