Bob Riley and the Masons
Just think of me as your little mole, driving around listening to Christian and conservative radio all day. Sometimes that’s all that will come in, and honestly, as opposed as I am to the idea that only some people are ’saved,’ some times I hear parenting and relationship advice I genuinely like on the Christian station. And other times, I hear good stuff that blows me away even on conservative radio. Do I have one foot on the slippery slope? I have something even better than this tidbit, but I’m going to have to save it for a lengthier post.
So. Who knew that Bob Riley, Alabama’s guvna, is a member of a whites-only Masonic lodge? The talk radio hostess read from the charter of the lodge, and it did expressly forbid the entry of anyone but caucasians. Of course African Americans have formed their own Masonic lodges as well, but in this day and age that’s not any better, I don’t feel. Exclusion is just not the answer. True courage and true healing for society consists in welcoming everyone.
O’course when you say the word Masons, conservative Catholics and Evangelicals alike get *all* tore up anyway.
Turns out some gen x and y Masons in Alabama and Georgia got together to form a lodge which welcomes all, regardless of color. The future is coming. Really it is.
The conservative (or was it Christian?) radio host said that private individuals can certainly form and join any organization they please, but that anyone who is an official elected to represent an entire state gives up some measure of privacy and should be ashamed to be a member of any organization that does not let in some part of his or her constituency.
Well… then she said she wished the Republican primary had yielded a candidate who could represent us all, meaning Roy Moore. Well… I dunno about that, but anyway.
Good info.
it’s bed time
I have so much more to say, good (or at least thought provoking) stuff that bubbled up while I was on my trip this weekend, but it is already nine and I would like to go to bed and read Animalia with shaky baby and try to finish my AS Byatt book. Did you know AS Byatt’s birthday was this month? And that she is the older sister of Margaret Drabble, yes the unreadable Margaret Drabble? I’ve tried. Trust me I’ve tried. I’m sure M told me that these prodigious two were sisters, because we read a Drabble book in our humble smart people’s book club, and didn’t I say at that time, silly me, that it wished it was AS Byatt but it just could never ever be? [To be honest I did enjoy that book tolerably well, although it let me down a bit in some ways.]
I did not sleep well on my trip despite the idyllic setting– the insects whose songs I thought would lull me to sleep actually rattled me awake about once each half hour, until I was driven to sleep nestled under the window unit air conditioner in the living room (where there were two twin beds). Then last night, what was just heat lightning when I went to bed, became a thunderstorm that, rather than inspiring in my gratitude to be cosy inside, nearly shook me out of the bed not to mention knocking me completely out of my deep sleep. It was still a good trip, I just didn’t get the good sleep of my last mountain hideaway.
I was so looking forward to a good night’s sleep here in my own bed, but it seems I’ve brought the thunderstorm home in my wake. Sigh. I hope that this, then, will be the night I wake up in the midst of a thunderstorm, sigh in comfort and pleasure to be inside listening to the storm outside, and drift back into peaceful sleep. I know I would sleep better if I would exercise more… come on, autumn, so I can enjoy being outside again.
too many choices
As I was sitting up in the mountains this morning trying to talk to myself about why I really will be happier with smoking completely out of the picture (more or less) (my desire to really do the healing school work being the most important reason to quit, honestly), my trail of thoughts led off into the various things I’d like to do in the next couple of years, subsequent to quitting smoking and/or my job.
Which of these things could possibly go together? Because any one of them could possibly take up every bit of my hope, joy, energy, flexibility and earning power for the next several years. How on earth can I get all of this done? In what order? Can you help me?
In no particular order of importance, I would like to quit my job to:
1. Have another baby
2. Take my existing child to China for several months in lieu of kindergarten (which won’t work if I am pregnant or have a newborn, so the newborn will have to wait)
3. Start my healing practice (which I am able to work on even while holding down my day job, but come May I’ll be a *graduate!* and which may or may not could be done while pregnant/caring for a nursling and certainly can’t be done while I’m in China although I could probably hook into some serious Chinese medicine wisdom while there)
4. Write
5. Just stay home because I want to because I am so very existentially to the very core of my being TIRED
6. Host (and spoil shamefully) a girl Chinese exchange student (We’d have to commit, economically and emotionally, to another school year in the same place, and we’ve already missed it for this year which would mean waiting for another year, and can I really have an exchange student AND a baby AND my healing practice?)
7. Move to Houston or at least somewhere in Texas close to my step kids (a tremendous financial and logistical move which would cause me to have to start all over with building my healing clientele and would be a stressful thing to do while having a baby and would put off the goal of having a Chinese exchange student another year while we settled in although if we were technically homeless anyway it might be cool for my husband to bachelor it for a while and look for places to live while shaky baby and I are in China…)
See what I mean?
Alabama’s first openly gay legislator (YEEEEEYESSSS!!!!!)
I hear about some very interesting things in my treks up and down the back roads, around the country side. So you see, it’s not a function of my ability to prioritize time to be informed… it’s about being trapped in the car for hours in the course of my day job. That’s just another pleasant side effect of my new job description.
Anyhoo, I can’t believe this is happening. The cool thing is, her line is all about social issues. She quotes the obscene fact that 76% of children in the Birmingham schools are living at or below the poverty level and she says she’ll shout it from the rooftops until it gets better.
I love this woman.
Saturday before going on the road again
I have finally dug all the vegan and vegetarian detritus of my parents’ visit and vegetarian/vegan exploits out of my fridge– two week old nut roast en croute, ten day old vegan chocolate cake, two week old mediterranean roasted veggie lasagne, and all the stuff that was backed up behind that because I couldn’t see it in time to eat it before it went bad. It’s like having a new fridge, and it has bugged me for a while. I don’t like being to busy to hook into the little maintenance things that need to be done reasonably often to keep it comfy and livable around here.
I also made the sad decision to throw away my wonderful funky vintage 90’s Steven Cojocaru style leather shag rugs. They are so cheerful and fun, and really made my somber, somewhat forbidding black and brown living room look softer and, well, funner. But they are a nightmare to keep clean. I can’t vacuum them, I have to shake them outdoors, and they are too heavy to shake by myself or very often. Dog hair and countless other unappealing stuff gets caught in them. We didn’t pay much for them, and we would never get that money back anyhow, and it will be so nice to just wipe the lovely clean pergo floor and be dog hair free in an instant. It’s a huge shift in my idea of what is worth it and what isn’t.
I’ve been busting my butt all day to get ready for a new work week and another trip out of town (this time, to stay at an even more wonderful state park). Cleaning, laundry, packing my kid’s school bag, getting some dinners made up for us and for my husband while he’s single dadding it. I need to stop soon, though, and spend some time with my husband and kid.
Last time I went on the road, I remembered everything except– my underwear. Back in college I thought going without panties was *great.* On a business trip in the rural South, with my more substantial figure of today, however, it isn’t, so much. So this time I’m going to try to be packed tonight, before going to bed. You guessed it– the panties are already in the bag.
NextGens, The Long Tail, and…
This week at work I have been putting together a presentation on customer service at public libraries, to be delivered at a public library up north the day after tomorrow.
Because I am me, and because I had limited time to present, I decided to touch on the policy and philosophy aspects of customer service rather than on specific situations. I’m touching very briefly on about 100 things, from creating a customer service team whose findings inform policy, to how management must set staff up for customer service success, to defusing an angry patron (what can I do to make this right?) to what not to ever, ever say to a patron (never comment on their choice of reading material, tell them what they can and cannot check out regardless of their age, or mention medical, ethnic, family, weight, age, gender, sexual, criminal, educational, or any other issues, in fact never mention any issues at all, EVER, yours or theirs, other than how you’re glad to see them, appreciate their business, and are there to help), blah blah blah.
Two things that I’ve come across in the last couple of weeks gave me a little jangle of awareness. Neither of these ideas are anything new, but when they first hit the airwaves I was at my smalltown library job and a new mother, so I wasn’t in a position to think about their implications.
One is The Long Tail– the idea that our hit driven culture hits the lowest common denominator and that many many small niche markets– made possible pretty much by the internet (unless you count the way librarians have been able to satisfy eclectic information needs and wants for years, no software needed) — are much more powerful and profitable than hits, for many reasons. The concept is very easily tailored to the five laws of library science/service, but someone’s already done that, so I won’t, at least not any more than I’ve already done for this customer service presentation. Here’s an article on it, if you have the time, which you probably don’t. Suffice to say that I and most of the people I know are really getting great benefit from the fact that it’s easier to get more diverse and interesting stuff to consume than it used to be.
The other is an article called Born With the Chip, about the information habits of people born 1982-2002– my children, if I stretch it a bit, and most of my friends’ children, at least their first babies. Now this really did jangle me, almost physically. Librarians spend so much time bemoaning how we can’t get teens into the library, how nobody wants to read books any more, etc. etc. etc. But that’s our problem. Society is moving in a certain direction, and that’s the way it’s moving, and if we stay stuck we’ll be left behind in our little backwaters. [Not that backwater isn't a nice place to be-- I kinda like it, meself, but do I want to be completely stuck there, with no choice?]
Libraries’ function as repository and archive, at least in terms of public libraries, is going away. Public libraries are about access for all, and due to scarce money and shelf space and staff there’s been no way we could afford to provide absolutely everything absolutely everyone wants… until now.
Since we’re not all that friendly a place to be, either, people are voting with their feet and going to much friendlier third spaces like book stores, coffee shops, and dentist offices.
[This thought is also nothing new among the wisest of librarian leadership, and I most recently heard it mentioned most humorously by Karen Hyman of the NJLA, but I thought it was worth mentioning here and in any customer service workshops I do.]
Now don’t get me wrong. I think traditional library service and resources are never going to go away. I always say, I can’t take my laptop or my ebook into the bubble bath, and there are two pretty significant barriers to entry for an oldster (GenXr, that is) like me– the learning curve, and the cost, of learning to use MP3 players, IPods, etc.
But technology is getting cheaper and easier to use all the time, and ‘these kids’ demand, and we must provide, access to all the, er, format agnostic, nomadic information recsources they crave. It is our job for many reasons.
We are supposed to be bridging the digital divide, making sure there are no have-nots in this day and age. Believe it or not, some families still don’t have internet access at home and can’t provide, or could care less about providing it, for their children.
These skills will serve the next generation well as they job hunt, learn, and express themselves.
Downloads are not just loud nasty music and empty or predatory chat. They are also news programs, lectures, social vehicles, and many other types of resources which bring people of different geographic, ethnic, educational and social milieus together– and that bringing together, both digitally and in person within their communities, is another life jacket that libraries need to put on, right now.
They are a way that libraries can finally have something for everyone, without having to go through the laborious, money and space intensive process of purchasing a physical object and putting it on the shelf to be, possibly, never touched again, stolen, or worn to pieces.
Then, as I logged in this morning to blog, I happened upon this, An Open Letter to Those Born After 1982 (Or the One Thing Your Parents Got Right). It really interested me. There are many comments of varying agreement on it, and I could take issue with a few things she says, but for the most part I really like it. It sums up many of my philosophical thoughts about parenting, such as whether our traditional measures of intelligence, success and happiness are all that, in the end, or hoping to skip kindergarten in favor of an extended trip to China or Germany, or the principles of this book or this one. I hate to be an elitist, but I think there’s a difference between being an elitist and making positive, proactive decisions about the kind of education and experiences you want for your child.
So… amongst my visits to scenic and isolated areas of my state and getting my nature on, that’s what I am up to professionally, as well as parentally, these last few weeks.
that was the day that the chicken truck crashed
ran up in the grass and turned over and stopped
and the chickens ran away
and the driver walked away
he walked to the chicken shack
he had wings! finger lickin good! finger! lickin’ good!
Sadly I did not write that. It’s pinched from a song by a truly stellar band from North Carolina who were touring when I was in college lo these almost 20 years ago. I am pretty sure I don’t have the last little bit of the words right. They, Fetchin’ Bones, were so great, and they are where I got most of my girl country punk aesthetic long before the girl country punk aesthetic (or other aesthetics, for that matter, according to this site) was cool or even on the radar. Their shows are where I learned to headbang and jump up and down until my whole body ached. They had the most wonderful t-shirts– skulls and bones entwined with flowers, most tastefully, believe it or not, so perhaps that’s where my skull thing really originated.
I have looked them up many times in the past and haven’t been able to find a damn thing on them. Suddenly, as I write this post in a last ditch effort to find the correct lyrics, I can. Now if I can just get the lyrics to this song.
Anyhoo…
I have one bad thing to say about my recent trip, or maybe it’s just an observation.
I have seen all the hundreds of miserable chickens in tiny metal boxes on chicken trucks, loading up and pulling out of all the chicken farms and into the ‘processing’ (read: killing, flaying, and chopping up) plants, all the huge tanker trucks full of — what? Waste?– that I need to see. I’ve put two and two together, between those poor miserable chickens going to their deaths in the chicken trucks, and the smell of cooking chicken wafting all over the small southern town where I was staying. I don’t think I want to eat chicken any more. It’s just too sad. If someone thinks they can rationally talk me out of this attitude, I’ll be glad to listen.
I *hate* to talk that way when the chicken industry provides the paychecks that allow many people to feed their families. Humans who need food and shelter come before animals, truly they do. I wouldn’t ask someone else to convert and see it like I do. But I just can’t be a part of it. For now. Til I become desensitized to it again and decide that this is a cruel world and I may as well eat since I’m fortunate enough not to be eaten.
I was thinking, with respect to food addiction and smoking just the other day– where is the line between, take, eat, this is my body given for thee, which, my mother told me, is about the goodness and sacredness of all food, and simple addiction that obstructs one’s ability to truly live? Or, where is the line between impossibly huge-scale industrialized cruelty to animals and gratefully taking the bounty of nature that our way of life offers us?
Now, if I could just find some cruelty free eggs and dairy I’d be in business.
I must admit, it is not a holiday– Thanksgiving, Easter, Christmas– for me without succulent roast of some kind of meat. But I think I can see my way clear to enjoy a really special meal that includes meat occasionally, sort of a, er, burnt offering, although I’m sure the poor animal doesn’t see it that way. I dunno. I’ll report back.
still furiously chewing nicotine gum
I went up into yonder mountains on Monday. I stopped at the Gap outlet on the way up and got my little one some apparel most cunning, and on sale of course.
[Don't tell anyone, but after 24 hours of smobriety I also bought a pack of cigarettes on my way North-- once they were all smoked, yesterday, I quit again. I just couldn't handle the happiness and excitement of being away on my own without smoking. So I'm up to 36 hours smoke free, and making it okay, that is, living with the cravings. Since I have nicotine gum the cravings are purely emotional and habitual. I'm thinking... the only time I'm really happy is when I'm smoking! Good lord. What a sad existence. I hope I can get over that quick. What makes people happy, who don't smoke? Will someone tell me, so I can try it? Is the truth that actually life is not meant to be happy, it's meant, in the absence of indulging one's addictions, that that it'll just be longer if I can avoid lung cancer? That I can finally be one with my tension?]
I checked into my cabin, at the top of the windy roads up the mountain, and went back down the mountain to Wal Mart, and bought way too much food, and rode back up, and realized that up on top of the mountain, nobody can hear you scream.
I honestly was a bit nervous. But I am one of those people who need nature. I lived in isolated country settings my entire childhood and youth, and it’s in my blood. I don’t have to do anything extreme, you know, survivalist sorts of things. I am perfectly happy sitting on the deck or driving down windy country roads through corridors of overhanging tall trees or skiing down the hill, riding the lift back up, skiing back down, riding the lift back up, and going inside for adult beverages and hot chocolate. Those simple acts heal my soul, and the quieter and more isolated the situation the happier I am. There was nobody in the cabins surrounding mine, and I just loved it. I loved it when I wasn’t startling at the strange sounds around the cabin, that is.
I considered doing some solo walking, but then a voice inside my head said don’t be stupid! You’re going to be a statistic. I have a very cool aquaintance who used to do survival camp for troubled teens– I’m going to have to run that by her and see what she says.
I still came down very healed. The way the sun streamed in the wonderful tall windows at the back of the cabin… the way the sun fell through the trees off the back deck… the almost silence– the freedom from everyone except myself… it was sooooo good. And I am out again next week, and I hear the park I’m going to next week is even nicer.
Work, you ask?
I enjoyed my work, which was meeting with several librarians from very rural libraries, so much that I wondered if I was actually having a manic episode. The librarians were so welcoming and grateful, even though most of the good that came out of our meeting came from the librarians themselves exchanging ideas and support. Driving up and down the deserted highways, through the fields and trees, made me feel so at home I just couldn’t stand it. I enjoyed the library staff and board at one library, and the tour of their wonderful historic downtown, so much I just wanted to cry, and buy a house there.
Sitting at one library’s boardroom table, listening to the folks picking on each other and talking over issues facing the library, I was reminded of something that is unique, in my experience, to very (like several hundred, under a thousand) small towns or isolated rural neighborhoods. You grow up in close quarters with the same people for years and years, know most of their business, and it breeds a sort of empathy and acceptance and continuity that is so rare. Sure people are imperfect, and backward, and perhaps not as well groomed or artificial as an urban or higher-income person, but they are yours. You tell the truth about someone, even when the truth isn’t that flattering, and honesty does not break the bond. You aren’t family, so you’re not stuck with each other… but you stay together year in and year out. Barring truly egregious abuse or violence, time heals most wounds and feuds. I literally got this sense that the people at the table looked right into, and spoke to, each other’s hearts and spirits, and whatever imperfections were just a barely noticeable, or maybe even beloved, part of someone they’d lived with and loved for many years. The world could use a lot more of that. I know I could.
As I drove away from that evening, I did realize that my longing for that sort of situation is as much a part of me, never to be filled, as it is a reality to work toward. Still. I know what I saw.
So… I think the good parts of this phase of my job are going to far outweigh the bad. As troubled as I am about being away from my child regularly, that is absolutely the only downside, and I believe she will, we will all be fine. I will certainly be happier for these little getaways. I can’t see myself doing this year in year out… in fact I want to quit my job some time in the next year or two… but for now it is very satisfying.
furiously chewing nicotine gum
I had a thoroughly depressed day today. I don’t know if it was because of all the effort involved in hosting our little party and being nice to people I don’t know well, or if it was because I drank (though not very much, especially for me) or if it’s because I ran out of cigarettes and decided to go ahead and quit (there’s never a right time), or because not only do I have to go back to work tomorrow but I have to travel, or if it’s because I wish so bad I could go back to my old northern stomping grounds that it made me depressed.
While I’m feeling a bit adversarial toward my poor spirited child, my relationship/time spent with my husband was the most important thing I could think of to do today. I couldn’t even make myself pack. Now I’m going to go read for a bit, probably about spirited children!
So anyway, I’m just checking in to say that I’ll be gone and unable to post for a few days, the first part of this week and then again the first part of next week. I am hoping that a few days in the state parks will help me get some rest, some nature, and some writing done. I’ll report back.
how I’ve spent my morning alone
I haven’t been able to make good use of it, somehow. Or, maybe it was good use, but I can’t see it yet.
I spent most of the morning searching for pictures of and information about Narrowsburg, New York, where I lived when I was about junior high school age. [Wonderful Photos Here -- I wrote the owner of the page to ask for permission and I hope he says yes] It was paradise, really it was, and I was sick with desire to go back and buy a house there. I even found a couple of houses for sale, one only 99K. Do you think I could rent it out enough to afford the house payment? It looks as if land values may go up amazingly… maybe we need to make a business trip for a looksee?
Here’s a salon.com article about its recent woes… her child went to the same school I did. In my day, most of my class went to Church School at the adjoining Catholic church, once a week at eleven. I had no idea there was an evangelical faction there. My existence was pretty areligious. If you weren’t Catholic, you probably weren’t a churchgoer. I suspect the author just didn’t hook up with the right people, because I personally know plenty of good liberals up there. Even if many of them are carpetbaggers, they are carpetbaggers who moved there many years ago and invested so much love, money, time, and faith in preserving and enhancing the beauty and potential of the area.
I don’t know how I could manage the vacation to take a trip back when so many other things have a claim on my vacation time. I have *got* to get a book written and sold.
It’s changed a whole lot– when I was there it was truly nowhere, an impoverished little town (although I didn’t know it) with nothing to recommend it. Snow was on the ground, in varying stages from lovely fresh and white to nasty frozen mud, from November through April. My school had a hard time scraping up 30 children per grade level, and grades K-6 were downstairs and 7-12 were upstairs, all in the same building. We walked from school ‘downtown’ to get lunch and candy some times, instead of eating at the cafeteria. I don’t know how people made a living there, because my father was a park ranger and I wasn’t much tuned in to the idea of jobs back then. I have no idea where my friends’ fathers worked, unless they owned local businesses like the pizzeria. I take that back. One other friend’s dad worked for the road department because he was always out with the snowplows– an almost constant thing in the winter.
The town, sitting in the middle of farm land and such, started in the twenties, I’m guessing, as a little resort for New York City folks to escape for the summer. So there were some amazing old buildings there, their old time glory falling into disrepair. By the time I got there it was just a crumbling little hamlet, surrounded by farms, clinging to the steeply dropped of banks of the Delaware river. We lived way out Highway 97, in a rented farmhouse on many acres of land, with a pond and all sorts of fruit trees. We were the last stop on the school bus route. If I could go back there and buy that house and live there forever, I swear I would.
It was a strange combination of cultural and academic excellence, and poverty and isolation. We had fantastic teachers at our dinky little school, and children of every ethnicity attended there, due to the proximity of ‘The City.’ We went skiing in a school bus every Saturday night, slipping and sliding over the mountain roads to Tanglewood or Masthope. Kids arrived at evening basketball games on snowmobiles, and teens paired off with lifelong boyfriends/girlfriends very young.
Now it’s got a thriving art, cultural, and conservation scene. It looks like paradise of a different sort. My little old school may not even be there any more… there’s a unified school district now and my school had to close. I dunno. I guess it’s time to tear myself away from my obsessive search for photos and news of this area. My husband came home from golfing completely soaked in sweat and hungry for lunch. I will take my melancholy and see what we can cook up for the rest of the day.
