Profanity

Stevie, my 13-year-old Border Collie, and I circumnavigate the block every morning. Lately, I’ve taken to scattering a handful of peanuts (unsalted, roasted) for the crows who squawk from the power lines above our heads.

A Steller's Jay is always present, but he is never reckless enough to try to take a peanut from the much larger crows.

This morning, I was throwing peanuts to the ever-increasing murder above my head when I heard very efficient, LOUD profanity from a nearby tree. I couldn’t see the potty mouth, but I acknowledged his anger and encouraged him to show himself.

With my encouragement, the Jay hopped down, grabbed a peanut from the roadway, and carried his prize back to his tree. I must say he glowed with pride.

What? Anthropomorphize a bird? Not me!

* * *

The current brouhaha over the rating of Harvey Feinstein's "Bully" needs to be resolved so that children of all ages can see this film. Having worked in a high school, I can tell you that the most naive student is well-versed in profanity, whether they themselves use it or not. I've heard third graders use words I don't use, and I am far from prudish. Despite an eloquent plea by one of the bullied students whose experiences are documented in the movie, the MPAA refused a PG-13 rating by one vote!

Hopefully, the rating folks will realize that obscenities are part of bullying, part of the intimidation factor, and leave the film its realism. We need to leave piety at the door and step into our children's world.

Movie: Annie's Point

Is there anyone out there who doesn’t love Betty White? Although she’s been well known to my generation since her role as Sue Ann Nivens on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, her career has spanned more than seventy years. And she’s still going strong, having recently been honored as the oldest person to host SNL, for which she won an Emmy.

I loved her in The Golden Girls, and her ditsy reprise on Boston Legal cracked me up. How can I not appreciate a ninety year old actress who encourages my warped sense of humor? I love her comedy, respect her spunk and appreciate her work for animal rights. I was pleasantly surprised to discover, watching the 2005 movie Annie’s Point, that she’s also a fine dramatic actress.

Annie’s Point is a story of a recent widow who is determined, against the advice of her doctor and her son, to make a cross-country trip to fulfill her husband’s last wish. She and her initially reluctant granddaughter, Ella (played by Amy Davidson, who I remember as the redheaded daughter on Eight Simple Rules), take off in Annie’s classic red convertible to travel from Chicago to California.

Their often-humorous adventures (including getting arrested for skinny dipping – Annie’s idea!) provide a structure for the film’s deeper messages of forgiving family, honoring grief, following one’s dreams and taking risks. The interplay of emotions and unresolved issues between Annie, her son (played by Richard Thomas, John-Boy of The Waltons) and granddaughter Ella are multi-layered and well played. Although this movie was made for the Hallmark Channel, there is too much humor to be cloying; there are too many fine performances to dismiss it as simply a TV movie.

One of the best surprises of the movie is Amy Davidson’s beautiful singing voice, displayed when Ella, at Annie’s urging, overcomes her anxiety to perform at an open mic.

Betty White is one of several senior actors who are providing role models for those who would wrap our elders in cotton batting and assume they are closed-minded, over-the-hill and out of touch with the real world. In both her real life and in this film, White challenges stereotypes with an impish delight that I suspect is very much a part of her personality, not just part of a role written for an actress. I recommend her and this film.

Reading Resonates: Books About Twins

“I realize now that yours is the heartbeat that I’ve always missed.”
-- Elyse Schein

Twins, especially identical twins, hold a fascination for many people, and I am as intrigued as the next person. I’ve recently finished reading Identical Strangers: A Memoir of Twins Separated and Reunited by Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein.

Elyse and Paula are identical twins who were placed as infants with two different NYC families. Neither knew the other existed until age 33, when Elyse started a search for their birth mother. The memoir traces their journey as they become acquainted and continue their search for the whys and wherefores of their birth, separation and adoptions. They also trace the history of the nature vs. nurture debate; are we more a product of our genes or of our environment?

I particularly enjoyed this book because it was so personal. Paula and Elyse tell their stories through alternating journal entries, speaking about what it is like to discover an unknown twin in mid-life. They discuss various twin studies, their search for their birth mother, and the corrupt science that lead to their being separated at the behest of a psychiatrist who wanted to study the development of separated twins.

Why do twins fascinate us so much?

For me, the obvious answer is that I’ve always wanted a best friend, and mostly haven’t felt like I had one. Add to that the potential of having a double I could persuade to play pranks on classmates or take my place in gym class and my childhood fantasy life was almost complete. (I once knew a twin who confessed that she took two algebra classes per day so her sister wouldn’t have to go to the dreaded math.)

I’ve spent a lot of time alone, and all of us crave a partner, someone with whom to share our greatest depths. What would it be like to have a true love, a soul mate, a twin?

I wanted a sister; I still want a sister. Perhaps I wanted someone built-in, who had to love me. I’m certainly captivated by the concept of having someone who looks like me. Perhaps I wanted moral support from a twin; someone to turn to when the world was against me. As a child who felt friendless, and was sometimes bullied, the idea of a built-in best friend was very engaging.

Although I have a younger sister, we have never been close. In fact, when she was around eleven and I was 14, we traveled across country to visit my mother’s family in Connecticut. To my sister’s horror, I cut my hair into bangs so that we would look more alike. My grandmother, in an uncharacteristic bit of whimsy, pretended all afternoon that she couldn’t tell us apart. LOL. I’m sure my sister loved that, too.

I remember one afternoon where my cousin and I took great glee in driving her mother to distraction by switching clothes. We didn’t look at all alike, but we were the same size and the same age, and we were good buds at that age. Cousin may have been the ringleader in our mischief, but I’m sure I wasn’t far behind. (And, oh, by the way, swamping the boat and getting soaked didn’t make my aunt any happier!)

Although there was a family resemblance between my sister, my brother and I, I never thought we looked particularly alike. (I did have a rich fantasy life, however; hence the incident with my grandmother!)

When I was in college, my mother showed me the proofs my sister had received from a professional photo shoot. Even though I knew for a fact that the photos were of my sibling, some of those images could have been of me. It was a most discomforting experience to look at pictures I knew were not of me, and see myself looking back. Apparently, my sister and I share many mannerisms and facial expressions, not just similarities in our bone structure and coloring.

Indivisible by Two: Lives of Extraordinary Twins by Nancy J Segal, is less personal, since it is written by a “twin researcher” who interviews some sets of multiples with unusual stories. However, the stories are interesting. Among others, she tells of a set of twins who are separated by divorce. One is raised in Eastern Europe as a Catholic, and joins the Hitler Youth. The other grows up in Trinidad, and is raised in the Jewish faith of his father. Another story concerns identical twin sisters, one of whom transitions to male when she reaches adulthood.

From the perspective of adulthood, I’m well aware that the twins I’ve known, particularly my students (fraternal as well as identical twins) often had a relationship where one was more of an achiever than the other, or one twin was quite dominant. Still, I expect I will always wish to see myself mirrored in a sister or friend, so that I can experience that unusual intimacy on which twins seem to have a premium.

Exploring Home: Community

Home. I’m not sure where it is anymore.

I grew up in Colorado, and although I haven’t been back for more than short visits since 1978, a piece of my heart lives in the Colorado Rockies.

I’ve lived in the Pacific NW since 1987. Northern Idaho, Seattle, the Kitsap Peninsula. When I go back to Kitsap County, that feels like home. My little house is gone, though.

My parents’ house in Northern Idaho was warm and colorful and very close to the outdoors that we could see through the multiple windows. I treasure the memories of sitting in the snowy woods with Myrddin, my aging gold setter, and a flock of chickadees who came to gossip about me in the trees around my log.

Idaho did not feel like home, only that house. I lived there on and off for two years. I found a picture the other day of a snowy lake surrounded by evergreens. I have no idea where it was taken, but it could be Spirit Lake, near where my parents built their house. That picture brought back love of place that I didn’t realize I felt.

The Idaho house was sold to strangers years ago. Life goes on.

I’ve lived in many places in Seattle: thirteen or fourteen different places. Some were pleasant, some not so much. I tend to try to make connection with place; with the woods, the trees, the fields, the water. I felt connection at many of these places, but none of them jump out at me now and yell, “Here. I’m home to you!”

That said, I like the climate and country here. I’ve said Seattle feels like home.

Although I spent ten years in Minnesota, as much of it as possible in the country, I have little desire to go back. I have many memories of being in beautiful places there, but the climate discourages me.

However, there were people in Minnesota, the one place where I really had a lesbian community, who still feel like a bit of home to me. How can I feel such strong connections to people I haven’t seen, except on Facebook, for 25 years? For the most part, these people do not talk to me any more. I’m sure they don’t feel like I am part of their community. But for me, the connection remains. Community is important and the social and political lesbian and co-op communities of 1980's Minneapolis was very much a part of who I was and who I have become.

In many ways, Minneapolis-St. Paul was where I came of age. I came out as a lesbian there. I listened to Women’s Music and became politicized. I learned to be assertive. I lived in cooperative houses, worked in collectives, and practiced consensus decision making until I actually became quite good at it. I worked as an interpreter for the Deaf and in the food co-ops, both jobs I really wanted to be doing. I dated my first girlfriend there. I spent many evenings at the lesbian coffeehouse.

My work in the co-ops was public, and I sometimes passed community news to every lesbian who came into the store. When someone died, when the Peace Camp needed women to stay overnight and maintain a presence, when an anti-porn demonstration was planned, I took on the role of news-speaker, probably to the amusement/chagrin of my less political co-workers.

I went to political meetings, to demonstrations, Holly Near concerts, to the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. I was active and passionate and social. We all were.

That community was important to others, too. When a dear, sweet woman died prematurely a few years ago, that old neighborhood came out of the woodwork, collecting on the internet, on Facebook, and reestablishing old connections. While I was very much on the perimeter of that reestablishment of community, I realized how much those women still meant to me, and how much I valued that time. I wonder if that is true of all lesbian communities from the political and idealistic 1980’s?

I’ve had other, briefer, communities that meant a lot to me, some of them before Minnesota, some of them here in Seattle. Coming out as a lesbian, in that time, at that place, was unique, though. For the first time, those quirks of personality that had kept me separate from the non-Queer world were reflected back to me from the women around me. I didn’t have to try to be a woman that I will never be: heterosexual, apolitical, or girly. Nothing wrong with that, but it isn't me. Some crucial parts of me were no longer “Other”, and that was such a homecoming.

I haven’t had much lesbian community in at least 20 years, but sometimes I step back into that world for a moment or two, and it feels so right, so much a part of me.

I don’t have much sense of community now, which has made memories of former communities feel more precious to me.

For me, much of the feeling of home is about place, and there are physical places, former and present, that are very much a part of my psyche, my feeling of self. However, there are neighborhoods of the spirit, times and places where I remember feeling part of the human commonality. My sense of home will always incorporate community, whether past or present.

I guess growing up, coming completely into one’s self, means finding home within one’s heart. There are individuals and communities that I miss at times. There are neighborhoods of ethos and song and thought that are part of my sense of me. I carry them within; I don’t have to look in on those neighborhoods in any physical sense to revisit old pathways to who I have become.

I started this post intending to write about place, about mountains and ocean, about arid Colorado and lush Western Washington. I wanted to explore the call to two such different places, two such dissimilar parts of my heart. The discovery that community, something I feel so little ability to create for myself these days, is part of my feeling of home, is bittersweet. Thank heaven for the memories. No one can take those away just yet.

Houses

Having been homeless several times, most recently for 14 months, possible and alternative living spaces fascinate me. This “hobbit house” is so perfect for hobbits. I wouldn’t mind adopting it myself.

Although I lived in my car for the summer at least twice during my thirties, that wasn’t forced homelessness; I was trying to be creative about the chunk that rent took out of my low income. Unfortunately, I found that living in my vehicle was usually more expensive than the rents I was paying. By the time one drives from food stop to shower facility to dog run to work, and eats instant or restaurant food much of the time, the gas and food expenses add up to more than I’d had to pay for rent. Whether one chooses it or not, living in a vehicle is stressful.

Because I chose to hold onto my critters, who were/are my family, finding living situations has always been a creative endeavor. I can’t count the number of times my “home” has not included a shower, toilet and/or kitchen facilities. I’ve made do with showers at the Y, buckets and hot plates. To say I am a Microwave Queen is an understatement! Generally, if everything else about the living space was congenial, those lacks were not the end of the world.

I drive around and look at possible living spaces even when I have a place to live. While I am drawn to small houses, I usually look more at garages with good windows, lofts, garden sheds, storefronts and other places that could keep off the rain and chill. When I have been homeless, I’ve often felt frustrated at TPTB who insist that people cannot live in a place that is not up to code. To me, this seems rather two-faced, since that decision leaves many people sleeping in the woods or on heating grates or in the backs of sedans.

And then they chase homeless folks out of those places they’ve made for themselves because people struggling to survive “bother” those who have comfortable homes and nice incomes. There are few things I have as much rage about as I do the way we treat people without homes.

I feel angry at home-owning friends who are frightened by a man in dirty clothes panhandling (or simply sitting) at a shopping center or in a park. I don’t hear them complaining about the men in suits who sit at shopping centers or read books in parks. I guess a man with a latte in his hand can’t attack women.

Every community has its troublemakers, including the communities dressed in designer fashions, but I learned a valuable lesson as I made the effort to talk to panhandlers and other street people. Although I’ve often had homeless men verbally harass me, I found that when I took the time to talk to them, and mentioned that I was living in my truck, the were as respectful, human and nice as any other stranger. The harassment is just a game they play. Perhaps they’re bored, or perhaps they’re expressing their rage at being treated like slime by 95% of the people they see in a day.

As I walked the streets of Ballard, where I lived for four months one summer, exercising my two adorable dogs, often followed by my opinionated cat, I experienced all sorts of prejudice and meanness. People leaned in their front windows and glared at me. They took a leaf blower to my truck, deliberately scaring my cat into running away. (Fortunately, he safely crossed two arterials and went back to a former neighbor who left cat food outside.)

Couples would stop to admire my animals until it dawned on them that I was homeless; then they would draw together, women especially acting afraid of me, simply because I slept in my truck instead of in a bed in a house. The animals were still cute, I still had a job, and sometimes I’d even had a chance to take a shower or do my laundry that day. Even if I had none of those privileges, I’m about as harmless as they come.

I was lucky to have my truck; the prejudice that street people face is far worse.

For many years, I maintained a P.O. box in a rundown section of town. I often ran into people selling Seattle’s street paper The Real Change. Buskers played on the sidewalk, men hung out near the newspaper stands and a frowsy-haired woman loudly vented her rage at bosses and other workplace abusers, while watching her shopping carts full of her possessions.

Other people in the neighborhood told me that she had once been a medical doctor but had become psychotic and ended up on the street. The men (the same ones who yelled insults and sexist remarks at me) told me that they watched out for her. Eventually, she disappeared, and I began to worry about her. A local Mennonite church, I was told, had given her access to a house nearby. “She’s too paranoid to go into it much, but if she wants to be inside, she can be,” one of the panhandlers told me. I never saw her again, so I hope she’s adjusted to being inside.

I try to be caring and honest with homeless people, but I fuck up all the time. I offer a chocolate protein bar from the back of my truck; she takes it, but I think that I probably should have found a way to gracefully offer to pick up something (her choice, within my budget) before I go into the store.

I chuckle at a youngster standing outside a McDonald’s with a sign saying he wants a Big Mac. “Clever sign!” I think. I give him some peanuts, and watch him frown after me. Of course he wants a Big Mac. Kinsey Milhone isn’t the only one who lusts after them, and who wouldn’t want a hot meal on a rainy day?

I chat in a friendly way with the man in the park who offers to wash my windshield for a donation, suggesting places he might be able to get a job washing windshields. And then I feel angry when I realize he’s conned me out of money to buy beer. We both know I’m a foolish, middle class woman.

I stoop to pet the patient dog keeping a couple of young men company on the sidewalk. I greet all animals before I greet their people, but homeless folks resent it when people are more concerned about their pets than they are the people. For the record, all the pets I have met, who belong to homeless people, looked well fed and loved. I’ve seen more abused-looking critters at the dog park in Seattle’s ritzy Sand Point area than I’ve seen on the streets.

So I keep working on learning to be a good advocate for those less fortunate than I am, and I keep looking at all the places that I think could be used to provide housing for those who need it.

And I dream about a tiny house all my own.

Photos from stock.xchng.

Destination Unknown

I seem to have conflicting ideas of where I want to go with this blog. Intellectually, I plan for it to be a place to post anything I deem worthy of sharing, no matter what the subject. Emotionally, I want to stay with my writing process, exploring and explaining each step I take.

The steps I’m taking are important to me, and I think some of my commitment hinges on staying with the themes introduced in the three initial posts, which have to do with questions of mortality and my dreams and needs around those questions. Although I do want to write about Lucky, for example, right now I need to do that in a different inner space.

The limitation intrinsic with exploring these initial themes is that I do not often have the insight and energy to go there. My daily life is made up of dogs and dog parks, emerging pussy willows and forsythia buds, cloud forms and light on the water. That and roommate hassles, money worries, menu planning and dirty dishes. The sublime and the mundane.

A friend called my blog “brave” and I suppose there is some bravery involved. I don’t feel courageous, really. I am just following my process, which is very different than it was ten years ago -- or even two years ago. So much of my life is inner, these days. I have few places to dream, fewer places to share those dreams. I have few friends, fewer people I can trust with much at all. I am no longer frantic, more self-contained.

I originally named the blog “Musings”, not because I thought that was a great name, but because I knew I had no real focus, and I didn’t want to limit it. But, after reading blogs with clever names, I changed the name to “Aspen Tangential”, which is certainly more colorful and personal, particularly to anyone who has listened to me ramble on. I’d like to find a picture of the Maroon Bells to put behind the title, even though Aspen, the place, is just a memory of my ideal Colorado, because that area is so beautiful.

I’ve needed to write this post all week, and have put off posts about Lucky or the dog park because this just had to come first. Now that it is written, who knows what tangent I shall follow next? Always, the journey beckons.

And, as always, nothing to do with the ski area!

Accepting Discipline

This writing in a blog is making me have to have goals and such. Not my usual way of writing.

I mostly learned to write through years of keeping highly personal and emotional journals. Long before Julia Cameron arrived on the scene, someone gave me a book entitled The New Diary by Tristine Rainer. I learned lots of techniques from that book, and believe using those skills enabled me to achieve a certain honesty in my writing.

Although I often shared entries from my journals, I also valued the privacy and safety that writing only for myself gave me. In that safe space, I gave myself free rein. I felt free to write exactly what I was feeling, even if the subject matter was far too personal to share with the wider world.

All writers, I assume, need that space to create. I think that safe space played a large part in my learning to accept myself for who I am. wrinkles and all, as they say. As expressing my emotions became easier, I gradually veered away from a regular writing practice. I’ve grieved that loss for half a lifetime, but have never developed the discipline to recover that lost identity. I’m trying to reclaim this most important facet of my personality now.

I’ve been thinking that writing a blog is similar to writing a column for a newspaper or magazine. Wherever my writing starts, the end result must encapsulate a certain subject, rather than becoming one of my infamous tangential journeys through the tangle of my thoughts. This is a new, and rather fascinating, discipline. I think I’m ready. I think I like it.

Bucket List

Bucket list!  What a term.  LOL

When I was very small, just old enough to know there was a joke I wasn’t getting, my parents went to see It’s a Mad Mad Mad World, which is a madcap movie, the all-star cast of which reads like a board from the old vaudeville days. In the opening of the movie, Jimmy Durante dies on dusty roadcut, literally kicking a bucket down the hill as he dies. 

That’s one saying whose meaning I will never forget. My mother may never forget trying to explain the joke to me while quieting my younger brother, who apparently screamed through the entire movie.  He always was a little slow on the uptake. . .

Like everyone, I have a list of things I have always wanted to do someday.  When the “someday” feels uncomfortably as if it might pass unheeded, one begins to realize that, although many of those dreams may never have come to be, the hope one holds out for the future is a hope that keeps the present doable.

In no particular order, some of my dreams include the following:

• I’ve always wanted to spend a year at Gallaudet , becoming really proficient in American Sign Language.
  
• I want to see the night sky far from the cities, so that I can finally see the stars again.  It has been too long.
  
• I’d like to go back to Colorado, where I spent the first 22 years of my life. I don’t know if I want an extended visit or to live there permanently, as I very much  enjoy the Pacific Northwest, but a part of my heart is still there. I dream of spending a winter in a small, cozy cabin near Independence Pass. I wonder if they have WiFi there?
  
• I’d like to go to the wilderness, perhaps on horseback or perhaps via canoe. Some of my fondest memories involve canoe trips to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area.  In the early 1980’s, we could dip our cups over the side of the canoe for a drink. Ten years later, the giardia was too present to make that safe. Still a beautiful place. And, oh, the skinny-dipping!
  
• My repeated adventures living in my vehicle had their genesis in my dreams of traveling the US in my camper van. These dreams leave no room for heat, cold, unfriendly towns or mechanical trouble. They’ve kept me going through many a winter night, curled up with a road atlas and a Fodor’s Guide.
  
• I’d like to become a competent rider. As disabilities take their toll and the diagnoses become more scary, this dream feels less likely to happen than it did a year or so ago. The memory of riding the trails deep into the beautiful San Juan National Forest, with my legs long in the stirrups and my seat deep in the saddle make me know it is possible to find that feeling again. Besides, I’m no longer so pigeon-toed that I’ll catch the toe of my boot in my opposite bell-bottom and go flying when hurrying towards the stable. Age has its perks.
  

I’d also like to see a Broadway show or three, learn to sing, become a photographer, spend an autumn in New England, or go to the Greek Islands (Mamma Mia!, here I come!). My heart wants to rescue and rehabilitate any variety of critters, although horses and dogs are closest to my heart.

I’m sorry I never was a parent, and hope someday to become an honorary grandparent. I’d like to teach, perhaps in a riding school or a senior center’s computer lab. I wish I’d known, when my mom used to encourage me to become a librarian, that librarians in the 21^st century would become experts in technology and online research, not just the dusty tomes of the dreaded Dewey Decimal System.

I don’t know which of these dreams I’ll be able to fulfill before I emulate Jimmy Durante, but their presence has some part in keeping my spirit alive.

Hope is only the love of life.

  --Henri-Frédéric Amiel

Breaking the Energy Barrier

I want to be writing, but it is so hard for me to get started. I’m scared, I guess, stuffing the lack of freedom I feel to express myself fully. I have not embraced writing on a daily basis in many, many years. Talent but no energy.

I look at my cousins, who are engineers, wilderness guides, mechanics, other successful people, and I know I must have smarts and talent. I don’t doubt I have writing talent, because I know how awesome some of what I’ve written is. But one is not a writer if one does not write. It is small comfort to know that I use most of my energy for surviving, and always have.

I need to do this for myself, though. I need to get something out there, to prove once and for all that I can do it. Proving to other people is one thing; mostly I have to prove it to myself. That doesn’t require snarky wit, although I may do that on occasion. It doesn’t require an interesting life; I can find beauty in tiny things. I often do. Writing requires me to write. That’s all. That’s so huge and terrifying.

If I do nothing else in the next 2 or 3 years, I need to do this. I am making an appointment with myself, daily, to write.