Well, this is what I get for declaring I'll write a new blog post when an African-American is sworn in as president of the United States of America. Thought I was safe with that one. Thankfully, no. And I guess that, like everyone else, I got a little something to say about it.
Everyone has their election stories. Like a lot of people, mine begins on the evening of the Democratic National Convention in 2004. I was driving home from Wisconsin, and I turned on the radio, which happened to be tuned to NPR. Barack Obama was in the middle of delivering the speech that would somehow, unfathomably then, lead directly to the events of today. I didn't know who he was or why he had been chosen to speak, but I stopped my car and I listened. There was something undeniably compelling about his words and his tone. For a moment, I was roused from my 20-something cynicism by a stir of emotion I would have been ashamed to admit to then. And I thought, "I wish I could vote for him in November." I also thought, "I wish I had an Oreo Blizzard." The latter of my wishes was easily addressed, as I had conveniently stopped my car in the parking lot of a Dairy Queen. As to the former, I tucked that hope away with my desires to have an Olympic gold medal, an Academy Award, and my own show on the Travel Channel.
On election night, I was devastated not at John Kerry's loss but at George Bush's win, and I made what was, at the time, an idle oath to do whatever I could personally to make sure that my candidate won next time.
Never would I have imagined I'd be knocking on strangers' doors in the cold Minnesota Februrary, asking them to consider caucusing for Barack Obama. I don't even like knocking on my friends' doors. Or using "caucus" as a verb. I may be visiting a friend I've known for years, been explicitly invited to arrive at an appointed time, and yet, my hand will hover, knuckles poised for knocking, while I worry over whether this is exactly the right moment for me to announce my presence. "Oh, I hope I'm not bothering them. Maybe I'll just go home." Imagine my horror at announcing my presence and my political stance to people I'd never met, people who, until the moment of my knocking, might have been peacefully reading a book, having just found the most comfortable position in which to sit, that perfect balancing act of relaxation and poise for page-turning. Ugh! It gives me shivers just to think about it. But I did it.
People have definitely used the word "hope" almost to the point of bleeding all its meaning over the past couple of years, but I really started to feel it. On the night of the Minnesota caucus, I voted at a school in one of the oldest and fanciest neighborhoods in Saint Paul. I had to park several blocks away and walk through the slushy snow and past Victorian era mansions to get to my polling place. At one point, I fell in pace with a middle-aged man and we both wondered at the crowds of people streaming towards the school. "I went to school here," he said. "Nice neighborhood," I replied, trying not to sound too impressed. He said he couldn't believe the crowds of people lining up to vote. He cast a quick glance around us and adopted the tone of an anthropologist, "I've never been to one of your people's gatherings before." I wondered what he meant by "my" people: Polish? Sci-Fi fans? Vegetarians? How could he know all that about me? Who was this guy? He looked around again and lowered his voice: "I'm a Republican."
"Can I ask what brought you out here tonight?" Then he caught my eye and simply said, "Obama," and I lost him in the crowd.
And then I found myself in another crowd in June. This time, I was in a line of thousands that snaked through the streets of downtown Saint Paul. Obama would be speaking in a few hours at the Xcel Energy Center, and he was expected to clinch the Democratic nomination. I'd gone alone, but I spent the entire evening talking to people, listening to their stories and their thoughts on social issues, on the environment, on the unique political and historical moment we seemed to be experiencing. I spent most of the time with a couple from South America, he from Venezuela, she from Colombia. They were so excited, so engaged in the American political process, so inspired by Obama's campaign and his message. Never mind they couldn't vote.
A lot of people who wouldn't be able to vote in the election in November stood in that line. One particularly lively group of teenagers took it upon themselves to remove what had become a hazardous roadblock as people finally started moving toward the Xcel. Minnesotans are a rule-following bunch, and when the police put one of those wooden horse-type barricades along the sidewalk, people kept away from the area it was blocking. But as more and more people crushed toward the Xcel, many found themselves pushed up against the barricade and unable to move safely beyond it. On reaching the barricade and finding themselves stuck, several people expressed a wish for the thing to be gone. It was a group of teenagers who embraced the activist message of the campaign and hoisted the thing above their heads, crowd surfing it up and away with chants of, "Yes, we can! Yes, we can!"
It had been threatening rain all day, and many of the people in line had brought umbrellas. Sure, we were a hopeful bunch, but we were still in the Midwest, and weather awareness and preparedness is a way of life. We could hope the rain would stay away, but, you know, just in case it didn't...
Our umbrellas were, however, a security risk and would not be allowed through the doors, we were told once we finally got to the Xcel. This explained the scores of umbrellas that littered the lawns around the building. As I approached the entrance, I chucked mine under a bush and counted the number of trees to the door, hoping I'd remember and be able to retrieve it after witnessing history or whatever. And even though I was in the nosebleeds, it was electrifying inside the arena. At the center of it all was this man whose steady voice I'd listened to since that day in the Dairy Queen parking lot and whose tone and message was just as compelling four years later, all the more so for its now being so clearly a real possibility. At the end of the night, Barack Obama bumped his fist into his wife's and walked off stage, but the energy of possibility lingered and radiated through the crowd, into the nosebleeds, out onto the streets--where thousands more people who hadn't made it through the security checks in time had watched on the jumbo screen outside--past the silent vigil of our our abandoned umbrellas, through the city, the state, the country, the world.
It was dark by the time I got outside, and I joined the throngs of people hunched over in the bushes, pulling back branches, holding up umbrellas and examining them in the light of their cell phone displays; black umbrella after black umbrella tossed back into the bushes in search of the exact one they had come with. I ran into people I knew, people I hadn't seen in five years, and perfect strangers. It was one of those completely surreal moments of odd community. "Is this it?" a woman asked to my right. "No," answered her friend. "Well, where did you leave it?" "Right here, I thought." "Well, what color is it?" "Camouflage." Good luck, I thought.
For those couple of hours in the Xcel, we'd been forced to abandon our cautiousness and our umbrellas; but we were also practical, and we fished our umbrellas out of the bushes and forced ourselves to consider the possibility that John McCain could have been standing at that podium today. But today I gathered with coworkers around the television in our break room and listened to that steady voice and those compelling words once more, and I'm just so glad to find myself in the happy majority of Americans. Also, I find myself craving an Oreo Blizzard.
Showing posts with label Americana. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Americana. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Monday, July 28, 2008
Things Get Hairy
"Ladies in their sensitivities, my lord,
have a fragile sensibility.
When a girl's emergent,
probably it's urgent
you defer to her gentility, my lord."
-- Stephen Sondheim, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
A friend of mine at work said something surprising to me this morning. "Your hair looks really nice today." We had passed each other in the hallway, and my hand instinctively went to my head. "Really?" I asked, genuinely surprised. I ran my fingers through the tangled mess. "Thanks." As we parted ways, my mind raced: "Quick, what did I do to my hair? Took a shower last night...let it dry for about an hour before taking the blow dryer to it...fell asleep on my right side..." I went into the bathroom and checked my look in the mirror.
I guess it did look kind of nice. And the Barber had shouted at me again. You'll recall, perhaps, that there is a barber shop on the next block over from my office. It faces the park across the street, where I had retreated this morning when it suddenly occurred to me that I couldn't look at my computer for one more second without clawing at the monitor. "Right. Time for a walk," I thought, and I headed out into the sweltering air. The man who had shouted at me as I walked home a few weeks ago was outside the shop again, this time in the middle of the morning.
"Hey!" he shouted. Hmm. He must work there. "Hey, hey!" He probably doesn't own the place; I can't imagine that the owner would shout at people like that from his place of business. "Yo! You! Hey!" He's probably a barber. "Hey! You!" Must be nice not to have to stare at a computer all day. "Hey!" At least there are trees between us this time.
Flattering as his cat calls are, I wondered if I should maybe wear a sports bra to work tomorrow, just in case I took another walk. But now my friend had introduced another possibility. I much preferred the idea that the barber's eye had been caught by my bouncing curls, so I considered his a professional endorsement and winked at my reflection before returning to my desk.
My hair has been a constant source of frustration. I've never been able to wrangle it into anything approaching a current style. In middle school, when my 634th attempt at constructing a lasting wall of bangs failed, I parted my hair down the middle and bought a pair of silver earrings in the shapes of little peace signs. "This Gulf War is just--well, it can't be good," I declared. "Peace, man."
My politics and my hair haven't really changed since then, though perhaps now there is less of a causal relationship between the two. Recently enraged over an email that was forwarded to me about the looming threat to the use of English in America, I glanced over the long list of addressees and felt the need to somehow balance the karmic scales. I enrolled in a class to train as an English tutor for recent immigrants and found myself in a room full of middle-aged do-gooders all gazing reverently at our instructor, who I despised within roughly ten seconds of her speaking.
She wrote her name on the white board at the front of the room but informed us that it would soon be changing, as she would be marrying a man I would come to picture as a large cat. That was the only way I could reconcile her engagement with the evidence before me. Any human man wouldn't have lasted with the wide eyes and the over-annunciating, the gesturing, and the constant reminders of her graduate degree in linguistics.
But, oh, how the rest of the class loved her. Imagine an Oprah audience as she interviews Deepak Chopra. Do you see them? With the knowing nods and the gentle "mm-hmm"s after every independent clause he speaks? There were four classes that were three hours long, with a 15-minute break every night just before the tip of my pencil reached my eyeball. I would spring from my chair and head to the soda machine down the hall. Without fail, someone would catch my stride down the long hallway. "Isn't she amazing?" they'd say. I quickly learned it was best not to hesitate the slightest bit in my answer. If I didn't produce a quick and hearty, "Absolutely!" there would be an inevitable, "Well, I would sure like to learn English from her; I can tell you that much," after which the devotee's pace would quicken and I'd be forced to wait behind them as they dawdled for a suspiciously long time in front of the Pepsi machine.
Much of the class concerned basic lessons in basic English that recent immigrants to this country would find very useful. It wasn't glamorous; that's for sure. There were lessons in how to read a phone bill, a prescription bottle, how to make an appointment at the doctor's office, the dentist, the barber. There were never any lessons that gave my prospective immigrant students the necessary vocabulary to construct effusive exclamations of gratitude: we were limited to ideas that could be communicated through gestures and pictures, and there were no pictures to go along with phrases like "word bringer," "she who shares meaning," or "there are many English words, and while you have taught me more of them than I ever dreamed possible, I do not now--nor will I ever--have the words to express my thanks."
No, the most we could reasonably hope for by way of communication largely involved pointing. "Does your arm hurt?" the instructor asked in one demonstration about a hypothetical visit to the doctor. In this scenario, we were supposed to communicate that we had a headache. She pointed to her arm. "No," we all answered. "Does your leg hurt?" She touched her finger to her thigh. "No," we said, waiting. "Does your..." her hand moved toward her head, and the class' breath caught in their throats. "...head hurt?" "Yes!" we all cried.
I've always ended up being friendly with the people from faraway lands. They're just so much more interesting than me. "So do you dream in Japanese?" I'll ask. "Tell me again about the time the monkey slapped your friend," I'll say. "What's Spanish for 'stalker'?" When I simultaneously got a perm and new coat with a fur collar in high school, a friend who had recently moved to America searched for the word to describe my new look. "You know," he said, "like a gangster's girlfriend." "A moll?" I asked, "A dame?" He looked confused, so finally I went there. "A hooker?" He denied that was the word, but I swear I detected the glimmer of understanding that comes when an idea finally matches a word you've heard but didn't understand until now.
And so no small amount of preparation went into the exchange I shared with a Middle Eastern woman in the health and beauty section of Super Target this evening. I had gone there for razors, yes, but mostly for the air-conditioning. It was more than 90 degrees in my apartment, and I grasped at any excuse to get into the cool air of consumerism. Yet here was this woman, swathed in layers of cloth: a floor-length dress and long scarf that covered her hair and fell down her back. I sweat just looking past her at the shaving gel.
I caught her eye, and she held up a bottle of Veet and pointed to the illustration of smooth legs on the label. "Is this for whole body?" she asked. Here was my chance! My mind raced through all my English tutoring classes. "No," I said, shaking my head. Crap! I remembered that shaking your head means different things in different cultures. I pointed to the drawing. "Just legs."
The woman's shoulders sank, and she heaved a sigh. I noticed then that she was pregnant. "I need whole body hair off," she said, pleadingly. Okay, I was surprised to be having this conversation in Target, but that wasn't going to stop me from showing this woman the beauty of America. You want all the hair removed from your body? We've got something for that, I'm sure. I pulled bottle after bottle off the shelf and read the labels carefully. "No, this one is just for legs," I would say. She looked a little confused, so I touched my finger to my leg. "Only legs." She picked up another bottle and handed it to me.
Warning: do not use on face, head, breasts, or genitals. Bottle after bottle contained this warning. I shook my head at her, and she raised her eyebrows. "Not whole body." But she was after specific information. With each bottle I put back, she wanted more details, and I got the feeling that unless I told her she couldn't specifically use it on whatever part of her body she was concerned about, she would be sold. And I hated my tutoring instructor all the more, because I knew she was right; I would have to point.
I raised my head to my face. "No face." She gave me a dismissive look, so I went on. "No head," and I ran my fingers through my hair. Still she looked expectantly. "No...chest," I said, congratulating myself on the quick substitution of "chest" for "breast," though I had to gesture toward my chest all the same. "Uh-huh..." her eyes said.
I grew a little desperate. "Not whole body," I tried again. But my eyes fell on her enormous belly under all those drapes of clothing. We were talking about the application of chemicals to her body, and I decided that it was unfair to this hairy woman's unborn baby to allow my puritanical aversion to gesturing toward my crotch in public interfere with the clear communication of this product's warning label.
I glanced around me; the coast was relatively clear. There were two other women at the other end of the aisle. "You can't use it..." The woman's eager eyes followed my hand. "Not..." Her breath caught in her throat. And it suddenly occurred to me that I was going about this all wrong. All I had to do was point to every other part of my body and nod. "Toes: yes!" "Legs: yes!" "Arms: yes!" But as I formulated my new plan of attack, a Target employee reached between the woman and I to place an item on the shelf. The woman seized the opportunity, turning to the employee and thrusting a bottle of Veet before her eyes. "I need whole body hair off!" she said. The employee sighed. "You're, like, the sixth person to ask me that today."
Here was someone infinitely more qualified to deal with this woman's hair removal questions, so I quickly replaced the bottle on the shelf and slid quietly around the end cap and out of sight. There would be plenty of other opportunities, I assured myself, to connect across the barriers of language with interesting people from foreign lands. Anyway, I had to get home and shower, let my hair dry for an hour, blow-dry it, and fall asleep on my right side.
have a fragile sensibility.
When a girl's emergent,
probably it's urgent
you defer to her gentility, my lord."
-- Stephen Sondheim, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
A friend of mine at work said something surprising to me this morning. "Your hair looks really nice today." We had passed each other in the hallway, and my hand instinctively went to my head. "Really?" I asked, genuinely surprised. I ran my fingers through the tangled mess. "Thanks." As we parted ways, my mind raced: "Quick, what did I do to my hair? Took a shower last night...let it dry for about an hour before taking the blow dryer to it...fell asleep on my right side..." I went into the bathroom and checked my look in the mirror.
I guess it did look kind of nice. And the Barber had shouted at me again. You'll recall, perhaps, that there is a barber shop on the next block over from my office. It faces the park across the street, where I had retreated this morning when it suddenly occurred to me that I couldn't look at my computer for one more second without clawing at the monitor. "Right. Time for a walk," I thought, and I headed out into the sweltering air. The man who had shouted at me as I walked home a few weeks ago was outside the shop again, this time in the middle of the morning.
"Hey!" he shouted. Hmm. He must work there. "Hey, hey!" He probably doesn't own the place; I can't imagine that the owner would shout at people like that from his place of business. "Yo! You! Hey!" He's probably a barber. "Hey! You!" Must be nice not to have to stare at a computer all day. "Hey!" At least there are trees between us this time.
Flattering as his cat calls are, I wondered if I should maybe wear a sports bra to work tomorrow, just in case I took another walk. But now my friend had introduced another possibility. I much preferred the idea that the barber's eye had been caught by my bouncing curls, so I considered his a professional endorsement and winked at my reflection before returning to my desk.
My hair has been a constant source of frustration. I've never been able to wrangle it into anything approaching a current style. In middle school, when my 634th attempt at constructing a lasting wall of bangs failed, I parted my hair down the middle and bought a pair of silver earrings in the shapes of little peace signs. "This Gulf War is just--well, it can't be good," I declared. "Peace, man."
My politics and my hair haven't really changed since then, though perhaps now there is less of a causal relationship between the two. Recently enraged over an email that was forwarded to me about the looming threat to the use of English in America, I glanced over the long list of addressees and felt the need to somehow balance the karmic scales. I enrolled in a class to train as an English tutor for recent immigrants and found myself in a room full of middle-aged do-gooders all gazing reverently at our instructor, who I despised within roughly ten seconds of her speaking.
She wrote her name on the white board at the front of the room but informed us that it would soon be changing, as she would be marrying a man I would come to picture as a large cat. That was the only way I could reconcile her engagement with the evidence before me. Any human man wouldn't have lasted with the wide eyes and the over-annunciating, the gesturing, and the constant reminders of her graduate degree in linguistics.
But, oh, how the rest of the class loved her. Imagine an Oprah audience as she interviews Deepak Chopra. Do you see them? With the knowing nods and the gentle "mm-hmm"s after every independent clause he speaks? There were four classes that were three hours long, with a 15-minute break every night just before the tip of my pencil reached my eyeball. I would spring from my chair and head to the soda machine down the hall. Without fail, someone would catch my stride down the long hallway. "Isn't she amazing?" they'd say. I quickly learned it was best not to hesitate the slightest bit in my answer. If I didn't produce a quick and hearty, "Absolutely!" there would be an inevitable, "Well, I would sure like to learn English from her; I can tell you that much," after which the devotee's pace would quicken and I'd be forced to wait behind them as they dawdled for a suspiciously long time in front of the Pepsi machine.
Much of the class concerned basic lessons in basic English that recent immigrants to this country would find very useful. It wasn't glamorous; that's for sure. There were lessons in how to read a phone bill, a prescription bottle, how to make an appointment at the doctor's office, the dentist, the barber. There were never any lessons that gave my prospective immigrant students the necessary vocabulary to construct effusive exclamations of gratitude: we were limited to ideas that could be communicated through gestures and pictures, and there were no pictures to go along with phrases like "word bringer," "she who shares meaning," or "there are many English words, and while you have taught me more of them than I ever dreamed possible, I do not now--nor will I ever--have the words to express my thanks."
No, the most we could reasonably hope for by way of communication largely involved pointing. "Does your arm hurt?" the instructor asked in one demonstration about a hypothetical visit to the doctor. In this scenario, we were supposed to communicate that we had a headache. She pointed to her arm. "No," we all answered. "Does your leg hurt?" She touched her finger to her thigh. "No," we said, waiting. "Does your..." her hand moved toward her head, and the class' breath caught in their throats. "...head hurt?" "Yes!" we all cried.
I've always ended up being friendly with the people from faraway lands. They're just so much more interesting than me. "So do you dream in Japanese?" I'll ask. "Tell me again about the time the monkey slapped your friend," I'll say. "What's Spanish for 'stalker'?" When I simultaneously got a perm and new coat with a fur collar in high school, a friend who had recently moved to America searched for the word to describe my new look. "You know," he said, "like a gangster's girlfriend." "A moll?" I asked, "A dame?" He looked confused, so finally I went there. "A hooker?" He denied that was the word, but I swear I detected the glimmer of understanding that comes when an idea finally matches a word you've heard but didn't understand until now.
And so no small amount of preparation went into the exchange I shared with a Middle Eastern woman in the health and beauty section of Super Target this evening. I had gone there for razors, yes, but mostly for the air-conditioning. It was more than 90 degrees in my apartment, and I grasped at any excuse to get into the cool air of consumerism. Yet here was this woman, swathed in layers of cloth: a floor-length dress and long scarf that covered her hair and fell down her back. I sweat just looking past her at the shaving gel.
I caught her eye, and she held up a bottle of Veet and pointed to the illustration of smooth legs on the label. "Is this for whole body?" she asked. Here was my chance! My mind raced through all my English tutoring classes. "No," I said, shaking my head. Crap! I remembered that shaking your head means different things in different cultures. I pointed to the drawing. "Just legs."
The woman's shoulders sank, and she heaved a sigh. I noticed then that she was pregnant. "I need whole body hair off," she said, pleadingly. Okay, I was surprised to be having this conversation in Target, but that wasn't going to stop me from showing this woman the beauty of America. You want all the hair removed from your body? We've got something for that, I'm sure. I pulled bottle after bottle off the shelf and read the labels carefully. "No, this one is just for legs," I would say. She looked a little confused, so I touched my finger to my leg. "Only legs." She picked up another bottle and handed it to me.
Warning: do not use on face, head, breasts, or genitals. Bottle after bottle contained this warning. I shook my head at her, and she raised her eyebrows. "Not whole body." But she was after specific information. With each bottle I put back, she wanted more details, and I got the feeling that unless I told her she couldn't specifically use it on whatever part of her body she was concerned about, she would be sold. And I hated my tutoring instructor all the more, because I knew she was right; I would have to point.
I raised my head to my face. "No face." She gave me a dismissive look, so I went on. "No head," and I ran my fingers through my hair. Still she looked expectantly. "No...chest," I said, congratulating myself on the quick substitution of "chest" for "breast," though I had to gesture toward my chest all the same. "Uh-huh..." her eyes said.
I grew a little desperate. "Not whole body," I tried again. But my eyes fell on her enormous belly under all those drapes of clothing. We were talking about the application of chemicals to her body, and I decided that it was unfair to this hairy woman's unborn baby to allow my puritanical aversion to gesturing toward my crotch in public interfere with the clear communication of this product's warning label.
I glanced around me; the coast was relatively clear. There were two other women at the other end of the aisle. "You can't use it..." The woman's eager eyes followed my hand. "Not..." Her breath caught in her throat. And it suddenly occurred to me that I was going about this all wrong. All I had to do was point to every other part of my body and nod. "Toes: yes!" "Legs: yes!" "Arms: yes!" But as I formulated my new plan of attack, a Target employee reached between the woman and I to place an item on the shelf. The woman seized the opportunity, turning to the employee and thrusting a bottle of Veet before her eyes. "I need whole body hair off!" she said. The employee sighed. "You're, like, the sixth person to ask me that today."
Here was someone infinitely more qualified to deal with this woman's hair removal questions, so I quickly replaced the bottle on the shelf and slid quietly around the end cap and out of sight. There would be plenty of other opportunities, I assured myself, to connect across the barriers of language with interesting people from foreign lands. Anyway, I had to get home and shower, let my hair dry for an hour, blow-dry it, and fall asleep on my right side.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Aha!
If you were to venture to Oprah.com, you could find a collection of celebrity accounts of their “aha moments.” Invariably, they are tales of experiences wherein your favorite female star realized she's not as eco-conscious as she could be (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), that she hasn’t properly introduced her deceased mother to her children (Oprah’s BFF, Gayle King), or that she is both black and beautiful (Alfre Woodard).
This one’s for you, Oprah.
This past weekend, I had a real-life “aha” moment. I felt the universe tugging on my skirt (yeah, I was wearing a skirt), all, “Psst. Jess. Hey. Psst.” I was occupying my place as the third leg in the generational relay race through time that had gathered around my mother’s kitchen counter. My grandmother and I had just returned from the dedication ceremony for my friends’ new baby. I had told my mom about all the delicious food my friend had made for the lunch reception afterwards and was just about to marvel at the vast differences between my life and my friend’s when I remembered to ask what she had done all day. Turns out, she was pretty exhausted, what with all the burning of the Bibles.
“Psst. Jess.”
“Shut up, Universe! Mom, you did what?”
When I left that morning, I knew my mother would probably spend the day cleaning, as she’s preparing to sell her home. In a house where six people once lived and various people have stayed over the last ten years, it’s now down to her, my grandma, my little brother, and all the shit we deserters left behind. And so the task of gutting the house has largely fallen to my mom. Sure, she makes piles for Goodwill and “do you want this?” stacks for me to look at when I visit, but lately, it would seem, she’s taken to burning stuff she doesn’t want to take with her when she moves.
“How many Bibles did you burn?” I asked, a little astonished.
“I don’t know. Maybe five.”
“You found five Bibles here? Whose were they?”
She couldn’t say for sure.
“What else do you burn?”
“Oh, just shit I find. You know, some papers, a big map, some clothes.”
Some Bibles.
No wonder I’d been nervous about going to church to see my friends’ baby dedicated. I’ve always felt a little silly sitting in congregations where I clearly do not belong…which is to say, all of them. When I do find myself in church for the inevitable procession of marriages of friends and baptisms of their babies that comes with being 20-something, I’m usually able to sit quietly, sing inaudibly, and maybe even give the impression of deep understanding with my patented faraway, could-be-thoughtful gaze.
My grandma had met these friends of mine at the wedding that was my left knee’s undoing. She’d developed quite a crush on their little family, and so when I got the invitation to the dedication of their third child, I thought it was the perfect chance for her to ogle my friend’s husband (only peripherally, thanks to macular degeneration) and coo over their truly lovely and ever-growing family.
And so I sat with my grandma in church on a Sunday morning for the first time I can remember. The congregation was very young and friendly, with people constantly catching my eye and smiling right at me. They were different from my usual crowd, but I managed to smile back after a few initial suspicious glances proved to be pretty clearly not the appropriate response. People shook my hand and welcomed me; their hearts seemed warmed by the sight of me in my skirt, leading my mostly blind grandma to the restroom.
I was almost out. With a few nods to people I recognized from the service and a loud declaration to my grandma that, “it really was a thought-provoking sermon,” we were in the parking lot and the home stretch. There was only one church member between my slow-moving grandma and our parked car. It was an older gentleman with a gray beard and a large motorcycle. He was putting on a leather vest that was truly riddled with various buttons along the alternating themes of patriotism, motorcycles, and Jesus.
And then something fluttered in the corner of my grandma’s eye. Universe! Why did it have to be the corner? That’s the only part where she can see!
There were two flags waving on the back of his motorcycle: one was the stars and stripes; the other was black with the POW/MIA insignia. The man told us a touching story of how the Lord had returned his POW/MIA flag when it had been dislodged by enemy wind on his way home one night. He hadn’t realized it was gone until he got home, but just as he was vowing to never give up on his missing flag, his wife pulled into the driveway and held it out to him, saying, “You missing something?”
Come on! But I kept my mouth shut. I smiled and said, “That’s amazing. Well, have a great ride home.” And I turned to continue toward the car. As soon as my grandma spoke, I knew.
“Well, you better watch out with your American flag,” my grandmother said to this very patriotic man. She pointed vaguely to where she knew I stood. “She’ll run right over it if you give her the chance.”
He was a large man, and he turned like a bear to face me. Somewhere in the cackling, nervous laughter, I managed to form the words “Canada,” “motorcycle,” “flag,” and “it was an accident.” The bear seemed placated, if not wholly amused. I held out my hand to my grandma and politely begged her to come along. She was shouting over her shoulder, “And it was on the Fourth of July,” when we finally reached the car.
“Well, that was a nice service,” she said from the passenger’s seat.
At my friends’ house, my grandma found a woman roughly her own age to talk to, the grandmother of my friend’s husband. They shared family stories over plates of cheesy potatoes and meatballs. Collected in the house were four generations of this particular family, with this woman’s great-grandchildren shouting playfully in the other room and her daughter sitting with us, sharing doting observations of the little ones.
I told my grandma her best chance at great-grandchildren was probably my younger brother, but even that chance seemed slim at the moment. “You should have taken this woman’s lead,” I joked, with a big gesture so she could see I was indicating her new friend. “You should have just had more kids to begin with and increased your chances.”
We all chuckled.
“Oh, I think I had enough.” My grandmother laughed.
We all laughed.
“And I think I’m safe now,” she said with a nudge of camaraderie to her new friend.
I laughed a little nervously.
“You’re safe, aren’t you?” she asked the woman.
“Oh, yes, I should think so,” the woman replied with a laugh.
“G—“ I started.
“Well, you never know,” she continued. “Just because there’s snow on the roof doesn’t mean there isn't fire in the furnace.”
Later, in my mother’s kitchen, the Universe tugs at my costume of a skirt. “Pst. Hey.”
How could my friend and I—roughly the same age, having grown up in the same area, gone to the same college—lead such vastly different lives now? I’d seen members of all the generations of her family earlier that day, and here were all three generations of mine, all sharing what we’d done that day.
“Psst.”
Aha! And I realized that probably at the same moment my grandmother had been joking about postmenopausal sexuality, my mother had been poking at a pile of burning Bibles, smiling through the smoke with a real sense of accomplishment.
This one’s for you, Oprah.
This past weekend, I had a real-life “aha” moment. I felt the universe tugging on my skirt (yeah, I was wearing a skirt), all, “Psst. Jess. Hey. Psst.” I was occupying my place as the third leg in the generational relay race through time that had gathered around my mother’s kitchen counter. My grandmother and I had just returned from the dedication ceremony for my friends’ new baby. I had told my mom about all the delicious food my friend had made for the lunch reception afterwards and was just about to marvel at the vast differences between my life and my friend’s when I remembered to ask what she had done all day. Turns out, she was pretty exhausted, what with all the burning of the Bibles.
“Psst. Jess.”
“Shut up, Universe! Mom, you did what?”
When I left that morning, I knew my mother would probably spend the day cleaning, as she’s preparing to sell her home. In a house where six people once lived and various people have stayed over the last ten years, it’s now down to her, my grandma, my little brother, and all the shit we deserters left behind. And so the task of gutting the house has largely fallen to my mom. Sure, she makes piles for Goodwill and “do you want this?” stacks for me to look at when I visit, but lately, it would seem, she’s taken to burning stuff she doesn’t want to take with her when she moves.
“How many Bibles did you burn?” I asked, a little astonished.
“I don’t know. Maybe five.”
“You found five Bibles here? Whose were they?”
She couldn’t say for sure.
“What else do you burn?”
“Oh, just shit I find. You know, some papers, a big map, some clothes.”
Some Bibles.
No wonder I’d been nervous about going to church to see my friends’ baby dedicated. I’ve always felt a little silly sitting in congregations where I clearly do not belong…which is to say, all of them. When I do find myself in church for the inevitable procession of marriages of friends and baptisms of their babies that comes with being 20-something, I’m usually able to sit quietly, sing inaudibly, and maybe even give the impression of deep understanding with my patented faraway, could-be-thoughtful gaze.
My grandma had met these friends of mine at the wedding that was my left knee’s undoing. She’d developed quite a crush on their little family, and so when I got the invitation to the dedication of their third child, I thought it was the perfect chance for her to ogle my friend’s husband (only peripherally, thanks to macular degeneration) and coo over their truly lovely and ever-growing family.
And so I sat with my grandma in church on a Sunday morning for the first time I can remember. The congregation was very young and friendly, with people constantly catching my eye and smiling right at me. They were different from my usual crowd, but I managed to smile back after a few initial suspicious glances proved to be pretty clearly not the appropriate response. People shook my hand and welcomed me; their hearts seemed warmed by the sight of me in my skirt, leading my mostly blind grandma to the restroom.
I was almost out. With a few nods to people I recognized from the service and a loud declaration to my grandma that, “it really was a thought-provoking sermon,” we were in the parking lot and the home stretch. There was only one church member between my slow-moving grandma and our parked car. It was an older gentleman with a gray beard and a large motorcycle. He was putting on a leather vest that was truly riddled with various buttons along the alternating themes of patriotism, motorcycles, and Jesus.
And then something fluttered in the corner of my grandma’s eye. Universe! Why did it have to be the corner? That’s the only part where she can see!
There were two flags waving on the back of his motorcycle: one was the stars and stripes; the other was black with the POW/MIA insignia. The man told us a touching story of how the Lord had returned his POW/MIA flag when it had been dislodged by enemy wind on his way home one night. He hadn’t realized it was gone until he got home, but just as he was vowing to never give up on his missing flag, his wife pulled into the driveway and held it out to him, saying, “You missing something?”
Come on! But I kept my mouth shut. I smiled and said, “That’s amazing. Well, have a great ride home.” And I turned to continue toward the car. As soon as my grandma spoke, I knew.
“Well, you better watch out with your American flag,” my grandmother said to this very patriotic man. She pointed vaguely to where she knew I stood. “She’ll run right over it if you give her the chance.”
He was a large man, and he turned like a bear to face me. Somewhere in the cackling, nervous laughter, I managed to form the words “Canada,” “motorcycle,” “flag,” and “it was an accident.” The bear seemed placated, if not wholly amused. I held out my hand to my grandma and politely begged her to come along. She was shouting over her shoulder, “And it was on the Fourth of July,” when we finally reached the car.
“Well, that was a nice service,” she said from the passenger’s seat.
At my friends’ house, my grandma found a woman roughly her own age to talk to, the grandmother of my friend’s husband. They shared family stories over plates of cheesy potatoes and meatballs. Collected in the house were four generations of this particular family, with this woman’s great-grandchildren shouting playfully in the other room and her daughter sitting with us, sharing doting observations of the little ones.
I told my grandma her best chance at great-grandchildren was probably my younger brother, but even that chance seemed slim at the moment. “You should have taken this woman’s lead,” I joked, with a big gesture so she could see I was indicating her new friend. “You should have just had more kids to begin with and increased your chances.”
We all chuckled.
“Oh, I think I had enough.” My grandmother laughed.
We all laughed.
“And I think I’m safe now,” she said with a nudge of camaraderie to her new friend.
I laughed a little nervously.
“You’re safe, aren’t you?” she asked the woman.
“Oh, yes, I should think so,” the woman replied with a laugh.
“G—“ I started.
“Well, you never know,” she continued. “Just because there’s snow on the roof doesn’t mean there isn't fire in the furnace.”
Later, in my mother’s kitchen, the Universe tugs at my costume of a skirt. “Pst. Hey.”
How could my friend and I—roughly the same age, having grown up in the same area, gone to the same college—lead such vastly different lives now? I’d seen members of all the generations of her family earlier that day, and here were all three generations of mine, all sharing what we’d done that day.
“Psst.”
Aha! And I realized that probably at the same moment my grandmother had been joking about postmenopausal sexuality, my mother had been poking at a pile of burning Bibles, smiling through the smoke with a real sense of accomplishment.
Saturday, August 4, 2007
Writing on the Walls of History
Oh, my god! I just totally saw the president's decoy helicopter leaving Minneapolis/St. Paul International Airport. I rolled out of bed around 11:00 this morning and turned on the TV to the sounds of a reporter on the second-to-worst local news apologizing for causing confusion as to whether or not Marine One had just landed at the airport after the president's visit to Minneapolis. "No, this one. It's this one. Here it comes. Yeah, this one is definitely Marine One." I got the feeling her in-studio counterparts had reason to doubt her assertions. "No, the other ones didn't have the white top, but this one does. Yeah, this is the president's helicopter."
The airport is just south of my apartment, and I could hear helicopter blades whirring ;) outside. So, keen for a chance to shake my fist at something presidential, I hurried to my front windows and caught sight of a single black helicopter in the distance. I aimed my fist pump in the direction of the airport and shouted, "Yeah, you better leave!" And then I watched George Bush oblige on TV.
I view my fist-shaking from St. Paul as a continuation of the traditions upon which this city was founded. Like a baby who narrowly escapes being named after crazy Uncle No Nose, St. Paul is lucky to have such a respectable, even holy, moniker, considering it was basically founded by a one-eyed fur trader turned moonshiner known for his "intemperate and licentious" behavior. Pierre "Pig's Eye" Parrant set up his still in what is now downtown St. Paul only after being kicked out of the area around Fort Snelling. Seems the respectable military types in charge of bringing civilization to the upper Midwest didn't approve of the squatters' camp around the fort, and especially of Pierre and his whiskey.
So Pierre packed up his still, popped in his false eye, and moved up the river to a place called Fountain Cave. But it apparently wasn't far enough away from the outpost. The officers perched up in their fort on the cliffs of the Mississippi didn't want the blemish of Pig's Eye within their sight. Pierre was forced even farther upriver, and St. Paul's skyline now rises from the place where some ragtag squatters blindly followed a one-eyed coot and his whiskey still. And for a long time, the area was named for crazy Uncle Pig's Eye.
Curious about the origins of this city, I visited historic Fort Snelling on Memorial Day this year. There was to be a flag raising ceremony and historical reenactments throughout the day. As I mentioned earlier, I am a vegetarian who loves The Deadliest Catch. Well, I'm also a pacifist who likes war stories. And although Fort Snelling never saw any kind of action, it's chock full of military history, and the promise of reenactors tromping around, using words like "musket" and "nigh on" in conversation was irresistible to me. I made my little brother go with me, you know, for his historical edification. Really, I needed a young boy to point to if I was called upon to say, "No, I'm not here alone. You know boys and guns. He just loves this stuff."
We arrived just as they were raising the new flag on its recently relocated pole, now in its original 19th-century position. A man dressed in a uniform and holding a spear welcomed us through the sally port gate. I turned to my little brother. "Here's your gate, Sally."
Already resentful at being dragged here, he didn't look at me. "Shut up," he said, his eyes on the sidewalk leading to the fort.
The uniformed man began, "They're about to fire a"-- BOOM! Cannon fire split the still May morning, my heart jumped, and my arms flailed. I looked down at my little brother, who regarded my expression with the look of a prisoner suddenly resigned to his sentence of death by boredom.
So this was the outpost of civilization on the upper Mississippi? It's an impressive collection of neatly ordered brick buildings high above the river. The area surrounding it, where the squatters once sang their drunken songs up to the disapproving fort, is now a state park with bike paths and hiking trails. Airplanes fly low and loud on their approach to the airport, which is about three miles away.
My brother and I made our way from building to building, watching demonstrations by washerwomen and blacksmiths. A man who said he was Josiah Snelling and produced as proof a bicorn hat gave a demonstration of 19th-century manners for a roomful of children and their nerdy parents. His house was the most well-appointed building in the fort, and I imagined the other soldiers in their barracks casting the occasional jealous eye at their colonel's fancy window panes and personal waste buckets.
Colonel Snelling had all sorts of rules regarding interaction between men and women: how to address one's wife, how to lead one's wife by the arm, how to walk up and down stairs in a manner most likely to avoid impaling one's wife on one's sword.
The signs on the walls of historic Fort Snelling are also telling of a period in history governed by a strict adherence to social rules, even in the remotest areas of untamed Minnesota. One framed sheet of paper in the hospital building bears a warning in Old English: "No person fhall fpit on the floor or walls of the hofpital, but fhall endeavor to keep the ward as clean as poffible." I was imagining the self-hating lisper who wrote this message when my little brother's voice came through the centuries.
"Can we go now?"
We made our way back to the sally port gate and arrived in time to hear the guard chastising a bicyclist. "No bikes on the sidewalk!" he shouted. The bicyclist eyed the man's spear and decided it wasn't worth the fight. He slung his bike over his shoulder and walked down the gravel path toward the state park's bike trails.
I like to think he continued down the trail that runs along the river, all the way past Fountain Cave and to Lowertown St. Paul. He stops in the shadow of Galtier Plaza, in the city once known as Pig's Eye, spots the planes circling the airport, and shakes his fist in the direction of Fort Snelling.
The airport is just south of my apartment, and I could hear helicopter blades whirring ;) outside. So, keen for a chance to shake my fist at something presidential, I hurried to my front windows and caught sight of a single black helicopter in the distance. I aimed my fist pump in the direction of the airport and shouted, "Yeah, you better leave!" And then I watched George Bush oblige on TV.
I view my fist-shaking from St. Paul as a continuation of the traditions upon which this city was founded. Like a baby who narrowly escapes being named after crazy Uncle No Nose, St. Paul is lucky to have such a respectable, even holy, moniker, considering it was basically founded by a one-eyed fur trader turned moonshiner known for his "intemperate and licentious" behavior. Pierre "Pig's Eye" Parrant set up his still in what is now downtown St. Paul only after being kicked out of the area around Fort Snelling. Seems the respectable military types in charge of bringing civilization to the upper Midwest didn't approve of the squatters' camp around the fort, and especially of Pierre and his whiskey.
So Pierre packed up his still, popped in his false eye, and moved up the river to a place called Fountain Cave. But it apparently wasn't far enough away from the outpost. The officers perched up in their fort on the cliffs of the Mississippi didn't want the blemish of Pig's Eye within their sight. Pierre was forced even farther upriver, and St. Paul's skyline now rises from the place where some ragtag squatters blindly followed a one-eyed coot and his whiskey still. And for a long time, the area was named for crazy Uncle Pig's Eye.
Curious about the origins of this city, I visited historic Fort Snelling on Memorial Day this year. There was to be a flag raising ceremony and historical reenactments throughout the day. As I mentioned earlier, I am a vegetarian who loves The Deadliest Catch. Well, I'm also a pacifist who likes war stories. And although Fort Snelling never saw any kind of action, it's chock full of military history, and the promise of reenactors tromping around, using words like "musket" and "nigh on" in conversation was irresistible to me. I made my little brother go with me, you know, for his historical edification. Really, I needed a young boy to point to if I was called upon to say, "No, I'm not here alone. You know boys and guns. He just loves this stuff."
We arrived just as they were raising the new flag on its recently relocated pole, now in its original 19th-century position. A man dressed in a uniform and holding a spear welcomed us through the sally port gate. I turned to my little brother. "Here's your gate, Sally."
Already resentful at being dragged here, he didn't look at me. "Shut up," he said, his eyes on the sidewalk leading to the fort.
The uniformed man began, "They're about to fire a"-- BOOM! Cannon fire split the still May morning, my heart jumped, and my arms flailed. I looked down at my little brother, who regarded my expression with the look of a prisoner suddenly resigned to his sentence of death by boredom.
So this was the outpost of civilization on the upper Mississippi? It's an impressive collection of neatly ordered brick buildings high above the river. The area surrounding it, where the squatters once sang their drunken songs up to the disapproving fort, is now a state park with bike paths and hiking trails. Airplanes fly low and loud on their approach to the airport, which is about three miles away.
My brother and I made our way from building to building, watching demonstrations by washerwomen and blacksmiths. A man who said he was Josiah Snelling and produced as proof a bicorn hat gave a demonstration of 19th-century manners for a roomful of children and their nerdy parents. His house was the most well-appointed building in the fort, and I imagined the other soldiers in their barracks casting the occasional jealous eye at their colonel's fancy window panes and personal waste buckets.
Colonel Snelling had all sorts of rules regarding interaction between men and women: how to address one's wife, how to lead one's wife by the arm, how to walk up and down stairs in a manner most likely to avoid impaling one's wife on one's sword.
The signs on the walls of historic Fort Snelling are also telling of a period in history governed by a strict adherence to social rules, even in the remotest areas of untamed Minnesota. One framed sheet of paper in the hospital building bears a warning in Old English: "No person fhall fpit on the floor or walls of the hofpital, but fhall endeavor to keep the ward as clean as poffible." I was imagining the self-hating lisper who wrote this message when my little brother's voice came through the centuries.
"Can we go now?"
We made our way back to the sally port gate and arrived in time to hear the guard chastising a bicyclist. "No bikes on the sidewalk!" he shouted. The bicyclist eyed the man's spear and decided it wasn't worth the fight. He slung his bike over his shoulder and walked down the gravel path toward the state park's bike trails.
I like to think he continued down the trail that runs along the river, all the way past Fountain Cave and to Lowertown St. Paul. He stops in the shadow of Galtier Plaza, in the city once known as Pig's Eye, spots the planes circling the airport, and shakes his fist in the direction of Fort Snelling.
Monday, July 16, 2007
Moving Target
It's an odd thing to stand behind someone in line at Super Target. There, spread before you on a conveyor belt, are items that will soon be tucked away from public view in medicine cabinets and cupboards beneath bathroom sinks, in closets and underwear drawers. You get to know a lot about a stranger while pretending not to notice their creams and powders and pills and candies. Coupled with the collection of stuff strewn out in front of you, the way a person acts in a check-out line is, I think, very telling of their general character.
Take the family in line before me at Super Target yesterday night. This little nuclear treasure consisted of a mother, a father, and their grown daughter. Mom stood at the pay station while the daughter was posted at the end of the aisle, moving bags from the counter to their cart. It was Dad's role in life, from what I gather, to circle the scene like some hyperactive satellite, keeping his eyes peeled for a chance at what I'm sure he'd describe as hijinks.
To find the exact opposite of this family, one needed to look no further than the cashier handling their soon-to-be possessions. These pasty, pair-shaped gasbags were defined in opposition to the stoic African cashier. She was movie-star pretty, possibly even model-who-dreams-of-acting beautiful, and she barely said a word as she worked--no small feat, considering the odds her silence was up against.
The mother marveled at the cashier's bagging abilities. "You really organize all that stuff before you put it in the bags, don't you? You're probably the best bagger we've ever had. Do they train you how to do that?"
The clerk shook her head in a silent "no."
"Wait a minute," declared Dad. "I gotta get my cold coffee drink." He bounced quickly over to the cooler in the next aisle and grabbed a Frapuccino. "I know. I know. I'm bad. But I just love cold coffee."
"Dad, you're so weird," said his daughter, turning to the cashier. "Isn't he the weirdest guy you ever saw?"
Coffee? Cold? That is wacky! Did this fella escape from the loony bin, or what?
Mom picked up her daughter's thought and reassured the clerk. "It's okay to say he's weird. You can't get in trouble for telling the truth."
Get in trouble? Did this woman imagine that the cashier had a history of falsely pronouncing men to be "the weirdest guy she ever saw"? Had Target management reprimanded her for not telling the truth? I imagined a managerial type's response to one of the clerk's submissions for the title of weirdest guy. "The weirdest? Really? That guy over there with the tattoos? Does he even drink cold coffee? Why don't you just go back to your register and let us know when you've got a real contender in your line?"
The clerk silently picked up a frozen pizza and slid it into a bag of frozen foods.
"She is just amazing," exclaimed the daughter. "Isn't she great? You know, one time, we had this guy who put so much stuff in every bag that they ripped when we were carrying them into the house."
Still the clerk said nothing.
The woman continued. "And I said, 'Damn it, Kevin,' 'cause that was his name, Kevin."
There was not a flicker of recognition in the cashier's face for either Kevin or this absurd creature talking to her.
I had started out hating this family as representatives of my race and my country, but I had slowly come to loath them as people. The Target logo was everywhere, and it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to imagine the red bull's-eye floating over their hateful faces.
They reminded me of my years in retail and that class of customer who views the $9.74 they hand over to you as a direct payment of your bills, the only means by which you will be able to put vittles on the table tonight. And even after you've wished them a great day and good health and sufficient prosperity to allow them to come again, they linger like they're waiting for a curtsy.
I told myself that when it came my turn at the register, I'd make amends for these people. I wouldn't say a word. I'd just slide my credit card through the machine, collect my things, and go. By completely ignoring her, my brilliant logic went, I'd show this woman behind the register real manners.
But when I was face-to-face with this woman, I wanted nothing more than to strike up a conversation with her. She was quiet, but she had an open face and a kind smile. I thought of things to say to her. Wasn't it busy in here tonight? Was it always like this on Sundays? "No," I told myself. "You had a plan. Now stick to it."
By the end of our silent exchange, I just felt rude. I packed my things into my cart as the elderly lady behind me chatted to the clerk about how tired she was. "Ugh," she groaned, "I don't even care if you use paper or plastic. That's just how tired I am."
Feeling like nothing so much as a cog in a machine of blinking lights and conveyor belts and credit card scanners, I started to wheel my plastic cart away.
"Ma'am," the cashier called to me. I turned back, perhaps a little too eagerly. Here was my last chance to be nice to this woman. She held out a 12-pack of toilet paper I'd just bought. She was silent, of course, but her eyes said, "You forgot this."
I gushed as if she'd just stopped me from stepping out in front of a moving bus. "Oh, thank you! I didn't see it there."
The clerk just turned back to the tired woman, who was going on about how busy it was for a Sunday night. I threw my toilet paper into the cart and made for the door, intensely aware of the bull's-eye on my back.
Take the family in line before me at Super Target yesterday night. This little nuclear treasure consisted of a mother, a father, and their grown daughter. Mom stood at the pay station while the daughter was posted at the end of the aisle, moving bags from the counter to their cart. It was Dad's role in life, from what I gather, to circle the scene like some hyperactive satellite, keeping his eyes peeled for a chance at what I'm sure he'd describe as hijinks.
To find the exact opposite of this family, one needed to look no further than the cashier handling their soon-to-be possessions. These pasty, pair-shaped gasbags were defined in opposition to the stoic African cashier. She was movie-star pretty, possibly even model-who-dreams-of-acting beautiful, and she barely said a word as she worked--no small feat, considering the odds her silence was up against.
The mother marveled at the cashier's bagging abilities. "You really organize all that stuff before you put it in the bags, don't you? You're probably the best bagger we've ever had. Do they train you how to do that?"
The clerk shook her head in a silent "no."
"Wait a minute," declared Dad. "I gotta get my cold coffee drink." He bounced quickly over to the cooler in the next aisle and grabbed a Frapuccino. "I know. I know. I'm bad. But I just love cold coffee."
"Dad, you're so weird," said his daughter, turning to the cashier. "Isn't he the weirdest guy you ever saw?"
Coffee? Cold? That is wacky! Did this fella escape from the loony bin, or what?
Mom picked up her daughter's thought and reassured the clerk. "It's okay to say he's weird. You can't get in trouble for telling the truth."
Get in trouble? Did this woman imagine that the cashier had a history of falsely pronouncing men to be "the weirdest guy she ever saw"? Had Target management reprimanded her for not telling the truth? I imagined a managerial type's response to one of the clerk's submissions for the title of weirdest guy. "The weirdest? Really? That guy over there with the tattoos? Does he even drink cold coffee? Why don't you just go back to your register and let us know when you've got a real contender in your line?"
The clerk silently picked up a frozen pizza and slid it into a bag of frozen foods.
"She is just amazing," exclaimed the daughter. "Isn't she great? You know, one time, we had this guy who put so much stuff in every bag that they ripped when we were carrying them into the house."
Still the clerk said nothing.
The woman continued. "And I said, 'Damn it, Kevin,' 'cause that was his name, Kevin."
There was not a flicker of recognition in the cashier's face for either Kevin or this absurd creature talking to her.
I had started out hating this family as representatives of my race and my country, but I had slowly come to loath them as people. The Target logo was everywhere, and it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to imagine the red bull's-eye floating over their hateful faces.
They reminded me of my years in retail and that class of customer who views the $9.74 they hand over to you as a direct payment of your bills, the only means by which you will be able to put vittles on the table tonight. And even after you've wished them a great day and good health and sufficient prosperity to allow them to come again, they linger like they're waiting for a curtsy.
I told myself that when it came my turn at the register, I'd make amends for these people. I wouldn't say a word. I'd just slide my credit card through the machine, collect my things, and go. By completely ignoring her, my brilliant logic went, I'd show this woman behind the register real manners.
But when I was face-to-face with this woman, I wanted nothing more than to strike up a conversation with her. She was quiet, but she had an open face and a kind smile. I thought of things to say to her. Wasn't it busy in here tonight? Was it always like this on Sundays? "No," I told myself. "You had a plan. Now stick to it."
By the end of our silent exchange, I just felt rude. I packed my things into my cart as the elderly lady behind me chatted to the clerk about how tired she was. "Ugh," she groaned, "I don't even care if you use paper or plastic. That's just how tired I am."
Feeling like nothing so much as a cog in a machine of blinking lights and conveyor belts and credit card scanners, I started to wheel my plastic cart away.
"Ma'am," the cashier called to me. I turned back, perhaps a little too eagerly. Here was my last chance to be nice to this woman. She held out a 12-pack of toilet paper I'd just bought. She was silent, of course, but her eyes said, "You forgot this."
I gushed as if she'd just stopped me from stepping out in front of a moving bus. "Oh, thank you! I didn't see it there."
The clerk just turned back to the tired woman, who was going on about how busy it was for a Sunday night. I threw my toilet paper into the cart and made for the door, intensely aware of the bull's-eye on my back.
Sunday, July 15, 2007
Bastille Day
I am happy to report that I didn't run over anything on Bastille Day. Specifically, I did not run over any French prisons. This might not seem like cause for relief. There must be cause for concern before there can be cause for relief, and really, what does a French prison have to be concerned about? Answer: nothing...364 days out of the year, that is. But on that one remaining day, Bastille Day, there is one thing that should make its stony foundation quiver with fear: me behind the wheel of a car. For I have the most obscure and useless super power: I run over the symbols of holidays ON the holiday they represent.
The first display of my "ability" came a few years ago when I was driving home from a holiday shift at the video store. I always worked holidays because they paid time and a half. This day was Easter.
The family had gathered at my mom's house for Easter dinner, and I was turning left into her driveway when a rabbit bolted out in front of my Toyota Camry. I didn't even have time to swerve. I stopped in the driveway and tilted my mirror down until I could see the lifeless body of the poor animal lying on the side of the road. It only took a few seconds to confirm that there would be no Resurrection this Easter. That bunny was dead.
I didn't tell anyone about the incident, afraid I'd be shunned from normal society because of my newfound power. No, I'd go on about my life as usual, speaking of this to no one and just trying to lead an ordinary life. And for a long time, it seemed like I had managed to suppress my ability. Maybe I got too comfortable. I let my guard down.
My dark secret came violently into the open earlier this month when, on the Fourth of July, that most hallowed of American patriotic holidays, I ran over the flag of the United States of America with my friend Sarah's Buick LaSabre.
We had gone to Canada to see the White Stripes play in Thunder Bay on July 3rd, and we had decided to symbolically reenter the United States, declaring our independence from Canada on the 4th. We awoke in Thunder Bay on the 4th, a Wednesday, to find everyone going about their Canadian business. Banks were open, and people were going to work. With no one else taking notice of the birth of our nation, Sarah and I made do with what we had and celebrated America by going to Wal-Mart and eating breakfast at McDonalds (two things I NEVER do in the States). As we made for the border, we joked about getting out from under the heel of the oppressive Canadian number system. This country didn't take into account our beliefs in denominations like miles and inches, and that was something we just couldn't live with. No, we'd flee to America, where numbers really meant something. There we'd find acceptance.
Once over the border, we headed down the two-lane highway to Duluth, taking in the grandeur of America and Minnesota's North Shore. We went a steady 55 American miles per hour, slowing down for the occasional town.
We came to one town where the line of cars slowed considerably. Up ahead, there was a pickup truck towing a flatbed trailer that was decorated with sparkling streamers and a sign extolling the virtue of "sticking together" or something. A few townspeople were standing in the bed of the truck, practicing their parade waves for the people walking on either side of the road to and from a classic car show. Behind the truck was a motorcycle with several flags sticking out of the saddlebags.
The parade truck turned left, and I was just trying to read its sign when a fateful gust of un-American wind dislodged one of the flags from the motorcycle. Old Glory fluttered lightly to the pavement in front of Sarah's car. I had only a few seconds to decide whether to stop, risking being rear-ended by the line of cars behind me, swerve into the other lane of the highway, or embrace my destiny.
Time moved slowly. To my left, the sun glinted off the sparkling float decorations. The motorcyclist had pulled over and was running back along the right shoulder of the road toward his fallen flag. Sarah had seen it all from the passenger's seat and seemed to also see the inevitable future as well. The look of horror on her face was a silent testimony; I, on the other hand, screamed as I accelerated. "I'm running over the flag on the Fourth of July!"
All of our windows were open, and what had simply been a loud statement of tragic irony must have seemed like an impromptu protest cry to anyone outside the car. The motorcyclist threw his arms up in disgust as the star-spangled banner yet waved under the Buick's tires. Sarah was pinned to her seat in horror, and my knuckles were white on the wheel as I sped up on the road out of town, checking my mirror nervously for motorcycles and the angry fists of a small-town mob.
People always fear what they can't understand, and so I must learn to look over my shoulder, remain vigilant against a world that might be, say, offended by my actions. Maybe one day I can harness my ability and use it for good. I could become a an anti-colonialism champion on Columbus Day or provide hungry families with roadkill turkey on Thanksgiving. I didn't ask for this power, but I must learn to live with it.
The first display of my "ability" came a few years ago when I was driving home from a holiday shift at the video store. I always worked holidays because they paid time and a half. This day was Easter.
The family had gathered at my mom's house for Easter dinner, and I was turning left into her driveway when a rabbit bolted out in front of my Toyota Camry. I didn't even have time to swerve. I stopped in the driveway and tilted my mirror down until I could see the lifeless body of the poor animal lying on the side of the road. It only took a few seconds to confirm that there would be no Resurrection this Easter. That bunny was dead.
I didn't tell anyone about the incident, afraid I'd be shunned from normal society because of my newfound power. No, I'd go on about my life as usual, speaking of this to no one and just trying to lead an ordinary life. And for a long time, it seemed like I had managed to suppress my ability. Maybe I got too comfortable. I let my guard down.
My dark secret came violently into the open earlier this month when, on the Fourth of July, that most hallowed of American patriotic holidays, I ran over the flag of the United States of America with my friend Sarah's Buick LaSabre.
We had gone to Canada to see the White Stripes play in Thunder Bay on July 3rd, and we had decided to symbolically reenter the United States, declaring our independence from Canada on the 4th. We awoke in Thunder Bay on the 4th, a Wednesday, to find everyone going about their Canadian business. Banks were open, and people were going to work. With no one else taking notice of the birth of our nation, Sarah and I made do with what we had and celebrated America by going to Wal-Mart and eating breakfast at McDonalds (two things I NEVER do in the States). As we made for the border, we joked about getting out from under the heel of the oppressive Canadian number system. This country didn't take into account our beliefs in denominations like miles and inches, and that was something we just couldn't live with. No, we'd flee to America, where numbers really meant something. There we'd find acceptance.
Once over the border, we headed down the two-lane highway to Duluth, taking in the grandeur of America and Minnesota's North Shore. We went a steady 55 American miles per hour, slowing down for the occasional town.
We came to one town where the line of cars slowed considerably. Up ahead, there was a pickup truck towing a flatbed trailer that was decorated with sparkling streamers and a sign extolling the virtue of "sticking together" or something. A few townspeople were standing in the bed of the truck, practicing their parade waves for the people walking on either side of the road to and from a classic car show. Behind the truck was a motorcycle with several flags sticking out of the saddlebags.
The parade truck turned left, and I was just trying to read its sign when a fateful gust of un-American wind dislodged one of the flags from the motorcycle. Old Glory fluttered lightly to the pavement in front of Sarah's car. I had only a few seconds to decide whether to stop, risking being rear-ended by the line of cars behind me, swerve into the other lane of the highway, or embrace my destiny.
Time moved slowly. To my left, the sun glinted off the sparkling float decorations. The motorcyclist had pulled over and was running back along the right shoulder of the road toward his fallen flag. Sarah had seen it all from the passenger's seat and seemed to also see the inevitable future as well. The look of horror on her face was a silent testimony; I, on the other hand, screamed as I accelerated. "I'm running over the flag on the Fourth of July!"
All of our windows were open, and what had simply been a loud statement of tragic irony must have seemed like an impromptu protest cry to anyone outside the car. The motorcyclist threw his arms up in disgust as the star-spangled banner yet waved under the Buick's tires. Sarah was pinned to her seat in horror, and my knuckles were white on the wheel as I sped up on the road out of town, checking my mirror nervously for motorcycles and the angry fists of a small-town mob.
People always fear what they can't understand, and so I must learn to look over my shoulder, remain vigilant against a world that might be, say, offended by my actions. Maybe one day I can harness my ability and use it for good. I could become a an anti-colonialism champion on Columbus Day or provide hungry families with roadkill turkey on Thanksgiving. I didn't ask for this power, but I must learn to live with it.
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