Only a Dog Walker

I fell in love with Joan Baez in 2008. It was a two-step process, actually, with the spill-over occurring recently, as Robin Young interviewed her on Here and Now. After Baez described how a hawk from the 60's stopped her on the street to say how much he hated her back then, and how now he realized how wrong he had been, Young launched into a "my marine dad apologized to me about Nixon!" story that made Baez's eyes tear up. Young announced Baez's reaction with a version of OMG! Are you - Joan Baez - crying because of something I said? Getting the interview back on track, Baez offered simply, "I live my life like this. I think it's better to just go ahead and let the tears pour than try and stop them all the time."

Her comment connected with me, then shot me back to a time during the summer when I was stuck in a traffic jam on a highway. Just before dawn, a driver had tried to commit suicide by slamming the front of his car into the overpass wall. The only thing the driver succeeded in doing was driving fast enough to catapult his car over the embankment wall and down onto the multi-lane thoroughfare. The driver lived and no one else was struck by the plummeting car, but crews kept all oncoming cars at rest that morning. The delay gave me a chance to hear Bob Edwards interview Camile Paglia over Break, Blow, Burn, Paglia's collection of 43 poems that she considered the world's best. Paglia read the beginning from "Woodstock." Without the familiar music noise about it, the lyrics hit my ears and created a vivid image flow as if I heard it for the first time and it was on beyond powerful. When, several months later, I heard Baez accept an overactive emotional state that I was beginning to suspect most women have, I thought, this is why she is an icon and I was an idiot for not picking up on this sooner. Of course, Baez did not write "Woodstock." Paglia had spoken a truth that I did not remember: Joni Mitchell authored that poem, a factoid that must have gotten lost on me as I stared at all the radiator fluid and crankcase oil darkening a section of the white stone highway wall. But rather than allow this correction to diminish Baez's status, it brought both Mitchell and she up to sainthood, and I thought it was a such a shame that I spent most of the late 60's wondering why God made striped pants for my thick legs, and fighting with my brothers over wanting to be Davy, not Peter, of the Monkees in our basement band of cue stick guitars and tupperware drum sets.

I can't say now why we had those guitars. We didn't even have a pool table.

On the way home from an art opening, my eight year old, Edit, and I were talking about traffic pattern issues and how if I wasn't careful in getting out of a parked car onto a busy Elmwood strip, I could get killed. "You can't die," she responded instantly. "Who would walk the dog?"

There are women who have taken enough chances and sacrificed freedom and love in the name of truth and art and clarity. Then there are the rest of us: the table clearers and the dog walkers. In my next life, I'm coming back as a poet.

Jackass, The Movie

Was there a series?

Congratulations, Now Quit Goofing Off

"My whole body is sore," the eight year old said the morning after a swim meet. She is swimming 100's without flinching, winning 50's against any age at the Jewish Community Center inter-club meets. It was her only complaint. I wanted to write a note to her teacher, telling her that she might be more in her own zone today than usual - and ask her for help on how to improve her reading comprehension skills. I had reviewed her papers the day before: a stack of 90's and 100's on all subjects except for reading comprehension. Those were always in the 60's. "Look at this," I said to my husband. "Less television, more reading and talking about what we are reading."

He reviewed. "These quizzes are only three questions long. If she misses one it's automatically a 66," he said, defending her somehow. I thought that if the quizzes were six questions long, it was not so off base to assume she would get two answers wrong, but I said nothing. "And look at the question," he continued. "'What was the point of the story?' it asks and she always answered 'to entertain.' That's what she thinks books are, wonderful entertainment. That is not such a bad thing." Lex laughed at how he mocked the test and how he presented Edit's frame of mind, and maybe a little because someone was giving me a challenge to my grade grief. He laughed too. He thought testing and grading at elementary levels to be ridiculous, and all this was further proof. There was nothing only 2/3s right with his daughter. I was the sole sourpuss in the room. "Everything is about entertainment, all that Disney and Nick TV, and Club Penguin on the computer. That's this generation's mindset."

It's hard to get severe when I see my children do some things - most things - so beyond expectations. But I do. It's not that I expect people to be perfect. But at the same time, I see their respective failings as being so out of sync with the order of their natural selves, that they must be my fault - my refusal to take the time to observe and correct early on. Winter's night darkness is here. I woke up this morning thinking we should get back to meals at the table, more games in the evening, and trips to the library. It's easy and cozy, as long as I'm willing to give up the computer, too, while they are awake.

Nurse Ratchet It Up

How Emo am I? I don't have to take the quiz. Less than zero. I'd put a barrette in my hair after three seconds of an angle bang hanging in my face. I like to laugh. Rripped jeans and shrunken sweaters is so the clothing of the Depression that it doesn't belong on people who have options. It is poser-wear. I hate poser-wear. There. I've learned a new word and over-used it.

Two bedridden people in the house for four days now. I'm a bad nurse. One needs ice, the other needs blankets. One is to eat, the other can't. Each is on a different medicine and has a unique sleep clock. One is to get up as much as possible, the other needs to be tied down. Keeping all this straight might be an issue if I remembered to check on them. Four days. Last night I went to a high school musical. It wasn't in my school district. I didn't know a soul in the play. It was a musical put on by high school students and high school musicians. Remember those? That's how much I needed to get out.

Actually, it was pheonomenal. The musical director at this school gets vocal chords in ninth grade and bends them to his will. He is crazy demanding, and three of the twelfth graders on stage last night sang better Idol contestants. The girl could be performing on Broadway. The two boys could be in time. And all this from those who sign up for chorus from the district's few hundred nothing special, second-ring outlying suburban whatevers. He presses their bland carbon into dazzle. It's a phenom. Gossip has it that he was a piano genius as a kid, but then choked or suffered performance anxiety and now survives by confining himself to this tiny segment of the world. Or so the story goes. Yesterday we passed one of Lex's teachers walking one of our city streets. "There he goes," she said. "He walkds everywhere. He never had a phone until the school made him get one so they could reach him. He doesn't have a television or radio. I guess he reads all the time. I wonder if he has lights for night. They say he got left at the alter." I looked at this older, slightly bent, somewhat bohemian gentleman moving with enough determination to signify sanity, thought of the alter and reading by candlelight and heating the end of the bed with bricks, and began contemplating whether the fleeing woman had a hand in creating his current ways or if she decided that there was nothing fundamentally evil about an occasional TV dinner. "But I suppose it could be a myth," Lex added. "One of my other professors said that to was a waste to have graduated from high school without taking one of his classes."

I had to approve the senior year book layout design ordered by Lex and her friend. I traveled to a photography studio and stared at walls full of poster size family portraits set in groomed back yards or beach fronts. Every family had a color theme: either light blue or white. The family dog would be well groomed. Everyone looked well groomed. And pretty. Everyone was so pretty. There were pet portraits, too. They were mostly of dogs, but my favorite was one of a three black dogs on a white ground, hanging out beneath a black cat atop a white pedestal. The cat was looking down on the dogs, as cats do. That one I liked. I liked it because it may have actually been tough to time. And there was sarcasm in it. None of the other images had sarcasm or irony, except for maybe the one of the pretty Mom in white. She was surrounded by six perfectly coifed boys between the ages of two and nine, all in matching light blue polo shirts. The photo was perfect. Everyone was perfect, except that the man responsible for all this Y chromosome damage was missing. It would have been more fun to see the boys appearing as themselves in that photo, with the mom up on a pedestal, holding a cell phone that never seems to connect to the father.

Can You Spare a Dime

We walked hand in hand up the walkway to the polling center, Edit and I. We passed one soul on the way in, and another at the front landing. He looked about 60 and this side of desperate - maybe more wearing with rumply hair. He stood in our way.

"Do me a favor, hon. Vote for McCain."

It was the saddest polling experience ever. How could anyone not driving a Bentley be that destroyed over this election?

Exit Strategy

"The 737 charged across the taxiway at high speed. 'I stupidly unfastened my seat belt,' Koch recalls. He was hoping he could run to the exit and be the first in line to get out." "The Price of Immortality," by Gary Weiss, Portfolio, Nov. 2008.

I keep skimming newspapers and magazines, thinking that if only I could stick with an article long enough and retain the information for more than 1.5 seconds, I could understand the true nature of our economic crises. I think that Weiss' article on David Koch's (pronounced coke's) survival of a deadly airplane collision, is all I - and perhaps Greenspan - need to read. Then, in a Portfolio article on Dov Charney, the founder of American Apparel, Claire Hoffman writes about an incident involving Dov and a female reporter: "The reporter [Dov claims] took the masturbation out of context."

That's what I'm missing. I am incapable of reading financial reports with the same eye for a jolly "puh-lease."

Evidence

And then the dog shat an orange balloon.

I can always tell when Lex is up to something.

She moves.

Then at some point, she asks if she can do anything to help me. She calls me, "Mommy!" with the exclamation point. She might offer to go grocery shopping, and she will have vacuumed before I come home from work. She suspected I would be at a late party on the 31st, so she began decorating the house for Halloween. Each day she brought home a different drug store abomination, like the electric pumpkin and the lime green glow-in-the-dark skulls. She found bags of cobwebs and carried in sixteen pounds of candy corn.

"Having a party?" I ask.
"Just getting in the spirit, you know? I love Halloween. Don't you love Halloween?" she answers.

"I'll end up in jail. You'll get in trouble and your permanent record will keep you from going to college. If a big group starts dancing in the foyer, the wooden floors will collapse into the basement. Someone will get hurt. I'm not kidding. No party," I unleash one morning, truly nervous over and quite tired of high schoolers..

"Don't worry. You know me," she says, as if the two statements were compatible. "And I'll take care of the dog while you are gone."

I put protective measures into play, then left. I had business to attend to as Marie Antoinette, at a costume party where for the first time that I could remember, people disagreed over politics and nobody got upset. When I came home early the next morning the place was spotless. All the beds were made, better. Garbage bags were lined up in neat rows in the garbage bin, as only a angle-advantaged basketball or volleyball player could arrange. Everything was perfect. It hardly looked like there had been a party at my house the night before.

But then this morning, I took the dog for a walk.