A Friend's Meditation on Human Error

Today is the third anniversary of the death of an old friend, Bill Baldwin, who set just about the best example I ever saw of how a life ought to be lived (in a word: unreservedly). Among his many admirable characteristics, Bill was an excellent and entertaining writer. I stumbled by the purest of accidents upon one of his essays a couple of days ago. Another friend of Bill’s had apparently posted it on his own blog on last year’s anniversary of Bill’s death, and I swiped it. I think I first read this piece back in the late ‘90s, and it had long since vanished on some diskette or hard drive whose technology is no longer supported by the Microsoft or Apple gods. So I’m sharing this bit of serendipity with Bill’s many other friends from the old Writers’ Cafe, who loved him and his writing as much as I did. Enjoy. -- Margie

NORTHERN LIGHTS
A Meditation on Human Error

by Bill Baldwin

If you grow up where winter drills so deep it can split trees, you quickly learn certain truths about the physical world. The effect, for instance, of sticking your tongue to iron pipe at nine degrees above. It doesn’t matter that your parents told you never to do such a thing, nor that if your buds dared you, there had to be a catch; you need the experience. All our days we crave adventures of body and mind, even though more often than not our acts lead to disappointment or pain or compromise or confusion or to yet another doorway that opens on—a closet. A bloody tongue’s nothing compared to the pain of not grasping the lessons of those first steps up the learning curve that we mistake for a rainbow.

The message I didn’t get right away, still haven’t fully mastered sixty years later, is, in layman’s language, “You’ll never be an engineer or a holy man.” Which was nature’s way of telling me to stay away from inflexible verities like mathematics and physics, as well as religious dogma and philosophical systems that end in “ism.”

In this state of being, you are destined to go through life taking two or more wrong turns for every right one. And when all you have is questions, that’s only half the process. Thus barely out of infancy you begin to choose career paths. More precise, careers begin to choose you.

You are born. A few years later you wake up. When I was four or so, and I had collected enough sequential references for a rudimentary memory, I woke up to the fact that we were living in an absurdly small northwestern Iowa burg named Mallard. Why we were there is a mystery to this day. What prolonged Great Depression or wartime hardship (it couldn’t have been opportunity) dumped us in this cul-de-sac on the wide-open spaces I’ll never know. I didn’t think to ask my parents in later years, and now they’re gone. Mallard is too minuscule to have history or character or to be a home-place or quaint or charming. You could never get maudlin about it. There is no there there, as Gertrude Stein said about Oakland. Still, there we were.

Look at a map of Iowa. In the far northern and western sector, around the 42nd parallel, just west of Highway 4 there’s a dot representing Mallard. And if your eye draws a slightly bent line northwest to southeast through Mallard you connect with two other dots, Curlew and Plover.

Driving through rural America, especially in the prairie and plains states, you pass a blink of a town and wonder how it survives or how it came to be in the first place. What wistful adventurers would think to settle these X’s of nowhere, three in an oblique row, and then have the poetry to name them for water birds? And just to the west of Mallard is Rembrandt. (What’s its story?) And what Old Testament-minded sodbusters christened Gaza, Carmel and Lebanon still further west?

I conjure up a Wistful Pioneer — a post-Civil War, upwardly mobile consumer headed for the sunset, lured on (nothing changes) by the railroads’ hype: ads and brochures illustrated with amber waves and orchards, fat cattle, milk and honey, and limpid brooks—all beckoning the gullible to desolation. In fact, from Iowa on, the territory was an infinity of buffalo, buffalo grass, buffalo chips, buffalo bones, and buffalo-chasing Indians in no mood to welcome strangers. After that, a range of 14,000-ft. mountains, then desert, then more mountains. Picture W. Pioneer and the Mrs. and their six surviving children standing by the wagon at the western edge of the glacial blacklands. He looks to the west. Nothing as far as he can see. Spacious skies, but not a tree, much less fruited plains or purple mountain majesties. He recalls tales of starvation and scalping raids and a bullwhip wind that snaps across the prairie.

He takes inventory: two wagons, four mules, two horses, a baby bull, a heifer (bony), six piglets, a milk goat, a rooster, hens and some seeds, potatoes, dry beans, and rootstocks. Having a stroke of sense, he admits to himself how far away California might actually lie, how close winter is, how cold and hungry they might get, how mule meat would taste, and how naked and bloody their scalped heads could be. “We’ll stop here,” he announces. “It ain’t half bad. We’ll raise beef and pigs. We’ll plant corn and wheat. We’ll grow beans and taters. We’ll have chickens and a garden.” He makes a sweeping gesture: “and maybe we’ll open a trading post and name it for a duck.”

My great-grandfather Franklin Morton Baldwin was born in Onondaga County, New York in 1829. At 20, he left the family salt-manufacturing business and lit out with two friends for the Wild West, which for them was Chicago. He worked three years in a dry goods store, he bought land and sold it and finally, either disillusioned with the rough town on the cold lake, or hungry for adventure on the frontier, he resumed his trek and left his hometown buddy Marshall Field to conquer Chicago.

Fortune took me to northwestern Iowa a few years back and I couldn’t resist visiting the one-stoplight places of my childhood. You don’t really need maps to find the towns; look for the grain elevators. As landmarks, these are the Gothic cathedrals of the farmbelt. Homing in, I turn off Highway 4 and there’s a sign with a giant sculpted Mallard drake hunkered on top: Welcome to Mallard. We’re Friendly Ducks!

Most of the City budget must have gone into the sign, even though there’s hardly anything to be welcomed to. A half-century later, Mallard is the same and not the same. It is a single main street that stumbles over railroad tracks, runs straight for six blocks then becomes a sand road wandering off into the soybean fields.

Gone: the movie theater where the screen burst into flames as my father and I were engrossed in a Western. (I thought at first it was part of the story and even as my dad carried me to safety, I twisted around to watch the images of cowboys and horses projected upon a screen of smoke as the actual screen was being consumed by a fiery scorch.)

Gone: our little house, the church across the street, the doctor’s office. (Must have closed the practice after we left town. I was a regular customer.)

I spot a storefront library — in Mallard still called a “lending library” — and slow down to read the titles. The same as everywhere else: Stephen King, Sidney Shelton, Danielle Steel, Danielle Steel, Sidney Shelton, Stephen King.

From Chicago, my great-grandfather Franklin journeyed west to the Mississippi. He rode a boat headed downriver to St. Louis so he could catch another up the Missouri to the far West. At Keokuk, at the very tip of Iowa, he changed his mind, got off and walked more than 200 miles to the center of the state and decided this was the place. Why he did what he did is not in family lore, but I know why.

The first Christmas you can recall in sharp focus? For me this is the place. Probably 1942. In retrospect, I think I was the only little kid in town. I had to invent one-kid amusements, and this is where the first confrontations with reality came in.

Across the side street from my house was a church with a stairway that led to a second-story office. Alongside the stairs was a tall, slender, fir kind of tree, now extra picturesque with new snow on its branches. My thinking was that I could go up the stairs to the landing, climb on the handrail and leap onto the top of the tree. Being supple, it would bend gracefully to the earth, where I would step off. The tree would then straighten, gracefully of course, and I would climb the stairs again to repeat this stunt over and over. Free ride!

That was the theory. And it worked out exactly as I’d envisioned. Except for the velocity. And what pilots call attitude. When I pounced on the top, the whole tree whipped over like a Slinky, only at hyper-speed. I was instantly upside down (wrong attitude) and falling in that curious dimension of slow motion and muted sound often experienced in an accident-in-progress. The branches whispered, the snow crystals hissed, the treetop broke with a soft liquid groaning ooOOPS! The tree flipped me like a bug into a deceptively thin cover of snow and right down to the hard HARD ground beneath.

First time to see stars. First wind knocked out. First hematoma. First loose tooth. I was too hurt and scared to cry. Lying cruciform on my back, I saw a woman clomping down the stairs like a berserk flamenco dancer. Red-faced, bug-eyed, screaming, she scooted to my house to give my mother an earful. The birth of a bad boy. Were was the Christian compassion? Where was the first aid?

Not for the last time, my mother hugged me and said, “I’m so mad I could kill you.” Instead she carried me across the street to the unflappable doctor who pronounced me okay even as he told me I was going to have a dandy shiner. I visualized a really nice baitfish. (Vocabulary lesson: what’s a dandy shiner?)

My father tried to repair the treetop, taping and bracing it erect, and helped string lights on the tree. Still if you walked around it, you could see the top was crooked. One night before Christmas, people from the church gathered to carol outside our house. My mother dabbed at tears, and Dad said, “that’s swell.” But even though the singing was sweet and their candles seen through frosted windows were magic, I was embarrassed. Not about the tree or the mean-spirited church lady, but something I had no name for; it was the humiliation of the charity case.
Great-grandfather Frank settled in a place called Iowa Center, north of Des Moines, probably in the belief that, being at the geographical center of the young state, it would grow to become a metropolis. But I think the real reason was a girl. He married, started up a general store with his brother-in-law, began a family. Once, as my Great-grandmother and another woman washed clothes in a creek, three Indians crept up on them and pushed them in. Sioux comedy. Great-grandfather was so indignant, he cut off their credit.

Reality Lesson II: just before Christmas. My head cleared, my tooth hadn’t fallen out and my shiner was fading like the memory of the lamentable tree ride. I had another idea. Women of the time held their do’s in place with huge hairpins that, to me, looked electronic, like the filaments in the vacuum tubes of our broken radio Dad was trying to fix. So I thought, if I stick one of these in a wall socket, we might just be able to hear the radio shows we were missing. (I was four, remember.)

Okay, you know what happened: sparks, a zzzzzz noise, black burn marks on the wall, burned fingers, burned-out fuse, doctor’s office, stethoscope to make sure the heart still worked, a deep look-see into the eyes, topical pain killer, gauze-wrapped fingers, he’s okay. Did he really do that?

Reality Lesson III. Against all odds (given our poverty), Santa Claus
brought me a bicycle. Actually it was the smallest of bikes and had training wheels, which I scorned immediately and had my Dad remove, only to ask him to put them back on when I couldn’t master two-wheel balance. Inexplicably it had hand-brakes. In my mind, brake = stop. Instantly, like braking a car. You brake, you stop. And that’s pretty much how it worked. On a level street. But I needed a serious incline to give the system a real test.

Iowa’s not known for hills, but a nearby town where my grandparents lived had beauts. In fact, their street was one of the steepest. Two-thirds of the way down, I was just a blur and I knew this was a really bad idea. Still I had a spark of faith that the brakes would stop me at the bottom of the hill. And, in a way they did. I grabbed the hand-grips in a death squeeze. And then that eerie accident slo-mo again: front wheel stopping, rear wheel floating up and catapulting me into space, me rolling over and over then body-surfing the gravel cross street.

There was no doctor in my grandparents’ town. Dad said, “does that hurt? I don’t think there’s any broken bones.” They cleaned and doctored and bandaged the abrasions and my grandmother sewed a sling for my arm, which made me see myself as a wounded war hero. Later I found out the bike was second-hand and the rear brake was broken. Probably when the previous owner was killed riding it.

My great-grandparents had six children. One died in infancy. One became a well-known opera singer in Chicago, one an artist–a regionally celebrated painter–one a spectacular eccentric who outraged his family all his life (and he lived to 102). Two were musicians. My grandfather, for whom I’m named played trombone and other brass instruments, auditioned for John Philip Sousa, was in the San Francisco earthquake of 1903 and, while lying in his honeymoon bed in Colorado, blasted a cockroach off the bedroom ceiling with his six-shooter — my grandmother’s favorite Will anecdote. How these 19th century Iowa burghers were exposed to literature and art and music and the romance of travel, who knows?

On the ride back to Mallard, Dad said, “Got a big surprise for you.”
“What is it?”
“Can’t tell you; it’s a surprise.”
“Where is it?”
“It’s tonight.”
“Why can’t I have it now?”
“Because you have to wait till tonight.” Four-year olds can only wait so long, and then they fall asleep. I was still waking up as my mother dressed me over my pajamas and worked my sore arms into a coat. She pulled a stocking cap over my bandaged head. “Where we going?”
“It’s a surprise, remember?” I was instantly alert.
“What is it? What is it?”
 “You’ll see.” I forgot about the sling. Puffing his pipe, my dad carried me to the car, already running and heated, and sat me in the back seat. My bundled-up mother climbed in front and we headed off for the
beanfield end of town. As we neared the last building, Dad said, “Okay, put your head down, no peeking.”

I was so excited it was hard to breathe. What air I pulled in was thick with pipe smoke. Then I had bad thoughts: maybe they were going to
take me out to the fields and leave me. I’d caused a lot of trouble. We drove on and on, up a road that rose to a ridge west of town. Lying face-down on the seat, I could hear gravel pinging the underside of the car. “When can I get up?”

“Almost.” They wouldn’t leave me out here. Would they? My dad stopped the car, but left it running. I heard him push in the light switch. “Oh, my!” said my mother.

“Shut your eyes.” He opened the back door, carried me to the front of the car and sat me on the warm hood. “Okay, open ‘em.” We were parked at the top of the ridge, looking north. It was too much to take in at once: the winter heavens, clear and sharp and spangled with stars against the blackest of black skies. And from the northern horizon, beams and veils and coronas of light, spiking and receding, shimmering and fading on a scale so huge the light seemed to rise from beyond the edge of the world. I had no idea, no reference. Maybe it was the war, far away. Cities burning.

“It’s the Northern Lights,” said my dad. “Aurora borealis. At the North Pole they see it all the time. We can’t see it from here very often. What do you think?”

I sat between my parents on the hood, warmed by the idling motor. There was nothing to say. My father tried to explain what caused the lights, but it didn’t sink in. We watched the show for a long time and then my mother said, “I’m going into the car; it’s too cold for me.” My dad hugged me closer and let me have a baby puff on his pipe. I pretended the steam I blew out into the freezing air was a great cloud of smoke. After a while there was nothing to do but go home.
In a history of Story County, Iowa, I read this: “Since that time, Franklin M. Baldwin has been senior member of Baldwin & Maxwell, one of the oldest mercantile firms of this commonwealth. So successfully has the business of this firm been transacted, that it passed through all panics and other trying times without financial embarrassment and has held its own in every respect for almost a quarter of a century. . .F.M. Baldwin has always been a Republican in his political views and is a man who has ever had the best interest of the country at heart.”

After my drive-through of Mallard, I spent the rest of the day checking out other towns of memory: Plover, Rolfe, West Bend, Algona, Cylinder, Emmetsburg, and after dark, circled back to Mallard. I looked for a cop or waitress or bartender to chat up, ask about the old days and the changes, where was this building and that. But there was no police station, no tavern, and the one café was closed. I drove west on the sandy road, retraced my midnight Christmas surprise of a half-century earlier. No Northern Lights tonight, but there was no moon either. I recommend the experience. Here’s what happens:

A clear moonless night sky with no light pollution or obstructions to the view is the ultimate theater, the ultimate temple. Just empty your mind, wait and see. As your preoccupation with getting and spending fades into
triviality, the vital questions surface: Who are we? How did we get here? Where are we going? What’s out there?

When you reflect that many of the stars you see no longer exist (except as light energy flowing through space), it’s easy to see your place in the continuum where, for instance, you can touch a great-grandfather who passed through panics and other trying times. . . and died nearly fifty years before you were born.

With the clarity of distance (and ignorant of the dull parts), I see him acting out a version of the timeless story of the hero and the quest — a
story not invented, but recounted from life and embellished over time to give it order and artistic truth. (Rescuing Helen of Troy, leading your tribe out of bondage in Egypt, sailing off in search of China and instead discovering a world no one knew was there, or just walking west by northwest until you find that exact place to stake your claim, marry your soul-mate, and live out your life. Never mind that Helen caused a ten-year war, that Moses never made it to the Promised Land, that Columbus got shipped home in chains, or that your great-grandfather ended up voting Republican.

I travel in time to the Christmas of the Errors and all the others when I strained my eyes watching winter heavens for Santa, and Baby Jesus, too, flying through the clouds. Later, when the myths and legends came down to Earth and down to size, I realized that something that’s impossible to conceive an end to in time or space is also infinitely more mysterious and wonderful than man-made saints and deities.

Think about this. Don’t squander the greatest wealth you’ll ever have: the story of your life — complete with pictures and captions. And keep in mind your story didn’t begin with you, nor will it end with you.

Forget the self-analysis, self-improvement, self-absorbed men are from Mars, left-brain right-brain, touchy-feely, New Age, occult, crystal-pyramid, Scorpio-rising, Tarot, encounter-group narcissism that can numb your brain and dumb you down. (In my view, scams to peddle books, DVDs, workshops, cults.)

Expunge your vocabulary of “proactive, empowerment, enable, permission, sensitivity, assertiveness, control freak, personal growth, visualization, unmet needs, healing process, co-dependency, dysfunctional” and similar fuzzy abstractions. Speak real words.

Use your self-help books to kindle a fire in the fireplace, curl up with a fat notebook (or a MacBook) and start writing the story of you. And when you run out of memories, ask your parents and grandparents —and anyone else connected — to sit around the campfire, metaphorically. (And do it now. When they, go, they take entire volumes of the story with them.) Illustrate it with snapshots and drawings and such. Really learn how to research. Keep a journal. For perspective take an extended trip to your homeplace. Or if you’re there now, go somewhere far away.

In the end, you’ll be smarter and wiser. And you’ll feel better. and have stronger defenses against charlatans. It’s not doctrines or superstitions or conspiracies or invisible forces that give our lives order and meaning, but the stories we tell about those lives. (Think of your favorite people, places, books and movies, and I’ll bet that the quality they have in common has something to do with the storyteller’s genius.)
If we really get ambitious, we find our stories intertwining with others to form a larger epic that will resonate forever. Or at least until our little red star self-destructs.

All the mistakes you made, all the dumb things you did, the loves lost, the business you didn’t get, the failed brakes, the busted heads, the bleeding tongues, burned fingers, the dissonance, the darkness, the leaps into the unknown, the suffering, the certainty of death: at the end of the day these are the flavors that made the good parts sweeter.

-End-

POSTSCRIPT: This first appeared in the December 1991 issue of Rough, once a monthly, now a sporadically published, magazine of the Dallas Society of Visual Communications, a non-profit outfit devoted to furthering graphic design and related communications arts. It started out a simple Christmas story, but then became what it is, a long meditation on larger themes and a memoir of a slice of my childhood in the farm towns of Northwestern Iowa. The story as is, is as close to my recollections as I could make it. That is, I didn’t embellish much at all, just compressed time and events and imagined others. The backstory of my Great-grandfather is from family lore and some old newspaper clippings, both of which may be of questionable accuracy.

I apologize for muddying these themes with a descent into didacticism at the end, and dated at that, but I was in a hurry to wrap and I had my audience in mind, mostly young-uns just starting out in our “industry,” or still in school. If I ever rewrite it, I’ll delete or soften a lot of that.

Since this was published, I’ve been back to Iowa on an assignment and had a little time to re-visit yet other places of my early days, including the famous bridges of Madison County and the blink of a town not far from Des Moines, Maxwell–named after my Great-grandfather’s brother-in -law and business partner in Baldwin & Maxwell.

There’s no trace of their once-thriving mercantile establishment, only the name of the town, the references in historical society archives, and the main residential street, which is Baldwin Avenue.

–BB

RAPE IS NOT ABOUT SEMANTICS

By now you've heard of Todd Akin, Missouri Senate candidate who earlier this week stumbled into a hornet's nest with his on-air comments about the odds of rape resulting in pregnancy. I was one of those outraged by what he said, so much so that when I happened upon a video of the interview in which he said it, I stood up from my desk and exclaimed at my PC screen, "No WAY." I watched again, listening carefully, becoming more incredulous with each passing second.

My initial reaction was to want to hit the thick-headed son-of-a-bitch over the head with a two-by-four, but then of course I realized how unproductive that would be (especially in keeping myself out of Federal prison). So I'm writing this blog instead.

First of all, my outrage has nothing to do with Todd Akin's views on abortion (he is against it, in case you haven't heard, and has drafted legislation to make it illegal in all cases). Whether or not abortion is murder, and therefore should not be legal under any circumstance, is an issue that has troubled the best minds (and hearts, too) in the country for many decades, with no definitive resolution, no matter what laws are in effect at any given time. I have concluded that it is a matter to be decided by the personal conscience of the uterus-owning person to which an unwanted pregnancy happens.

My outrage has everything to do with the fact that Todd Akin has been working on legislation that governs half the people in this state, but without the merest glimmer of a clue about what it means to be one of those people, and what their particular vulnerabilities in society might be. In the video of his interview with Charles Jaco, he actually makes a dismissive gesture, as if to wave away all women who were ever raped and left pregnant thereby, as if they never existed, and indeed would never exist in his mind, since he was laboring under the delusion that rape could not cause pregnancy.

My outrage has to do with the absurdity of his holding a position of legislative responsibility for years but never bothering to walk even half a mile in the shoes of those whom those laws might effect. In short, his words in the Jaco interview proved to me that he was dealing with the problem of rape by choosing to believe that it simply doesn't exist. Presumably, it's something made up by sluts who want attention or want to harm innocent men by their accusations... or who, heaven forfend, actually WANTED to have sex, which in itself, in his eyes, is apparently somehow damning. Also, he seems to believe that every instance of "legitimate" rape consists of a great show of physical violence with lots of spectacular bruises to exhibit to a DA. Sadly, nearly every woman knows all too well that all that's required is for someone bigger and stronger (or with sufficient drugs or alcohol) to get physical control of her body for a few minutes without her consent or compliance. And anyone who's ever so much as channel-surfed past any pop-psych show such as Oprah or Dr. Phil is surely aware that vast numbers of children are raped, "forcibly" or otherwise, every year in this country alone, and that they frequently they have babies as a result.

Todd Akin is woefully, willfully ignorant of the issue he is trying to legislate about, and that I can neither countenance nor forgive, especially when his subsequent "apologies" deeply underscore his continued cluelessness as to WHY people (and not just women) are outraged.

It's not that we deny him the right to his pro-life stance or that we do not respect it; it's that he has concluded that it is the only correct stance without doing even a modicum of his homework. And it's not that he "used the wrong words" in the now-famous interview. This is SO not about semantics. It's not even so much about ignorance of human biology, although that in and of itself is troubling.

It's about complete ignorance of the problem.

Has Todd Akin ever sat by the bedside of a 12-year-old laboring to deliver her own father's baby? Probably not. Is he aware that a third of all women in the U.S. have had or will have an abortion during their reproductive lifetimes? Doubt it. Did he ever even do a quick Google, as interns at news stations all over the country did the day the Jaco interview aired, just to fact-check how many pregnancies (reported ones!) result from rape per year? (That would be over 32,000, by the way. Seems a lot of them to be dismissed by the wave of a liver-spotted hand.) I was told recently by a psychologist with a PhD who practices family counseling that one in three women will be sexually abused in her lifetime, but that that figure may be low because sexual abuse is a vastly underreported crime. I wonder if Akin knows that statistic, or even dimly grasps what it means? And if he doesn't, how can he possibly hope to represent women in Congress?

And before you conclude that I'm just another angry, man-hating, feminist cow, I would like to state that I do not object to men. I love, admire, cherish, and respect lots of them. I had a father who was male, have a brother who is male, a husband who is male, and a beloved son who is male. Some of my best friends are male. Nor do I particularly object to old, white, Christian males, so long as they make an effort to understand people and things outside their own narrow range of experience, just as I strive to understand men and their issues, some of which will always be far outside the range of my own personal experience.

If Todd Akin chooses to take a sabbatical from politics to educate himself about the realities of a woman's life -- perhaps by volunteering at a shelter for battered women, by talking with and getting to know former rape victims, by interviewing counselors who treat such victims, by reading a biology textbook, by any means he can think of to educate himself so that he can represent in Congress my issues as a woman -- then I would accept happily accept any apology he chooses to make.

But until then, please, Missouri; do not elect another old, white, Christian male who does not begin to understand the people whose lives he wants to govern with ill-considered legislation.

Two Households, Both Alike in Dignity...

"Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean."


I happened to buy tickets for an upcoming performance of "Romeo and Juliet" (the ballet, not the play or the movie) this week, and it got me thinking. I grant you, it's almost too facile to draw comparisons between Capulets v. Montagues and Democrats v. Republicans... but I couldn't help wondering if maybe the tragedy in Tucson might demonstrate to America's two warring camps, for once and for all, how pointless and potentially damaging to the country as a whole their feud is has become. You know; kind of like what happened in Verona.

After all, the parallels are almost too strong to miss. In both cases, two feuding factions under a common government escalate a grudge until a terrible incident brings both sides up short. And just as in the play, our own leader spoke at a memorial service in an effort to provide a grieving populace with some clue about how it might move toward some better way, some saving grace. Unlike Shakespeare's Prince, though, our President did not scream at us, as we perhaps deserved, "A plague on both your houses!"

No; instead, Mr. Obama pointed out that no matter how ugly certain "hunt-'em-down-and-shoot-'em" political imagery has been, it didn't cause the shootings in Tucson. As repugnant as I personally find such imagery, I know he was right. A disturbed gunman was to blame, and that's that.

However, I think the truth we truly need to absorb here is not that blame for such violence lies with any one group's unsavory choice of political "fight" metaphors, but the cold reality of exactly what such metaphors look and feel like when acted out in real life. They look like a hard-working, well-intentioned Congresswoman fighting for her life. They feel like bereaved parents watching their little girl being lowered irrevokably into her grave.

After I heard Mr. Obama's speech (which in my view rose high above the fray and got to the very heart of the matter; i.e., setting the best example possible for each other), I channel-surfed a bit to see how pundits in both camps would react to what he had to say. My mood of hopeful elation evaporated as I realized a Romeo-and-Juliet ending -- Capulets and Montagues linking arms and exiting stage right -- would not be forthcoming any time soon.

I found one camp focused almost entirely on chastising the propagators of cross-hairs-and-bullet-holes imagery and tsk-tsking that this person or that had chosen not to attend the memorial service...  and the opposite camp focused on criticizing the memorial service itself and damning with faint praise the President's attempts at offering some balm to a wounded city. 

It seemed that following that memorial service in which so many high roads were taken, both sides had the perfect opportunity to lay down arms and at least turn in the direction of a new civility to each other, We The People chose to take another jab.

Really?

People?

Chris? Ed? Glenn? Rush? Family? Esteemed Facebook friends?

Is this the best example We The People can bring to America?

What do you figure it would take to get us as a nation to stop bringing plagues on both our houses?

Blackberry Season

Been thinking a lot lately about the scuffles in Congress over regulation and reform of the finance industry... about great institutions (e.g., the press, the clergy, banks) in which the placement of public trust was such a given that we never thought of insulting them with such an unnecessary superfluity as "oversight."

To me it began to seem that trust -- and trustworthiness -- existed in no corner of the universe anymore and anyone who did trust was so absurdly naive that s/he deserved the rip-off s/he was bound to suffer.

So it's with awe and delight and much annoying effusion that I tell you my tale of finding just such a corner right here in River City, a.k.a. St. Charles, Missouri.

Last week, Husbing expressed a wish for some homemade blackberry pie. But blackberries at Schnucks, Dierberg's, et al might as well be rubies right now, based on the current asking price. As serendipity would have it, though, in the next day or so, out driving around, we spotted a very small, very unassuming, hand-lettered sign that whispered, simply, "BLACKBERRIES," at the entrance to a gravel driveway leading off a main local drag. The drive was a bit overgrown with foliage, so we couldn't see past the first 30 feet or so, but we could tell there was a house back there somewhere. We exchanged a glance and a shrug and pulled in.

At the end of the drive, past a house with an open garage, another hand-lettered sign ("STORE") with an arrow directed us to the right. Husbing stopped the car and I hopped out for a look around.

First impression: a sense of being way, way out in a field somewhere... big patch of blackberry canes off to the left... cicadas singing and grasshoppers swinging on the canes... to the right... a rather jury-rigged tent/greenhouse arrangement sagging in the hot sunshine.

The tent was open on one side and I stepped in. To the right, a glass-doored cooler stocked with pints of berries and an inventory of day-lily corms. At the back, boxes of beautiful gnarly heirloom tomatoes. Dead ahead, more hand-lettered instructions, complete with arrows where necessary (for example, one pointing to a mailbox perched on a counter of wooden planks: "Leave Checks Here") and a price list:

BLACKBERRIES

1 pints $1.75
2 pints $3.50

and so on.

Oh, and a pick-your-own option, too... $1.25 a pint.

And scales, for weighing what you picked, and the tomatoes.

I opened the cooler and took out two pints of berries... and then cautiously opened the mailbox.

Inside, a syrofoam cup stuffed with bills and coins.

I added my four ones and made my own change.

Back to the car... we drove away with our berries, having never seen a human being.

I spent the rest of the day in the glow of an unfamiliar but delightful feeling... of having been trusted unconditionally. It lasted while I rolled crust, sugared berries, and ate pie a la mode. It still suffuses me when I think about "Leave Checks Here."

I also wondered how long it would be before some marauding teenagers out joy-riding or an addict seeking an easy mark ruined this little corner of trust for good.

What's that?

Where, exactly, is this stand?

Sorry, but I can't tell you that.

I just don't trust you.

(No, no... kidding. If you're local and I know you, email me and I'll tellya. Of course then I'll have to killya so you don't put it on Facebook.)

So You Want To Quit Smoking?

Well far be it from me to advise you how. Maybe you can benefit from my experience, though. I realize it's different for everyone. Maybe you don't smoke all the time; maybe you don't smoke a lot. I was a two-pack-a-day-er who tried to hold it to a pack and a half, but sometimes blew through three. Since I lit my first Winston Red at 19 until January of 2008, I didn't live a day that wasn't focused in some way either on how to get more nicotine or how to steel myself to keep from ingesting it.

Of course I didn't go from a single Winston to 40 of them a day overnight; that took a few months. And I switched brands quite a few times since that first one, going from Winston Reds to Marlboro Reds to Marlboro Lites and then cheaper brands as prices increased along with my habit. And back when I started (as I recall, it was 1973), cigarettes had a lower nicotine content than the ones coming out of the Tobacco Belt today.*  They were easier to kick, and I did it several times, cold turkey, over the years. Happily, I was able to quit before I became pregnant with my son. But a year after he was born, I started up again.

By 2000, I was so hooked that attempt after attempt to quit failed. I tried patches, gum, wafers, will-power... but the Misty Menthol Lite 120s I was smoking then always weaseled their way back into the spot of number-one priority in my life. My last thought upon going to bed at night was whether I should run up to the nearest Mobil for more smokes. My first thought upon waking was how many cigarettes were left in the pack. And did I have a working lighter? Did this restaurant allow smoking? Could I scrape up enough cash for another carton this week? Yes, I felt guilty about the money I was spending; yes, I was conscious of a worsening cough. I knew all the health risks; what smoker doesn't? But I still loved (not too strong a word; if anything, an understatement) my Mistys. I went nowhere without them.

Sometimes I went a whole day or two without lighting one, but they still occupied my every waking thought. If I passed an overflowing ashtray outside a building, the ever-present low-level anxiety about having or not having a smoke burst into a full-blown craving. If I smelled cigarettes in a bar or saw anybody lighting up, that's pretty much all my brain could focus on. I didn't always give in, but I always wanted to.

Fast-forward to 2007. I saw an ad online for a new smoking-cessation drug called Chantix being introduced in the U.S. by Pfizer. I read up on it; I talked to a doctor about it. By January of 2008, I had cadged a prescription (my doctor had reservations about it, but I was persuasive) and set a quit date.

I didn't quite make it by New Years Day, my target date, as I didn't get the script filled until around the 15th of January. The instructions stated that it was supposed to be taken for three months, but I decided to fill just one month at a time until I knew how it worked.

I took it for two weeks.

By the end of that time, I was bat-shit crazy.

But I wasn't smoking.

It was as if, for me, cigarettes had never existed.

After 35 years of struggling with nicotine-related anxiety of one form or another, I was completely free of it.

I know you don't believe this if you're still smoking. I couldn't have imagined it a year ago, either. But it's absolutely true. Here's the best illustration of this I can give you: I don't know the exact date that I ceased to smoke. One day I simply forgot to. And never thought about doing it again.

Now when I'm among people who happen to be smoking, I am mostly unaware of it. The smell is neither delicious nor offensive to me, nor does it trigger the mental nudge that anything cigarette-related used to give me. Long butts abandoned in ashtrays no longer call to me. Packs of cigarettes stacked on store shelves don't arrest my attention any more. I just don't notice them. For awhile I was worried that if I purposely remembered what it physically felt like to smoke, I might want to do it again. Mercifully, that turned out not to be true. I am writing this piece without a hint of craving. My feeling about smoking now is complete and utter indifference.

Okay; now you know that Chantix made me quit smoking. (Yes, I said "made me"; my own will had nothing to do with it.) However, so you can make your own decision about trying it, I need to tell you what I meant above about bat-shit crazy.

Some of it I expected. The package insert is quite explicit about the fact that anybody taking Chantix can expect vivid dreams, for example. Boy, did I have those: deep, colorful, excruciatingly detailed, highly emotional epics that seemed to last all night and stayed with me for days. But they were not all nightmares; some were vastly entertaining. (Who knew I had that much imagination?) The manufacturers also warn about physical symptoms such as nausea and constipation, and they're not kidding. But certainly these side effects were no worse than those experienced with pregnancy, so I was more than willing to continue taking the drug.

A few more oddities cropped up. For one thing, stuff I used to love (e.g., coffee) suddenly seemed disgusting; stuff I used to hate (e.g., bell peppers) I suddenly adored. This part, at least, felt somewhat familiar... a little bit like the cravings/aversions people often have with pregnancy. Also, I lost my appetite. By that I mean I no longer seemed to have that internal thermostat (not the right word... appestat?) that lets people know when they are hungry, no matter how long it had been since I'd eaten. Perversely, when I did have a meal, about half an hour later I would feel as if I were starving and simply had to eat something or die. Oh, and I suddenly had an acute sense of smell, and most smells nauseated me. (Again, not that different than what some people experience during pregnancy.) Perhaps a bit weirder, though, my own skin seemed to take on a strange scent, like toasted almonds, that I just couldn't shower off. I also felt somewhat more irritable than usual, but I expected that with any smoking-cessation attempt. 

About two weeks into the prescription, though, something just... tilted. Out of nowhere, with no provocation, I'd feel anger building into a blind, unreasoning rage. Seconds later, a random line on TV or in a book would strike me as so funny I literally couldn't stop laughing. People I'd known and liked for years suddenly seemed like loathsome, hateful creatures, full of vicious intent. Every painful or unpleasant situation from my past swam up out of memory and replayed in my mind. Inanimate objects (in one case, cans of corn on a grocery shelf) seemed like the saddest things in the world, and I didn't know how to comfort them. Once, in the act of clicking a couple of unneeded computer files with the intention of deleting them, I was overwhelmed with pity for the poor little documents and simply couldn't bring myself to "kill" them. Out to lunch with my husband one day, talking with him about plans we had for the evening, I burst suddenly into uncontrollable tears. But without any feeling of sadness. It was like somebody else was in charge of my brain, running gleefully up and down its passages and flipping switches at random.

Somewhere in there I stopped taking Chantix (DUH, you say), but without tapering off. That just made things worse. I broke out in a fierce case of hives, for one thing. But above all, I began to feel like a person I simply didn't recognize. I started taking half a pill a day, increasing slowly to the dosage I'd been at when I stopped, and then backed off slowly again. That caused less physical discomfort, but all day, every day, I fought thoughts of paranoia (family, friends, clients were all working secretly against me; soon I would have no work at all and my family would starve; I'd be homeless, etc.). Bad as I felt emotionally, however, I knew I was merely  reacting to the drug.

Finally, even after being off Chantix entirely for months, the depressive episodes intensified and I began to think of suicide. I knew better than to give free rein to those thoughts, but all the same, I made an appointment with a psychologist, just to have someone help monitor me through the situation. I also enrolled myself in a clinical drug trial for antidepressants (because without medical insurance, I couldn't afford the $250 per hour an initial office visit to a psychiatrist would have cost, let alone the medication). I'm not sure the pills helped, but at least I felt I was doing something other than succumbing to misery. And I knew it was all temporary. Or at least, so I hoped.

"Temporary" turned out to be a little longer than I thought it would. Say a little more than a year and a half.

It's been a year and nine months, give or take a week, since I last swallowed a Chantix tablet. I no longer have thoughts of suicide, paranoia, or depression. Life is good again. I still love some foods I used to hate, and hate some foods I used to love. I still cannot tell whether or not I'm hungry. I still never think about cigarettes, and I do not miss them. For real; it's as if I'd never so much as seen one.

Now you know the best and the worst Chantix has to offer.

Good luck. 

---

*The web site www.bio-medicine.org reports that independent analysis, based on data submitted to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (MDPH) by the manufacturers, found that increases in smoke nicotine yield per cigarette averaged 1.6 percent each year, or about 11 percent over a seven-year period (1998-2005).

Oh, Gnats...

So yesterday (Saturday), as I was dashing through Walgreen's to pick up some wrapping paper, I saw some spray-on sunscreen and thought, "Why not?" Much easier to just spritz than have to slather on a lotion, so I grabbed some. Before I headed out for the trail that afternoon, I sprayed me all over, liberally, according to package directions. Kinda oily, but it smelled good. Not your typical chemical-y sunscreen scent.

Nice walk... busy trail... seemingly everybody in West County out enjoying the last few days of a good summer... sailboats on the lake... every type of unmotorized wheeled vehicle imaginable on the trail (kids in strollers pushed by moms on Rollerblades; dads riding bikes alongside, etc.)... dogs of every size and stripe. I was stepping along at a good clip, swinging my little baby 2-lb hand weights, working up a respectable sweat... til I got about halfway round the lake, just passing the Page Avenue Extension overpass.  I noticed I was ITCHING. Like, a LOT.

Glanced down at my arms... then my legs... and realized I was dotted, every inch or so, with wriggling little gnats, happily drinking my sunscreen.  Actually the situation extended to every exposed scrap of skin including neck and face. So I set down my weights and tried to swat/brush them all off; not a quick or easy process cuz instead of letting go, they squished and left tiny streaks. Ack ack ICK. I ended up not so much brushing as picking. When I was finally satisfied that I'd gotten most of the little buggers (hundreds of 'em, I tell you), I picked up my weights and stepped out, much relieved. But a quarter-mile later, I was all be-gnatted again.  

Finally, instead of stopping and picking, I just decided to live with my little hitchhikers. After all, I was in their space; not the other way around.


 

Friday, September 18 on the Trail

Some days I have the trail very nearly to myself. Then it seems like the whole long asphalt ribbon was laid out for my personal benefit. In that kind of solitude the miles elapse without registering, and the mind turns up hundreds of cool things it misplaced long ago. It's like going through a junk drawer. You find things you can't imagine why you kept, but you're mostly glad to see them. 

For example, a few fronds of mimosa in the overhanging tangle of leaves make me think of the primitive Tree of Life ubiquitous in Pennsylvania Dutch folk art. That image morphs into another bit of mental selvage: the raw edge of a Sylvia Plath poem right out of my college copy of "Ariel." All I can recapture now is this little snippet: 

"The tree of life and the tree of life, 
Unloosing their moons, month after month, to no purpose. 
The blood flood is the flood of love..."  

And then I ponder how badly Sylvia wanted to love her babies and not to be crazy, and I hope fiercely that she and son Nicholas ended up together in whatever place it is that God's got set aside for suicides. I personally think it's a place of great healing in preparation for the soul's next launch and not at all a place of abandonment. Why would God do otherwise? How counterproductive would that be? Silly popes. THEY have no built-in trees of life.  

But that makes me wonder... what happens to any of us when our trail eventually runs out? I'm not sure the elaborate heavenly futures we imagine for ourselves are more noble than those of the fallen logs I see scattered all along the trail, slowly melting back into the loam and loess, becoming food for insect life and fungus. Now and then I've seen them covered so completely with mushrooms it's like they were edged by an over-zealous decorator in row upon row of crocheted lace. I think that maybe life, whatever that is, simply reinvents itself in another form, over and over, for as long as there's an Earth to keep it in.  

If such stuff is not enough to keep a mind busy on the trail, there's always the nature show. For instance, I sometimes see an orb weaver's web with its brilliant tenant in residence, or a black snake kedging its way into the weeds, or a doe cropping water plants in the slough. And I could look forever just at the berries alone: dusky-skinned wild grapes; inky, poisonous pokeberries; orange bittersweet; some white ones I never saw elsewhere and can't identify; and some equally mysterious red things, translucent as rubies, with faint internal ribs like gooseberries have.   

It's not just the sights, either; it's the sounds that entertain. If I'm walking in the morning, it's a project unto itself just picking out the different birdsongs: mockingbirds, cardinals, robins, crows, and what-all mix with the bull-horned instructions of a crewing captain to his rowers out on the lake. On hot summer afternoons the grass on both sides of the trail twitches with crickets and katydids. At twilight, the cicadas hush and the echoless basso profundo of a bullfrog solo may take over. And in the fall, there's the soughing crunch under my Sketchers of all the falling sycamore and oak.  

But nothing delights me like the smells. Every few feet there's a new one: oak, of course; honeysuckle; wild onion; cut grass (the soccer fields); the sick-sweet treacle of Scotch thistles; the hot cinnamon of wild roses; the mushroom musk of the woods; and sometimes, by the footbridge over the creek, an inexplicable whiff of raw petroleum.