Trying to Keep Our Freedoms

I had the strangest conversation with a group of people at the library the other day. It wasn't a planned meeting, yet it became a forum. This is Banned Books Week. Oh, I'd heard about it on the radio, but the librarians had set up a table of books that people, the government, or special interest groups had tried to ban.

I love my country, but it isn't free. Not really. Bigotry still exists. Religious freedom gets attacked every day. I don't even want to go into the issues of domestic air travel or a woman's right to choose.  Still, why do other people want to restrict the books I read? I'm an adult. My library exerts a huge effort to let me choose whether or not a book is appropriate for me. I don't think that any groups, religious or not, should determine what our librarians are allowed to put onto the shelves.

Pornography? Now, that's a tough question. Will it damage a child? Can that right be protected for some others without grossing me out whenever I walk through the library? I don't mind the boards over certain offensive magazine covers at the grocery store. But these books on the table were not pornography. That's usually what I had assumed when I'd thought of banning books.

As I stood in front of those banned books, I started to get angry. It held an array of wonderful books including the Koran, a book about Buddhism, and the Bible. It held best-sellers like 'Harry Potter' and 'Twilight' alongside high school classics like 'The Catcher in the Rye' and 'Animal Farm.'

I muttered something like, "The Bible, the Koran? You've got to be kidding!"

Other people were standing there next to me. An older woman picked up a book by F. Scott Fitzgerald and said, "I had to read this in high school. It's a classic."
One by one, we looked at the books and discussed them. A teenager joined in, animated, when we got to 'Twilight.'

"I didn't like the movies, but the books were okay. The way I figure it, if you don't approve of reading about vampires, then don't. Just don't assume you get to decide what my religious beliefs are."

You go girl, I thought. We all stood there looking. Another woman said, "It looks like a list of must-read books." The librarian walked over and joined us.

"If you check out a banned book and carry it around reading it, it will send a strong message." Then she offered us a list of websites where we could read about banned books and post our opinions.  I knew that when I got home, I'd look at these sites: The American Library Association, The American Civil Liberties Union, and the First Amendment Center.

Another table the librarians had set up showed some so-called reasons why groups had tried to ban particular books. The Bible was deemed inappropriate for children because it contained passages depicting murder and incest and thus should be reomoved from the library. A ban on a book about Buddhism was supported with "If you read this book, you might become a Buddhist." So what's wrong with showing the beauty of your beliefs? Those people knocking on my door with religious pamphlets on Christmas morning weren't breaking the law. They were just annoying. Oh, I wish I could remember the reasons for the other books.  It was fascinating.

So I've decided to to do my part by reading the Koran. I've never read it before, but I'll bet I'll love much of it. I'll bet I find more similarities than differences in the morals encouraged in my own Bible. I wonder if I'll find contradictions in it or the parts that have not kept up with modern life.  I'm curious. 

I'll read the Koran here in Tully's. I'll bring it to school when I join my Reading Buddy. I'll bring it to choir practice and end up telling someone in church something I learned from it. I imagine I'll carry some secret message from it in my heart wherever I go. That's what I'll do during Banned Books Week. What will you do?

Thank you for listening, jb

Funk

It's a bit disappointing to have a good plan for the afternoon and find that Nick and Adrian just want to play at home.  We were going to go to the Issaquah Sportsmen's Club to do some shooting.  I was looking forward to seeing Adrian shoot a real gun for the first time.  His parents gave us permission.  I'd gathered the hearing protection, the ammunition, the targets, and the key to the trigger lock.  I'd thought that this was a clincher, a sure thing to get us all up and out of the house.  I was wrong. 

It's hot out and the boys only wanted to come inside where it was still cool to play.  They've been downstairs most of the time.  That's one of the nice things about having a house on a hill.  The lower level may only have windows on three sides, but it's always cool down there in the summer, or in this case the Indian summer. Heat or not, I wanted to go out and do something interesting.  We could have biked through the Snoqualmie tunnel and stayed cool.  We could have headed out to swim at the Bellevue Aquatics Center where the water is always brisk.  We could have gone to Nick's dojo, the Z-Ultimate studio and I could watch little kids sparring.  That's always fun. It's so hard to get the boys motivated to do something interesting on a Friday afternoon.  They get off early and have almost a half a day to play, but I guess after going to school all week, they just want to hang around.  After being home alone all week, I want to get out and do something.

Can you see that I have cabin fever?  I would never make it through an Alaskan winter.  Now I'm stuck deleting old emails as I look through the window at the beautiful day outside.  It's hard to keep looking out the window too, because the neighbor is working on his pumphouse, the one that houses our community well.  And he has his shirt off.  He's not an ugly man, but for some reason, I'm repulsed by this.  When did it become improper for a man to work outside without a shirt?  My dad did.  One of my grandpas did.  The other grandpa always had a distinct line on his arm above which his skin was white and below which it was a deep reddish tan.  I don't remember thinking anything about men walking around without a shirt back then.  Yet, I've noticed my opinion has shifted over time, not having seen many men shirtless in a long while.  Even at the pool, most men and almost all of the boys wear swim shirts.  At first, I thought it was self-consciousness, but it's the norm now.  Maybe it bothers me to have to see this neighbor outside because I don't like his attitude and I don't want him to look up and see me looking out the window.  He might presume that I was looking at him.  Ewwwww.

In the view of all this lassitude, the highlight of my day was when I opened a package of liverwurst and the cats came running.  Buddy happily ate two chunks of it while Seth begged for some, but disdained to actually eat it.  Really?  I'm not sure why I relented, but I got out some of Seth's little dry crunchies, Greenies.  How can a cat like Greenies more than liverwurst? 

On these restless days, I hate the sound of the television, especially the cartoons that the boys are interested in at their age.  The animation is weak.  The stories are rude.  It seems like they work to make the colors and characters as offensive as possible without affecting the rating.  I guess I shouldn't complain.  I used to watch Popeye. 

Oh man, I have got to get out from behind this computer.  The neighbor is still strutting about and I don't want to see it.  I tend to stare at the green out the window in front of me and my eye keeps getting drawn to the only movement on such a still day.  Not even the tops of the Western Red Cedars are swaying.  God forbid I'd actually want to pull some blackberry in my own yard.  Then I'd have to talk to the man too.  If I go into my sewing room to hem Nick's jeans, I'll automatically switch windows.  That might work.  Might get me on my feet and out of this week-long funk too.  If not, I'll go for a bike ride when Mike gets home, with or without the rest of them. 

Thank you for listening, jb

Truthful Fiction and Making Up Names

For a while, I was stopped cold when it came to writing my stories about my dad. Have you noticed that? About a month ago, Mike asked me a simple question, "How is your story real if you don't put the difficult things into it, like the fact that your dad had a bad temper?"  I really didn't want to write about that.  I loved my dad.  I still do, but Mike's right, you know. It's all part of our story, the real part of who he was to me.

There's another problem I run into when I think about telling stories about my childhood.  Over and over, I've had arguments with my brother, sister, and mother about what really happened when I was young.  Of course, they're older and surely remember it all better than I do.  So when it comes to my stories, I figure they'll do the same thing, tear it apart looking for inaccuracies.  Someday they'll see what I've written, stories about when I was young, and they'll refute what is the truth for me.  I was brought up in a household where being right was almost as important as being smart.  I wish I'd been brought up feeling that kindness was the most important trait.  I know people who were and I envy them a great deal.  Finally, after a long time stewing about this problem of being right, I have the answer.

The stories that I tell are my truth. That truth doesn't belong to anyone else but me, so if that's the way I remember it, then it's fine.  That's the truth as I see it.  If anyone else needs to, they should think of it all as fiction.  The truth of a ten year old girl's story just has to be someone else's fiction, after all. How historically accurate could it be?

And with that, I started remembering the elusive names of the men my father worked with.  There were the easy ones, our neighbors.  These men rode with my dad to and from work every day for eleven years.  Then there were the others, the ones I didn't know as well.  They were the men who worked on the same projects with my dad.  Their very names feel right on my tongue.  The first time I flew in a plane was with one of these guys.  I'll tell you that story sometime.

But I have yet another issue.  Early on, I decided that I wasn't going to use people's real names here out of respect for their privacy.  So I'm not going to tell you these wonderful names that I suddenly remembered after not thinking about them for thirty years.  Then I went off in a whirl over names they could have had, names that put me right back into that place again.  Here are a few of the good names that I put together:

Ray Bechtel
Cecil Grimes
Eldridge Parsons
Virgil Stafford
Jimmy Jo Johnson
Noble Cox
Rex Smelzer
Dick Finkle

Aren't those great names for men who lived in the Midwest in the 1960s?  I can even picture which names match with different jobs and educational backgrounds.

See, I'm still not adjusted to having all this time to myself.  I need to get out to galleries and write about it.  I need to get a social hobby, as long as it doesn't involve working with 75 school children to hand stitch a book for each of them.  I'm not sure making up fictitious names fits that bill either.

Thanks for listening, jb

So Much Quiet

I haven't managed to shift into the fall season gracefully.  The first week Nick was back to school and Mike headed back to work, I ran errands like crazy trying to catch up.  I'd missed some things since our friends came in from out of town and we extended our vacation with them.  I forgot about the two small bags to return to the grocery store and the department store that got lost under the pile of backpacks and the picnic basket.  It was embarrassing to think of returning them.  For the summer activities, I had let go of any semblance of neatness so that Nick's room evolved to a state of having only a narrow path through which he traveled to get into his bed.  Then, my Himalayan Blackberry, the worst of the exotic plants I want to eliminate from my yard had grown up the side of the garage and up and across the roof of our shed.  It hasn't even produced enough berries to redeem itself from my hostility. 

For the past two weeks, I accomplished nothing.  On Labor Day, I tripped and fell going into the Evergreen State Fair.  Oh, I had looked forward to that day, but lost most of it in a haze resulting from the jolt.  Now, two weeks later, the road rash on my leg is just shedding the last of its scabs, and still keeping me up at night with the itching.  My elbow really isn't broken.  It aches now and then, but I can still hit a very high note and leap wildly when I accidentally tap it on something solid.  With all of this attention on my newfound frailty, Nick is changing.  I dread the day when he takes my elbow to step up over a curb.  I know it's coming sooner than I care to think about.  Oh, I want him to be a sympathetic man.  I just don't want to be the recipient of that sympathy.

In all of that healing, I missed a weekend at the Scout camp, but then Nick missed it too by catching a weekend cold.  Oh, he was so sad he missed his weekend and not a school day.  Not one.  But the good news for him was that we allowed him to skip a half a day of school and go to the Puyallup Fair.  Now, when do I get to go?  My fair experience this year was flawed.

Now finally this week, I feel up to doing things.  I could go to the Seattle Art Museum.  I could walk through the sculpture garden on the waterfront.  I could paint, bike, swim, or hike trails, but instead of loading my bike onto the rack and finding a trail, I'm hanging around at home.  Worse than that, I'm actually spinning around and doing mostly nothing all day.  Just about the time the boys are getting off the bus, I'm gearing up for some real fun.  I'm on the verge of quilting, writing, or finally learning how to knit socks.  I could save some money and make notebooks, but no.  I'm just hanging about.

God knows, I haven't found a notebook out there that satisfies me lately.  After a week of hobbling around in search of something decent now that our local Borders has closed, I finally went all the way into Seattle to find notebooks. Elliot Bay Books never disappoints.  I think I spent $100.00 on all my happiness in just being there.  I bought three books for Nick and a couple for me.  One of them has satisfied me with its title alone, 'Crimes in Southern Indiana.'  Now I could tell you a thing or two about crimes in Southern Indiana.  I'll let you know if the book runs down that country lane.  Doesn't matter, really.  I have my own mental book with that title, but I'll get to that later too, a lot later.  Plus, I brought home a couple of almost-perfect notebooks from Moleskine.

I like the Moleskine notebooks.  I really do.  But the one I just started using has, on it's first page,

In case of loss, please return to:
________________________________
________________________________
________________________________
________________________________
As a reward: $ ____________________.

Okay, I get the part about returning the notebook.  It'd be embarrassing to lose one, especially with all that personal dross.  I haven't lost one.  I wouldn't, I think.  Still, I'm not likely to put my address into every one.  I'm still too burned by that identity theft thing that happened last July to go throwing my personal information around, even in a notebook that I don't expect anyone else to open. 

The reward part is just hubris.  I mean really.  Here sits a person with this brand new orange notebook.  She opens it to the first page.  There it is, the valuation portion of her thought process.  But wait, she hasn't even put her name in the upper right corner the way she usually does.  There are lines for that.  (She hates lines in her notebooks.)  Then, after she's supposed to write down her personal stats and doesn't, she has to determine the value of this as yet unwritten work.  Really?

I'm supposed to think about all those early morning entries, the ones in which I'm still asleep with the cracked Itoya pen in my hand, wishing I had two or three more hours of sleep, the ones in which I can't even spell, let alone carry on a coherent thought?  It's embarrassing to think of how many times I wrote about how little sleep I got the night before and the aches and pains I bear, let alone the random thoughts that come when I'm still lost in an incoherent dream from the night before.  My notebooks aren't worth a reward. 

That said, I scribbled out that section of my new notebook and still revel in it's silky pages and the ease with which I haul it around with me wherever I go.  I'll probably buy more the next time I go to Elliot Bay Books, but I'll probably scribble out that part of the notebook with some swirly scribbles.

So this week, I've been reading too much and cleaning too much and thinking too much about the first page of a new notebook.  Mike might disagree that I've been cleaning too much.  What I'm doing is trying to make it easier on him.  The only good new in procrastinating all my really interesting activities is that I've reclaimed Nick's room and our guest room. The nice thing is that this guest room has an empty desk to which I can escape when the silence becomes unbearable at 2pm. 

Thank you for listening, jb

A Mom's GPS

Just about now, Nick is at lunch with Adrian, waiting to be picked up to go to the fair.  I picture him just sitting at the end of one of those long tables with the little square of tape delineating the space Nick needs to keep distance from the other kids' food because of his tree nut allergy.  The kids will be crowding into that space and pressed against each other's shoulders down the length of the table.  It will be raucous in the room from the kids' happy chatter, and the boys may have trouble hearing the announcement for them to come to the office.  I didn't even pack a lunch for Nick this morning since they're stopping for lunch at Denny's on the way down to the fair.

Back in the '80s, when Mike and I met, we were both engineers at Lockheed, working in their electronics division.  I was a hardware engineer and he designed software.  Those were the days of Ronald Reagan's Star Wars Initiative and we were always talking about new technology, new aircraft that had been sighted over Area 51, and the incredible shrinking of the computer from the size of a building to something that could fit under one side of a desk and process a whopping 512K of data. 

And there was the Global Positioning System, which began in 1973 in a program called Navstar, the synthesis of the LORAN radio-navigation, the atomic clock, and the Cold War.  Our GPS conversations centered around the tendency of outdoor-technology geeks to carry it up into the mountains with them to keep themselves from getting lost.  We were fans of the classic map and compass method.  Now, after all of these years, we both have free apps on our phones and casually use them to find geocaches hidden near trails wherever we go.  Geocaching makes hiking with kids a lot easier.  The whole thing becomes a treasure hunt and Nick and Adrian run down the trail instead of slogging behind.  Only now, after four years, is the newness beginning to wear off.  Nick and Adrian still like it, but they don't always take a treasure out of the cache and they don't run down the trail as enthusiastically as they did.  Right now, though, a different kind of global positioning is happening to me, mom radar.

By now, Nick is sitting at a booth with Adrian's family, making his own choices about lunch.  They'll look like the classic American family with two parents and two kids.  Nick will order a cheeseburger and probably French fries.  If my message about making good choices most of the time sank in, he'll order a salad, but I don't have high hopes about that.

In about an hour, Nick will have a dizzy pass band around his right wrist and will be negotiating with Adrian about which rides they will go on.  They might be walking along the pavement with elephant ears in their hands, the cinnamon and butter soaking through the napkin and dripping onto the pavement.  Or maybe they'll go the route of the fair scones with strawberries, syrup, and whipped cream.  Oh, I can almost taste it.  These days, I take a bite of Mike's scone and satisfy myself with an ear of roasted corn and either meat on a stick or a corn dog.  Nick might even try a deep-fried Twinkie or Snicker's bar for the first time.

I hope they'll take the time, later, to walk through the displays of photography, hand crafts, and art.  Can you tell that I'd like to have gone to the fair today too?  More than that, though, is that worry that hangs in my consciousness.  Is Nick coughing?  Is he feeling sick?  Is he even having a good time? I'm trying to relax, but I still imagine him as he goes on his way, away from Mike and me, with people who might not hear that tone in his cough.  That sounds raises the hair on the back of my neck. 

Mom radar is the best and yet the worst of letting a kid grow up and begin to move away from home. I can picture him having fun, but I can also imagine his struggles as well.  He's not going off to college yet, like my sister's kids, but he's on his way.  Nick's smack in the middle of that time when a boy's friends become more important than his family.  I just need to get on with my own work and let that internal GPS do its job while Nick still needs it. 

Thanks for listening, jb

Lying and Superstitions

I'm not generally a superstitious person, but Mike and I both have this crazy feeling about Nick's nebulizer.  It's an ugly white compressor with a long hose hanging out of it that usually sits in the nest of power cords at my end of the couch.  Both of us feel that if we put it away, Nick's going to get sick again.  Well, I put it away in a fit of cleaning in June and it took all summer to pass before it came true.  I try not to believe this sad superstition, but I do.

Here's another one - if I'm taking a sick day to play, then I'll probably get sick.  I just wrote an email to Nick's teacher to tell him that we're letting Nick skip school tomorrow afternoon to go to the state fair with Adrian and his family.  It was embarrassing telling the truth, but I knew the truth would come out anyway and that would feel worse. 

Nick's teacher is a tall, broad-shouldered man who could be intimidating if he wanted to, but he's actually a little shy with parents, holding his hands in front of himself and nodding his head a lot.  He's really trying to connect with the kids in his classroom and to teach them to want a good education for themselves.  I get the feeling that this is the teacher that Nick will remember for the rest of his life as that guy who really took the time to understand him and challenge him.  This makes me really hate sounding like an idiot in front of him.  Now Nickie is coughing and I had to get out the nebulizer to give him some Xopenex for his breathing.  I sat on the edge of his bed, holding the tube toward his nose and mouth and tried to keep him from waking all the way up.  I loved how Nick's warm hand wrapped around my waist while I leaned over him.  I'm not sure he's going to the fair after all.  It figures.  Take a sick day and you're going to get sick.

It might not have been so bad for Nick to go to the fair, but they're taking him to a weird Al Yankovic concert there and Adrian's dad said they are going 'rain or shine.'  It's going to be late when the concert gets out.  You take a kid like Nick, send him somewhere a little bit sick, spin him, get him wet, and keep him up late, and you'll have a full-blown situation on your hands.  Missing a half day of school is one thing.  Missing a week because we were goofing around is another. 

Good thing I didn't try to lie to this teacher.  I could have imagined Nick at school on Friday talking about how funny the Weird Al concert was and I knew I couldn't lie.  It would be so transparent as to indicate that either I thought he was stupid or that I was colossally stupid.  The truth really does come out, at least for me.  Some other person might be able to hide four murders and the theft of 3 million dollars, but I can't lie to Nick's teacher about an afternoon spent using a dizzy pass to go spinning on carnival rides.

Still, I am not an all-believer in teaching kids to tell the truth all of the time. I think lying is great for when you're trying to protect yourself or your family.  "No, my dad's in his office working and can't come to the phone." 

Sometimes it's okay so that you can protect your time, like when someone wants you to volunteer for one more thing and you want to stay home and read your book for a change.   Lying is valuable when you're trying to protect someone's feelings.  "Does this dress make my butt look big?"

But lying changes character whenever anyone is going to get hurt or cheated and that's when I'm just not good at it.  Maybe that's a good thing. 

We'll see what happens tomorrow. Will my superstitions come true? 

Thank you for listening, jb

Improved Flavor

I'm curious about what our cats would say if they could talk.  Lots of times, Nick and I entertain ourselves by making up their dialog as if their words were dubbed in a B movie.  Mike's sense of humor is a bit too dry for that. 

Our cat Seth always hovers over someone who is sick in our house.  Last week, he looked at the road rash on my leg more than once, as if to inspect it for infection.  I have always associated that behavior with love and concern.  He was worried about us.  I know it's anthropomorphic, but I like doing it anyway.  I was that little girl who had whole lives built up around her stuffed toys, even the ones that spent most of their time in the back of the closet.  But what if my cute and cuddly perspective is just wrong?

Lions, tigers and all other members of the cat family eat meat, often culling the weak from the herd.  I once read a news story about a cougar that licked a man's minor cut until it bled, then began to chew on the man's leg until he managed to get away. 

I've notice that if I'm paying attention, I can tell just when to take food out of the oven by the smell.  When it smells perfect, it's ready.  It's actually more accurate than the timer, as long as I'm paying attention.  What if it sort of works like that for cats too?

So then, when our cat sits close when one of us has a cold, is he really thinking that we smell just about good enough to eat?  I'm not sure I want to know what's going through my cat's mind after all. 

Thank you for listening, jb