A Unified Hammer Dialogue

Partner and I celebrate the nineteenth anniversary of our first date this week (I tell that sordid tale here, and quantify it here, but note that we are up to 19 years, 6 cars, and 5 high schools now). And by celebrate, I mean we talk about it and smile and remember how stupid we were, and how glad we are that our stupidity turned into something really awesome. No gifts, no special meal. Just retelling old personal jokes and the State of the Union Address. One joke in particular is strikingly appropriate to a remembrance of Pete Seeger, who died yesterday. This joke is a dialogue, initiated randomly, usually when working on a household repair or home improvement project. 

A (calmly, with distraction): I wish I had a hammer.

B (equally distracted, but polite): What would you do with a hammer?

A (with a shrug): I’d hammer in the morning. 

B (attention still diverted): Would you hammer any other time?

A (nonchalant): Oh sure, I’d hammer in the evening. 

B (mildly interested): Where would you hammer?

A (dismissive): Oh, all over. 

B (concerned): What would you hammer?

A (with sudden increase in volume and exuberant gestures — jumping onto the table with arms flung wide is not out of the question here): I’d hammer out LOVE between my sisters and my brothers aaaaa-AAAAAAA-ALLLL over this LAAAAAAND. 

[end scene]

I never said we weren’t ridiculous. Now, where did I put that hammer? 

Dinner with the Chef

I dreamt last night that Partner and I were on vacation with Tony Bourdain. We were floating in a giant swimming pool, full of other vacationers, including the kids, and presumably Tony Bourdain’s family. Tony Bourdain invited us to dinner, but Partner had some work to do, so he encouraged Tony Bourdain and I to go out to dinner without him. We had appetizers at one place. Dinner at another place. Cocktails at yet another, after being toured through the fancy new kitchen. And at each place, Tony Bourdain knew people.

It was neither obviously a sex dream or a food dream, but managed to suggest both. We debated politics and philosophy over tapas and tequila, alone and with acquaintances. The evening was full of flirtatious innuendo, but never crossed over into vulgarity or transgression. His friends made a few inappropriate comments, but I fought my own banter battles and managed to have a charming time with the notorious chef-traveller. Until I woke up.

All this is to say what you may have guessed, that he works too hard, but I have my own version of the tall, sexy chef. Flirty without being vulgar, intellectually challenging and funny without being tedious, and who isn’t afraid to spontaneously make fresh mayonnaise at a party.

I prefer purple, on democracy and disagreement

I love you. I mean it. And I’m not trying to be weird. You’re interesting and amazing and I appreciate you and your ideas. I believe that human beings are essentially good. That most of us are plugging along on our paths doing the best we can, stumbling now and again, suffering, loving, and getting confused and happy and annoyed and surprised and excited and bored and a bunch of other stuff. Not sure about that? Look around at the people you know. Count them, the ones that are doing ok, being essentially good, and the ones that are not so much. I think you’re doing great, going along your path, working at what you work at and hoping for the best.

We don’t have to agree on everything. And I’m not just paying lip-service when I say that I believe we have more similarities than differences. What I think and what I feel may be different from what you think or feel sometimes, and that’s great. We can be blue or red or purple or orange or grey or teal or chartreuse, and that’s fine. What I hope, though, is that we can believe what we believe and respect each other enough to ask each other questions and share ideas and not resort to calling each other names. Because contrary to what I’ve seen in my Social Media feeds recently, I am not pro-murder, I am not pro-fraud, I am not pro-whore. I am not anti-god, or anti-Christian, anti-gun, or a man-hating feminazi. I promise. I am a lot of things, some that I’ll even admit, but I’m not those things or a lot of other, nastier bits that rise up out of the amazing organic froth and foment of the twenty-first century internet. So let’s make a deal. I’ll not call you names, directly or by implication, and you’ll not call me names, directly or by implication. And we’ll swish along in this bubbling democracy, and perhaps we’ll smile at the similarities or fume a bit at the differences, and maybe, every once in a while, we’ll influence each other a little bit and call it compromise. And every little thing will be just fine.

Further discussion

• Name-calling by word or implication includes but is not limited to anything that begins “Liberals believe q” or “Conservatives believe x” or “Monkey-necked freckle mongers want z” or “Anti-monkey-necked freckle mongers want w.” Me and most of my friends are included in one or another of those groups. Except maybe the freckle mongers. I’m not sure about those.

• Having experienced a murder in my immediate family, I can say for 100% certain that I am anti-murder. But I am also pro-choice. Not pro-abortion, mind you. I’d happily prevent the need for most abortions with comprehensive, evidence-based sex education, equitable and affordable access to contraceptive services for both women and men, and equitable and affordable access to high-quality, comprehensive pre-pregnancy and pre-natal care. Until most people have access to those things, I’m pro-choice because I believe life is way more complicated sometimes than you or I can easily imagine, and sometimes people find themselves in tough situations without as much support or resources as some of us are lucky enough to have. Your choices may have worked for you, and that makes me very happy, but your choices would not work for everyone for lots of different reasons. My pro-life, Democratic, State Senator Judith Zaffirini summed up something like my perspective very beautifully in her closing remarks of the debate on #HB2 in the Texas Legislature’s second 2013 special session. {I’m looking for a link.}

• I believe in a comprehensive social safety net and in the expansion of equitable, affordable healthcare access. I know for sure that there is fraud in those systems. There is fraud in all human systems. But just because someone steals a loaf of bread now and again doesn’t mean we stop sharing our bread. I also don’t believe that vilifying the poor is the most useful occupation. To blame the most desperate people, in their most desperate circumstances, when they do desperate things, while at the same time ignoring the actions of people in less-desperate circumstances who create more problems for the poor and enact more expensive and economically damaging consequences for society is at best misplaced and at worst enables the continuation of that damage. I also believe that structures can manifest inequity more steadfastly and more invisibly than any hurled rock, and so the structures must be named and changed and blamed when blame is appropriate.

• I believe that women are people. People assert themselves. People have sex. People are nice and mean and quiet and loud and make choices and defer choices and make mistakes and live in this messy, gritty, delicious world all together. A woman who asserts her rights to her body, her mind, or her actions is not a whore. She’s a human being. And I support her. A man who asserts his rights to his body, his mind, or his actions isn’t a whore either. He’s a human being. And I support him. That is my definition of feminism, and under that definition I am an unapologetic feminist.

• Religion and spirituality are personal, individual, and complex. You and I probably do not believe in the same way. But one of the truly awesome (and I use that in the AWE way, as in, the thoughtfulness of this particular thing inspires AWE in me) about the United States is this: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. You get to dig what you dig and I get to dig what I dig (or not) and the government won’t shake a stick at either of us, in fact, the government has an obligation to keep its stick completely out of the conversation. The “Government” includes courts, law enforcement, tax offices, street sweepers, and public schools, among many other things. Once upon a time a persecuted group of Vermont Baptists were so happy about this particular provision, frequently named The Separation of Church and State, that they gave Thomas Jefferson a 1200 pound cheese. Ok, I know, that sounds a little absurd, but this particular group of (mainly) farmers were so happy to have their government stay out of their spiritual affairs that they took an epic manifestation of one of their most valuable commodities and gave it to the person they credited with being the main architect of that Butting Out. That is my favorite story about The Constitution, and I have a minor intellectual crush on Thomas Jefferson, who served the cheese at the White House for a very long time. (I edited the size of the cheese after rereading the story. If you’re curious, google “Cheshire Mammoth Cheese.” It’s an even more epic story than I remembered.)

• I don’t think the second amendment is as cut and dried and as simple as most people want to make it. And for me it’s very personal. See above reference to “having experienced a murder in my immediate family.” A responsibly-owned gun, in a gun-aware, responsible gun-owning family, was used by one said responsible gun-owner to murder one of the other responsible gun-owners. My feelings about gun ownership are therefore complicated, fraught, and I continually wrestle with them. But I do believe that people allow themselves to be ruled by irrational fears, and I do believe there is a strange tendency to fetishize gun-ownership sometimes. And I believe that a gun, the primary purpose of which is destruction, should be reasonably regulated, at least as much if not moreso than reproductive organs, the primary purpose of which are hormonal regulation of bodies and species reproduction (i.e. maintenance and creation).

• In case I didn’t state it clearly enough in my earlier paragraph (see again, “Having experienced a murder in my family”), I love you all. All of you. I object to the suffix -nazi as applied to anyone or anything of any time period other than actual Nazis and their sympathizers. Look how loosely that suffix is bandied today. The Nazis murdered six MILLION people. Systematically, with a calculation and a brutality that is gut-punching and astounding and not equivalent in it’s modus and scope to any other thing in human record. Hanging that -nazi suffix on the end of words and phrases (feminazi, soup-nazi, grammar nazi), even as metaphor, is insensitive and bafflingly wrong-headed. Unless it’s referring to actual Nazis who did actual genocide and their genocidal support structures, or the baffling people who continue to believe in word and action that the Nazis had a good thing going. Please, freely use the term or the suffix there, because that’s where it actually belongs.

• Want some cheese?

Semi-Dreaming of Snow

I could hear him moving around in the kitchen, in the edges of my sleep. I was semi-dreaming. Half-awake, half-buried in sleep. I pulled the blanket up a little to cover a gap on my shoulder, guarding against the cooler air in the room. Not cold, of course, because this is Texas and this is May. But cooler than the warm coziness under the blanket.

I remembered days like this, years ago, when he would be awake so early, making coffee and reading in the semi-dark. I remembered those days when he’d lean over the bed and kiss me goodbye before wrapping the scarf around and around and around his neck against the frigid temperatures for his walk to work. But mostly I remembered those mornings when I could hear him, in the kitchen, making coffee, with mumbles of radio weaving in and out of his moving sounds. Remembering when the mumbles would stop and he would climb back in bed, careful not to let too much cold air under the blankets, and settle back next to me, whispering, “Snow day.”

And the rain came down: Puddle Ducks

We had a little rain this morning. Twelve to fifteen inches depending on who you ask. When the storm blew over and the water receded, the Sonars went out to play. They’re lankier versions of the waddling puddle ducks they were a few years ago. They have an angular grace now as they leap over puddles and bogs rather than swishing through them. When I watched them splash and chase grass-blade boats in the gutter currents, I remembered a short piece I wrote a while back, on an afternoon when heavy rain surprised us at afternoon pickup from school.

Could you resist a puddle like that?

Puddle Ducks

The first drop from the grey-black sky splatted against my right lens. One, two, three beats between the lightning and the thunder. One, two, three strides to damp hair and a spotted shirt. By the time I crossed twenty yards of macadam to the portico my hair dripped, my shirt was plastered to my chest, my arms were slick with rain. I jogged the last few feet, leaping over the final puddle alongside another mom. We laughed our disbelief at the suddenness of the downpour.

Cars wound around the pickup circle, lights blinkering, wipers swiping uselessly at the sheets of rain. The car queue stretched down the block like a sluggish, twitching snake thumping out a wiper-blade heartbeat.

Older kids were outside under the portico. Younger in criss-cross-applesauce-nobody-goes-anywhere-unless-you-tell-your-teacher-first lines in the entry hall. Aides and administrators in ponchos and walkie talkies tried to match kids to cars without dripping on the floor, without putting the wrong kid with the wrong adult, without losing little sister in the crush of people, trying to keep kids from washing away in those last steps to car doors under umbrellas.

I slide through a door between a custodian with a Yellow Caution Wet Floor sign and the gym teacher in neon green galoshes and two terrified looking preschoolers clutching his jacket. I find one of my kids by the cafeteria door, catch the attention and a thumbs up from his teacher, scoop up my second child and touch his teacher on the elbow. She smiles and squeezes my hand as I squeeze back through the crowd with my treasures. I dodge out the side door, stepping aside for the principal in a long yellow raincoat and waders.

I ask the kids if they’re ready to get a little wet. Their eyes twinkle.