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Drawbacks of Home Ownership #116:

We were watching the film Batman Begins the other night.  There's a scene where the Batmobile is careening across the rooftops, shattering slate shingles, crushing dormers and wreaking havoc among the HVAC, chimneys and roof vents.  Monica and I just looked at each other -- all we could think of was -- "Oh the poor roofs!  Doesn't he know what it's going to cost to fix all those roofs?"

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Ed at Gin and Tacos goes on an entertaining tirade about privileged, (conservative) whites who seem to delight so much in their ludicrous claims of victimhood.  (Students complaining about the "death tax" set him off.)

Maybe it's only a psycho-babble replacement for our abandonment of Hell as a cultural consolation, but I think that privilege and oppression must take their toll on the oppressors.  I think it puts a kind of cap on how self-actualized you can be.  Self-delusion definitely works for many people and I can't claim their happiness and self-satisfaction is anything but genuine.  But those are people of limited souls.  To be a full human being you have to actually see the world around you with less delusion — and that's not compatible with much of the conservative   boilerplate about how abused and misunderstood well-off white males are.  It may not be compatible with privilege at all.

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Sharon Astyk makes a provocative case that if progressive groups are actually concerned about outreach and diversity they should reach out to ex-convicts,

If you are SERIOUS about wanting to increase the diversity of your membership in terms of age, class and race, wanting to make your future communities more secure, wanting to expand local food and employment opportunities, wanting to do outreach into minority communities and offer something to those already hardest hit by the early stages of our society’s crash, I’d recommend one particular access point – find ways for your group to work with recently released prison inmates in your community . . .

The post is worth reading in full, but a side point that she well understands is that this kind of things gets outside the comfort zone of many of her readers.  For example her commenter, D . . . 

Consider the risks and the benefits and . . . commit to a great deal of research prior to taking on the issues of society’s law breakers. Sharon is right on that these issues need our time and attention; yet at the same time, there are considerations one must ponder prior to throwing one’s self and family into this area . . . Practicality and safety do call for a level of caution.

Which led me to leave a comment of my own . . . 

D., you bring up a good point about the dangers inherent in dealing with people who've been swept up into forms of criminality.  But that danger is exactly the crux of the matter.  In fact, the ability to NOT have to deal with such people and their potential dangerousness is probably one of the defining ways that class and social geography are structured, at least here in the US.  If you are poor, you have no choice -- these people are your neighbors, family members, co-workers, friends and enemies.  If you are privileged on the other hand, you can choose to take advantage of the way class and ethnicity are segregated so that you can CHOOSE (more or less) whether or not to have them part of your life.   

 Yes, it increases your danger when people cross the barriers - when they are invited into your church or school or workplace or neighborhood.  There's no doubt about that, and it's a reason why people don't want to live in "those neighborhoods."    But these very barriers are, without question, a major part of the problem.  The only way this country can maintain its inhuman war on drugs, its unprecedented and draconian incarceration rates, and its great myths about privilege and the undeserving poor -- is because the privileged make use of these walls to not see what is going on right next to them.  And so the cycle is sustained and intensified. 

 If we integrate our communities, we expose ourselves to some of the dangers that poor people face every day.  But by stitching together one community where there were many -- some used to being excluded and some used to doing the excluding -- we create something better.  I believe that.  We can wait for things to collapse, or we can start to take the bricks down ourselves.

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The boys aren't very demanding when it comes to their birthdays.  At least they know better than to trust us to buy them their presents.  They're at the age where they'd prefer cash, and their aunts and grandparents usually supply them some.  Other than that - they're content with some cake or fresh doughnuts and a day's worth of slightly elevated status. 

Porter turned fifteen yesterday and I took him and Jose and Nico bowling.  (Our actual birthday present was to shell out for his 9th grade school trip -- 10 days traveling,  studying the geology and biology and culture of Hawaii.  He and his classmates will leave in the wee hours of Monday morning, damn them.)  

On the rare occasions that we bowl we usually do it at Westerly's little pizza-and-beer, working class lanes, Alley Katz, but for a special occasion we chose somewhere more alien and disorienting.  So in the drizzling day I drove the 15 miles westward to the Foxwoods Casino, where the High Rollers alley is.   

Foxwoods rises jarringly out of the woods of eastern Connecticut, a strange, out of place island of gambling and commerce.  Entering the hotel-casino complex I feel like I'm an odd, harmless virus within some bustling alien organism.  

While we waited for a lane to clear (the brusque girls at the counter would text us when we reached the edge of the waiting list) we ate burgers at a restaurant aggressively decorated with mass produced nostalgia-clutter -- as though, after the clamor and glare of the slot machines, no one was prepared to face more than a few inches of bare wall.   The girl that Porter wanted to see found us there, and the five us us strolled the long interstices between the gaming rooms, theaters and concert halls, these long shopping-mall hallways.  

Porter and the girl were busy catching up (the casino is the half-way point between their towns and they don't see each other much), but it's hard to imagine three people less interested in window shopping than Nico, Jose and I.   Normally, I'd enjoy people watching, but most of the demographics interesting to me -- like teenagers,  families with kids, immigrants and the fashionably hip -- were not here.  Instead it was older, married couples, nouveau riche foreigners, tourists up from New Jersey and suburban New York, the occasional pack of office drones -- the kinds of people who think it's a fun idea to trek to a gambling island in the woods of eastern Connecticut.

But eventually lane 16 freed up and we got in to bowl our games and eat their fancy pizza.  And Porter managed to bowl just a bit better than the girl, though she pressed him in the second game.  And Jose managed to bowl just a bit better than Nico and then Nico bowled just a bit better than Jose, (who was then quick to point out that his lack of talent at bowling is a small thing compared to his superior skills in soccer and basketball).  And I bowled better than all of them, which was only fair.

And then, the girl's mother had collected her, and the rest of us were driving back through the rainy night, toward home.

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I sit in a teleconference, 4 of us trying to craft a survey instrument that could track changing public attitudes about the economy and low-wage work.  Outside my window the woodpeckers are foraging in the bark-folds and lichen. There are 4 species of woodpeckers: downy, hairy, red-bellied - even a clumsy yellow-shafted flicker.    White breasted nuthatches and a brown creeper probe the crevasses with their small, sharp beaks.  The tree is slowly falling apart, especially in this vicious winter, but I wonder how any invertebrates can still survive there.

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In Saturday's post I claimed that leaders are almost certainly right that Americans wouldn't go along with a plan that sacrificed present-day prosperity in order to avoid future calamity.  But almost certain does not mean certain.

After all, humans collectively are capable of unpredictable craziness.  If we can leap to out-of-the-blue stupidities like ancient Egypt's Great Pyramids, or Mao's homicidal Great Leap Forward, or American Suburbia, well there's no reason humans couldn't make a sudden sharp turn, even chuck suicidal consumerism in favor of sudden wisdom - or at least rediscover a kind of cultural clear-headedness.  It's not like our present society is great at creating bucketfuls of happiness for people.

So it is good that friends are down in Washington DC marching against the tar sands pipeline.  It's good that my work is to try and make our public discourse smarter and more constructive.  It's good that the climate scientists are getting the science done.  Who knows what might trigger an unexpected change.

Humans are profoundly conservative creatures of habit.  We like our novelty within strict limits. But the world is also full of immigrants.  Whether or not we have moved across borders, we can migrate from one culture to another - when we have to - or when we see an opportunity to achieve some dream of a better future for our children.

So, as they say . . . we'll see.  Nothing is certain.

FEB 19 UPDATE:

Orlov says our only hope is to pray for an asteroid, Gin and Tacos says we've broken the planet, and Nocera in the New York Times says we just gotta keep digging (or something).

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We burned through the firewood I had brought inside as preparation for last week's blizzard.  Now the boys are hauling in wet, snow-dappled wood to stack beside the stove.  Another few inches should fall in the night.  But I take a break from snowy chores to fret about the self-induced decline and fall of our so-called civilization.  

It begins to dawn on the public consciousness that global warming is actually happening.  The media begin to cautiously note the fact of its existence in stories about extreme weather.  Comedians joke about it.  World leaders mention it in their speeches again.  Polls show that ever larger majorities of people think "something ought to be done."

But we don't do anything about it, and there's no sign we'll do anything any time soon.  Because in fact, mentioning the solution to global climate change is strictly and absolutely taboo - not just among politicians, economists and the media, but among most environmentalists and scientists as well.  At least when the argument was about whether or not climate change was happening - and then later whether it was caused by humans - there was a controversy and a back and forth, and an effort to shape public opinion and public policy.  (No matter how dishonest and stupid it was and how much it was distorted by cynical money from the defenders of the status quo.)

But the solution that dare not speak its name is to leave fossil fuels in the ground.  Don't dig up the tar sands, don't frack the shales, don't mine the coal, don't drill the Arctic oilfields.  You can put up all the charts you want about "reducing CO2 emissions", but as long as we are digging out fossil fuels and burning them we will continue to track the high lines of climate destabilization.

Have you heard any of our leaders talk about leaving it in the ground?  I haven't.  If anything, the enthusiasm now is for more drilling and mining and fracking.  At best I hear about clean energy sources and conservation, but those mean nothing at all for climate change as long as we continue to dig up and burn.  Carbon sequestration is not going to save us, and any attempt at geo-engineering will almost certainly end in disaster.

It's really quite simple.  If we are not willing to step back and leave fossil fuels in the ground, we will create catastrophic global climate change - and many things we take for granted about our lives will fall away.  I understand why the most knowledgeable politicians and environmentalists see little possibility that the public is going to support the needed proactive policies.  They are almost certainly right.   It would mean a pre-emptive end to much of the Oil era's great prosperity.  I understand the calculus that says, leaders cannot cause even a minor catastrophe in the present in order to avoid a major (or even final) catastrophe in the future.  

And because I understand the inescapable logic of it, I have little hope that our leaders will save us from the worst.  Until we have an era-ending collapse of some sort (whether economic, political or environmental) they will do everything they can to help us close our eyes tightly and close our minds, and we'll all just hope for the best.

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Our blizzard blasted through, and plastered everything 

with hard frosting that pulled all branches down, snapping some.

Snow to be shoveled,

and beehives cleared.

Power out for a day, the internet down for a couple days more.

But we'd put in plenty of wood, and our friends, whose house grew too cold for them,

came to spend the night and shared with us our wood stove pot roast

and our peaty Laphroaig.

Now, rain is falling and a fog is rising from the snow

smoky as though all of this were a volcano's hot and fatal ashfall.

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15 inches.  Not too bad.

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On January 19th we were in Glendale for Esperanza's memorial service.  The Little Church of the Flowers at Forest Lawn was filled to overflowing.  Many of us were dressed in bright colors, to go with all the flowers and honor her memory as a lover of color.  Several of us read pieces that we had written, myself, her sister Alicia, her cousin Lida. Clara had composed a slide show from pictures she'd gathered.  Monica read a poem that she had written.  The Mendoza twins, Carlos and Mauricio sang the song Amigo, as she had asked them to.

The service was beautiful and powerful and Esperanza would have loved it.

Below is the poem that Monica read:

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Today, with freshly cracked molar,  I crept back shamefaced to the dentist I've been neglecting for several years.  Dr. Giuliano is an avuncular, unscolding sort, and it's clear he just doesn't understand how I could manage to miss 4 yearly checkups in a row.

But dentists . . . yeah.  My first dentist, Dr Yeager seemed to have it in for my teeth, reliably finding a cavity or two in mine, but never in my sister's.  He paced himself so my head was never too heavy with fillings until when I was about 14 he suddenly diagnosed a dozen cavities at once.  As he was describing to me his drillsome plans, I blurted out with teenage tactlessness that I might want a second opinion.  I don't think I'd ever been cussed out with such anger by an adult other than a parent (except for some elderly neighbors protective of their shrubbery, but that was from a safe distance), and Yeager furiously banned me from his practice never to return.

My next dentist, Dr. Reginald, never did find a dozen cavities - so maybe Yeager was planning on filling the rough spots in my teeth - or he needed funds to make his escape.  Months after our falling out he abandoned his wife and daughter to run off to New York City with a gay lover, so who knows what stresses he was under.

After my 20's -- the middle years of dental promiscuity - looking up a DMD whenever my traitorous tongue wouldn't let me ignore some rough spot - it wasn't until San Diego that I got vigilant again.  Fieldwork was coming up and I wasn't going to trust my teeth to those great crafters of stainless steel chompers,  the stomatologs of Kazakhstan. So San Diego was a place to jump from cleanly.  There was young Dr. Yorick panicking as he realized the liquid glass he was using to affix that crown wasn't what he thought it was -- crack, crunch, chisel.  And my lovely Tijuana dentista kneeling upon my chest to get out that damned wisdom tooth -- this one, dios, wouldn't break for sure.

After Kazakhstan, it was more years of promiscuity and neglect.  Ireland was great -- a country of people mostly as content as me to agree that there's really no point to having your teeth outlive you.  But soon enough I was back in the US, in Rhode Island under pressure again to leave a skull full of sturdy teeth as legacy.  Good old Doctor Giuliano ushered me back into the familiar world of fillings and the unfamiliar world of root canals.  He'd have charmed me into periodontics next if I hadn't started avoiding him.

But now I'm back, with my molar patched and an appointment for a new crown next week.  He hasn't made a whisper about periodontics, yet, of course.  I think he knows I'm skittish.  Yeah.  Dentists.

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A month has passed without an update to the blog.  In December I'd been engaged in endless editing and writing for other things.  Turning to the blog felt like nothing but a burden - which is not what it is meant to be.  And January turned into a landscape of head and chest colds.  

This past week was particularly frustrating, since it was the week of true winter.  Nights near or below zero; days in the teens or low 20's.  The ponds froze first, then the windswept lakes, and finally a few days ago, animals could walk across the frozen Pawcatuck river.  In the woods over the wall, there are great swaths of swampy woods and fen that you can only walk during the true winter.  Then the streams and bogs are iced over and you can crunch along the beaver trails through broken reeds and tufts of swamp cotton.

But I had a bug that filled my body with chill and exchanged all my will for apathy.  Monica was in California traveling with her sisters and scattering her mother's ashes.  I drove the boys where they needed to go and, if pressed, put in the occasional hour at work, but there was no venturing out into the bitter.  It was a monkish cold too: little food, no coffee, no alcohol - but water and sleep and placid, indifferent meditation.

I've come out the other side, monkish still and phlegmy, but my apathy has ebbed.  Too late.  Temperatures have soared into the dreary 50's and all the hard ice has collapsed.  All the swamp yankees, who bring forth onto the lakes their winter contraptions for those precious days -- go karts, snow mobiles, sail-sleds, fishing huts with awls and runners -- have put it all back into their sheds.

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I don't trust our ancient furnace not to explode or asphyxiate the cats, so when there is no one here to feed the fire the house gets cold.  We returned from 3 days away to find the indoor temperature a cool 47 degrees.  So cats and humans alike have been lolling downstairs while the fire blasts out enough heat to make the  house habitable again.

I never installed any fans to bring the heat up, so I had the boys tie on blanket capes and run up and down the stairs.  Effective as well as entertaining.

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 Christmas 2012

The Aftermath

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The shortest day of the year was rainy, windy, cold and dreary.  A good day to stay home.  But, of course we celebrate the night not because it's a nice, pleasant night - but because, despite all dreary evidence to the contrary, it's the night of turning once more toward the sun.  The days will get longer.  The cycles of the world will renew.  It's going to get colder - this is the first day of winter, after all - but the work of re-making spring starts now.

After darkness had fallen and the drizzle was only intermittent, I took dry fuel from the woodpile to build a blaze.  The windy night soon had it whipped into a dancing bonfire.  A friend and her daughters joined us and we toasted marshmallows and sang, and dodged the sparks and embers that were flung out from the fire.  I threw wet pine boughs on the blaze to send even more shards of fire twirling up and around in the dripping wet woods.  

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There's a side of me that thinks winter ought to be a time of dormancy.  That we should take our cue from northern nature, whose living bits more or less coast through the cold, dark months on whatever they have managed to store away.  I read somewhere that the old Russians used to nap the winter months away on their stove ledges - maybe doing some needlework or carving to complement their imperfect hibernation.

To this side of me it seems cruel that we are flogged through the trough of the year by winter holidays -- these christmases and hanukahs and new years.  Too much febrile bustle for such short, dark days to contain.

But in a few days the solstice will be here.  I'm going to burn our mound of pine boughs and make a hissing, spitting, crackling pyre in defiance of the sun's neglect and in welcome of its imminent return.  And I'll drink hot cider and scorch my wet boots dry.  Because there is a side of me that wants no part in dormancy.

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Monica took the top of the pine that the hurricane threw down, and she made it our Christmas tree.

José and Nico discuss the nature of flying monkeys.  (All three of the boys are performing in the school musical, The Wizard of Oz this week.)

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In October Monica's mother, Esperanza, was diagnosed with late stage ovarian cancer.  Monica flew out there and her sister, Clara arrived from Costa Rica.  There was little that medicine could do except ease her pain.

Abuela with her grandchildren

Esperanza gathered her family and her friends around her - she reached out to those she couldn't gather, and she gave them the strength and peace to accept that her life was drawing to a close.

And on December 9th she died.

In January we'll have a memorial service for her in California, and I hope by then I will have been able to put together the words to express some of what she meant to all of us.

With her daughters two years ago

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A Veterans Day genealogy:

Veterans Day is an invitation to reflect upon war and military service.  Myself, I’ve never been a soldier - never was taught to kill or die for god or country. 

My father, Richard Brown, was a young school teacher in the 1960’s, and so he was never sent off to the war in Vietnam.

My grandfathers, Porter Brown and William Gilchrist farmed the land in Pennsylvania, even as the Second World War swept 16 million Americans into military service.  You need to look further back to find a soldier.

My great grandfathers, Fred Brown, Roy Metz, George Gilchrist and Jacob Tewksbury – farmers, hotelier, teacher –

 never sailed for Europe in the Great War.  Instead they farmed, taught school, raised families.

So too did their fathers and fathers-in-law, Cyrus Brown, John Metz, Samuel B. Metz, Jacob Heddings, Bayard Tewksbury, James Sanford, George Atkins.  These Pennsylvania farmers, carpenters, lumberman would have known the War between the States, even if they were too young to go and join a regiment.  William Gilchrist was old enough, but he broke both his legs in a tree felling accident before he and his friend could run away to enlist.  He was bow-legged ever after, and his friend never returned from the southern battles.

Did my Scots-Irish great great great grandfathers, Francis Gilchrist and John Brown ever take up arms in the North of Ireland?  There’s no record of it.  Nor any record that William Brown or Martin Fleming or Isaac Wagner or John K. Metz or Samuel K. Metz or Matthew McClintic or Heddings left their farms to wear a uniform.  Nor Ben Tewksbury, or Zedekiah Gardinier, or Joseph Burrel Sanford, William Watkins or Ben Holgate.

In that generation of three times great, the only trace of a uniform persists in a family tale of my grandmother's great-grandmother, seduced by a boarder, a French soldier named Philips in 1847.  He was driven off at gunpoint by her father, Roger Haynes.

At least, among the four-times great grandfathers, there are finally guns being pointed at other men.  And a pocket watch that sits upon my bookshelf was carried by a grandfather of that generation, William Brown, in the skirmish that was dubbed the War of 1812. 

But otherwise the list of four-times great grandfathers grows to a thicket, and there’s little sign of soldiery: Amos Tewksbury, Henry Benson, Jacob Gardinier, Samuel Alexander, Elias Sanford, James Woodmansee, Robert Gilchrist, Samuel Ralston, Thomas Brown, John Brown of Strabane, Edward Holgate, Robins Douglas, Robert McCoy, Joseph Fleming, William Hazlett, John Wagner, William Schilling, John Metz, Eli Wakefield, James McClintic.  These were mostly men born into the new United States in the years after the Revolution when there was little call for warfare.

It’s only in the previous generation, 7 generations back, among my great great great great great grandfathers that soldiering makes any real appearance in my ancestry, notably during the War for Independence.  Benjamin Haynes fought the Lenni Lenape in the valleys of the Delaware River – and is said to have crossed the Delaware with Washington. Barnard Worthen carried a rifle for Massachusetts in the Revolution, and Jacob Gardinier was wounded in the battle of Oriskany in 1777.  Doubtless, research into the records would show more of this among 64 branches of ancestry. 

Perhaps it is not surprising, given how the Indian wars and the Revolution were the last to play out across the landscapes of the Northeastern US.  It was the last time that war occurred at the farms and villages of my forbears – where they didn’t have to go and meet it somewhere else.  It seems remarkable that with so much of history written of blood and bullets, so many men should live, like myself, without ever having been a soldier.  I’m not entirely sure what to make of that.

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