Margotlog: What Washington Learned
It takes a particular genius to bring alive a hero so ossified and marblized as George Washington. We see him in full-length statues and half portraits later in life, with his mouth a tight scar across his hawk-nosed face. The poor man had such bad teeth, and then bad wooden dentures that he didn't smile and often suffered from mouth and jaw pain. His profile is on our coins and dollar bills. We rub against him daily, as perennial and indistinguisable as sky. Thus it's no surprise that only a literary and historical genius can set him back on a real stage and show us the inside of his head and heart, blood and guts.
David McCullough in "1776" does just that. But though Washington is eventually the pinnacle of this pyramid of a history, with the foot soldiers as the base, McCullough does not begin with him. He opens the book with a long description of George III's setting out from St. James palace to address Parliament on the question of the colonies' rebellion. We are entertained by lavish details of the king's coach--all 4 tons, with elaborate exterior sculptures and scenes, inside which rides the rather pedestrian personage of the king, not given to either sexual or gustatory license, preferring puttering on his farms to the intrigue and excess of court life. By the time McCullough sights across the 3000 miles of ocean to the siege of Boston, we are convinced that though Brittiania rules the waves, it harbors a canker within--excess confidence and debauch within its aristocracy. Still it has the largest and best-trained army and navy in the world.
Whereas, the ragtail rebellion holding the British within Boston after the pyrrhic British victory at Bunker Hill, are poorly clad and armed, irregularly fed, and its generals except for Washington are green to the business of warfare. Not so Washington. From the beginning of his command, Washington rises above his men. His physique and physical strength, at the start, capture our attention. At 42 years old, six feet, two inches tall, he is used to riding to the fox hunt for seven or eight hours at a stretch and has fought in the French and Indian Wars. At crucial moments of near rout, he will position himself among his faltering army and in a fury of threats and pleas rouse them to battle.
His pen is never idle: in a era of epistolary communication, his letters provide masterly details of the rebellion, his own uncertainties of command, and occasionally minute directions to Mount Vernon for the cleaning of chimneys, finishing of wainscotting and pruning of fruit trees. Precision and order are native to his personality, as is constant, daily involvement with the men under his command. Perhaps his first lesson learned is subterfuge: As the Americans are digging into fortifications on the heights of Dorchester, Washington provides the British down in the city of Boston with a diversion. It works. The British wake up to discover the American army above them, and soon decamp.
The next lesson is to know the surrounding territory, which is not the case with New York, the Americans' next stop. Even to me Washington's decision to bring his army into what we now call Manhattan seems foolhardy--the huge British fleet will anchor in the harbor and send ships cruising up and down the Hudson and East Rivers. Washington has no generals who know Brooklyn or Long Island, which is where the British make a surprise landing. The Americans are poorly positioned to take on the huge British and Hessian army, and Washington is forced to pull up the island toward the narrow, heavily wooded heights.
Finally, as winter closes in and Washington's troops have walked toward Trenton, often with no shoes, leaving bloody trails to mark their passing, Washington learns one more lesson in this crucial first full year of conflict: the advantage of a surprise attack. Ever since American history meant anything to me--I'm guessing maybe age 8 as my history-professor father lectured us at the dinner table--Washington's crossing of the Delaware River has loomed as one of the crucial instances. To read that it actually happened, that the ragtag army and all its cannon and horses were crossed in flat-bottom boats in foul weather to surprise the Hessians billeted at Trenton brings to life Washington's daring and determination. Outnumbered and outgunned, yet with surprise as their weapon, they rouse the Hessians in the middle of the night, and capture hundreds, killing the Hessian leader as well. This victory, as Washington understood, was necessary to rouse and unite the flagging American populace, fix the army's confidence, and find purpose to keep fighting.
The truism of the ultimate American victory is that the Americans were fighting on their home ground. To this McCullough adds Washington's grit, intelligence, and spirit of command. He was not the only fine American general, nor was he inordinately proud and incapable of collaboration. In fact, he was often humbled by what transpired, and throughout had an excellent eye for the skill and courage of his subordinate generals and staff. He did not stint himself; but often put himself in the thick of the fight, as did occasionally the British general Lord Howe. But Washington had perserverance, determination, and the physical and emotional qualities to thrive in what we call a theater of war. That he also made a fine first president has earned him the title "Father of his Country." Given how raw was the country, how much it was building itself up from scratch, his gifts were even more necessary and helped determine our survival.
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Saturday, August 27, 2011
Margotlog: Lions, Tigers, and Bears, Oh My!
Margotlog: Lions, Tigers, and Bears, Oh My!
There were none of the above in our childhood zoo--Hampton Park, Charleston, South Carolina. Well, maybe a medium-sized brown bear in a tiny cage, sitting like a teddy bear as we stared at his doglike snout. But in our peninsular world, huge pelicans skimmed the ocean surface and what we called porpoises lifted their gray, scimitar backs in tandem above the waves. My Midwestern mother soon discovered the relief of walking down the beach away from us, breathing in an expanse of ocean and dunes not so unlike the wide fields and skies of her native Dakota.
She had an almost rural childhood, as opposed to my father who grew up amid a conglomeration of Italians in Pittsburgh. He was the least likely to enjoy a picnic, fastidious to a fault, his operatic voice rising in agony over a spot on his Citadel uniform, or for our picnics at the Battery, wearing dark trousers and a sport coat with a white sport shirt winging smartly over the coat lapels. While the rest of us sat on a blanket my mother spread on the grass, he stood, a chicken drumstick in one hand and a napkin in the other. He might have been holding up his violin for all the formality of his pose, ready to join the little orchestra that played under a canopied bandstand.
Stamina and yen for exploring the wider world lay almost entirely with my mother. She planned our summer trips either by car or train, almost always north or northwest, out of Charleston, to visit their relatives in Pittsburgh or North Dakota. For local forays, she led us into marshes, plantation gardens, beaches. I remember slogging through flats of pluff mud, searching for oysters which we plunked into a pail, then at home, washed and scrubbed, baked in the oven until they gaped and we could insert a knife between the crusty lips and pry open their pearly insides. I have no recollection of actually eating them, though, given her household economy, I'm sure we did. Those were the days before pollution made eating shellfish problematic.
Living as we did in the block-long Old Citadel, we two girls lived almost entirely outside, racing up and down the irregular slate sidewalks, roaming the beige glitter of Marion Square to snag discarded cigarette packs and extract the tin foil for postwar factories. We drew a circle hopscotch under the hackberry tree growing outside our King Street wing of the Old Citadel, and appropriated the tough orange pomegranate blossoms from the same yard as cups for our dolls. There's a picture of a school we created inside a huge packing box, which my mother nabbed from a furniture store on Hudson Street, just behind the Old Citadel.
And we walked to school, imprinting our neighborhood in ever-expanding familiarity, denizens of a real place, with its own particular architecture and faces--many of them black and poor. We learned through osmosis the difference between class and race, antebellum homes rising with their tiers of porches, and the more recent bungalows of an earlier 20th century. We learned to look down at the sidewalk, where occasionally someone would drop a nickle or dime, and once I followed errant drops of blood, sure that some dog had been wounded. We had two dogs during those years at the Old Citadel: Tippy, a smallish black terrier who died maybe six months after we acquired him, and much later (with several cats inbetween) Rover, a red hound that Shorty, our black janitor, brought from Johns Island, south of the city.
I attribute my adult love of walking the neighborhood, of traveling far and wide, and of the natural and built environment to that childhood in the warmth of Charleston, and to my mother whose entire orientation was to quiet activity, exploration, and noticing what could be made to use. That last was as important as the other two: we never believed that an item was better because bought at the store. It was as invigorating to make-do, collect and reuse--notably the dance dresses my mother bought us at the Thrift Store--as it was to acquire new. Those qualities still get me up in the morning, curious to explore and discover what there is to hand. It was my father who brought the joy of sociability into our lives, but that's a entirely different story.
There were none of the above in our childhood zoo--Hampton Park, Charleston, South Carolina. Well, maybe a medium-sized brown bear in a tiny cage, sitting like a teddy bear as we stared at his doglike snout. But in our peninsular world, huge pelicans skimmed the ocean surface and what we called porpoises lifted their gray, scimitar backs in tandem above the waves. My Midwestern mother soon discovered the relief of walking down the beach away from us, breathing in an expanse of ocean and dunes not so unlike the wide fields and skies of her native Dakota.
She had an almost rural childhood, as opposed to my father who grew up amid a conglomeration of Italians in Pittsburgh. He was the least likely to enjoy a picnic, fastidious to a fault, his operatic voice rising in agony over a spot on his Citadel uniform, or for our picnics at the Battery, wearing dark trousers and a sport coat with a white sport shirt winging smartly over the coat lapels. While the rest of us sat on a blanket my mother spread on the grass, he stood, a chicken drumstick in one hand and a napkin in the other. He might have been holding up his violin for all the formality of his pose, ready to join the little orchestra that played under a canopied bandstand.
Stamina and yen for exploring the wider world lay almost entirely with my mother. She planned our summer trips either by car or train, almost always north or northwest, out of Charleston, to visit their relatives in Pittsburgh or North Dakota. For local forays, she led us into marshes, plantation gardens, beaches. I remember slogging through flats of pluff mud, searching for oysters which we plunked into a pail, then at home, washed and scrubbed, baked in the oven until they gaped and we could insert a knife between the crusty lips and pry open their pearly insides. I have no recollection of actually eating them, though, given her household economy, I'm sure we did. Those were the days before pollution made eating shellfish problematic.
Living as we did in the block-long Old Citadel, we two girls lived almost entirely outside, racing up and down the irregular slate sidewalks, roaming the beige glitter of Marion Square to snag discarded cigarette packs and extract the tin foil for postwar factories. We drew a circle hopscotch under the hackberry tree growing outside our King Street wing of the Old Citadel, and appropriated the tough orange pomegranate blossoms from the same yard as cups for our dolls. There's a picture of a school we created inside a huge packing box, which my mother nabbed from a furniture store on Hudson Street, just behind the Old Citadel.
And we walked to school, imprinting our neighborhood in ever-expanding familiarity, denizens of a real place, with its own particular architecture and faces--many of them black and poor. We learned through osmosis the difference between class and race, antebellum homes rising with their tiers of porches, and the more recent bungalows of an earlier 20th century. We learned to look down at the sidewalk, where occasionally someone would drop a nickle or dime, and once I followed errant drops of blood, sure that some dog had been wounded. We had two dogs during those years at the Old Citadel: Tippy, a smallish black terrier who died maybe six months after we acquired him, and much later (with several cats inbetween) Rover, a red hound that Shorty, our black janitor, brought from Johns Island, south of the city.
I attribute my adult love of walking the neighborhood, of traveling far and wide, and of the natural and built environment to that childhood in the warmth of Charleston, and to my mother whose entire orientation was to quiet activity, exploration, and noticing what could be made to use. That last was as important as the other two: we never believed that an item was better because bought at the store. It was as invigorating to make-do, collect and reuse--notably the dance dresses my mother bought us at the Thrift Store--as it was to acquire new. Those qualities still get me up in the morning, curious to explore and discover what there is to hand. It was my father who brought the joy of sociability into our lives, but that's a entirely different story.
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Margotlog: I Wake with Rudolpho's Music...
Margotlog: I Wake with Rudolpho's Music...
Puccini's La Boheme is the quintessential Italian love story. Yes, I know, there's always Verdi's La Traviata with Violetta (reformed high-class prostitute) dying of TB at the end. She's left her middle-class lover at the instigation of his father--to "save" his reputation--and returned to a life of partying until the disease takes over. La Traviata was the quintessential opera play-acting for my sister and me as girls, but now that I'm older, give me Rudolpho's love song to the little seamstress Mimi.
Puccini, born in the charming walled Tuscan city of Lucca in 1858, created a blend of unfolding story and music called verismo. The music does not stop for set pieces--the older operatic duets, trios, quartets in which characters simply stand still on stage and belt out whatever is motivating them. Instead, the music twines around the action, in fact announces the action which then becomes metaphoric. So when Mimi, the seamstress, knocks at her neighbor's door (imagine a tall Parisian house with its garret overlooking rooftops), she asks for a light for her candle and then drops her key. Rudolpho, the painter of a trio of bohemian artists, instantly is drawn to her. Takes her hand and begins the love action with "Che gelida manina" or How cold is your little hand. Mimi then introduces herself, "Mi chiamano Mimi..." or They call me Mimi.
What sings in the play of words against melody is the gentle conflict between Mimi's shyness and Rudolpho's stratagem--he finds the key and pockets it to keep her there, at the door of his garret. Even more miraculous,the tenor's high notes, coming from the voice of a young Pavoratti in the recording I own, ascend toward heaven with a continuing richness that takes the breath away. What woman wouldn't swoon at such an outpouring of passion and melody?
Do we care about the rest of the opera? The inevitable struggle between poverty and freedom, freedom and declining health, which is the staple of the 19th century's treatment of "consumption?" Do we care that Rudolpho feigns eventual disinterest in Mimi in the hopes that she'll find a wealthy suitor who will feed and clothe and warm her as her illness requires? Do we care that Mimi inevitably dies in the end--typical sentimental (and of course accurate) conclusion to this scourge of the century which was imbued with the belief that consumption made one more tender, more sensitive, even more lovely?
Coughing up blood, my sister and I took turns dying as Violetta in my mother's embroidered bed jacket, a piece of nightime apparel we'd never seen our furiously busy and robustly healthy mother wear. What was the appeal to us girls, aged maybe seven (me) and five (my sister) those many years ago in The Old Citadel where we were housed in Charleston, South Carolina? (My father taught at the military college called The Citadel, and this was the former barracks, stretching a block long between Meeting and King Streets, looking for all the world like a medieval-style fortress. We didn't have a garret, but the huge rooms of our apartment with their 16-foot ceilings and deep window wells gave an entirely European backdrop to our continual expiring.)
What was the appeal of dying young in the arms of an inconstant lover? Well, we didn't factor in the lover so much as the soaring music and pathos of beauty, youth and death. Nineteenth- century Italian opera from Puccini and Verdi made TB a paragon: consumption was a sign of extra sensitivity; in fact, having the disease bestowed creative genius on the bearer. Somehow with no one telling us this, we girls knew this.
I had to grow much older the find the corrective in the English writer Elizabeth Gaskell's mid-19th century novels set in the northern manufacturing city of Manchester. There in many of her novels, a pathetic young woman who's been employed in the mills dies, maybe not of TB but of another lung disease, maybe emphysema, caused by breathing in tiny cotton fibers from the looms. These deaths in the poor holes where the workers live evoke nothing romantic or grand, no soaring metaphors. They do not ennoble the sufferers, though they do in some cases motivate other workers to unionize and protest. This shift, more realistic, emphasizes the cause of these deaths--dangerous working conditions, poor wages, unclean lodgings, heartless mill owners. The drama is much darker than Puccini's love-enthralled couples. Gaskell shows us a grim, early form of protest literature.
I admire her work and read it with a kind of pleasure. But there's very little swoon to it. She arouses our sympathic spirit of protest. She does not argue that these lives are ennobled or made more sensitive and artistic by this working-class contagion.
Puccini's La Boheme is the quintessential Italian love story. Yes, I know, there's always Verdi's La Traviata with Violetta (reformed high-class prostitute) dying of TB at the end. She's left her middle-class lover at the instigation of his father--to "save" his reputation--and returned to a life of partying until the disease takes over. La Traviata was the quintessential opera play-acting for my sister and me as girls, but now that I'm older, give me Rudolpho's love song to the little seamstress Mimi.
Puccini, born in the charming walled Tuscan city of Lucca in 1858, created a blend of unfolding story and music called verismo. The music does not stop for set pieces--the older operatic duets, trios, quartets in which characters simply stand still on stage and belt out whatever is motivating them. Instead, the music twines around the action, in fact announces the action which then becomes metaphoric. So when Mimi, the seamstress, knocks at her neighbor's door (imagine a tall Parisian house with its garret overlooking rooftops), she asks for a light for her candle and then drops her key. Rudolpho, the painter of a trio of bohemian artists, instantly is drawn to her. Takes her hand and begins the love action with "Che gelida manina" or How cold is your little hand. Mimi then introduces herself, "Mi chiamano Mimi..." or They call me Mimi.
What sings in the play of words against melody is the gentle conflict between Mimi's shyness and Rudolpho's stratagem--he finds the key and pockets it to keep her there, at the door of his garret. Even more miraculous,the tenor's high notes, coming from the voice of a young Pavoratti in the recording I own, ascend toward heaven with a continuing richness that takes the breath away. What woman wouldn't swoon at such an outpouring of passion and melody?
Do we care about the rest of the opera? The inevitable struggle between poverty and freedom, freedom and declining health, which is the staple of the 19th century's treatment of "consumption?" Do we care that Rudolpho feigns eventual disinterest in Mimi in the hopes that she'll find a wealthy suitor who will feed and clothe and warm her as her illness requires? Do we care that Mimi inevitably dies in the end--typical sentimental (and of course accurate) conclusion to this scourge of the century which was imbued with the belief that consumption made one more tender, more sensitive, even more lovely?
Coughing up blood, my sister and I took turns dying as Violetta in my mother's embroidered bed jacket, a piece of nightime apparel we'd never seen our furiously busy and robustly healthy mother wear. What was the appeal to us girls, aged maybe seven (me) and five (my sister) those many years ago in The Old Citadel where we were housed in Charleston, South Carolina? (My father taught at the military college called The Citadel, and this was the former barracks, stretching a block long between Meeting and King Streets, looking for all the world like a medieval-style fortress. We didn't have a garret, but the huge rooms of our apartment with their 16-foot ceilings and deep window wells gave an entirely European backdrop to our continual expiring.)
What was the appeal of dying young in the arms of an inconstant lover? Well, we didn't factor in the lover so much as the soaring music and pathos of beauty, youth and death. Nineteenth- century Italian opera from Puccini and Verdi made TB a paragon: consumption was a sign of extra sensitivity; in fact, having the disease bestowed creative genius on the bearer. Somehow with no one telling us this, we girls knew this.
I had to grow much older the find the corrective in the English writer Elizabeth Gaskell's mid-19th century novels set in the northern manufacturing city of Manchester. There in many of her novels, a pathetic young woman who's been employed in the mills dies, maybe not of TB but of another lung disease, maybe emphysema, caused by breathing in tiny cotton fibers from the looms. These deaths in the poor holes where the workers live evoke nothing romantic or grand, no soaring metaphors. They do not ennoble the sufferers, though they do in some cases motivate other workers to unionize and protest. This shift, more realistic, emphasizes the cause of these deaths--dangerous working conditions, poor wages, unclean lodgings, heartless mill owners. The drama is much darker than Puccini's love-enthralled couples. Gaskell shows us a grim, early form of protest literature.
I admire her work and read it with a kind of pleasure. But there's very little swoon to it. She arouses our sympathic spirit of protest. She does not argue that these lives are ennobled or made more sensitive and artistic by this working-class contagion.
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Margotlog: How to Leave a Comment
Dear Readers, to leave a comment, type in the box, then scroll down to "Comment as:" If you have signed into your own Google.doc account, your name will probably be there, but if not, if you've arrived from outside the Goggle system, then select either "Name/URL" or "Anonymous." Enter your name, not the URL, or enter Anonymous. Press ENTER. Then press POST COMMENT below. If you're outside the Google system, you'll be asked to "read" a weird word--it's a kind of security gate. Once you pass this, make sure you keep pressing enter.
Your comment may not show up in the Post a Comment box but in a list of comments which I can access. I'm thinking of making the comments more public and possibly allowing for an exchange of comments, but so far, this is how I understand the commenting function works. Good luck.
Your comment may not show up in the Post a Comment box but in a list of comments which I can access. I'm thinking of making the comments more public and possibly allowing for an exchange of comments, but so far, this is how I understand the commenting function works. Good luck.
Margotlog: I Gave Birth...
Margotlog: I Gave Birth....
It was supposed to be natural. I'd gone with my husband to childbirth education classes, learning to pant for relieving pains. The pregnancy was uneventful--I was twenty-eight years old and in good health, I walked to classes, ate well, gained only about 12 pounds. Today more would be recommended but then, in the 1970s, my doctor applauded me.
Suddenly as I sat in bed one evening after my husband had gone to sleep, working on my last paper for my last course in my Ph.D. program, it occurred to me to take a shower. It was probably 10:30 p.m. I was 41 weeks pregnant. It was a warm, clear October night.
As soon as I was dried off and returned to bed, lying in as comfortable a position as possible, I felt a huge wave of pain. This is it, I thought, if I was even capable of thought. The pain was all-encompassing, imperative. Someone was pounding at the door.
Waking my husband, I urged him to help me dress and grab the bag already packed. He had to help me down the flight of stairs and out to the car. Luckily the University of Minnesota hospital was only about seven blocks away. In the elevator up to the right floor, I felt as if I was one column of contractions. Will I even be able to stand up, I must have said, because he recommended I slump down.
After that, it's a blur. I was fully dialated--cervix open, eyes not. The contractions were coming maybe a minute apart. All the natural childbirth "panting" lay like a deflated garment beside the gurney. They were wheeling me to the delivery room. But wait! The doctor had been at home, in bed, five miles distant. Did I care? Coherent thought was impossible. I was squeezing my husband's hand so tight he later showed me the deep indentations still visible above his wedding ring. I can almost hear my screams.
Some kind of medication slowed me down and dulled the pain. How long it took until the doctor arrived, I have no idea. Maybe 20 minutes. I remember a white-masked face suddenly appearing above me and the words, "You can push now." My daughter was born just after midnight. Six pounds nine ounces, APGAR (if that's the right abbreviation) score, 9. Ten is perfect.
That night she was born, October 5, summer ended. When we left, five days later, it was cool, wet autumn. Welcome to your home state, daughter.
I stayed in the hospital five days, unheard of today, when young parents are sent out to the world, supposedly ready to cope in 24 hours. I would have hated that. All my oomph had gone into delivery. Afterwards, I was limp, shaky and very tired. Since it was the University of Minnesota hospital, in the days before it merged with Fairview, my doctor attended me trailing a string of medical students and residents. They stood just beyond clear vision, a semi-circle of white-robed savants, stroking their chins and murmuring. All male!
The nurses got me through. All that pushing? They dealt with the hemorrhoids, the difficult first feedings. They ushered in my occasional visitors. I had no family in town. My parents, my husband's father lived on the east coast along with aunts, uncles, cousins. Only the North Dakota relatives lived closer by, and they waited until I came home to arrive with treats, flowers, good wishes. At the hospital I was very grateful for the few friends from our little town-house complex who came to sit by my bed. I was very much still in bed.
Then, contemplating returning home, I urged my mother to visit from South Carolina. It was unprecedented. We were rarely easy with each other until she became an old woman
and allowed me close, needing the warmth of companionship and help organizing and directing her bevy of home-health-care providers.
But for the week after I left the hospital with my daughter, my mother was a godsent. Miraculously, she did not attempt to take over--her deference to my husband, "the doctor,"
no doubt helped. She kept very busy, doing all the household chores, scrubbing the bottoms of my Revere-ware pots to shiny copper. And occasionally she held the baby. I have an adorable photo of them perched on the piano stool, my mother with a fanciful scarf tied around her neck bends over the baby, that little lozenge of hungry flesh. They are for one short moment, a perfect pair.
Now, looking back, I realize that I probably duplicated her own first delivery--me--except for one important particular: she and my father had to drive to Pittsburgh from Wheeling, West Virginia where he'd found a job. It was wartime. Their "midnight ride" became the stuff of family legend. If I'd had to make such a trek, my daughter would have been born in the car. I thank heaven we avoided that. As it was, she might have entered the world in an elevator.
It was supposed to be natural. I'd gone with my husband to childbirth education classes, learning to pant for relieving pains. The pregnancy was uneventful--I was twenty-eight years old and in good health, I walked to classes, ate well, gained only about 12 pounds. Today more would be recommended but then, in the 1970s, my doctor applauded me.
Suddenly as I sat in bed one evening after my husband had gone to sleep, working on my last paper for my last course in my Ph.D. program, it occurred to me to take a shower. It was probably 10:30 p.m. I was 41 weeks pregnant. It was a warm, clear October night.
As soon as I was dried off and returned to bed, lying in as comfortable a position as possible, I felt a huge wave of pain. This is it, I thought, if I was even capable of thought. The pain was all-encompassing, imperative. Someone was pounding at the door.
Waking my husband, I urged him to help me dress and grab the bag already packed. He had to help me down the flight of stairs and out to the car. Luckily the University of Minnesota hospital was only about seven blocks away. In the elevator up to the right floor, I felt as if I was one column of contractions. Will I even be able to stand up, I must have said, because he recommended I slump down.
After that, it's a blur. I was fully dialated--cervix open, eyes not. The contractions were coming maybe a minute apart. All the natural childbirth "panting" lay like a deflated garment beside the gurney. They were wheeling me to the delivery room. But wait! The doctor had been at home, in bed, five miles distant. Did I care? Coherent thought was impossible. I was squeezing my husband's hand so tight he later showed me the deep indentations still visible above his wedding ring. I can almost hear my screams.
Some kind of medication slowed me down and dulled the pain. How long it took until the doctor arrived, I have no idea. Maybe 20 minutes. I remember a white-masked face suddenly appearing above me and the words, "You can push now." My daughter was born just after midnight. Six pounds nine ounces, APGAR (if that's the right abbreviation) score, 9. Ten is perfect.
That night she was born, October 5, summer ended. When we left, five days later, it was cool, wet autumn. Welcome to your home state, daughter.
I stayed in the hospital five days, unheard of today, when young parents are sent out to the world, supposedly ready to cope in 24 hours. I would have hated that. All my oomph had gone into delivery. Afterwards, I was limp, shaky and very tired. Since it was the University of Minnesota hospital, in the days before it merged with Fairview, my doctor attended me trailing a string of medical students and residents. They stood just beyond clear vision, a semi-circle of white-robed savants, stroking their chins and murmuring. All male!
The nurses got me through. All that pushing? They dealt with the hemorrhoids, the difficult first feedings. They ushered in my occasional visitors. I had no family in town. My parents, my husband's father lived on the east coast along with aunts, uncles, cousins. Only the North Dakota relatives lived closer by, and they waited until I came home to arrive with treats, flowers, good wishes. At the hospital I was very grateful for the few friends from our little town-house complex who came to sit by my bed. I was very much still in bed.
Then, contemplating returning home, I urged my mother to visit from South Carolina. It was unprecedented. We were rarely easy with each other until she became an old woman
and allowed me close, needing the warmth of companionship and help organizing and directing her bevy of home-health-care providers.
But for the week after I left the hospital with my daughter, my mother was a godsent. Miraculously, she did not attempt to take over--her deference to my husband, "the doctor,"
no doubt helped. She kept very busy, doing all the household chores, scrubbing the bottoms of my Revere-ware pots to shiny copper. And occasionally she held the baby. I have an adorable photo of them perched on the piano stool, my mother with a fanciful scarf tied around her neck bends over the baby, that little lozenge of hungry flesh. They are for one short moment, a perfect pair.
Now, looking back, I realize that I probably duplicated her own first delivery--me--except for one important particular: she and my father had to drive to Pittsburgh from Wheeling, West Virginia where he'd found a job. It was wartime. Their "midnight ride" became the stuff of family legend. If I'd had to make such a trek, my daughter would have been born in the car. I thank heaven we avoided that. As it was, she might have entered the world in an elevator.
Saturday, August 20, 2011
Margotlog: Slavery and American Christianity
Margotlog: Slavery and American Christianity
Michele Bachman is providing mini lessons on the Southern branch of American Christianity. Granted, as she keeps telling us, she's from Iowa. Her current constituents in Minnesota may also be surprised to find that they're supporting a branch of Christianity that can be traced back to the slave-owning and segregated South.
Let's start with the recent challenge during the Iowa debates: Would you, Michele Bachman, bow to the Biblical dictum that wives should be subservient to their husbands? She nicely sidestepped that, but the underlying message of a hierarchy-- some members of the human race being closer to God and thus carrying more authority than others--remains. True, the ditty about all God's children, "black and white, red and yellow," which we used to sing in Sunday school is inherent in Christianity, but so too is the idea of a "chosen race, God's chosen people," a band of the enlightened, persecuted and reviled by pagan hordes, but triumphing if not on earth, then in heaven. Michele Bachman is all about triumphing on earth.
The history of Christianity calls up this complex of ideas and emotions: persecution, special enlightenment, a "light shining in darkness," and extraordinary power to trump all established kingdoms. Very political, inherently revolutionary or at least resistant. Christianity is replete with contradictions.
I have no special pipeline to heaven, but I do have years of experience with Southern and Christian racism. My parents moved to Charleston, South Carolina after World War II. My father was the son of a Presbyterian "missionary" to his people--they being Italian immigrants in Pittsburgh, whom my grandfather, also a recent immigrant, was trying to convert to Protestantism. My father also studied for the ministry, but gave it up in favor of teaching history. Whatever notions about Christian hierarchy he brought with him to South Carolina, were, over the next four decades, infused and distorted by the furor over civil rights.
"Slavery was a benign institution," he would say, scratching his receding hairline. "It took barbarians, black as the ace of spades, and it Christianized and civilized them." It was an old apology for slavery, still making its rounds, one he undoubtedly taught in his American history courses at The Citadel. "Black people a're unclean," he would hiss as me as we passed groups of maids and janitors standing at bus stops. It took me a while to become suspicious of this apology for the aftermath of slavery we were living with: segregation. Gradually I noticed that the black parts of town were poor and ramshackled. Black maids and gardeners, our own black janitor Shorty, wore old clothes and down-at-the-heel shoes. They were subservient, though I didn't know that word, but as they passed empty seats at the front of the bus and moved to the rear, I felt ashamed at laws that burdened hard-working men and women, but privileged me, a mere teenager, simply because my skin was a lighter color.
"God has given them into our hands," my father would proclaim in his best moods. In his worst moods, he would shout, "Miscegenation will be the downfall of the race!" It took me a while to parse that one. When I finally figured out it meant a black and a white person having sex and giving birth to a child, I narrowed my eyes at him. He was, by then, accusing me of enticing black boys to our door. They would want to date me. "Daddy," I screeched, "I don't know any black boys!" Facts did not penetrate his towering, righteous certainty.
When I consider the danger that Michele Bachman represents, I'm reminded of this towering certainty and my father's rather remote connection to slavery, segregation and the Southern experience. He grew up in the North, yet his family was imbued with a deeply Christian worldview. They were also embattled: fighting one of the Western world's most decidedly religious battles between Catholicism and Protestantism. He was also given to quoting the Bible, especially the Old Testament where power resided in patriarchs, where believers were hounded out of Egypt but with God's intervention--rolling back those Red Sea waters--they reached the Promised Land.
As a history teacher, he was well aware of the divide at our nation's founding: between northern states with little slavery and a dislike of it, and the Southern plantation owners whose entire way of life was predicated on retaining African slavery. What freedom meant to these diverse regions was not the same thing. Over the decades after Freedom was gained from England, freedom shifted its glare toward the bondage of enormous numbers of black people, who lived largely in the south. But there, the white owners coopted the word freedom for their own use: they were free to pursue their own way of life. They would not be imposed upon by their northern brethren. Each side used Christian teaching to prop up their underlying belief about how to treat a people oppressed and degraded within this bastion of supposed freedom.
After listening to the likes of Michele Bachman, it's s rather a relief to remember Christianity can also be made to support "all God's children got wings," to quote a black spiritual. Christ died for ALL our sins. No one is ultimately elevated with power over another. Or, to step aside and view the way religion can be made to serve competing political positions, to remember that the United States is predicated on a separation of church and state. And t0 be deeply disturbed when reading in a recent New Yorker article on Michele Bachman, that Oral Robert University in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she received her law degree, required students to sigh a "code of honor" on their Christian beliefs, and that one of the school's two goals is "to restore law to its historic roots in the Bible." (Ryan Lizza, "Leap of Faith," The New Yorker, August 15,22, 2011, p. 59).
Michele Bachman is providing mini lessons on the Southern branch of American Christianity. Granted, as she keeps telling us, she's from Iowa. Her current constituents in Minnesota may also be surprised to find that they're supporting a branch of Christianity that can be traced back to the slave-owning and segregated South.
Let's start with the recent challenge during the Iowa debates: Would you, Michele Bachman, bow to the Biblical dictum that wives should be subservient to their husbands? She nicely sidestepped that, but the underlying message of a hierarchy-- some members of the human race being closer to God and thus carrying more authority than others--remains. True, the ditty about all God's children, "black and white, red and yellow," which we used to sing in Sunday school is inherent in Christianity, but so too is the idea of a "chosen race, God's chosen people," a band of the enlightened, persecuted and reviled by pagan hordes, but triumphing if not on earth, then in heaven. Michele Bachman is all about triumphing on earth.
The history of Christianity calls up this complex of ideas and emotions: persecution, special enlightenment, a "light shining in darkness," and extraordinary power to trump all established kingdoms. Very political, inherently revolutionary or at least resistant. Christianity is replete with contradictions.
I have no special pipeline to heaven, but I do have years of experience with Southern and Christian racism. My parents moved to Charleston, South Carolina after World War II. My father was the son of a Presbyterian "missionary" to his people--they being Italian immigrants in Pittsburgh, whom my grandfather, also a recent immigrant, was trying to convert to Protestantism. My father also studied for the ministry, but gave it up in favor of teaching history. Whatever notions about Christian hierarchy he brought with him to South Carolina, were, over the next four decades, infused and distorted by the furor over civil rights.
"Slavery was a benign institution," he would say, scratching his receding hairline. "It took barbarians, black as the ace of spades, and it Christianized and civilized them." It was an old apology for slavery, still making its rounds, one he undoubtedly taught in his American history courses at The Citadel. "Black people a're unclean," he would hiss as me as we passed groups of maids and janitors standing at bus stops. It took me a while to become suspicious of this apology for the aftermath of slavery we were living with: segregation. Gradually I noticed that the black parts of town were poor and ramshackled. Black maids and gardeners, our own black janitor Shorty, wore old clothes and down-at-the-heel shoes. They were subservient, though I didn't know that word, but as they passed empty seats at the front of the bus and moved to the rear, I felt ashamed at laws that burdened hard-working men and women, but privileged me, a mere teenager, simply because my skin was a lighter color.
"God has given them into our hands," my father would proclaim in his best moods. In his worst moods, he would shout, "Miscegenation will be the downfall of the race!" It took me a while to parse that one. When I finally figured out it meant a black and a white person having sex and giving birth to a child, I narrowed my eyes at him. He was, by then, accusing me of enticing black boys to our door. They would want to date me. "Daddy," I screeched, "I don't know any black boys!" Facts did not penetrate his towering, righteous certainty.
When I consider the danger that Michele Bachman represents, I'm reminded of this towering certainty and my father's rather remote connection to slavery, segregation and the Southern experience. He grew up in the North, yet his family was imbued with a deeply Christian worldview. They were also embattled: fighting one of the Western world's most decidedly religious battles between Catholicism and Protestantism. He was also given to quoting the Bible, especially the Old Testament where power resided in patriarchs, where believers were hounded out of Egypt but with God's intervention--rolling back those Red Sea waters--they reached the Promised Land.
As a history teacher, he was well aware of the divide at our nation's founding: between northern states with little slavery and a dislike of it, and the Southern plantation owners whose entire way of life was predicated on retaining African slavery. What freedom meant to these diverse regions was not the same thing. Over the decades after Freedom was gained from England, freedom shifted its glare toward the bondage of enormous numbers of black people, who lived largely in the south. But there, the white owners coopted the word freedom for their own use: they were free to pursue their own way of life. They would not be imposed upon by their northern brethren. Each side used Christian teaching to prop up their underlying belief about how to treat a people oppressed and degraded within this bastion of supposed freedom.
After listening to the likes of Michele Bachman, it's s rather a relief to remember Christianity can also be made to support "all God's children got wings," to quote a black spiritual. Christ died for ALL our sins. No one is ultimately elevated with power over another. Or, to step aside and view the way religion can be made to serve competing political positions, to remember that the United States is predicated on a separation of church and state. And t0 be deeply disturbed when reading in a recent New Yorker article on Michele Bachman, that Oral Robert University in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she received her law degree, required students to sigh a "code of honor" on their Christian beliefs, and that one of the school's two goals is "to restore law to its historic roots in the Bible." (Ryan Lizza, "Leap of Faith," The New Yorker, August 15,22, 2011, p. 59).
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Margotlog: Poetry and the Night Sky
Margotlog: Poetry and the Night Sky
Living in modern cities with street lights dimming the dark, we settle into a comfortable amnesia. This is all there is: kilowatts and miles per hour. Each day fractured into little bits. Nerves, heart, even our prose growing ever speedier.
Then, if we're lucky and live near the edge of the great light bubble, we escape. We pare down, turn off, retain only essential ties. There's enough food to keep us alive for days. A bird feeder draws summer close. A great expense of lake stretches in many directions, captures clouds and waves, a few loons. We have a horizon again.
Even so, I'm reluctant to wait out the light. It takes a long while for nerves and muscle to release the energy of arrival and departure, schedules and commitments. For many days I fall asleep before the light has completely left the sky.
As time relaxes, I dive deeper into memory and image. Lines begin to sing in my head. One night I am alert. I wait up. When deep dark has arrived, I step outside. The night sky is aswarm with stars. Caverns and archipelagos, ice caps and mountains, worlds I can barely imagine they are so distant. Yet they shine down on me. A plane or two chugs across. A shower of meteors darts like sky minnows. With luck, northern lights throw green veils across the dark. I have become the infinitessimally small in the vastness of time, space and stars.
Poetry comes from this kind of wonder. Even if the emotion is not subdued, but pounds and shatters, it must arrive in language that has looped beyond the commercial bubble. It must stretch far and wide. It must try to see in the dark.
Not only has my own poetry flourished during my lucky tenure with the Laurel Poetry Collective, but my experience of what is possible has stretched enormously as I've been surrounded by this company of star gazers. It's not that we hear the same voices in the dark. But that singly or together, we step outside and seek to be awed, amazed, surprised by what constantly exists, yet is usually very hard to see. In 2012, we will publish our last anthology. It's time to celebrate our years, more than a decade long, of plucking poetry out of the dark.
Living in modern cities with street lights dimming the dark, we settle into a comfortable amnesia. This is all there is: kilowatts and miles per hour. Each day fractured into little bits. Nerves, heart, even our prose growing ever speedier.
Then, if we're lucky and live near the edge of the great light bubble, we escape. We pare down, turn off, retain only essential ties. There's enough food to keep us alive for days. A bird feeder draws summer close. A great expense of lake stretches in many directions, captures clouds and waves, a few loons. We have a horizon again.
Even so, I'm reluctant to wait out the light. It takes a long while for nerves and muscle to release the energy of arrival and departure, schedules and commitments. For many days I fall asleep before the light has completely left the sky.
As time relaxes, I dive deeper into memory and image. Lines begin to sing in my head. One night I am alert. I wait up. When deep dark has arrived, I step outside. The night sky is aswarm with stars. Caverns and archipelagos, ice caps and mountains, worlds I can barely imagine they are so distant. Yet they shine down on me. A plane or two chugs across. A shower of meteors darts like sky minnows. With luck, northern lights throw green veils across the dark. I have become the infinitessimally small in the vastness of time, space and stars.
Poetry comes from this kind of wonder. Even if the emotion is not subdued, but pounds and shatters, it must arrive in language that has looped beyond the commercial bubble. It must stretch far and wide. It must try to see in the dark.
Not only has my own poetry flourished during my lucky tenure with the Laurel Poetry Collective, but my experience of what is possible has stretched enormously as I've been surrounded by this company of star gazers. It's not that we hear the same voices in the dark. But that singly or together, we step outside and seek to be awed, amazed, surprised by what constantly exists, yet is usually very hard to see. In 2012, we will publish our last anthology. It's time to celebrate our years, more than a decade long, of plucking poetry out of the dark.
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Margotlog: Dirty, Foul-Mouthed, Cold: Washington's Boston Army
Margotlog: Dirty, Foul-Mouthed, Cold: Washington's Boston Army
In these days of intense partisanship, when disgust at our fellow citizens runs high, it's been a good counteractive to listen to David McCullough read his account of 1776, when a rag-tail army, dirty, foul-mouthed, and cold, eventually forced the British to withdraw from Boston. The American commander of course was George Washington, but McCullough, with his perennial wit, clarity and vivid personification of men, climate, and geography, also brings to life the British commander Lord Howe, many of Washington's supporting officers, notably Boston bookseller Henry Knox, and the shifting regulars who had no uniforms but their farmer clothes, little book-learning thought lots of physical know-how, and an acute shortage of gunpowder.
After the Battle of Bunker Hill in July 1775 showed the British how feisty and wily their opponents could be, the Americans spent the next seven months digging fortifications, trying to figure out how to "smoke" the British out of Boston, and getting used to each other. Washington did not like New Englanders. McCullough paints a vivid portrait of the American commander, contrasting his Virginia elegance and hardihood in the saddle--Washington enjoyed day-long fox hunts--with the rough men from New England who made up his army. This is one of the most important underlying contrasts in the period: Virginia planters were served by slaves who did almost every kind of physical labor on plantations. New Englanders worked their own land, made their own wagons and built their own houses. They were jacks-of-all-trades, used to physical hardship, and not particularly polished by education or social niceties.
As Henry Knox also proved, they could be rallied in the hinterlands to support the cause of independence. Knox himself, a large, hearty, sociable Boston bookseller-turned-soldier, had the idea of traveling to Fort Ticonderoga in December of 1775 and bringing back the fort's usable cannon and mortars, floating them down Lake Champlain, then sledding them over the Berkshire Mountains. This enormously difficult feat was accomplished against all but constant odds, forced ahead by Knox's refusal to give up, and the aid of local citizens along the way, who built sledges, helped recover cannon which sank, luckly close to shore, and provided oxen, then horses to drag the sledges over the mountains.
The British, McCullough makes clear, had little of this "get up and go." Lord Howe, the commander, though a brave and well-trained soldier--he led the last charge up Bunker Hill and was the only British soldier left standing--was slothful, over-confident, and given to constant socializing. One of my favorite scenes takes place that Boston winter during a Boston theatrical, in which booms of cannon resounded. The audience of British soldiers and Loyalists took the cannonade to be part of the farce, but in reality it was American guns. A telling mistake.
McCullough sums up the difference between the British and American command with several succinct comparisons: The American generals and other officers had, with a few exceptions, little military experience except for years before, fighting as did Washington in the French and Indian Wars. The British soldiers were not only highly trained, but their leaders had all served in many engagements. Yet the loose regulations governing American hierarchy let virtual unknown civilians like Nathaniel Greene and Henry Knox rise to the top, which proved immensely important, as they added wit and intelligence and determination to the cause. Meanwhile the British rigid division between aristocracy and commoners kept brilliant military strategists and engineers at lower levels.
By the time Washington's army, using decoying techniques, had dug the Ticonderoga guns into the Heights of Dorchester, both sets of assumptions were proven wrong. The British were not superior as they withdrew, deciding to save their men, rather than engage. They had been outsmarted. And Washington had tested the mettle of his officers and men. Whether he changed his mind about New Englanders, at least in his voluminous correspondence, I have yet to find out. I'm only half-way through the book.
It's good to be reminded that from the very beginning of this nation's formation, there was a divide between northern and southern ways of life. Washington had the fortitude, humility, power of command and intelligence to use what he was given to its best advantage. Perhaps this is what we lack today. Though I admire President Barack Obama for many of his initiatives and his obvious desire to compromise, I see him lacking qualities that made Washington a compelling leader, not just a good one or an experienced one, but compelling. With his imposing figure always in the field, encouraging, directing, taking charge when necessary, Washington provided an outstanding leader whose skill, determination, and power to unite could not be ignored. One example comes back to me: in a melee that fall of 1775, when the American soldiers fell upon each other to beat and curse, and damage each other, Washington (one of the tallest of his contemporaries) strode into the fight, grabbed two combatants and held them at arms' length as he alternately cursed them and knocked their heads together.
We are not now on a battlefield except figuratively. But it gives me great satisfaction to image President Obama pulling apart two of the most snarly Dems and Republicans and giving them a talking to, then knocking some sense into them.
In these days of intense partisanship, when disgust at our fellow citizens runs high, it's been a good counteractive to listen to David McCullough read his account of 1776, when a rag-tail army, dirty, foul-mouthed, and cold, eventually forced the British to withdraw from Boston. The American commander of course was George Washington, but McCullough, with his perennial wit, clarity and vivid personification of men, climate, and geography, also brings to life the British commander Lord Howe, many of Washington's supporting officers, notably Boston bookseller Henry Knox, and the shifting regulars who had no uniforms but their farmer clothes, little book-learning thought lots of physical know-how, and an acute shortage of gunpowder.
After the Battle of Bunker Hill in July 1775 showed the British how feisty and wily their opponents could be, the Americans spent the next seven months digging fortifications, trying to figure out how to "smoke" the British out of Boston, and getting used to each other. Washington did not like New Englanders. McCullough paints a vivid portrait of the American commander, contrasting his Virginia elegance and hardihood in the saddle--Washington enjoyed day-long fox hunts--with the rough men from New England who made up his army. This is one of the most important underlying contrasts in the period: Virginia planters were served by slaves who did almost every kind of physical labor on plantations. New Englanders worked their own land, made their own wagons and built their own houses. They were jacks-of-all-trades, used to physical hardship, and not particularly polished by education or social niceties.
As Henry Knox also proved, they could be rallied in the hinterlands to support the cause of independence. Knox himself, a large, hearty, sociable Boston bookseller-turned-soldier, had the idea of traveling to Fort Ticonderoga in December of 1775 and bringing back the fort's usable cannon and mortars, floating them down Lake Champlain, then sledding them over the Berkshire Mountains. This enormously difficult feat was accomplished against all but constant odds, forced ahead by Knox's refusal to give up, and the aid of local citizens along the way, who built sledges, helped recover cannon which sank, luckly close to shore, and provided oxen, then horses to drag the sledges over the mountains.
The British, McCullough makes clear, had little of this "get up and go." Lord Howe, the commander, though a brave and well-trained soldier--he led the last charge up Bunker Hill and was the only British soldier left standing--was slothful, over-confident, and given to constant socializing. One of my favorite scenes takes place that Boston winter during a Boston theatrical, in which booms of cannon resounded. The audience of British soldiers and Loyalists took the cannonade to be part of the farce, but in reality it was American guns. A telling mistake.
McCullough sums up the difference between the British and American command with several succinct comparisons: The American generals and other officers had, with a few exceptions, little military experience except for years before, fighting as did Washington in the French and Indian Wars. The British soldiers were not only highly trained, but their leaders had all served in many engagements. Yet the loose regulations governing American hierarchy let virtual unknown civilians like Nathaniel Greene and Henry Knox rise to the top, which proved immensely important, as they added wit and intelligence and determination to the cause. Meanwhile the British rigid division between aristocracy and commoners kept brilliant military strategists and engineers at lower levels.
By the time Washington's army, using decoying techniques, had dug the Ticonderoga guns into the Heights of Dorchester, both sets of assumptions were proven wrong. The British were not superior as they withdrew, deciding to save their men, rather than engage. They had been outsmarted. And Washington had tested the mettle of his officers and men. Whether he changed his mind about New Englanders, at least in his voluminous correspondence, I have yet to find out. I'm only half-way through the book.
It's good to be reminded that from the very beginning of this nation's formation, there was a divide between northern and southern ways of life. Washington had the fortitude, humility, power of command and intelligence to use what he was given to its best advantage. Perhaps this is what we lack today. Though I admire President Barack Obama for many of his initiatives and his obvious desire to compromise, I see him lacking qualities that made Washington a compelling leader, not just a good one or an experienced one, but compelling. With his imposing figure always in the field, encouraging, directing, taking charge when necessary, Washington provided an outstanding leader whose skill, determination, and power to unite could not be ignored. One example comes back to me: in a melee that fall of 1775, when the American soldiers fell upon each other to beat and curse, and damage each other, Washington (one of the tallest of his contemporaries) strode into the fight, grabbed two combatants and held them at arms' length as he alternately cursed them and knocked their heads together.
We are not now on a battlefield except figuratively. But it gives me great satisfaction to image President Obama pulling apart two of the most snarly Dems and Republicans and giving them a talking to, then knocking some sense into them.
Sunday, August 14, 2011
Margotlog: I've Stopped Eating...
Margotlog: I've Stopped Eating...
First or second go-around farmers in Minnesota grew a little bit of everything from chickens and turkeys to beef and dairy cows to wheat, corn, flax, rye, and the numerous tiny crops of their summer kitchen gardens. When I visit friends in Finlayson almost straight north of Saint Paul on Highway 35, I stand amazed in a garden as big as my city backyard filled with potatoes, corn, beans, broccoli and cauliflower, tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, cucumbers, squash, onions, and the perennial herbs like oregano and mint, not to mention flowers twined around for beauty and charm. It's a bonanza of fecundity, which this quasi-farm family (really the wife) cans and dries, freezes and stews or stores in sand in the cellar. Did I mention the family also grows several kinds of apples and pears?
They know exactly where their food is coming from and what growing it does to the environment--no pesticides, herbicides or other "cides," which of course means an agent of death. To combat plant killers, they rotate crops, spray with relatively benign mixtures of vinegar or soap suds, pick off some noxious critters themselves, or shroud their trees in nets. To keep up the fertility of the soil, they dig compost into it every spring. Every summer, some scourge gets a crop or plant or two, but they still harvest an enormous stash of healthy food which lasts them almost through the winter.
Yet it's a lot of work and it keeps them all summer chained to their garden. No gadding about to Europe, Asia or the antipodes. Though I tend to gad, still I admire them and try to take the message of their work to heart. Lately I've been troubled by evidence that we in the Northland have forgotten one of the most profound messages of farming: What gets dumped upstream pollutes down the river.
Item number one: Minnesota farms send a huge plume of nitrates down the Mississippi every growing season. This plume joins other such noxious run-off and settles in the Gulf of Mexico to deaden the water for any crustacean or fish. According to a recent article in the StarTribune, this dead zone is the size of Connecticut. The Environmental Protection Agency and the Clean Water Act should be working to help farmers at our end of the watershed use less fertilizer, ring their fields with run-off barriers of tall plants that would filter out these nitrates. But whatever is being done is clearly not enough.
Our fish populations especially on the Atlantic shores are already so over-fished as to be nearly extinct--due to rampant greed and the high-tech killing capability of fishermen. (There's some evidence that they're taking a new tack toward conservation--after all, their own livelihoods depend on restraint.) I've also read that farmed fish that eat other fish are no solution. ONLY TILIPIA, which is a plant-eating fish, works in a farm and helps conserve wild fish stocks. So I'm not eating salmon or cod anymore because it's very pricey or farmed. I'm eating TILIPIA.
Now it looks as if fish in the Gulf are being forced further and further from shore, if not outright suffocated with chemical pollution. CORN is the culprit. Ethanol is the reason, not to mention the nation's abhorrent dependence on corn-fed beef and corn syrup which gives soft drinks their diabetic punch. I swore off soft drinks unless they're sugar free years ago, and now I'm working on my husband to swear off beef. NOTE THIS: The fat content of feed-lot, corn-bed beef is 90% higher than range-fed/grass-fed beef.
The answer of course has to start at home: we have to change our own eating habits first--organic and local foods, and animals treated to their and our own best health. But we also need to lobby our representatives.
One of the most profound underlying causes is the enormous size of contemporary Minnesota farms. It is more possible to monitor the health of fields when a farmer has only the old homestead size of 180 acres. But with the thousand acres (think of Jane Smiley's Pulitzer-prize-winning novel A Thousand Acres), maximizing yield through the enormous application of herbicides and pesticides becomes an end in itself. We need to get rid of ethanol, it's proven poorly cost-effective, and the corn used to produce it contributes the majority of nitrate run-off.
Though very wealthy huge farmer will lobby powerfully, we as individuals can make a difference by what we consume. No ethanol (ultimately more expensive anyway), and no corn syrup sodas, no corn-fed, feedlot beef (our hearts will thank us), and letters to our congressional reps.
It's not easy being green!
First or second go-around farmers in Minnesota grew a little bit of everything from chickens and turkeys to beef and dairy cows to wheat, corn, flax, rye, and the numerous tiny crops of their summer kitchen gardens. When I visit friends in Finlayson almost straight north of Saint Paul on Highway 35, I stand amazed in a garden as big as my city backyard filled with potatoes, corn, beans, broccoli and cauliflower, tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, cucumbers, squash, onions, and the perennial herbs like oregano and mint, not to mention flowers twined around for beauty and charm. It's a bonanza of fecundity, which this quasi-farm family (really the wife) cans and dries, freezes and stews or stores in sand in the cellar. Did I mention the family also grows several kinds of apples and pears?
They know exactly where their food is coming from and what growing it does to the environment--no pesticides, herbicides or other "cides," which of course means an agent of death. To combat plant killers, they rotate crops, spray with relatively benign mixtures of vinegar or soap suds, pick off some noxious critters themselves, or shroud their trees in nets. To keep up the fertility of the soil, they dig compost into it every spring. Every summer, some scourge gets a crop or plant or two, but they still harvest an enormous stash of healthy food which lasts them almost through the winter.
Yet it's a lot of work and it keeps them all summer chained to their garden. No gadding about to Europe, Asia or the antipodes. Though I tend to gad, still I admire them and try to take the message of their work to heart. Lately I've been troubled by evidence that we in the Northland have forgotten one of the most profound messages of farming: What gets dumped upstream pollutes down the river.
Item number one: Minnesota farms send a huge plume of nitrates down the Mississippi every growing season. This plume joins other such noxious run-off and settles in the Gulf of Mexico to deaden the water for any crustacean or fish. According to a recent article in the StarTribune, this dead zone is the size of Connecticut. The Environmental Protection Agency and the Clean Water Act should be working to help farmers at our end of the watershed use less fertilizer, ring their fields with run-off barriers of tall plants that would filter out these nitrates. But whatever is being done is clearly not enough.
Our fish populations especially on the Atlantic shores are already so over-fished as to be nearly extinct--due to rampant greed and the high-tech killing capability of fishermen. (There's some evidence that they're taking a new tack toward conservation--after all, their own livelihoods depend on restraint.) I've also read that farmed fish that eat other fish are no solution. ONLY TILIPIA, which is a plant-eating fish, works in a farm and helps conserve wild fish stocks. So I'm not eating salmon or cod anymore because it's very pricey or farmed. I'm eating TILIPIA.
Now it looks as if fish in the Gulf are being forced further and further from shore, if not outright suffocated with chemical pollution. CORN is the culprit. Ethanol is the reason, not to mention the nation's abhorrent dependence on corn-fed beef and corn syrup which gives soft drinks their diabetic punch. I swore off soft drinks unless they're sugar free years ago, and now I'm working on my husband to swear off beef. NOTE THIS: The fat content of feed-lot, corn-bed beef is 90% higher than range-fed/grass-fed beef.
The answer of course has to start at home: we have to change our own eating habits first--organic and local foods, and animals treated to their and our own best health. But we also need to lobby our representatives.
One of the most profound underlying causes is the enormous size of contemporary Minnesota farms. It is more possible to monitor the health of fields when a farmer has only the old homestead size of 180 acres. But with the thousand acres (think of Jane Smiley's Pulitzer-prize-winning novel A Thousand Acres), maximizing yield through the enormous application of herbicides and pesticides becomes an end in itself. We need to get rid of ethanol, it's proven poorly cost-effective, and the corn used to produce it contributes the majority of nitrate run-off.
Though very wealthy huge farmer will lobby powerfully, we as individuals can make a difference by what we consume. No ethanol (ultimately more expensive anyway), and no corn syrup sodas, no corn-fed, feedlot beef (our hearts will thank us), and letters to our congressional reps.
It's not easy being green!
Friday, August 12, 2011
Margotlog: Summer's Lease and the Freedom Riders
Margotlog: Summer's Lease and the Freedom Riders
I've been noticing a shift in heat and days, the congregation of birds at the free-standing feeder, now full of chickadees and red and gold finches, as the fledglings forage for themselves and parents fatten up for the cold. Summer's lease, in Shakespeare's wonderfully evocative phrase, is slowly expiring, mornings dawning later, and we in the northland even lucky enough to have cool, as compared to those poor creatures in Texas, sweltering through yet another day over 100.
Faulkner's Light in August has just run itself out on my disk player. I'm noticing how the master of Southern storytelling shifts from focus on his three main players, using omniscient narration to depict each one in shifting perspectives, to broader, more anonymous and briefer renditions. The one who survives is Lena Grove, pregnant and walking from Alabama to Mississippi at the beginning of the book, in search of the man who "knocked her up," as we used to say in my Carolina teen years. "Passed on" by the end are the two men, Reverend Hightower, that flabby dechurched preacher whose failure is rank with sweat and solitude, and Joe Christmas, the reputedly half-Negro, orphan now 33 years old, a Christ-like figure whose childhood of hateful treatment has made crazy. He has killed a white woman who was his lover and by the end is hounded down by various incarnations of Southern militarism. Lena survives, walking again after pausing in Jefferson, Mississippi, to acquire a protector and give birth to her child. The voice who describes her at the end is that of the small-town truck driver who provides a ride into Tennessee for her and her protector, Byron Bunch. The driver, returned home, lies in bed and relates to his wife how Byron finally had enough gumption to present himself as her consort. The narrator is amused by Byron's "indefatigable"--along with "outrage" one of Faulkner's favorite words--attentions to the serene, madonna-like Lena, and so are we, amused and grateful that Byron has finally found declared himself.
Writing in the early 1930s, Faulkner depicts an "unreconstructed" South--now we're hearing my North Dakota mother's voice. Though far from an out-and-out liberal, my mother rarely mouthed any racism nastiness, as opposed to my father who often could not shut up about it. (I've decided he was co-opted by racism, and prepared to be so by a childhood in Pittsburgh where as a Protestant Italian he and his missionary family were hazed every Sunday by their Catholic compatriots. But that's another story.) The Southern story is about the change that swept over the South in what we call civil rights.
This summer is the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Rides, when young black "agitators" (my father's term, but he was not alone) rode interstate buses into the South to prove that the Supreme Court decisions desegregating interstate transportation were not upheld. Calvin Trillin has a fine essay in the July 25th issue of The New Yorker describing his experiences covering the south for Time magazine during this year of 1960-61. When reporters like him contributed to regular national coverage of civil rights agitation (and success and murder) in the South, they helped widen national thinking. Public opinion shifted from considering segregation as he puts it, a "regrettable regional problem" to seeing it as "a moral wrong that had to be addressed."
Many histories have been written of this crucial period, but most of them focus on the brave people, black and white, outsiders and Southerners, leaders and followers, who either challenged the segregated system or opposed that challenge. But the story of the civil rights era should also include the by-standers, those black and white Southerners--or Northerners living out their lives there like my parents. As Faulkner's novel makes evident, racism in the South twisted everyday life into extremes, imbuing the already rigid divides in Protestant Christianity with extra fiery force, and tainting the average white person's ability to "see" black people's poverty and lack of freedom and opportunity, not as something they deserved, but as something the white people themselves promulgated (one of my father's favorite words).
To quote Trillin again, civil rights preaching (think Martin Luther King) toward love and equality "seeped through the defenses" of good Southern white people and taught them that supporting segregation was not "independent and enlightened" nor was agitation caused by "meddling outsiders." In fact, we date the beginning of change to the sit-ins conducted by black college students wearing suits and ties, heels and hats and gloves--bright and determined Southern blacks. Though my father never overtly admitted how wrong and hateful his language had been during the civil rights era, he eventually simply talking that way, either too tired to continue, or (what I like to hope) finally understanding the justice of equality under the law.
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
I've been noticing a shift in heat and days, the congregation of birds at the free-standing feeder, now full of chickadees and red and gold finches, as the fledglings forage for themselves and parents fatten up for the cold. Summer's lease, in Shakespeare's wonderfully evocative phrase, is slowly expiring, mornings dawning later, and we in the northland even lucky enough to have cool, as compared to those poor creatures in Texas, sweltering through yet another day over 100.
Faulkner's Light in August has just run itself out on my disk player. I'm noticing how the master of Southern storytelling shifts from focus on his three main players, using omniscient narration to depict each one in shifting perspectives, to broader, more anonymous and briefer renditions. The one who survives is Lena Grove, pregnant and walking from Alabama to Mississippi at the beginning of the book, in search of the man who "knocked her up," as we used to say in my Carolina teen years. "Passed on" by the end are the two men, Reverend Hightower, that flabby dechurched preacher whose failure is rank with sweat and solitude, and Joe Christmas, the reputedly half-Negro, orphan now 33 years old, a Christ-like figure whose childhood of hateful treatment has made crazy. He has killed a white woman who was his lover and by the end is hounded down by various incarnations of Southern militarism. Lena survives, walking again after pausing in Jefferson, Mississippi, to acquire a protector and give birth to her child. The voice who describes her at the end is that of the small-town truck driver who provides a ride into Tennessee for her and her protector, Byron Bunch. The driver, returned home, lies in bed and relates to his wife how Byron finally had enough gumption to present himself as her consort. The narrator is amused by Byron's "indefatigable"--along with "outrage" one of Faulkner's favorite words--attentions to the serene, madonna-like Lena, and so are we, amused and grateful that Byron has finally found declared himself.
Writing in the early 1930s, Faulkner depicts an "unreconstructed" South--now we're hearing my North Dakota mother's voice. Though far from an out-and-out liberal, my mother rarely mouthed any racism nastiness, as opposed to my father who often could not shut up about it. (I've decided he was co-opted by racism, and prepared to be so by a childhood in Pittsburgh where as a Protestant Italian he and his missionary family were hazed every Sunday by their Catholic compatriots. But that's another story.) The Southern story is about the change that swept over the South in what we call civil rights.
This summer is the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Rides, when young black "agitators" (my father's term, but he was not alone) rode interstate buses into the South to prove that the Supreme Court decisions desegregating interstate transportation were not upheld. Calvin Trillin has a fine essay in the July 25th issue of The New Yorker describing his experiences covering the south for Time magazine during this year of 1960-61. When reporters like him contributed to regular national coverage of civil rights agitation (and success and murder) in the South, they helped widen national thinking. Public opinion shifted from considering segregation as he puts it, a "regrettable regional problem" to seeing it as "a moral wrong that had to be addressed."
Many histories have been written of this crucial period, but most of them focus on the brave people, black and white, outsiders and Southerners, leaders and followers, who either challenged the segregated system or opposed that challenge. But the story of the civil rights era should also include the by-standers, those black and white Southerners--or Northerners living out their lives there like my parents. As Faulkner's novel makes evident, racism in the South twisted everyday life into extremes, imbuing the already rigid divides in Protestant Christianity with extra fiery force, and tainting the average white person's ability to "see" black people's poverty and lack of freedom and opportunity, not as something they deserved, but as something the white people themselves promulgated (one of my father's favorite words).
To quote Trillin again, civil rights preaching (think Martin Luther King) toward love and equality "seeped through the defenses" of good Southern white people and taught them that supporting segregation was not "independent and enlightened" nor was agitation caused by "meddling outsiders." In fact, we date the beginning of change to the sit-ins conducted by black college students wearing suits and ties, heels and hats and gloves--bright and determined Southern blacks. Though my father never overtly admitted how wrong and hateful his language had been during the civil rights era, he eventually simply talking that way, either too tired to continue, or (what I like to hope) finally understanding the justice of equality under the law.
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Margotlog: Money Sense
Margotlog: Money Sense
When my sister and I received our allowances as kids, each week's outlay probably amounted to a quarter. In that distant era, when a loaf of sliced bread cost a nickle, and a bottle of milk not much more, a quarter was big money. We would walk across Marion Square, in Charleston, South Carolina, named for Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox, who fought the British during the Revolutionary War, and won. From our doorway in The Old Citadel's King Street wing to the other side of Marion Square sliced the city block at a diagonal. There, on Meeting Street, half a continent away, hunched a tiny grocery story. Sometimes we bought our mother a loaf of bread but more often we purchased candy cigarettes with pink-tipped flames, or Mars bars, with their swoosh of stellar dust, or tiny wax bottles of disgustingly sweet liquor tinted green, purple or maroon. We spent our allowances, our "own money."
My mother had excellent money sense. She'd grown up in comparative wealth, half a continent away, on another diagonal, from coastal Carolina to her North Dakota hometown. Hankinson was tiny in comparison with Charleston, but it sat in the midst of acres of winter wheat, oats, and rye. Her father, though not a banker, propped up the town economy by selling furniture, caskets, and funeral arrangements. He eventually become an absentee landlord of four farms nearby clustered around a small lake. He acquired these during the Depression, my mother told me later. The owners hadn't the cash to pay the taxes, but he did. That's all it took. Later, in the 1950s, gravel was discovered beneath one of the sand hills at one edge of the lake. This gravel, sold to the county and state to improve rural roads, made my grandfather a wealthy man.
My father, on the other hand, earned only a modest college professor's salary, but with outlays of money from North Dakota, my parents were eventually able to buy a piece of property across the Cooper River in Mount Pleasant. There they built a bungalow. Now we lived not in a small city, but a really small town. During the 1950s Mount Pleasant was forging connections across the nausea-inducing Roller Coaster bridge to Charleston, but many parents of my school friends still worked locally. My father, one of those early pioneers who commuted to work in Charleston, brought home more money (I'm thinking around $15,000 a year) than lots of other working parents. When I entered high school, my mother returned to work
"B.B., before babies," as she used to quip, she worked in Pittsburgh in various college and university libraries, using her library degree from the University of Minnesota. She'd graduated in 1929, at the beginning of the Depression. As far as I know, she had no college tuition debt. But she would learn quite a bit about economizing. In order to afford her first trip to Europe with my father, in the late 1930s, she ate oatmeal twice a day. She bragged about this economizing. Later when we lived in Charleston, I watched her do the budget, sitting at the kitchen table with checkbooks and bills spread around her. It was the lists of expenses, written on the backs of envelopes--columns of tiny cramped figures--that caught my attention.
When I went to college in Baltimore, North Dakota money paid for it too, and I still had an allowance which arrived every month, a check written in my mother's tiny crabbed hand. It was probably $25. Only once during those four years was I "flush" with funds: when I won a literary prize and spent the $100 on a portable stereo and several record sets of Brahms and Mozart.
My mother's example has stood me in good stead because I, too, have had to make do at various times over the years. I have never borrowed money for anything other than a big purchase, a car, or a house. I did not enter adulthood with a load of debt. North Dakota wheat money, in part, saw to that, but equally important was my mother's money sense. She knew how to "put by" for bigger expenses. She knew how to buy second-hand, and "make do." She knew how to cook inexpensive meals. She knew how to prioritize desire and save for those luxuries--almost always intangibles like concerts, higher education and overseas travel, which meant to her the bliss of escape and storing up knowledge and aesthetic experience to enrich the inner life.
Recently I had a conversation with a masters level student who wants to write his final paper on the weight of college debt among his generation. In five minutes, he's painted a picture of ignorance, predatory lending from big banks, and long-term onerous consequences. At age 17, he walked into a Wells Fargo bank in the Twin Cities and asked for information about college loans. "I knew nothing about borrowing money," he tells me. Without doing a credit check, the bank extended him what was in essence a credit card for his tuition and living expenses. The percentage the bank could charge was variable, according to the agreement, which, of course, he was too young and ignorant to check. At some points over his four years at the University of Minnesota, the interest rate rose as high as 25%. To add insult to injury, the University discouraged students from working more than 10 hours a week. Though I appreciate this limitation, I'm also appalled at it. When this young man graduated, he had accumulated $46,000 worth of debt.
It took him only a year of attempting to live on his own, and working at a modest-paying job, to realize that the only way he could ever pay-down the debt was to move home. This he has done. He calculates that two years of having no rent costs has whittled $10,000 from the principle. Soon he will return to the rental world but with a roommate. Now with his better paying job, and a roommate sharing rental expenses, he calculates that he'll pay off the debt in three-five years.
How different from my college expenses, saved for in part by my mother, funded in part by my grandfather's gifts. I graduated with no debt and luckily a fellowship to graduate school, where again, a combination of family savings and gifts paid my dorm costs. My student will pay down his debt until eventually he has erased it, but the financial bind it put him in has forced him to take work that was not his first choice, forced him to live at home for several years, and delay marriage and children. None of these is life-threatening. He seems to have health and now a greater degree of financial savvy, as well as college and master's degrees. Far from pitiable.
Still, I'm appalled and incensed. He was clearly far too young to realize the hole the bank had waiting for him. And I'm willing to bet, he also hadn't much younger training in saving and going without. Still, the onus of this problem lies with the bank. Just as there's been a public outcry against predatory credit card solicitations among college students, we need to raise our voices against predatory college loans. NOTE: these are not federal loans, but local bank loans which many students need to supplement federal grants.
Now I have another reason to look askance at the chirpy, excessively friendly (let's say intrusive) clerks at the Wells Fargo windows where I bank. If I were a naive high school student, their chattiness would indeed translate into safety and comfort. It is, in fact, the exact opposite. It's part of the package of enticing the ignorant young into signing up to be fleeced. I'm collecting stories from other clients of Wells Fargo: almost to a person, we hate this intrusive, smarmy friendliness. We're old enough to know where it can lead.
When my sister and I received our allowances as kids, each week's outlay probably amounted to a quarter. In that distant era, when a loaf of sliced bread cost a nickle, and a bottle of milk not much more, a quarter was big money. We would walk across Marion Square, in Charleston, South Carolina, named for Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox, who fought the British during the Revolutionary War, and won. From our doorway in The Old Citadel's King Street wing to the other side of Marion Square sliced the city block at a diagonal. There, on Meeting Street, half a continent away, hunched a tiny grocery story. Sometimes we bought our mother a loaf of bread but more often we purchased candy cigarettes with pink-tipped flames, or Mars bars, with their swoosh of stellar dust, or tiny wax bottles of disgustingly sweet liquor tinted green, purple or maroon. We spent our allowances, our "own money."
My mother had excellent money sense. She'd grown up in comparative wealth, half a continent away, on another diagonal, from coastal Carolina to her North Dakota hometown. Hankinson was tiny in comparison with Charleston, but it sat in the midst of acres of winter wheat, oats, and rye. Her father, though not a banker, propped up the town economy by selling furniture, caskets, and funeral arrangements. He eventually become an absentee landlord of four farms nearby clustered around a small lake. He acquired these during the Depression, my mother told me later. The owners hadn't the cash to pay the taxes, but he did. That's all it took. Later, in the 1950s, gravel was discovered beneath one of the sand hills at one edge of the lake. This gravel, sold to the county and state to improve rural roads, made my grandfather a wealthy man.
My father, on the other hand, earned only a modest college professor's salary, but with outlays of money from North Dakota, my parents were eventually able to buy a piece of property across the Cooper River in Mount Pleasant. There they built a bungalow. Now we lived not in a small city, but a really small town. During the 1950s Mount Pleasant was forging connections across the nausea-inducing Roller Coaster bridge to Charleston, but many parents of my school friends still worked locally. My father, one of those early pioneers who commuted to work in Charleston, brought home more money (I'm thinking around $15,000 a year) than lots of other working parents. When I entered high school, my mother returned to work
"B.B., before babies," as she used to quip, she worked in Pittsburgh in various college and university libraries, using her library degree from the University of Minnesota. She'd graduated in 1929, at the beginning of the Depression. As far as I know, she had no college tuition debt. But she would learn quite a bit about economizing. In order to afford her first trip to Europe with my father, in the late 1930s, she ate oatmeal twice a day. She bragged about this economizing. Later when we lived in Charleston, I watched her do the budget, sitting at the kitchen table with checkbooks and bills spread around her. It was the lists of expenses, written on the backs of envelopes--columns of tiny cramped figures--that caught my attention.
When I went to college in Baltimore, North Dakota money paid for it too, and I still had an allowance which arrived every month, a check written in my mother's tiny crabbed hand. It was probably $25. Only once during those four years was I "flush" with funds: when I won a literary prize and spent the $100 on a portable stereo and several record sets of Brahms and Mozart.
My mother's example has stood me in good stead because I, too, have had to make do at various times over the years. I have never borrowed money for anything other than a big purchase, a car, or a house. I did not enter adulthood with a load of debt. North Dakota wheat money, in part, saw to that, but equally important was my mother's money sense. She knew how to "put by" for bigger expenses. She knew how to buy second-hand, and "make do." She knew how to cook inexpensive meals. She knew how to prioritize desire and save for those luxuries--almost always intangibles like concerts, higher education and overseas travel, which meant to her the bliss of escape and storing up knowledge and aesthetic experience to enrich the inner life.
Recently I had a conversation with a masters level student who wants to write his final paper on the weight of college debt among his generation. In five minutes, he's painted a picture of ignorance, predatory lending from big banks, and long-term onerous consequences. At age 17, he walked into a Wells Fargo bank in the Twin Cities and asked for information about college loans. "I knew nothing about borrowing money," he tells me. Without doing a credit check, the bank extended him what was in essence a credit card for his tuition and living expenses. The percentage the bank could charge was variable, according to the agreement, which, of course, he was too young and ignorant to check. At some points over his four years at the University of Minnesota, the interest rate rose as high as 25%. To add insult to injury, the University discouraged students from working more than 10 hours a week. Though I appreciate this limitation, I'm also appalled at it. When this young man graduated, he had accumulated $46,000 worth of debt.
It took him only a year of attempting to live on his own, and working at a modest-paying job, to realize that the only way he could ever pay-down the debt was to move home. This he has done. He calculates that two years of having no rent costs has whittled $10,000 from the principle. Soon he will return to the rental world but with a roommate. Now with his better paying job, and a roommate sharing rental expenses, he calculates that he'll pay off the debt in three-five years.
How different from my college expenses, saved for in part by my mother, funded in part by my grandfather's gifts. I graduated with no debt and luckily a fellowship to graduate school, where again, a combination of family savings and gifts paid my dorm costs. My student will pay down his debt until eventually he has erased it, but the financial bind it put him in has forced him to take work that was not his first choice, forced him to live at home for several years, and delay marriage and children. None of these is life-threatening. He seems to have health and now a greater degree of financial savvy, as well as college and master's degrees. Far from pitiable.
Still, I'm appalled and incensed. He was clearly far too young to realize the hole the bank had waiting for him. And I'm willing to bet, he also hadn't much younger training in saving and going without. Still, the onus of this problem lies with the bank. Just as there's been a public outcry against predatory credit card solicitations among college students, we need to raise our voices against predatory college loans. NOTE: these are not federal loans, but local bank loans which many students need to supplement federal grants.
Now I have another reason to look askance at the chirpy, excessively friendly (let's say intrusive) clerks at the Wells Fargo windows where I bank. If I were a naive high school student, their chattiness would indeed translate into safety and comfort. It is, in fact, the exact opposite. It's part of the package of enticing the ignorant young into signing up to be fleeced. I'm collecting stories from other clients of Wells Fargo: almost to a person, we hate this intrusive, smarmy friendliness. We're old enough to know where it can lead.
Saturday, August 6, 2011
Margotlog: London's Burning, London's Burning
Margotlog: London's Burning, London's Burning
When we were kids in Charleston, South Carolina during the 1950s, we'd play "London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down; London bridge is falling down, my fair lady." Then on the "my fair lady," the four clasped and upraised arms could descend over a victim, one of the stream of kids walking under our bridge. The message was simple: disaster struck even the beautiful and fair, and it struck rather indiscriminately.
Some disasters are waiting to happen: so with the Great London Fire of 1666. Beginning in a single dwelling it spread over three days to destroy 439 acres, 80% of the city. The houses were all of wood. Warehouses containing very combustible materials added to the blaze. King Charles II was reluctant to call for destruction of houses within the fire's path, to create what were called fire breaks. Eventually, with a small resurgence, the fire burned itself out, destroying 13,000 houses, 89 churches, and 52 guild halls. Yet the loss of life was small: only sixteen humans. But multitudes of plague-bearing rats were incinerated. After the fire, the city rebuilt itself largely of brick, and the plague disappeared due to the decease of flea-bearing rats.
Every now and then, I pretend I'm looking down on Earth from a great height. The fires that destroyed many wooden cities flare up--San Francisco after an earthquake that led to a fire in 1906 (with 3000 dead, the worst disaster in California's history), Chicago in 1871, related to drought and high winds. It was coupled with a far larger fire that burned a swath of Wisconsin, the Peshtigo Fire, which killed between 1200 and 2500. Note this: the town of Singapore, Michigan, provided so much lumber to rebuild Chicago that the resulting deforestation created barren sand dunes which residents abandoned.
Yes, these great cities rebuilt in less combustible materials, formed stronger fire-fighting brigades, and went on to become greater cities than before. Now we face not urban fires so much as environmental disasters caused by accumulating human-made greenhouse gases. Maybe I'm drawn to disasters because they flare above the common ordinary and catch our attention: the Texas drought caused by 34 days of over 100-degree high temps, plus rainfall lower by 60% since January. This drought crosses the lower southern states, all the way from Georgia through Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, to Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico. Nuclear power plants cannot use some of the river water which normally cools the plants because the water temperature is over 90 degrees. Cattle and crops (not to mention wildlife and forests) are withering. There's talk of cleansing sewage for drinking water.
This is horrific, yes, but nothing to the mass exodus of herding and farming people in Somalia, with 29,000 children already dead of malnutrition. I look at pictures of mothers, themselves skin and bones, bending over the dehydrated, rib-showing bodies of their children or keening over their children's graves. One family has lost 4 of their 5 children within a month.
There's a beauty in fires: they rage hot and bright. They destroy right before our eyes. We humans, with our amazing ability to ignore what our experts tell us, pretend that it can't happen here. But we have trouble ignoring a major fire. In 300 years from now what will children be chanting? A version of London's burning about our droughts? Something like "Texas burning" or "Dakota flooding?" We may not see the flames but in fact, what we're doing with the constant increase of carbon dioxide (CO2) is like a constant low-level fire, filling our atmosphere with smoke, which spreads around the globe, distorts and magnifies weather patterns and will eventually BURN US UP! It's time we started singing like children. It's time we let ourselves be scared by modern-day fairy tales coming horrifically true right before our very eyes.
When we were kids in Charleston, South Carolina during the 1950s, we'd play "London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down; London bridge is falling down, my fair lady." Then on the "my fair lady," the four clasped and upraised arms could descend over a victim, one of the stream of kids walking under our bridge. The message was simple: disaster struck even the beautiful and fair, and it struck rather indiscriminately.
Some disasters are waiting to happen: so with the Great London Fire of 1666. Beginning in a single dwelling it spread over three days to destroy 439 acres, 80% of the city. The houses were all of wood. Warehouses containing very combustible materials added to the blaze. King Charles II was reluctant to call for destruction of houses within the fire's path, to create what were called fire breaks. Eventually, with a small resurgence, the fire burned itself out, destroying 13,000 houses, 89 churches, and 52 guild halls. Yet the loss of life was small: only sixteen humans. But multitudes of plague-bearing rats were incinerated. After the fire, the city rebuilt itself largely of brick, and the plague disappeared due to the decease of flea-bearing rats.
Every now and then, I pretend I'm looking down on Earth from a great height. The fires that destroyed many wooden cities flare up--San Francisco after an earthquake that led to a fire in 1906 (with 3000 dead, the worst disaster in California's history), Chicago in 1871, related to drought and high winds. It was coupled with a far larger fire that burned a swath of Wisconsin, the Peshtigo Fire, which killed between 1200 and 2500. Note this: the town of Singapore, Michigan, provided so much lumber to rebuild Chicago that the resulting deforestation created barren sand dunes which residents abandoned.
Yes, these great cities rebuilt in less combustible materials, formed stronger fire-fighting brigades, and went on to become greater cities than before. Now we face not urban fires so much as environmental disasters caused by accumulating human-made greenhouse gases. Maybe I'm drawn to disasters because they flare above the common ordinary and catch our attention: the Texas drought caused by 34 days of over 100-degree high temps, plus rainfall lower by 60% since January. This drought crosses the lower southern states, all the way from Georgia through Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, to Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico. Nuclear power plants cannot use some of the river water which normally cools the plants because the water temperature is over 90 degrees. Cattle and crops (not to mention wildlife and forests) are withering. There's talk of cleansing sewage for drinking water.
This is horrific, yes, but nothing to the mass exodus of herding and farming people in Somalia, with 29,000 children already dead of malnutrition. I look at pictures of mothers, themselves skin and bones, bending over the dehydrated, rib-showing bodies of their children or keening over their children's graves. One family has lost 4 of their 5 children within a month.
There's a beauty in fires: they rage hot and bright. They destroy right before our eyes. We humans, with our amazing ability to ignore what our experts tell us, pretend that it can't happen here. But we have trouble ignoring a major fire. In 300 years from now what will children be chanting? A version of London's burning about our droughts? Something like "Texas burning" or "Dakota flooding?" We may not see the flames but in fact, what we're doing with the constant increase of carbon dioxide (CO2) is like a constant low-level fire, filling our atmosphere with smoke, which spreads around the globe, distorts and magnifies weather patterns and will eventually BURN US UP! It's time we started singing like children. It's time we let ourselves be scared by modern-day fairy tales coming horrifically true right before our very eyes.
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
Margotlog: Light in August and the National Debt
Margotlog: Light in August and the National Debt
William Faulkner drew the title for his 1932 novel from a comment his wife made while they were sitting on their porch, "There's something different about the light in August." That was in the depths of the Great Depression. Here we are, more than seventy years later, still pondering how that light can fall so differently on different minds and hearts--i.e. on local and national responses to personal and national debt.
In the novel, the heat of good and evil--specifically sexuality, racism and the Lord's dictates--goad characters into action. There could not be three more potent areas of human thought and action than these three--with the addition of the environmental imperative. With a rhetoric rich (and occasionally loggy) with repetition of abstractions--indomitable, impregnable, outraged--Faulkner shows us Lena Grove walking from Alabama to Mississippi, heavy with pregnancy. She is of two minds, comments the author, about the man who made her so: she knows he's a scoundrel, yet she believes that the Lord will bring together a man and a woman at the birth of their child. She believes she cannot help but find this man she calls Lucas.
Off in the woods on the outskirts of Jefferson, Mississippi, Joe Christmas mutually ravages and sinks into depravity with a white woman, Joanna Burden, who's carrying on her parents' Yankee efforts to aid "the Negro." Joe, orphaned, ground into hatred and mental malaise by a God-fearing adoptive father, believes he himself is part "Negro." When he slices Joanna's throat, it's because she has started to pray over him.
Finally the forces for good in Jefferson are represented by two men: a failed minister, Reverend Hightower, and a working man Byron Bunch, who has fallen in love with Lena and her burden over one slow afternoon at the mill. Byron and Hightower periodically discuss Lena, her insistent hope of discovering the scoundrel who impregnated her, and Byron's growing desire to shield her from the town, coming unraveled by the hunt for Joe Christmas and his moonshine-making partner, the drunk who's Lena's lover hiding under an assumed name.
In Byron and Hightower's conversations, Faulkner takes us deep into the difficulty of doing what is right. Their recognition of evil, of double and complicated minds, and of the necessity of protecting the vulnerable--all call up our political debates from this summer, the Minnesota and national argument about how to manage the public debt. Whereas Lena operates from two opposed but fixed ideas, and Christmas is set in motion by impulse and canny intelligence, Byron and Hightower examine Lena's situation with caution, probing for good, and aware of limitations. At one point Faulkner comments that men who habitually lie become skilled in fooling themselves that they're telling the truth--that would be Lucas--though they rarely fool anyone else. But a man who consistently tells the truth, i.e. Byron, can occasionally lie with the effect of being generally believed.
What do I make of these complicated and engrossing stories that Faulkner displays in the steamy and hazy August light? First, that the good is almost always created in relation to others; it is difficult to create and sustain alone. Second, that weighing what is possible within any given set of heart demands and head limitations remains difficult, necessary, and ultimately fruitful. Byron wants to remove Lena from a boarding house so that she can give birth away from the constant wear and tear of scandal, yet in her compromised situation, pregnant and alone, his very attentions might cause both of them to suffer.
In our summer of political conflict about how to lower the national debt, competing plans have been put forward by those who claim divine guidance, those who speak for the vulnerable among us, and those who urge draconian actions. In our conflict, divine guidance in this conflict is almost always claimed by "Tea Party" Republicans who admit that they owe allegiance to their churches before anyone or anything else, Claims to represent the vulnerable usually come from liberal (also often intransigent) Democrats who refuse to accept any changes in "entitlement" programs like Social Security and Medicare. I find myself impressed ultimately by neither camp, just as in Faulkner's dense and complicated fiction, I recognize the shewed beliefs and dangerous behavior of both Joe Christmas/Joanna Burden and the indomitable (couldn't help myself) Lena Grove.
Despite her unwavering trust in the Lord, Lena must be protected by those who recognize the limitations of public life and sentiment. On the other hand, Joe Christmas and Joanna Burden, in their hatred and isolation, cannot ultimately make a difference. They collapse into a black hole of nonbeing. They cannot function. It is clear to me that we as a state and a nation must step around the rigid, God-fearing appeals which cannot work in the real world. Yet we must keep the needs of the vulnerable in mind but find workable ways to help them without bankrupting the public treasury. There is no knight in shining armor to save Lena. Only slow, careful consideration and a willingness to extend ourselves can make a difference.
William Faulkner drew the title for his 1932 novel from a comment his wife made while they were sitting on their porch, "There's something different about the light in August." That was in the depths of the Great Depression. Here we are, more than seventy years later, still pondering how that light can fall so differently on different minds and hearts--i.e. on local and national responses to personal and national debt.
In the novel, the heat of good and evil--specifically sexuality, racism and the Lord's dictates--goad characters into action. There could not be three more potent areas of human thought and action than these three--with the addition of the environmental imperative. With a rhetoric rich (and occasionally loggy) with repetition of abstractions--indomitable, impregnable, outraged--Faulkner shows us Lena Grove walking from Alabama to Mississippi, heavy with pregnancy. She is of two minds, comments the author, about the man who made her so: she knows he's a scoundrel, yet she believes that the Lord will bring together a man and a woman at the birth of their child. She believes she cannot help but find this man she calls Lucas.
Off in the woods on the outskirts of Jefferson, Mississippi, Joe Christmas mutually ravages and sinks into depravity with a white woman, Joanna Burden, who's carrying on her parents' Yankee efforts to aid "the Negro." Joe, orphaned, ground into hatred and mental malaise by a God-fearing adoptive father, believes he himself is part "Negro." When he slices Joanna's throat, it's because she has started to pray over him.
Finally the forces for good in Jefferson are represented by two men: a failed minister, Reverend Hightower, and a working man Byron Bunch, who has fallen in love with Lena and her burden over one slow afternoon at the mill. Byron and Hightower periodically discuss Lena, her insistent hope of discovering the scoundrel who impregnated her, and Byron's growing desire to shield her from the town, coming unraveled by the hunt for Joe Christmas and his moonshine-making partner, the drunk who's Lena's lover hiding under an assumed name.
In Byron and Hightower's conversations, Faulkner takes us deep into the difficulty of doing what is right. Their recognition of evil, of double and complicated minds, and of the necessity of protecting the vulnerable--all call up our political debates from this summer, the Minnesota and national argument about how to manage the public debt. Whereas Lena operates from two opposed but fixed ideas, and Christmas is set in motion by impulse and canny intelligence, Byron and Hightower examine Lena's situation with caution, probing for good, and aware of limitations. At one point Faulkner comments that men who habitually lie become skilled in fooling themselves that they're telling the truth--that would be Lucas--though they rarely fool anyone else. But a man who consistently tells the truth, i.e. Byron, can occasionally lie with the effect of being generally believed.
What do I make of these complicated and engrossing stories that Faulkner displays in the steamy and hazy August light? First, that the good is almost always created in relation to others; it is difficult to create and sustain alone. Second, that weighing what is possible within any given set of heart demands and head limitations remains difficult, necessary, and ultimately fruitful. Byron wants to remove Lena from a boarding house so that she can give birth away from the constant wear and tear of scandal, yet in her compromised situation, pregnant and alone, his very attentions might cause both of them to suffer.
In our summer of political conflict about how to lower the national debt, competing plans have been put forward by those who claim divine guidance, those who speak for the vulnerable among us, and those who urge draconian actions. In our conflict, divine guidance in this conflict is almost always claimed by "Tea Party" Republicans who admit that they owe allegiance to their churches before anyone or anything else, Claims to represent the vulnerable usually come from liberal (also often intransigent) Democrats who refuse to accept any changes in "entitlement" programs like Social Security and Medicare. I find myself impressed ultimately by neither camp, just as in Faulkner's dense and complicated fiction, I recognize the shewed beliefs and dangerous behavior of both Joe Christmas/Joanna Burden and the indomitable (couldn't help myself) Lena Grove.
Despite her unwavering trust in the Lord, Lena must be protected by those who recognize the limitations of public life and sentiment. On the other hand, Joe Christmas and Joanna Burden, in their hatred and isolation, cannot ultimately make a difference. They collapse into a black hole of nonbeing. They cannot function. It is clear to me that we as a state and a nation must step around the rigid, God-fearing appeals which cannot work in the real world. Yet we must keep the needs of the vulnerable in mind but find workable ways to help them without bankrupting the public treasury. There is no knight in shining armor to save Lena. Only slow, careful consideration and a willingness to extend ourselves can make a difference.
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