Margotlog: Neighborhood Roundup: On a Scale of 1-10.
It's a beautiful morning in this small part of the Upper Midwest--skies "couple-colored as a brindled cow," to quote Gerard Manley Hopkins. Brisk breezes counteract humidity. Sun dazzle makes a row of poplars wink and glow. Within a tall stand of golden glow, taller than I am, wrens and goldfinch rasp and tweet. Raising babies.
It's hard to hold onto horror on such a lovely morning. Yet here it is. The horror of a young mother's death, the agony of a young child's slow torture and final murder. One of these is rather personal. The other not.
The personal is occurring just beyond my three-generation family circle. The daughter-in-law of friends has 4th stage breast cancer. She's no more than 41 or 42. Tomorrow her parents will leave for London to visit her one last time, and help the husband, their older son, manage two grandchildren aged 2 and 4. Do we call and speak our shock and grief to the parents who used to be better friends, possibly because for several years as this young woman's breast cancer spread, and she suffered through surgeries and chemo-therapy, our friends were distracted by grief, anxiety, and fear. And by frequent visits to her and her family.
Their grief and the young woman's impending death seem particularly frightening to me this morning because I just spent a happy afternoon with my own daughter, about this young mother's age. It's a vulnerable time, late 30s, early 40s. Many come into their own, earn more, expand families. Others can be struck numb by loss, disappointment, error. It can be a time of reassessment, of taking stricter account of oneself. Of shedding destructive habits. Of making big moves. I shucked a destructive relationship and moved with my daughter into a little house with an eyebrow window. The alcohol abuse which had precipitated the break-up was curable. I was lucky. There was Al-Anon.
The other horror amid the glow of this late morning arrived via the Sunday StarTribune as a long report about a 3-year-boy whose child-care workers repeatedly reported bruises, face bites, and toward the end, a tell-tale broken arm to Minnesota's Pope County child protection agency. Tell-tale break because when adults physically abuse young children by twisting their arms or legs, the bones break in recognizable patterns. The County did nothing. Over and over, when these reports arrived, child protection workers did nothing. Or the one time they questioned the step-mother, and she denied or prevaricated, that was that. Now she is going to jail for life.
Beyond the obvious facts, what went so horribly wrong here? Over and over as I walked through this morning's beauty, the naked refusal of those employed in Pope County to protect, search, question, build a case, who "Did Nothing" made a tattoo of disgust and shock to the time of my footsteps. Why did they routinely do nothing? Why did the child care workers who saw the boy hurt over and over and took the time to report this, why did they not go to the police? Would the local police have done better? What would it have taken to rouse these officials into action? What kept them so criminally unresponsive?
I could make a case for neighborhood, and small-town connivance in shielding perpetrators through fear of "rocking the boat...we have to live with these people...who's to say these child-care people know what they're talking about?"
Yet small-town connivance was broken when the women who took care of the boy reported his bites and bruises, and finally his broken leg. Imagine a step-mother biting the face of a three-year-old. Biting his face. It makes me shudder. Poor thing, poor neglected, hurt small creature. His father evidently shielding the brutal step-mother, the child-care workers not sufficiently empowered to go to the law. And this woman rampaging over the body of a pliant boy of three.
I say Pope County needs to clean out its compliant abettors. Replace them with stern, determined experts who care nothing for community pride and connivance. Who care for innocent children. Who are determined to get to the bottom of reported abuse. Who do something until the doer of such crimes is behind bars and the hurt child, instead of being dear, might have a chance to recover.
Sunday, August 31, 2014
Friday, August 15, 2014
Margotlog: Late Summer Tears
Margotlog: Late Summer Tears
You don't have to weep with me--not wrenching sobs at any rate, just a slow seep of wet, honoring the clouds of green and scimitars of swallows twittering against high blue. Mornings on the deck with black and white Julia pinned beside me, a red-splashed finch goes time and again to select sunflower seeds, while one, no two fledglings peep incessantly from the crap apple tree. Their wings flutter, the almost universal sign of baby-bird begging. Only a sudden movement startles them and they fly off together.
Maybe ten days ago, huge jay teens pined for food as their parents (hard to tell father from mother) ignored them. Now on their own, these goofy loud oafs fly in and claim the place, their head feathers not quite formed for adulthood, their wings and tails not quite adult blue with crisp black stripes. They command any perch they choose, though usually one holds back to act as sentry with a loud, "Caw, caw," or a funny "click, click, gurgle," which I can't translate. Not a danger sign, I think, but some family jay-chatter meant only for familiar ears.
The season is tending toward its end, making these pleasures bitter-sweet. When the State Fair begins late August, it's almost always intensely hot and humid. Once when my daughter answered phones in the cow barns, I'd call her up just to hear her mushy voice, nearly drowning in her own sweat. We still have a week before the pops of fireworks begin to light up the northern sky, and I can almost hear the disk-jockeys announcing either a tune or a heifer.
And why does any of this bring on tears? Because the green fuse is almost burnt out, and I pine for the season's already fleeting beauty. The glory of lilies is over, now comes the brazen tall-as-a man sunflowers. Yet, even amid these stanch portrayals of summer, even more than in winter, when we hunker into ourselves, summer ghosts flit among the zinnias. And there I am sitting in my mother's place, mid-morning of a hot South Carolina summer's day. It's her back porch, not unlike my back deck, and there's the shade of a maple she planted after Hurricane Hugo made off with some older tree or another. Her maple was not as sky-high as mine, brushing the air with enormous billows of green, but it was full enough for lovely shade. She had jays too, and flickers, sticking their long beaks in the ground looking for grubs.
As she ate her breakfast on a tray--always the same cereal with milk and a banana--she and Cindy, the dog of her solitude, low to the ground and wire-haired gray, perused the yard happenings. It was both her love of the outdoors, her tender care of trees and flowers and hydrangeas which she turned blue by burying some metal at their roots, as well as her solitude, facing the morning alone with her big empty house at her back (mine is not empty but I forget that)--both make me tear-up.
Maybe I sense I have become her, and unlike my resistance of years gone by, I don't mind so much. In fact, I honor her for making the day and the season and the active life of her yard as important to her as life itself. For it was much of her life then. She had no husband or work, no nearby offspring to bring her out of herself. But the wider world was sufficient. Whether she wrapped up in raincoat and headscarf or wore only a thin cotton shift--she found her life in touch with the red birds and azaleas, the jays and mocking birds, the maples and sycamores, the breeze and scent of Charleston harbor way off in the distance.
When my sister or I did arrive, she talked incessantly, as if she'd saved up a thousand things to tell us. But I wasn't fooled. She was always shyer than she wanted to let on, and talk covered her joy in our visit, her need to be hostess and keep the party going. But it's not her conversation I remember, but the rapt attention to a "green thought it a green shade," that I honor. This phrase from Andrew Marvell's 17th century poem, "The Garden," captures exactly that twining of leaf and memory that brings me almost perfectly in line with her shape, years ago facing the last heat of summer.
Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness :
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find ;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas ;
Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade.
You don't have to weep with me--not wrenching sobs at any rate, just a slow seep of wet, honoring the clouds of green and scimitars of swallows twittering against high blue. Mornings on the deck with black and white Julia pinned beside me, a red-splashed finch goes time and again to select sunflower seeds, while one, no two fledglings peep incessantly from the crap apple tree. Their wings flutter, the almost universal sign of baby-bird begging. Only a sudden movement startles them and they fly off together.
Maybe ten days ago, huge jay teens pined for food as their parents (hard to tell father from mother) ignored them. Now on their own, these goofy loud oafs fly in and claim the place, their head feathers not quite formed for adulthood, their wings and tails not quite adult blue with crisp black stripes. They command any perch they choose, though usually one holds back to act as sentry with a loud, "Caw, caw," or a funny "click, click, gurgle," which I can't translate. Not a danger sign, I think, but some family jay-chatter meant only for familiar ears.
The season is tending toward its end, making these pleasures bitter-sweet. When the State Fair begins late August, it's almost always intensely hot and humid. Once when my daughter answered phones in the cow barns, I'd call her up just to hear her mushy voice, nearly drowning in her own sweat. We still have a week before the pops of fireworks begin to light up the northern sky, and I can almost hear the disk-jockeys announcing either a tune or a heifer.
And why does any of this bring on tears? Because the green fuse is almost burnt out, and I pine for the season's already fleeting beauty. The glory of lilies is over, now comes the brazen tall-as-a man sunflowers. Yet, even amid these stanch portrayals of summer, even more than in winter, when we hunker into ourselves, summer ghosts flit among the zinnias. And there I am sitting in my mother's place, mid-morning of a hot South Carolina summer's day. It's her back porch, not unlike my back deck, and there's the shade of a maple she planted after Hurricane Hugo made off with some older tree or another. Her maple was not as sky-high as mine, brushing the air with enormous billows of green, but it was full enough for lovely shade. She had jays too, and flickers, sticking their long beaks in the ground looking for grubs.
As she ate her breakfast on a tray--always the same cereal with milk and a banana--she and Cindy, the dog of her solitude, low to the ground and wire-haired gray, perused the yard happenings. It was both her love of the outdoors, her tender care of trees and flowers and hydrangeas which she turned blue by burying some metal at their roots, as well as her solitude, facing the morning alone with her big empty house at her back (mine is not empty but I forget that)--both make me tear-up.
Maybe I sense I have become her, and unlike my resistance of years gone by, I don't mind so much. In fact, I honor her for making the day and the season and the active life of her yard as important to her as life itself. For it was much of her life then. She had no husband or work, no nearby offspring to bring her out of herself. But the wider world was sufficient. Whether she wrapped up in raincoat and headscarf or wore only a thin cotton shift--she found her life in touch with the red birds and azaleas, the jays and mocking birds, the maples and sycamores, the breeze and scent of Charleston harbor way off in the distance.
When my sister or I did arrive, she talked incessantly, as if she'd saved up a thousand things to tell us. But I wasn't fooled. She was always shyer than she wanted to let on, and talk covered her joy in our visit, her need to be hostess and keep the party going. But it's not her conversation I remember, but the rapt attention to a "green thought it a green shade," that I honor. This phrase from Andrew Marvell's 17th century poem, "The Garden," captures exactly that twining of leaf and memory that brings me almost perfectly in line with her shape, years ago facing the last heat of summer.
Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness :
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find ;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas ;
Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade.
Saturday, August 2, 2014
Margotlog: When Almost Nothing Happened
Margotlog: When Almost Nothing Happened
For five days I've been out of contact. Yes, the cell phone rang a few times. And I talked to my daughter who shared a room with me. But I read no newspaper, saw no TV news, checked no email. Instead I gazed at "purple mountains majesty." Looked up at enormous white pine, so tall I had to bend backwards to see their feathery tops. Morning mist clung to the mountains. A family of Canada geese climbed out of the lake and waddled across the grass.
In this yoga retreat center called Kripalu in western Massachusetts, I saw plenty of people at meals. But once I closed the door of my little cell, the quiet was profound. Almost nothing happened. Except in the novel I was writing. The books I was reading. In my dreams.
Then we left. The drive to Logan Airport in Boston took four hours, the last in heavy rain. As my daughter drove, I chanted jump-rope rhymes--"Miss Mary Mack, Mark, Mary, all dressed in black, black, black," or "Cinderella, dressed in yellow, went downstairs to see her fellow." Almost no boys jump rope. Almost all jump-rope rhymes are about girly girls.
We tried singing show tunes, but the drive out had exhausted the charm of "the surrey with the fringe on top" and "I'm just a girl who cyan't say no." By the time we returned the rental car and found the empty check-in counter for Sun Country airlines, my intense inwardness of the past five days was eroding. I smiled at the young man who was making salads for the first time at Le Bon Pan. I studied an older daughter from India who pushed her baby sister sternly away from her mother. As the wait extended from an hour to 90 minutes to two hours, my alertness sagged. It was 6:30, 7, 7:30.
We began the long walk to the gate. I took the moving walkway, feeling more and more zombielike. Slumping into a seat not far from the boarding gate, I noticed several TV screens suspended from the ceiling nearby. The screens were split into three -- the anchor in the middle flanked by one or two commentators. All were talking about the bombing of civilians in Gaza in retaliation for the abduction and probable death of one Israeli soldier. This had evidently broken a brief cease fire and renewed hostilities. I hadn't known there was a cease fire,
In my exhaustion, the reiteration of certain facts drilled into me: several thousand Gaza civilians killed in Israeli rocket fire over the past couple of days. Killed in homes and schools, in supposed safe areas. One Israeli soldier abducted and possibly dead against hundreds, thousands of civilians dead in Gaza. The numbers did not compute.
This extreme imbalance of suffering shocked me. I clenched my teeth. Every time the screen showed destruction in Gaza, I grew angrier. For the death of one combatant, Israel felt justified in what could only be called mass murder of innocent people.
Isn't that exactly what happened to the Jews during the Holocaust of World War II? I asked myself with a flare for dramatizing the obvious. Not so easy to state even to myself was what this implied:
about Israel. Now, looking back after 24 hours, I recognize the enormity of Israel's response. The death of one Israeli soldier prompted the bombing of thousands in retaliation. One Israeli, so precious, one Israeli death, such an enormity that it was almost impossible that enemy suffering could balance this death.
Was I witnessing arrogance? Or was it fear that without extreme retaliation, fury would rain down on Israel? If an atrocity as my gut told me, would it go unnamed (our president's response so bland as to be despicable) because many wealthy, powerful U.S. Jews hold key positions in commerce, government, and politics? It is possible that for the first time, CNN commentators were speaking out in disgust and outrage appropriate to an enormity, while U.S. officials said almost nothing? Did that silence make us, as individuals and a country, complicit? What was behind this pretense that almost nothing had happened?
For five days I've been out of contact. Yes, the cell phone rang a few times. And I talked to my daughter who shared a room with me. But I read no newspaper, saw no TV news, checked no email. Instead I gazed at "purple mountains majesty." Looked up at enormous white pine, so tall I had to bend backwards to see their feathery tops. Morning mist clung to the mountains. A family of Canada geese climbed out of the lake and waddled across the grass.
In this yoga retreat center called Kripalu in western Massachusetts, I saw plenty of people at meals. But once I closed the door of my little cell, the quiet was profound. Almost nothing happened. Except in the novel I was writing. The books I was reading. In my dreams.
Then we left. The drive to Logan Airport in Boston took four hours, the last in heavy rain. As my daughter drove, I chanted jump-rope rhymes--"Miss Mary Mack, Mark, Mary, all dressed in black, black, black," or "Cinderella, dressed in yellow, went downstairs to see her fellow." Almost no boys jump rope. Almost all jump-rope rhymes are about girly girls.
We tried singing show tunes, but the drive out had exhausted the charm of "the surrey with the fringe on top" and "I'm just a girl who cyan't say no." By the time we returned the rental car and found the empty check-in counter for Sun Country airlines, my intense inwardness of the past five days was eroding. I smiled at the young man who was making salads for the first time at Le Bon Pan. I studied an older daughter from India who pushed her baby sister sternly away from her mother. As the wait extended from an hour to 90 minutes to two hours, my alertness sagged. It was 6:30, 7, 7:30.
We began the long walk to the gate. I took the moving walkway, feeling more and more zombielike. Slumping into a seat not far from the boarding gate, I noticed several TV screens suspended from the ceiling nearby. The screens were split into three -- the anchor in the middle flanked by one or two commentators. All were talking about the bombing of civilians in Gaza in retaliation for the abduction and probable death of one Israeli soldier. This had evidently broken a brief cease fire and renewed hostilities. I hadn't known there was a cease fire,
In my exhaustion, the reiteration of certain facts drilled into me: several thousand Gaza civilians killed in Israeli rocket fire over the past couple of days. Killed in homes and schools, in supposed safe areas. One Israeli soldier abducted and possibly dead against hundreds, thousands of civilians dead in Gaza. The numbers did not compute.
This extreme imbalance of suffering shocked me. I clenched my teeth. Every time the screen showed destruction in Gaza, I grew angrier. For the death of one combatant, Israel felt justified in what could only be called mass murder of innocent people.
Isn't that exactly what happened to the Jews during the Holocaust of World War II? I asked myself with a flare for dramatizing the obvious. Not so easy to state even to myself was what this implied:
about Israel. Now, looking back after 24 hours, I recognize the enormity of Israel's response. The death of one Israeli soldier prompted the bombing of thousands in retaliation. One Israeli, so precious, one Israeli death, such an enormity that it was almost impossible that enemy suffering could balance this death.
Was I witnessing arrogance? Or was it fear that without extreme retaliation, fury would rain down on Israel? If an atrocity as my gut told me, would it go unnamed (our president's response so bland as to be despicable) because many wealthy, powerful U.S. Jews hold key positions in commerce, government, and politics? It is possible that for the first time, CNN commentators were speaking out in disgust and outrage appropriate to an enormity, while U.S. officials said almost nothing? Did that silence make us, as individuals and a country, complicit? What was behind this pretense that almost nothing had happened?
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