I'll Call It Like I See It

Good Stuff or Babbling?

“Yeah, I read your blog every time,” the younger woman sitting next to me said. “Sometimes it’s good stuff and I print a copy of it and save it. Other times, it’s just babbling.”

I burst into laughter when she said that, but she wasn’t finished. “What’s with all this country music? Don’t you ever listen to anything other than country? You need to branch out.”

At this I protested, but she had another comment. “I can tell with the first sentence if it’s a good day or if you’re out there rambling around in outer space.”

Carmen is a beta follower for this blog, but of course I have no way of tracking whether she reads the entries or doesn’t so I was really pleased to hear that she does. Carmen is the granddaughter of one of the four most important women in my life, Willie Flora, and I’ve known her since she was a little girl in elementary school. I had her email address and invited her to follow along with me when I sent the original invitations. She accepted and now here we were almost two years later chatting and eating brisket in a booth at Dozier’s Barbecue in Fulshear, Texas in the middle of a Saturday afternoon.

She is a Reader. A Follower. And she had no reluctance to call it like she sees it. I’d love to take credit for some of that bravado but I’m afraid she learned at the tables of two masters, her mother and her grandmother. I’ve had a few lessons at those tables myself.

Good stuff or babbling? A new bar is raised. To print or not to print? That’s the question.

May 11, 2013

If I Could Turn Back Time — I Wouldn’t

April is National Poetry Month for Canada. I am a poet of sorts – sorta not a very good one. However, I found this effort tucked away in a folder that I had cleverly labeled “Original Writings” at some point in my life. This poem is untitled. Maybe it’s not even a poem. Oh, well. Forgive me, Canada.

There are some things that I am.

I am glad that I am a woman born in this particular time.

I am grateful for the opportunities that I have had in my life to choose my own spaces, my own career, my own roles in life.

I am fortunate.

I am also concerned about the future.

I am worried that my struggles and the struggles of women before me are going to reappear unnecessarily.

I am angry at the thought of having to fight battles again that I thought had already been won.

I am tired of a political climate that threatens my survival as a real person in a world that is as much mine as it is anyone’s.

There are many things that I am not.

I am not going to pretend that there are no problems.

I am not going to hope that things will work out without my help.

I am not going to depend on someone else to speak up for me anymore.

I am not going to quit.

The poem is undated, but it was typed with several typos on a real typewriter on plain white typing paper that is now yellowed with age. The tone indicates the time period during the efforts to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment so that would be forty years ago. I like it not because of the quality of the writing but because I like the young woman in her twenties who wrote it, and I like to think she followed through on her promise not to quit.

Social justice issues were struggles which often required courage and tenacity on small battlefields in churches and offices and at dinner tables and cocktail parties and family reunions. Consciousness raising in the days before Will and Grace was a thankless task in everyday conversations at work and play. The light at the end of the tunnel appeared to be the proverbial oncoming train.

But the times did change. I wept as I added my partner’s name to my company benefits paperwork for the first time in 2003. I was sitting in my new office by myself and was overwhelmed by the enormity of the moment. Domestic partner benefits. I was fifty-seven years old and the light at the end of the tunnel wasn’t a train.

So today I celebrate National Poetry Month with my friends in Canada and remind myself that, unlike Cher, if I could turn back time — I wouldn’t.

April 30, 2013

Ships That Don’t Come In

“To those who stand on empty shores and spit against the wind
and those who wait forever for ships that don’t come in.”

Joe Diffie recorded these words written by Paul Nelson and Dave Gibson in 1992 and I hear them several times a week on my favorite country legends radio station. Each time I listen to them I am transported to the 1950s to vivid childhood memories of my maternal grandmother who told me all the things we would do when her ship came in. We would take wonderful trips from our little town in Grimes County, Texas to exotic far-away places like Maryland to visit her brother Arnold and his wife Amelia and California to visit her favorite sister Orrie in Los Angeles. We would stop at the See’s Candy store in Los Angeles and buy all the chocolates we could eat. We could travel whenever we wanted to because she wouldn’t have to clerk at Mr. Witt’s General Store any more. She would buy my mother a new piano and my dad a new car. She would buy me anything I wanted. Life would be good.

I will be seven years younger this Sunday than she was when she was buried on my birthday in 1972 at the age of seventy-four. She believed her ship never came in, and I understand why. Much of her life she stood on empty shores and must have felt she was spitting against the wind. Powerless in the face of poverty and its constraints. Overwhelming loneliness when my mother and dad and I moved out of her home in 1958. Severe depression with sporadic primitive treatments and debilitating medications. Spitting against the wind.

Yet for me, life with her was a ship that did come in. The love I felt from her was as steadfast as the love I feel from my dogs, and they adore me regardless of what I say or do. The fun we shared when I was growing up was worth far more than a trip to Maryland or California could ever bring. My time with her was priceless.

Birthdays are an opportunity to celebrate another year under our belts which need to be notched a little looser these days. For those of us who choose to reflect, birthdays are a godsend. We can ponder and ponder the meaning of life and whether we think our life is well-lived. At my age I can also mull over my legacy. I’d like to think I have one.

As for ships, well, I’ve had my share come into shores. Some have stayed longer than others and some are still with me, but all the ones that came in left their imprints in my sand. Life is good.

April 17, 2013

First Comes Love, Then Comes Marriage? Ask The Supremes

The dust has settled after the media frenzy surrounding the Supreme Court hearings on two cases affecting the future of same-sex marriage in the United States. Whew! The gays and gay-friendlies partied. Jon Stewart skewered DOMA and its supporters on Comedy Central. The Republicans tried desperately to find someone – ANYONE – in their party to explain their position on marriage on CNN in a way that the general citizenry wouldn’t characterize as narrow-minded at best or bigoted at worst. That search is ongoing and a generous reward is offered to the finder.

The hearings are over and the rulings expected in June. Eight Associate Justices and the Chief Justice hold the key to opening doors of equality that have been slammed shut since the founding fathers held these truths to be Self-evident in the Declaration of Independence in 1776. “…That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among which are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

I am amazed to realize I have seen all of these Supremes don the robes of the Court at the end of the required appointment process. Clarence Thomas is the only Southerner. He was born in Georgia and is a Yale law school graduate. He is 64 years old and the only appointee of President George H.W. Bush. His appointment process was ugly, nationally televised and his robes permanently tainted. He is the only Supreme who is African-American.

Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotamayor and Elena Kagan were all born in New York. Justice Ginsburg is the oldest member of the Court at the ripe age of 80. She is a Columbia law school graduate but studied at Harvard for a time. She was appointed by President Bill Clinton. Chief Justice Roberts was appointed by President George W. Bush and is a Harvard graduate. He is 58 years old. Justice Sotomayor is also 58 years old and is a Yale graduate who was appointed by President Barak Obama. She is the sole Hispanic Supreme. Justice Kagan is another Obama appointee and is 53 years old which makes her the youngest member of the Court. At the time of her appointment she was Dean of the Harvard Law School.

Three other Associate Justices were Harvard law school graduates: Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy and Stephen G. Breyer. Both Justices Kennedy and Breyer were born in California and are in the same age brackets. Kennedy is 76 and Breyer is 74, but they had different presidential appointments. President Ronald Reagan appointed Kennedy and President Bill Clinton appointed Breyer. President Reagan also appointed Justice Scalia who was born in New Jersey and is now 77 years old. He is the father of nine children which puts him in a category all by himself on the bench and how he ever had time to be a Supreme is beyond me.

The final Associate Justice Samuel Anthony Alito, Jr. shares Scalia’s home state of New Jersey and is the third Yale graduate on the Court. He is 63 years old and was appointed by President George W. Bush.

In summation, Your Honors, I find that the fate of same-sex marriage in the United States in 2013 rests with folks who graduated either from Yale or Harvard law schools and were born in the New York/ New Jersey area on the East Coast or California on the West Coast with one stray Southerner thrown in for good measure. Well, maybe not good measure, but certainly thrown in.

The question before us today is whether this hodgepodge of political appointees will take its place in history as the Court that restores the unalienable rights of a minority of its LGBT citizens who have been made to feel “lesser than” and treated with discrimination that often threatens their Lives and their Liberty and always endangers their pursuit of Happiness.

I respectfully ask the Court to stand and deliver on the promises that have been the hopes and dreams of all Americans for more than two hundred years.

I rest my case.