Bloggery - Highlights - Archives

Waves

March 22, 2010 - View Single Entry

In her wonderful autobiography, Outercourse, Mary Daly writes about feeling that she was riding a great wave on her improbable journey from Catholic schoolgirl in Schenectady, New York, to possibly the most important feminist thinker of the 20th century. I'm having a similiar feeling. The wave I'm riding doesn't feel especially great, but it is insistent. Where it's carrying me I don't know.

My friend Susan in New Mexico just noted that her psychic map of my Martha's Vineyard had been changing since Rhodry died and Travvy arrived. Aha. There's a reason for this: my psychic map has been in flux during that time, maybe because the tectonic plates under it were rumbling and shifting and kicking up this wave I'm riding, all out of balance and without much grace, but riding all the same. And the wave is carrying me away from places where I've been hanging out for quite a long time.

Hanging out, hanging, suspended -- "the stillness in the wind before the hurricane begins . . ."

Last March my sourdough starter died. That kicked me into writing again, and writing was the wave that carried me out of the doldrums I was sinking into after Mud of the Place was published. I'd assumed that Mud would generate some momentum and the momentum would point me in whatever direction I was supposed to be going. It didn't. The bookstores and newspapers pretty much ignored it. I expected people to argue with it, disagree with it, even hate it -- all those things raise enough energy to make things move. Silence doesn't. The unexpected death of my sourdough starter did, in combination with the call from Trivia: Voices of Feminism for work responding to the question "Are lesbians going extinct?"

By then Travvy was propelling me forward. I followed where he led, improvising all the way. The owner of the barn Allie was at didn't like Travvy at all. We left that barn. One of my horse-sitting clients didn't like Travvy either: client and I dropped each other, fairly amicably. In both cases, the dissolving of the formal relationship left almost no connection at all. This surprised me a little but not too much: most of my friendships and other personal relationships are rooted in proximity, and when circumstances change there's little incentive on either side to maintain the connection.

What I missed at the time, maybe because I was so exhilarated by the feeling that I was moving again, was the direction I was heading in. Or, more important, what I was heading away from: both Travvy and the writing were pulling me away from horses. I haven't ridden since mid-December, and it's not because the winter was especially severe. We've had some lovely weather this month, but when it comes down to choosing what to do with my hours, working is non-negotiable and writing and dog stuff come before riding. My heart has known this for some time, but the practical details were almost too daunting to contemplate. Not to mention -- having been a "born-again horsegirl" for more than a decade, who will I be without a horse? Fate intervened again, in an "accident" as momentous and portentous as the death of my sourdough starter a year ago. More about that tomorrow. The short version is that I've decided to sell Allie.

Strange Daydream

March 11, 2010 - View Single Entry

You know that song that begins "Last night I had the strangest dream"? I learned it back in the Pleistocene and haven't forgotten the words. The dancing in the streets part is easy to imagine. The putting an end to war part -- well, that's the dream.

For a while now I've been pondering this conundrum: Why are our congresscritters so obsessed with cost when it comes to health care reform when they didn't give a good goddamn about it when they voted to invade Afghanistan or Iraq? In a sane society it would be the other way round, right? In a sane society, legislators would be generous when it came to healing people and stingy when it came to killing them.

I just figured it out. When it comes to health care reform, the legislators are up against the insurance industry, which is making a killing (so to speak) on the current "system" and might not do so well when the system gets reformed. When it comes to war, all that stands in the way are good sense, a grasp of certain historical lessons, and compassion. None of these have powerful lobbies behind them, so they are easy to blow off. "We the people" are pathetically disorganized, so we are easy to blow off too.

What we need to do is give the insurance industry a powerful incentive to lobby against war. Here it is: require them to insure all members of the armed services at fixed rates, and with no exclusions, statutes of limitations, or caps on benefits. Soldier is wounded in a land mine explosion? She's covered. Sailor is killed by friendly fire? He's covered. One MP is raped by another? S/he's covered. Troopers experience severe PTSD after returning home? They're all covered. This insurance would not be compulsory, of course. Members of the armed forces are already covered by their employer, i.e., the U.S. government. This insurance might be purchased by troops when they find out they're about to be assigned to a combat zone.

Voilà! A powerful lobby dedicated to make sure war doesn't happen. Maybe war would happen anyway, but the endless delays and political machinations would give legislators and the media time to come to their senses. Couldn't hurt, eh?

Psychic Maps

March 09, 2010 - View Single Entry

Here's another one from To Be Rather Than to Seem. This isn't my last word on the subject, no way, not by a long shot. The theme slithers between the lines and often breaks through the surface of lots of my writing. Last week I gave a talk to the local Rotary Club about psychic maps, with a focus (surprise!) on Martha's Vineyard. Martha's Vineyard isn't even mentioned here. Watch this space. We'll get there, we'll get there . . .

In an independent study seminar on U.S. labor history that I took as a Penn undergrad, the instructor had each of us draw what he called a "psychic map"[1] of Philadelphia. The point wasn't to duplicate from memory the Philadelphia found in road maps and tourist guides. We were supposed to map our own personal Philadelphias, Philadelphia as each of us knew and experienced it.

My Philadelphia was an oblong. At the left end was the Penn campus, with all the streets named and numbered and several buildings indicated with little squares. At the right end was the downtown bus station. Market Street bisected the oblong horizontally. A couple of other east–west streets were sketched in, and a few numbered north–south streets. Somewhat to the left of center was the 30th Street train station, which was within walking distance of the Penn campus if you weren't carrying a heavy suitcase.

That was my Philadelphia all right. I spent a little less than two years in the city, but I didn't really live there. I lived on and around the Penn campus. Whenever I could, I went back to D.C. to hang out with my friends there. At holiday time, I could sometimes bum a ride; more often I took the bus or the train. Not for nothing did the Greyhound and Amtrak stations loom far larger in my mind than the city's museums, historic sites, and restaurants.

In the lavatory at home hung a framed map, done in antique style, titled "A New Englander's View of the United States." New England was drawn to scale. The West Coast was recognizable. The three thousand miles between New York and California were compressed into maybe three inches, their only feature a few clumps of grass; all that was missing was the "Here be dragons" of pre-Columbian days when the earth was flat. My own psychic map included the Eastern Seaboard between Virginia and Massachusetts, but other than that it wasn't unlike "A New Englander's View of the United States." My Massachusetts featured Routes 9, 20, and 30 running to and from Boston in glowing neon, the Mass Pike extension as far as the Storrow Drive exit, and the arc of 128 that linked them. Less prominent threads led north to the Franconia, in New Hampshire's White Mountains, and south toward Woods Hole. Points west of Framingham -- where the old Shoppers World mall was a frequent shopping destination -- were vague and vaguer. The Berkshires and Springfield were slightly more real than Nebraska, but not much.

I was an avid news watcher before Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, on April 4, 1968. I knew about segregation, desegregation, and the civil rights movement. I knew that Bull Connor and George Wallace were bad guys. I knew who Martin Luther King was, but I didn't know who he was. My school gave students and faculty permission to skip classes in order to attend a memorial gathering on Boston Common. I was astonished by the number of memorial-goers gathering in the hall. I thought they were just trying to get out of class. If I had drawn a psychic map of my evening news, anything related to the Middle East would have been in the foreground. Most everything else was sketchy. I could identify and explain the significance of the Sykes-Picot agreement, the Balfour Declaration, and the Treaty of Sèvres, but I doubt I could have located Dienbienphu or explained its historical significance.

When Robert Kennedy was assassinated a scant two months later, I felt personally connected to the event: the assassin was a Jordanian and he was motivated by Kennedy's pro-Israel foreign policy. I had recently shifted my allegiance from Kennedy to Eugene McCarthy because McCarthy seemed aware that "the Arab-Israeli crisis" had a history and that uncritical support for Israel wasn't going to solve anything.

My school's commencement ceremony was held two days after RFK's death. In those days the entire school attended, and the entire student body wore white. A classmate and I were wearing black armbands when we lined up with the rest of the junior class. Our homeroom teacher told us to take them off. We refused. She said we couldn't march in with our class if we insisted on wearing the armbands; it was the seniors' day, she said, and we were distracting attention from them. We said fine, we won't go to graduation. Some high-level conferring went on that didn't include us. The upshot was that we kept our armbands on and marched in with our class.

In late spring and early summer, in the wake of Dr. King's death, St. Peter's Episcopal Church held a series of talks called "Where Is Racism?" I'd attended Sunday school at St. Peter's, but I had dropped out after eighth grade, when I got confirmed and aged out of the junior choir. But I went to all the talks, read all the readings, and wound up volunteering at METCO, a nonprofit organization that arranged for black students from Boston to attend participating, mostly white, suburban schools. METCO's office was in Roxbury, a mostly black section of Boston.

I was seventeen; I had my driver's license. The first time I went to the METCO office, I headed down Route 9 in my father's VW Bug convertible, a Boston street map spread on the passenger's seat. I knew Route 9 well: my grandmother lived within a stone's throw of it in Brookline, and when I drove to school (having dropped my father off at the Riverside MTA stop en route), I took Route 9, often stopping to pick up my friend Lisa on the way, then hung a left on Longwood Avenue and drove through the hospital district to school. Going to METCO, I turned a little sooner, and to the right, on Tremont -- and entered a world whose existence I hadn't even suspected. Even in midsummer, green was scarce; shop signs were faded, most storefronts built of unpretentious brick, and nearly everyone on the street was black. I had no idea that the Roxbury I saw on the news, usually when something bad happened, was so close to Route 9. On my street map the proximity was obvious. In my psychic map they were in parallel universes that never touched -- until the first time I drove from one to the other.

Psychic maps. Two people who live at the same address may not live in the same world. They probably don't. One of the most important and useful concepts I've ever learned. What happens when you come to the frontier of your psychic map? What if you fall off the edge? What if invaders cross the border and head for the walled city in the middle where you're quietly going about your life? To Be Rather Than to Seem is the story of my psychic map.

Note:

[1] A quick Web search turned up the information that this is generally called a "cognitive map." I've been calling them psychic maps ever since I drew my first one, and I'm going to stick with it.

Travvy Got His RN!

March 07, 2010 - View Single Entry

Today Travvy and I went to our third Rally trial -- and finished our Rally Novice (RN) title! We had a wonderful run on a challenging course that was so twist-and-turny that people were calling it a "dramamine course." It also had 16 stations; the usual top for Novice is 15. Woo woo! Our score was 93 (out of 100), which was good enough for third in the Novice A class. There were only seven entered in the Novice A class, however, and three of them didn't qualify. A qualifying score is 70 or above. We got our second leg with a 73 -- 10 lost points were due to handler error. On our first leg we got a 88, but the judge was, shall we say, "generous" across the board. Each of our runs has been significantly better than the last, and this one was really good.

So the adage goes that "getting there is half the fun." Here it was half the challenge. Thursday night we had class at Karen's training facility. It was dark, I was rushing, and I drove over a stone border at the edge of the parking lot. Oops. Driving home the steering felt a little funky, and when I looked at Uhura in the light of the next morning, the left front wheel didn't look quite straight. Like I might have done some front-end damage, and no way was I going to go off-island and hit 495 in a truck with shaky steering and maybe worse.

I was bummed. A) This was a stupid thing to do, and B) I was seriously psyched for this trial because we were so ready. But my dog friends rallied around (so to speak) -- Katy volunteered to take me and Travvy in her car on my reservation. The weather was perfect -- after days of gloom we're in the middle of a sustained promise that spring really is coming. We were a caravan of two on the 7 o'clock boat, Karen and Julia in Karen's truck with Nolan, Karen's Aussie, and Xochi, Julia's golden; Katy and me with Travvy in Katy's Subaru.

We made a pit stop near the Falmouth Ice Arena -- these guys have been to more trials and shows than I have, and they know the drill. This offers plenty of space to walk the dogs, who hadn't had time to do their serious business at home, not to mention coffee, muffins, etc., for the people and gas for the vehicles. (For the non-islanders among you: the price of gas is so high on Martha's Vineyard -- it's around $3.40/gallon at the moment -- that if you're driving off, you let your tank get as low as you dare and then fill up on the other side. One of the last things you do on the way home, if you aren't breaking land speed records to catch a boat you're late for, is stop to top off the tank before you cross Vineyard Sound.) Karen has walkie-talkies for off-island travel. She handed one to me, showed me what buttons to push, and we were off.

With the back seat down, Travvy's crate fit nicely into the Subaru, and Travvy rode very happily in his crate. At the show, we left the (crated) dogs in the vehicles most of the time; it's still cool enough that even on a sunny day heat doesn't build up in a car if the windows are open enough. This meant that I got to watch many of the Advanced and Novice runs, which I didn't get to do in September because I had my hands full with Travvy. I think that my next vehicle won't be a pickup: these days transporting Travvy is more important than transporting hay and shavings. I still do plenty of the latter, but the tradeoffs are moving in the opposite direction. A small wagon would serve me better, especially if it had four-wheel drive.

The trial, sponsored by the Labrador Retriever Club of Greater Boston, was held at the MasterPeace dog training facility in Franklin. It was just off 495 and very easy to get to. This is good, because we're going to another trial there two weeks from today, Uhura Mazda willing. The space was probably once a warehouse, not too huge but with a very high ceiling. The entire floor was covered with heavy mats; the ring, delineated on two sides by the building's exterior walls and on the other two by baby gates, occupied between a quarter and a third of the floor space. People bring their own chairs, and some bring their dog crates inside. Given the ideal weather and the limited indoor space, others left dogs and crates in their vehicles. I brought Travvy in for a while, sans crate but with his green mat (one of Allie's mostly worn-out saddle pads), to get him used to the space and the presence of other dogs. He was amazingly good, excited for sure but mostly attentive and even relaxed. Good sign. Whew.

Still, you never know what's going to happen in the ring. The course started with the usual sit at the Start sign. The judge asks, "Are you ready?" and you say yes, and off you go. The first sign, a left turn, was dead ahead, and immediately followed by the spiral: three cones in a row. Handler and dog first circle all three, then the first two, then the first one -- we call it "the paperclip." It's a good test of heeling (which this particular judge puts a premium on) and the attention that handler and dog are paying to each other. Because it came so early in the course, we had virtually no time to warm up or get into gear. Trav did really well. We probably lost a point for a quick sniff at the floor, but by the time we came off the spiral we were in sync. Next was a moving side step, then more cones, this time four in a row: this means you weave through them instead of going around them, another good heeling test. This time through was a "weave twice" or serpentine, meaning you weave through once, go round the last cone, and then weave back.

Next was a halt 1-2-3 -- you halt and dog sits, then you take a step forward, halt and sit; two steps forward, halt and sit; and three steps forward, halt and sit. The tricky thing for the dog is to sit straight -- they tend to swing their hind ends out a little more with each subsequent sit -- and for the handler it's to halt and don't move your feet. We did it really well. Then we turned right and proceeded to "halt, walk around dog." Here Trav's sit was clearly crooked, with his tail brushing the fence. We definitely lost a point or two there, but he sat still and I didn't step on his tail, so we did OK. Then came the dramamine-advised part of the course: a 270-degree left turn, followed by a 360-degree circle right, followed by a left about turn in the corner -- this is a fun and stylish-looking maneuver in which the handler turns to the left and the dog comes around to the right, returning to heel position -- followed by a 270-degree left turn. Since this was in the corner and the course was tight, the challenge here, especially with a big dog, was to leave enough space to turn. We managed it very nicely if I do say so myself. (During the walk-through, I walked this sequence three times.)

Then we went through the four cones again, this time from the opposite end, in a "weave once," followed by a right turn, a halt and sit, a left turn, and a "slow," which means you and your dog have to slow visibly from your normal pace, ideally at the same time. The next sign was Finish. I was so happy with our run that I was getting weepy. I did manage to avoid hugging Travvy till we got back to our friends on the sidelines. Karen, Julia, and Katy were all so happy for us -- they were all in our first Rally class last spring, and they know how far we've come! -- and Julia had even got our run on video.

My reservation was for the five o'clock. Karen's was for later. When we arrived in Woods Hole, Katy's Subaru right behind Karen's Tundra, the 3:45 was still loading. Karen was directed to lane 7, Katy to lane 1. Hmm. Karen was in the standby line, we were in the line for vehicles with five o'clock reservations -- and it looked like Karen was going to make it onto the nearly full boat and we weren't. We said, more or less, "We're with them." The guys managed to shoehorn us in. When I opened the Subaru's hatch door, to refill Travvy's bone with peanut butter and kibble and grab my wallet, the ferry's back door was closing and we were so close I thought it was going to take my butt or the car's back door off.

We then adjourned to the lunchroom, where the passengers (Julia and me) treated the drivers (Karen and Katy) to beer and we sat around a little bar table, watched the videos Julia had made of my run and Karen's, and rehashed the course, the trial, the performances, and our most excellent luck of making it onto this boat. Just out of the slip at Woods Hole, the shoreline started moving in a clockwise direction. Huh? The Island Home is a double-ender and doesn't need to turn around after leaving port. Had the SSA designed a dramamine Rally course for ferryboats, replete with 270- and 360-degree turns? Was it the beer?

Turned out they were doing some test maneuver and all was well. Katy dropped us and our stuff at our house, and after getting it all inside, Travvy and I went off to feed the horses. Great day, all around.

Four Pens in Play

March 05, 2010 - View Single Entry

While working on my Rotary talk, I hauled out an almost-new college-ruled spiral-bound notebook and started writing in it. "Psychic maps" is already branching out, spiraling around, spinning off new seeds. Morgana V wants everything sorted into files and folders, but material in the sprawl stage resists the either/or classifications necessary -- Save As what? my brain short-circuits just trying to come up with a filename -- while notebooks are more laissez-faire. Just write goddammit, they say. You don't need to call it anything.

A couple of stories were developing, one about going to Katharine Cornell Theatre for the first time, another about going to the Edgartown post office. I didn't want to force a connection between them, so the obvious solution was to start them on different pages. And in different colors, so I could flip to a page and know immediately which story I was in.

My fountain pens haven't been getting enough exercise in recent months, so they all needed refilling. The dark green one with the emerald green ink, the one I had been using most often, seemed to have gone missing. After looking in all the obvious and not-so-obvious places -- but resisting, barely, the temptation to tear the apartment apart in search, since deep in my heart I recognized that for yet another procrastination technique -- I figured that it had probably fallen off my desk and into the wastebasket. Like my stamp pad, pocket calculator, and assorted pencils, it had done so before and I'd rescued it. Most likely it fell in one more time than I pulled it out. So I filled the Pelikan 200 (translucent yellow) with dark cherry ink, the Verona (purple) with brown, and the two True Writers (blue and black) with, respectively, green and fireball -- a brown-tinged orange that calls attention to itself -- and went to work.

I love writing in longhand. I also write well in longhand -- my editor takes a break and pretty soon my writer stops looking over her shoulder. I keep forgetting this. As I wrote, shifting from one pen to another as necessary, I noted how fluent the Pelikan and the Verona were and how comparatively scratchy the True Writers. I have four True Writers, including the missing green one, all purchased when I became a born-again fountain pen user while working my way through Julia Cameron's Artist's Way workbook. They're beautiful, and relatively inexpensive, but when I bought the Pelikan (on sale), I realized that some pens write more smoothly than others, and their ink doesn't have to be coaxed to flow after a day or two off-duty.

An upgrade, I decided, was in order. Maybe two. First I browsed the Fahrney's Pen website. Then I did a little online research. Then I started haunting eBay. I've bid on several, but so far they've all gone out of my reach. I'm looking for another Pelikan or a Sailor. I'm high bidder on one of each right now. Wish me luck.

Update, 4:09 p.m.: I am now the proud owner of a Sailor Procolor 500 in wisteria violet. It'll be shipped in the next day or two from Japan. Yee-hah!