I'm moving. Not me, really, but this blog. To
http://katherinelhester.wordpress.com/.
See you.
Friday, April 24, 2009
Friday, April 17, 2009
Linkage
Yeah, I know that lately this has been little more than links that send you elsewhere, but I've always liked collages, so let's just say that this is some newly-honed mosaic style of blog writing (rather than the cheating shorthand that it is).
This week's story in the New Yorker, though, Chris Adrian's "A Tiny Feast" — is so lovely I can't help myself.
There are of course plenty of lovely stories out there (most of them desperately seeking homes, but that's whole 'nother topic) but the subtitle of this blog is "mixing the oil and writing" after all.
Way back in the very first entry posted here, I opined:
Adrian's story attacks this question, and I, for one, am left speechless before it.
This week's story in the New Yorker, though, Chris Adrian's "A Tiny Feast" — is so lovely I can't help myself.
There are of course plenty of lovely stories out there (most of them desperately seeking homes, but that's whole 'nother topic) but the subtitle of this blog is "mixing the oil and writing" after all.
Way back in the very first entry posted here, I opined:
We all behave as if the choice about how to talk about parenthood is easy, lies either in sentimentality or its inverse, some wry jocularity. I have to believe that the truth is more complicated than that, that it resides elsewhere, spreads and deepens, shifts and shimmers; watery enough to both sustain and drown.
Adrian's story attacks this question, and I, for one, am left speechless before it.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth
Because, after all, a single parenting book title is worth god knows how many thousand words:
Your Seven Year Old: Life in a Minor Key
Your Seven Year Old: Life in a Minor Key
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Coffee Break for the Day
It takes me a while (a week?) to get around to it some times, but Judith Warner's latest in the TImes is very nice.
SOMEBODY'S got to do it....
A couple of weeks back, when my mom spent the weekend in the hospital, once things calmed down and we all settled into a hospital routine of sorts, I went off to run some errands for my folks. One of which was to buy groceries so their refrigerator would be full once she got home, because what else am I but a mom myself, and that's the sort of things that moms do — make sure people are fed and clothed and have clean faces.
While I was standing in the check-out lane, I picked up a Martha Stewart Living and tossed it on the conveyer belt, figuring it would give my mom something to read while she was convalescing. I'm not actually all that sure she wants to flip through Martha Stewart Living, but it seemed better than People, at least.
And the magazine did do what I'd hoped, and distracted her. Especially the section on April Fool's tricks that a person (meaning 'a mother') could play on one's family, which gave the two of us fodder for at least fifteen minutes of conversation.
When Martha Stewart tackles April Fool's Day, she does it as only Martha can: one of her proposed "tricks" (which was bee-you-tifully photographed, let me tell you) was to fry up quail eggs one by one and place them gently on tiny cocktail toasts which then could be served for breakfast on April 1.
Quail eggs?
Lady, you do know that Rome is burning out there, don't you?
But.
One of her other suggestions just happened to contain materials that I... just happened... to have on hand: milk and gelatin.
And the basic idea was to make a sort of milk jello and serve it in glasses for breakfast April Fool's morning.
What was I going to be out if I went down this path? A packet of gelatin purchased in 2003 and a cup of milk. And so, dear Reader, I presented my loving family with three glasses of "milk" this morning.
We usually don't drink milk with breakfast.
The Husband looked at his, bemused. Why did you give me a glass of milk? he asked, as if it were a vodka tonic or something equally unusual and forbidden.
The girleens, oh the girleens, they did exactly what they usually do when presented with a glass of milk — and ignored theirs.
Breakfast was winding down, the glasses sat untouched.
Have a sip of milk before you go get dressed, I urged Elder Girleen (knowing Younger Girleen was even much less likely to reach for hers).
She reached; she lifted the glass.
It's solid! she cried.
And then my long-suffering family turned and stared at me, their mother, the silly one, such a complete April Fool.
While I was standing in the check-out lane, I picked up a Martha Stewart Living and tossed it on the conveyer belt, figuring it would give my mom something to read while she was convalescing. I'm not actually all that sure she wants to flip through Martha Stewart Living, but it seemed better than People, at least.
And the magazine did do what I'd hoped, and distracted her. Especially the section on April Fool's tricks that a person (meaning 'a mother') could play on one's family, which gave the two of us fodder for at least fifteen minutes of conversation.
When Martha Stewart tackles April Fool's Day, she does it as only Martha can: one of her proposed "tricks" (which was bee-you-tifully photographed, let me tell you) was to fry up quail eggs one by one and place them gently on tiny cocktail toasts which then could be served for breakfast on April 1.
Quail eggs?
Lady, you do know that Rome is burning out there, don't you?
But.
One of her other suggestions just happened to contain materials that I... just happened... to have on hand: milk and gelatin.
And the basic idea was to make a sort of milk jello and serve it in glasses for breakfast April Fool's morning.
What was I going to be out if I went down this path? A packet of gelatin purchased in 2003 and a cup of milk. And so, dear Reader, I presented my loving family with three glasses of "milk" this morning.
We usually don't drink milk with breakfast.
The Husband looked at his, bemused. Why did you give me a glass of milk? he asked, as if it were a vodka tonic or something equally unusual and forbidden.
The girleens, oh the girleens, they did exactly what they usually do when presented with a glass of milk — and ignored theirs.
Breakfast was winding down, the glasses sat untouched.
Have a sip of milk before you go get dressed, I urged Elder Girleen (knowing Younger Girleen was even much less likely to reach for hers).
She reached; she lifted the glass.
It's solid! she cried.
And then my long-suffering family turned and stared at me, their mother, the silly one, such a complete April Fool.
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Weather Report: March 25, 2009
The tree guys under contract to Georgia Power have been out for the past week or so, trolling the streets of the neighborhood with their bucket trucks; their orange flags and cones; they are paring branches to keep the power lines taut and unsnapped — too late for the "blizzard" three weeks ago but just in time for another growing season.
A few nights back some strolling pranksters spray-painted the word "riot" beneath the sign they set out that warns: men working.
On the cusp right now, and the leaves are little more than a pale green haze haloing the tree limbs; so tender.
Every year, our neighbor Blue House Joy requests a driveway’s-worth of cast-off chaff straight from the chipper for her garden and its beds. And in service of that exchange, what a hour ago was part and parcel of the scrim between us and the sky has been turned into a six-foot pile of mulch, newly dumped and steaming gently at the bottom of her driveway.
All that's left — mere wood; it's had the life crushed from it; possesses a manure-like smell. Wisps of steam slip from it as if it were a live thing, a bulked big-shouldered cow standing patient for the farmer outside some Midwestern barn at twilight, breath visible and rising from its nostrils.
The denuded trees are black in the rain, grieving their rended selves, and I am walking past, fidgeting sorrows like coins worn by long handling in my pocket — I do not do enough, or well, or have enough time; I am aging, gaining, tiring, I have worries and gray hair, I have not turned out to be the person my younger self expected. This is the currency the middle-aged sometimes carry with them; how exactly do we spend it?
When I was eleven, I watched an older cousin, tawny-haired and tan, change into her swimsuit during a family trip to the beach and thought: I will never reach the place where she is. Meaning: grown. Thought: well, maybe it's breasts that do it.
When I was a senior in high school, I thought maybe college would make me an adult. In college, I felt sure it would come with the 9-to-5. Once there, I thought surely it came falling in love. Once there, I figured it had to be a side-effect of marriage. Once married, I decided it was kids that would do it once and for all.
But now, maybe, I really know: it's parking in the hospital lot when one's parent has been admitted inside that takes you closer to grown than anything else that's come before.
The regional hospital that's become, as they age, my parents' own, reminds me that I live in Georgia. Itl succors anyone in need from the surrounding little towns; there are cars with plates from five counties in the lots. A guy in overalls outside the sliding entrance doors, talking on his cellphone, and let me tell you, he's no hipster who pulled them on ironically this morning.
There are three generations holding vigils in the waiting rooms: brothers, sisters, wives and husbands; children; grandchildren; two women holding newborns about the same age — are the two mothers sisters? cousins? Are the two-identically cashew-curled babies cousins themselves, and how many times removed would that make them? One of the woman is already noticeably pregnant again; I flip through old Better Homes and Gardens and try to do the math.
The heart floor is always busy, as is the new wing for babies. We should all get jobs in health care!
All over the hospital there are families dodging bullets, or taking them, and people talking seriously on their cell phones.
My mother was discharged, with admonishments to slow down; the dogwoods began to unfurl their creamy white blossoms;
the mulch pile at the end of the neighbor’s driveway steams, so wispy and quick, like something alive.
A few nights back some strolling pranksters spray-painted the word "riot" beneath the sign they set out that warns: men working.
On the cusp right now, and the leaves are little more than a pale green haze haloing the tree limbs; so tender.
Every year, our neighbor Blue House Joy requests a driveway’s-worth of cast-off chaff straight from the chipper for her garden and its beds. And in service of that exchange, what a hour ago was part and parcel of the scrim between us and the sky has been turned into a six-foot pile of mulch, newly dumped and steaming gently at the bottom of her driveway.
All that's left — mere wood; it's had the life crushed from it; possesses a manure-like smell. Wisps of steam slip from it as if it were a live thing, a bulked big-shouldered cow standing patient for the farmer outside some Midwestern barn at twilight, breath visible and rising from its nostrils.
The denuded trees are black in the rain, grieving their rended selves, and I am walking past, fidgeting sorrows like coins worn by long handling in my pocket — I do not do enough, or well, or have enough time; I am aging, gaining, tiring, I have worries and gray hair, I have not turned out to be the person my younger self expected. This is the currency the middle-aged sometimes carry with them; how exactly do we spend it?
When I was eleven, I watched an older cousin, tawny-haired and tan, change into her swimsuit during a family trip to the beach and thought: I will never reach the place where she is. Meaning: grown. Thought: well, maybe it's breasts that do it.
When I was a senior in high school, I thought maybe college would make me an adult. In college, I felt sure it would come with the 9-to-5. Once there, I thought surely it came falling in love. Once there, I figured it had to be a side-effect of marriage. Once married, I decided it was kids that would do it once and for all.
But now, maybe, I really know: it's parking in the hospital lot when one's parent has been admitted inside that takes you closer to grown than anything else that's come before.
The regional hospital that's become, as they age, my parents' own, reminds me that I live in Georgia. Itl succors anyone in need from the surrounding little towns; there are cars with plates from five counties in the lots. A guy in overalls outside the sliding entrance doors, talking on his cellphone, and let me tell you, he's no hipster who pulled them on ironically this morning.
There are three generations holding vigils in the waiting rooms: brothers, sisters, wives and husbands; children; grandchildren; two women holding newborns about the same age — are the two mothers sisters? cousins? Are the two-identically cashew-curled babies cousins themselves, and how many times removed would that make them? One of the woman is already noticeably pregnant again; I flip through old Better Homes and Gardens and try to do the math.
The heart floor is always busy, as is the new wing for babies. We should all get jobs in health care!
All over the hospital there are families dodging bullets, or taking them, and people talking seriously on their cell phones.
My mother was discharged, with admonishments to slow down; the dogwoods began to unfurl their creamy white blossoms;
the mulch pile at the end of the neighbor’s driveway steams, so wispy and quick, like something alive.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Monday, March 16, 2009
Life, and How to Live it?
Way back at the dawn of time, when I was a newly-minted mother of one, a One who in her short miraculous life had decided, at least as I perceived it, to shun sleep as if it were her greatest enemy, I did what the average 21st century mom usually does when her life throws her a curve ball she can't catch, and hied myself over to the Google. And there, prostrate before The Great Oz of the present-day, I posed this question:
Infant sleep?
Oh, the Google, it aims to please! It took me hither and yon, from Babywise to the Ferber Method, but the only place it took me that did me a lick of good was... The Berkeley Parents Network.
As the Husband points out, we live nowhere near Berkeley. The Berkeley Parents Network recommendations for earthy- crunchy pediatricians and simpatico playgroups can't help me a whit. But the section of the site labelled ADVICE... well, that's another story.
Seven years later, I still occasionally find myself trolling the Advice section of the Berkeley Parents Network. And not necessarily because it has answers. I visit it simply because it has the QUESTIONS.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
The petitioners to the Berkeley Parents Network Advice section, all — as I imagine them — wan, sleep-deprived, milk-stained mothers, ask every question you can't imagine the serene, sleek-haired mothers of your actual acquaintance ever having. Does your child walk only on her tiptoes? Light fires? Smear bodily fluids on the walls? Did having a child make you depressed? Eager to never have sex again? Unable to take care of life's most basic functions? The women (and men) who end up on the BPN Advice Forum have been there. Are you worried about Developmental Milestones, or whether an academic career is compatible with being a mom? Don't worry, on the Berkeley Parents Network you are not alone. There is no problem so great that some other mom has not already had it, and this is a very very good thing to know.
For quite some time, Younger Girleen has had a "situation" that has caused us all, parents and child both, some distress. We've talked to her pediatrician; it shall resolve itself, I know. But last week, I was feeling, well, lonely in this situation.
There is page after page of "advice" regarding this particular situation on the site... this, however, is the tidbit, I decided to read aloud to the Husband:
Our wise and wonderful pediatrician, now retired, said this: ''Ok, I think he's a little young, but try this. Go buy a family of dolls, a toy toilet, and some brown clay. Make a little turd out of the clay & initiate a game with him, with you playing the boy, him playing the mom or dad. At some point, after the game is really going strong, have the toy boy say 'Mommy I have to go poo. No I don't want to go poo'. Then watch him. If this works as it should, you may gain some insight into what is causing him to withhold.'' WELL, we got the dolls & the toilet, made the little turd out of clay, & got the game going. When I (as toy boy) said ''Mommy I need to poo. No I don't want to go poo,'' My son said, frantically, MOMMY I HAVE TO GO POO! He ran off to the bathroom & did a big one & was never constipated again. It was extraordinary. We never even got to brandish the clay turd. Whatever was in his mind about poop & pain must have been safer for him to view from the distance of play, he worked it out on the spot & has been an appreciative pooper ever since. He's 17 now.
What did the Husband do upon hearing this? He sighed heavily. He rolled his eyes. He said: Keep me out of this. If you want to put on your earthshoes and rub your crystals, that's fine, but... keep me out of this.
So I did.
I will just say that Younger Girleen's response to all this was ... quizzical bemusement.
————————————————
All that of course is water under the bridge. But last night, I was somewhere, attempting to engage in adult-type life and an acquaintance asked me this:
So, getting any writing done?
Lady, lady, I felt like saying, we're way down in the trenches here. I'm making beds and role-playing with dolls in the time I used to spend on that.
Friday, March 13, 2009
The Written Word
Recently received notification that my story "Little Man," which appeared in Brain, Child Magazine this time last year, is one of three finalists for the 2008 Texas Institute of Letters Kay Cattarulla Award for Best Short Story. It's in good company, and I'm quite chuffed that it's there.
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Signs of Spring
60 degrees today, and bits and pieces of the snow men sculpted five days ago during our winter wallop list toward the muddy lawn like much-licked popsicles: winter's last gasp, already on its death-rattle exhale.*
Me, I'm ready.
I know I've waxed rhapsodic about the southern spring before, but then again, constancy, thou art a jewel! I love spring in its leave-taking, when it is perched upon the high-dive that launches it on its spectacular swan-dive into summer; I love it in its full April effulgence, when the trees are spun-sugar confections and roots extend through moist earth with a minute snare-brush whisper — we are alive — but maybe I love it most right now, when everything trembles on the cusp.
Everything?
The transitory moment before the heavens part and rain starts sluicing down, when the clouds are oiled and heaped high and greenish and the wind begins to rise; the blink-and-it's-gone pause between day and twilight, when the air you walk the dog through is so pink-tinged you long to linger in its embrace; the bit of day before the sun peeks over the housetops, chill and formal, full of birdsong — there is much to be said for the bits of time that lie in the spaces in between.
Spring is here, but not really, not yet. The trees are still just angular constructions, festooned with last-year's nests, in disrepair; there's still snow in the birdbath.
But at the same time, a pale rosy haze hovers above the bare branched dogwoods: next month's buds. The peonies that never bothered to bloom last year have already let red ropy foliage emerge from the ground. And once more, as we always do, we begin again; we hope.
Yesterday, two bluebirds lit on the scrub in the park a good portion of the neighborhood avoids. Today, a hawk, perched on the phone pole.
*Possibly hurried there by Elder Girleen's single swift well-placed kick on the way to the car before school — oh to be young enough to enjoy the beauty in destruction!
Monday, March 2, 2009
Weather Report: March 2, 2009
Southerner that I am, I don’t have the proper words for snow. Sugar snow, corn snow, powder: here in Atlanta we don’t know nothin’ about those: we just have little snow, otherwise known as dirty snow. People who actually have more than a passing acquaintance with the cold white stuff would scoff; wouldn’t even call what we get around here snow at all. But yesterday’s "storm," which began about 11 in the morning and lasted, off-and-on, until supper time, was such a lovely one —feathery, snow-globe-upended flakes, a cold swirl-and-dance to land on the tip of the tongue, the eyelashes, superlative for packing into snow balls. It left six inches behind in places (not south of I-20, as much as we hoped it might), contained thunder; muffled the city for a bit.
Somewhere there are children who make snowmen that aren’t muddy brown and studded with bits of pine straw collected on the initial roll of ball through snow, but I’m not sure the experience they have is half as magical as it is for a southern child, who longs for snowfall all year long, experiences it once, if at all, and never ever has to attend school once it commences, since around here flurries constitute a “winter wallop” that leaves the streets empty of people to do what they have to but full of those engaging in what they want instead (get coffee, have a late breakfast).
Yesterday we had our annual snow, and embraced it with glee, because if it’s only going to snow for six hours, it doesn’t matter too terribly much that you lack gloves (me, because I lost one a year ago and figured I could hedge my bets and go without for an entire year), have never owned a suitable scarf (both girleens) or don’t possess a waterproof winter coat (ditto). Not for us the burn-out that comes with having to scrape ice from windshields every morning for months! Not for us, the ritual of getting suited up in padded snowsuits only to have to strip them off for a last-minute bathroom trip before even getting out the door!
Today, of course, all of yesterday’s cold austere beauty has become a few scabrous patches of dirty ice left below the trees, but all the same school’s been cancelled.
Somewhere there are children who make snowmen that aren’t muddy brown and studded with bits of pine straw collected on the initial roll of ball through snow, but I’m not sure the experience they have is half as magical as it is for a southern child, who longs for snowfall all year long, experiences it once, if at all, and never ever has to attend school once it commences, since around here flurries constitute a “winter wallop” that leaves the streets empty of people to do what they have to but full of those engaging in what they want instead (get coffee, have a late breakfast).
Yesterday we had our annual snow, and embraced it with glee, because if it’s only going to snow for six hours, it doesn’t matter too terribly much that you lack gloves (me, because I lost one a year ago and figured I could hedge my bets and go without for an entire year), have never owned a suitable scarf (both girleens) or don’t possess a waterproof winter coat (ditto). Not for us the burn-out that comes with having to scrape ice from windshields every morning for months! Not for us, the ritual of getting suited up in padded snowsuits only to have to strip them off for a last-minute bathroom trip before even getting out the door!
Today, of course, all of yesterday’s cold austere beauty has become a few scabrous patches of dirty ice left below the trees, but all the same school’s been cancelled.
Because it’s not actually snowing anymore and there’s nothing left to play in, the Girleens are mostly just bemused, though game to stay home. But I — although looked at objectively a snow day for me now is by no means a day off — embraced the news with the same joy I did back in those old bad days when snow day meant no classes for me at the University of Georgia and lollygagging in a bed covered with raggedy quilts in a rundown apartment until mid-afternoon when all that was required of me was leisurely afternoon stroll downtown to see who was out which coffee shops and bars were open.
In the southern locales I've so far lived out my life, snow is not... extraordinary, but at the same time it is so out-of-the-ordinary that it becomes so. When it snows, the matter-of-fact dailiness of my life is dusted with magic, transformed. I see a little better; I step a little more carefully, my eyes for once on exactly where I'm going.
I tend toward the ambitious in terms of resolutions, can come up with a baker's dozen, as I did a month ago, here.
But it would be enough; to treat each day like a snow day, an unexpected party, and rejoice.
Sunday, March 1, 2009
Monday, February 23, 2009
Sunday, February 15, 2009
IN OUR TIMES
This is a long one... by Stephanie Ramage in Atl's The Sunday Paper...
City Hall, are you listening?
Grant Park, Ormewood Park, East Atlanta and Inman Park have a crime problem. And it’s not imaginary.
By Stephanie Ramage
It looks as though the tiny house with tarpaper showing through its walls and a roof grown shaggy with torn tiles has vomited up a flea market.
Furniture, old lamps, liquor bottles, potted plants and remnants of carpet take up nearly every available inch of space in the few feet packed between the street and the place where a black man named Lorenzo Beck blends in with everything else.
His presence is betrayed by the movement of his hand as he tinkers with something on the porch.
The yard, whatever it may look like, is his life’s work.
“I’m a collector,” he says as my intern and I gingerly step around some pots and across a few concrete blocks to introduce ourselves.
I explain that we've dropped in because there has been quite a bit of speculation lately regarding whether there is a crime problem in the city’s southeastern corner, a swath from Grant Park to East Atlanta, and if, perhaps, residents have overreacted to the slaying in January of bartender John Henderson at nearby bar and eatery the Standard.
Atlanta Police Chief Richard Pennington has insisted that residents are overreacting, and Mayor Shirley Franklin claims the city is safer than it has been in decades.
I've come to ask Beck what he thinks.
He says he has lived here in Grant Park for 40 years. He moved into this house with his family when he was a teenager, and crime has always been bad off-and-on. Some times are worse than others.
“But in the last two or three months, it has done got worse. I mean sho nuff worse,” he says, adding that a few weeks ago, only four blocks away, he was mugged and beaten up by three guys. He fiddles with the tire gage clipped to the pocket of his blue work shirt and shakes his head as he remembers it.
At the neatly renovated house next door, Scott MacFarland is just on his way out. He moved to Grant Park seven years ago, and he agrees with Beck that crime in the area goes in cycles.
“It’s usually worse in the summer,” he says. “I always feel like, right around August, ‘What’s going on here?’ Then school starts again and things calm down. You get comfortable, I guess, with the routine of it. And then something will happen like the shooting at the Standard.”
He squints up the street from under his baseball cap.
“That changed things,” he says. “He had given them the money, but they killed him anyway. You want to believe it’s the economy, but that was such a violent act, that’s not just poverty, that’s something else. It’s really disturbing.”
Not long ago, MacFarland’s own home fell prey to an attempted burglary.
“Lorenzo,” he says, motioning to Beck, “scared them off. Everyone I know here has had some kind of run-in with crime.”
According to the Atlanta Police Department’s figures, I remind him, violent crime across the city is down.
“The numbers don’t help you sleep better at night,” he says. “What matters is your own experience of it and knowing friends and neighbors who have experienced it and are talking about moving. The numbers don’t matter. Let’s say you have six people die in one year, and the next year only five die. You can say that’s an improvement, but you’ve still had five people die.”
He’s not frightened, he says, but his wife is afraid. They keep in touch during the day to be safe, but he doesn’t think that qualifies for what APD Chief Pennington has described as an out-of-proportion response to crime.
MacFarland says he believes that the neighborhood outcry is the result of having more empowered people in the area than was the case in the past—people who are less afraid of calling the police and who are more likely to go to the City Council to demand better public safety.
He and Beck pose for a photo and we talk about the APD’s shortage of about 400 officers. On a night when nobody calls in sick or is out for other reasons, there may be 10 or fewer officers patrolling any one of the city’s six zones.
Beck says that he doesn’t feel comfortable with the police.
Not long ago, when the kids at the school across the street were out for recess, their ball went over the fence and rolled down the hill. Beck had no sooner retrieved it and tossed it back over the fence, he says, than an APD cruiser pulled up and two officers began questioning him about the contents of a shopping bag on his premises. It was the bag, says Beck, where he keeps his shaving items.
“I couldn’t get my mind together to talk to them,” he says. “And if you do try to report something, they are so mean and nasty to you it’s like you’ve done something wrong.”
Beck didn’t report the beating he endured a few weeks ago to the police. And he’s not alone.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ 2007 National Crime Victimization Survey, which is based on interviews with victims, more than half of all violent crimes surveyed—including robbery, rape and aggravated assault—are not reported to police. So if there are a lot of police-wary residents like Beck in a given area, crime stats from the APD, the source used by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in its Feb. 8 story, “Though Atlanta Crime is Up, Violence Overstated,” would not give an accurate account of crime.
Also, as researchers have been pointing out for decades, police departments can classify crimes according to their own tastes or needs.
As early as 1974, in an article titled “Getting the Crime Rate Down: Political Pressure and Crime Reporting,” David Seidman at Princeton University and Michael Couzens at the University of California at Berkeley deduced that even small changes in police administrative procedures can produce big changes in crime rates. They also noted that police departments under political pressure to make a city look safer than it actually is have plenty of leeway to do so through classifying crime. The police decide what will be considered a crime and how the crime should be described—as a larceny or a robbery, for example.
“Sometimes,” writes Seidman and Couzens, “this description is reviewed at another point in the police hierarchy,” and changes are made accordingly.
A few doors down from MacFarland, Mike Fitzgerald is renovating his home. He has lived in Grant Park for 12 years and, unlike Beck, he feels more comfortable with the police around.
“They’ve reinstated the mounted patrols, I think,” he says. “And that helps. It makes you feel better to see them.”
He doesn’t think there’s been a rise in violent crime, but he’s heard about more carjackings.
“I think what’s got people on edge is the guns and the groups of perpetrators,” he says. “If you’ve got gangs with guns now, that’s a problem. The guy at the Standard, they didn’t have to kill him to get what they wanted. And they didn’t kill him just because they didn’t want any witnesses because, after all, they left the girl who was working with him alive. So, why did they kill him? You just have to think that the person who did it was some kind of weird animal.”
CRACK HOUSE WHACK-A-MOLE
The next day, I return to Grant Park, this time with Lou Arcangeli, a former deputy chief of police at the APD who teaches criminal justice at Georgia State University.
We schlep up the hill that curves away from Cherokee Avenue, to where a woman in a business-y skirt and blouse, her arms full, is unlocking the door of a house with thoroughly barred windows.
Her name is Malinda Teel, and she has lived here for 30 years. She’s never been a victim of crime, although she’s heard about neighbors whose cars have been broken into. She simply takes precautions.
“We’ve always had a dog, we don’t park on the street,” she says. “We don’t own a big-screen TV, but if we did it wouldn’t be shining out into the street. We’ve got really good locks on the doors. The backyard is fenced in. We go out every night and walk the dog and we do not feel afraid. There might be a spike in crime every now and then when somebody gets out of jail, but I am a little surprised about how vehement the reaction has been to the bartender being killed.”
As Arcangeli and I drive east on Glenwood Avenue to Ormewood Park, the frequency of For Sale signs increases. I turn down a side street where a young man with a shaved head is working on the edge of a driveway. A tattoo of the infinity symbol slithers on his white upper arm as he slowly swings a trimmer.
His name is Stephen Sheldon, and he and his wife have lived here for three years.
“There were three to four identified crack houses in the neighborhood,” he says, “and this kid who did a break-in here came from the one across the street. We got rid of that one.”
Arcangeli asks him how he managed that.
“We called the police. We called and called and called over and over again and we got it shut down,” he says. “Then, of course, the crack house just moved around the corner, but at least it’s not across the street anymore.”
Sheldon suspects that one reason for the persistent crack houses and the random crime around them is a lack of awareness. He notices things on the street, but not everyone does. “I hate to be an a**hole about it,” he says, “but some of the older people, really the middle-aged people, are just not paying attention.”
CRIME BY THE NUMBERS
A little further on, East Atlanta huddles around its small business district.
Like Grant Park and Ormewood Park, it is a chock-a-block area of economic diversity. Carefully restored bungalows share hedges with tenements that are little more than shacks. From 2007 to 2008, the area saw a 14 percent increase in violent crime, despite a decrease in much of the rest of the city.
I turn down McWilliams Street, and Arcangeli stays in the car to make a phone call as I knock on doors along a stretch of rundown houses.
As I step into one driveway, a group of guys on the porch shout a stream of profanity and threaten to kick my ass or shoot me if I come one step closer. I say I’m a reporter, but either they don’t hear me or they don’t care. It becomes apparent that they think I am a government worker of some sort because they yell “Get out the goddamn yard unless you goin’ bring me my f**kin’ $1,000 tax refund the gover’ment ’spose to be givin’ ever’body! Where’s my goddamn check, bitch? I want my f**kin’ money!”
I return to the car.
We drive a couple of blocks west, where a woman who looks to be in her 40s is out for a brisk walk. I wave and ask her if she feels safe here. She says yes. Then another woman, with a baby in a sling and a dog on a leash, approaches us and tells her, “We’re forming a neighborhood watch and I thought you might want to be a part of it.”
The woman, who introduces herself as Elaine Wright, replies that she does. The two women admit they only know each other by sight, though Wright’s lived here for six years. They exchange phone numbers and Wright explains to me that last fall, she and her neighbors managed to get a crack house shut down. She points to the house where it used to be.
“We called the cops over and over again,” she says. “My husband took pictures of all the traffic in and out and we finally got it shut down.”
Now the inhabitants of the crack house have moved to another house in the neighborhood, right up the street. It’s the same scenario presented by Ormewood Park’s Sheldon—a game of criminal justice Whack-a-Mole.
Arcangeli and I drive by the new location of the crack house. An elderly woman totters up the steps.
Arcangeli details a phenomenon familiar to criminologists called “cloaking.” In it, unemployed younger family members move in with a grandmother or grandfather who’s glad to have the company, but the young people then use the older relative’s home as a crack house. The legitimate flip side of this phenomenon, where young unemployed relatives move in with grandparents, can be a positive development, because it does provide greater safety for the elderly and gives the kids more stability. The only way to tell the difference is by watching the activity.
Traveling north on Moreland Avenue from East Atlanta, one soon enters the Little 5 Points/Inman Park area.
When the AJC published “Though Atlanta Crime is Up, Violence Overstated,” Inman Park resident John Hines focused on the tables of crime stats at the bottom of the article. In an e-mail written in reference to the article, he states that the APD stats as analyzed by the AJC seem to indicate “that violent crime is sharply up in Inman Park from an already bad year in 2007 although it is down for Atlanta citywide…”
In Inman Park, the “numbers show a 19 percent increase in violent crime...from 2007 to 2008, and a 30 percent increase from 2006 to 2008 … violent crime increased very sharply in the fourth quarter of 2008, from an average of 2.5 per month in the four preceding quarters to an average of 10 per month in Q4…” (East Lake/Kirkwood, from 2007 to 2008, experienced the biggest jump in violent crime of any neighborhood: 53 percent.)
The numbers are less important, though, than how Mayor Franklin and Chief Pennington respond to them.
According toTom R. Tyler, author of “Policing in Black and White: Ethnic Group Differences in Trust and Confidence in the Police,” an article published in Police Quarterly in 2005, the APD has an opportunity to help the community, whether it solves violent crimes like the slaying at the Standard or not.
“People get very upset when they feel that their concerns are not heard or are not being addressed, and that’s true whether they are white or African-American,” says Tyler, a professor of psychology at New York University. “One thing the police can do is make a big effort to share information with people. They might not be able to solve the case, but they can restore trust.”
And having confidence in the police department is important in determining more than merely the perception of crime, says Stephen Raudenbush, a sociologist at the University of Chicago who has researched neighborhoods and violent crime.
“Past evidence suggests that when neighbors distrust the police, crime will tend to thrive." SP
City Hall, are you listening?
Grant Park, Ormewood Park, East Atlanta and Inman Park have a crime problem. And it’s not imaginary.
By Stephanie Ramage
It looks as though the tiny house with tarpaper showing through its walls and a roof grown shaggy with torn tiles has vomited up a flea market.
Furniture, old lamps, liquor bottles, potted plants and remnants of carpet take up nearly every available inch of space in the few feet packed between the street and the place where a black man named Lorenzo Beck blends in with everything else.
His presence is betrayed by the movement of his hand as he tinkers with something on the porch.
The yard, whatever it may look like, is his life’s work.
“I’m a collector,” he says as my intern and I gingerly step around some pots and across a few concrete blocks to introduce ourselves.
I explain that we've dropped in because there has been quite a bit of speculation lately regarding whether there is a crime problem in the city’s southeastern corner, a swath from Grant Park to East Atlanta, and if, perhaps, residents have overreacted to the slaying in January of bartender John Henderson at nearby bar and eatery the Standard.
Atlanta Police Chief Richard Pennington has insisted that residents are overreacting, and Mayor Shirley Franklin claims the city is safer than it has been in decades.
I've come to ask Beck what he thinks.
He says he has lived here in Grant Park for 40 years. He moved into this house with his family when he was a teenager, and crime has always been bad off-and-on. Some times are worse than others.
“But in the last two or three months, it has done got worse. I mean sho nuff worse,” he says, adding that a few weeks ago, only four blocks away, he was mugged and beaten up by three guys. He fiddles with the tire gage clipped to the pocket of his blue work shirt and shakes his head as he remembers it.
At the neatly renovated house next door, Scott MacFarland is just on his way out. He moved to Grant Park seven years ago, and he agrees with Beck that crime in the area goes in cycles.
“It’s usually worse in the summer,” he says. “I always feel like, right around August, ‘What’s going on here?’ Then school starts again and things calm down. You get comfortable, I guess, with the routine of it. And then something will happen like the shooting at the Standard.”
He squints up the street from under his baseball cap.
“That changed things,” he says. “He had given them the money, but they killed him anyway. You want to believe it’s the economy, but that was such a violent act, that’s not just poverty, that’s something else. It’s really disturbing.”
Not long ago, MacFarland’s own home fell prey to an attempted burglary.
“Lorenzo,” he says, motioning to Beck, “scared them off. Everyone I know here has had some kind of run-in with crime.”
According to the Atlanta Police Department’s figures, I remind him, violent crime across the city is down.
“The numbers don’t help you sleep better at night,” he says. “What matters is your own experience of it and knowing friends and neighbors who have experienced it and are talking about moving. The numbers don’t matter. Let’s say you have six people die in one year, and the next year only five die. You can say that’s an improvement, but you’ve still had five people die.”
He’s not frightened, he says, but his wife is afraid. They keep in touch during the day to be safe, but he doesn’t think that qualifies for what APD Chief Pennington has described as an out-of-proportion response to crime.
MacFarland says he believes that the neighborhood outcry is the result of having more empowered people in the area than was the case in the past—people who are less afraid of calling the police and who are more likely to go to the City Council to demand better public safety.
He and Beck pose for a photo and we talk about the APD’s shortage of about 400 officers. On a night when nobody calls in sick or is out for other reasons, there may be 10 or fewer officers patrolling any one of the city’s six zones.
Beck says that he doesn’t feel comfortable with the police.
Not long ago, when the kids at the school across the street were out for recess, their ball went over the fence and rolled down the hill. Beck had no sooner retrieved it and tossed it back over the fence, he says, than an APD cruiser pulled up and two officers began questioning him about the contents of a shopping bag on his premises. It was the bag, says Beck, where he keeps his shaving items.
“I couldn’t get my mind together to talk to them,” he says. “And if you do try to report something, they are so mean and nasty to you it’s like you’ve done something wrong.”
Beck didn’t report the beating he endured a few weeks ago to the police. And he’s not alone.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ 2007 National Crime Victimization Survey, which is based on interviews with victims, more than half of all violent crimes surveyed—including robbery, rape and aggravated assault—are not reported to police. So if there are a lot of police-wary residents like Beck in a given area, crime stats from the APD, the source used by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in its Feb. 8 story, “Though Atlanta Crime is Up, Violence Overstated,” would not give an accurate account of crime.
Also, as researchers have been pointing out for decades, police departments can classify crimes according to their own tastes or needs.
As early as 1974, in an article titled “Getting the Crime Rate Down: Political Pressure and Crime Reporting,” David Seidman at Princeton University and Michael Couzens at the University of California at Berkeley deduced that even small changes in police administrative procedures can produce big changes in crime rates. They also noted that police departments under political pressure to make a city look safer than it actually is have plenty of leeway to do so through classifying crime. The police decide what will be considered a crime and how the crime should be described—as a larceny or a robbery, for example.
“Sometimes,” writes Seidman and Couzens, “this description is reviewed at another point in the police hierarchy,” and changes are made accordingly.
A few doors down from MacFarland, Mike Fitzgerald is renovating his home. He has lived in Grant Park for 12 years and, unlike Beck, he feels more comfortable with the police around.
“They’ve reinstated the mounted patrols, I think,” he says. “And that helps. It makes you feel better to see them.”
He doesn’t think there’s been a rise in violent crime, but he’s heard about more carjackings.
“I think what’s got people on edge is the guns and the groups of perpetrators,” he says. “If you’ve got gangs with guns now, that’s a problem. The guy at the Standard, they didn’t have to kill him to get what they wanted. And they didn’t kill him just because they didn’t want any witnesses because, after all, they left the girl who was working with him alive. So, why did they kill him? You just have to think that the person who did it was some kind of weird animal.”
CRACK HOUSE WHACK-A-MOLE
The next day, I return to Grant Park, this time with Lou Arcangeli, a former deputy chief of police at the APD who teaches criminal justice at Georgia State University.
We schlep up the hill that curves away from Cherokee Avenue, to where a woman in a business-y skirt and blouse, her arms full, is unlocking the door of a house with thoroughly barred windows.
Her name is Malinda Teel, and she has lived here for 30 years. She’s never been a victim of crime, although she’s heard about neighbors whose cars have been broken into. She simply takes precautions.
“We’ve always had a dog, we don’t park on the street,” she says. “We don’t own a big-screen TV, but if we did it wouldn’t be shining out into the street. We’ve got really good locks on the doors. The backyard is fenced in. We go out every night and walk the dog and we do not feel afraid. There might be a spike in crime every now and then when somebody gets out of jail, but I am a little surprised about how vehement the reaction has been to the bartender being killed.”
As Arcangeli and I drive east on Glenwood Avenue to Ormewood Park, the frequency of For Sale signs increases. I turn down a side street where a young man with a shaved head is working on the edge of a driveway. A tattoo of the infinity symbol slithers on his white upper arm as he slowly swings a trimmer.
His name is Stephen Sheldon, and he and his wife have lived here for three years.
“There were three to four identified crack houses in the neighborhood,” he says, “and this kid who did a break-in here came from the one across the street. We got rid of that one.”
Arcangeli asks him how he managed that.
“We called the police. We called and called and called over and over again and we got it shut down,” he says. “Then, of course, the crack house just moved around the corner, but at least it’s not across the street anymore.”
Sheldon suspects that one reason for the persistent crack houses and the random crime around them is a lack of awareness. He notices things on the street, but not everyone does. “I hate to be an a**hole about it,” he says, “but some of the older people, really the middle-aged people, are just not paying attention.”
CRIME BY THE NUMBERS
A little further on, East Atlanta huddles around its small business district.
Like Grant Park and Ormewood Park, it is a chock-a-block area of economic diversity. Carefully restored bungalows share hedges with tenements that are little more than shacks. From 2007 to 2008, the area saw a 14 percent increase in violent crime, despite a decrease in much of the rest of the city.
I turn down McWilliams Street, and Arcangeli stays in the car to make a phone call as I knock on doors along a stretch of rundown houses.
As I step into one driveway, a group of guys on the porch shout a stream of profanity and threaten to kick my ass or shoot me if I come one step closer. I say I’m a reporter, but either they don’t hear me or they don’t care. It becomes apparent that they think I am a government worker of some sort because they yell “Get out the goddamn yard unless you goin’ bring me my f**kin’ $1,000 tax refund the gover’ment ’spose to be givin’ ever’body! Where’s my goddamn check, bitch? I want my f**kin’ money!”
I return to the car.
We drive a couple of blocks west, where a woman who looks to be in her 40s is out for a brisk walk. I wave and ask her if she feels safe here. She says yes. Then another woman, with a baby in a sling and a dog on a leash, approaches us and tells her, “We’re forming a neighborhood watch and I thought you might want to be a part of it.”
The woman, who introduces herself as Elaine Wright, replies that she does. The two women admit they only know each other by sight, though Wright’s lived here for six years. They exchange phone numbers and Wright explains to me that last fall, she and her neighbors managed to get a crack house shut down. She points to the house where it used to be.
“We called the cops over and over again,” she says. “My husband took pictures of all the traffic in and out and we finally got it shut down.”
Now the inhabitants of the crack house have moved to another house in the neighborhood, right up the street. It’s the same scenario presented by Ormewood Park’s Sheldon—a game of criminal justice Whack-a-Mole.
Arcangeli and I drive by the new location of the crack house. An elderly woman totters up the steps.
Arcangeli details a phenomenon familiar to criminologists called “cloaking.” In it, unemployed younger family members move in with a grandmother or grandfather who’s glad to have the company, but the young people then use the older relative’s home as a crack house. The legitimate flip side of this phenomenon, where young unemployed relatives move in with grandparents, can be a positive development, because it does provide greater safety for the elderly and gives the kids more stability. The only way to tell the difference is by watching the activity.
Traveling north on Moreland Avenue from East Atlanta, one soon enters the Little 5 Points/Inman Park area.
When the AJC published “Though Atlanta Crime is Up, Violence Overstated,” Inman Park resident John Hines focused on the tables of crime stats at the bottom of the article. In an e-mail written in reference to the article, he states that the APD stats as analyzed by the AJC seem to indicate “that violent crime is sharply up in Inman Park from an already bad year in 2007 although it is down for Atlanta citywide…”
In Inman Park, the “numbers show a 19 percent increase in violent crime...from 2007 to 2008, and a 30 percent increase from 2006 to 2008 … violent crime increased very sharply in the fourth quarter of 2008, from an average of 2.5 per month in the four preceding quarters to an average of 10 per month in Q4…” (East Lake/Kirkwood, from 2007 to 2008, experienced the biggest jump in violent crime of any neighborhood: 53 percent.)
The numbers are less important, though, than how Mayor Franklin and Chief Pennington respond to them.
According toTom R. Tyler, author of “Policing in Black and White: Ethnic Group Differences in Trust and Confidence in the Police,” an article published in Police Quarterly in 2005, the APD has an opportunity to help the community, whether it solves violent crimes like the slaying at the Standard or not.
“People get very upset when they feel that their concerns are not heard or are not being addressed, and that’s true whether they are white or African-American,” says Tyler, a professor of psychology at New York University. “One thing the police can do is make a big effort to share information with people. They might not be able to solve the case, but they can restore trust.”
And having confidence in the police department is important in determining more than merely the perception of crime, says Stephen Raudenbush, a sociologist at the University of Chicago who has researched neighborhoods and violent crime.
“Past evidence suggests that when neighbors distrust the police, crime will tend to thrive." SP
The Third of Three Valentines...
Every mom needs...
a friend to take walks with
a friend to shop with
a friend to have lunch with
friends who have no kids, to keep her real
friends who have older children, so she'll remember not to sweat the small stuff
friends who have younger children, so she can re-experience those early days in all their messy glory
friends to talk shop with, whether that shop is of the motherhood variety, or of the career pursuasion
Happy Valentine's Day (better a day late than never) to all the women who make up my life.
a friend to take walks with
a friend to shop with
a friend to have lunch with
friends who have no kids, to keep her real
friends who have older children, so she'll remember not to sweat the small stuff
friends who have younger children, so she can re-experience those early days in all their messy glory
friends to talk shop with, whether that shop is of the motherhood variety, or of the career pursuasion
Happy Valentine's Day (better a day late than never) to all the women who make up my life.
Friday, February 13, 2009
The Second of Three Valentines
This morning, I threaded my way through traffic to the dentists' office, completely on my own, no offspring with me; sat myself down in the hygienist's chair only to discover that it had been over a year and a half since I last showed up there. Apparently taking your children to the dentist religiously, slavishly, punctually to the dentist every 5.9 months does not, through some interesting osmosis, translate into clean teeth for Mom.
Just in case you thought otherwise.
Hygienist Sarah remedied that state of affairs and was even quite nice about it, conceding that I was in pretty good shape, all things considered (or rather, my teeth were).
That taken care of, I heighed myself back into traffic, tuning into AM 1690 ("The Voice of the Arts") for the drive home.
AM 1690 used to be AirAmerica, and then it wasn't, and then I stopped listening to it while I was driving, and then recently I found it again in a Come-to-Jesus moment occasioned by the fact that as I was fiddling with the car radio, they played "I'm Working for the Man,"
(Oh, well, I'm picking em up and I'm laying em down
I believe he's gonna work me into the ground
I pull to the left, I heave to the right
I oughta kill him but it wouldn't be right
Roy Orbison, 1970)
and since then, whenever I end up at the 1690 end of the dial, the dj's playing a song by the Rondells or a rousing rendition of "Roumania, Roumania or something else that makes a perfect soundtrack for the movie-of-life.
Today being Friday, the song was "Roumania, Roumania, (they play it every Friday at a certain time) and the fact that the album it's from is called From Avenue A to the Great White Way: Yiddish and American Popular Songs 1914-1950 tells you everything you need to know: klezmer music makes the six-lane stretch of Interstate 75/85 through downtown Atlanta downright cinemagraphic.
Previous posts long ago made it clear just how often I depend on the car radio for moments that transcend the mundane.
This morning, the sky was all wisps of blue and cotton batting. Laid out underneath it was the ornate strutwork of the city; the skyscrapers built the past few years already become such a stairstepping bar graph — charting what exactly?
Oh Atlanta, real honest-to-god cities laugh at your pretensions, wouldn't even bother to call you a city at all. But I love the way your commuter trains trundle and clank, over asphalt that comes together and parts and merges, a clotted molten river, particularly during morning and afternoon drive-time.
Here in this sprawling southern city, life is mostly flicker and ebb we prefer to remain sealed off from in our cars: slag-heap and shanty, weeds and tattered plastic bags, even the elegant Tilt-A-Whirl of the buildings downtown and their chill, translucent spires, the looping trajectory of headlights sinuous around them like some welder’s arc-light.
Years ago, before children, I worked for a while in a law office downtown and took MARTA to get there. Every morning, the doors of the train parted and I stepped forward, hobbled by high heels and skirt. On the train, I swayed, half-asleep, always facing forward, moving toward employment I had to have but didn’t much like.
But once, an elderly man slipped back through the train’s automatic doors to rescue the glove dropped by a crying child onto the platform. Once, the car I stepped into was so still and hushed that it felt almost holy, seemed as full of silence as the pause and pulse of breath, drawn in, before a choir starts singing.
Oh, how did it happen, that I could feel so much for a particular city? That it could become home?
Just in case you thought otherwise.
Hygienist Sarah remedied that state of affairs and was even quite nice about it, conceding that I was in pretty good shape, all things considered (or rather, my teeth were).
That taken care of, I heighed myself back into traffic, tuning into AM 1690 ("The Voice of the Arts") for the drive home.
AM 1690 used to be AirAmerica, and then it wasn't, and then I stopped listening to it while I was driving, and then recently I found it again in a Come-to-Jesus moment occasioned by the fact that as I was fiddling with the car radio, they played "I'm Working for the Man,"
(Oh, well, I'm picking em up and I'm laying em down
I believe he's gonna work me into the ground
I pull to the left, I heave to the right
I oughta kill him but it wouldn't be right
Roy Orbison, 1970)
and since then, whenever I end up at the 1690 end of the dial, the dj's playing a song by the Rondells or a rousing rendition of "Roumania, Roumania or something else that makes a perfect soundtrack for the movie-of-life.
Today being Friday, the song was "Roumania, Roumania, (they play it every Friday at a certain time) and the fact that the album it's from is called From Avenue A to the Great White Way: Yiddish and American Popular Songs 1914-1950 tells you everything you need to know: klezmer music makes the six-lane stretch of Interstate 75/85 through downtown Atlanta downright cinemagraphic.
Previous posts long ago made it clear just how often I depend on the car radio for moments that transcend the mundane.
This morning, the sky was all wisps of blue and cotton batting. Laid out underneath it was the ornate strutwork of the city; the skyscrapers built the past few years already become such a stairstepping bar graph — charting what exactly?
Oh Atlanta, real honest-to-god cities laugh at your pretensions, wouldn't even bother to call you a city at all. But I love the way your commuter trains trundle and clank, over asphalt that comes together and parts and merges, a clotted molten river, particularly during morning and afternoon drive-time.
Here in this sprawling southern city, life is mostly flicker and ebb we prefer to remain sealed off from in our cars: slag-heap and shanty, weeds and tattered plastic bags, even the elegant Tilt-A-Whirl of the buildings downtown and their chill, translucent spires, the looping trajectory of headlights sinuous around them like some welder’s arc-light.
Years ago, before children, I worked for a while in a law office downtown and took MARTA to get there. Every morning, the doors of the train parted and I stepped forward, hobbled by high heels and skirt. On the train, I swayed, half-asleep, always facing forward, moving toward employment I had to have but didn’t much like.
But once, an elderly man slipped back through the train’s automatic doors to rescue the glove dropped by a crying child onto the platform. Once, the car I stepped into was so still and hushed that it felt almost holy, seemed as full of silence as the pause and pulse of breath, drawn in, before a choir starts singing.
Oh, how did it happen, that I could feel so much for a particular city? That it could become home?
The First of Three Valentines
Man o man, I wish I'd written this — Judith Warner's column for today from the NYTimes.
I might, in fact, have a bit of a crush on the woman who can write like this.
I might, in fact, have a bit of a crush on the woman who can write like this.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Not Women's Work, not Men's Work, just... Work
Last night I sat and watched President Obama's press conference — feeling such a moment of awe and pride during that measured second when he settled himself at the podium before he began: we did that, America, we did, for a moment we transcended who we usually are and became something so much larger — and then I sat down at the computer and emailed my senators, Isakson and Chambliss, asking them in no uncertain terms to vote for the economic stimulus plan.
Will it do any good?
If by "good" we're asking if those two will vote for the plan, probably not.
Does that mean I shouldn't have bothered?
Asking that does as little good as wondering about trees that fall in forests and who hears them, and whether they might make a sound as they come crashing to the ground.
Monday, February 9, 2009
Spring Fever
It shouldn't have arrived yet, but it has, though maybe it'll abandon us again before the month's done: Spring. It comes, bearing gifts, and crocus (croci?) to nestle in the still-wintery beds. The mockingbirds are, this morning, rejoicing: the sap is running in the maple that graces the lefthand corner of our yard.
It seems absurd to sit here in front of this screen in the face of this shy excess.
I cut my teeth on spring, varietal Georgian. In fact, if spring in this neck of the woods were, truly, a varietal (not that I know jack about wine), it would have to be a prosecco or that Portuguese sort known as Vinho Verde.
Spring in the bit of earth I call home is a green wine, effervescent, astringent. It goes down easy. There are always things to be done, but me, I'm off to take a heady early-morning sip.
Friday, February 6, 2009
Reading Lists, Redux
This time last year, I was more than happy to take up blog-space (and bore my friends and relations) by documenting what books sat on the nightstand, hungry to be read* — and my good intentions regarding them.
Resolutions are made to be broken. Lists are made to be lost. I would say about a third of those books actually got read. I But lately I've been squirreling away a whole new stack as if I'm expecting some late-winter blizzard to keep me house-bound for months.
But I shall read them all this year, each and every one of them, I swear:
The Feast of Love Charles Baxter
Lark and Termite Jayne Anne Phillipps
Last Night at the Lobster Stewart O'Nan
The 351 Books of Irma Arcuri David Bajo
Jarhead Anthony Swofford
Operation Homecoming:
Iraq, Afghanistan and the Home
Front, in the Words of U.S.
Troops and Their Families Andrew Carroll, editor
Chemistry and
Other Stories Ron Rash
Madeleine is Sleeping Sarah Bynum
Netherland Joseph O'Neill
*I was also happy to set the goal of finishing the draft of a novel by the end of 2008, and see how far that got me (uhhh, 50 pages in?).
Monday, February 2, 2009
In Our Times
This morning, during breakfast, during that brief eye of the hurricane between squabbles over who gets to hold which cereal box, the spillage of orange juice and shouts from the male half of the parenting duo of "come on! come on!", Elder Girleen posed the following question to her younger sister:
Hey, P, what do you want to be when you grow up?
If the face of a three-and-a-half year old can exhibit complete and utter disdain, Younger Girleen's did at that moment.
I DON'T WANT TO GROW UP, she replied and that settled the question.
This may be the most sensible answer to this question that I've ever heard; in fact, as I multi-tasked between feeding myself, feeding others, drinking coffee, sneaking a look at yesterday's NY Times Book Review, making nutritious lunches to be schlepped to school and emptying the dishwasher, I doffed my hat to her.
I'm sure that if I sat down and devoted three hours to thinking about it, I probably could set some laudable goals a la Your Best Year Yet, mentioned last post, and I must admit that the thought of doing so appeals to the adult section of my brain, the same side that couldn't stop itself from picking up a copy of The Mom's Day Planner! at a stationary store the other day.*
I started making lists when I was a freshman in college, and the fact that the Husband can get through his life without doing so blows my tiny mind (practically the first thing out of my mouth when he received the employment boot was maybe you should make a list...)**
I will teach myself to play the guitar; I will double the size of the garden; I will finish the novel; I will be a better mom/daughter/spouse/neighbor; I will resume my role as community gadfly until the City, distressed or not, breaks ground on the playground promised our neighborhood; I will make more money; I will sell myself better; I will paint the house; I will...
I've run out of breath.
But there is something, also, to be said, for being completely at home in the skin you inhabit right this minute.
Ours is a culture seduced by transformation (and by success, but that's another story),*** and I'm a sucker for the modern fairy tales (What Not to Wear, where Cinderella becomes a princess every single time; Super Nanny, where the dysfunctional family becomes a sane one in just four days...) as much as the next girl, but this year, I think I'd rather take a page from Younger Girleen's book.
Here's to being no one other than the person you are, right this second.
*Did she buy it; did she not? Only the Shadow knows!
** Of course, those freshman in college lists were practically elegant haikus:
quit smoking
write
finish reading Moby Dick for AmLit
*** The fact that transformation often involves spending money bears thinking about: how much of our lust for transformation has to do with keeping consumer spending levels up?
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Weather Report: January 28, 2009
The new year, and most of the first month of it has already been swallowed up. By what exactly? And just how did we get here so fast? Younger Girleen has a brand-new Louise Brooks-style haircut, Elder Girleen commemorated her 7th birthday with waffles for dinner last night and, last weekend, a "movie party" with the girls in her first grade class (for the first time I rejoiced that there are 14 boys in her class, leaving only six girls to feed pizza to). The Husband is still sans job, though taking a page from the laconic cowboy model of manhood, has by sheer force of will, strongarmed lots of irons into the fire.*
And me, I’m just a week or so back from another winter’s worth of contract work reading lots and lots and lots and lots of short stories, during which I deduced that the current literary short story template includes:
twins as protagonists**;
And me, I’m just a week or so back from another winter’s worth of contract work reading lots and lots and lots and lots of short stories, during which I deduced that the current literary short story template includes:
twins as protagonists**;
cell phones set on nightstands the way cigarettes were once set in ashtrays, that vibrate sleeping couples — one of whom’s a cheater — awake;
elderly parents who must be cared for;
cold, hard sex between people who care for each other not a whit.
Oh, and Graphic Novels.
And here in Atanta? It’s cold, cold, too cold, and a pale wintery sky. A new president; a new year; and I have from the library conjured up for myself a book — Your Best Year Yet!
Because it would be nice, wouldn’t it, for 2009 to be that? But there is so little time, and is what there is of it worth expending on worksheets and assessments, on contemplating what I might’ve accomplished this past year, and how I limited myself as I worked toward it?
Nah, no time for any of that. Sorry I've been gone so long.
**If you are 23 now you were born in 1986, and given all the older mothers running around by then, chances are quite high that you know a lot of twins
Oh, and Graphic Novels.
And here in Atanta? It’s cold, cold, too cold, and a pale wintery sky. A new president; a new year; and I have from the library conjured up for myself a book — Your Best Year Yet!
Because it would be nice, wouldn’t it, for 2009 to be that? But there is so little time, and is what there is of it worth expending on worksheets and assessments, on contemplating what I might’ve accomplished this past year, and how I limited myself as I worked toward it?
Nah, no time for any of that. Sorry I've been gone so long.
*The assumption being that the saying refers to a cowboy who has his hands full at branding time, not a Victorian housemaid ironing lots of petticoats.
**If you are 23 now you were born in 1986, and given all the older mothers running around by then, chances are quite high that you know a lot of twins
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