Now Is The Time, And We Are The Answer

Way back in the day, when Elder Girleen was still just a babe-in-arms, one of the things that ended up giving structure to the days I spent with her was taking daily morning walks through the neighborhood in the company of a few other moms (and the occasional dad) who had kids of stroller-sitting age.  The "Stroller Brigade," as we came to be known throughout the neighborhood, wasn't some official club; it wasn't an organization anyone had dreamed up. There was no board of directors, no officers, no fundraisers.

We were just a group of women whose main (and sometimes only) commonality was the fact that we had kids of roughly the same ages that we were staying home with.  We met every morning in the parking lot of a nearby church — sometimes there were 7 of us, sometimes 2. Sometimes no one showed up at all.  We walked for an hour  and mostly talked in the cautious pleasantries employed everywhere by moms:  where do you live?  how old are your kids?  Are you from here? 

Would we have met each other, pre-children?  Probably not.  

Now I know some of those folks and their kids much better but back then the main thing we had in common was our babies.  And that was — and can be — the most tenuous of bonds.

For our various reasons, we all needed those morning walks; we were wary of breaking those social bonds.  Thus, when we walked one morning way back in 2003 when Iraq was invaded, the fact did not even come up, nor did the politics surrounding it. 

That was probably as it should've been (how could we have kept rubbing shoulders every morning if we vehemently disagreed?).  What we had in common wasn't strong enough to overcome what we probably did not.  

But the time for such careful politesse is, I think, long past. At this moment, politics does  belong on the playground, around the water cooler, everywhere.   

All of which is a long preamble to the passionate and eloquent call-to-action I received from a friend today:

Hi-

I don't know about you but I am getting more and more scared as I watch the news.  There's never been a party quite like the Dems from snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, but even without any obvious missteps, with the best ticket I've seen in my life, and with Americans nearly unanimous in seeing deep deep flaws in how the past eight years have been handled, I can see that we might lose this one.  And the stakes have never been higher.  

So what to do?  Last weekend  I rounded up a bunch of friends, and used the Obama website and local listserves to take a caravan of cars to go canvass in nearby Bucks County, Pennsylvania.  It's one thing to read in the paper about disaffected white ethnic voters, or soldiers who return from Iraq telling stories of having to fight without enough body armor (or bullets!), but it's quite another thing to actually see those people face to face.  

Canvassing is not really that hard but it's not easy either.  The folks at the Bucks County field office were super-organized, and when we showed up they had packets with lists of doors to knock on, and good maps, and they got us trained and out the door pretty fast.  At first it feels embarrassing to knock on the door of total strangers (but then at first it must feel embarrassing to go trick or treating too, right, and somehow we got over that hump pretty easily).  After a couple of houses, you get in a rhythm.  I was lucky and went with a good friend, so we had the unexpected bonus of some mommy time in between houses, catching up on summer vacations, the beginning of school, and the delicate balance of survival as a working mom.  

The goal is to connect with people.  If they are hard and fast for McCain, then it's just "thank you, have a nice day."  For the undecideds, we asked them what issues were important to them, and then shared our thoughts about where the candidates stand on those.  We tried to move those leaning toward Obama into strong Obama voters, sought out strong Obama voters as prospective volunteers, and made sure that those who voted for Hillary were moving (or already moved) into the Obama camp.  Since my friend who accompanied me was a big Hillary supporter herself, she was sort of a "secret weapon" on the trail, talking about the commonalities in Obama's and Hillary's agendas.  

With eight adults and three children divided into four teams, we knocked on about 200 doors and earned probably 10 votes.  It takes effort, and energy, but ultimately nothing is more effective than showing up as a volunteer, being the heart and soul of a movement, demonstrating that you care enough about what this election stands for to get up off the couch and do something about it.  If you are religious, think of this as praying with your feet.  (Whether you are religious or not, think of this as stopping the scary slide toward becoming a theocracy!)  

If we lose, it's our fault for not doing enough — and we will get the goverment that we deserve.

So why am I writing?  *To encourage you to get involved.*  If you live in or near a swing state — Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Virginia are all really important but so are some others — then hit the trail.  It's so easy — just go to the Obama website, click on "states," then find a local field office and call them up.  They will be happy to hear from you and will give you everything you need to get started.  

*If you don't live near a fiend office, then hit the phones.*  I did this during the primary and while it was not as fun as going door to door, I did rack up several hundred phone calls for Obama.  Again, at first it feels scary to call total strangers, and we all hate telemarketers, but for the most part I found people to be surprisingly receptive to listing to the political enthusiasms of the disembodied voice of a total stranger.  

I'm exhausted too, and behind on my work, and the house is a mess, and I desperately need a pedicure.  But for the moment all that's on hold....

Ask yourself what you can do — and then get out and do it.  

Don't know about you, but after reading that, I'm signing off now to figure out how to get down Florida this weekend.  

Consider the Fig

It's not news to anyone:  spring's long long gone, not even a whisper of memory anymore.  The rabbit's-foot curves that were the leaves of the fig tree at the side of the house in April are now completely unclenched; as early as June they'd become hands with broad, spatulate fingers.  

I stand on tiptoe, push the leaves back with both hands, searching for fruit, greedy.

A cicada insists:  hot, hot, hot.   A mockingbird patrols the sag of the phone line.  Who would think it's September?  Not I,  trills the bird mockingly, over my head.  The figs I find weep milk and crystalline sugar.  They're purplish, ripe, completely unlovely.  Borne of plants put into the ground a generation ago, when this neighborhood was bars-on-the-windows and frugality handed down.  

Now we live in such plenty:  nobody eats them.  

Me, though, I might be a scavenger born and bred, the offspring of hippies who scoured their neighbors' Madison, Wisconsin lawns for dandelion greens, a copy of Stalking the Wild Asparagus open to the leafy greens chapter.  I've been known to ... well, let's put it this way: one summer, when Elder Girleen was still young enough to sit in a stroller, I filched handfuls from the back yard of a vacant house and carried them home in an emptied sippy cup.  And the boughs draped over our backyard privacy fence from the neighbor's yard:  if I can reach the drooping figs, I can consider them fair game.  

They're wonderful with goat cheese and arugula.  One summer I made them into ice cream.  I don't know when I started to like them.  When I was little, I equated them with the gardens of elderly women:  on a par with swept dirt yards , cracked tire planters, whitewashed trunks of pecan trees.  Inside the sorts of houses that fig trees belonged to, there were sure to be dirty kitchen drawers lined with yellow, curling shelf-paper.  Sure to be window sills displaying mason jars with screw-top lids full of miscellaneous screws, and balls made from old rubber bands saved for decades.  

In Texas, my grandmother had a fig tree in her yard.  We visited every summer; every morning I watched her breakfast on figs ripe from her tree, sliced and swimming in bowls of half-and-half.  I turned up my nose.  

But I would sit cross-legged in the dappled, rustling shade underneath the tree, reading  books I found in the old glass-front bookcases; musty-smelling books I never would have dreamed of reading at home, where I had access to friends, television, the library:  Anne of Green Gables, Return of the Native.   Whose names were inscribed on the end-papers of those books?  Ancestors, I supposed.  I didn't know them. 

Now, here I am, forty-three:  when I reach for the figs on the trees outside my dining room window, maybe all that history is still within my grasp.  I part the leaves, I reach for summer with both hands.  The Girleens like them with Greek yogurt and honey.  

We get two or three at a time.  They're certainly not anything you could live on, but when I check for ripe ones while the Girleens are at school I feel like ... like what?  A good provider?  Inside the house are lists to be made, emails to answer. I am procrastinating.  I am outside in the yard, picking figs.  

Lists.  I make them, I change them.  In two weeks, I leave for  a two-week residency here.  I did this sort of thing before,  but all that was in another life, one before children.  Now I have two kids, and I find that I'm preparing for being away from them (and it's not even two weeks, it's ten days) the way a mother bear eats berries in preparation for winter.  My lists — what time people have to be at school, how many snacks have to be packed to go with them, when they have to be picked up, when and where piano lessons are, the telephone numbers of neighborhood mothers whose help has been pro-offered and gratefully accepted — have become so elaborate:  I may have to give the Husband and the Grandmother, who is coming to stay, a Powerpoint presentation before I get in the car loaded up with files and research books and computer and printer and drive off to the mountains!  

For ten days, I will be responsible for no one but myself, and this feels both seductive and frightening.

I imagine that driving-away, and it feels like it's for so long, and to such a far-away place.  I remind myself it's not rocket-science, this mothering I spend so much of the day-to-day engaged in.    Everybody will be fine!  Children learn good things from seeing their mothers engaged in work. They learn good things from going to school with hair uncombed every once in a while (this being one of my predictions)! So what if they eat too much pizza for dinner!  

I will learn good things.  I will have the chance to replenish, to write, to rub shoulders, to talk shop.  

But if people can get along without you, then they can get along without you.  And that is complicated stuff.  

So what do I do to combat my anxieties?

I pick figs, as if that would be enough to keep anyone from being hungry.  The house is better stocked with food than it usually is, no matter that I've done it so far in advance my stockpile while be long-gone by the time I drive off.  I do load after load of laundry, as if that will keep people from running out of clean clothes two weeks from now.  

    

Because I Can't Think About Much of Anything Else Right Now...

The real state of the union.  

And a glimmer of hope.  

State of the Union: September 2, 2008

I don't remember if I read this somewhere, or if it's something someone told me, but here's a stat plucked from the ether:  the average blogger (as opposed to the superstar blogger, who makes money from their avocation) keeps a blog going for about six months. 

Who knows what a blogger's ability to keep a blog going for six months means (or, equally,  if it means anything).  Maybe it takes six months to get bored with yourself.  Or maybe it takes six months to run out of anything to say.   Or maybe it takes six months to use up the goodwill of any friends out there in cyberspace who might be checking in on a regular basis.

No, I'm not pulling the plug — though these days I post so infrequently maybe I should.  But the past few weeks, between getting kids to school, keeping carpool schedules straight in my head, helping Elder Girleen weather the slings and arrows of first grade's early days (It's hard! she's wailed once or twice) and assisting Younger Girleen as she navigates the rocky shoals of her newly nap-less state, I've found myself wondering.  Wondering not why? not what's the point? but just wondering. 

OK, maybe why? and what's the point? do play a part in whatever it is that I'm wondering.  

So much of my life never ends up here.  (And maybe that's a good thing, the editoral voice that's never very far from hand chides me.)  Maybe it shouldn't.   The self-professed slant of this was "mixing the water and oil of motherhood and writing" after all. 

But at this particular second, those parameters feel like a bit of a box.  

Maybe it's that motherhood epiphanies are few and far between as you shepherd a child through first grade — it's not kindergarten when everything's new; instead, it's just life.  Or maybe it's that a summer of such active parenting has led me to a fallow fall.  Or maybe there are certain motherhood junctures when one feels the strongest need to give voice:  when the baby is born, when the first one starts school, and now just isn't one of those times.    

Soon enough, I predict, Media Studies scholars will take as their research topics like that, and we'll all be the wiser. 

But in the meantime, what we've got going on around here is just life.  

This morning, Younger Girleen and I took my car to the shop, driving eight lanes of interstate to get there.  Early morning sun palmed the guy-wires supporting the cell towers arrayed along the right-hand shoulder of the road.  A guy in an Expedition, the name Magnolia snaked across one forearm, asked in gestures if I'd let him merge in front of me.  I complied.

One of the things that needed fixing in the car was the radio, which has been on the blink for months.  The mechanic changed a fuse and .... voila!     As we drove back through town, Atlanta suddenly looked like the setting of a movie.  A movie along the lines of The Wire, but a movie all the same.  

Everything looks good when you've got the right soundtrack.  

 

Food For Thought...

First grade.  Those first few weeks as the family transitions back into the school year schedule can be a killer.  Elder Girleen has bags under her eyes like she's been cramming for a final, but honest, Ms. M the First Grade Teacher, she's in bed by eight!  

Last night, though, I know she was up a little later:  I could hear her in her bedroom reading On the Banks of Plum Creek to herself for at least half an hour.  Reading a chapter book.  The second week of first grade.  I myself don't remember much about first grade besides the tedium of Sally, Dick and Jane and the morning nit-check (it being 1970 in small town Georgia after all).  

First grade is just not what it was back then in those primitive days; in fact, a couple of times it has already seemed to me like Elder Girleen's first grade is my first grade experience, completely inverted.  She can read like nobody's business already; I was grinding through books with little more two words on each page at that age.  But on the other hand, I was walking by myself to school.  Elder Girleen can't.  

Her school isn't within walking distance from our house, which makes things easier for me:  I don't have to face any hard choices about whether or not she should.  But every morning when I drive her there or carpool with the neighbor, I think about the way things used to be — the quarter bestowed upon me so I could stop for ice cream at the soda fountain at the pharmacy on the way home, the fact that once I walked all the way home from school backwards, and down one of Athens, Georgia's main artery streets, no less — and the way they are now, when letting a first grader play in the front yard of your house may be a fraught proposition.  

All this is a rich vein to mine.  And Leonore Skenazy, a New York City mom and New York Sun columnist does just that, here. In case you missed the uproar (as I had), Skenazy let her nine-year-old take the subway home from Bloomingdale's without a parental escort and then wrote about the experience for her column.  Two days later she was on the Today Show (this is much worse than ending up on the cover of "Bad Mommy Monthly").  

Not saying I agree with everything she says ... but it is food for thought.   

Here One Day, Gone the Next

Elsewhere in the world, it may  still be the dog days of summer, but not 'round here.  

Nope, your calendar's not wrong:  it's still just early days of August, when lawns unravel into little more than crabgrass and heat leaves everything limp.  The leaves of the kudzu and the poison ivy are glossy and lustrous twining up the trunks of the trees.  The crepe myrtles have littered the ground with brassy fuschia blossoms, stridently attempting to add some color to things.  Last week, when we walked from the car to the pool,  wilted fluff from mimosas spangled the pavement.  

But even as August does what August does best, we have The First Day of School, and today the Girleens, newly-backpacked and outfitted, are off at their respective schools (first grade and preschool) experiencing life without maternal intervention.  

The house is very quiet. 

 The temperatures may be inching up into the nineties, but all you have to do is walk a first grader into their school building, opening those heavy metal doors into the smell of fresh paint and freshly-waxed linoleum floor that says first-day-of-school like nothing else can, to feel fall's onset.  It's there, like an underglaze under the panorama of summer.  

There's crisper weather ahead.  You can taste it on the tip of your tongue. 

One Week, and Counting...

School starts here in the ATL in a week, so we're celebrating these last days before the school-year routine whips us into shape by doing things we usually don't ...

... like sleeping late...

... staying in pajamas until 11 a.m....

and

... going to the swimming pool every single day...

Because being Martha Stewart is definitely one of those things I'm not a regular basis, I feel required to commemorate  the Fresh Fig Tart with Rosemary Cornmeal Tart and Lemon Mascarpone Cheese  we made this weekend.

With figs from the tree we planted two springs ago.  

You gotta celebrate the end of summer with a flourish.