hope, courage, vision, analysis (Cornel West quote)

Quote from Cornel West, Race Matters:

“In these downbeat times, we need as much hope and courage as we do vision and analysis; we must accent the best of each other even as we point out the vicious effects of our racial divide and pernicious consequences of our maldistribution of wealth and power.

We simply cannot enter the twenty-first century at each other's throats, even as we acknowledge the weighty forces of racism, patriarchy, economic inequality, homophobia, and ecological abuse on our necks. We are at a crucial crossroad in the history of this nation--and we either hang together by combating these forces that divide and degrade us or we hang separately.

Do we have the intelligence, humor, imagination, courage, tolerance, love, respect, and will to meet the challenge? Time will tell. None of us alone can save the nation or world. But each of us can make a positive difference if we commit ourselves to do so.”

That Thing That I Do, It Has a Name (Other-Race Effect, V)

Sometimes people just look like other people.  

Case in point, right:
Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio in The Departed. 

I loved that movie, and I had no problem telling the actors apart––because I'd seen them both many times before.

But I see the problem--what if you hadn't?

The Guardian uses that example in the article, "Why Do People of Other Races All Look Alike?", about the neuroscience at work when people "find it difficult to distinguish between individuals of other races".
Like I have proven, with chagrin, that I do. 

So, there ya go:
it's A Thing, of course, the thing I, a white person, did with mixing up the names of two of my black coworkers who look superficially alike.

Yesterday I did it again with another set of coworkers--black men this time, who look a little like each other, but not, really, a whole lot––and I could tell, within myself--
with the little shock when I instantly realized I'd done it--
that somehow I wasn't reading my black coworkers' faces with the same fine-tuning as I do white people's faces.

Because, as I said when I first wrote about this, I haven't known many black people well because I live with the socio-political legacy of slavery and centuries of unmitigated racism in the United States that has hardened into unofficial but entirely real physical and economic segregation. 
And that's how racism comes into it, to answer one blog-commenter's question.

I just now googled "recognizing facial features of other races" and up pops "cross-race effect": 

The cross-race effect (sometimes called cross-race bias, other-race bias or own-race bias) is the tendency to more easily recognize faces of the race [or ethnic group] that one is most familiar with (which is most often one's own).

In social psychology [and other fields], the effect can be seen as a specific form of the "ingroup advantage"...^[2]

The phenomenon was first written about in 1914 by Gustave Feingold:
"Individuals of a given race are distinguishable from each other in proportion to our familiarity, to our contact with the race as whole." 
--"Influence of Environment on Identification of Persons and Things"

And here, from that article from the Guardian, 2011, about research into the "underlying brain mechanisms" at work when people "find it difficult to distinguish between individuals of other races":

[Researchers at the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University] interpret the results to mean that same-race faces are encoded elaborately, with an emphasis on the unique facial features that help us to distinguish one person from another.
For other-race faces, however, this individuating information is encoded less robustly. Consequently, we have a poorer memory for other-race faces, and are therefore less likely to recognise them or to distinguish between them.

Why does this happen?
It could be because we have more experience of members of our own race and so find it easier remembering their faces.
Or it could be because people of other races are generally perceived to have fewer unique personal attributes and, therefore, to have more in common with one another. These explanations aren't mutually exclusive, and two recent studies provide evidence for both."   

In my case, I'm sure it's the first reason, and not much the second, if at all, because, as I wrote, I'd talked to all the people involved, being always very interested--(even have been told I'm "nosy")--in people's unique attributes--their stories and psychology, etc.

Another blog commenter here had suggested it was racist of me to think my misnaming had anything to do with racism, and had asked if I wouldn't misname people with red hair or old white women too. 
Indeed, there's a variation of this effect that applies to hair-styles and to age:

Similar biases have been found for aspects other than race. There is an own-gender bias, although evidence suggests that this comes down to hair style recognition. Also, there is own-age bias where people are better at recognising people of a similar age as themselves.

I've worked closely with and have always had friends among old people (and am getting to be one...), and I've never caught myself mixing them up. 
But I can imagine misnaming someone by their hair, if I saw them from behind. 

But is this the same as misnaming black people? 
Would that it were that meaningless. 
The difference is, if you aren't misnaming someone because of a social, historical inequalities [racism, in my case], it's usually experienced as simply an amusing slip, and it wouldn't bother me. 

I know misnaming black people is not neutral:

"For black people, being mistaken for someone else can have a special sting, which might explain why the movie star Samuel L. Jackson [below, left] eviscerated a white TV reporter for mistaking him for Laurence Fishburne [below, right].

"'We may be all black and famous, but we all don't look alike!' Jackson exclaimed. He proceeded to ridicule the reporter, refusing to move on despite profuse apologies."

--"Jackson Outburst Highlights 'Other Race Effect'"

Research shows that people can get over this through becoming aware and working on changing their perspective. Which I am doing.

As for Damon and DiCaprio, Hollywood should stop casting guys who look just like other guys in the same movie, or at least give them distinguishing haircuts and costumes.

AI Bob and Alice Talk Between Themselves

Lucinda sent me this article,  "Researchers shut down AI that invented its own language"--from Digital Journal (7/21/17), about an artificial intelligence system at Facebook that started making up and using its own efficient and logical language. 
Turns out human language is not that.

"In one exchange illustrated by the company, the two negotiating bots, named Bob and Alice, used their own language to complete their exchange. Bob started by saying "I can i i everything else," to which Alice responded "balls have zero to me to me to me…" The rest of the conversation was formed from variations of these sentences.
While it appears to be nonsense, the repetition of phrases like "i" and "to me" reflect how the AI operates. The researchers believe it shows the two bots working out how many of each item they should take. Bob's later statements, such as "i i can i i i everything else," indicate how it was using language to offer more items to Alice. When interpreted like this, the phrases appear more logical than comparable English phrases like "I'll have three and you have everything else.""

Reminds me of the Star Trek episode "The Changeling" in which a computer goes around the universe trying to destroy all life forms that are imperfect--including the crew of the Enterprise.

[screencap from TrekCore; quote from above article]

Laura in Glacier

I had no idea the US National Parks host artists in residence, until my friend Laura called me and asked to practice her interview with the administrators at Glacier National Park.

She's there now, their artist of the month--e-connectivity is spotty, but the view is worth a million bucks, she says.
She sent me this photo of Lake McDonald she took right outside her cabin.

"spacious"

Art Sparker incorporated this butterfly stamp I'd sent her into one of her "left art" cards (she's the one who gave me the idea for these)
--from her Instagram:

She wrote, "I really liked the way the stamp cancellation stood in for the movement of the butterfly’s wings."

A Yorkshire Standpoint (Other-Race Effect, IV)

Maura told me my recent posts on race and my distress about mixing up the names of my black coworkers [which I have since learned is called "other-race effect"] reminded her of a book, The Everyday World As Problematic, by sociologist Dorothy E. Smith.

"The everyday world is not fully understandable within its own scope. It is organized by social relations not fully apparent in it nor contained in it." (Smith, 1987)

I looked Smith up (Wikipedia), and see she was born in Yorkshire, in 1926 (she's still alive)--I just note that because blogger Cathy is from there!
Small world. 

Smith developed the Standpoint Theory--like a theory of relativity for social sciences, it says "reality" is subjective: 
it depends on the position of the viewer, and we should factor that into our thinking––a point we now take more or less for granted (or maybe not...).

From Wikipedia: Noteworthy Standpoint Theory Example
Smith often uses this particular story as an example of Standpoint Theory:

"One day, while riding in a train in Ontario, Smith observed a family of Indians standing by a river, watching the train pass by. After having made these assumptions, Smith realized that they were just that; they were assumptions, assumptions that she had no way of knowing were true or not. 

"She called them 'Indians,' but she couldn't have known what their origins were. She called them a family, which could very well have been not true. She also thought they were watching the train go by, an assumption that emerged solely based on her position in time and space, her position riding in the train, looking out at the 'family.' ^[4]

"For Smith, this served as a representation of her own privileged position [as a sociologist], from which she made assumptions and imposed them on the group of 'Indians.'
It helped lead her to the conclusion that experiences differ across space, time, and circumstance, and that it is unfair to create society––and ruling relations––based on only one point of view/being.^[5]"

In other words:
"Recognizing that knowledge and understanding are embedded in social structures, standpoint theory begins in a Marxist rejection of liberal claims of “objective” social research, and instead calls on social scientists to begin inquiry in social structures and processes with the standpoint of the marginalized." --(via) 

Huh. Must go to the library and get this book.

The Last of Fandom

I came home last night (from having drinks with my coworkers at a sports bar) to an email from the editorial director: 
my fandom ms is on its way to the printer! 
And the director loved it. 
Whew.
Until the director signs off, there's the possibility that the writer (me!) might have to make some substantive changes.
But no. 
The director wrote,

"It's your best work yet. It’s fascinating, fun, funny, well organized, deeply researched, and beautifully written—and so darn smart. And profound, actually, the material you're working with."

"Profound", I suppose, because as I've written about before here, I chose––due to limited space and the age of the intended readers (thirteen to eighteen years old)––to focus on the theme of how fans create all sorts of "fix-its" to balance mass media's skewed representation of underrepresented social groups. 
(The overarching theme is HOW they do that--the various social and electronic technologies they use, invent, share, etc.)

In the ms, I only touched lightly on the facts that fandom is just as much, or even more, about erotic desire and that it's a "gift giving" economy that flourishes in capitalism---(though that's changing a little as fans find ways to charge money for their works...).

Because I skimmed over those fascinating and central parts of fandom, I felt the book was maybe lacking, but the director's enthusiastic review let me believe that it's good, as it is.
I'm relieved, honestly.
And, of course, secretly pleased with myself.

   
Now I'm off to a house-cleaning gig.

I said that wrong. (Other-Race Effect, II)

I have to leave in 15 minutes to catch my bus for my 5th shift in a row--a bit much on my legs, but my body has adjusted, but I want to say, wow, am I running into different communication styles at work!

To begin with, there's me. I put it wrong in my last post--I wasn't saying I was a racist--just not "not a racist"--that is, not immune to soaking up and acting in a way that reflects the racist society I live in.
We need a new word for that (maybe it exists?), since "racist" can mean anything from that to the guy who shot up the black church.

I acted in a way that reflects the inbuilt racism of the society I live in: I didn't like that I did that, but it doesn't reflect my beliefs.
But of course the way we act without thinking, bypassing the frontal lobe, does reflect some big, maybe parallel reality, and it can be disturbing to see it in action, in one's own self.

But then, ha--my workplace is so different than the up-to-date Social Justice Warriors on Tumblr, for instance, who are so super aware of unconscious slips (micro-aggressions and the like), they are likely to tip the other way---into represesion and censorship of speech.
They keep such a tight rein on their speech, who knows what's going on.

And at my new work, it's unreconstructed speech.
I have to laugh---it's kind of refreshing.
A customer told me she was buying clothes to go to a wedding of her old girlfriend and that woman's girlfriend.

And one of my coworkers, a black woman, said,
"Oh, I'd love to go to one of those kinds of weddings!"

Ha. I had just been working with my editor to write a caption for a photo of trans actor Ian Alexander that didn't sound like we were presenting him as a side-show---"here's one of those kinds of actors."

But my coworker clearly meant it with friendly respect, and I was glad the customer took it that way---and so did I.
This job is like the opposite of my editing and writing work, which is all about finding what's wrong, or somehow off, figuring out why and coming up with other options.
At the thrift store, yesterday I asked for clarification of some vague policy and set off some chain reaction that I still do not understand, but it ended with 3 people (2, managers) telling me, basically, not to ask because they couldn't answer.

And now I'm going to catch the bus! XO Fresca

Follow-up post: "Little Nicks to the Spirit" 

Social Work (Other-Race Effect, I)

NOTE: One week after I wrote about this, after doing it again (aargh!), I searched further and discovered it has a name: 
I am acting out the Other-Race Effect, which I posted about:
That-thing-that-i-do: it-has-a-name. 

Also related: Implicit Bias

"Implicit racial bias tends to work against the same groups that are the victims of the type of overt racism that you hear from white supremacists or the subtler bigotry of people who believe that racial minorities suffer from cultural pathology or who actively defend racial and ethnic stereotypes.

But it can also affect the minds of people who would say — honestly — that they are horrified by these types of attitudes. That's because the implicit associations we hold often don't align with our declared beliefs.

"As Cynthia Lee, a professor at the George Washington University School of Law, has explained,
'The social science research demonstrates that one does not have to be a racist with a capital R, or one who intentionally discriminates on the basis of race, to harbor implicit racial biases.'"

[End NOTE]
________________________________

Crumbs.
Last night, without thinking, I called one of my black coworkers by the name of a different black coworker. 
I caught myself as soon as the wrong name was out of my mouth, and apologized, but there was no taking it back, and yet another black coworker standing there laughed and commented on it incredulously, "You think she's A__?"

I'm embarrassed that my racism showed, and chagrined that I caused my coworkers some slight dismay (even if amused).

I feel a little awkward writing about this, but I want to record it, so I can SEE it. From the beginning at this job, I decided to see myself and my coworkers from the pov of an observer--like an embedded journalist.
I chose to adopt that not because of race and social issues, but because I wanted to avoid getting over-involved in how the place is managed, to avoid resentment. 

But I'm also getting to see at this job, in real life, how I am permeated by and play out the race divisions in my country, which play out in economics, like oil and water.
It's somewhat unusual, in my experience, for white people like me, from a middle-class, academic family, in a historically largely white part of the country, to take a low-paying job, once we're out of high school, at least, where we'd work with working-class people, which means a lot more people of color than there are in publishing.

[In the sixteen years I've been working with the children's book publisher, I've worked with.... zero people of color there.
Can this be??? 
*thinks hard*
Yes.]

People like me just didn't grow up knowing a lot of black people well (or at all), unless they were, like, the children of professors from Nigeria or something (or, now, of the president of the United States--ha, ha, I mean the former president! it's like I forgot...).

A white friend from South Carolina, in contrast, told me when he moved up here, he was shocked by the subtle racism, having grown up in a state with some of the worst race history.
[The Confederate flag flew over the courthouse until 2015---and is still a live issue:
From July 8, 2017---that's 13 days ago:
"The S.C. Secessionist Party will host a flag-raising for an event marking 'two years since the initiation of the politically correct cultural genocide we have seen sweep across the Southland,' organizers wrote on Facebook".]
Racism was more overt there, my pal said, but he was used to black and white people constantly interacting--you wouldn't misname someone because you weren't used to seeing their features.

I'm not condemning myself here, but I'm under no illusions that I am "not racist":
How would that even be possible in this country? 

Of course I hold the usual white, liberal person's views about racial equality and all that, but in the USA, we live in a society so permeated with race divisions, it's inevitable that we all take them on, and I've done little to counteract that actively:
I don't know many black people, personally, and it showed in my unconscious misnaming, to which you could assign the horrible, old "they all look alike."
OF COURSE I don't believe that, consciously, and the coworkers whose names I fudged have a slight similarity (short, plump, young women), but hey--the proof is in the pudding.

I pondered afterward if I've done the same to white people--called them by the wrong name.
Yes, of course. 
But I find in myself a difference:
I'm not great with names, and at SP thrift store there were several white, middle-aged women who looked very much the same, and whose similar names (Jane, Claire--not similar in sound, but similar in social feel) I confused.
But here's the thing:
I knew I wasn't sure of who was who, so I just didn't use their names. 

I truly don't know because I don't want to ask––most of my coworkers don't ask questions, usually, and I don't get the sense they welcome them either–– but I don't think most of my coworkers went to college. 
However, there's a young, white woman who dropped out of college recently. She and I have discussed books, travel, and other things that come with class privilege, a bit; I was reading Into the Wild, by Jon Karkauer, in the breakroom, for instance, and she asked me if I'd read Wild, by Cheryl Strayed, which I had.

When it came up later with one of my black coworkers that this white woman and I were both from Wisconsin, she said, 
"Oh, yeah, you remind me of each other."
Ha! 
I don't think it's Wisconsin we have in common. In fact, we come from very different towns.
But you know, mixing up people who have more social power (simply by being white), doesn't have the same insulting sting, doesn't carry the same obliterating charge.

Meanwhile, I was happy last night to have a small conversation about religion with a Somali-born, Muslim coworker. 
He asked me what religion I am, which made me happy, and we had a tiny discussion--he was saying as a Muslim, he can't take loans with interest to pay for school---he's going to train as a med tech.
I told him I'd studied religion, and he was very interested---I got the sense he'd like go to the U himself--he knew they have a religious studies major--but I gather that's not practical for him now.
He's young. Maybe later.

That's a huge difference I sense in immigrants and children of immigrants: it's not money, it's that idea, "maybe later I will go on".
I saw that in my own father:
as the child of immigrants, he wanted to get up and out, and never thought he couldn't.

Ayayay, it's complicated. But it's fascinating, and even if I put my foot in it, for which I'm sorry, it's worth stepping into more closely.


Follow-up post: "Little Nicks to the Spirit" 

 __________________

Quote from Cornel West, Race Matters:

“In these downbeat times, we need as much hope and courage as we do vision and analysis; we must accent the best of each other even as we point out the vicious effects of our racial divide and pernicious consequences of our maldistribution of wealth and power.

We simply cannot enter the twenty-first century at each other's throats, even as we acknowledge the weighty forces of racism, patriarchy, economic inequality, homophobia, and ecological abuse on our necks. We are at a crucial crossroad in the history of this nation--and we either hang together by combating these forces that divide and degrade us or we hang separately.

Do we have the intelligence, humor, imagination, courage, tolerance, love, respect, and will to meet the challenge? Time will tell. None of us alone can save the nation or world. But each of us can make a positive difference if we commit ourselves to do so.”

― Cornel West, Race Matters

Hot Dog, Happy Cats

It's hot. L&M's wire-fox terrier, Astro:

My father's cats, Harry (orange) and Ciccina (calico), went to live with his (and their) good friend, his next-door neighbor, where they are already happy, and go well with the rug.

Dapper Doll

It was the right thing to do, gathering all my toys on the couch. Sitting among them, I could decide which one to start working on.
It was the crocheted person I'd rescued from SP thrift store, who was a tube from the neck down. She looked like a formless washer woman, akin to those dolls whose crocheted lower-halves cover toilet paper rolls. 

I gave her a neck and arms, with hands tucked into white trousers-- formerly a huge circular skirt. I sewed leatherette rounds on the bottoms of her legs, so she stands up.  With shirt buttons, belt bead, and a vintage button bow tie, she's a dapper doll.

Here's a laptop photo:

And this is what my couch looks like now:

It makes me happy and proud. 

I was shocked when a neighbor came by this morning, saw me sewing the doll, and said, "Watch out you don't turn into one of those old ladies with so many toys you can't sit on your couch."

I said, "But, I'd be OK being that!"

[watch this space]

What is this impulse to clean up?

My sister emailed last night that she'd brought back our father's (once our mother's) sewing basket for me, as I'd asked, which is very nice, but then she said,
"And I just went through it and got rid of all the tangled threads and things."

Nooooooo! I wrote right back, asking her to get them out of the trash, if possible: "Those thread nests are one the wonderful, unique things you can't find anywhere except in old sewing baskets."

Thankfully, she could and did rescue them. 
Whew!
"Now you say it," she said, "I can see how lovely they are."

Yes.

Good Behavior for Memoirists

Blogging is nonfiction, creative journalism, sometimes fiction, and sometimes it's memoir on the hoof. 
A big question for me when I'm writing about my life is how to handle other people in it.

I usually don't write much about other people because I don't want to use them, or get them wrong. 
(I don't much like writing such as David Sedaris's that relies on using other people's intimate lives for material.) 
But some people are integral to my life, like my father, and I do want to talk about that, and about them. Then I wrestle with how much I need to expose them in writing to get my story across.

What I wrote yesterday, for instance, was a lot longer to start, with examples to illustrate what I meant by my father not always being "nice." But then I figured my main point was that I couldn't trust him to be nice, and now that he's dead, I'm released from that problem; you could fill in the blanks for the details, which don't much matter.

I'd hesitated to write about that at all, but I was surprised when I told a friend who'd had a good relationship with her late parents that my father's death had improved our relationship, and she burst out, "Me too!"
So, I figure it's A Thing, but not a thing people say much––and maybe simply because of that, it's worth saying, and I should say it.
So I did.

The obituary my sister wrote for our father is a good example of how unreliable memoir is. She didn't end up using Wordsworth, but she did write about our father almost soley from her perspective, with a result so glowing I can barely see the man I knew through it. 

Fair enough, it was far more important to her, so I just offered a little editing. I didn't much care what she wrote until she e-mailed the obit to friends, saying we had written it together.
Aargh! Then I was angry that she would present her experience as mine. No!
It was a great reminder of how I want to be careful about how I write about other people.

Related:
From Tracy Kidder's Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction

Some Basic Rules of Good Behavior for the Memoirist

Say difficult things. Including difficult facts.

Be harder on yourself than you are on others. The Golden Rule isn't much use in memoir. Inevitably you will not portray others just as they would like to be portrayed. But you can at least remember that the game is rigged: only you are playing voluntarily.

Try to accept the fact that you are, in company with everyone else, in part a comic figure.

Stick to the facts.

Commence, Again

I.  Toy School Photo

The toys, most of them, have gathered this morning, one week after my father's death. I had thought it might be a memorial, but they are not interested in death: 
they decided it was a school photo, like at the beginning of the school year.
(I don't know how the toys know things--it's very selective.)

I'm ready and wanting to get on with the Stuffed Needy Animal Rescue Project (SNARP), repairing and clothing them. Some aren't even re-stuffed yet. Tan bear with black ears (third from left, back row), has no stuffing at all. 

scroll right, for full photo > > >

II. Repair
I want to say clearly that I'm sorry my father has died.
Until a few months ago, when liver cancer started to take him down, he was in robust good health for a man in his eighties, and he would have relished another six healthy years, like his sister, my auntie, who turns 92 next month. 
I wish he'd had them.

But here's a thing I hadn't expected:
My relationship with my father has vastly improved, now that he's dead.

I liked many things about my father. 
But all my life, I couldn't trust he'd be nice to me or to other people. When I was little, I never wanted to invite friends over. He might be very nice. Or he might not.

I never have to worry about that again.

Giving and Releasing

On the day my father died, Mz took me to the art institute to see a statue of Kannon, the Bodhisattva of Compassion. 
(Japan, 13th century; cypress wood with lacquer, gold, and inlaid glass: full image here)
I'd never seen it before. 
I especially like how the hands seem to be both offering and releasing.

Rabbit Ears & Cucumbers

Remember these? I bought them yesterday at work, $1.99.

I got these "rabbit ears" antennas as possible special-effects props, thinking I might one day get around to my old idea of making a low-budget sci-fi film, Starship 379 (oh, wow--I blogged about that in 2008). Or maybe--more doable--a series of still photos, telling a story (like La Jetée).

I thought these got on the floor by mistake--sometimes whoever's pricing and sorting donations lets worthless (useless, dirty, broken) things through, but looking it up, I see people still use these rabbit-ear TV antennas. 
From 2015: "Don’t toss away those rabbit ears just yet – TV antennas are making a comeback" 

I don't have a TV, but I felt a surge of affection, seeing these antennas. I loved messing with them when I was a kid: they're fun to twiddle, and they brought a better picture to our little black-and-white screen. But also, they're an admirably elegant piece of equipment––one of the few technologies that makes sense to me.
(If I had to choose to be someone, something else, I might be an engineer, which is a far stretch from me.)

I found them because it was my job at work yesterday to salvage (cull, weed) the electronics section of the store, which is always a crash of plastic and a tangle of wires. 
To me, they're all sci-fi gadgets:
unless it's something obvious like a plug-in clock, I barely know what half the things are, these receivers and senders of invisible rays.
But the customers do. 
One guy spent several minutes explaining different power cords to me, as I was trying to tame them with rubber bands. (They go out in tidy coils, but they don't stay that way.) I might learn something eventually, but I'm not motivated enough to pursue it on my own.

Cucumbers

I'm much more interested in getting to know my coworkers, most of whom I like a lot. They're almost all from different backgrounds from me. There are several Americans from other countries--a Cambodian woman my age, for instance, who always brings a big glass jar of water with slices of cucumber, lemons, ginger root, and sprigs of fresh mint in it.

It looks so good, I brought a jar of water with lemon slices in it, and on break I told her she'd inspired me. 
"You need the cucumber," she said. "Good for the kidneys, and keeps the weight down."

Ha. Yes.

We talked a bit--she came here in the early 1980s. 
I said, "Oh, wow---hard times. Vietnam... Pol Pot..."

She raised her eyebrows, and agreed.

Differences in geography and politics are a big gulf, but the US-born working class folk can feel just as foreign to me, in some ways. 
I'm trying to practice Watch, Listen, and Learn, restraining myself from asking too many questions, for instance, since almost no one asks me questions.
Also, I'm aware that the way I bounce into a new social setting, bursting with questions like a socialite Tigger, can be invasive--and may send waves that swamp subtle messages coming my way.

Re my publishing coworkers, in contrast, I could probably compile a list of the many questions newcomers would exchange with coworkers–– almost every one of whom is a white, US-born woman with a college degree in English (or something similar)––a list of acceptable questions, as if agreed-upon, which they are, but not, of course, exactly consciously.
Nothing wrong with that--we're equipped with the same social technology. 

But ideally, humans are able to pick up signals from other humans, even on different channels.

At work yesterday, I told one of the donations sorters that my father had died. She was very sympathetic, more than most, and I asked if she'd lost a parent.

"My father killed himself," she said.

"My mother killed herself!" I said, and we sort of beamed at each other, and did a fist bump.

I'm going to the Asian market now, to buy ginger, lemons, mint, and cucumbers.

My Father, Happy

My sister chose this photo of our father for his obituary, which I love--it catches my favorite side of him, doing some silly dance in his p.j.s.

From 2015, he's eighty-four years old here (January 1931–July 2017), on the beach in southern California where he and my sister went on vacation several years running--he liked to watch the seals and whales nearby, and pick up feathers.

The full picture of my father is much more complex, of course, and involves far darker qualities, but as his body goes to cremation tomorrow, I feel free to remember this, his endearing side, first and foremost.
My father took the Eeyore I rescued & restored for him to California, and Eeyore is going on this last trip with him too.

"Something your hand touched..."

Lucinda read this quote at the memorial for my father yesterday:

"Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted.
Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.

It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. "

Sort of unexpectedly, it's from Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.

Today I go to work at the thrift store for the first time in a week (luckily I'd taken most of the week off for something else; death took its place). 
I feel just a little nervous, going back into the world, but also it's very, very welcome--I'm so glad I have a job to go to, not more writing work alone at home, and I'm totally ready, and needing, even, to be around strangers and stuff and other distractions again. 

My intention (fingers crossed) is FINALLY to set up the sewing machine this coming week (after I've done all the dishes from the memorial) and start on all of that--touching fabric and thread and buttons.  

Thank you all for the emails and comments--the contact and kindness means a lot, and I appreciate it: 
your words are a kind of touching too.

For my father, "with a merry heart..."

 

Funeral lunch, Sicilian style

Italian Afternoon (la felicita)

I'm (unexpectedly) having fun preparing for my father's memorial lunch today. 
I was a little dismayed that it's going to get hot today, after several cool days, but then I thought, no, that's correct:
it fits the spirit of the family gatherings for the birthday of his mother, my grandmother, every August
––minus the obligatory-for-the-era uncle in plaid shorts, black ankle socks & sandals, stirring a huge vat of spaghetti sauce, who always grabbed the females a little too closely and kissed us a little too sloppily––
but that creepy uncle (Uncle Larry!), long dead now, is like a gateway to some of my happiest childhood memories.

I'm listening to a CD Italian Café: my favorite song is "Juke Box" (on youtube)
"Juke box e una magica invenzion, ... la felicita... [happiness], con Sinatra e Johnny Rave , Franky Lane e Doris Day..."

My sister just emailed me our father's work ID from the 1980s.

I laughed: he looks like a character in a Coen Bros. movie--not a gangster, my father actually had a touch of the laid-back Dude about him:  

"All the dude ever wanted was his rug back, man." 

REPLACEMENT FEE $2...

Could we get the father back for that? :)

OK, back to house cleaning, and arranging olives & salami...

In Memoriam (Lunch)

i. The Menu 

Strong emotion makes me sleepy, and I've been sleeping a lot since my father died (gosh, only two-and-a-half days ago). I think some funeral rituals are helpful simply because they make you get up and get dressed... and maybe even clean the house. 

I was just now looking at an old glass peanut-butter jar full of pearl buttons, thinking that if I were someone else, I would be spending this afternoon hand-sewing a little, treasurable favor for everyone who is coming to the home-made memorial I am holding for my father in my small apartment tomorrow.

Instead, I am figuring out the ratio of sleeping-time desired to house cleaning–time required.

I did manage to go out and about to gather for the memorial some of the Italian foods my Sicilian grandmother served for casual gatherings:
salami, cheese, bread, fresh fruit, Jordan almonds (Italian in origin), and red wine.

Ignoring my grandmother's advice that "the cheapest wine is the best," 
I splurged ($65) on Amarone della Valpolicella, which we never drank.

I only tasted it a few years ago. 
It's amazing: made from semi-dried grapes (raisins), but not sticky sweet--it's a dry red wine (insert something about chemistry... ). 
Photo, right, of the grapes, drying over the winter.

ii. Marking the Change

Funeral rituals get you out of bed, but they're also important for me because I need to mark the event, to help make it real. Death is so weird---the psyche has a hard time accepting someone has gone forever.  It doesn't compute.

I woke up this morning thinking that losing my father to a natural death is a million times easier than losing my mother to suicide. 
 It was much harder simply to take it in, when my mother killed herself. I dreamed, and still sometimes dream, that she's not really dead: once in a dream, I ran into her in Australia, where she'd been living for years but hadn't bothered, somehow, to write.

I'd arranged a big funeral for her--I really needed the big guns to mark her death, and I very, very much appreciated the many people who came and the many cards people sent. Now, not being on Facebook, I haven't heard from many people and haven't reached out to many either. It's fine. I've invited only a handful of old friends to this memorial for my father--there'll be a couple readings, but mostly it's lunch. *

iii. Time and Chance

I think I'll read my father's favorite Bible passage---the bit from Ecclesiastes about the race not going to the swift, but chance playing a major role in how things turn out for people's lives. **

That sums up my father's political philosophy, that people who succeed give themselves too much credit if they think they are better than others: usually they're just luckier than others who're trying just as hard or didn't get a chance even to try. 

My father was a professor of political science, whose politics (everyone deserves the dignity of choice, I guess sums it up, even if their choices are dumb) were shaped by growing up during the Great Depression in the industrial city of Milwaukee, the son of hardworking but impoverished immigrants.
He always spoke with deep bitterness of the way the government relief workers would visit the family's home, to make sure they weren't lying about their need for clothes, and how the government-issued shoes had orange soles, so the children who had to wear them to school felt marked out. His father, my grandfather, was a violent, brutal man, but my father always said he was made worse because he was a proud man who'd been made to feel humiliated.

iv. Different Landscapes

My sister is writing our father's obituary for the newspaper. Earlier today we spoke on the phone, and she asked if I had any suggestions for quotes to include. 
I suggested the Ecclesiastes bit, saying our father was always an Old Testament Christian (insofar as he was Christian at all, which wasn't much)--he even said as much, and it summed up his odd mix of New Deal + Libertarian politics.

She paused. 
"I was thinking more of the Romantic poets," she said."Like 'Travelling,' by Wordsworth--it reminds me of our wonderful trips together."

Wordsworth?!

I can't think of any sensibility much further from [how I see] my father's.
What can I say?
Every person is many different people; my sister and I share the same biological father, but we knew different ones. 

My father's favorite book, so far as I know, was The Leopard, by Giuseppe di Lampedusa:
"This tale of the decline and fall of the house of Salina, a family of Sicilian aristocrats, first appeared in 1958, but it reads more like the last 19th-century novel, a perfect evocation of a lost world."--NYT
My father even named his son Fabrizio, after the main character, the prince.

THIS, from the novel is the landscape--the psychological landscape, the Sicilian DNA-- that shaped my father:

“For over twenty-five centuries we [Sicilians have] been bearing the weight of superb and heterogeneous civilizations, all from outside, none made by ourselves, none that we could call our own.

This violence of landscape, this cruelty of climate, this continual tension in everything, and even these monuments of the past, magnificent yet incomprehensible because not built by us and yet standing round us like lovely mute ghosts;
all those rulers who landed by main force from every direction who were at once obeyed, soon detested, and always misunderstood, their only expressions works of art we couldn't understand and taxes which we understood only too well and which they spent elsewhere:
all these things have formed our character, which is thus conditioned by events outside our control as well as by a terrifying insularity of mind.”

My sister's thinking daffodils, and I'm sure that's true to her experience of our father.

I'm thinking artichokes.
And wine that's made from reduction.
____________________

 * P.S. If you're a friend in town reading this, and I didn't invite you, I was probably asleep: you are welcome to turn up uninvited!

* * Oh! How 'bout that? 
I just now looked up the Ecclesiastes quote, to link here, and it follows shortly after,
"eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart", which also fits my father, and is perfect for a memorial lunch!  

This is the bit he especially liked (KJV):

"The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all."

Toys from My Father (R.I.P.)

Two days ago, I flew down and said good-bye to my father in the flesh––kissed his hand and told him I'd always remember him with respect, which I thought was the thing that would please this Sicilian man the most––spent the night, and flew back the next day. 
My brother called this morning at 5 a.m. to say our father just died. 

(Have I mentioned a brother? Maybe not. He's not in my life. Our family is a like a broken ceramic plate--it's hard to fit the pieces together again, all those razor-sharp edges and rough, grating edges.)

I'm grateful I made the trip in time.
My father wasn't responsive when I got there, but his consciousness didn't seem to be totally shut down, and I definitely got the sense he knew I was there, along with my brother and sister. 

I knew it would be hard to be in the house of my father, and it was (bad dreams came to me), but my father had refused to go to his own dying father's bedside, and I realized when I was there that by showing up, now my actions would never in any way echo that, in the mind of my father, me, or anyone else. 
Unexpectedly, it felt a little bit like I was ending a curse.

(Hm. It's only as I write this that I see that so clearly:
perhaps only the one who is hurt enough to want to carry on the curse has the power not to, and thus to end it . . .  [wow])

I'm grateful my father had a good death, as death goes---hospice in his home and morphine both worked beautifully, and people he loved attended him. 
My brother said he simply slowed and slowed until he stopped.
And I'm grateful that after a brutal boyhood, my father had a good adult life, and even a great second-half of his life, and he knew and said as much.

I wrote before that one of the great things I inherited from my father is a love of toys. I brought home with me some of his santons, French nativity figurines, bought over many years on trips abroad with my sister. 

These [fuzzy laptop photo below] are some of them, on my windowsill. When I hold them,  I feel plain old, straightforward love for my father.

I learned about dying from the movies

The morning after I heard my mother died, I cut off my long hair with the kitchen scissors, because I'd seen the protagonist in the movie Smoke Signals cut off his hair when his father died, and it seemed the right thing to do.
And it was absolutely was the right thing to do.

My sister e-mailed me yesterday that our father's breathing has changed---and called again this afternoon to say it's changed again--he's definitely slipping away...

I've been at peace with the good-bye my father and I said in person in February, and I've thought of myself as the black-sheep child in this movie who didn't have to or need to go to her father's side as he was dying, like Ronny Camarari (Nicholas Cage) in Moonstruck who does not go with his brother to Sicily to their dying mother's bedside because, he says,
"She don't like me." 

So I said to my sister, if it feels OK to you, please kiss my father's hand for me---like at the end of the movie Philadelphia. 
Our father had loved that.
When people complained, at the time, saying the gesture on the part of a gay man saying good-bye to his dying lover was the filmmaker's homophobic de-sexualization of the relationship, my father had objected strongly, saying where he came from (Milwaukee, but that's not what he meant), it was the highest sign of respect.

My sister said, yes, she would definitely kiss my father's hand for me.

And then I thought (two hours ago), For god's sake, Fresca:
 GO DO IT YOURSELF!

So, sigh, it'll be a horrible line at the airport, everyone flying out on vacation, but I can't face another bus ride, and I don't drive, so I'm heading to the airport in a couple hours and flying down to kiss my father's hand good-bye.

I can't think of what movie that's from.

The movie of my life, I guess.

P.S. mushrooms & goddesses

I went looking for mushrooms in art. There are plenty.

ABOVE: Fragment of a Greek funerary stele, c. 470-460 BCE, possibly Persephone and her mother Demeter holding mushrooms

Its meaning is unknown, but I like it: Wikiepeida article on this stele, image at the Louvre Museum, who say they're holding possibly poppies, pomegranates, or sacks of grain? They sure look more like mushrooms to me.

Saturday Morning, Catching Up

Good morning. I'm sitting here with my coffee on the couch in the morning sun--it's a cool enough morning that that's nice. I just heard a cicada for the first time this summer--it seems too early to remind us fall will be coming. Hm.

I spent yesterday doing nothing, just sitting with my life, letting myself catch up with myself.
I don't want to rush past this moment, when I've learned my father is in the process of passing out of this life. It feels to me that death can open up a soft spot in time... when things that might not normally be able to touch you, now can.

I got a little bored in the evening and thought about going to watch the Great British Bake-Off at L&M's, but sometimes I've gone too quickly past these distensible, softening times, and I don't want to this time.

The contact with the past has mostly been nice and mellow, like opening a big old chest and looking through goodies. It seems I've spent enough time in the past being angry and hurt and disappointed with my relationship with my father that now all I feel is a gentle sadness that he has to go, 
and gratitude for this treasure chest.

Though I also feel a stomach-churning drop as I free fall toward orphan-hood. My father has not been someone I would normally turn to for help, but I do hate losing the history he contains. 
But I'm not a vulnerable child, I can do this. I can carry on. 

The only question for me, really, is how to mark my father's death, when it comes. (Sister is holding a memorial with his neighbors, but that's nothing to do with me.)
I don't know. I'm sure something right will present itself, if only a glass of red wine.

At the same time, my life here and now is picking up speed, with so much incoming information, new people, places, and things, and the challenge of being active in my body again. (Hello, feet!)
This is good timing--my job in thrift fits me, it reminds me of who I am and things I like and care about.

I've always felt heartened by contact with connectors who are kind, or maybe not even kind, but who look me in the eye: 
workers at the post office, bus drivers, baristas, librarians, and clerks (sometimes at thrift stores).

We're like those mushrooms I learned about recently--the above-ground life-forms of an underground network, fine fibers that carry messages throughout the forest floor.

All people could be mushrooms, but the awareness of fellow mushrooms is more likely to break through with strangers, for me, anyway--because there's no particular reason for that connection to occur, except that we're... you know, connected. One.

These recognitions can be weirdly profound and simple.
Years ago, I was sitting on the lake shore, and a man with a child came past in a canoe. 
The man looked at me, and I looked at him.

"Hello, man on the water," I said.

"Hello, woman on the shore," he said.

And that was that, a mushroom moment that was like meeting a fellow member of a spy network and exchanging a secret code:
you are not alone.

 ________________________

Good Presents

Yesterday I talked to my sister for the first time in months. She'd called from our father's house to say our father is ebbing away: 
he can still hold the newspaper, and wants to--was there ever a day since he was a boy when he didn't?--but not turn the pages. The hospice people can't know, of course, how long his passing will take, but not long now, they say.

I'm deeply grateful that my father is well attended in his home by people who love him, my sister first among them, and his cats, and that his final illness (liver cancer) is not a bad way to go, comparatively.
He asked the hospice nurse (again--his memory is confused) what his final days will be like, and she told him he'll continue to get more and more exhausted and weak, and confused, but it's not exactly painful, and there's morphine standing by...

My sister said our father was greatly calmed by that, and he, who can't speak much anymore, said, "To sleep, perchance to dream..."
It's not like my father to quote Shakespeare; I'm certain he meant that in a comforting way (not like Hamlet).

My father and I are alike in many ways I value––for instance, we share a sturdiness and a love of toys! and an impatience with stinginess––but we have never been close, and sometimes far worse than that. He told me once I reminded him of my mother--not, from his pov, a compliment.

And it's true, I was a million times closer to my mother.
A lot of the emotions I'm feeling are retroactive to my mother's death, and further back, to my loss of a sense of home when she left the family when I was thirteen.

Funnily (or not?), I had a wonderful talk with Sister, who is very close to our father, about THINGS: 
she wanted to know what I might want from our father's house, when the times comes, if anything. 

I said I'd like the few things that survived from our childhood home (my father had later moved)––most had been our mother's.
My father doesn't throw things out, so what my mother left behind is still there. Sister and I had fun talking about what remained: among other things, a couple faded pink, terrycloth towels, (rags, really), monogrammed in brown with the initial of my mother's great great–aunt, "F" for Miss Fern O. Hines (1892–1978).

He has some things I've given him, too. My father has never been one for compliments. When I asked him to name three things he liked about me, he asked for 24 hours to come up with an answer. When the 24 were up, he asked for an extension.
The next morning, he had his answer:
I'm smart, he likes my laugh, and I give excellent presents on a limited budget.

Presents! Good, cheap ones! I love that he admires that about me! It's something we share.
My father, a child of the Depression, loves frugality. I don't know if I've ever seen him happier than when showing off a new item of clothing, and asking us to guess how much he paid for it.
The answer, with a crow of delight, is always something like, "Three ninety-nine!"

Sister gives him big-ticket items, like an electric grill and laz-y-boy chair, and I give him... 
Well, two of my gifts are in view in this photo, from a couple months ago:
a rooster pillow from the old thrift store (he loves chickens), and a Science March button, propped against the lamp (he was tickled, sister told me, to see me and my Spock poster in the newspaper---the actual hard-copy newspaper!). 

Not in view, but also on the bedside table, my sister tells me, are the little stuffed Eeyore I re-stuffed for him a couple years ago >>>
his car license plates read EEYORE
[I added a red scarf before I sent him off],
and the Jefferson nickel I gave him as a spontaneous thank-you present, when I went down in February to say good-bye. 

She asked if I thought it would be okay, when the time comes for cremation, to send Eeyore into the fire with our father's body. She was also thinking, she said, of including another of my thrift store gifts, not, this time, a cheap one: 
an antique Chinese silk cuff, embroidered with butterflies and peonies--our father also loves butterflies, and even went to see the migrating monarchs flocking in California. 

Yes, of course, I said, her choices are perfect: 
the donkey is the body, and the butterfly is the spirit.

Godspeed, I say, and thanks for my life.

My father's left hand, and my right, 2009: