My friend Nina’s twin girls arrived today — two little girls with full heads of black hair, who came out squalling and who each bit the doctor! Nina is my dear friend, the one I called when that assistant coroner was sitting in his truck in front of my house a year ago, waiting to see if I had someone who would come. Nina came, and she cooked pot roast for days and took care of me and everyone else who gathered in my kitchen that week. Nina’s last pregnancy ended in stillbirth, so this one has been fraught. We’ve…
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Last night I was reading Tara Bray Smith’s memoir, West of Then, when I came across a familiar name in the text. It’s an unusual name, and I looked at it, and thought I wonder if that’s who I think it is? The age would be about right, and my friend also grew up in Hawaii in, shall we say, a sort of hippie household. So I called her up, and she said that yes, it was her, and that the whole thing has been really difficult for her. Smith used not only her first name in the book, but…
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I have an old friend here in town — one of those people with whom I was friends in my 20s — and well, we’ve taken very different paths as adults. Her husband works as a conservative activist for a libertarian think tank, and my friend has become increasingly involved with the conservative cause. They’re nice people, who are raising good kids. But they’re also the kind of trust-funders I grew up with, the sort who don’t question their own level of privilege, and who believe that they deserve their bigger piece of the pie. Like I said, we’ve taken…
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Well, last night all the air went out of my good intentions, out of my determination not to let them get to me, out of my belief that we will, in the long run prevail in our intentions to build a progressive society. Last night I was tired and jittery over our political situation, over my new job at Cisco that I don’t know how to do, over my fears that this administration will wreck terrible havoc in the name of “faith”. But I was having dinner with a friend, and it was good, and we ran into some people…
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From Chris over at Get Your War On. Now is not the time to give up. There is real work to do, and we’re the only ones who can do it. Wrote a letter to the editor of the local paper today. I’ve never done that before, since the letters page starts to look like a tar baby from which none of us are safe, but I’ve decided it’s time to get in the game, and not just in the echo-chamber that is this blog. I tried to keep it simple, tried to point out that what this man was…
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As the Dalai Lama says. And he’s someone who knows opposition when he sees it. Did the Dalai Lama squeal about how mean the Chinese were? How they overran his country and killed his people and destroyed his cultural heritage? Nope. He spoke truth to power, while continually pointing out that “the Chinese people are good people.” Frankly, these days I’m looking to those folks who have seen real tangible serious oppression. The Dalai Lama. Nelson Mandela. Vaclav Havel. So what did I do today to make positive effort for the good? I wrote letters. Yup, boring old on-the-ground letter…
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A few years ago I was hit by a snowboarder on the first day of the season. I was standing in the lift line when a snowboarder, going too fast, caught an edge and fell. He came screaming toward me, caught me in the legs, and I caught my cheekbone on the edge of his snowboard as I fell. And the guy cursed me out. He wasn’t apologetic or anything. I came up bleeding like one can only bleed from a face wound and swinging. I was furious. I grew up fighting my brother and my seven boy cousins and…
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I remember being really little and going with my mother to vote. We went to West Park, to the skating shelter, and she wouldn’t let me come in the booth with her. She explained that voting was private, and that in America, no one could ever make you tell who you voted for. She explained that this was one of the things that made the system work. That you had the right to a secret ballot. And then she walked across the shiny wooden floor and pulled the curtain behind her, and I remember watching her legs underneath the curtain…