My World Part XII

I had a biopsy on my face on Tuesday. 

Because that's how this year is going.

It was a weird little bleached spot on my cheekbone. Had a bump on one side. I went in to have them tell me I was a hypochondriac yet again. And I was disappointed.

"I'm glad you came in, we need to biopsy that," was the answer.

The nurse practitioner and doctor stood in front of me and talked medical talk but I was able to absorb that just by looking it, they could both tell it was a basal cell carcinoma, but they were concerned it was an infiltrative one and wanted a punch biopsy to confirm before they sent me for Mohs micrographic surgery.

All those new vocabulary terms. I can see the worksheet in my mind with the matching terms and definitions. Use "punch biopsy" in a sentence. Name three types of basal cell carcinoma in order from most aggressive to least. 

So now I wait. I have two stitches in my face and they come out on Tuesday and hopefully I'll have the inevitable answer by then and I can go have my little white bump removed and then be put on what they called "the six month plan" which is discouraging but...manageable.

So I'm putting off the knee surgery....

But what you don't get is

I was going to talk about teaching but right now teaching has become a lightning rod in my nation as everyone seems to weigh in on what we should do with school buildings reopening for the fall and I just, I just, I'm tired. I know what I think, I know what I want for my family, and I also know full well that the handbasket this country is sitting in is going straight to hell and does not care a whit what I think.

So I'm going to talk about when I worked at Cloth World, which doesn't exist anymore but was transformed into one of those big box crafting stores. Back then, fabric was the majority of what was sold, and the current mutation is mostly craft kits, cheap crap from China, and polar fleece.

Things the outside observer might not have understood about what was entailed in this just-above-minimum-wage job:

*You had to be really good at fractions and quick mental math. This was before the little sku gun that did the multiplication for you. 3 and 7/8 yards at $5.89? Do it. I learned all my fractional equivalents of decimals at that job.

*You had to understand fabric. Plaids are cut differently than other wovens. Knits have to be matched up in the corners first. Jute burlap has to have a thread pulled, you have to spread out the fluff on fake fur. And velvet? You rip that shit. It's awesome to watch a customer nearly faint as you rip $40/yard velvet in front of them.

*You had to be able to read and understand the intricacies of sewing patterns. This means not only knowing the difference between a georgette and a challis, but also fabric width and shrinkage and grain and interfacing and buttons and zippers and thread.

*You had to kill a lot of bugs.

*You had to understand a variety of repair jobs. Car headliner. Upholstery. Clothing. Quilts. Heirlooms.

*You had to have soft skills, too. How to praise someone on their choices or how their quilt was coming along. How to advise the mom who plans on making a halloween costume and has arrived at your store on October 27 with a vampire-to-be.

*You had to be quick on sales days, which of course is any retail job. But fabric is different, perhaps a little like dressing room work, or a deli, in that you have to portion off a part of the item and then put the rest back. You learned tricks, like that you could count on a bolt's folds to see how many yards were left before you unraveled the whole thing and found out you were two yards short of the ten you needed.

I go to the big box fabric store these days and I find that many of these skills are no longer required. It is assumed that the customer knows what she needs and advice is not given, or perhaps not even known. Fabric is limited, and I watched a young woman at the cutting table cut a plaid homespun fabric without lining up the stripes and I had her cut it again for me. "We don't do it that way," she apologized. "We just cut and go."

I only worked at Cloth World for 7 months, quitting right before the Christmas rush in preparation for apprentice teaching the following spring (and I didn't want anything to do with a Christmas rush). I learned a lifetime's worth of fabric and sewing knowledge in that 7 months, however. I am going to go ahead and say that this probably isn't true anymore. Just cut and go.

My World Part XI

I fell today. In the basement, with a basked of laundry blocking my vision, I stepped on a plastic hanger my middle daughter must have dropped on the floor and went for a slide that ended with my right knee twisted, my left knee planted firmly on the concrete, and now, two hours later, a sore neck and the beginnings of a headache.

When I landed, the first thing I did was lie down on the floor, on this strip of carpet scrap that forms a path through the laundry room and if the hanger had been lying on, would not have made me slip. I thought about my grandmother who died in December 2016 and how her final day at her own home was on the basement floor with a bloody broken ankle that our family's DO orthopedic surgeon couldn't fix. 

My second thought was about how that surgeon, who had done my parents' knees, my left knee with the necrosis, my grandfather's knees and back, my uncle's shoulder...had retired in March. Good time to exit health care. But who was going to do my next knee surgery? The knee I twisted has junk in the joint, and each morning I walk like Frankenstein until it all settles again and I'm functional. I figure it's either a chewed up meniscus or it's more dead bone. 

My third thought expanded on the lack of surgeon I trusted and I wondered how I would find someone and also how I would afford said surgery. But I know I need it done, within the year or so if possible.

So then I got up off the damned floor and carried the laundry upstairs a step at a time.

Pre-judged

I do not like foreign priests.

No. That isn't so. I have gotten along with lots of foreign priests. I just also had several very negative encounters with priests from India and Africa, and like a typical white American, I lumped them into a category instead of treating them like individuals. I also will openly admit that except for priests from Vietnam or from Latin America, the foreign priests I encountered spoke English that was so differently accented from mine that I often lost the thread of a sermon or conversation trying to attend to the words.

In actuality, my experiences with priests who came from other countries was typically positive when I interacted with them in my own parish. We had a large immigrant population and so were always hosting clergy from around the world for the short or long term. Many of these priests were students at a local Catholic university and were wonderful men. Actually, all of the foreign priests I got to know at my parish were individuals and I have positive feelings about them. 

When it comes down to it, what I didn't like was priests who visited my parish or schools and preached as guests. Oftentimes misogyny played a large role in their preaching, and the nature of carnal sins of a variety of types also loomed large. This was then typically followed by guilt trips about giving money to the missions. I just, these sorts of visitors rubbed me the wrong way, and don't get me wrong, many many many American priests did too.

But this is a story about being wrong. 

My great-aunt Maria died in 2006. She had Friedrich's Ataxia and had outlived her predicted lifespan by 20 years. Over the course of my childhood she had become completely dependent on others. When her mother died in 1988, this meant the staff at the nursing home where she was moved to, considering both her sisters were much older than her and frail themselves. I did not know Maria well, since I had not grown up in my extended family, but instead around the country, and upon returning to my fair city, she was already in an institution and I had a difficult time with this, with nursing homes of all kinds. My cousin Gina and I went and visited sometimes, and I went with my grandmother (her sister) as well. But I was not a regular visitor nor did I know her well. I can conjure her shaky high voice in my head, already weak when I was a small child, and I can see her face, but I don't know anything about what she liked, what she knew, what she hoped for or talked about or enjoyed. 

She died right before our region was hit was a massive thunderstorm that knocked power out for 2/3 of the area for 3-6 days. It was epic, and part of the fallout was that the church she grew up in (as well as my father and his siblings) had no electricity. Since we were such a small group, the funeral home said we could have the mass there. 

You can see it coming. In walks a priest, and he's from India. I sit down by my parents in folding chairs and sigh to myself. If only they'd been able to bring a priest in from her home parish, a priest who KNEW her. This guy, where did they even find him? It's sad enough that we're here in this parlor instead of church...

Mass starts. He introduces himself and then there are readings and a psalm. He reads the gospel and then begins his homily in English that I do have to lean in to understand. And I'm glad I did.

Because he wasn't from her home parish where she grew up. He was from the parish where the nursing home was located, and his entire ministry was at the nursing home. He met with Maria 3-4 times a week and they had become close friends and confidantes. He admired her strength and steadfastness through her lifelong debilitating illness. She, who had never been 100 miles from her own home, encouraged him here in America away from everything he knew and grew up with. He said he would miss her terribly and their talks he would always hold in his heart.

I've never listened to a funeral homily from any priest anywhere that both smacked me across the face while also exposing the shared humanity of both the deceased and the speaker. I was utterly ashamed of my previous private grumbling and relieved I hadn't said any of that crap out loud. 

It was a watershed moment for me. I always, I believe, had been good at encountering children where they were; as a teacher you have to be good at that. But this is when I started giving that grace to adults. Adults who didn't look like me. Who didn't speak like me. And who probably didn't think like me. I don't even remember Maria's priest's name, but I think about him a lot. I needed to hear what he had to say and it shattered the way I used to think.

When my hair was green and growing out badly. I survived.

My World Part X

No more touching.

Today I went to the art glass studio where I learned how to build stained glass panels, looking to match some glass for the school project I'm doing. I was thrilled they were open--they've been closed due to exposure to the coronavirus for two weeks. I walked in and the same guy I always talk to was right there at the front desk. And I realized I was roped off in a single rectangle of space. There would be no touching of glass today.

He matched it and found everything I needed and I left with all my stuff and felt incomplete. I understood. The fewer hands that touch the glass the fewer of those Clorox wipes displayed there on the work counter they will have to use. But look at this place. It is aching to be touched and examined and enjoyed.

But no more.

It is amazing to me how much I just touch things, especially when shopping. I don't now; I watch (mostly white older men) touch with wild abandon, every package of jelly beans while I wait my turn the week before easter, touch all the apples in a bin while I decide to go ahead and get pears instead, touch every handle in the frozen food aisle, even ones they don't choose to open. Why? I think because they (and I) are used to just touching things.

I think about my classroom and everything I kept on my desk and how my middle school students would come up and fiddle with things while they asked me for help or permission to do something. People don't touch with their eyes. They like to fiddle.

Once when I was at Catholic Supply, a store that sells, well, Catholic supplies, with Maeve, she was about 3, and I was looking for something and not watching her. I had told her that in this store, which had everything from statuary to jewelry to vestments, that she could touch things but only with one finger, she could touch with one finger. I was speaking with a clerk about some specifics and Maeve ran up to me with a very breakable blown glass Christmas ornament, asking, "Is this something I can touch with one finger?"

Now not even one. Don't touch what's not yours and clean up after yourself and why was it ok to just touch everything anyway?

My World Part IX

My Zoom List (Also Google Meet, which is what we were required to use for school):

*My mom on mother's day with my siblings

*daughter's doctor

*daughter's counselor

*Boss' biweekly "staff meetings" which were actually just unneeded team builders

*"office hours" for my classes, which not a single student attended

*Summer school training

*Check out with school year boss

*Check out with summer school boss

*Two different school board meetings

*Blog friends from around the world

*One crafting coffee morning

*Three IEPs

*a twice-weekly summer school live lesson that one student attended each time

*daily meetings with summer school support staff while we waited for students who never arrived

*Two union meetings (much better than in person)

*Sweet open google meets with Leo's school friends throughout the spring and summer since the links never expire and he jumps on sometimes just to see if anyone is on, and sometimes they are. This also allowed for "sleepovers" during the school year with friends, including girls, while they played video games and talked to each other until after midnight and is the SINGLE MOST WONDERFUL thing about the quarantine. Leo is now friends with Lottie and Ada and Anya and so forth in a deeper way than he would have been without it.

My World Part VIII

I went to the dentist today for three fillings in three places. One of them was replacing a filling that crumbled in my mouth while the office was closed for COVID. The other two were due to neglect on my part, but also, as Indigo Bunting mentioned today, the wind's fault.*

Because "summer school" is over as of last Thursday, I scheduled it for today at 9, knowing that it might knock me flat for the rest of the day.

It did. I sailed through two of them but the third, my strong-ass dental nerves broke through and the dentist, apologizing many times, had to re-numb me in several rounds more of Novocaine or whatever they use now. Out of my peripheral vision I could see the large metal syringe and I knew I was doomed.

I got home at 10:30, changed into pajamas, and slept until 3:30. I am only now upright, and that's because my phone wouldn't let me comment on IB's post that included the footnote below. I took a damned 5 hour nap and ate up Monday.

I could not be more pleased.

*There must be someone who isn’t me to blame. “‘If it was the wind,’ said Owl, considering the matter, ‘then it wasn’t Pooh’s fault. No blame can be attached to him.’”

My World Part VII

Because it's not all whining and bitching and kvetching.

My World Part VI: Brief Epilogue to Part V

I wrote to my cousin and told him the beach photo was making me crazy jealous.

"Yeah," he wrote back, "We do have great sunsets here."

I then told him he looked happy and that made me happy to see. Several hours later he replied to my comment.

Learn to ignore what the photographer saw, isn't that how the Pet Shop Boys song goes? I am, we are very lucky right now but happy doesn't really tell the story. NYC is horrifying. We are lucky we got out and could collect ourselves here. I've had to furlough 5 people and now I lie awake at night worried about how those families will put food on the table too. I've had 10 friends hospitalized with COVID and 4 of them died. I don't know what's going to happen next and I'm terrified, my line of work doesn't matter, I mean fashion? Fucked. Interior design I might be able to keep working at if anyone is left to care about interior design after this. But I'm strong and I can work and I think I can make it somehow. What about you, how is your family and job? 

God I love him so much and it reminded me of a friend who once said if you take a group of women, have them write down their problems on slips of paper and put them in a bowl to pass around and choose from, when everyone goes home they will go home with their own problems. Other people's problems are too hard.

I'm jealous of the good parts of his life but I know I couldn't handle the hard parts. Xoxo Joe.

Names from the other side

I write about my dad's family most often because they are large personalities and although my relationships there are complex, they are not as toxic as the ones on my mom's side. It also helps that genetics run strong on the Blake side, all my cousins and their children look like replicas of uncles and grandfathers and great-great-grandmothers. My mother's genes show up in one of my siblings alone, and that's just Colleen's brown eyes. So it is easy to turn my back and ignore them. Healthy, actually. But here are a few thoughts on names.

My grandmother's next oldest sibling is Emily. She was always Emily--her full name was Emily Elizabeth Broadhead. When she married, however, and got a copy of her birth certificate that her father had filled out, she realized that all this time she was actually Elizabeth Emily Broadhead.

Broadhead. It felt like a joke name for the longest time, like one of those medieval names given to point out gross bodily features. Then I started learning archery and saw it differently. So I looked it up. It is an old English name, unlikely to be connected to arrows, but it also has nothing to do with fat foreheads. It is a geographic name, referring to a broad round hill.

The Broadheads, at least the thread that led to me, had several children: Overton, John, James Carr, Archie, Roy, Emily/Elizabeth, Harold, and my grandmother Edith. Their parents were Overton and Mazie. Mazie was an Aiken, two generations from Northern Ireland, the part of Northern Ireland where you can likely see Scotland from your house. Aiken = Adkins.

My mom's father's family are Wibbenmeyers. All the Wibbenmeyers are related and all of them came over at the same time to the same little town in Southeast Missouri, having sent a priest ahead of them to see if it was a worthwhile move. They immigrated first and second class, through New Orleans. All German all the time, marrying other Germans and more Germans for several generations, with heavy names like Christiana and Josephine and Theodosia. Then my great-grandfather Theodore married Emma Rose Donnelly and broke the trend. Her family had been in America for 50 years (more famine refugees), mostly upstate New York. Her mother was a Sarah and she named her oldest Sarah Jo.

I was a Sarah then as well, but just like Elizabeth Emily, I always went by my middle name. I dropped Sarah when I married, in favor of my maiden name in the middle. When I divorced, my lawyer cautioned me against taking Sarah up as a first name for legal reasons (I'd had to do a complicated name change in 2016 already because of the first name disappearing). Could I take it as a middle name?

It didn't feel like mine anymore and I didn't really want it. So I took Sparrow instead and scandalized my former hippie mother who never called me Sarah anyway.

My World Part V in Five Parts

The Beginnings

I was supposed to go to Florida at the end of March, an adult vacation, just two of us, no kids, no parents, no obligations to anyone except ourselves.

Instead I stayed in St. Louis and was filled with obligation after obligation. My job became a series of essentially bullshit tasks. Grocery shopping was exhausting and stressful. My kids went through waves of deep sadness and deeper boredom.

I dreamed of the beach. I haven't been on a beach in years, perhaps a decade. That whole last week of March I kept thinking "I'm supposed to be on a beach."

The Sustained Boredom

But no. No beach, and no bars and no libraries and no eating out and no casual friendship chatting and holy shit I was losing my mind in April and May.

I did things--I built Leo a bed. I started a garden. I supported Sophia's baking ventures. I read my first romance novel. I watched a lot of Netflix.

And I didn't do things--I no longer had a 45 minute one way commute. I didn't have to brace for my job each day. I didn't waste money on anything. I didn't engage with negative people online or in person.

The Boundless Ennui and Limbo

But as the summer began, the uncertainty of the near and distant future started to take a toll. The headaches are back. I am losing energy required to do basic things as I try to bolster my daughters' moods and keep everything together. I have to cheerlead myself through basic self-care every morning.

The Goddamned Turning Point

On top of that, Sophia got a flat tire this afternoon, I had to interact with my ex-husband and his girlfriend because somehow all three of us were required to change a fucking tire, I have a paper to write for the last class I need to move lanes on the salary scale, it's humid as fuck, the grass needs cutting, the dog needs shaving, I am lonely and bored and frustrated.

Today my favorite cousin posted this.

He and his partner are in the Hamptons, where they have been weathering the NYC Covid-19 storm with perfect hair and two designer dogs. They are fortunate to have a friend with a house and were given free range this whole spring. 

CAN YOU EVEN IMAGINE?

WHAT THE FUCK JOEY DON'T YOU KNOW THIS IS KILLING ME?

Le Denouement

There is no untying yet. I am still with a matted poodle and a weedy front yard and not enough beer in the fridge and no beach. No sunsets, no perfect hair, nothing but this. Day after day.

I'm going to go do what must be done. Which in this case is nothing sinister. I think there's a bathroom that needs cleaning and somebody sometime has to make dinner. 

My World Part IV

I didn't know the phone number but I picked up anyway. He introduced and connected himself to the parish school where Leo attends and he'd gotten my name from a mutual acquaintance. He's the lead architect/site manager for the school construction project, taking a 1930s cobbled together building with too many entrances and creating an obvious front entrance and proper office

Would I be interested in rebuilding some stained glass windows inset in doors for the school?

Sure I would.

Imposter Syndrome raging, I went up to school and took a look. They were totally in my wheelhouse. This was something I knew how to do. But they wanted safety glass on each side. I called the experts I knew (a local art glass company) and they made suggestions as if I knew what I was doing in general.

I wrote a proposal with real numbers.

They accepted it.

The architect had questions that made me realize I did know what I was doing after all--like, he asked, "now, do your measurements including the caning?"

When there is no caning. The lead is called came, not cane.

Or he asked, "this will be glass, right, not plastic?"

Of course it will. I wouldn't build a window out of colored plastic. Luckily I was on the phone and he couldn't see me roll my eyes.

So now I'm in charge of building six windows and setting them into giant wooden doors along with thin laminate glass that a local company is cutting to size for me.

Because of course I am.

Also drinking coffee. Because.

My World Part III

I sew. I've been quilting since I was 12 and I dabble in clothing construction here and there. Because of this I am often called upon to do tasks that don't fall into my normal sewing repertoire. I recovered a canvas lawn chair that a partner teacher used in her classroom. I've made curtains out of towels for a guest bathroom. Repaired headliner in a friend's car. Not really the same thing as quilting liturgical art for my church or making another triple Irish chain for a child's bed. But these are things I learn and figure out and can do. I am always willing to try.

Now people suddenly needed masks and there I was, willing to try. My first prototype was clunky and hard to breathe through. My sister sent me a pattern she used. I spent time trying to figure out nose piece metal things, coating floral wire, then trying pipe cleaners, whatever I had around the house since everything was closed and canceled. Then Sheet Metal Workers Local 36 got some donated aluminum and had their apprentices cut metal strips for nose pieces that they put in a lockbox outside their front doors for free. The same training school that made my metal toolbox I got on that Labor Day's parade so long ago.

I went through the first 50 I picked up, thinking I was actually taking too many. But people started asking me for masks and now it looks like we will need more masks as time goes on and children go back to school and so today I went and picked up another 100 metal strips. 

I use quilter's cotton, which I have in large quantities. But I ran out of the little bit of elastic I had after only a few masks. I did non-stretch loops out of ribbon for faces I could measure (my family) but I was at a loss as to what to do for outside folks. 

After brainstorming a bit, I went to the store and bought a large pack of little girls' underwear. Sat on my couch watching netflix and picked stitches until I had plenty of pastel elastic.

A friend's sister asked about hair covers (she works in an ancillary healthcare job in a hospital) and I borrowed my sister's wig stand and devised something.

I can turn out 2 masks in about 10 minutes. It's easier to make them two at a time. I'm running low on elastic and I might actually buy more underwear because it is sadly cheaper that way and the color is fun.

This is what I do now.

My World Part II

My father was in IBEW Local 1. My grandfather was in AMFA. I have uncles who were boilermakers and ironworkers and one who was in the other airline machinists' union, IAMAW. Further back I have all of the St. Louis bricklayers standing behind me, their blood running through my veins. This was literally all background noise until I lived with John and learned the inner workings of his union, LiUNA Local 42.

Without seeking it out, I got an education in union history, politics, future, pride, and failures. Anytime he got too tired handling his past in my safe quiet house that gave him nightmares and flashbacks, we would talk concrete or we would talk unions. The quilt I made him, in the blank spaces, are three leaf clovers and the number 42. It was important to him and became important to me.

When I knew him, I worked in the Catholic schools and unionization was forbidden. Don't even get me started on the hypocrisy of this. But once I was let go (partially because of no checks and balances that a union could provide), I found myself luckily in a new job with much better pay, benefits, and an optional union membership. I joined, thinking of my young friend who had died that summer and I toasted to him when my membership card arrived in the mail.

It didn't matter that year or the next year or even this past year. Our jobs are on a three year cycle, or rather, we are on a one year contract basis but the agreement about our salaries, benefits, working conditions, hiring, firing, and so forth is on a three year cycle. And that cycle is up.

Negotiations fell through and we are without a resolution and the district has refused mediation.

I don't know what will happen, and right now, where I am in the salary ladder, I'm good even if nothing changes from last cycle. And part of me was like "it's fine either way, life is really stressful right now".

But then John came nagging me in my head. John and Rich and Edward and Ned and Daniel and Kelly and Glennon and Patrick. All the dead men, a few living men, many who bear my name, who stood on picket lines the past 100 years.

So I wore red for ed last week, picketed outside the central offices right before the board meeting which of course is closed to the public because Covid. I don't know if the press we got will be enough to sour the taxpaying public on the district's money hoarding during this, the perfect rainy day to use that rainy day fund, but I'm glad I went. I'm glad I stood out there with my sign and waved at cars and got tired and my knee got sore and I went home sweaty and totally done wearing that damned mask but I showed up.

For like, the first time. If I'm going to be honest. I showed up and I didn't let all those people in my head down. Cheers, John.

Looking west, about 200 of us

Walking a Narrow Way

This was a post I was supposed to do back in May and I am ashamed I did not but here I am, delayed but not yet canceled. Another repost rewrite from 2016.

North Carolina is balanced at the end of the next switchback. I kept telling myself that as I walked further and further up the ridiculously named "Low Gap" Trail. Low gap my ass. Tennessee was killing me with switchbacks like staircases.

This seemed like such a good idea. When we told the guys in the raft that we were going to try it, these men, these scruffy men who lead float trips full of girl scouts down this river every day all summer long, looked at us and told us that was quite a big bite to take.

 North Carolina is at the top of the next switchback. I can do this. I can do this because I don't have a lot but I do have stamina. I persevere. If I can do 52 hours of labor with that crazy Maeve I can walk to North Carolina.

 North Carolina wasn't at the top of the next switchback. Or the next. We kept walking, my traveling companions including Sophia who was smiling at me mildly as I kept saying, "no, I can go further." I can keep at it. I can keep going. I can do it. I can do this. I am more than this.

 I could see the change in the light as we curved around on the last switchback. Finally the last one. I saw it but I didn't believe it. I kept my eyes on the steep rocky ground, these hiking boots that could keep their own blog steadily moving me up. This. Mountain. And then there we were.

She sits on a big gray rock/takes off her boots and socks/not knowing what/she will do next/just starts to cry (Jimmy Buffett)

I hike because it calms my brain. I can feel the synapses refocus and reorganize. I hike because damn it, I'm tired, I'm over 40, my brain won't leave me alone, and all I want to do most days is crawl back into bed but I won't. I won't do it. I can't do it. So I hike.

This hike obliterated me. Because we got to North Carolina and we weren't done. Not even. Walking the border between North Carolina and Tennessee, walking that oldest footpath, it was easier than Low Gap, but it was haunted.

So many footsteps on that narrow little trail. It felt more like a pilgrimage than anything I've ever done before. The path was so narrow. How could it be so narrow? All those feet, all year long, walking this path. And it was one person wide.

Some days I drive to errands or stand in my garden with the hose or clean a bathroom and I think, someone is there right now. Someone is walking that path right now. Someone, tonight, is sleeping along the border of North Carolina and Tennessee and looking at the stars I saw that June. That I hope to see again. And walk under and breathe, the world so big and that path so narrow.

My World Part I

In the spirit of Indigo Bunting's Covid Notes.

My tattoos, except one, were all done by the same artist. I have one done by another guy, but all came from the same shop, which I have recommended to friends and priests and my brother's daughter who got one for her 18th birthday. I trusted my guy and I trusted where he works.

I have recently found out that while my guy is still a stand-up guy, shy and unassuming behind his neck and knuckle tattoos and quiet laugh and true artist's eye, the shop is not. It's in a neighborhood that is one of those up-and-coming strips in the city like a lot of St. Louis has experienced at one time or another, in the 1970s and 80s, boarded up and abandoned. Then the gay bars moved in and then the classy gay bars moved in and a few immigrant-run restaurants and then a local brewery and so forth. The tattoo place fit in with vibe of the street, with tacos and beers and rough ladies bars and 50-something buttoned-up gay mens' lounges and a Himalayan buffet across the street. Classy condos started going up and gentrification was well on its way.

The tattoo shop was one of those co-ops with several owners, who also owned several other places on the same strip. Part of what was moving the neighborhood forward, if you looked at it from the surface like I did when I stopped in to see if my guy could schedule me for more work. But one of the owners and one of the tattoo artists were recently called out on social media for a variety of terrible things. Drugging women at a club and raping them was the main accusation, which hit the news and I assume is moving forward with law enforcement. The tattoo artist, it turns out, inked his name into women's tattoos without permission. Gross stuff.

My tattoo place this week posted on Instagram, my guy's hand scraping the window paint off, both the men's names. He'd obviously taken control of the Instagram account and was in damage control mode. The other owners were scrambling to cut the one guy out and the artist was fired. Today, he posted again.

He admitted that while he had no knowledge of what was happening, he was part of the silence, the covert action, that allowed for this unsafe space and these terrible men to continue their terrible acts. And he set out a 6 point plan to begin to rectify the situation, including cover-ups for anyone who had received a tattoo from one of the accused. Then he said he needed to go be with his wife and daughter and he would post again tomorrow.

I hate that this has happened at a place where I felt completely safe and recommended highly to other people, other women, young women. I hate that my guy and the four other artists who did not commit any bad acts are cleaning up this mess. I am proud that they are, though, instead of circling wagons and deleting accounts and victim-blaming, which seems to be the name of the game these days, maybe all days.

I was just talking to Maggie about how both of us need more ink, and how I was going to give my guy a call. I'm going to let the dust settle a bit but I'm going back. My oldest daughter doesn't think I should: "You are rewarding them for doing the bare minimum."

Maybe I am. But I'm a huge fan of the simple thought: "We do what we can. When we know better, we do better." My guy and his coworkers may have put their heads down and let things happen around them, but now they know better, and I think in doing better, they are doing right.

Bird

Funny, as I write this, Blackbird by the Beatles is on, apropos to the current situation my nation keeps finding itself in. You were only waiting for this moment to arise.

But I'm going to do a repost rewrite to dip my foot back in the pool.

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A shearwater is a bird. It's a sea bird, nothing that amazing in appearance. Sooty brown (there is a species, in fact, called the Sooty Shearwater), a crooked beak, black eye. You've probably never heard of it. It wouldn't make you turn your head. If I ever saw one in person I'd probably think, "gull" and go back to what I was doing, and I like birding.

Growing up near the Gulf, gulls are a nuisance bird. The pigeons of the seashore.

The shearwater, though, is more than just a brown sea bird. It migrates more every year than any other bird--thousands of miles from northern Europe to South America, for instance, some in a figure-8 pattern, or infinity, back and forth through their lives, tens of thousands of miles each year. 

Often going days without eating to reach its destination, it can dive hundreds of feet into the seawater to catch fish. It is long-lived, too, with the oldest banded bird at over 55 years old in the wild. How many hundreds of thousands of miles that single bird has logged.

Shearwaters fly in a cruciform shape, tilting their long wings to catch the breeze. Their name comes from the habit of gliding on stiff wings along the troughs of waves, making its migration just a bit easier.

This bird found a niche in my brain years ago. Its tenacity, resilience, and stamina covered up in almost complete anonymity, flying across oceans all year long while I walk this solid earth unthinking.

It fades in, I'm sure, with other sea birds, like gulls, hovering above the fishing boats, all looking the same.

But this one, this one is different.

This one is alive in a way that others are not.

This one has a story.

My Year of Tattoos

My principal was waiting for me in my classroom. It was a week before school started and she was sitting on a student desk. I had a bulletin board of personal photos--my family, friends, experiences I'd had recently--and there was a picture of my sister Colleen with a tank top on, tattoos exposed. She told me she wasn't going to tell me what to do...but another teacher had walked in and seen it and reported it to her. This really wasn't the family-friendly kind of photo they wanted on a teacher's desk.

I took it down in front of her, along with the one of my other sister with a nose ring. I couldn't even believe I was being censored. I wasn't used to this level of scrutiny.

That October, for my birthday, I got my first tattoo. I was 39. It was in typeface, simple, on my foot, reading "It's fine."

A couple of months later I followed with the other foot: "Let them be."

Sophia's godmother out in Kansas City had told me that summer before I went back to teaching, the summer John and his son lived with us, that I was really good at just letting people be. I loved this insight into myself, and I reveled in the idea that I let people be. But I needed the reminder.

I followed this quickly, so quickly, with a wrist tattoo that said, in Russian, ничего. It's the Russian word for "nothing," pronounced nichevo, but is used for a variety of purposes. It's what you say when someone thanks you for saving the child from running out into traffic. Nichevo. It was nothing. You also say it when asked if you like something. Is the jacket ok? Nichevo. It's fine. I found myself thinking about this nichevo a lot when my house was a hostel for wayward laborers, just a "hey, you can't repay me and don't try, it's totally fine." An outward facing version of the "It's fine" on my foot.

Then the golden spiral on my back followed that spring, the Euler's line on one calf and a stylized version of my family's crest tweaked with arrows and some hobo signs on the other. "Don't give up" reads one. The other? "You can sleep in my hayloft." Because you can.

I rounded out the year finding out that I had a tumor in my right breast and went through an admittedly simply procedure that was fraught with uncertainty at the time. What if it were cancer? How would every damned thing change? How could I be the person I needed to be for everyone else if my health wasn't what it needed to be? I realized I needed to care for this person before I reached too far outside my grasp for others. I didn't retreat, but I stopped putting myself off balance for those who wouldn't do the same in my position. I balanced a bit. I thought before I volunteered. I didn't overextend. I started thinking about Bridgett.

The whole time I was in the uncertainty of "it's a dense area" followed by "ultrasound" followed by "it's a tumor" followed by "if it's cancer...." the health care professionals kept saying it was about the size and shape of an olive.

An olive branch was the only thing that made sense.

Actually longer than a calendar year, about 18 months all told, and I was done. I only got one more tattoo after that, an intricate classic design of a compass and the words "finding my way" because by the time I got that one, I was inextricably on a path to find my way.

The time wrapped up and although I think about getting more, I haven't. It's been 4 years since my last and I might be done. For now at least.


Here's the others, minus Euler's line, which I can't find a picture of and I'm too lazy right now to set up the camera to catch the back of my other calf:

Notes from Home

Everything is from home now. Here are some notes on the social distancing happening in my hometown.

1. A local radio station is playing Christmas music. This is not comforting.

2. My parents keep refusing to stay at home and let me and my sisters run the errands since I'm a teacher and they work in grocery stores so we are likely already exposed. They keep just...going to Target. Going to the book store "one last time before the shut down." Getting lunch out.

3. My sisters are literally on the front lines of a major amount of White People Behaving Badly. They work at a well known upscale grocery store, each of them at different locations, and their days are filled with women demanding to know where the better lettuce is. Well-dressed men arguing that they need 10 packages of chicken when the limit is 5.

4. I picked up Leo's work from school today. We had a 15 minute window by last name. I was the last in his classroom. "All these little desks have emptied out today and I..." and his teacher couldn't finish her sentence. Here's a teacher who loves her job and her students. I envy that, and I am so sorry for what is happening.

5. But we ended on a bright note, each of us knowing we were walking through this fire and at the end of it would have so many new skills to use in our classrooms. Yes we will, for sure. It's just going to be a long road.

6. The proposed return to school of April 6 has probably been negated by the city and county ordering a stay-at-home mandate until April 22.  State testing has been cancelled. I wonder if I will go back at all this year.

7. We were the last customers in a little donut stand that's been open since the end of WWII when GIs returning from the war were given pamphlets on how to start up their own businesses and donut shops were one of them. We have several around south city. This one was shutting its doors until further notice and we bought their last donuts. I wonder if they will reopen.

8. Driving through the city to run the last errands before the shut down, Maggie and I played "they'll come back/they won't make it", a grim game where we point to businesses and debate if they'll make it through a month of being closed. Tire places and chain restaurants will make it. Most other places won't. We stopped playing when I pointed to Roseborough Monument Company with their sample headstones in the side yard. They'll make it.

9. The unreality of being on the shallow end of an exponential curve makes it feel like a huge overreaction. Then I read reports from Italy and I self-correct.

10. Rosie our little bichon-poodle mix is having the time of her life. All the coziness and fetch she can handle and never in her crate. She will be spoiled by the time we go back to normal.

We will go back to normal. And I will never take a night at the bar or a night at the movies for granted again.