Jun 1, 2012
A few weeks ago I went with my sister Luli and her friend Margaret to the North Carolina Zoo in Ashboro. It was the best day I have ever spent at a zoo. Certainly the weather helped: blue sky, a steady breeze, high 70’s. But it was the zoo itself that impressed me.
The North Carolina Zoo has the advantage of space and a temperate climate – almost 1400 acres in the rural Piedmont, an hour and fifteen minutes from Chapel Hill. It was built in the mid-70’s as the first natural habitat zoo in the U.S. designed by Dwight Holland, a painter and designer who directed the zoo for many years. In the 80’s it was expanded using a master plan by Jon Coe, a landscape architect who specializes in zoos.
The zoo has two sections, North America and Africa, about a mile and a half apart as the snake slithers. We began with the cypress swamp in North America, and the contrast with other zoos was immediately apparent. The first exhibit we passed was various carnivorous plants – sundew, pitcher plants, Venus fly traps. The signs had lots of information, but not so much as to be daunting, and the ranger there answered all our questions. I loved learning a bit about the animals’ environments as well as the animals.
COLORADOCARNIVEROUSPLANTSOCIETY.COM
About 1100 animals of more than 200 species live in habitats designed to mimic their natural environment and give them as much space as possible. All the habitats are behind glass; the larger ones with ample seating – benches and risers – to let us wait for the animals to appear. Walking from one exhibit to the next we were usually in the shade, and many paths were landscaped to feel like woodland trail. The most impressive habitats were the western prairie, with elk and bison, the chimpanzee habitat, and the 37-acre African savannah, with elephants, rhinos, ostriches, antelope and gazelles.
From a visitor’s point of view, the disadvantage of large habitats is that you may not see some of the animals up close and personal, or indeed not see some of the animals at all. We arrived at the prairie and climbed up to the top step of concrete risers. A vast expanse of waving grass and wildflowers was all we could see until Luli, our best spotter, saw what might be an elk’s head in the distance above the grass. A twitching ear confirmed it. A little later we realized that what looked like some sticks next to her were velvet-covered antlers. We waited, enjoying the fresh air and wild flowers.
Human families came by, the children clambered up the steps, looked around, and moved on. Then the female elk stood up from the clump of grass and ambled toward us along the perimeter of the prairie, walking the length of the glass and disappearing into the brush at the far end. The male followed her. He was molting and his shaggy winter coat was in tatters. Finally, a calf came along – we had had no idea it was there. We probably sat fifteen minutes watching for elk, and then we moved on, past an extensive poster display about the loss of the great prairies, and modern day attempts to use the land for agriculture while preserving what native grasslands remain. We stopped at another viewing point, and under a distant clump of trees saw a dark mound that was the back of a sleeping bison.
FOTOSEARCH.COM IMAGE k1110339
We had come on a Monday, to avoid crowds of children – I thought field trips were usually on Fridays. But the first thing we saw when we arrived were about seventy-five children from the Liberty Preschool, and we saw many school groups throughout the day, as well as parents and grandparents with preschool children and babies. Despite, or perhaps because of the long walks between exhibits, and waiting sometimes in vain for a glimpse of the animals, the children and hence the parents were calmer and better behaved than I have ever seen at a zoo.
Certainly the children acted like children – growling at the cougars, yelling “Wake up!” at the alligators – but they were far happier and less whiny than I usually see at zoos. They had lots of room to run, and weren’t tugging at their parents to move from one animal to the next. Spotting the animals soon became a game for them, far more interesting than watching a couple of bears or lions pace in a small cage.
We came to the endangered red wolves. Their habitat was shady – brown ground covered with dry leaves, a shelter in the distance, a pond up by the glass. We couldn’t see any wolves. A father asked his family – “How many frogs can you find?” Together we found eight huge bullfrogs in the murky pond. Then a little boy spotted two ears behind a log, and patiently instructed me – “over there, see, just past the big tree”- how to find the wolf. Soon someone found a small red wolf over by the fence and we watched him for awhile.
The Sonoran desert, in a huge glass enclosure, was as hot as it sounds. But it was fun looking for the critters – birds, lizards, snakes – and the designer had thoughtfully provided grates in the path that blew cool air up at us.
We had arrived at the zoo at 9:30. We were desperate for coffee and ready for lunch by the time we finished the North American section. We bought bad pre-sweetened cappucino and sat in the shade at the Junction Plaza, where they have the special attractions – animatronic dinosaurs, the dino theater, a carousel – and a tram to take you between the two sections. There was a restaurant, but Luli had prepared a picnic lunch – roasted vegetables, bread and cheese, grapes and strawberries. When we were through, we took the tram to “Africa.”
We walked away from the tram, rounded a curve and suddenly saw three giraffes eating from tree tops and two zebras grazing the grass. One family was more absorbed by the turtles swimming in the pond. At the chimpanzee exhibit we watched from a distance as a toddler chimp climbed repeatedly onto a nursing mother’s head. Each time she gently lifted him off and set him on the ground. Eventually another grown chimp, a male I think, came out of the woods and enticed the toddler away with a game of stick throwing.
TREEHUGGER.COM CREDIT: SHINY THINGS/FLICKR
At the lemur island, there were a couple of red-ruffed lemurs and six ring-tailed lemurs. According to various internet sources, ring-tails hang out on the ground while red-ruffed are arboreal. Lemurs have not been informed of this. The two red-ruffed lemurs had the good sense to race around on the ground, but all the ring-tails were up in a most astonishingly spindly tree, mere twigs. They leapt and climbed from limb to limb.
RED RUFFED LEMUR: DURRELL WILDLIFE CONSERVATION TRUST RINGTAILED LEMUR. PUBLI-DOMAIN-IMAGE.COM
I was pretty tired by the time we got to the savannah. We sat on benches on the large overlook. We saw one huge elephant far in the distance, and a couple of white rhinos, a kudu, a water buck and a Thomson’s gazelle a little closer. Canada geese were everywhere, voluntary residents.
When we all agreed we were through zoo-ing, Margaret looked at her watch. It was ten minutes to five, and the zoo closed at five! We had happily stayed almost eight hours, way longer than I usually stay anywhere, but now we had visions of spending the night in the African savannah. We went down to the service road and flagged down a truck. The kind driver radio-ed a ranger in a golf cart, who came to pick us up and take us back to the tram to North America, where we had parked. We saw many families walking, but he gave us a ride because we are old. White hair is such an advantage!
There are all sorts of policy and ethical questions in regard to zoos, of course. click How do we justify penning up animals for our edification, even with the most enlightened approach to zoo design? Why is the state of North Carolina supporting a zoo that very few of its citizens can get to or afford to visit? I can just imagine the legislature that passed that appropriation – I wonder who was the legislator from Ashboro!
I know (sort of) the counter-arguments: breeding programs, preserving endangered species, fostering respect for wildlife; jobs, tourism, economic development. Jon Coe, who has generously shared information since I found him on the internet, says, “Regarding the morality of zoos, we may fault the original animal collectors, but I see today’s zoo animals as “refugees from the human war of conquest over nature.” Most zoo animals (at least mammals) were born in zoos and couldn’t survive release back into the ‘wild’ even if any suitable areas could be found which aren’t already at full carrying capacity. I believe when zoos can deliver the kind of experience you and your friends had and the quality of animal welfare NCZ provides it’s animals, then they are justified. But there certainly are zoos and especially some private collections I cannot justify.”
JON COE, ZOO DESIGNER, WITH BONOBO. used by permission
I’ve told you about my favorite parts of the zoo. Some of the habitats struck me as small, and I don’t know about caging gators and other reptiles that aren’t endangered. I can’t sort it all out, and I don’t believe I have to have a carefully-reasoned moral stand on every subject. Sometimes I just seek my pleasures in the world as it is. If you like visiting zoos, the North Carolina Zoo is worth the trip.
ENTRANCE TO THE NORTH CAROLINA ZOO
Note: In research for this post, I became totally absorbed in Jon Coe’s website, where you learn a lot about zoos, and also can see his poetry and sketches from the field (ie wild areas few of us will ever visit).click
May 4, 2012
I am not always a nice person. “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all,” was one of my mother’s favorite sayings, but sometimes…
Joe and Amanda and I went out to dinner Friday night to celebrate the end of the FCAT’s, Florida’s terrifying standardized tests. We had a wonderful time at Harry’s downtown. Joe had a weird martini, I had a normal martini, and Amanda had a Shirley Temple. She was in high spirits, and decked herself with Mardi Gras beads, which she shared with the large plaster alligator next to her.
After dinner we headed to Mochi, where the frozen yoghurt is self-serve and the toppings range from blueberries through chocolate chips to Cap’n Crunch. Amanda boogied down the street ahead of us, but waited for us at the corner before crossing.
On the corner by Mochi we encountered a fair number of people who call themselves Warriors for Christ. A young man with a crewcut was standing on a milk crate. I believe he had a megaphone. Proselytizing Christians irritate me anyway, and anyone who calls himself a Warrior is down ten points with me before he opens his mouth.
I THINK I WOULD QUALIFY AS A GENERAL HEATHEN
He did open his mouth, and addressing me, asked, “Do you care about Jesus?” I should have just said no, of course, and continued on my way. Instead I replied, “I don’t give a shit about Jesus,” (I may have used the f-word instead; I’m not sure.) “You’re going to go to hell,” he told me, as I walked on with Amanda. “And you’re going to take that little girl with you. You have a responsibility to that child.” Amanda made some gesture which I caught out of the corner of my eye; I believe she was flipping a bird.
iMAGE FROM PHOTOBUCKET BY LIBERAL NC
Amanda does believe in God and Jesus, and cares about them both when she thinks of it. I asked her whether that boy’s Jesus was the one she knows, and she said no. We agreed that the only Jesus worth knowing is all about love, not hate and aggression. After we left Mochi, we crossed the street to avoid the asshole, and encountered another young Warrior who asked if we would like a leaflet. I politely told her no thank you, and we went on.
Now the last thing I need is a callow youth telling me I have a responsibility to Amanda. As I fume about it now, I make lists of all the responsible things I do that are focused on her, and wonder whether he’s ever been responsible for more than a goldfish.
Although I am not a believer, I usually try to respect the beliefs of others. I do find it annoying that strangers feel entitled to interrogate me, but I know that many Christians feel that it is part of their duty to spread the Gospel, as it is the only path to their Heaven. They’re supposed to be fishers of men (and women and children too, I suppose).
SOURCE: CLIPART.OCHRISTIAN.COM
So I put up with them when they call to me on the street, and even when they knock on my door. Part of me is sorry I was rude, and gave a rude example to Amanda. But a bigger part of me gets a giggle whenever I think of it. Joe was happy that we had dinner AND a show. I think perhaps I should drink martinis more often.
Mar 15, 2012
For Julie’s birthday the Muumuus* went swimming with the manatees. We met at 7am at Julie’s house on a cold, beautiful, clear-blue-sky morning. Julie drove and we talked or were silent, watching the quiet Florida scenery on the flat, straight road to Crystal River.
The town is a couple of miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico, by King’s Bay; Crystal River runs from the bay out to the Gulf. Manatees winter there to take advantage of the constant 70- degree temperature of the many springs in the river, and at least a dozen companies run manatee tours.
We signed in with our company and wandered through the souvenirs. Manatees with winsome smiles in ceramic, pewter, and lurid plush Manatees on T shirts, refrigerator magnets, pencils, key rings. Notecards with photos of manatees. I bought a book about manatees, and iridescent manatee stickers for Amanda. The trouble with manatee-shaped souvenirs is that manatees are kind of shapeless – like huge baked potatoes.
DOES THIS WETSUIT MAKE ME LOOK FAT?
We struggled into our wetsuits in changing rooms with no embarassing mirrors, but we asked someone to take a picture. We watched a fifteen minute video about manatees and how to swim with them. Although their numbers have increased remarkably since no-wake rules were implemented in the rivers, Florida manatees are still an endangered species, and it is quite a privilege to be able to interact with them. You’re not allowed to approach or pursue them, but if they come to you, you may touch them with one open hand, avoiding their genital area and their nipples, which are under the flippers. You can’t feed them, ride them, poke them, stand on them. You don’t dive, but lie on the surface and watch. You don’t walk around on the bottom, which stirs up silt and makes viewing difficult.
We boarded a small pontoon boat with a bench along each side of the enclosed cabin. There was a chemical bucket for a toilet, with a strong smell of pee, and a curtain hanging from a ring for a dressing room. Our companions were twin sisters – one a U.S. park ranger, the other a retired military psychiatrist.
And then there was our boat captain, an old hippie with grey hair in a pony tail. He and his wetsuit were equally full of himself. “I’m Captain Jack. They call me Swamp Man; they call me Gator Man. I wrestle alligators.” As he took us back to the dock, he said, “If you want to know more about me, you can visit my website.” But he knew and shared a lot of information about the manatees.
It was President’s Day holiday, the busiest weekend of the year. At the springs there were hordes of tour boats and kayaks surrounded by floating snorkelers, some in wetsuits, some not. The boat captains watched their groups carefully. The park rangers are out on the water too, and if they see anyone violating the rules, the fines are steep, for the violator and possibly for the captain. Captain Jack watched out for everyone in his vicinity, and instructed them in friendly fashion if they were breaking any rules.
He dropped anchor a little distance from the other boats and we swam away. Underneath me was a huge sleeping manatee; I circled above her for a bit, happy. Then Captain Jack signaled to all of us to swim down toward the refuge, marked with a rope and buoys. Just inside the rope were forty or fifty manatees, sleeping. Just outside the rope were a hundred snorkelers, waiting.
Every once in a while two or three manatees would swim out of the refuge past the people, and we could reach out and pat them. I had been intructed that if they came up and bumped me, or even nuzzled or hugged me, I shouldn’t panic, but just enjoy it. One swam underneath me a couple of inches from my belly. One bumped as she swam past. I saw one baby nuzzling her mother, with another next to them lying on its back, flippers waving. Three big ones slept beneath me, big ovoid lumps, with scarred skin.
After maybe forty minutes I was cold to the core, and ready to go back to the boat. Iris was ready too. As we climbed the ladder she said, “They’re kind of stupid,” but maybe we’re the stupid ones. Manatees don’t struggle to get the kids off to school, write memos, rush to meetings, read distressing newspapers, worry about fats and carbs and war-mongers. They lie sleeping on the bottom, drift to the surface every ten minutes or so to take a breath, then slowly sink to the bottom again, still asleep. When they wake up, they float around eating plants.
Back on the boat, half shielded by the curtain, I struggled out of my wetsuit, put on dry clothes and sat in the sun. Iris pulled out her food supplies: crackers and hummus and fresh blackberries. The other women returned, with Captain Jack, and everyone stripped and dried and dressed. We were tired out but happy, chatting and snacking, half-listening to Captain Jack’s bragging. As we left the spring we began singing ‘When I’m 64.’ I reproached us for annoying the manatees, but Captain Jack said that actually they love singing, and when girls giggle they draw near.
We found a crowded restaurant for lunch. I sat in the sun, with hot tea. We talked of everything, and reveled in our friendship. I fell asleep on the drive home. We stopped for frozen yoghurt, but I was still cold inside, and didn’t even want to taste it.
It was a lovely day, a perfect birthday celebration. I liked watching the manatees. But I’m not sure about the whole idea. I don’t recall the manatees saying, “Please join us in the water for a morning of frolic.” I was distinctly aware that we had not been invited.
We destroy their habitat, slash them with boat propellors, and then intrude into the bit of territory they can still call their own. The tour operators justify the intrusion by saying that the direct contact with the beasts sensitizes people to their plight, and will help efforts to protect them. I don’t know. I’d say half the people who swim with manatees are already sensitive to their plight. The other half think they are big toys and chase and poke them when no one is looking. Iris had gone once before, and said the children on the tour all went in the water while their parents sat dry on the boat and urged them to do all the things the tour guide had forbidden.
My attitude towards animals is inconsistent. My mind says all species are equally valuable, each a unique and irreplaceable result of millions of years of evolution. My heart values humans more than other animals, probably because I am one.
On a 1 to 10 scale I probably rate a 7 as a pet mom. I take my pets to the vet and feed them good food. But I don’t give them as much attention as I should, especially our dog Trisket. When our 14-year-old cat suddenly stopped eating and blood tests revealed nothing, I declined further diagnostic tests and had her euthanized, with a moderate amount of anguish. It was partly the unwillingness to put her through all kinds of misery which she was incapable of understanding, but it was also the money and bother. I say I love my pets, but there is no comparison to the attention I lavish on Amanda, and I would certainly address a human health crisis more aggressively.
Amanda and I went to see The Big Miracle. It is a lovely, feel-good movie about the time Big Oil, Greenpeace, the Reagan Aministration, the Russians, and an Inuit village all worked together to save three whales trapped under Alaskan ice. It was suspenseful to the very end, even though you knew there wouldn’t have been a movie if they’d failed. But really – all that effort to save three whales, while we destroy the ocean?
As a species we are making the earth uninhabitable for ourselves and everybody else. We are obliged to stop (which we won’t) and rectify (which we can’t). Maybe we should stop tromping around in the bit of space they have left.
*For more about the Muumuu Mamas click
Mar 9, 2012
I have desired to go where springs not fail
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
And a few lilies blow
And I have asked to be where no storms come
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb
And out of the swing of the sea
Gerard Manley Hopkins – Heaven-Haven: A Nun Takes the Veil
This is one of the few poems I have memorized and retained – I learned it as a teenager. It is a fantasy of cloistered life, and probably unlike any cloister inhabited by real people, though a vow of silence could certainly reduce the hail and storms. In my mind I often visit this poem.
Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters Collection
My dream is solitude in a small white room, empty but for a single bed with a white candlewick spread, a nightstand with a lamp and a book, and a table with a bud vase holding a single rose. And my real life? Crazy with clutter and people.
After my brief first marriage I had always lived alone with my son. When he was 14, Iris, who had a two-year-old, suggested we join forces. We bought a house together, and shared expenses, chores, and lots of tea and laughter as the boys tore around the house.
After a couple of years, though, Iris got married. I bought her share of the house, and then advertised for roomers so that I could pay the mortgage. A succession of young men moved in and stayed with us briefly.
I only remember a few. A Nigerian man and an Africaaner, both grad students, shared our house. They did not like each other, though they had something in common – they ran up huge phone bills and then balked at paying. After they moved on, a musician moved in. He was a short, chubby man who practiced his bassoon in the living room. The other roomer thought he was gay, and complained to me about sharing the bathroom because he feared he would catch AIDS.
Finally we found two roomers who felt like family. We got along so well that we decided to share meals. I cooked dinner; they bought the food and, with Eric, cleaned the kitchen. I’ve always loved cooking for people who like to eat – now I had three hungry and very appreciative young men. I particularly remember a chocolate layer cake that lasted only one night.
Rick was a massage student. He set up his table at home and practiced on me on Sunday nights. Claudio was a Brazilian who was getting his doctorate in coastal engineering. I would find him pacing in the living room early in the morning, playing Bach at high volume on the stereo, as he wrestled with his thesis. Then one morning he burst into the kitchen and announced that he had figured out turbulence in breaking waves. He was ecstatic.
Rick graduated from massage school and joined his fiancé in Colorado. Claudio got his degree and returned to Rio. Then Eric finished high school and left home.
Eric’s teenage years had been rough on both of us. His absence wasn’t a case of out of sight, out of mind – I thought of him a lot. But he thrived on risk and extreme physical exertion, and it was so much easier to hear about his various adventures and misadventures from a distance.
.
Now I felt my life opening in front of me, a clear, empty space, and I was exhilarated. It was little things: I didn’t have to tell anyone where I was going or when I would be back, and when I returned, everything was just where I had left it – no wandering scissors. And it was the big thing: now I could write. I’d always found that my wool-gathering faculty, so necessary for writing, was fully occupied with work and child.
Lambtown 2008 (Dixon, CA) by WonderMike. Flickr via Sprixi. CC by license
GATHERED WOOL
Living alone, I completed my first novel, and got a good start on a second. Though a boyfriend moved in, he was very quiet and self-sufficient, and didn’t take up a lot of physical or psychic space.
Meantime I volunteered as a guardian ad litem, advocating for children who had been taken from their parents for abuse or neglect. But after watching two children move from foster home to foster home, I had no choice – I took them in myself. The boyfriend moved out. The children and I struggled together for almost two years, while I worked and tried to maintain some semblance of a social life. I put the writing on hold.
Eventually the children left, and I briefly lived alone, until Joe moved in. We married, and Amanda came to live with us for a couple of long stretches before it became permanent.
I have friends who live alone. I admire their independence, and envy their control over their time and space. I also admire foster parents who have three, four, five children at a time, and always have room in their houses and hearts for one more. I would love to be so open-hearted, so welcoming.
I think we all have a dream of greener grass. The farmer yearns for the city, the city girl for bucolic bliss. We visit our dream for solace, but if we are lucky enough to have had choices and made the right ones, maybe we are living the life that suits us.
Jan 27, 2012
“That’s vulgar,” my mother would say. Oh. Well then. That settled it; I wouldn’t dream of doing anything vulgar.
My mother died when I was twenty-three, before we had fully recovered from my adolescence. I grope in the dark to understand her. Much of what I think I know is probably wrong.
I was reminiscing with my sister-in-law, Esther. “And what’s wrong with vulgar?” she said. “It just means common.” Though I was past fifty, and had long since shattered every one of Mother’s taboos, I had never questioned that vulgarity was shameful. It was a powerful moment, and I began thinking of all the things that Mother considered vulgar.
Dangling earrings. Pants worn with high heels. Bikinis. Clashing colors. Chartreuse. Fuchsia. I was in 7th grade when I got my first sexy bathing suit: an orange tank with broad fuchsia stripes up the sides. Everyone knew orange and pink clashed, as did red and pink, green and blue. I have to assume I chose the bathing suit, and I admire Mother for buying it. She was encouraging autonomy. Or maybe she was just tired.
DANGLING EARRINGS ON VULGAR RED LACE
The word Mom. In 1955 Phillip Wylie coined the term momism in Generation of Vipers, an astonishingly misogynistic (and extremely popular) book. Mother absorbed his loathing, and I can see her mouth stretched in an exaggerated O as she spoke the word Mom with contempt. As children we called her Mummy, nicely British, therefore not vulgar. (My father was an extreme anglophile.)
New York accents, nasal voices, loud female voices, crude language. “Gentle voices,” my father would say, if Luli and I spoke too loudly, and he frequently spoke of Esther’s melodious voice. I never heard “shit” until I was 12, and was astounded some years later when I realized Mother knew the word.
Carmen Miranda, Las Vegas, blondes. Ginger Rogers was only saved from vulgarity by her elegant pairing with Fred Astaire.
Fried foods, chewing gum. “It’s like a cow chewing her cud.” And Mother would do a wonderful cud-chewing imitation.
Fat women in stretch pants. Fat women. Fat. My father felt fat women were a personal insult, as they apparently did not care to attract him. My sister Luli says Mother was terrified of becoming fat. Luli was fat for many years, distressing my father, as she was his favorite.
I learned the concept so well I can apply it to things my mother never mentioned. Tap dancing is vulgar (except for Fred Astaire); ballet is not. Why weren’t Broadway musicals vulgar, full of flashy colors and blondes? Probably because my mother and father enjoyed going to an evening of dinner and theater in the city.
It’s hard to know where my father’s thoughts ended and my mother’s began. The only subject on which I know they disagreed was Eleanor Roosevelt. My mother admired her; my father dismissed her. She was homely, and her voice was horrid.
Mother was the daughter of a distinguished professor, whose specialty was southern agricultural history. Professors were respected, but ill-paid, and her mother taught piano. Mother grew up in the south, went to college at George Washington, and belonged to Kappa Delta. She dropped out after her junior year to marry my father, a Jew from New York. He was six years older than she.
Dad was ashamed and contemptuous of his father, but he was proud of his mother. His father was an entrepreneurial merchant whose business failed, a man full of life and bonhomie. Her family were sugar barons in Colombia, where she was raised rich and sent to a Jewish boarding school in London.
I believe Dad was quite young when he began denying he was Jewish. He dropped his father’s name and took his mother’s, changing his surname from Jacobs to Eder. He was over 90 when he told me my mother’s parents didn’t like him because he was Jewish. It was the first time I had ever heard him acknowledge it.
My father was successful as an international corporate lawyer, and my parents lived the high life in South America and Long Island. But Esther once described my father as a man standing outside a beautiful house, with his nose pressed against the window.
I think my mother also felt like an outsider. Yearning to be not just respectable, but aristocratic, my parents had to guard against any taint of the vulgar.
I try to find a common thread in the things my mother identified as vulgar. Anything flagrantly sexual was certainly vulgar. Anything which suggested Jewish. Anything from poor southern culture, which would include anything Black.
The other day in Cordele, Georgia I met a woman in the motel breakfast buffet. She was a very fat woman, with bleached blonde hair. She told me she is raising five foster children – a 17-year-old whom she’s had from birth, two three-year-olds, and two four-year-olds. They live out in the country, so there’s plenty of room to play. She loves having foster children. Her face glowed as she talked of them.
She, her husband and some in-laws were on their way from Michigan to Florida to take a Caribbean cruise, and she was very excited. I asked if the children were in respite care. “Oh no, my daughter and her husband are keeping them.”
My mother would consider modern-day cruises vulgar, though ocean crossings in the grand style of the first half of the twentieth century were fine. Yet Mother valued kindness above all. Would she see past the stretch jeans, the dyed hair, to the generous heart and patient spirit of this woman? I like to think she would.
MOTHER
Jan 20, 2012
When I was in college everyone took a personality test. We ridiculed the question that asked whether you preferred carrots raw or cooked, and assumed it was about sex (wasn’t everything?)
COOKED OR CRUNCHY?
But I also remember being asked to agree/disagree with statements such as “Success in life is largely a matter of luck” and “I can control my destiny.” As I understand it, your answer to these indicates your sense of efficacy and likelihood of success. If you think life is largely a matter of luck, you’re out of luck.
But so much of life is determined by luck. You walk along happily for awhile, doing whatever it is you do, and then life comes along and snatches the rug out from under you. The personal calamities: dread disease, business failure, loss of a loved one. The public calamities: hurricane, riot, economic collapse. Any of these will knock you flat.
Wise advisors, such as self-help books and grandmas, say that though you can’t control what happens to you, you can control your response. While some are defeated by fortune, others rally and stand up again, like one of those little dolls with a rounded, weighted bottom. No matter how many times you knock it over, it pops right back up.
So where do we get our optimism, the courage to fail, the will to keep trying? I say pluck is also a product of luck. If we are very fortunate perhaps we are born resilient, but I think for most it is nurture, not nature. And our luck resides in the circumstances of our birth.
I have an image of babies, each set at the beginning of a path. On every path there are hurdles. On some paths there are small, regularly spaced hurdles, and at each early hurdle, hands reaching out to help the child clear the bar, voices raised in praise when she does. On other paths the hurdles are high as a house, and the child is alone. Some rare few of these children – and who knows the source of their strength? – will clamber over and move on, but many more will be defeated.
PERDITA FELICIEN AND DAWN HARPER
I used to ask my law students why the homeless victims of hurricanes receive assistance and compassion, while the world scorns the chronically homeless, whose lives were blown awry by abuse, war, illness. And they would reply that the chronically homeless people were responsible for their own situation, and should help themselves. Yet the students knew very well that for some people the deck is stacked from the beginning.
Puzzling over their need to blame the victim, I thought it was hard for them to acknowledge the role of luck in their own success. They wanted to have control. And if they believed they had not earned their many advantages, they would feel guilty. Even more, it was important to believe that the losers had brought their troubles on themselves. Otherwise, what was to prevent the same thing from happening to them?
I’ve had a lovely life, full of friends and lovers, a late and happy marriage, interesting work, adventures, travel, and even economic security. The primary reason is that I’ve been lucky. Of course I’ve met my share of hurdles, and worked hard, but I was lucky to be born into a family that blessed me with enthusiasm, optimism and resilience as well as material well-being.
There were plenty of weeds in the family garden – alcoholism, tyranny, petty snobbery. For me they were hidden by the flowers. My parents assumed I would succeed in school and in life. My father was an optimist until the day he died. He was also overbearing, but because I was the last child, I wasn’t the star of his dreams, which meant I had room to move. My mother was gloomy but loving, and I was very close to her. They were both voracious readers. They had more than enough money, and happily they valued education and experience over stuff, so we had excellent schooling, travel and adventure in our lives.
As one of the lucky ones, I hope to repay my debt to fortune with compassion and appreciation. I should keep my heart open to the one who has not been lucky. I can’t walk a mile in her shoes – she’s wearing them, and only she knows how they hobble, where they pinch. But I should meet her where she is, and help where I can.
And I should appreciate good luck while I have it; it will certainly come and go. I can’t live looking over my shoulder for that figure that will snatch the rug out from under me, but I can rejoice when life is going well. Denise Levertov said it as well as it can be said:
Of Being
I know this happiness
is provisional:
The looming presences –
great suffering, great fear –
withdraw only
into peripheral vision:
but ineluctable this shimmering
of wind in the blue leaves:
this flood of stillness
widening the lake of sky:
this need to dance,
this need to kneel:
this mystery.
in Breathing the Water (1987)
click
