Forget, Hell!

I'm sure glad I have that History degree. A solid grasp of history and knowledge of the Zodiac can sure help explain a lot of everyday life's tribulations. For example, I'm reminded of the great War Between the States as our annual Thanksgiving skirmish unfolds.

Just after Halloween every year I literally feel the pall cast over the fun as we turn toward Thanksgiving. And like the portent of John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, I can hear the distant rumble of cannon and the rippling of musketry along the picket lines: What are we going to do for Thanksgiving?

For starters, I have already given up on Thanksgiving. So Norman Rockwell were the feasts of my youth that to even try to recapture them invites domestic disaster. But like a dreamy abolitionist, I tried this year anyway. How about a cozy afternoon with our best friends? They would love to escape the clutches of their families as well, I'm sure of it. And so I was. I made up a menu - and even allowed cornbread stuffing to pass the threshold of my kitchen. We were going to watch the parades. Play football out on the street. Watch movies. Play board games. I and The Queen were even going to cook the whole dinner ourselves. This was all something new. If this thing went off alright, it could become the new tradition - we might even look forward to Thanksgiving next year (picture a tall, thin depressive guy with bad acne, a beard and a very tall hat).

A student of history knows that about this time the old line plantation families in the South were not going to let this happen. When the news hit Charleston about a week ago, it was made clear: if that tall sad sack gets elected there's going to be trouble. The politics began in ernest. At first shock was displayed that we would even want to do anything different. Then the smoky room stuff started. Attempts were made to use the children as leverage; a well-timed call from a sibling; a seemingly unrelated letter came with the salutation, "We will miss you at Thanksgiving."

A poll was taken. None of us wanted to have dinner with the extended family. I'm not going to run down the laundry list of reasons why, but they are sufficient to motivate anyone to look for alternatives. My declarative was, "Why would I want to go there?" But we have a Copperhead in our home and a Libra at that. For days, YHWH wrung her hands and bore the thousand-yard stare. She saw both sides of both sides, but in the end, like Robert E Lee ( "I have not been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives"), she couldn't shake the bonds of tradition.

It's all about the stuffing. In Oklahoma, I-44 bisects the state diagonally. If you hail from south of I-44, you're likely a Reb and you eat cornbread dressing; north of I-44, you're likely a Yankee and you eat stuffing made from bread crusts. If you're from OKC or Tulsa, you're likely to find both on offer. And there you have it. YHWH, with an honest to goodness Yankee pedigree (she actually descends from an in-law of Jonathan Edwards) and wife of a good Nickajack man (my ancestor stole over the Virginia border to fight for East Tennessee loyalists), supports the cause of her Reb stepfamily and their cornbread dressing.

I know you've pensively read this far with bated breath, knowing full well this analogous account leads to secession. Nothing so dramatic as that happens. In this scenario, there is no Gettysburg Address. We skip right to act III, scene 2 of Our American Cousin.

Finally finished the sweater for SGK...



And the om hat for my SIL. I made it a little too long on the top and not enough ribbing on the bottom, but I'm happy with the way the design turned out.

I Went To a Garden Party

Yesterday the family ventured out to Downtown with the intent of seeing the OCMoA's loaner exhibit from the British Museum's Egypt collection. Arriving on the scene, we found parking spaces to be at a premium and we had to park a few blocks over. I answered curious enquiries as to why by mentioning the peace festival, held annually in the Hall of Mirrors, was the likely draw. This was met with great interest, so we went there first.

If you haven't been, this is an event which features information tables and various wares offered by the deepest indigo blue-staters in the metro area. All the heavy-hitters were there including Amnesty International, Sierra Club, Green Party, Greenpeace, etc. plus a few local flavors. As I am in so many places, I was def a fish-out-of-water. I immediately had an allergic reaction to the whole place - mainly at the practitioners. I have struggled with this affliction for years. I walk into assemblages like these and I am bombarded by emotional responses I can't understand. It makes me appreciate the difficulties faced by SID folks.

It's frustrating because I can't quite get a handle on it and that annoys me to no end. I feel contemptuous, judgmental, confused, stubborn, schadenfreude; all these and more all at once. I'm confused because I agree with the sentiment of probably 80% of the people in there (in fact I knew three of the people manning the booths), and yet I'm compelled to roll my eyes and laugh at them. My initial analysis is that it's some sort of deep conditioning I got as a child growing up in a cult, going to gunshows, hoarding weapons, ammo, precious metals and pennies. But I have overcome so many other elements of that conditioning, it seems too easy an explanation. I've even wondered if seeing Vietnam War protesters and civil rights activists beaten up on the nightly news as a four and five year old somehow conditioned me to feel that way. I discount that because I don't and never have felt violent toward anyone in my whole life, but maybe there's something there.

Another thing is that it seemed like such a club. I always hate that. For one thing I don't really like any of the uniforms available (e.g. tie-dye, long scraggly hair, saffron robes). There tend to be a lot of intractable holier-than-thou positions to take, many of them hypocritical, and therefore not unlike those folks on the other side. The difference is those folks on the other side used to be my folks. I guess I've already picked and chosen from them and fought the battles so I'm either more tolerant or at the very least, not passionate in my opinions regarding them anymore.

I couldn't make it in the club because I would be paralyzed. The concession was selling Starbucks coffee and I felt like if I walked around with a cup the anti-globalization guy would get on me. I only hoped the socially-responsible investing guy and the Fair Trade guy would come to my rescue, but if the investing guy came to my aid, he would risk getting sucker-punched by the Socialist Youth guy. So I just went without coffee. And the ham sandwiches. Forget it. I mean, they put the vegan table right by the exit, how was I going to get out of there alive?

And then there was sort of a general disdain I picked up for America and American culture and a corresponding heightened interest in exotic cultures. There is def a lot of baby-bathwater tossing I think. Just because America may have been co-opted by robber barons again, doesn't mean we the people are bad people and doesn't mean we shouldn't make lionize the ideals of the white males up on Mt. Rushmore. I couldn't help thinking that if some of these causes started adorning their material with American flags and using words like heritage and freedom it might be a little more palatable to the great middle in this country. Maybe they don't want that. Maybe that would dissolve their raison d'etre.

In my defense, I want to remind you that I do not act on these impulses. I don't laugh at people I don't know. I don't treat them poorly when I interact with them. I picked up their pamphlets and read them. I engaged a couple of booth-manners on the issues. The fact that I'm there proves I'm open-minded. But why does it bother me so much? If you know me, go ahead, take a whack at me; leave a comment.

The funniest thing was when I turned the last corner and saw one of my best friends at the World Neighbors booth. She was shocked that I was at a peace festival. I was shocked that she was shocked. I said, "I'm all about peace. Fair Trade, non-violence, justice, unions, condoms, environmental protection; what's not to like?" She just smiled and said, "Just by yourself, right." She knows me all too well...

My Heart Could Use Some Glasses

Well, I just wrapped up a week of single-dadhood. YHWH attended a week-long retreat at a bucolic haven in western Oklahoma. I'm not sure I ever got a handle on the stated goal of the event and even though it featured two high-profile prophets, I think not being around the rest of us was the ultimate end of the exercise. So to that end, it was highly successful.

At first I was dismayed that such an event would be held for a full week and in the off-season, but later I learned that most of the attendees were pastoral types with irregular work hours. Pastors are quite acquainted with overlooking the well-being of their families for the needs of the flock, so I could see the rationale. It was pretty disruptive to the rest of us but we got a lot of help from Mimi, who came in from out-of-town, and it was only a week and you can do anything for a week. The greatest benefit was that Mimi now understands how complicated our daily lives are.

I was also reassured in my staunch belief that the Catholics are right to have an unmarried clergy, especially monks and nuns, of course. Ya can't serve two masters and all that, ya know. I had to work hard to not be jaded about the whole thing. It seemed really ironic to me that peace and harmony are achieved by disrupting the lives of so many other people. The girls really didn't understand it and were kind of disturbed by it. They got over it, but they just didn't get it. In the end, though, YHWH felt like she needed it, so I'm glad she found what she was looking for.

I was very careful to avoid letting myself whine about it and I tried to take the opportunity to observe and reflect while I was in the middle of it. A nice luxury since most times when your patterns are disrupted you don't have time to plan or you're so busy trying to cope you can't see the forest for the trees. The most powerful insight I gained was a better understanding of the single parent. I'm pretty empathic and Pisces (if you believe) are very good, dangerously good, at being consumed by role-playing and my only respite at times was knowing it would all be over in a week. Real single parents can't say that. The other thing I learned from that was the importance of one's social network. I found myself making contingency plans for contingency plans; if she can't pick up SGK, I'll call him, if he can't, I'll call... Thanks to Mimi I didn't have to use them. I'm glad because I also learned from this that I am very loathe to ask anyone for help. I guess I would get over that quickly if it were for real.

I also feel like I can better understand my mom and therefore my own childhood after this week. For most of my early life, my dad was in route sales and he would leave on Sunday night and come back Friday night. My mom had to be good cop and bad cop, make lunches, get us ready for school, and everything else alone. Some years she worked while we were in school. My dad came home to a hero's welcome every Friday night. I already knew all this, but I took the time to think about how she must have felt during those years; she was probably pretty resentful for one thing and I'm glad she didn't let it color her relationship with us -- too much. This also made me think a lot about the spouses and children of our soldiers, especially with so many Guardsmen having to stay in rotation. One of Killer's classmates has a father on active duty in Iraq and her mother's Guard unit was sent to a base on the east coast. This happened nearly two years ago. She's been living with her grandmother.

Despite all those things, I feel pretty good about saying I could do it if I had to. I guess you figure out something that works, get in a pattern and go with the flow. Build up your social network, don't be too proud to ask for (or accept) help, make contingency plans as best you can, and hold on loosely. Famous last words, huh?

Strike A Pose, There's Nothing To It

OK, OK, I won an award at work.

The thing is, I don't remember any of it. I remember dressing up and going to the banquet facility. I remember I had my lovely daughters with me. It was appropriately Oscar-night themed as I remember because we walked in on a red carpet and there were people greeting us and handing me things and then I stopped for my photo op and then my publicist swept in and ushered us over to our table.

I remember the director was reading off some introductory remarks about the winner and then everyone around me started prodding me and saying, "It's you. It's you, man." And I think I heard someone say, "Get up there, man." So, when my name was announced I zoned out and just focused on getting up to the front without tripping or anything. I picked up my oversized check and crossed the stage and while there I heard the director say, "Let me tell you a little about St. Fiacre." That's all I heard, so discomfitted was I. No chance of a big head here - I didn't even find out what I'd done to win it!

Super Giant Killer was mightily impressed with the gigantic check. On Sunday morning Molly, Nellie, and Kit reenacted the cermony and the winner made several large purchases befitting such a large check. Later that day, she observed that southern Europe and southern Asia have similar shapes and so she drew a map of Italy and neighbors and compared it to another she drew of the similarly dangling Malay Peninsula. Not exact of course, but I do see what she picked up on. These were drawn on the back of my check.

I Want To Be A Football He-ro

Adjective Queen likes to joke that I am her son Sport's Football Dad. Actually what she says is he is my Football Son. This isn't usurpation of Sport's bio-dad or an attempt at compensating for my having only girls, but rather a simple meeting of minds - he and I are the only members of our circle of friends who like football and sports in general. In our respective nuclear familial units, football is a bane of the first order up there with Dubbya and evangelicals.

I have never fully understood the loathsome regard blue-staters have toward football. I can name several reasons why I believe it to be, but I always come away feeling like I've diagnosed the symptoms rather than the disease. I think they don't like it because athletes are ascendant in most American high schools and the most dominant, almost iconically so, are football players and their female counterparts, cheerleaders and by contrast blue-staters, as individualistic, geeky, brainy, and largely unathletic, tend to be quite a bit south of there hierarchically. They prefer baseball because it has a solid literary tradition. They prefer soccer because they can comfortably root for the snobby Europeans or the noble post-colonial indigenous peoples' teams.
Probably most telling is they don't like it because 'everyone else' likes it, especially unthinking red-staters. It's also violent and there are those pesky cheerleaders to remind women of their eons of subjugation.

I'm confused because I think they should like it. In both the way it is played and the way its league is structured, it embodies the very community ideals and socialist economics they often tout in their ideology. In baseball, individual contributions are toted up to arrive at the final result. In football, everyone moves down the field together or not at all. The teams are made up of players with diverse skills and abilities. The professional league is structured so that revenues are split evenly among all teams, parity is highly desired and achieved so that all the teams and their fans have fair chance at glory, and players have both a minimum wage and a salary cap to prevent any one player or team too great a share of that society's riches. These seem like a blue-state dream, but I rarely see it celebrated.

I really didn't mean to go off on that tangent. It just occured to me as a thought about this post. I mainly just wanted to report that I took Sport to several local small college football games this year and he seems to have enjoyed it, as did I. We talked about plays and strategies and had some dogs and stuff. I almost asked him about the cheerleaders, one of whom looked like a dead-ringer for Kirsten Dunst, but I stopped myself because I thought he was probably too young to have checked them out and my own particular living arrangements have drubbed out any habit I might have of making public comments about a female's appearance - unless I am telling my three how spectacular they look.

I mentioned that Queen calls me Football Dad and I have to admit it makes me feel weird because it makes wonder sometimes how I would do if I had also had a son. I always wanted to have girl children because I knew how hard it was to grow up as a boy. Of course now I have the perspective that they both have their own brand of hellishness. The main thing I figured would be hard about raising boys is that they never talk. Girls talk constantly, so I figure I will at least know what is going on most of the time.

So anyway I was reminded of this during halftime at Saturday's game. We were sitting back shootin' the breeze and I started asking him stuff:
"So have you thought about where you want to go to high school?"
"Nah."
A plane flies over.
"Hey, that could be Lego Guy someday."
"Yeah."
"Do you think he'll fly someday?"
"I dunno."
"So, does he have a girlfriend?"
"Nah."
"What about you?"
"Yeah."
"Oh, yeah. Do you talk to her and stuff?"
"Some times."
"Is she pretty?"
Shrug.
"What's her name?"
"I'm not tellin' you!"
"You're not? I thought we were friends!"

That pretty well sums up my history with my dad, too. We would drive for two hours and not say a word and he'd say, "Enjoyed being with you, son." So, I hope I did OK this season, Queen, in my limited capacity as Football Dad. Oh, and by the way, he hasn't ever heard of Jim Thorpe. What the hell kind of family are you running over there, anyway? Never heard of Jim Thorpe, sheesh.

I'm All Lost in the Supermarket

There was one more episode about the New York trip that I forgot to disclose - mainly because I was hoping it was just a nightmare which would pass like bad gas in the morning. But it didn't. At LaGuardia getting ready to board the flight home, YHWH lost her organizer. Nothing big really, just her driver's license, health card, credit card, and other sparkling gems of the identity theft gold mine. She didn't realize it until the next morning, and so we weren't sure where it was lost - or stolen. I had just been to a short workshop on i.d. theft and so I was sure the prospects were pretty grim. So that first day back, YHWH cancelled all the cards and notified the credit agencies and got the defensive ball rolling. Meanwhile we turned every pocket, every bag inside out hoping it was stashed somewhere. All airport and airline lost-and-founds were called fruitlessly.

Everyone had a theory. YHWH's sister was sure that it was stolen from her purse at O'Hare. In fact, she recreated an entire narrative in which she selected a half dozen swarthy immigrants who worked in the food court and had been taking a break nearby as the perps in this crime drama of her own making. Sadly, this is a woman who doesn't get out much and her world view is largely formed by the local news. To me it just didn't add up. Mainly because they didn't have two key crime elements: motive or opportunity. And because I think profiling is really pathetic.

YHWH thought the missing piece was flung from the underseat nest of her purse when our tiny jet made a rather abrupt touchdown and overbraked to a stop on the runway at Will Rogers in OKC. As to its current whereabouts, she had no answer and by the end of the day I ruled that one out because the cleaning crew sweeping in after our departure would have picked it up and if they were going to turn it in we would've known by the end of that next day, they being local and all.

I, however, knew what happened although I could not say where exactly the organizer was. When we got to LaGuardia we had to check our bags at the curb. The airlines now charge two dollars a bag for this. It was really chaotic at the checkstand, so I gave YHWH $12 for our five bags and her sister's and then took the girls inside the terminal to try and thin out the crowd on the curb. Apparently, the baggageman took the $12 and said, "This is for the airline. Now another $12 for me." YHWH didn't have it so her sister had to crack open her wallet; this was its virginal opening on the trip I'm pretty sure. I mention this because I think this was the first of a succession of mental distractions for YHWH, who is very easily distracted. So, after the bags are gone, her sister tells her we owe her $10 for the bags. OK, she stayed at our house, our friend took us to the airport, I paid the $12 in OKC to have the bags loaded, I bought her two drinks, she doesn't spend one dime on the whole trip, I had just paid the $12 to the airline and not only will she not get the tip, she prorates it. This took YHWH aback and rattled her a little bit. Understand, it's not the money, it's the principle.

We then proceed to the TSA line to get screened and all of a sudden the line gets really chaotic and some heavily armed dude shows up and starts rerouting people through other lines. And this isn't like three parallel lines. This arrangement looks like that universal symbol for USB ports you see on computers. Anyway, in a scene out of a Holocaust movie, before I know it, right in front of my eyes, Killer gets pushed into a line by herself and YHWH and I get pushed to another and the sister and C.F. Kats to another. I can't even see Killer from where I am and this SWAT-looking guy with a machine gun is in my way. I decided to just get through the line as fast as I can and keep an eye on that line. Unfortunately, the reason for the commotion is in our line. YHWH and I turn a corner and there at the conveyor belt are two young women with a baby and two freakin' cats. These idiots were bringing cats as freakin' carry-ons! And the cats were not having any of it. Do they not know people who can feed their damn cats at home? Mind you, they have shoes all over the floor, their bags aren't zipped up, nothing is in baskets - it's a g-d TSA training video is what it is. And all I know is I can't see my child. So, one woman carries a cat through the metal detector. She has to wait for the cat's bag to go through the scanner and then fights with the cat to stuff it into a bowling-type bag. Then she tries to go back for the other cat, but the TSA lady stops her and says you can't go back through once you've passed. The baby is, of course, crying it's head off by now. The TSA lady tells the other lady to come through with the cat, but she says she can't leave the baby!! So we're at an impasse. No way, they claim, will they put the cat through the scanner thing. And the TSA lady is stumped. So finally I say, "Just carry them both, lady! The cat and the baby!" Everybody just stopped and looked at each other. YHWH was not looking too good. Very frustrated. At that point I just walked up to detector and went through without looking back, praying I wouldn't beep. I grabbed all my stuff of the conveyor belt and frantically searched for Killer. There she was, sitting on a bench putting her shoes on like nothing ever happened. Looking back at the scene I'd left behind I saw that YHWH had cleared and then I saw another SWAT guy approaching - with a big German Shepherd on a leash. Wouldn't want to be there when the dog showed up.

So, I think she lost her organizer there because she had to get it out to show her ID to the TSA people and I think she got so frazzled that she left it around there. For the last two weeks we heard nothing about it and I was pretty sure YHWH was in denial about it. And then today she got a small, thick envelope with no return address and a postage due stamp on it. It was the innards of her organizer, apparently unmolested. Where it was found, who found it, where the actual organizer is, we do not know. Might have been one of those cat women. Might have been one of those boys at O'Hare. All we know is there are still good people around this country of ours.