I was at a Grateful Dead show, and there was Brad in the parking lot. It was around 1993, I think. Atlanta. The Omni. One hideous layer of asphalt after another. The city is beautiful in spots, but the lots surrounding this venue were particularly bleak. Like a Soviet-era postcard from eastern Europe.
Brad had a cheap Mexican blanket spread across a parking space. There were "just another lizard for peace" airbrushed t-shirts and his cholla cactus pipes. The red pipestone was carved at odd angles and mounted onto a metal rod with the cholla serving as a sleeve for the stem. I sat down and we shared a beer. I asked whether he was going to the show.
"You know, Debra, I'm just parking lot scum. Don't tell anyone, but I don't even like the Grateful Dead."
This didn't entirely surprise me. I knew that he and I shared obsessive love for his friend Dexter Romweber's band, the Flat Duo Jets. At the time Brad liked Athens bands, harder punkier sounding stuff.
"Besides, I need the money. I'm broke."
I asked if he had a place to stay. Here in Atlanta, he had to know people. But he had other plans.
"You know, I saw a big piece of plastic over there by the railroad track." He pointed to his left, but I didn't see any train track. "I'm planning to pick that up after the show and head over to a warehouse to sleep."
I never could tell whether Brad's hardscrabble ways were motivated by a flair for dramatic detail or because of his disinterest in imposing on friends. If he had simply driven to a buddy's house that night, it wouldn't have been nearly as memorable as my concern for Brad hunkering beneath industrial polyvinyl among the home bums.
I stood up and headed to the show. After the encore I left and saw Brad in his best Shakedown Street form, talking up the college students and Deadheads, offering trades for some good weed. He looked so happy whenever he had an audience and a pipeful of smoke. Money seemed uninteresting, except for the endless need for automotive repairs, gasoline and intoxicants. Brad was a simple man.
Brad eventually came to love the Grateful Dead and many other bands. I reminded him of his remark about the Dead in the early nineties awhile back. He said something like this:
"I started getting into them that last year or two. And after Jerry Garcia died, I missed them so much. Maybe everything seems better after it's gone. So I try to see more music now."
And this was true. Although Brad could still work straight through a festival at times, he did take some time to see some bands. I saw him dancing across from me at the Sun Ray Festival near Athens, at the disastrous Fire Lake Festival in Gaffney, and at Down On The Farm in northern Florida. Berlin, Devo, the Drive-By Truckers, Steve Earle, War - Brad was an awkward white dancer, much like me, but we laughed and danced and drank through it all.
In fact, Brad got a computer and became an ardent fan of music files. He burned wonderful mix CDs for me with names like "Songs About Guns and Death" and "Start Chopping: Another Great CD by Brad". There were tunes by Johnny Cash, the Violent Femmes, Townes Van Zandt, Johnny Thunders, the Avett Brothers, Charlie Louvin. There were surprise tunes from mainstream country artists and seventies Eagles. I came to be quite impressed with Brad's wide musical spectrum.
There are songs I can't separate from thoughts of Brad. Joe Diffie, "Pickup Man". Violent Femmes, "Country Death Song". And these days, Johnny Cash's version of Trent Reznor's "Hurt".
NTD
Saturday, November 24, 2007
Friday, November 23, 2007
From the Bradbury Quote File:
Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't try to do things. You simply must do things. - Ray Bradbury
and another:
Stuff your eyes with wonder . . . live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. – Ray Bradbury
NTDThursday, November 22, 2007
My daughter is editor of her high school yearbook. In our town, many of the graduates' families purchase "dedication pages", which are really vanity spaces for our darling children/siblings/paramours. So far, my daughter has talked her father, her sister, her best friend, and me into buying a page for her. This is weird but typical here. In a way, I can see that if a kid is paying sixty bucks for a yearbook, he/she wants some decent photographs and dedications, rather than a half-assed senior shot and a short list of the clubs that the kids rarely went to a meeting for. My own yearbook was an embarrassing tome which pointed out that, no, I was not one of the popular girls. It's more like a slideshow that could have accompanied Janis Ian's anthem of misfit-ism, "At Seventeen". To make it worse, the most heartfelt notes in my yearbook were written by my teachers. The friendless teacher's pet, my yearbook cries out.
My teenaged years were not quite as bad as the yearbook indicates. Still, I cringe whenever I look at it. The best thing about it is the firm evidence that I never donned the seventies mullet. My daughter pointed this out admiringly, when she saw that every single person on my page had a version of feathered and layered hair except me.
I have to pick a good quote, a personal note, and a group of photos for my daughter's page. She e-mailed me from school the other day, suggesting that I look at the famous words of Barry Manilow. I can't quite figure what she means - "I made it through the rain"? "Music and fashion were always the passion at the Copa"? "I never realized how happy you made me, Oh Mandy"??? I was thinking more along the lines of my own quotable favorites - Dr. Suess, Einstein, Douglas Adams, Alice Walker. I'll dig a little deeper in the morning. All the pumpkin pie and butter beans have left me lethargic.
Happy Thanksgiving, y'all.
NTD
My teenaged years were not quite as bad as the yearbook indicates. Still, I cringe whenever I look at it. The best thing about it is the firm evidence that I never donned the seventies mullet. My daughter pointed this out admiringly, when she saw that every single person on my page had a version of feathered and layered hair except me.
I have to pick a good quote, a personal note, and a group of photos for my daughter's page. She e-mailed me from school the other day, suggesting that I look at the famous words of Barry Manilow. I can't quite figure what she means - "I made it through the rain"? "Music and fashion were always the passion at the Copa"? "I never realized how happy you made me, Oh Mandy"??? I was thinking more along the lines of my own quotable favorites - Dr. Suess, Einstein, Douglas Adams, Alice Walker. I'll dig a little deeper in the morning. All the pumpkin pie and butter beans have left me lethargic.
Happy Thanksgiving, y'all.
NTD
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
I don't believe in writer's block
"I don't believe in writer's block." - Grady Tripp, played by Michael Douglas, The Wonder Boys
Well, I generally don't either, Grady. Especially in my own writing, because it generally consists these days of producing, per month:
- two political columns for three newspapers.
- an average of ten blog entries.
- several personal e-mails in which I try to approximate wit.
This is hardly the prolific output of a Stephen King here. So it is frustrating when I have difficulty with my smallish, modest writing schedule.
Today I want to race ahead on my political column schedule so that I am not struggling three hours before deadline. About two good opening paragraphs on a half dozen subjects practically write themselves before the inevitable descent into bullshit reveals the hard truth: that I don't really have any grasp on a revelation, and lack the interest to make something happen here.
I suppose that the Great Truth is revealed: I need More Coffee. This isn't writer's block, damn it. This is a mild caffeine withdrawal symptom.
That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
NTD
Well, I generally don't either, Grady. Especially in my own writing, because it generally consists these days of producing, per month:
- two political columns for three newspapers.
- an average of ten blog entries.
- several personal e-mails in which I try to approximate wit.
This is hardly the prolific output of a Stephen King here. So it is frustrating when I have difficulty with my smallish, modest writing schedule.
Today I want to race ahead on my political column schedule so that I am not struggling three hours before deadline. About two good opening paragraphs on a half dozen subjects practically write themselves before the inevitable descent into bullshit reveals the hard truth: that I don't really have any grasp on a revelation, and lack the interest to make something happen here.
I suppose that the Great Truth is revealed: I need More Coffee. This isn't writer's block, damn it. This is a mild caffeine withdrawal symptom.
That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
NTD
Sunday, November 18, 2007
Saturday, November 17, 2007
Monday, November 12, 2007
The Lizard for Peace
One thing I know is this: the personal is political. This week I have tried to write something for my political column, and all I can think about is the death of my great friend Brad. In a world full of violence and political madness, there was Brad, selling his humble handmade "Just Another Lizard for Peace" t-shirts for twenty years in parking lots and at festivals.
Hunter S. Thompson said this about his character Dr. Gonzo in Fear and Loathing: "There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. Some kind of high-powered mutant never even considered for mass production". Nothing truer could be said about Brad.
Six days before Thanksgiving 1996: Brad owed me a hundred dollars, so I picked him up at the Athens house he shared with two roommates. The idea here was to do some of the man-work around my house down in Statesboro in order to pay me back. We also conspired to make art. Brad was a visionary artist who could fill a K-Mart shopping cart with house paint, fishing line, glue, and the kind of poster board used in a million elementary school projects, and turn this into the creatures which lived inside his brain. Little men with short legs and long torsos who drummed and banged on guitars. Fish and weird lizards with mismatched appendages, butterflies with menacing sharp wings. That week we hunkered over his snake stencil, its head triangulated and the long body curling across the cardboard. He painted several snakes that evening. I chose a forest green and royal purple snake for myself. It has sat in a makeshift frame on the mantel in my bedroom ever since.
Brad jumped on my daughters' trampoline that week and managed to sprain his ankle. He needed copious amounts of whiskey and beer for the pain. That painting is the only payment I recall toward the original debt.
It was my ex-husband's turn to have the daughters for Thanksgiving, so Brad and I found ourselves without proper food options by lunchtime. We drove around Statesboro and found nothing open. When we passed Boyd's BBQ, we saw an open door and went in.
There were a group of Baptist men preparing box lunches for the poor. I spotted my ex-brother-in-law among them.
"Robert... do you think that you could spare a couple of meals for us? I'll pay whatever." I was embarrassed, realizing that the World of Brad had rendered me a little hungover and thoughtless, much like him.
Robert appeared to enjoy my helplessness. But he handed me a pair of turkey dinners, and I gave him a ten dollar bill.
Robert died last year unexpectedly, a complication of diabetes. And now Brad is dead too.
When I recently re-read Jack Kerouac's On the Road, almost every description of the character of Dean Moriarty/Neal Cassady made me think of Brad. The reckless enthusiasm for what Kerouac calls "kicks"- whether having another adventure on the highway or hearing a great piece of music - was so much like my memories of Brad. Brad loved the desert, good books, the road, making art, taking drugs, and seeing live music. He had traveled with the Flat Duo Jets and kept talking about writing a book about those days. He sat on my porch last year listening to Gram Parsons' Return of the Grievous Angel over and over, crying and whispering along to the music. He called me last winter from a remote desert hot spring, raving about how happy he was and how perfect the stars looked in the open sky. He talked me into buying screenprinting equipment in order to start a sticker business this spring, and then promptly fell behind in paying me back for it. He hated the rise in gasoline prices, which made it difficult for him to afford more adventures. But he had fallen madly in love with a girl we all admired for her calm demeanor and grace a few months ago and the feeling had been mutual. So Brad was trying to reconstruct his life over the past weeks in order to be worthy of this next phase of life: a middle-aged husband with the beautiful woman who had accepted his proposal of marriage which had been blurted out in a wild-eyed state in the dusty field that was the Bonnaroo Music Festival last June.
I last saw Brad in a convenience store parking lot in Lexington, Georgia. He wore crazy yellow sunglasses and lumbered around our vehicles, showing me his latest idea - airbrushed canvas bags with his artwork. He had done well at the Philly Folk Festival with his t-shirts and canvas concert chairs, and was hoping that he could get out of Widespread Panic parking lots and aim for an older, middle-class market. He seemed simultaneously happy in love and worried about money. He gave me one of the bags with a smiling orange sun painted on the front. We hugged and I told him that I would see him down the road. I always counted on that.
But Brad drove to Birmingham in order to make some Widespread money on Friday. And although details are sketchy, I know that his heart stopped while he was parked beneath a highway overpass in his truck.
It is hard to believe that there will be no more stories from Brad - no late night pass-around-the-bottle visitations sharing tales of gathering stones from the sea at Big Sur, sleeping in a hammock in a cabana in Mexico, the transvestite hooker's kitchen near Times Square, the various felonies and misdemeanors committed with rock stars and starlets in bathrooms and back alleys, the constant leaking of transmission fluid, oil, money, and dreams while on the road... Brad was the greatest storyteller I ever got to sit at a campfire with. I miss him so much already, but so does everyone who knew him.
Brad was the son of a Baptist preacher. I used to play piano at the Baptist church. During the week that Brad sprained his ankle and painted snakes, we got to spend an evening at my piano with the Broadman Hymnal. We drank Budweiser and sang every hymn we both knew. He frequently told me that we would have to sing hymns again one day.
I promise, Brad, that I'll get that hymnal out again soon.
NTD
Hunter S. Thompson said this about his character Dr. Gonzo in Fear and Loathing: "There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. Some kind of high-powered mutant never even considered for mass production". Nothing truer could be said about Brad.
Six days before Thanksgiving 1996: Brad owed me a hundred dollars, so I picked him up at the Athens house he shared with two roommates. The idea here was to do some of the man-work around my house down in Statesboro in order to pay me back. We also conspired to make art. Brad was a visionary artist who could fill a K-Mart shopping cart with house paint, fishing line, glue, and the kind of poster board used in a million elementary school projects, and turn this into the creatures which lived inside his brain. Little men with short legs and long torsos who drummed and banged on guitars. Fish and weird lizards with mismatched appendages, butterflies with menacing sharp wings. That week we hunkered over his snake stencil, its head triangulated and the long body curling across the cardboard. He painted several snakes that evening. I chose a forest green and royal purple snake for myself. It has sat in a makeshift frame on the mantel in my bedroom ever since.
Brad jumped on my daughters' trampoline that week and managed to sprain his ankle. He needed copious amounts of whiskey and beer for the pain. That painting is the only payment I recall toward the original debt.
It was my ex-husband's turn to have the daughters for Thanksgiving, so Brad and I found ourselves without proper food options by lunchtime. We drove around Statesboro and found nothing open. When we passed Boyd's BBQ, we saw an open door and went in.
There were a group of Baptist men preparing box lunches for the poor. I spotted my ex-brother-in-law among them.
"Robert... do you think that you could spare a couple of meals for us? I'll pay whatever." I was embarrassed, realizing that the World of Brad had rendered me a little hungover and thoughtless, much like him.
Robert appeared to enjoy my helplessness. But he handed me a pair of turkey dinners, and I gave him a ten dollar bill.
Robert died last year unexpectedly, a complication of diabetes. And now Brad is dead too.
When I recently re-read Jack Kerouac's On the Road, almost every description of the character of Dean Moriarty/Neal Cassady made me think of Brad. The reckless enthusiasm for what Kerouac calls "kicks"- whether having another adventure on the highway or hearing a great piece of music - was so much like my memories of Brad. Brad loved the desert, good books, the road, making art, taking drugs, and seeing live music. He had traveled with the Flat Duo Jets and kept talking about writing a book about those days. He sat on my porch last year listening to Gram Parsons' Return of the Grievous Angel over and over, crying and whispering along to the music. He called me last winter from a remote desert hot spring, raving about how happy he was and how perfect the stars looked in the open sky. He talked me into buying screenprinting equipment in order to start a sticker business this spring, and then promptly fell behind in paying me back for it. He hated the rise in gasoline prices, which made it difficult for him to afford more adventures. But he had fallen madly in love with a girl we all admired for her calm demeanor and grace a few months ago and the feeling had been mutual. So Brad was trying to reconstruct his life over the past weeks in order to be worthy of this next phase of life: a middle-aged husband with the beautiful woman who had accepted his proposal of marriage which had been blurted out in a wild-eyed state in the dusty field that was the Bonnaroo Music Festival last June.
I last saw Brad in a convenience store parking lot in Lexington, Georgia. He wore crazy yellow sunglasses and lumbered around our vehicles, showing me his latest idea - airbrushed canvas bags with his artwork. He had done well at the Philly Folk Festival with his t-shirts and canvas concert chairs, and was hoping that he could get out of Widespread Panic parking lots and aim for an older, middle-class market. He seemed simultaneously happy in love and worried about money. He gave me one of the bags with a smiling orange sun painted on the front. We hugged and I told him that I would see him down the road. I always counted on that.
But Brad drove to Birmingham in order to make some Widespread money on Friday. And although details are sketchy, I know that his heart stopped while he was parked beneath a highway overpass in his truck.
It is hard to believe that there will be no more stories from Brad - no late night pass-around-the-bottle visitations sharing tales of gathering stones from the sea at Big Sur, sleeping in a hammock in a cabana in Mexico, the transvestite hooker's kitchen near Times Square, the various felonies and misdemeanors committed with rock stars and starlets in bathrooms and back alleys, the constant leaking of transmission fluid, oil, money, and dreams while on the road... Brad was the greatest storyteller I ever got to sit at a campfire with. I miss him so much already, but so does everyone who knew him.
Brad was the son of a Baptist preacher. I used to play piano at the Baptist church. During the week that Brad sprained his ankle and painted snakes, we got to spend an evening at my piano with the Broadman Hymnal. We drank Budweiser and sang every hymn we both knew. He frequently told me that we would have to sing hymns again one day.
I promise, Brad, that I'll get that hymnal out again soon.
NTD
Saturday, November 10, 2007
R.I.P. Brad Bishop
I got the call around 2:30 a.m... Brad died in Birmingham. He was one of my closest friends.
NTD
NTD
Thursday, November 8, 2007
Respectable
I have all kinds of friends. By that, I mean that there's a wide variety of age groups, educational levels, and economic success. Some of them have outstanding warrants in multiple states, and some have plaques hanging on their walls touting their various civic accomplishments. Sometimes I loosely group the warranted buddies and the convicted felons among what I call my "bad" friends. I have bailed out my share over the years. But many of my so-called "bad" friends are among the best - and I would likely phone up some of them when I have troubles long before I would tell the more respectable ones about the darker details of my life.
Today I am having lunch with a couple of the Respectables. I don't fault them for their excess of virtue - I consider all people capable of misdemeanors and rebellion. It's just that some people have had a lack of drama, whether it is the luck of their non-addictive genetics or their ability to balance a checkbook, or their great good fortune in falling in love with a kind, reliable spouse at an early age. I consider my own spotless legal record to be largely a matter of my adolescent fear of hell, combined with mathematical prowess which helps me to stay financially afloat.
In the case of the lunch date, I happen to know that in the very early seventies, my wealthy friend had an FBI file regarding her anti-war activities. She once showed me an underground publication which featured a photograph of her younger, skinnier self leading a protest march. My other friend I'll see today has told me of growing marijuana on the balcony back in the day, sometimes travelling with grocery bags full of the stuff.
My warranted friends are a little younger, and some still wander the country with their weed and their untagged vehicles. It's hard to get to your court date when you're broke and five states west of the courthouse. Besides, it's mostly misdemeanor stuff - simple possession, minor speeding, no proof of insurance, vending in a concert parking lot without a license.
It's hard to blame anybody for their vices. Or for their troubles. They're still trying to live the Kerouac life, and somehow haven't noticed that it's 2007. And it's hard for me to condemn anyone for their dreamy love of the road, no matter how impractical. I have a perverse respect for the idealistic road warriors.
But I also respect the folks who keep the home fires burning, the gardens growing, and the children tucked safely in their beds. I feel the gravity myself more and more.
One definition of "respect" is this: esteem for or a sense of the worth or excellence of a person, a personal quality or ability. "Respectability", on the other hand, can mean "respectable social standing, character, or reputation". As for me, I can respect the respectable some of the time, respect the disreputable some of the time; but I can't respect the respectable OR the disreputable All of the Time.
NTD
Today I am having lunch with a couple of the Respectables. I don't fault them for their excess of virtue - I consider all people capable of misdemeanors and rebellion. It's just that some people have had a lack of drama, whether it is the luck of their non-addictive genetics or their ability to balance a checkbook, or their great good fortune in falling in love with a kind, reliable spouse at an early age. I consider my own spotless legal record to be largely a matter of my adolescent fear of hell, combined with mathematical prowess which helps me to stay financially afloat.
In the case of the lunch date, I happen to know that in the very early seventies, my wealthy friend had an FBI file regarding her anti-war activities. She once showed me an underground publication which featured a photograph of her younger, skinnier self leading a protest march. My other friend I'll see today has told me of growing marijuana on the balcony back in the day, sometimes travelling with grocery bags full of the stuff.
My warranted friends are a little younger, and some still wander the country with their weed and their untagged vehicles. It's hard to get to your court date when you're broke and five states west of the courthouse. Besides, it's mostly misdemeanor stuff - simple possession, minor speeding, no proof of insurance, vending in a concert parking lot without a license.
It's hard to blame anybody for their vices. Or for their troubles. They're still trying to live the Kerouac life, and somehow haven't noticed that it's 2007. And it's hard for me to condemn anyone for their dreamy love of the road, no matter how impractical. I have a perverse respect for the idealistic road warriors.
But I also respect the folks who keep the home fires burning, the gardens growing, and the children tucked safely in their beds. I feel the gravity myself more and more.
One definition of "respect" is this: esteem for or a sense of the worth or excellence of a person, a personal quality or ability. "Respectability", on the other hand, can mean "respectable social standing, character, or reputation". As for me, I can respect the respectable some of the time, respect the disreputable some of the time; but I can't respect the respectable OR the disreputable All of the Time.
NTD
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
Even in my quiet neighborhood...
... the evening/nighttime/early morning sounds have increased lately. There is a cat in heat who prefers to make love in the privacy of my back yard, just below my bedroom window. At 3:30 a.m., the city hall alarm goes off every morning. Sometimes it lasts 30 seconds, sometimes 30 minutes. During a ferocious migraine I called the police department and demanded an explanation. "The cleaning crew sets it off", she explained without offering any future relief. All I can think, is that this town better have the most germ-free government in the history of the world.
The train which runs across a mile or so of track delivering something - raw peanuts or bricks, I think - has a conductor who sits on the air horn with a vengeance. This begins around 7 a.m. And now somebody has a sad puppy who barks relentlessly when night falls. The same dog has also learned to howl along with the morning train, as well as to police and ambulance sirens.
And then there are the squirrels who recently moved back into my attic for the season. In the evening I believe that they jog in place just above my bed, perhaps to keep in shape after eating too many pecans, the same nuts which have been bouncing off my metal roof for weeks now.
Then the neighborhood chicken usually starts scratching around the grass at dawn.
Other than the air horn enthusiast and the janitors who can't figure out how to switch off an alarm, I usually don't mind the other sounds. At least they are Evidence of Nature, if you can count the house pets.
I only write this down because I couldn't sleep last night. And all I can seem to think of are all the little disturbances which remind me that the universe is alive and well and there's a bunch of living, breathing creatures happy to make a racket whenever they feel like it. And, whether or not I am in the mood to listen, nature's cacophony is good.
NTD
The train which runs across a mile or so of track delivering something - raw peanuts or bricks, I think - has a conductor who sits on the air horn with a vengeance. This begins around 7 a.m. And now somebody has a sad puppy who barks relentlessly when night falls. The same dog has also learned to howl along with the morning train, as well as to police and ambulance sirens.
And then there are the squirrels who recently moved back into my attic for the season. In the evening I believe that they jog in place just above my bed, perhaps to keep in shape after eating too many pecans, the same nuts which have been bouncing off my metal roof for weeks now.
Then the neighborhood chicken usually starts scratching around the grass at dawn.
Other than the air horn enthusiast and the janitors who can't figure out how to switch off an alarm, I usually don't mind the other sounds. At least they are Evidence of Nature, if you can count the house pets.
I only write this down because I couldn't sleep last night. And all I can seem to think of are all the little disturbances which remind me that the universe is alive and well and there's a bunch of living, breathing creatures happy to make a racket whenever they feel like it. And, whether or not I am in the mood to listen, nature's cacophony is good.
NTD
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
I read the news about the Federal Reserve Board's survey on U.S. median income and median net worth this morning. My income is a reasonable Level 3, and my net worth is up there, thanks mainly to various real estate agents' insistence that each of my houses are worth about twice what I am paying for them. It's all so hypothetical unless you cash it in - the house, the inventory of my shop, the vehicles. In the meantime, there's still rot and old carpet and fading paint.
The scary thing is the fragility of the Level 1 families - little income, and credit card debt eating up whatever they might have counted in their meager assets. I have numerous friends who require credit cards or unfavorable second mortgages to simply exist month after month.
I have been very fortunate - although I have lived through a bad divorce agreement, invasive house mold, and the usual adult issues. It was probably very educational to have a grouchy, introverted mother who raised me on her tiny Sears and Roebuck paycheck. Mama was plagued by migraines and was largely unpleasant - we haven't spoken in years, sadly - and she never seemed to muster a single promotion that might have made growing up more comfortable for us. My father, meanwhile, struggled back in Claxton with a fledgling insurance business and made custody payments faithfully. But it wasn't really enough. Our neighbors sent us homemade chili on Fridays and made their son mow our grass when it needed it. But my mother was proud, and would never stoop to sign my sister and I up for the free lunch program or anything else which might have helped. However, she farmed me out as a babysitter starting at age ten, and by fourteen I spent summers working with Laura Da Vinci, a wonderfully eccentric Italian woman who terrorized Savannah highways with her Laura's Pizza on Wheels RV. Laura could cook a mean rigatoni, and we traveled from construction site to factory serving the finest of Savannah's blue-collar workers. But when I turned sixteen my friend Debbie called from Shoney's and offered me a job. The next morning I told Laura that I was leaving.
I hated Shoney's. I also hated selling Olan Mills portrait plans over the telephone, my next job. But I continued to babysit, and over the college years I cleaned houses, played piano for a kindergarten, worked at an Ace Hardware, Dunkin' Donuts, the school cafeteria, a Chinese restaurant, a motel, a vegetarian restaurant... and what I lacked in work consistency, I made up for in tenacity. I learned to live off of day-old bread stores and thrift shops. I had no car for a year. I learned to like the city bus. I made mistakes - an early marriage, for one thing - but like my mother, I learned frugality by necessity. Most of all, I learned to enjoy the challenge of living within my means. It wasn't really a burden for me.
The hardest thing about the post-divorce years was carrying some credit card debt just to get by. My unfavorable divorce deal left me walking away with little more than an aging Honda Accord, a futon, and my upright piano. But I got to buy my ex-husband's share of our store - although it cost me more than the entire shop was worth at the time. Also, I bought an old house one block from my ex, so that the children could walk back and forth between them. It took thirteen years to crawl out of the debt, between the selling price of The Emporium and the need to provide all the things that children require - braces, clothing, college, etc. But I remained endlessly optimistic (except for a few bouts of dark depression) that everything was possible. And between the shop, festival vending, flea markets, Ebay, Amazon, incense making, bead stringing, and the occasional desperate yard sale - the credit debt is gone and I allegedly have a decent net worth. I was also lucky. And, like my mother, I can be very cheap.
My mother's birthday is this week. I send her a lengthy message on birthday cards every November, but she has refused to speak to me for years. It took a lot of therapy to accept the current limitations, and hopefully things will improve one day. But I suppose that this rambling blog entry is, in its own way, a tribute to my mom. My memories of her crying at the kitchen table over the month's budget, all the eggs and toast and rice and other cheap food, the old Plymouth Valiant, her unwillingness to simply find another husband to rescue her from the dire household finances - I really do appreciate her perseverance, and hope that she knows that her influence has made me a decent money manager and a stronger parent for my own two daughters (both of whom know their way around a Goodwill).
Thanks, mom.
NTD
The scary thing is the fragility of the Level 1 families - little income, and credit card debt eating up whatever they might have counted in their meager assets. I have numerous friends who require credit cards or unfavorable second mortgages to simply exist month after month.
I have been very fortunate - although I have lived through a bad divorce agreement, invasive house mold, and the usual adult issues. It was probably very educational to have a grouchy, introverted mother who raised me on her tiny Sears and Roebuck paycheck. Mama was plagued by migraines and was largely unpleasant - we haven't spoken in years, sadly - and she never seemed to muster a single promotion that might have made growing up more comfortable for us. My father, meanwhile, struggled back in Claxton with a fledgling insurance business and made custody payments faithfully. But it wasn't really enough. Our neighbors sent us homemade chili on Fridays and made their son mow our grass when it needed it. But my mother was proud, and would never stoop to sign my sister and I up for the free lunch program or anything else which might have helped. However, she farmed me out as a babysitter starting at age ten, and by fourteen I spent summers working with Laura Da Vinci, a wonderfully eccentric Italian woman who terrorized Savannah highways with her Laura's Pizza on Wheels RV. Laura could cook a mean rigatoni, and we traveled from construction site to factory serving the finest of Savannah's blue-collar workers. But when I turned sixteen my friend Debbie called from Shoney's and offered me a job. The next morning I told Laura that I was leaving.
I hated Shoney's. I also hated selling Olan Mills portrait plans over the telephone, my next job. But I continued to babysit, and over the college years I cleaned houses, played piano for a kindergarten, worked at an Ace Hardware, Dunkin' Donuts, the school cafeteria, a Chinese restaurant, a motel, a vegetarian restaurant... and what I lacked in work consistency, I made up for in tenacity. I learned to live off of day-old bread stores and thrift shops. I had no car for a year. I learned to like the city bus. I made mistakes - an early marriage, for one thing - but like my mother, I learned frugality by necessity. Most of all, I learned to enjoy the challenge of living within my means. It wasn't really a burden for me.
The hardest thing about the post-divorce years was carrying some credit card debt just to get by. My unfavorable divorce deal left me walking away with little more than an aging Honda Accord, a futon, and my upright piano. But I got to buy my ex-husband's share of our store - although it cost me more than the entire shop was worth at the time. Also, I bought an old house one block from my ex, so that the children could walk back and forth between them. It took thirteen years to crawl out of the debt, between the selling price of The Emporium and the need to provide all the things that children require - braces, clothing, college, etc. But I remained endlessly optimistic (except for a few bouts of dark depression) that everything was possible. And between the shop, festival vending, flea markets, Ebay, Amazon, incense making, bead stringing, and the occasional desperate yard sale - the credit debt is gone and I allegedly have a decent net worth. I was also lucky. And, like my mother, I can be very cheap.
My mother's birthday is this week. I send her a lengthy message on birthday cards every November, but she has refused to speak to me for years. It took a lot of therapy to accept the current limitations, and hopefully things will improve one day. But I suppose that this rambling blog entry is, in its own way, a tribute to my mom. My memories of her crying at the kitchen table over the month's budget, all the eggs and toast and rice and other cheap food, the old Plymouth Valiant, her unwillingness to simply find another husband to rescue her from the dire household finances - I really do appreciate her perseverance, and hope that she knows that her influence has made me a decent money manager and a stronger parent for my own two daughters (both of whom know their way around a Goodwill).
Thanks, mom.
NTD
Monday, November 5, 2007
I go to one of those ladies' gyms where the median age is, like, sixty. There's a few college girls showing off their workout spandex on the treadmills, but The Rack is the university gym/pickup joint on campus where most students go. So I sweat among the older and softer females of my town. And other than the annoying scriptures posted on every machine and the occasional Christian workout CD, I kind of like the matronly air about the place. It's like exercising among a passel of kindly aunts.
Sometimes we talk, but it's generally limited to discussions about everyone's children and grandchildren. I can talk about my daughters all day long, so this is easy enough. Otherwise, I spend a half hour on the elliptical trainer, reading the guilty pleasure magazines like Self and Shape, and speculate about the level of photoshopping required before any abdominal muscles are published. When those are all read, I move on to Prevention and wonder why Dr. Andrew Weil apparently refuses to be photographed below the chin. Finally, I have recently succumbed to the gym's supply of Suzanne Somers books, which advocate her "Somersize!" program - that Suzanne seems to never run out of exclamation marks.
If you had sat beside me on a city bus back when I was a skinny nineteen year old college student and revealed my future - a little overweight, middle-aged and looking for guidance from a cast member of Three's Company - I would have moved immediately to another seat.
But here I am, seeking Miss Somers' advice about nutrition and hormones. Strange days indeed.
I was struggling with some sort of abdominal torture machine this morning while a neighboring woman flexed her calves on something I like to call the Singer sewing machine. I pride myself in renaming the equipment to suit myself - there's the sex machine, the birthing chair, the ass-master, the pretty hate machine (which I usually skip). So the ab torture device was hurting, and I hurried through it so as not to give up altogether. And Ms. Singer Calves smiled at me with what I perceived as abundant self-righteousness and stated flatly "You're doing that wrong". She proceeded to explain the problem of rushing through it, but without an ounce of compassion. She had just hula-hooped for five minutes, then gone around asking everyone how she looked, beaming. I decided that I hated her before she had even looked my way.
And look - the evil ab machine is not going to hurt my back or damage a tendon if I do it wrong. It just won't do as much good as the slow, painful, correct way. It's not like twirling a freeweight during your Downward Dog.
This is the way that I raised my children: I tended to watch them while they made mistakes and learned from their errors. And if Anna wasn't running out on the highway and Sarah wasn't hurting herself, I kind of sat back and watched. I never cared to discourage them by giving excessive directions and demanding proper procedures. Children don't seem to like that sort of invasive attention.
As for me, I'm pretty independent. Simply joining a gym and showing up several times a week is a Very Big Deal for me. And if I'm not in imminent danger, I don't want unsolicited advice from know-it-alls. I get my Chicken Soup for the Cellulite from Suzanne Somers, thank you very much.
NTD
Sometimes we talk, but it's generally limited to discussions about everyone's children and grandchildren. I can talk about my daughters all day long, so this is easy enough. Otherwise, I spend a half hour on the elliptical trainer, reading the guilty pleasure magazines like Self and Shape, and speculate about the level of photoshopping required before any abdominal muscles are published. When those are all read, I move on to Prevention and wonder why Dr. Andrew Weil apparently refuses to be photographed below the chin. Finally, I have recently succumbed to the gym's supply of Suzanne Somers books, which advocate her "Somersize!" program - that Suzanne seems to never run out of exclamation marks.
If you had sat beside me on a city bus back when I was a skinny nineteen year old college student and revealed my future - a little overweight, middle-aged and looking for guidance from a cast member of Three's Company - I would have moved immediately to another seat.
But here I am, seeking Miss Somers' advice about nutrition and hormones. Strange days indeed.
I was struggling with some sort of abdominal torture machine this morning while a neighboring woman flexed her calves on something I like to call the Singer sewing machine. I pride myself in renaming the equipment to suit myself - there's the sex machine, the birthing chair, the ass-master, the pretty hate machine (which I usually skip). So the ab torture device was hurting, and I hurried through it so as not to give up altogether. And Ms. Singer Calves smiled at me with what I perceived as abundant self-righteousness and stated flatly "You're doing that wrong". She proceeded to explain the problem of rushing through it, but without an ounce of compassion. She had just hula-hooped for five minutes, then gone around asking everyone how she looked, beaming. I decided that I hated her before she had even looked my way.
And look - the evil ab machine is not going to hurt my back or damage a tendon if I do it wrong. It just won't do as much good as the slow, painful, correct way. It's not like twirling a freeweight during your Downward Dog.
This is the way that I raised my children: I tended to watch them while they made mistakes and learned from their errors. And if Anna wasn't running out on the highway and Sarah wasn't hurting herself, I kind of sat back and watched. I never cared to discourage them by giving excessive directions and demanding proper procedures. Children don't seem to like that sort of invasive attention.
As for me, I'm pretty independent. Simply joining a gym and showing up several times a week is a Very Big Deal for me. And if I'm not in imminent danger, I don't want unsolicited advice from know-it-alls. I get my Chicken Soup for the Cellulite from Suzanne Somers, thank you very much.
NTD
Saturday, November 3, 2007
Yard Sale Finds of the Morning:
1. A 1953 diary for a nickel, with only a few entries including the odd "I drove Pop's truck had a good time. Jack Jr. got killed". And did he really mean this: "I comed in the bathtub tonight" which was wedged between "Carol got mad because I think she talks to much" and "Tried out telescope works pretty good". This is not quite as good as the stack of sad postcards my daughter Anna and I read a few weeks ago with the tragic lovelife of Lulu and her friends from the early seventies.
2. The Rhythm of Sterility and Fertility in Women: Hygienic and Ethical, from the thirties. Priests and Catholic doctors argue against condoms as ungodly, and generally make nookie sound like something very un-fun. Lots of drawings of cute babies on the cover.
3. Las Vegas Cooks! Even Vegas cookbooks sound exciting, although the recipes are too complicated for a basic cook like me. The Joys of Jello also looks pretty cool, but I only eat jello if I'm sick or it's spiked with vodka in a nifty shot form.
I think that the 21st century is so weird that I find myself retreating to other eras via the old stuff found at thrift stores and yard sales. Sometimes the simplicity of an earlier time is comforting (although the diary is a little disturbing).
It's all nifty stuff, but sleeping late would have been wonderful. I've been waking up so early, I wonder whether the time change tonight might help or hurt.
NTD
2. The Rhythm of Sterility and Fertility in Women: Hygienic and Ethical, from the thirties. Priests and Catholic doctors argue against condoms as ungodly, and generally make nookie sound like something very un-fun. Lots of drawings of cute babies on the cover.
3. Las Vegas Cooks! Even Vegas cookbooks sound exciting, although the recipes are too complicated for a basic cook like me. The Joys of Jello also looks pretty cool, but I only eat jello if I'm sick or it's spiked with vodka in a nifty shot form.
I think that the 21st century is so weird that I find myself retreating to other eras via the old stuff found at thrift stores and yard sales. Sometimes the simplicity of an earlier time is comforting (although the diary is a little disturbing).
It's all nifty stuff, but sleeping late would have been wonderful. I've been waking up so early, I wonder whether the time change tonight might help or hurt.
NTD
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