Over fifty plus years of writing, my audience has never been huge other than the years I wrote articles about insurance claim handling. Despite the riveting genre, those articles never garnered much more than a gaggle of stereotypical insurance conventioneers who dropped their mostly smoked cigs long enough to tap the ash off into a weary plastic coffee cup that long ago stopped holding liquids, so they could give my insurance prose a cursory glance and decide whether it should go with them to the bathroom. I’ve a particular gift for creating literature that lusters in the glow of excretion.

I had a great audience in my sister-in-law Daley, though. She must have had a notification alarm set, because every word I ever wrote triggered a loving remark from her almost immediately. Year after year, essay after essay, story after story was rejected for publication (and still is), but our beloved Dale never missed an opportunity to let me know she hung on every word. We miss her for so many reasons, not the least of which is that she made me feel like someone was out there listening. She made us all feel that way.

My father loved greek olives but not just any kind. He loved the wrinkly, oily, greasy ones; what I now know to be called Sicilian Oil Cured Black Olives. He used to get those and a big expensive can of good olive oil when he made his famous sub sandwiches with green peppers, onions, provolone, salami and “capicola”. It was a fancy day when he made them; we were a typical American sliced cheese family that never got provolone cheese any other time. It always meant he was in a great mood and we would be in a great mood too, because we children loved those sandwiches like he did. Mine would be dripping with olive oil because he knew I loved olive oil. On Fridays, fish day in a Catholic household, he would get Long John Silvers for himself and my mom and they would sit in their barcaloungers with their TV trays and tall beer cans and watch a TV movie my mom had recorded. If someone was sick or sad they got poached eggs on toast. Poached eggs still make me feel better if I’m sick.

My father was the first person who taught me about loving someone through food. He passed away 22 years ago this month. Last week I found some olives my dad would have loved and I’ve been putting them on everything. Each time I eat one I’m reminded of how my dad fixed my sub sandwich just the way I liked. I have never eaten a sub sandwich as good as those made by my dad. He told me when I was little that those olives were “cured” and I thought that was a good name for them since they seemed to cure just about anything bothering me at the time and they still do.

I am feeling very peaceful today.  The sun is shining through the clouds.  I am alive in my home with my daughter and Bruce. Its hard to imagine that it will not always be exactly like this; that someday we will not be here.  Not be here each in a room down the hall, not able to call to each other down the stairs.  Not be able to walk into another room and stroke a loved one’s hair.

Sometimes I have to quell my instinct to add motion and noise to a space.  We forget that love is there in the stillness more often than the noise.   I want to freeze this moment to remind myself to feel it more often that I do; to find the love in the quiet, in the stroke of a hand, in the brush of a stray hair, in a shared breath.

We lose our awareness of love found in the quiet spaces.   We live fast paced lives and surrender that awareness to our “to-do” lists.  How often is awareness even on our agenda?   It needs to be there amidst the missed calls and emails, the laundry, the groceries.  It needs to find a home among our priorities.

I read somewhere that the new English that we are teaching kids in school, the new, faster shorter brief-er English, will have one less space after the period in a sentence.  One less space.  Shouldn’t we be adding space?  Shouldn’t our pauses be greater, not less?  I for one, may very likely start adding a third space after my sentences because I am not willing to forego my pauses so easily.  I’m not sure what I’ll do with all that extra time between sentences.  Perhaps I’ll just take a brief respite to be still with my thoughts.  #still

January 3, 2015.   I am getting older by the second.  I want more time.  I want all the time back.  I want to be young and pregnant again so I can feel it more.   I want to hold my little baby again so I can look into her eyes better, lose my temper less, love her better, hold her hand a little longer before she walks away.  Who knew age would come this quickly?  That I would be worried, can I go the distance.  Can I retire to the little farm home and be visited by my Babygirl and her children?   Can I be there for her when is scared, when she doesn’t know what to do.  Can I be that old lady with the vegetables in her garden and frizzy braided grey hair.  Can I.  Please? Please.

I Remember You.

Today I went to the bowling alley. A year or so ago, Bruce and I had befriended a couple at a local watering hole that we ran into several times a month. I can’t remember the wife’s name; it might be Donna. I’m pretty sure the husband was named Gary. She had a storage company. He might have been a long haul truck driver. Or they could have worked at something else entirely. The last time we saw them they told us they’d starting hanging out at the bowling alley I went to today so I checked the lounge thinking they might be there and they were not.

I was mulling over the thought that there are some people we meet and we immediately memorialize their names, while there are others that we know when we meet them we will not have to register their names in our mental library. Not to say that there was anything about Donna and Gary that didn’t warrant remembering; they were a perfectly lovely couple and we enjoyed their company. But I think in retrospect that I knew they were going to be a transient encounter. So I wonder what it is about our socializing these days that prevents us from really connecting, and more so, that facilitates our own disconnect such that we meet people and know that, even though we run into them on several occasions, we will not have to remember their names. The brevity of these encounters is known to us seemingly instinctively, and its as though there is an internal decision not to store a simple detail such as their name. Are we really that shallow? Have we become as data usage conscious with our own brains as we are with our iPhones?

When we were kids and a new kid moved into the neighborhood, there was a buzz about what the new kid’s name was. The big shot among us was the first to throw the new kid’s name around. The name connected us to that new kid’s mystery.

Perhaps these days we don’t register a new name because we don’t want to connect; we want to keep our distance and preserve our own mystery. We minimize our internal data usage so that we don’t make any unnecessary emotional investments. We don’t need to know the waitress’ name unless she doesn’t wait on us timely; then we want a name so we can ask where our food is.

I think I refuse to live in this data conserving age. I want to know and remember everyone’s name, as much as I want them to remember mine. A few years ago Bruce and I went to Sausalito to visit a very dear friend who had lived there for years. Every day he walked two miles around downtown Sausalito, ending with a stop at the coffee shop on the way home to get his cappuccino. We walked with him the first day of our trip and asked him what the name was of the barista that served him his cappuccino every day and he didn’t know. We were sanctimoniously shocked and made it our business to learn the name of every person we encountered on our trip so we could greet them by name as we daily toured the city. Yet here we are, four years later, pondering our inability to recall a person’s name simply because we devalued the odds of their recurrence in our social circle.

I don’t think this self-revelation is going to change anything I do. I wonder only if I have relinquished a bit of my social grace (being the good Southern girl that I am) for the sake of mental economy.

George Zimmerman:  Not guilty.   Words that have touched all of us — nearly all of us have some level of opinion and if you have one, you feel emotionally convicted about it.  It’s undeniably charged with emotional investment.   Even those that don’t have an opinion about guilt or innocence feel the loss of the life of a boy.

I had lunch with my daughter and her friend today.  Her friend is very blond and blue eyed; the white Barbie doll stereotype.  She’s a truly delightful being who loves to tell you her about her huge weightlifter black boyfriend.  So the liberalist interpretive conversation at lunch was very revealing about where young liberal white people are going to ring in on the Zimmerman verdict.  They firmly believe that racial profiling is the primary focus of the case.

I believe that racial profiling was a factor in George Zimmerman’s actions, but so is profiling teenagers.  There are plenty of white kids being subjected to bias because they wear hoodies and let their pants sag.   Despite the fact that the only people indigenous to this country are American Indians, we are a nation of bias.  Even my daughter’s  friend shows her unintentional bias by referring to her boyfriend as “my black boyfriend.”   Albeit, she does so to protect him, it’s still something she feels compelled to do: warn people.   And I say this with the tenderest of hearts for her; I know she’s sincerely not wanting anyone to show him any discomfort so she tells them ahead of time.  But really, if someone has a problem with him, it’s their problem.  If they’re going to be an interracial couple they need to get some thicker skin.  Interracial couples in Europe are common and in  some areas, more common than same race couples.  Nobody warns anybody because they don’t have to.  Yet, we have to worry about it here.  Why is that?

Trayvon Martin is a young man who will never grow up.  Advocates of George Zimmerman support him by saying the boy had burglary tools in his backpack.  Last time I checked death was not the penalty for burglary.  Let’s say in the worst case scenario the boy had bad intentions.   The solution was to call the police.   He did so.  It was their job to take over from there.  The fact that he was told not to carry his gun and he made the choice to disregard this instruction tells me that George had an overblown sense of his role. He must have had visions of himself as a victor.   Clearly his ability to think rationally was impacted by his sense of excitement at having discovered what he considered to be a threat.  The reason Zimmerman says he became involved in the community watch was due to burglaries in his neighborhood.  Burglaries are seldom a violent crime; the studies do not support that burglaries traditionally end in gunfire.  Burglars generally commit their silent crimes so that they can avoid conflict with the homeowners.  So then, WHY the gun George?   I think that maybe Zimmerman was interested in community watch because he wanted to protect his home, but also because it fed some other interest; some desire to feed a Superman yearning.

I have been a paralegal for many years.  I believe George Zimmerman was acquitted because a case like this has a very high evidence threshold and the prosecution did not present the evidence in a way that met that threshold.  A jury in a criminal case has to acquit unless the evidence is convincing beyond a reasonable doubt.  I think the fact that they deliberated for two days means that the issue was not whether to convict him, but whether the evidence presented supported a conviction, that’s why they had the question about the definition of manslaughter.  The scene was dark.  The witness accounts were confusing and conflicted.   That Zimmerman never got on the stand hurt the prosecution because they did not have the opportunity to use him to show his own bias and predisposition to violence which was a key element, and they would not have known that he would not testify before the Trial began.   There are many legal reasons why the case was a difficult one to pursue.  In the end, I think the jury acquitted not because they didn’t believe he should be convicted, but because the evidence presented did not support it and their responsibility ultimately was to follow the Judge’s instructions on the interpretation of the law.   So even though I don’t believe George Zimmerman followed the law, in the end it was the law that got him acquitted.

I am worried though, about what we are going to do with this development.   Surely there will be violence.  It was a violent act that killed Trayvon Martin and violence always begets violence.    The armchair bigots who have been extolling praise for Zimmerman all along will only be bolstered in their bigotry by rioting and violence from the black community.  They will not be changed by riots; they will be enthused.  The family of Trayvon Martin will become pariahs of black victimization, instead of parents mourning their dead child.  They will not greave in peace.  They will greave publicly and the public will lose sight of their very private and personal loss.

What we should be learning is how to respect each other for our uniqueness, not hate each other for our pre-conceived labelling .  We should be looking at this horrible event and realizing that this happened because both George and Trayvon were afraid of each other: George in his fear of black teenagers and Trayvon in his fear of a white adult stranger in pursuit of him.  Trayvon  turned and confronted George about stalking him.  What teenager would do anything differently.  George got scared.  When he was following Trayvon, he perceived himself to be cloaked and armed.  When Trayvon confronted him, as any frightened teenager would do, George panicked.   It was their mutual fear that compelled them to confront each other.   It is our fear of what is not “us”, that creates bias and bigotry.  It is this fear that needs to be conquered so that we can live with each other without killing each other.

A year ago this week I flew to Germany to join my daughter and travel around Europe.   It was the most exciting and frightening thing I’ve done.   Just the flight alone — 9-1/2 hours to Frankhurt (hint: buy the mid-level seat upgrade) — was out of the box for a claustrophobic anxiety junky like myself.   I sat next to a guy on the plane who lived part time in Germany.  I told him I’d never flown a transcontinental flight before and I was nervous.  He told me that when he flies he imagines that he’s inside a bus.  I found this extremely comforting imagery and it got me through the flight.

There were a lot of problems on the trip.   In retrospect, I was ill-equipped to plan and execute my own tour of Europe.   My poor daughter was relying on me to be well-informed and in control of our environment, which was not the case.   There were some rough bumps that I regret.

All in all though, it was an education in so many ways.  I think one of the most expansive things I learned is that here in America we live in a bubble of newness.   Our country is a toddler in the spectrum of time.  The buildings in Europe are thousands of years old and have survived bombs, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, fires, wars.   And granted they haven’t survived them all that well, but they’re essentially standing in whole or part.   They were built by hand; by stone masons, carpenters, laborers who spent 40 years building a structure that may not have been completed in their lifetimes.  Those buildings housed emperors and slaves.  They saw animal sacrifices and chariot races.  As you walk through Italy you see the history of the Golden Ages laid out before you.   The cab drivers know the history of Pompeii, that volcanic ash from Mount Vesuvius buried the town until it was discovered and excavated.   My cab driver knew that the people of the neighboring towns nearly survived unscathed but those who were trying to evacuate as Pompeii was swallowed in ash, soon found themselves awash in the second wave of the eruption.

Here at home these days we’re just trying to build modern day homes that can survive tornados and hurricanes.

Anyone who knows me knows that I avoid politics like I avoid red ant mounds.  Life is short enough without having to argue about everything.   I’m a little tore up though about this Paula Deen controversy, and as an avid fan of Paula (we country girls have to stick together) I have always felt a sort of kinship with her.  After all we both love butter and batter and brown sugar.  That said, I feel compelled to say that I’m disappointed in her poor choice of conduct.   There are a lot of people out there in the world using the “n” word, though I’m not one of them.  I do think in certain sections of the country it may be construed by its users as being potentially less offensive than it might be considered in other parts of the country.  Unless you’re black.  I think, if you’re black, it’s just plain offensive.  That’s all there is to it.

And here’s the problem with Paula Deen using it or allowing it to be used in her business:  Paula Deen is not sitting on her sofa being all private and saying whatever she wants to in her living room watching the tube like you and I are.  Paula Deen is a PUBLIC FIGURE — by her own choice BTW.  Her actual audience includes black people, who I don’t think are going to be particularly thrilled to find that they’ve been making Paula Deen’s recipes all these years while she or her partner brother were calling them the “n” word.  And while we’re on the subject:  who decided to call it “the ‘n’ word?”   Is that some way of making an intolerable word tolerable by disguising it?  It’s a horrible word.  It is intended to mean something derogatory.  Let’s be real:  Does anyone ever really say it and intend it to be good?  That Paula would say she used it and didn’t mean anything bad, or that her brother may have used it in her restaurant and she didn’t know, is ridiculous.  It should never be uttered by a person who has been made wealthy by entering the homes of the very people she was degrading.  It should never be tolerated in any of her businesses.   A person who partners with a racist and allows racial epithets in the workplace, is a racist.  She should be profoundly ashamed of herself.  I’m sorry country sister, I have loved you as have we all.  But you have bitten the hand that’s fed you and you deserve to understand what it means to be degraded.   “N” people have been part of making you very wealthy, and you have a social responsibility to own your conduct. You need to go home and figure out how to resurrect your career and be socially conscionable at the same time.  Or just rest on the bounty of the money you’ve made while you were demoralizing the very people who made you who you are.  No sympathy for you Babe.  Enjoy retirement.