The Only Speech I Want to Hear Ann Romney Make

Ann Romney is scheduled to speak Tuesday at the Republican National Convention. Based on interviews over the past few days, it’s pretty clear her goal is to get people to see her husband as a real human being, loving, caring and down to earth, someone we might like to invite into our own living rooms. She has gone into some detail recently of the devastating changes in her life when she was diagnosed a few years ago with Multiple Sclerosis, even to the point of revealing how Mitt would crawl into bed with her when she was at her lowest and sickest point to boost her morale and keep her spirits up. We’re supposed to see him as a nice guy. And I suppose, in the realm of loving husband and father, he is a nice guy.

But what I want to hear Ann tell me in her speech is how she thinks it might have felt to get that same diagnosis, to face the same questions, fears and uncertainties she faced, to conquer the depression that eventually overcame her, to undergo the costly treatments that ultimately turned the illness around for her, without either money or insurance. I want to hear how well she might have handled her illness with the odds already against her. 

And then I want her to tell me how the Republican Party expects people, normal middle income people, to go through what she went through without the Affordable Care Act, which is the only thing to come down the pike in years that actually helps the middle class. Because Romney insists that if he is elected, repealing it will be the first thing on his agenda. Which is the single most important reason every non-millionaire American should not vote for him.

I don’t need to list statistics here to show how devastating a long-term chronic and/or potentially life threatening illness can be to a family’s financial security and stability. We’ve all heard the stories, the nightmares. And as many of us have already experienced, the Affordable Care Act, if nothing else, at least provides the security of knowing that in the face of a serious illness the one thing we won’t have to worry about is that our insurance company might drop us, or refuse to pay for certain aspects of our care, or raise our rates to a point where we can no longer afford the coverage. I want Ann Romney to tell us all what she would have done if she had had to face issues such as these as she struggled with her new diagnosis. Of course she won’t have an answer, because of course she has never had those kinds of concerns.

In the first place, though I have no way of knowing it, my guess is that she doesn’t even carry insurance – why should she since she is already a multimillionaire who can surely afford any treatment she may need? But even if she does have insurance, no doubt the best money can buy, I doubt she has even the least worry about whether or not her rates will go up, or even if the insurance company might drop her outright, which of course they would never do, because she is, after all, Ann Romney. I’d love, however, to be a fly on the wall as she tries to imagine herself in such a situation. A situation that does occur, however, countless times every single day to good, hard-working people throughout this country.

So tell me, Mrs. Romney, please, just how do you expect people will handle a diagnosis like yours, and all its related problems, issues, concerns and fears, after your husband repeals the Affordable Care Act? You can talk until you’re blue in the face about what a good man he is, how concerned and caring he was when you were diagnosed and in the throes of your illness – but how does that make him any different from any other husband, father, or son facing a loved one with a devastating illness? What I want to see is evidence that he cares about ME, as an individual, enough to leave things as they are with  the Affordable Care Act and my insurance. Because I need my insurance. And I need my rates to not go up or my coverage to be dropped just because I get sick.

Mrs. Romney, just how DO you expect people to handle a diagnosis like yours after your husband repeals the Affordable Care Act?

My Strawberry Lament

I love strawberries. So you’d think this time of year I’d be in strawberry heaven. That, however, is not the case. Because this year, more so than in any previous year, I simply cannot find strawberries that I feel good about eating. That is, normal sized strawberries. Not anywhere. Well, to be honest, I haven’t gone to a certain popular yet expensive natural foods market, but that’s because I know I won’t be able to afford what I find there. But I do hope that they, at least, have not stooped to selling those repulsive, genetically altered and hyper-horticulturalized monsters everyone else sells. I think I invented that word, by the way – hyper-horticulturalized. I tried Googling it just to see, and up until now anyway, it doesn’t seem to exist. So I’m putting it out there. Because unfortunately the practice of hyper-horticulturalization is growing, no pun intended.

 

We can all probably agree that eating healthily on a tight budget seems to get more challenging each day. Especially when our food markets offer sales on things that are not actually good for us. For the past few weeks my local market has had strawberries at buy one package, get one free. Which is tempting, to say the least. Until I look at them. Then all I can think about is the laboratory experiments, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides it took to make them grow so unnaturally huge. And I walk away empty handed.

When I was a child, my grandparents had a strawberry patch on their small New Jersey farm. Nana made strawberry shortcake beyond compare. With exquisite anticipation I trudged into the garden rows with her on cool summer mornings, stooping low to search beneath the dew-covered leaves for the ruby-red berries. Back then I could easily cup my hands around several at once. Of those I find in the grocery store these days my adult palm can hold maybe two. This is not right. Nor are those anemic white interiors they all seem to have now, or the absence of flavor and juice, or those humongous seeds. Strawberries are not supposed to crunch!

I do miss strawberries. Real, unadulterated strawberries.  Nothing evolved from a test tube tastes that good.  Kids growing up today have no idea what they’re missing. That’s sad. And probably perilous. 

Am I the only one who’s suspicious of these things? Are we all so naïve as to think food that’s been genetically altered and over-fertilized  in order to make it grow bigger, fatter, and faster is not going to have some kind of effect on us as well? What about all these kids leaping into puberty years earlier than normal? What about the soaring obesity problem? I’m thinking we should revolt. Just stop buying them, stage a strawberry boycott like the grape boycotts denouncing pesticides back in the 80s. I’m already having my own personal version of one, going several weeks now without one of my most favorite things.

Why should I drive 20 miles on $4.50 a gallon gasoline to pay $6 or more for a pint of strawberries just so I can be assured they haven’t been genetically altered and treated with heaven only knows what? My local market should have them, and they should cost the same as those mutations they now sell. Or less, because it must be cheaper to grow things that haven’t been scientifically modified and loaded with additives, right? 

I admit I don’t know a lot about this stuff, because I’m not a farmer. Or a scientist either. Perhaps I’m all wrong – maybe the strawberries are growing this enormous all by themselves, but somehow I don’t think so.  Just imagining the kinds of things that are being done to our food gives me the creeps.  

With all the important issues going on in the world, I feel a little guilty obsessing over strawberries. Perhaps I’m a little too absorbed in this. But, I don’t know, giant fruit could be auguring a future we’re none too happy with. Maybe we should all be worrying. What’s going to be next? Grapes the size of ping-pong balls? Oh, right, they're already out there, too.

The Essay I Can’t Write

Chinese Proverb: I hear and I forget; I see and I remember; I write and I understand.
 

It’s been a tumultuous few days. Such a variety of events have occurred that I find it difficult to focus. I want to organize the details, make them merge into something cohesive and clear, but instead they play in my mind like some discordant orchestra whose sounds refuse to blend.
 
It began on Easter Sunday with a call from my sister, her tearful words filling my ears, “Baby Noah is dead!” His drug-abusing mother, the daughter of my sister’s partner, had left him alone in the bathtub. One day after his first birthday. This mother and her live-in boyfriend had met in rehab and had begun co-habiting and making babies even before they’d put their own fractured lives back into order. Now they face arrest and two other children have been removed from their custody. And yet they seem unwilling to accept responsibility for what they’ve done, even as their lawyer builds their defense against a system that should rightly punish them for this crime of negligence and narcissism but perhaps never will.
 
These unspeakable things happen, but how can I write of them? I don’t know how to begin.
 
On Wednesday those awful tornadoes set upon Mississippi, Georgia and Tennessee and swept a 200 mile long swath across my own home state of Alabama, making history while killing 340 people and leaving hundreds of others missing amidst the overwhelming destruction. 
 
I want to write about this somehow, to make the pain and loss more bearable, but where are the words?
 
The following day a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses came knocking on our door and wound up engaged with my partner in a lengthy discussion about God and how, if He does exist and is the good and loving God he is purported to be, He can allow such tragedies to happen. But this pair, sweet old ladies dressed in straw hats and bright ankle length skirts and with speech heavily laced with Caribbean accents, would not have their faiths shaken. 
 
Which started me thinking about people who believe passionately in a deity whose existence has never been proven. While at the same time demanding proof of the citizenship of a man who stands before them, the president of their country, having already provided such proof. People who believe conspiracy theories and lies – none of which is based on solid or tangible evidence. Yet who in this case, having been stirred to a frenzy by an egotistical bone-head, demand proof.
 
Because on top of everything else, the media had spent days lavishing Donald Trump with undue attention, allowing him to show himself the fool we already knew he was. The one good thing, if there can be a good thing, about the tornadoes is that they took the media’s attention away from that despicable man, his self-adoration and his lies.
 
I want to write of this, to use the page as my soap box, asking people to look into their hearts and think before they believe the bile one man spews. But I cannot. There would be no point.
 
On Friday we viewed the CNN coverage of Britain’s dramatic royal wedding. Juxtaposed in sharp contrast to the images of destruction in the American south, it seemed almost surreal and, in many ways, shamefully decadent.
 
It would be nice to write about how so many people still cherish the magic of a fairy tale wedding. But I can’t. My heart is too burdened by the shameful inequalities of life on this planet. 
 
Saturday and Sunday I watched as neighbors came and went from the house across the street where a gigantic yard sale was being held. Adult children selling the collections of their parents’ 65 years of living there. It’s a small cottage, gray with white trim, black shutters, a magnificent stone chimney, a split-rail fence. But it has been sold and will be demolished to make way for something big, modern and pretentious. This is the trend all over our little town. Our neighborhood was once nothing but beach cottages and summer homes, rich with personality and history. Young home buyers have no respect for this. What they want instead is to flaunt their wealth, and they do, even as the unique history of our town disappears in the dust. There are 3 cottages left on our street. One of them is ours. We’d like to put money into some renovations, but we know it will be money lost – when we are gone, this too will be a tear-down. 
 
I want to write about this trend they call progress. But how can I when I am at a loss to explain it, even to myself?
 
Sunday night Osama bin Laden was overtaken by a team of brave American soldiers who swept into his secret compound and shot him dead. As soon as the news was out, celebrations began all over the world. I can’t explain why, but I don’t feel like celebrating. It does not seem right to me to celebrate the death of another human, even one as patently evil and deserving of a horrible death as this man. Though I am as happy as anyone that he is finally gone. What I hope is that al Qaida – the malignancy that remains although the tumor has been removed – will see now how outnumbered and hated they are and will just slink into a corner somewhere to die a natural death. But already the world gears up instead for the retaliation that is sure to follow their leader’s assassination. Because these people believe in revenge with as much passion as they believe that killing innocents will guarantee them reward in the hereafter.
 
I want to write this essay. But first I want to understand these things. Why it is OK to dance at the death of a monster. Or why we allow the dismantling of history for the sake of tawdry improvement. Why we live amidst such shameful extremes of poverty and wealth. Why there are egos so huge their owners fail to realize the fools they make of themselves with their own hubris. Why people’s belief that there is a God who loves them will not be shattered. And how people can risk the lives of their children to indulge their own pleasures.

To write about these things, I need to understand them. Otherwise, I don’t know where to begin.

Mind Matters

It was only after my mother died that I became fully aware of how little I actually knew about her. She shared so little of herself with any of us. But one thing I always knew, on some level anyway, was how terrified she was of developing Alzheimer’s, as her mother did, and her grandmother before that. In fact, no one even knows how far back into our family it goes, this insidious and dreadful disease.

 

My grandmother died curled into a fetal position in a nursing home where she had lingered for more than ten years. But long before she’d reached that stage she’d already forgotten who my mother was. Her only daughter. My mother never let on how much this hurt her. But it hurt me. Not just for my mother, but for myself as well. Most painful was the day my grandmother, though still living alone and managing her life, approached me at a family gathering and asked, as one might ask someone newly introduced, “Now, what did you say your name was again?” This was how the disease started with my grandmother, turning her loved ones into strangers.

 

So when my mother’s symptoms began, her denial was understandable. It’s not like cancer, which eats away at some organ but with luck can be caught and slowed if not eliminated altogether. Alzheimer’s spells certain doom. Drugs, what few there are, don’t stop it. And in many cases don’t even slow it noticeably. The tragic outcome is always there, staring you down, looming larger and larger until you lose your senses right along with your mind. Your life does a 180, and you go backwards, returning to the state of helplessness in which you began. It was this sad irony my mother wanted to avoid, and which I, too, had hoped might skip right over her somehow.

 

So sometime in her second life - that is, the life-after-children life – she developed an addiction to crossword puzzles. “Brain exercises,” she called them. Whenever she visited me over the years, in all the various places I lived, I was trained, like a loyal pet, to leave the house early in search of a paper stand. So that we could begin each day as she always did when she was home - with Katie Couric and the puzzles. I don’t think she was capable of doing it any other way. As some people drink coffee to jump-start themselves, my mother worked a crossword. 

 

She always made a show of reading the other sections first, often out loud - which was more than a little annoying - but I knew it was only a half-interested effort at best to keep up with the day’s events. As the years progressed, the time span between the front page headlines and the methodical folding down of the sought-after section – in half, then half again, pencil in hand - got shorter and shorter. Until eventually it seemed as if that one page, the puzzle page, was the only reason for a paper at all. 

 

Carl, her companion of thirty plus years, whom she refused to ever marry or even live with, was hooked too. The link between them and their crosswords was so interwoven that even on the nights when they each slept at their own homes, one would always call the other early the following day with a question like, “34 down…what’d you put there?”

 

My mother’s memory had always been unfaltering. And indisputable. Or at least, if she was wrong, no one dared suggest it without facts to back themselves up. She remembered things in surprising detail – the name of a restaurant we’d gone to years earlier, or a street we’d lived on a lifetime ago, places and events no one else could recall. My grandfather was one of ten children – my mother had stories to tell about all of them, in detail. So when these memories began escaping her, it was easy to see how it terrified her. The look in her eye of abject fear. And it was easy to understand her denial. But when she began to confuse memories of my father, whom she divorced in the sixties, with Carl, who was with her until he died in 2005, there was no way for me to remain in denial right along with her.

 

I had tried for years already to get her to do other “brain exercises.” Learn a new language, take a course in something, anything. I even tried convincing her to buy a computer. She refused. “What do I need that for?” she’d ask, even as my sisters and I presented her with answers ad infinitum. She’d get angry at us if we persisted. It did no good to tell her how it might help keep her memory sharp. By then it had become a touchy subject, almost taboo. So we tried to show her other reasons, the joy of surfing the net, the convenience of email. To no avail. As afraid as she was of Alzheimer’s, I think she was even more afraid of failure. The challenge of learning to use a computer was more than she was willing to try. And she as much as said so.

 

Then the day came when I learned the level to which her dementia had finally advanced. I had found a stack of unfinished crosswords. Dozens of them, going back weeks. All in a neat pile, almost hidden, under the coffee table in her living room. Her habit had always been to save a puzzle if she’d been unable to complete it, going back to it again and again until it was finally done. Sometimes it would take her a few days, but she was determined, and nearly always successful. “Did it!” she’d exclaim as soon as she’d filled in the last word, her understated way of waxing triumphant. So she had been saving all of these for the same reason, apparently with the same determination. I selected one from the stack, thinking to fill some idle time by completing it. But many of the answers she’d filled in were completely inappropriate, utterly wrong. I was afraid to look further into the collection. I couldn’t bear to see any more evidence of what I already knew. 

 

Four months later, two days before her 84^th birthday, my mother died. It’s sad and frightening to think about how unsuccessful her paltry efforts to beat her destiny were. But I can think of one small way in which she won. She still knew the names of all her children. In that, at least, there is victory. “Did it!” I can hear her saying.

Easy Writing

Bought this new pen yesterday. Spent a long time selecting it.  At Staples – I stood there for maybe thirty minutes examining them all; so many to choose from. Ended up with this new style, called a Dr. Grip. Fat at the grip, so my arthritic fingers don’t cramp up and whine just when I’m on a creative roll. 

I took a writing workshop a few weeks ago, the gist of which was to help me be more disciplined, to help me make my writing a lifestyle habit rather than drudgery. And the instructor suggested, among a lot of other helpful things, that everyone, or at least those like me who write in longhand first, get an “easy writing pen.” 

Not anything I’d ever thought of before. But then I realized that, yeah, some pens you have to really prod. Some are not very dependable, and take a lot of persuasion, or don’t write at all, so that you have to go digging around for another one.  Which is when that capricious flow of creativity just dries right up. 

But I like my pens to be more than just reliable. I like my pens to be pretty and to make a statement. To say something about me, like that I’m not all business, because I have this little flaky right-brain thing going on sometimes too. And that I’m not cheap, though I am frugal; and that I have a sense of style, but not a loud one. 

I want my pen to be colorful. But a classy color, not flashy, like orange, or intimidating, like blue. Classy, like this new one. Pink. Pink and silver. Yes. 

I want my pen to put me in the mood to pick it up. I want a pen I can clasp without effort as it slides across the page. And I want the words and sentences and language to ooze out of it like syrup, clinging to the paper and making perfect, indelible sense. A pen that writes from the very first letter without cajoling; no frantic scribbling to get it going; no pressure; no sputtered ink that lies in ugly, disconcerting gobs on the page. Just the silken flow of flawless prose, spurred by gravity and my pen, held taut yet relaxed in an indefatigable downward dog.  

My ideal pen will be sound and relentless in its tasks, an effective and very fine writer. 

My pen will be a model of efficiency and glamour.  Because when the job is done, and it is good, it is the pen that must be ready then to step forward and takes its bows.

Right?

Waiting for Godot, et al....

I’ve always felt undereducated. But never more than since moving to New York six years ago. It seems everyone I meet here has a degree or two. Not that I ask them, because I don’t - I don’t want the question turned back on me, because it always embarrasses me to have to explain that I’ve never even been to college.
When I was seventeen and fresh out of high school I left home to move into a dormitory at a hospital-based School of Nursing blocks away from the University of Alabama. This program, once I graduated and then passed eight grueling hours of State Board exams, would render me a Registered Nurse. But not a degreed nurse.
I am one of those dinosaurs known as a “diploma” graduate. A term lay people are not even familiar with. What it means is that even though University professors came to our school to teach our courses – English, Math, Sociology, Psychology and all the requisite sciences – and even though we attended classes and worked in the clinical arena 5 days a week for 11 months each year for those three years (not an easy program, either – only half the number that I started with made it to graduation), what we left with was not a degree of any sort.  But, that was in 1968. And in 1968, diploma graduates were the rule, not the exception.
In the seventies diploma schools began being phased out.  Aspiring nursing students then began choosing between a two year Associate’s Degree or a four year Bachelor’s Degree. One could even begin one’s career with the AD, and then later add the courses needed to complete the BS. My having graduated with only a diploma and no college credits to my name meant that a degree of any kind would require me to start as a freshman again and run the whole race.
What I always said was that if I ever did return to school, it would not be to study nursing, though it would certainly have helped advance my nursing career. What I wanted instead was to study literature and the craft of writing. As a working wife and mother, and then a single parent, it always seemed the impossible dream.
My daughter, whom I coaxed and pushed through nine fragmented years of secondary education, and who managed, finally, to walk away with a BFA, feels only half the pride I think she should for that accomplishment. If only she knew how I envy her.
As I examine my life these days, it seems to be curiously bookended, on the one side by my daughter and her somewhat nonchalant attitude about her education, but on the other by my maternal grandfather. In my first and most indelible memory of that quiet, gentle man, he is seated, thin, frail and balding, in a wicker rocker on his and my grandmother’s porch, engrossed in a Reader’s Digest.
It’s not what he was reading that fascinates my fractured memory so much as the fact that he was reading. I had no idea, as I stood watching his yellowed fingertip follow the words across the page that day, that he’d had to quit school when he was only eight to help support his ten brothers and sisters, and had taught himself everything he’d learned thereafter, including how to read.
Being  jealous of the higher education everyone I know seems to have acquired should not inspire me as much as my grandfather’s determination to learn despite having had his right to even the most basic education stolen from him.  But it does.
I hang around a lot of wannabe writers like myself. I am always envious when they make references to some literary detail that I’m not familiar with, even though, on my own, I’ve read and studied whatever college lit I could get my hands on over the years.
When I read the bios of accomplished (that is, published) writers, I always make note of their academic careers. It seems they all have degrees, in English, or Fine Arts, or something equally esoteric. It seems many, if not most of them are also teaching the same subjects. What, I then wonder, am I doing trying to get my foot in that door? I am not educated. I have no right.
Yet I’ve yearned to acquire that right for years. So what am I waiting for, you want to know. Well, besides what is most daunting -the cost - the whole college admission process completely intimidates me. I had to be tutored just to pass high-school algebra – how can I possibly pass a college entrance exam forty-something years after that embarrassing fact?  But just to hold a degree in my hand some day, well, I think it would feel pretty amazing. And would make my grandfather proud.
Maybe it’s time to just do this thing.

No Spirit Moves Me

It doesn’t feel at all like Christmas. In spite of the fact that I’ve spent the past three days cooking, packaging and preparing to mail to my three siblings and my daughter an abundance of fudge, bourbon balls and pralines, as I do every year. It only dawned on me last night that we haven’t put up a tree yet, and here it is the 17^th already. Well, that’s not so bad, I guess. When I was a child the occasion of my birthday on the 20^th was the day my parents put up the tree. Not what I’d wanted exactly, but we were poor, so since there was never going to be a party, this was a reasonable substitute for a celebration.

I’m trying to figure out why this year feels so un-Christmasy. When I said to my partner last night, “Well, should we put up a tree?” as he sat reading in front of the TV, his response was as non-committal as my suggestion. He told me that when he stopped into Home Depot the other day he’d gone into the garden department just to have a look at their trees and there was not another soul in there looking. Seems almost eerie. Like maybe it’s not really December?

I suppose it’s the economy. We’re just two old retirees, but I would think for those thousands who’ve lost jobs, and for whom the squabbling in Congress holds unmentionable animosity, it’s probably especially difficult to summon up the spirit of giving. I can’t even imagine the Dickensian Christmas a lot of folks are having this year while our rich elected officials and their wealthy cronies dicker over how much of their gazillions they get to keep at our behest.

I read a quote by Jack London recently. Paraphrased, it said something like “Charity is not the bone to the dog. Charity is sharing the bone with the dog when you’re both hungry.” You gotta wonder about the wealthy in this country – they have no earthly idea what being down and out really means. I’m pretty sure they can’t even imagine trying to feed a family of four, or six, or more, with limited funds. I have a semi-wealthy friend whose idea of cutting back is getting one manicure a week instead of two. I recently heard some wealthy person interviewed on TV who’d decided she had too many coats already so she wouldn’t  buy another one, this year. Really?  Too many coats. Must be nice. Some of us in this country feel lucky to have one. I wonder if these wealthy know how that feels. I wonder if they know what shopping for underwear in Wal Mart, instead of Victoria Secret, feels like. I wonder if they’ve ever considered that $28 for a single pair of panties is just a little bit outrageous, especially when there are people who will feed their kids for three days on that amount.  I wonder if they realize that it’s some of our country’s poorest who manage to dig into their threadbare pockets to pull out change for the Salvation Army bell-ringer that the wealthy walk right past. Sharing the bone with the dog when they’re both hungry. Yeah, that will yank the Christmas spirit right out of you, just knowing how wealth works in this great land of ours.

We’re turning into India, you know. We’re developing a real caste system. And soon it will be as ingrained as it is there, so that there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell of someone from a lower caste moving into a better one. That’s what the wealthy want I think. And soon they’re going to have it. The fight is going out of most of us. Right along with our Christmas spirit.