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Impression

23 Apr

Saturday night I went to see Billy Bragg at the Keswick Theater in Glenside, PA. This is an odd concert venue, as it is in a very out-of-the-way suburb of Philadelphia. The upside of this hard to get to venue is that, for every show I have ever seen there, I always end up with the sweetest seats. This time we sat in seats CC 104 & 105, otherwise known as sixth row, center; I once saw Emmylou Harris there, and had similar seating. Each time, I marveled at my luck.

The show was very good. In-between old and new songs, Mr. Bragg ripped on the ambiguity of hipsters and their beards at SXSW, knocked on Nick Cave’s style, dissed Morrissey twice and, of course, talked about what his day was like when he woke to the news that Margaret Thatcher had passed. On that day he shopped for a wardrobe of pearl snap button western shirts and checked his email on his phone in a coffee shop, all the while sporting the same hipster beard he made fun of. He may be terribly more vain than he could ever recognize, as a great deal of what he spoke of related to what people or ideas “looked” like.

I spent some parts of the show being a silly girl, crying in row six, dead center of the stage. The apparent sincerity of songwriting and a new guitar for each song are exactly the ripest of conditions for me to unload some of my own heartache and angst, and a bit of the sadness I don’t know what to do with. No matter how much I carefully apply heavy black liquid eyeliner, wearing it like a precaution so I won’t cry, a seatbelt of sorts, I still do. Especially in dark concert halls.

He spoke about Woody Guthrie, how Woody never got to play an electric guitar before his death and how he, like me, dreams of alternate universes. In his, Buddy Holly never died and Woody did get to write his supersonic boogie on an electric guitar. That was when I really wished I had just packed a few tissues instead of trying to stop myself from feeling anything through thick eyeliner; because I do feel things. It is not ambiguous.

Throughout the show the smart phones were aglow, filming videos and taking photos of Billy. I certainly can be very guilty of this pandemic keeping-my-monkey-hands-busy-with-a-dumb-phone-nonstop-documentation myself. I even recently setup an Instagram account, doing so regardless of my feeling unsure about participating in yet another way to share, my instinct trying so hard to push her way through the distraction of another shallow sharing app to ask, “Why the need to share and view so much of the mundane, sweetheart?” But my dissing Instagram while owning and operating a blog is as laughable as Billy Bragg dissing hipsters. He is one, whether he realizes it or not.

Towards the end of the show, I watched this guy from the audience sneak up to the stage, in a hunched-over, burglar-style tiptoe, to take a few shots of his idol on his phone. It reminded me of the time I decided that I wasn’t going to take photos in front of monuments anymore. Well, only if I didn’t want to. I was in Italy with my ex-husband. I had been to Italy at least a half a dozen times before but only once to Rome. He and I were traveling with a good friend, visiting the lovely and less traveled Umbria before we spent this single perfect day walking through Rome. While in front of one of the Egyptian obelisks, I decided to end my lifelong façade as a polite, obliging tourist. I declined to have my photo taken. It wasn’t some big declaration; I wasn’t rude; I just didn’t need to have every single moment of this dreamy day documented like I was in a pack of crazed, Japanese tourists. I didn’t need to prove “I was here!” over and over and over again.

I just wanted to sit and look, really look at that obelisk. This object, like Billy Bragg, had been photographed by thousands of novice picture takers, as well as thousands of professional ones. I could just look it up in a book if I wanted to see it again. What I couldn’t do again was to sit on a bench, drenched in early October sunlight, and quietly study it, wondering about the men who carved it, and what their lives were like, what was going through their minds as they worked.

Why do we rush to take a photo of someone we admire, or of a monument we find ourselves in front of? Is it some type of ego-driven ownership, like a dog marking his territory? When we are face to face with greatness, why aren’t the impressions that form in our minds of any more substance than the urge to indulge in crappy photography?

I may never walk through Rome or see a Billy Bragg show again; or sit in the Keswick theatre, crying over all the spilled milk I wasn’t wise or careful enough to not knock over. I didn’t take any photos on my phone to upload that night. But my impression of him and his thoughts, and mostly of who I am in the middle-end of my thirties, is forever stored deep in my collected impressions.

© Mad Question Asking – 2013 All Rights Reserved

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Inside Joke

27 Mar

I was driving through the main street of a pretty suburban town a few years back. It was one of those sunny days when you could picture blue birds singing to each other, a gentle breeze kissing each tree. I slowed down to stop at a light and this woman walked by the side of my truck; she had this dazed, distant, somewhat vacant look in her eye; her gait was a zombie-like shuffle. I watched her and thought, “Man, what is this world coming to? So many people just look half-alive, they’ve got no life in them at all. This lady looks like she’s never seen a goddamn flower open or a blood orange sunrise.” Disgusted, I started driving and glanced in my side mirror for one last look at today’s example of how lackluster the world was.

She had a cane and a seeing eye dog.

I fell apart with laughter; at myself, at every bit of my high-and-mighty oh-Ingrid-LOVES-to-smell-the-fucking-roses bullshit that I spin in my head.

The universe can make such a fool of us, can’t it? Just when you feel so confident, so sure of yourself, in that split second can the gods slip their giant feet in front of you, and laugh in rolls of thunder, while you trip and fall in your mortal humiliation, somehow made worse by being the only living witness. Maybe life really is one big joke; and like all the best ones, it’s an inside joke, shared only between ourselves and our faulty beliefs.

Some of my fondest memories come from “making my own bed” but finding myself lying in a pile of cow shit. One of my very favorite examples of this is when I was in high school and I was voted female class non-conformist.

I never participated in anything in high school. Well, that’s not entirely true; I did run for student council treasurer one year. I even made a poster of a giant dollar sign with $15 worth of emerald-green glitter I stole from Woolworth’s. I think I won too; but this tiny prick of a teacher who ran the student council said this other kid, all pimples, with a slack jaw whose mouth never closed fully, had won. I knew for sure I’d won, but that teacher had the hots for that other kid and messed with the ballot (I was always really aware of which teachers wanted to sleep with which students. My keen sense of innuendo and stolen glances tipped me off; plus, I watched everyone like a hawk, whether they knew it or not). This tiny, homosexual teacher loved that kid, and hated me for being a female with five inches and 30 pounds on him, and for being such a smart-ass and a nuisance. In any case, I only wanted to be treasurer to steal the money, like I did the weekly homeroom donations made to the Catholic Charities. At 16, I believed that if somebody was dumb enough to give the Vatican money for more 24k gold toilet seats, then they deserved my stealing their money. So, as I strolled down to the main office each week, I pocketed the cash money, but never the coins. Then I would go and smoke a cigarette in the girl’s bathroom or use the pay phone to call my boyfriend or my mom.

At some point during senior year, my class, the class of 94, was asked to create a list of all those goofy awards, like Nicest Legs or Most Likely to Whatever. I’d tell you what all the awards were but I didn’t fill it out so I don’t know. I had a policy—I still do—that I would never fill out anything when asked. For example, there was an incident at a Pearle Vision a few years back; I was asked by a piece of paper if I had AIDS or had ever slept with someone who had. I was already in a mood and couldn’t for the life of me understand why Pearle Vision wanted to know if I had AIDS. I was under the impression there would be no sexual encounter between me and their employees that day, so when the receptionist came in the waiting area and said, “Ingrid? Are you ready to come back and see the doctor?” I looked at her quizzingly and asked, “I don’t know, am I? Do YOU have AIDS? Does Dr. Singer HAVE AIDS?” It really was a scene.

Back to the awards… somehow I ended up winning Female Class Non-Conformist my senior year. I was actually stunned, both that it was a category and that all those people, to whom I never gave the time of day, even knew what a non-conformist was. I don’t think I even knew what a non-conformist was. I wasn’t trying to, on purpose, not conform. Suddenly, this tiny moment of attention started to swell my almost non-existent ego. The fact that I won a category that was so much more exotic than great legs or prom queen was making me feel exactly how I envisioned the popular girls feeling, the ones who won greatest smile, the ones I tortured so ruthlessly, the ones I made cry when acne appeared and I loudly pointed it out by calling them things like pizza face. I watched myself go against my very nature and agreed to be photographed for the yearbook!

Our yearbook photo-op was scheduled after school on a Thursday. The male non-conformist, true to his newly assumed title, never showed up. I, on the other hand, went ahead and let them take my photo, seething inside at the embarrassing pleasure I took in receiving this ego-stroking, faux honor.

Seasons passed and the yearbook finally came out. I scoured through it looking for my picture, quickly passing by our senior portraits and cutesy remarks, stupid words like “I love LBI and golden retrievers and want to be forever young!” I had left mine blank. I wasn’t going to share my dreams with people I despised so deeply and have it published for all of eternity, any more than I’d get a tattoo and live to regret the lifetime reminder of something I liked for five minutes of my life.

I kept leafing through the pages and, without warning, there it was, the greatest inside joke of all: my photo, alone, under the heading “Most Likely To Be Late To Graduation!” What!!? What happened to Female Non-Conformist!? Had sitting for that photo-op ripped me of my true given title? I had no way to defend my non-conformist honor or make any correction without becoming even LESS of a non-conformist!

I knew nobody would ever care or even notice, certainly not all the people who intended to live forever young! Yet, I was forced to see that, despite being SO intent on differentiating myself from my peers and doing the opposite of whatever they did, I had, this one time, let my smug, dark guard down; the gods had tripped me and I fell right into a published pile of cow shit, an eternal, humble reminder that the jokes I make and the games I play, even the ones in earnest, will always turn on me, and that it is I who is the biggest ass of all.

© Mad Question Asking – 2013 All Rights Reserved

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Broken and Unwanted

28 Jan IMG_5529

If I close my eyes, relax, and lean far enough back in my chair, far enough back in my memory, I can hear the sounds that I miss from my childhood. I can hear the sounds of tractor trailers backing up into our yard, unloading some sorry, unwanted find—huge, busted architectural pieces, salvaged orphans that my father loved. I can hear my father hollering, yelling over the hum of diesel engines, “Yo! Buddy, move it here!” “Watch out! Be careful!” “Alright. Looks good.” “Stop!”, the Maestro’s arms moving explicitly, telling his men, his workers, where to place his treasures.

He amassed acres of the beautiful, broken and unwanted.

IMG_5529

Inside trailers reminiscent of piano keys that made it through a hurricane, trailers that he painted green, his favorite color, the color of money and nature, are pieces like giant ceiling rosettes, waiting to be painted and hung; items from torn-down, French rooms, 40 carved panels, waiting to be repaired and assembled; tiles, thousands of tiles, boxes of books, vintage horsehair paint brushes wrapped in paper, carriages, millions of nails, none of it valuable, none of it wanted.

He didn’t have the money to buy the perfect. He only had the money to buy the broken and build his dreams out of the unwanted. My dad had plans. He was going to build houses, palaces, rooms he remembered from fragments of nighttime dreams. He’d vividly tell me how beautiful a room looked from a dream of his. I’d walk out there with him, watching his eyes grow distant, sad and overwhelmed, from not having what it took to make his grandest dreams come true.

Setting a marble column in its place, salvaged from a fire. He paid 20 bucks each for them.

Setting a marble column in its place, salvaged from a fire. He paid 20 bucks each for them.

Back there, I saw who he really was, not what children selfishly see when they look at a parent. I saw him as a person, separate from me; I didn’t see who I needed him to be. I saw him cry back there once, after he fell apart inside, taking his anger out on my brother. I wasn’t born with any of the things he valued in my siblings; I wasn’t a boy, I wasn’t a blond, blue-eyed first-born, I wasn’t an artist, I wasn’t smart like my sister, Chris. I didn’t get the attention they did but he let me get close enough to him to understand human nature, what lies behind anger and broken dreams. It always just looked like hurt. And, from his anger and his beautiful dreams, I learned to look harder when I looked at someone.

Dad

Dad

I find comfort inside those trailers. I like to go in them and remember his dreams for him and I can hear him telling me, his arms moving wildly to get the point across, to make up my own dreams, telling me that I am more than just who everyone else needs me to be.

© Mad Question Asking – 2013 All Rights Reserved

Absence of Presence

18 Jan

Reading a news story about a two-year-old boy, Zahree Thomas, decapitated by his own mother last August while she was high on the drug “wet”, was hard for me to digest and accept. It’s even harder to forget.

Zahree Thomas

Zahree Thomas

Two weeks after Zahree’s baby head was found in a freezer, and his mother had taken her own life, six-year-old Dominick Andujar bled to death from stab wounds obtained after he jumped on the back of a man—also high on “wet”—who was raping his 12-year-old sister, Amber, at knifepoint. This 6-year-old gave his life and saved his sister.

Dominick Andujar

Dominick Andujar

Reading those stories at the end of last summer was hard on my heart. It’s hard to imagine that, in the richest country in the world, a city like Camden NJ, a city so lost, would exist, where crimes so horrific can take place, crimes stemming from conditions so poor that most of us are ignorant of their existence, or maybe deem them too painful and too complicated to think about.

*****

Six nights after Christmas Eve, I attended an hour of the four-day long “Vigil for Peace” at The Cathedral of The Immaculate Conception in Camden. This yearly vigil gives an hour to each of the victims of homicide in our nation’s most dangerous city. In 2012, 67 persons were murdered in Camden, all adults, except for the two children I’m writing about. Most of them were murdered by gunshot or stabbing, some by blunt trauma, and one by decapitation.

When my good friend, Jude, a social worker knee-deep in Camden’s ugly truth, asked if I’d join her at the vigil, I said, “Of course.” I have no allegiance to any religion and, honestly, I have no disrespect for any either. The way I’ve always seen it, probably just as much bad as good happens inside a church as does outside of one.

I figured that, since we were headed to the cathedral, the mothership church of the Camden County diocese, it would be packed. The decapitation story made international news. Dominick’s story is one of extreme bravery. Those facts alone led me to ask Jude if I wore the right coat for this weather; maybe we wouldn’t even get in and I’d be standing outside of the church, cold in my thin parka.

We pulled up, and, to my sincere surprise, the parking lot of the church had five or six cars parked in it. That’s it? In a nation of 314 million people, in the most densely populated state, that was the turnout at a vigil for peace? For one solitary hour dedicated to a six-year-old hero?

If this child’s story was one of a white or wealthy child, this church would be filled with hundreds of mourners, mourners who’d attend to be a part of something society said had value, that culture had commodified for them—through the media, through classism and racism—right into the shallow reserves of American humanity.

As I walked through the parking lot in the cold night air, this shocking absence of presence made me immediately think of all the useless, wasteful gifts and cash donations sent to the victims of the Sandy Hook shooting.

The United Way has received 7.6 million dollars’ worth of donations for Sandy Hook. Is this how we grieve?

Is this all that Americans are capable of? Do teddy bears and dollar bills patch up that small part of our hearts that is forced open to grieve losses that do not belong to us?

Is this how we feel? What could 7.6 million dollars ever do for an already wealthy community? What is the “I’m-sorry-some-rich-kid-killed-your-kids, here’s-a-hundred-dollars-for-your-loss” going to do?

These crimes and what causes them—a separation from one’s soul and its ability to feel—may just not be so different to how the public pardons itself and absolves its own responsibility to feel.

*****

After we quietly said hello to Father Mike and a few cops standing in a circle speaking to the Camden police chief, we sat down, about 10 rows from the front. Photos of Dominick were on display at the front of the altar, on a small table. Nearby, a yellow, smiley-face balloon swayed gently in a balloon bouquet set next to a statue of Jesus. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Dominick’s family, who could have been Dominican or Puerto Rican, sat up front. There were about 15 of them, with roughly 15 other folks, like me and Jude, present.

The cathedral looked so big, so empty.

Watching Dominick’s mother hold onto the shoulders of his sister, Amber, as she burst into tears, their family gathered around them, all of them wearing jean jackets and t-shirts airbrushed with Dominick’s image and the words “hero warrior” above his sweet baby face, was unbelievably real and very painful to see. These were the faces of a news story I had read, come to life. Here was a beautiful 12-year-old girl gathering herself with a resolute toughness that I am not sure most people could muster. I watched her turn her neck to look at someone, and have her scarf fall enough to reveal the long red scars, the gashes from a knife a man took to her throat, as he raped her not more than four months ago.

I sat stone still, staring at the now familiar faces of the few people I’ve met who do not seem to give up on this lost city, as they grieved this boy’s death; the chief of police, Father Mike, Jude’s friend Nancy, and Brother Karl. And Jude, sitting next to me, crying into her palms, her elbows supported by her knees, and her beautiful, long, red curly hair spilling all around her like camouflage to conceal her massive grief. Both of us mothers, we were both unable to understand or comprehend this story.

*****

After the hour had passed, Father Mike introduced us to Dominick’s mother. Jude hugged her first, then me, and I realized that in this world all we can really ever give each other, that has any value, is to simply care. Nobody can take away another’s grief, or wholly solve the problems of the world, but to simply care enough to be present may be enough to start a revolution of kindness, that could maybe wake up a nation in absence.

As we got ready to leave, we were told that no one, other than the vigil’s organizers and the few I mentioned, showed up for Zahree’s hour. It’s like that little boy never mattered, alive nor dead. The whole world was reported his story. Nobody showed up for him, for his hour for peace.

Our truth lies in our dead children, but also in how the living grieve, how all the living feel.

© Mad Question Asking – 2013 All Rights Reserved

Dreams Breathe

16 Jan

Today, of all days, was my court day. I am officially no longer bound by the bonds of matrimony. And although it was not humiliating for me, an expectation I worried over, it certainly was for most of the cases that came before mine.

I sat in a small court room, number 11, in the center of the city of Camden. The female judge began her day with a case of a lesbian divorce. I had just slipped my book out of my purse when the word “she” kept getting tossed around. Sitting there, my eyes growing very wide as the term “sexual relations” came up as the reason for the dissolution of this marriage. I bit my tongue before I blurted out the question burning my mind, “Did she cheat on you with a guy??”

The good news was that the universe threw me a bone, on a day I was uncharacteristically nervous to deal with. I was really worried that I’d cry like a girl or tell the judge to fuck off if she, in any way, was nasty to me. Worried that it would just be really hard on me. But having a situation that piqued my curiosity, which trumps all of my other emotions, was a true blue blessing.

The case right before mine was really sad. The defendant was this pitiful man who although he was not fat, had man boobs. Ones I could see through his sweatshirt, the sort of man boobs that want to sit under armpits, I guess to hide or keep warm. Well this poor chap, who has been clinically depressed for three years, unable to work, claimed he had made $10,000 in the last three years. The judge asked him what he did all day. This was the sort of thing I was afraid of for myself, a judge who lacks the compassion to see that she is publicly evaluating, well, judging, a stranger’s life. He answered her and said he picked the kids up from school sometimes. His wife, who had a lawyer, just wanted to be done with this guy. She clearly had enough of his depression. Their whole thing was sad, it was low. In a way, made even more sad by the fact that neither had the strength to fight. They both seemed like life, and all its joy and sweet desire and dreams, had just been removed from them completely.

My turn. My ex was not present, as he didn’t need to be, so it was just me, no lawyer. I was last so I had no audience. I was asked about 35 questions, all yes or no answers, and then she granted the divorce and said I could have my name, my identity, back. In the end she said I presented my case well and wished me good luck.

A couple of hours later I was taken out to lunch by friends, who happened to be two married men. A lunch complete with a bottle of champagne, us toasting my future. This was certainly an odd, or rather, characteristically Ingrid, way to celebrate. My family and female friends all called or sent texts of encouragement. Two dropped off flowers, white tulips with a beautiful card and a handwritten Dorothy Parker poem inside. I felt very loved and supported. But mostly, today I felt like me. Hopeful, lonely, curious, and mischievously excited that I have my whole life in front of me again. No longer held back by bonds or guilt or fear anymore.

My romantic dreams can breathe again.

© Mad Question Asking – 2013 All Rights Reserved

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Pro Se

4 Jan

When I was a little girl, I ran to and climbed up a pine tree whenever things got too grown up inside my house. My brother had nailed down a plywood board about 15 to 20 feet up this one tree. I’d sit and listen to the windmill’s blade rotate and creak, and the sound of the wind passing between the neighboring trees that stood like friends on a sidewalk, and I’d close my eyes, imagining a life that was happy, a life I dreamed to have one day. This story grew and built itself into the walls of my mind from those years, years when my long brown baby hair was still curly and I could make all the sadness disappear if I just retreated to my imagination and the plywood board.

Living inside of my head, then and now, made all the cruelty, meanness, and disappointments bearable, personal or not. It never mattered where I was; I was running laps of jokes around my mind, playing complicated mind games, holding hands with the greatest guy in the world, and he was all mine and he wanted to be mine. He was gonna show up one day and see right through me, right to that plywood board and all the silence and thoughts I’d ever had. He was going to know exactly how I felt. And I would be all that for him, so in love.

*****

I never met that guy. I got pregnant a few months after I met my daughters’ dad. I bought a house and he proposed. I did the right thing for my first daughter. She deserved to live with both parents. All kids do. I said yes to her life, his proposal and that common tale someone else wrote.

I withdrew. I was all business and motherly duty. I thought ‘My happiness means nothing next to this child, one who worked so hard to create her life inside my body. I am lucky to have her, she needs her dad around.’ Seven years passed, half way through which I gave her a sister. I withdrew further and further. I had failed all my dreams, I had nobody to talk to, nobody got my best jokes, nobody knew or liked that part of me that is who I really am. I had no choices. I was standing inside a 2′ x 2′ room with four doors. With each door I opened, all I did was hurt somebody.

Last winter I had a narrow window of escape. My husband saw a side of me he hadn’t seen before. He saw me happy and relaxed. He saw me sticky-sweet. He saw this side for only seven hours but they rattled loose the seven years of his denial.

I had said how I felt, for years. He couldn’t hear me. After those seven hours passed, it wasn’t me who was confronted, but him. I slipped quickly through the door. The passage was so quick, so painful, maybe like birth, and just as irreversible.

I lost something new, fears that were old, ideas I didn’t believe but borrowed, and was left black and blue inside. Blue enough to sit in a very deep tub and stare, crying silently at the tile cracks, immobile, wishing he knew how I felt. I sat like that all last winter and most of spring.

*****

Two weeks from now, I am going to court at 9 am to finalize my divorce, alone. I thought for months that I was a shining example of genuine liberty, bragging that I had filed all of our paperwork myself. I am the only person I have ever known who got divorced without a lawyer. Ingrid, Plaintiff Pro Se.

But as the days grow closer, as I see myself standing there alone in court, all I feel is failure. All I see, in expectation of that cold morning, is me standing in front of a Camden County Judge with her finger pointed towards me in shame, shame for failing society, for failing my family, for failing my little girls, for failing the dreams of a little girl who sat in a tree to escape the cruelty inside her childhood home; but mostly, shame for never being good enough to find real love.

I come up for public judgment that day. My love life, my choices, my sex, my children, my loneliness, all quickly looked over by a public official. I am then granted my freedom and maiden name, things I shouldn’t have to be humiliated to regain, things that should just be mine.

I am going to try to hold my own hand that day, to tell myself my best jokes if I start to feel afraid or nervous. I don’t want anybody there with me. I want the story to reset itself, to begin at zero. A blank page. I am leaving all that shame and feelings of failure in that court room and walking outside alone. I’ll close my eyes and imagine a life that is happy, and remember all the purity of my childhood dreams created inside the branches of a pine tree.

© Mad Question Asking – 2013 All Rights Reserved

Gilda & Keith

2 Jan

For reasons unknown to me, I will, on rare occasions, refuse friendships. If you know me, then you know this is out of character. I generally like to be friends with everyone and only discontinue a friendship if I have been repeatedly, passive-aggressively needled. I am not one of those stingy, closed-up persons, who only love the handful of people whom they worship or who never let them down.

When I moved into the house I currently live in, I was quickly introduced to my next-door neighbor, Gilda, an ancient slip-wearing, poorly-fitting-red-headed-wigged, very loony female writer. She caught me in the backyard and from across our shared fence, she offered me a thin slice of homemade, frozen fruitcake in an aqua-colored ziplock bag in the middle of July as a welcome offering. I grimaced, thanked her, and hurried from the introduction. I tossed the slice in the trash, announcing to my then husband that, “The fruitcake gave us fruitcake.”

Now, I love crazy people. I love eccentrics. I like old people. But for whatever reason, this woman would receive my rare cold shoulder, for years. Maybe it was the tiny hairs rising on my neck indicating she’d be a pain in my ass, asking me for things I didn’t have time for since I already had a husband with an ex-wife, a step-son, a toddler and a nursing infant, each one leaning on me, sucking me clean of time and compassion.

A few months back Gilda, who has a sharp wit and a pretty voice, called me one day as I was working from home. I answered sweetly, heard her voice and became slightly cold, slightly detached.

“Hello Ingrid, could you please tell me the name of the lead male character in the Shakespeare play, “The Taming of the Shrew?”

“Sure, hold on.”

(I look online) “Petruchio.”

“Thank you.”

“No problem.”

I hung up, aware of and ashamed that I had such an icy boundary with this woman. Nobody ever called me with such good questions.

Just this past week—the week of giving, spending, massive guilt, realizing how poor and rich we are, etc—my mother reminded me to grab a gift for my 70+ uncle. So while I got him and his girlfriend flowers, I decided to get some for Gilda.

On Christmas Eve, I walked next door, rang the doorbell and entered Gilda’s house, a house which can only be described as every weirdo’s dream. She has a dummy dressed and seated at a chair to look like a real, live man (with empty bottles of wine laid at his feet), incredible nude paintings of herself from many decades past, Asian art and furniture that I know is not just interesting but very pricey. There are so many odd knickknacks all over her living room and carved oak bar that seats 10, that I stood there and thought, “This lady is like a dinosaur and she lives right next door to me. I know phony hipsters that would kill to have a 1/100th of this lady’s sincere kookiness. Why do I shun her? Why am I being so weird?”

I gave her the flowers, made my kids hug her, and told her the next day was Christmas, which she didn’t know. I left, feeling stupid and cruel and, worse, exclusionary. And that is, to me, the worst human trait of all.

******

Keith is a person with whom I have many friends in common, friends we’ve shared since we were both in our teens. Keith, like Gilda, was the lottery winner of my rare, icy shoulder since I was 17. Keith, to me, could be described as one of those wordy, clever guys who made the mistake of reading Nietzsche in their late teens, those who drop out of college to work at book stores, who only date girls whose parents have enough money to cover the rent, and who weakly dabble in homosexual thoughts. I have actually thought of making a short film called, “Did Nietzsche ruin your life?” in which I ask someone—like Keith—straight forward questions about the hard life of a misfit coffee shop philosopher.

Keith has, on and off for the last 20 years, tried to become my friend, and each time I have declined. A few weeks ago he, again, requested my Facebook friendship. Trying to turn over some new leaves, I decided to write him instead of just ignoring him.

Keith,

I am not sure if I should accept your FB friendship. Part of me says “sure, why not?”, but the other part of me, that has continuously unfriended you for almost 20 years, thinks that, at this point, we should remain unfriends.

I encourage you to either tell me to fuck off or convince me to just drop the act. It was always without reason. Well… except for that time you hit me at a party.

Ingrid

He quickly replied.

Because, after a message that wry, sophisticated and frosty, it would be simply ruthless to refuse me. Regardless, I will not tell you to fuck off, you Goddamned hellcat.

Cordially grateful and devoted,

Keith

He then sent me a draft of a pretty good book he is writing, told me he always admired my capacity for contempt, and apologized for hitting me that one time. I still haven’t accepted his FB friendship, but I did read his drafts and give him my comments. I’ll admit I liked being called a hellcat as much as I liked Gilda’s drunken, stuffed, indoor scarecrow.

Human beings are wired in such complicated ways, myself included. I am looking into my uncalled-for and brisk shunning of Gilda and Keith. I don’t really like that I do that. It’s my own manifestation of ugliness. Maybe my own indoor scarecrow, trying to shoe off the blackbirds I should befriend instead.

© Mad Question Asking – 2013 All Rights Reserved

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From the Bottom, Up

6 Dec

Seven a.m. Sunday morning I locked my front door with one hand, balanced a glass filled with hot, black coffee in the other, and clenched a hunk of a seeded french baguette in between my teeth. My friend, neighbor, and editor, Donal, was waiting for me in my driveway. We were headed down to Atlantic City to work on a woman’s home that had been ravaged last month by hurricane Sandy.

Donal had been to Karen’s house the weekend before. He went to Atlantic City with his wife, Jude, to lend a hand and help perfect strangers put their homes and lives back together. After spending a day working at Karen’s, he took it upon himself to organize putting her house back together, complete. He has every weekend booked with volunteers committed to help, right up to Christmas.

Karen lives in a very tiny row home three blocks from the Revel Casino. This isn’t her second home at the beach, she is the working poor, she lives at the very bottom of the middle class. She has worked in a women’s shelter for 24 years and didn’t miss a day of work through the crisis of the storm.

The first floor of her home was destroyed by Sandy. She lost her appliances, her sofa, her floor, and the first two feet of her walls had to be removed because of mold. When we arrived, wet, rippled photos and important personal papers were laid out on the radiators to dry.

Seeing, first hand, the devastation of loss for someone who already has so little, in material objects, was very sad. But what was really sad was asking her about her insurance company and FEMA. She told me she was told that it may take a year to get a claim. As far as FEMA, she has to apply for a small business loan (she is not a small business, she is a human being), which then needs to be rejected for her to get assistance. She did not have content insurance, so for the sofa and appliances, she has to replace them out-of-pocket.

I had made it clear to Donal that if I was going to just stand around and look good and crack jokes, than I wasn’t coming. He put me right to work, hammering nails back into the sub floor. After I finished my task, I took a too-long break to chat with Jim, Donal’s brother-in-law. Jim is a fellow wannabe anarchist. As we chatted, he couldn’t really get past the fact that I knew about Ruby Ridge to laugh at an idea I had for a MQA post. The idea is that I write Ruby Ridge a hundred times over, like the jingle, baby-back baby-back baby-back baby-back baby-back ribs, just to mess with our wacky gov’t and the stunning brains hired to monitor the internet.

While Donal continued to work hard, Jim and I covered everything, politics, relationships, my stubborn dreams of real love, what he sees as the dire hopelessness of America, and we both agreed that bottom-up charity is where it’s at, not checkout dollars. We also agreed that Karen’s two sons, who are 17 and 19, should have been there, helping out.

In America, the feel good fundraising movement has cast, I think, a shadow on what is really needed to make real progress. Everybody has to get their hands dirty, donating money isn’t enough, and neither is accepting hand outs. Donating to the Red Cross is one of the biggest question marks I have. Where does that money go? Why be so willing to just resign to feeling good about giving a (I bet) corrupt organization your money and expect them to fix our world’s problems? And Karen’s kids are old enough to have enough pride of ownership in their home or respect for their mother, or, Donal, who organized the complete restoration of Karen’s home, to be there, getting it done. I personally wouldn’t let a team of people enter my home and not lift a finger myself. Neither would my kids. But we live in a world where responsibility is tossed all over the place, more fingers get pointed than lifted.

Then there are those rare people, like Donal. He has a busy life, a job, a gorgeous wife (also a true blue humanitarian), and three kids under four. But from his sincere, selfless leadership came a posse out of the woodwork to help get one poor woman’s life back together. He made time, not excuses. He didn’t look elsewhere for a place to rest responsibility.

His action is the virtue of humanity. I was really proud to be a part of something that rose, bottom-up. Karen has spent 24 years helping women in crisis, her return was not by way of material wealth or an easy life, but, to me, it looks like her paybacks came by way of one man’s vigorous kindness.

Thinking about Sunday, and all the things Jim and I talked about, one thing is clear, humanity is not hopeless and love should be stubborn, they may just need to come through, from the bottom, up.

If you would like to donate your time or you have flooring or furnishings to donate to Karen, please contact me at ingrid@madquestionasking.com

© Mad Question Asking – 2012 All Rights Reserved

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Back Doors and Cheap Seats

4 Dec

When I was a kid of 19, trying to make my way to adulthood, some guy friends used to sneak me into the Khyber Pass Pub in Philly. I’d pass through the same door used for loading the amps and guitars and drum kits. Once inside, I’d stand close against the wall, biting my lower lip, grinning, so excited that I could watch my friends’ band play live on a crappy, elevated platform stage to an audience of four strangers, 10 friends, and the token supportive family member who looked like they would’ve been more comfortable at a Cracker Barrel gift shop.

Being snuck in added a sense of excitement; Brooke and I got caught and kicked out for being underage as many times as the goonish bouncer didn’t catch us.

On one occasion when we got kicked out, we blamed it on my pants. The day before I had scored a vintage pair of crushed velvet Levi’s that were forest green and white gingham. These huge bell bottoms still had the tags on and fit like a glove. I wore those gorgeous pants with a matching ribbed green wool turtleneck that whole winter; wearing them in that dirty club was like flaunting a brand new diamond tennis bracelet around a Greenwich, CT PTA meeting in 1983. Everybody wanted them. Any self-respecting thrift-store-shopping hipster would be stopped dead in their tracks by those pants and the three feet of legs I lent them.

*****

I lived in NYC around that time. Every year, Sting and friends (e.g. Elton John, James Taylor and Billy Joel) put on a show to raise money for the Rainforest, and for three years in a row, my sister’s boyfriend, Alex (now her husband), had snuck me into Carnegie Hall to see the show.

Alex, being an alumnus of the Art Students League, had a painting studio in Carnegie Hall, just a single room with a skylight, and no toilet. He must have had two thousand paintings in there, landscapes and still-lifes of flowers, each one really beautiful. It was this solitary bluish-grey room that was our ticket to the Rainforest gig.

Now Sting, Billy Joel, Elton John, and Sweet Baby James Taylor were never on my top list of musicians or even close … but, they are legends, and the songs I heard them sing together on that stage were literally breathtaking. Billy Joel, shockingly, did a better version of Leonard Cohen’s “Light As the Breeze”; and there is no living person I’d love the chance to make smile more than Mr. Cohen. Then there is Elton John’s “Your Song.” I know he didn’t write it, but “How wonderful life is while you’re in the world” is perhaps one of the most beautiful lines ever written. Imagine that? Imagine somebody thinking the world is more wonderful because of you! That’s the thing about classic rock; these songs are more heartfelt. You can feel emotion in them and relate to it. Not as much of today’s music does that. Maybe nobody appreciates generous words of love strung together anymore.

In 1995, the Rainforest benefit concert would feature Bruce Springsteen as the oh-so-secret special guest. Alex knew this but he kept this from my sister, Chris, and me, knowing that my sister, a die-hard Springsteen fan, would be blown away by the surprise. The whole audience would be blown away; Sting and friends AND Springsteen doing that year’s theme of Elvis songs!

We were placed in the Carnegie Hall studios elevator by Alex, and subsequently handed over to Reggie, an usher, who was going to sneak us in and seat us. He opened a door to a box of seats and told us to sit, and that if we had any trouble to find him.

That first tier, above the stage and orchestra, reminded me of the magnet often featured in cartoons, the red one shaped like a horse shoe and then dipped silver at the magnetic ends. As I sat stage left in the silver magnetic part of the first tier, in a box seat that must have cost many thousands of dollars, I squinted to see who was sitting across from me. In exactly the same seat but opposite of me sat Claudia Schiffer and her boyfriend at the time, magician David Copperfield. Next to them was Donatella Versace and unidentifiable beautiful men in tuxedos with hard jaws and slicked black hair. Everyone was wearing gowns; even at that distance, I could see the sparkle of gems and the high shine of wealth.

My own outfit was not a gown, but an adorable black satin mini skirt overall dress with a white tee underneath. My black converses were hidden by the balcony but I hoped the shine of my satin would give the illusion I was fancy. Staring at Claudia and David, I started to panic that the tissues I kept shoving up my nose due to my sinusitis would blow our cover. I decided to pretend I had the craftsmanship of a blind ship-in-a-bottle maker and make really tiny pieces of tissue for my dripping nose, like a nose tampon that looked like a bang snap, and subtly replace them every 20 minutes.

It was thrilling to be snuck in to this concert, to be able to attain the same class status as dumb celebrities, all the while wearing chucks and even inventing something as brilliant as nose tampons.

*****

The next year, I went with my friend Brooke. Now she is a live target for the male species. I don’t know what it is (boobs) but no matter where we go she gathers attention that a too forward, too talkative, too tall girl like me could only dream of. Once, on a trip to Paris, she was so worried about her ass getting grabbed that I had to keep telling her, “Listen, I have been to Europe like a 100 times, nobody does that anymore. Don’t worry about it.” Within 15 minutes of landing, two Arabs grabbed her ass. I just shook my head and lit a cigarette. That girl is a damn man-trap.

Knowing this about Brooke, I was worried that she was more likely to get us caught than my gross tissues from last year. But, I took my chances. Alex couldn’t deliver us to Reggie this time so he gave me strict instructions on how to get into Carnegie Hall. Most of it was keeping your mouth shut and I was used to this sort of instruction.

It wasn’t so different from the orders I was given a couple of weeks after I got my driver’s license. My dad had handed me four books and said “Go to Freeman’s Auction House. Don’t talk to anyone. Just get in the elevator and go to the third floor, books. Ask the man in books if these books are worth anything. Talk to no one else and come right home.” I did as I was told, as no one in their right mind would disobey my father. The man in books, who was surrounded by grey metal shelves filled with faded books bound in dull colors and assorted ephemera, had a skin color so pale as to suggest he only left his post after hours to eat or sleep. He was not surprised at my presence. I handed him the books. He passed quickly by the first edition Uncle Tom’s Cabin (those are a dime a dozen) and took a long time looking at the largest book, saying

“Do you have the second volume?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Well, if you do, this pair of unbound, uncut first edition Webster’s dictionaries is worth around $10,000.”

I took the books from him and said thank you. I went straight home as instructed. When I asked my dad if he had the second volume, his reply was “None of your damn business kid.” I shook my head, walked outside, and lit a cigarette. The man was nuts.

We found Reggie and he sat us in a box just like last year. This year I wore a grown up black dress and black heals. Just before the show began, a man entered the box and sat behind us. I wasn’t sure what to do so I did nothing. He tapped me on my shoulder and asked how we got tickets for the seats we were in. I saw a small glint in his eye; he was a bit of a trouble maker himself, his smile told me so. I paused, looked at Brooke, than back to him and replied, “How did YOU get the tickets for your seat?”

He smiled and said his company owned the box. I excused us and we left, our heart’s pounding. We found Reggie and he placed us up in the cheap seats.

Looking back, one thing I know for sure is that I don’t ever want to be too safe and miss all the fun. I don’t want the cheap seats. I want to forever smell the excitement of sneaking in, especially through the back door.

© Mad Question Asking – 2012 All Rights Reserved

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Who’s Next?

28 Nov Unknown

The phone rang last night and it was my brother on the other line, asking if I knew anything about the huge Tupperware bin filled with 50 LPs, left out in the rain, next to our mother’s mailbox.

“WHAT? This is SO exciting! Who left them? Who are they addressed to? What records are in there? Is there a love letter included, perhaps inside a champagne bottle that was once lost at sea, addressed to me?!?”

My brother, very annoyed with my nonsense, replied, “Ingrid, you come and deal with it. They are soaking wet and there is no evidence of them being intended for you or any of us. They were left in the cold rain.”

“Damn it! I can’t come now, the kids are asleep. Tell mom I’ll be over in the morning!”

We hung up. I couldn’t understand it. Why would someone abandon LPs at my mom’s mailbox, in the rain?

The person who left these magic records got it wrong, so very wrong. I would be the one bursting with joy if that happened at my house. My mom doesn’t care about books or records. She is a different sort of information junkie; talk radio, TV, newspapers, and magazines are her thing. The only book I ever saw her reading was a Suzanne Somers’s book on menopause (in LARGE PRINT) that she bought at Costco. I asked her if she’d like the accompanying Thigh Master and hormone replacement drugs; maybe I could get them for her at Costco? In large print?

The only record I ever saw my mom purchase for herself was John Schneider’s White Christmas. It was 1981 and I was five and a half. Boy, did that purchase turn into a shit storm. My dad was so jealous that she was “obviously” in love with the blonde Dukes of Hazzard star, that he made all of us, his children, sit and watch him lose his mind for hours, questioning her fidelity, fantasy or not. At one point she yawned. He said he’d kill her if she did that again. I knew by then to never question anything he’d threaten; if one of our guinea hens made too much racket, too early in the morning… he’d just open his bedroom window and shoot it dead. He didn’t even dress for early morning murder. He just stood there at his balcony window, shotgun in hand, his undershirt tucked into his tighty-whities.

No one was safe.

Sitting there, my eyes wide and my mind totally bored, an unwilling spectator of so many of his brazen displays of wild and loose insanity, I thought maybe I should stick up for my mom and move his attention towards me, the real slut in the family.

I was the one, who, in lieu of getting any attention from my family, watched tons of soap operas, getting ideas about the word play and long gazes that led to… something. I was the one who locked my parents’ bedroom door, slipped on a lace mauve negligee with matching panties that my mom kept in the bottom of her underwear drawer, laid my brown-haired ken doll down on a pillow and proceeded to practice my future moves, whispering sweet nothings to my favorite male doll. This buried, ugly negligee was my ticket to acting like all the ladies of daytime television. I’m pretty sure my mom never even wore it; it was given to her by my tacky aunt, a self-absorbed, 70s version of throw-money-in-your-face idiocy; the original real housewife – what feminism never saw coming!

Sadly, my mom claims she really thought he’d like that song just as much as she did. I don’t think she ever dared to buy another 45 again.

*****

I drove to my mom’s early this morning, still a bit salty that she was the one with the admirer, even if he was a weirdo. On arrival, she immediately told me that after inspection, the records must have been left outside by Bull. I sighed, resigned to the fact that… well, it just wasn’t that exciting of a story after all.

Bull was this really tough black guy that worked on and off for my dad. He’d often be tooling around town with my dad, riding shotgun. Bull was transient and he lived in the back room of an office at a moving company. But mostly, he was just my dad’s friend. My dad had two kinds of friends: homeless black guys and Arabs. Bull always wore a zip-up jumpsuit, a do-rag, a weightlifting belt, and this great satin jacket. On the back of the jacket was embroidered a list with the dates of all the amateur boxing fights he’d won. And at the very bottom, almost as an afterthought and embroidered crookedly, were the words “Who’s Next?” I don’t know who was next but that was the greatest jacket I ever saw.

My mom says she remembers my dad giving Bull a lot of records; he had lots of doubles from buying a close-out record shop in the 80s. She thinks Bull must have returned them and, when I asked why he’d leave them in the rain, she reminded me not to try to rationalize the motives or actions of a transient veteran of Korea and Vietnam.

Disappointed that the mystery was solved, that the LPs were clearly from my dad – too many Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass for them not to be – I fondly remembered the words “Who’s Next?” and I let the story go, reminding myself there’d be another one, right around the corner.

© Mad Question Asking – 2012 All Rights Reserved

Like An Ass

16 Nov

Much of life can be measured in memories of being an ass or by the daily toil in avoidance of being an ass.

Somewhere in the middle of puberty and eighth grade, my dad decided that I could sing. He believed this so strongly, as if a lightning bolt had struck him to his knees with this knowledge, that for a single week, he made me stand in front of him and sing Patsy Cline songs.

I was a child of sound logic and reason, even at the age of 13, I completely accepted what my limitations were. I knew what I was and what I wasn’t and I wasn’t a singer.

I was fine with that. Just the spring before this exhaustive week I had asked my mom to sign me up for voice lessons. She obliged. I found a little studio in Medford that sat on a second floor of an old colonial number. The room was well-lit but the decor was reminiscent of a pediatrician’s office in an insane asylum. Drab, clinical, and made child-like by someone who didn’t like children.

Leaving my mother happy in a waiting parlor that had magazines she’d like, like People, I entered a room with a piano and an old man. To me, he looked very much like chicken, after it was alive, but before it was cooked. He was one color head to toe with very little hair, but fat in the middle. He looked plucked.

He started in on the lesson and I quickly interrupted him, he misunderstood.

“I’m not here for singing lessons. I am here to work on my voice. I want to change my accent.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

“My accent. I want to change it. I don’t want to sound so nasally. So South Jersey.”

“Why would you want to do that?”

We went back and forth, with him trying to sell me on singing lessons and me trying to explain how horrid a South Jersey accent was. And how since I was willing to pay him, he should be able to help me pronounce words like ocean correctly.

My mother paid the man for his time. No one understood me.

The big problem with the singing situation was that once my dad had an idea, like this one, his mind placed a bear trap around it and no reason could break it free. I fought to explain that I simply couldn’t sing, but as I stared at the two loaded shotguns he kept behind him, I feared he’d start shooting at my feet and the next order would be “dance!”, so I took a deep breath, lost a bucket’s worth of dignity and produced an embarrassment of sound by way of “I Fall to Pieces.” (Years later, on learning of the bacha bazi or the dancing boys of Afghanistan, I felt I could understand what they went through a little – minus the sex slave part, thank god.)

He grew frustrated, as if I was holding back my talent. Maybe he thought it was spite in my throat. At one point he thought maybe I was too embarrassed to sing. He then poured a glass of water over his head to illustrate how to never feel a fool. I wondered if any of my friends ever had to withstand this type of nuisance, or did their dads just ask them how school was that day?

He eventually lost interest in my voice and stopped making an ass out of both of us. I stopped caring if I had a South Jersey accent. The self-importance in avoiding being an ass took all the fun out of everything, just like logic and reason can. I have learned to accept that I am an ass, maybe even most of the time. But especially when I fall to pieces.

© Mad Question Asking – 2012 All Rights Reserved

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The Dead

31 Oct photo-5

It wasn’t until today that I remembered the dead. Remembered to look in on them after Sandy the hurricane passed. I had been so worried about the living, the stuff, the stories, and the news, that I had completely forgotten about the beloved dead.

The last many weeks have been rough for me, (honestly) I am drowning in the deep, lonely waters of questions of existence. An elegant, violent storm passing by on a full moon didn’t help any.

All day long, I listen. I watch. Then, I think that roughly six billion years ago, science says that Earth was mostly just a ball of swirling gases. It got hard. It formed. It changed. It changed quite a bit – like every 50 million years something really big happened.

Science says 100 million years ago a meteor crashed and wiped out the Dinosaurs. They say that humans came on the scene 2,000,000 years ago. But have only played a major role on a six billion year old planet for roughly 11,000 years.

I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t know if science is any more or less correct than Jesus freaks are.

I don’t know one damn thing for sure.

And that’s a hard place to be. Because when I listen and watch my fellow humans all day long, in the background of my mind I think 11,000 years out of 6,000,000,000? And all I got was this lousy, lifeless, loveless, soulless, fast, dull, ugly, mother fucking culture?

I got Obama. I got Romney. I got cool. I got safe. No risk, no want. No search for truth, love, and beauty. NO ART. I got bumper stickers about what type of dog is loved by the driver. I got shit.

Driving to the cemetery on Halloween, I knew it’d be just me there. White people never visit the dead. I would catch the last 20 minutes before the gates closed.

Three huge limbs on some old oaks fell around the graves I visit. I sat down on top of the letters that spell out “loving father” and said I was sorry it took me a few days to remember them.

I sat there a long 15 minutes and had a good, hard cry. Wishing.

Today, I didn’t ask the dead any questions.

This world spins around so elegantly in our Milky Way, a galaxy which is only one in an infinite number of galaxies whirling in space.

Just like the dead, the Earth’s story is totally forgotten in all the lousy worrying about the living, the stuff, the stories, and the news. With Earth seemingly forgotten, it sometimes looks like there’s just no room for truth, love, and beauty here on this very lonely planet.

© Mad Question Asking – 2012 All Rights Reserved

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“You’re Not Jewish”

28 Oct

Sandy, a storm set to hit NJ tomorrow, sent me to Whole Foods late today.

I was avoiding the hype. I think all this panic for generators and water is some kind of corporate Weather Channel-Pathmark-U.S. Gov’t conspiracy to send the public into a tizzy and do what they want us to… spend money out of fear. Anyway, I’m prepared enough I told myself. But then the kids’ school called and said it was closed tomorrow. Not wanting to mingle with the spazzs at Wegmans, I threw the kids in the car and headed to Whole Foods.

Sandy has left the beehive (Sissel, my mother) stranded in Eleuthera, Bahamas this week. She is without water, electricity and the airport, that looks more like a farm stand, is closed. She spent a night with metal grills covering her windows and listening to maddening wind and woke up to water up to her knees. But not a hair out-of-place, I’m sure.

Earlier today I watched “The Princess Bride” with my little girls and wished for a Peter Falk in my life. A witty, old grandpa-type to worry about me. And call me “babe.”

We entered (a not busy) Whole Foods and after I got my cod and kale and forced myself to ignore the fusion salt kiosk, I ended up in the soy sauce aisle. This aisle is the lame semi-ethnic aisle. An old, feisty guy was buying 24-hour burning candles and told me I needed to get some for the storm.

“These are the best candles!” he said.

My reply “What is wrong with the candles that I already have?”

“You’re not Jewish. These candles burn for 24 hours and if you put them in the bathroom sink, then you know where the toilet is.”

“OK, good point. But how do you know I’m not Jewish?”

He laughed in my face. “Get the candles. You learned something new today.”

What I got today was an old, loudmouthed character when I asked for one.

© Mad Question Asking – 2012 All Rights Reserved

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American Activism Part Three

9 Oct

This is Part Three of a MQA three-part commentary on Activism. Read about Part One here and Part Two here.

9.19.12

When I sit and think about Camden NJ, I always think about how I live in average, middle-class comfort right next door to one of the most impoverished cities in the United States. Actually, Camden is home to THE most dangerous neighborhood in the country. I also think about how on the other side of my little bedroom community of a town, I neighbor wealthy Cherry Hill, whose mall has stores that sell handbags for upwards of $2000.

Just six miles separate extreme wealth from extreme poverty. How can it be so? How is it that I live sandwiched between two towns so completely different?

Today I attended the Camden County Mentoring Institute’s Mentoring Luncheon. I was invited by a friend who works for the Center for Family Services. The guest list had some big names lined up to speak, such as Camden Mayor Redd, Wilson Goode, and the NJ Attorney General.

After I parked across from City Hall, I walked down Market Street towards The Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, where the luncheon was being held. As I waited at a light to cross the street, I overheard two homeless men involved in a heated conversation.

The one man cursed at the other, and once he noticed I was standing there he said to me, “Sorry miss, I didn’t see you there, I didn’t mean to speak like that in front of you.” I replied, “No worries, I’ve heard worse.” He put his hand to his heart and said, “I’m truly sorry, I wasn’t raised to talk like that.”

I was still smiling from homeless Mr. Manners as I walked up to the cathedral’s iron gate, guarded by a police officer. Beyond him, in the church’s parking lot, important looking men in suits and ties stood next to shiny black SUVs. Just then a man passed the gate and said out loud to no one in particular, “Looks like we havin’ a dog show today.”

Was this a dog show? Would I sit yawning, unmoved by a parade of semi-important persons who showed up in fancy cars protected by police to talk about mentoring the nation’s lost children? Was this going to be like what I didn’t see in Bethlehem or D.C.? Or would I actually see something here that resembled action, some form of civic-minded activism?

I entered the gymnasium, placed my preprinted name tag sticker over my green silk shirt, and was seated at a table filled with women my friend works with. Behind me were two tables of Nation of Islam men wearing bow-ties. Theirs were solemn faces that wouldn’t make eye contact with me, and they held graceful, stoic postures that kept those bow-ties straight. I was disappointed I wasn’t seated with them. To be honest, inside my head I said, “Rats! When the hell am I ever going to be in the company of the freaking Nation of Islam again? Why do I always get seated with the ladies by default of being female?”

After I stood in a buffet line for an Italian hoagie, chips and a can of coke, I sat down with my back to the bow-ties and adjusted my own posture to take in two hours of speakers.

Wilson Goode spoke about being a recovering politician. The former two-term mayor of Philadelphia went on to found Amachi, a faith-based mentoring program for children of incarcerated parents. He said that when asked why he chose this path instead of pursuing high-paying, high-power positions, he says, “because I went from success to significance.” I liked his answer.

Goode started to speak about the corruption of the prison system or, as he called it, “The Prison Industrial Complex,” but said that this was a conversation for another time.

Camden’s Chief of Police told the story of a nine-year-old boy he mentors, a child who last summer, in broad daylight, stood between two drug dealers to stop a fight and was shot in the head with a bullet that exited his eye. On the afternoon that this little boy was shot, I wonder how many handbags were being looked at and purchased six miles away?

The event was coming to an end. The final remarks were made by Monsignor Mannion, also know as Father Mike. Father Mike only spoke for a few minutes, but those minutes impressed me as the most powerful and heartfelt.

His words were not measured, they poured out of him with a stunning mixture of compassion and rage and volume. He brought up Dominick, a six-year-old boy who weeks ago was stabbed to death by a man who broke in his home while his mother was in the hospital. Dominick jumped on the back of the man as he was raping his twelve-year-old sister, who was set to celebrate her birthday the next day. His sister escaped, but Dominick didn’t.

Father Mike told the tale of being in the hospital when Dominick’s sister, Amber, came to. How she kept saying, “He saved my life, he saved my life.” Two thousand years ago, Father Mike said, martyrs bled to death, and just days ago a little boy bled to death to save his sister.

As he came down, the rapist/killer, who was high on the drug ‘wet’ (PCP-laced marijuana), said to the cops, “Did I hurt someone?”

Father Mike delivered words that came from a place of deep compassion and said to us all, “What if HE had had a mentor?”

What if he had had a mentor? What if someone had taken an interest in this guy when he was a kid and changed the path he ended up on?

As we sat in this Catholic church’s gymnasium, just before Minister Wasim Muhammad from Temple of Islam #20 gave the closing prayer, Father Mike said his final words. He said that inside of each of us is a story. Tell that story to a child.

I don’t know how many of the 200 people present will become mentors, or how many of them already are, but at least they showed up. And that was more than what I saw in Bethlehem or D.C.

I started this week wanting to see something that was real, to see where people came together to do good for society. I wanted to see activism. To see what was happening outside of shopping at malls.

Today I didn’t see signs or protests or fanfare, this wasn’t a dog show. In a Catholic church I saw an Islamic Minister give the closing prayer for a non-profit organization’s luncheon. Through storytelling, I heard a diverse group of adults ultimately ask for the same thing, to actively participate in society through mentoring. That sure sounded real. And it sure looked like activism.

If you’d like information on mentoring in Camden County, please contact the Center For Family Services Mentoring Department: 856-964-1990 x180

© Mad Question Asking – 2012 All Rights Reserved

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U.S. Army Poet

12 Sep crazycake

A few months back, over homemade cookies and a nice, strong coffee at her home in Brooklyn, my old friend Kelly told me that her goal in life is “to actively subtract from the amount of violence in the world.” The sentiment struck me hard, knocked me out a bit. I have, personally, never made a declaration like that; in fact I’m well aware that I’m just a lazy dreamer. Nor do I ever hear goals like that said out loud. Most of the goals I hear of relate to running marathons, moving to towns with better public schools or personal weight loss.

Hearing Kelly say those words made me want to share what I know about her story.

When I met Kelly in 1998, she was working in a small independent book store on 2nd street in Philadelphia that was literally around the corner from my apartment. We clicked pretty fast. She made me chai lattes as I was always trying to give up my beloved black coffee habit. After a few lazy, sunny afternoons of sitting and talking at the small two-chair table in the front of the bookstore, we became real friends.

Kelly wasn’t like anybody I’d ever met. She wore Frye cowboy boots, bell bottoms and polyester vintage shirts. Kelly was a poet. And when I spoke to her, she listened, with eyes attentive and her mind focused on what I said. I’m certain anyone who knows her would agree that having a conversation with Kelly feels much like a gift.

Not too long after we met, Kelly did something very unexpected, something that the community of artists in which she lived did not support.

Kelly, the poet, joined the U.S. Army.

She told me that it came to her one morning while meditating. She immediately called the enlistment office, rode her bike over there and signed up to be a linguist, signing up for five years of service.

She said she was broke and wanted to get an education, to go to college. She said it felt like the universe told her to do it, to join the Army. Who was she to question the universe? Within hours of the idea entering her mind via meditation she was all signed up.

Before she left for basic training I threw her a party, a big going away party on the second floor at the 700 Club (a hipster bar in the Northern Liberties neighborhood of Philadelphia). All the artists, writers, musicians, painters and drunks were invited. Many came but, again, they did not support her choice. I knew this was really painful and troublesome for Kelly, that she had made this incredibly bold move in a community of friends who very openly disagreed with her choice.

I on the other hand…love to throw a party. This going away party featured camouflage-colored streamers, balloons, a giant camouflage sheet cake that read GODSPEED. I made Kelly a garland of daisies for her hair.

The ring of daisies really caused a stir amongst the anti-war liberals. One woman was infuriated, commenting in a biting sarcastic tone that daisies and machine guns where a great combination.

For no reason, other than my own instinctive perception, I trusted her choice and believed she knew what she was doing. Who was I to say she was wrong? I saw what she did as brave, to make a choice like that in the face of zero support. As a 22 year-old girl, three years before 9/11, I didn’t see joining the army as being pro-war. In a way, since Kelly was looking for a paid education, it didn’t seem much different than half my friends who collected unemployment as long as they could, milking the system. I did know that Kelly was setting her life on a course that would take her out of the safety net of the self-selecting group of artists we knew, artists who made proclamations based on big, lofty opinions about our world, but sat inactive on bar stools. The hardest choices they made were which beers to drink that night.

While at her nine weeks of basic training she told me the only items you are allowed to have are essentials, like your uniform, soap, a toothbrush, tampons and The Bible. Kelly had her Raja Yoga book confiscated during a routine checking of lockers. Upon her exclaiming that the book was a religious one (Raja Yoga is part of Hinduism) the Army replied “Yogi is not a religion.” Having her book on meditation taken from her so soon only cranked up the volume of her own refusal to fall in line.

From that point on she turned it around, messing with them in a smart, mischief-making way. She has told me tales, such as being asked repeatedly to fix her hair by her Sergeant and always replying “Sorry Sarnt, it’s the seat of my soul.” This behavior left the Army unsure what to do with Kelly. I can visualize all the people of authority literally scratching their heads after one of her poetic, “brainiac” replies.

Kelly ended up in Monterey, CA and climbed to the top of her language class, learning Farsi. I visited Kelly at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey on a cross-country road trip I was on with my boyfriend at the time. I had never been on any sort of army base before; I couldn’t get over how young everyone was. It looked like any other college at which I had visited friends, only they all wore camouflage. We ate Indian buffet together and talked about the language she was learning. Not long after our visit, Kelly ended up getting kicked out of the army after one and a half years of service. The honorable discharge reason . . . she was too fat, or as it says on her Army medical records: Chronically Overweight.

Kelly is a size four.

Kelly got kicked out of the army because she was too different, too smart;  they did not know what to do with her. They couldn’t control her and, despite being in the top of her class, they let her go. I think it is very interesting how the retaliation the Army used on Kelly, a woman, was to make it about her weight. I don’t think you have to be a feminist to agree that is pretty sick.

She came back to Philadelphia and got a full ride at PENN, a stipend for books and housing. Kelly got what she wanted: an education, paid for by the U.S. Army.

As she was closing in on graduating, completing her Islamic Near East studies at PENN, she got a job offer from the CIA as an open sources analyst. After the in-processing weekend she spent in D.C., that included a polygraph test, a psychological evaluation, a physical and a visit to the office where she would work, the CIA ultimately didn’t hire her, sending her instead a vague letter saying to apply again next year. Before the polygraph test, Kelly was told that “no one can trip the polygraph test, not even people good at yoga.” I’m guessing that Kelly must have a classification of TOO GODDAMN RADICAL in her FBI file.

Kelly wasn’t supported by the artist community she lived in; nor was she supported by the U.S. Army. This parallel makes her story quite interesting. It’s a story that made me think…what would happen if, say, 100,000 or more artists and poets joined the U.S. Army, like Kelly did, at once? What would happen?

Would the army fail? Would it shut down and explode like one of Grandpa Munster’s basement inventions?

If 100,000 or more artists joined the U.S. Army and the machine did not know what to do with this type of person, would we achieve peace? Would a shift of real change occur? Would we be a step closer to a revolution of peace?

Seems like the bravest move, the one essential for change (if that is in fact what some of us really want) is to walk straight into the devil’s mouth (the American military-industrial complex) and bite his tongue to shut him down, not just sit on a bar stool complaining about the world’s problems. Takes a lot of guts to do what is out-of-order.

I’m proud of Kelly. I see what she did as brave. I see, through her, how taking risks can lead you to having goals that are bigger than yourself, as big as wanting to “to actively subtract from the amount of violence in the world.” And that is the most beautiful sentence in the world.

© Mad Question Asking – 2012 All Rights Reserved

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