My World and Welcome to It
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Because I Haven’t Known What to Say
Because the events of the past week — the horrific shooting deaths of nine African-Americans in a Charleston church by a young white racist, and the — maybe — final straw that will bring down the Confederate battle flag, and bring the longed-for change, I am trying to say — Because when we were children, in the extremely white liberal suburbs of Marin County in the late 1960s, we used to say, “Eenie meenie miney mo, catch a nigger by the toe,” called Brazil nuts “nigger toes,” and when someone asked, “Where’d you get that?,” the response was, “Stole it off a dead nigger.” Because the one African-American girl in…
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The Ugly Truth: Sins of the Forefathers
A few years ago I picked up a book at the library because of its intriguing cover and title. It was Edward Ball’s Slaves in the Family. I read about Ball’s exploration of his roots, delving deeply into his family’s history as slave owners, discovering the ugly truth in his own backyard, as it were. When I finished reading this devastating portrait of Ball’s own family, it took weeks before I could read anything else. My mind was full of the revelations and secrets he had exposed. Not long after, I was visiting my 93-year-old great-aunt Doris, and we turned to the topic of books. I told her about Ball’s…
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Leatherbound
I lost my leather jacket about three weeks ago. I had it on, I took it off, I laid it down, I apparently left it wherever I was and now it has vanished, seemingly forever. I bought that jacket when I was 19, at Coddingtown Mall in Santa Rosa, where I had taken the bus after classes at the junior college. I was working part-time for my father in his then-new brass wind-chime factory (housed in a barn on our rural property). I strung wind-chimes together: three knots for the center, five knots for the pipes, a jerk and a flourish and it was done. I made 60 cents apiece…
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WTF? My Strange Life & the Cosmic Yawp
I spend a lot of my time howling the cosmic yawp into the blue beyond. It looks, to mortal eyes, like I’m making lunches and beating a deadline and running errands and remembering to put out the trash cans. But I assure you, a goodly portion of every day is given over to caterwauling (mostly in my inside voice, but not always) on the why of everyday living. The why of how did we get here? The why of how can X be happening? I’m old enough to know better. I am hitting the midpoint in life. I have successfully raised 4.9 kids (just 1 year left on #5). We have a…
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Writing What Scares You
I have written a few essays lately, inspired by the lovely and talented writers Jordan Rosenfeld, Rachel Thompson and Lillian Ann Slugocki, that scared the bejeebers out of me. Actually, the work scared me even more than that, but I’m trying to be polite. And what I’ve discovered is that it’s harder than I ever thought to put certain words and experiences down on paper. But it also feels better than I expected to have done so. I’ve had a couple of stories in my mind for many years that I thought, “Someday I will write that down. Someday, I’ll put that on paper and everyone will read it and know how…
