Ignorance is not bliss

An anti-bullying bill presented by North Carolina State Senator Julia Boseman recently passed despite some truly moronic statements by the Minority Leader, Skip Stam. His comments are beyond ridiculous. A few months ago, an eleven year old boy in my part of Massachusetts hanged himself after being bullied in school and called gay. I guess Skippy believes that the kids who bullied him were only doing their civic duty.

Clay Aiken, who is a self proclaimed news junkie, blogged this evening to his fanbase. What I didn't realize is that not only did Skippy make these statements with a straight face (pardon the pun) but he did so in front of Senator Boseman, who is a gay parent. And her son was in the room when this was said.

I'm having a hard time trying to figure out if Skippy is ignorant, stupid, afraid or some combination of all three. I hope the good people of North Carolina don't allow him to spread his personal form of bigotry and intolerance for another term.

Clay's blog was called "Warning"



I'm a little late on this one, but... be careful. Don't breathe in around me!

In debating the School Violence Prevention Act during a legislative session, NC General Assembly Minority Leader Skip Stam (R*-Wake) said that "explicitly protecting gay kids from bullying would lead to pedophilia and gay marriage," The man, who has obviously come unhinged from reality also argued that gay parents are "more dangerous than second-hand smoke."

I hope I haven't caused any health problems for any of you!

What a dumbass!

Do enough of you guys live in southern Wake County to help him lose his job next year?

c

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Sing

Recent news stories have reported that several distraught fans of Michael Jackson (mostly overseas) have committed suicide after his death. While I was a big fan of Michael Jackson (before the bizarre years), I can’t imagine taking things to that extreme. Really? Nothing left to live for? Why? He was just a singer.

I can understand feelings of grief. I think I've only felt unusually sad a few times when celebrities have died. Princess Diana, David Bloom, Tim Russert. But it only lasted a day or so.

I remember how I felt in May of 2003, after the AI2 finale had aired. While deep in my heart, I expected the outcome, I still felt defeated, cheated and terribly sad. I remember the next day when I had to attend a conference, I would have rather stayed in bed and grieved. Would I ever see him again? I walked from session to session, feeling like a good friend had died or at least moved far away. I was in a funk, I couldn’t concentrate. And I couldn’t understand it.

He’s just a singer.

A couple of months later, I was at that same venue attending the AI2 concert. I had floor seats and was so excited I hardly slept the night before. I even had a sign (something that would make me roll my eyes now). The sign said “This is the Night for a Platinum Record.” I held up the sign when he stood in front of me. He looked, pointed and laughed with joy. I stood there and all of a sudden, I started to cry. Me. Miss practical, Type A, ESTJ in charge kind of gal. My friend looked at me and said “You’ve got it bad.” I wiped my eyes in disbelief at the emotion that had spontaneously burst forth. What was wrong with me?

He’s just a singer.

I can pick out his voice from another room when my iPod is on shuffle providing background music. I worry when he is far away in dangerous places like Afghanistan or Somalia and I try to educate myself about the horrors of their people after he describes their despair. I pay closer attention to how people treat others with disabilities. I get giddy when he writes a few words of hello. I absorb his writings on serious topics like a sponge, thirsty for more of his well-informed opinions.

I set aside vacation days for when he can entertain me again. I laugh at his comedic timing in concert, television or stage performances. He has become a part of my life, outside of the real bond of family yet closer than a neighbor or an old college friend. I’ve been a fan of many before but this is so different. But why is this so different?

He’s just a singer.

I’ve met friends whom I would trust with my life. Some share different social or political views, yet we can communicate those views in a flurry of noise and emotion that offends no one. One primary common bond draws us together, because to hear the Voice with those friends by your side adds to the vibrations in your soul. We feel the Voice, while a stranger would just hear a song. Because after all,

He’s just a singer.

I’ve learned a lot in the past six years. I’ve learned about the goodness and generosity in people. I've also learned far too much about those that are lost, intolerant, alone or just plain bad, things that I wish I had never learned. But I wouldn’t trade the experience for the world. Think of what I would have missed if I had decided six years ago to turn off the TV that night in May with a shrug and decided, eh

He’s just a singer.

He’s not. He never will be.

Sing for me, Clay.




MJ Photo credit Jae C. Hong/AP

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Landslide

I took my love and I took it down
I climbed a mountain and I turned around
And I saw my reflection in the snow covered hill

About seven months ago, I posted a blog called Crossroads which reflected upon the issues facing our new President, Clay Aiken as well as my own family. I wrote about how focused I was on the complex process of applying to colleges with my daughter. I remember reflecting“In the chaos and complexity of common application, recommendations, deadlines, college tours, FAFSA and a mountain of paperwork, there is the real human emotion of preparing your child to leave you.” But back in December, that seemed like miles ahead of me.

This afternoon, under a cloudy Massachusetts sky, I will hear the familiar strain of Pomp and Circumstance. I’ve heard it plenty of times before, when you are in the high school band; you play it so many times each spring that you hope you never hear it again. But never has it had as much meaning as it will today.

Our town’s high school is on a small hill, overlooking the athletic fields. At 7 PM, those bleachers will be filled with parents, grandparents, siblings and friends but the anticipation won’t be over a soccer tournament. When the first notes of that overplayed tune begin to float through the wind, all eyes will turn to the hill. The hill, where I took two toddlers sledding whenever there was a good New England snow storm. The hill, where for 30+ years, seniors have snuck out at midnight to burn their class year in giant numbers into the grass. The hill, which has had 2009 burned in it since September, yet I’ve hardly noticed.

Then they will come. The boys dressed in green, the girls in white, with their green tassles catching a breeze on top of that traditionally strange headdress. They will walk across those numbers and down the hill, as if crossing an invisible threshold into adulthood.

I’ll try to catch her eye. She’s taller than most of the girls, so I’ll probably find her easily. Beautiful with a face that defies the need for makeup. It sometimes makes me uncomfortable to walk in the mall with her; she turns so many heads that it feels like there is a spotlight on us. Tall like her father, with the tendency to plan like her mother, but only if the topic interests her. She’s got her father’s attitude on life and her mother’s academic proficiency. Where the beauty comes from, we’ve never been able to figure out.

And the others who have been her circle of laughter and love will come. Most I’ve known since the first grade. Many of them just walk into my house now without knocking. I’m sure the lump will stay in my throat for the entire ceremony.

Time makes you bolder, children get older
I’m getting older too.

Ashley, who tragically lost her mother in their sophomore year. The school spirit winner with the huge smile and the broken heart. I will never forget the pleading eyes that came to me in September asking for help in choosing a major and a college and figuring out the applications. I took her on tours, I answered confused text messages late in the evenings, I edited her essay on the impact her mother’s death has had on her, both of us stopping to have a good cry before we uploaded it. She was the inspiration of my college consulting business.

Chel, the good friend for many years, now looking to be a journalist. Lizz, another friend who lost her mother and persevered despite a learning disability. Carrie, the only other tall one with the brains to match her height and the big foot occasionally in her expressive mouth. Arianna, the semi-wild one who couldn’t get focused on school because of a poor support system at home. Those girls took her under their wing and each did their part to get her to pass those extra classes so that she could walk down that hill with them on this day.

I’ve been ‘fraid of changing, cuz I
I built my life around you.

And then they will call her name. Her full name with my grandmother’s name in the middle. The woman who meant so much to me and who would have loved this young woman to pieces since they share a quirky sense of humor.

She’s waited for this day, counted down to it and yet has been very introspective in the past week since she finished her senior classes. I think the enormity of it all finally hit her. She knows. She knows that the future is right around the corner. I hope she knows how bright that future is.

She’s already got her class schedule for college Freshman year, an interesting mix of liberal arts and mass media/advertising. In some ways, she is following in my footsteps yet the goals she has set for what she wants to do with her training are very different. She’s braver than I was at that age, both philosophically and physically. It wouldn’t surprise me if she tries sky diving. Her spontaneity will get her in trouble from time to time but she will also experience things that I may have walked away from and have been the poorer for it.

Can I sail through the changing ocean tides?
Can I handle the seasons of my life?

Eighty-six days from now, we will move her into her new dorm at a private college about 90 minutes from here. I can’t even type that concept without getting emotional. You hope that the value system you’ve instilled in your children will carry them through the exhilaration of being on their own, while exposed to new temptations and to people who may not share the same value system.

Her friends say she is the one that is most likely to be famous. Perhaps. She already is the one that has been mostly likely to be loved.

Happy Graduation Day, baby girl.

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Ten Years Ago Today...

My mom told me my very first dirty joke at the age of nine.  I was a little slow on the uptake -- it took a decade for me to get it.  Not that I would ever have admitted it to her.  The joke, if I remember correctly, had something to do with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton and her method of cooking his breakfast.  ("Sliding up and down the banister!" brayed my mom gleefully.)  I've always wondered if she read that joke somewhere or made it up herself.  Either way, I laughed right along with her -- I wanted to be as cool and smart and irreverent and funny as she was. But did I have any idea what it meant? Nope. Not a clue.

Bright red chipped toenail polish.  Mischievous gray eyes and a cynical smile.  A foamy glass of beer.  Elegant fingers cradling a lit Parliament cigarette, poised over a misshapen green ceramic ashtray I had made in art class and proudly presented to her one Christmas. (I never saw it thereafter when it wasn't full of lipstick-stained butts.)  A nimbus of hazy yellowish smoke around her head.

These are some of the images I retain of my irrepressible mom, who has been gone now for exactly ten years today. 

If I had to guess, I'd say that the very last thing on earth she aspired to be was a suburban housewife and mother.  (Funny how that whole "self-fulfilling prophecy" thing works.)  Having found herself in that position, though, she gamely gave it a shot...with mixed results.  She wasn't what you'd call domestically inclined -- she had zero interest in housekeeping, wasn't very good at mending our clothes or tending the garden or ironing.  She could charitably be described as an indifferent cook:  her Jello molds were crooked, her gravy was lumpy, her pot roast was tough, and her cookies tended to come out burned around the edges...assuming she remembered to turn on the oven in the first place.

It was clear even to me as a child that her heart just wasn't in it, and it was obvious that she thought that any woman who professed to enjoy these things -- like the perky gals enthusiastically hawking housewares in TV commercials -- was either "a lying sack of crap" or had been brainwashed.  Forget Donna Reed and Jane Wyatt and (later) Florence Henderson.  I'm thinking my mom's television alter-ego was probably the sublimely sexy Carolyn Jones as Morticia Addams, who serenely ran her household from a big rattan peacock chair without ever appearing to do any actual work.  (That slinky black dress, perfect manicure, and enveloping mane of hair would have made it difficult in any event.)  What a life -- effortlessly beguiling her smitten husband, Morticia never had to concern herself with mundane things like attending PTA meetings or pretending to be interested in somebody's new recipe for chicken salad or keeping up on the latest kitchen appliances.

So, no...my mom wasn't going to win any housewife-of-the-year awards. We were fed and clothed and had what we needed...wasn't that enough? Dust? Clutter? Big deal -- life is short.  And she didn't have much use for anyone she saw as phony, elitist, and pretentious, whether they be a public figure or someone from the neighborhood.  Case in point:  Jacqueline Kennedy, either before or after JFK's assassination. "They were aiming at HER!" declared my mom to the ladies at the weekly bridge tournament, who nearly dropped their Bloody Marys in shock.   That was fine; my mom liked to shock people.  It should come as no surprise that she didn't have a lot of friends among the neighbors, who probably found her candor alarming.

She fled from convention.  She deplored conformists.   Ironic, considering where we lived on my hardworking dad's teacher salary: a small, flat ranch house identical to many others in our cookie cutter bedroom suburb.  Such a banal existence must have seemed like the seventh level of hell to someone like her.  There were many days that she retreated into alcohol and food and ordering things on the Home Shopping Network and shouting out all the right answers on Jeopardy.  Her bed was her best friend sometimes.

I've always wondered how her life would have been different if she had continued to work. Clearly, she was a brilliant woman, and proved to be -- to our pleasant surprise years later -- a very savvy investor. There were many times, I'm sure, when she was frustrated and miserable and filled with regrets.

But catch her in the right mood and oh, the stories she would tell!  Scheherazade in a seersucker robe.  Outrageous tall tales about her childhood, her wacky family, her various unusual jobs, the men she had um...dated...in her va-va-va voom youth before my dad came along (no detail was spared!), and her skillful lampooning of our very stereotypical 1960s-era neighbors...

The Osaka family -- mom, dad and three daughters -- who trooped out of their house every Wednesday evening to their county orchestra rehearsals, all of them with French horns in tow. Mrs. Osaka also gave French horn lessons, and whenever the sound would waft out of their house and over our back fence, my mom would bellow, "Release the hounds!"  The McKendricks, whose Grandma had Alzheimer's (we didn't know that word then -- to us, she was just crazy). The poor thing would forlornly wander the neighborhood in her bare feet and nightgown in all kinds of weather, searching in vain for her late husband.  My mom would sigh, throw on a coat, grab a blanket, bundle the trembling Mrs. McKendrick into the car, and determinedly take her back home.  The Pembertons, who perennially won the prize for the gaudiest Halloween and Christmas displays...co-mingling church and state, they thought nothing of having a big Santa and his reindeer right next to their Nativity scene in the front yard.  Mrs. Pemberton, resplendent in her heavy Cleopatra eye makeup, capri pants, and perfect ash blonde beehive, assailing us with an impossibly chipper greeting as she arrived for the early morning kindergarten carpool.  My mom had a field day with that -- "What, is she up at four in the effin' morning?"

The time I, a newly-minted five-year-old, refused my mom's help and insisted on personally carrying six big flat boxes of chocolate donuts into my classroom birthday party.  Of course I dropped them, and my mom and I, laughing like loons, had to chase down four dozen donuts as they rolled down the snowy street...later doling them out anyway with nobody the wiser.

And the family -- her doctor brother Herb and his family, looking down their noses at us while constantly moving from pillar to post.  Her feckless philandering cousin Jack and his long-suffering wife Joanne, who once went after him with a stiletto-heeled shoe right there in our living room -- in front of all us kids -- upon hearing of his latest indiscretion.  Her genial faith healer mother, a line of alarmingly bright wigs on her dresser (probably a holdover from her flapper days), whose rambling St. Louis boarding house was filled with doddering catatonic shell-shocked veterans, books on the occult, a perpetually smiling black cook named Elmira (my very first African-American!), and an ever-changing coterie of striped felines -- all named "Mama Cat" -- undulating in and out of the house.  Her tight-lipped frugal Baptist mother-in-law, for whom even Mother Teresa would never have been good enough for her only son.  She and my mom proved worthy adversaries, doing surreptitious battle for years right under the nose of my unsuspecting father.  His only sister, who baked for church socials and raised four Eagle Scout sons in rural Indiana while harboring a secret fascination with bats -- she liked to keep the little creatures in the garage until she was persuaded that they didn't make good pets for the kids.

A running commentary on all of this, and much more, would flow freely from my mom with a swig of beer and a sardonic drag on her cigarette.  Was it all strictly accurate?  Who knows? As my dad used to say, "Your mom never let the truth get in the way of a good story." Certainly I never tired of hearing her stories -- on the contrary, I was her biggest fan, and made her repeat them over and over.  I think she liked that; after all, what good is a performance without an appreciative audience?  And in my eyes, she was Carol Burnett, Phyllis Diller and Lucille Ball rolled into one.  I hope she knew it.

My last exchange with her, ten years ago this weekend, was typical. In the final stages of lung cancer (all those Parliaments had finally caught up with her), she was now in a wheelchair on oxygen. I had brought her a big tightly bound bouquet of bright pink tea roses, and upon taking them out of the wrapping, I was dismayed to discover that they were full-blown, meaning they wouldn't last long. I said as much, and my mom gasped, "No, I'm glad...I don't have to wait for them to open. They're...perfect."

We had a nice visit and shared a grilled cheese sandwich (sadly, I ate most of it). As I was leaving, I leaned over to kiss her goodbye and said I'd see her tomorrow. She smiled sardonically and rasped, "Maybe I won't be here." I looked at her, weak and ill, hunched in her wheelchair, hooked up to those heavy oxygen tanks and a loudly buzzing generator, and asked her where she was planning on going. "Maybe I'll be out dancing," she whispered, with that old glint in her eye.

I guess she knew more than I did -- she was gone the next day. And maybe she really did go dancing. I like to think so.