My North Carolina Accent

Today Teshon, our school's technology guru, noticed my accent and recognized it as North Carolinian--not Southern, which anyone can hear--but North Carolinian.

Twenty years ago, when I lived in Dallas, my car battery died and I went into a local bar to ask if anyone had jumper cables. I hollered out, and a guy at the bar said, "You must be from North Carolina's triangle area." Why yes, I am. We seem to have a very specific accent.

Teshon visited the Charlotte area to watch his two younger brothers, who played basketball at Climson, play in the ACC Tournament. He may not be schooled in the peculiarities of North Carolinian accents, but he hears the poetry.

"That accent doesn't slam you like accents in the deeper South," he said. " It's not aggressive like a New York accent. It's like a gentlemanly accent."

That's me. Gentlemanly.

Heather's Book

Ann and I spent last week at Emerald Isle, a beach in North Carolina, with my parents, Sister Jen and her family, and Brother Matt and his family.

This place is as beautiful as any place I've been, with long white sandy stretches that are flat enough for walking, water that is grey or brown or green or blue--or all of those--depending on its mood. Waves crash with that rhythmical regularity that's mesmerizing. Sea oats wave in the dunes' breezes.

It's the one week each year that we gather together as we have since my parents' children were Gretchen's age, five, and skiing on the sound whenever we could. It's a time when we relax together. Someone's always reading; someone's napping; someone's eating; someone's on the beach. We're together.

It's our annual pilgrimage when we gather to remind each other that we are family, and we are here for each other.

This year, Sister Jen read aloud to me the novel, Under the Mercy Trees, by my childhood friend Heather. Heather's Owensby family, a dysfunctional lot living in the North Carolina mountains, became part of our family this year. They're dysfunctional, but they're endearing, and I'm glad they came along with us.

The novel's beautifully written. Here are a few snippets:
In describing a copse of bent trees, a young woman records, "Some trees had rotted and laid down tired in the undergrowth, but some still sat....eight ladies murmuring a welcome.... She wondered if the ladies minded the kinks in their trunks as they remembered the trauma that bent them, or had they gotten on with things....Maybe we'd grow crooked, too, if we got hit in the middle by a storm" (19).

Later in the story, another character remarks, "Bacon is a gift from God." Heather attributes this thought to the character Hodge, but I know it's really Heather.

The book's a gift, as is the beach. I recommend both the beach and the book to you. The book is cheaper.

Mary

The End of Junuary

Weekends, I huddle in front of our gas fireplace in our home here in Seattle. I nestle up in a wool blanket and wear my wool socks so that I don't get too cold while we I talk with my parents in North Carolina.

Mom always asks, "What's the weather out there?" This month, I respond, "Like usual. Rainy, cloudy and cool. Highs in the 60s and lows in the 50s. What's it like there?" Something like, "Ninety-seven degrees with 100 percent humidity. My hair is frizzing everywhere."

The weather here in Seattle is one of the many markers of differences between the land of my childhood and the land of my adulthood.

I could ask, "How many SUVs did you pass on the road today?" The number would be high in North Carolina and low in Seattle proper, even though those of us in Seattle have more hills and snow and bumpy roads in the mountains to manage than North Carolinians living in the Piedmont have. "How many hybrids did you pass?" Here is Seattle, the question is more like which hybrids did you see the most, but in Raleigh, the answer might be, "How can you tell a hybrid from an SUV?" (I know that there are hybrid SUVs, but it seems to me that Hybrid SUVs are a paradox.)

In Seattle, we have a preponderance of Starbucks, Tully's, Seattle's Best Coffee, and other coffee shops. In Raleigh, on most corners you'll find a church instead of a coffee shop, and there are as many varieities of churches in Raleigh as there are coffee shops in Seattle: Methodist, Baptist, Presbytherian and so forth.

Dressing up in Seattle is significantly different than dressing up in Raleigh. Last week, my partner Ann went to a "semi-formal" event: in this context, "semi-formal" meant no blue jeans. In Raleigh, for sure you'd need to wear hosiery and pearls (and somethinkg fancy to cover all you parts.)

In Raleigh, complexions tend towards tan, and hair gets blonder in June if you're white. In Seattle, we're mostly pasty with dark hair unless we go get some highlinghts at the beauty parlour (that's Southern for Supercuts).

Seattle's the city for me, but I wouldn't mind a little more sun by June. I wonder if this year we'll have Julyuary, too. It's looking like it.

Practically Nekkid

My mom, reading of my adventures in the trauma center because of Tuesday's car wreck, worried about the state of my dress. She asked what any good Southern mother worried about her daughter's modesty might ask, "It sounds like they cut off all of your clothes except your underwear, so you were practically nekkid. What did you wear home?"

It is true that all of my clothes, having been cut off of me, were no longer wearable, and my shoes, too filled with glass to be salvageable, were destined for the trashcan.

What does a good Southern girl wear home from the Emergency Room at midnight? The hospital social worker found some paper clothes, extra large unisex. (They would have fit my 350 pound granddaddy, but I was glad to have them.) I was glad it wasn't raining so that the paper didn't stick to me. On my feet, I wore those hospital socks with treads so that I didn't slip. The social worker (bless her) also found an old black sweater that had been donated that I could wear over my paper top.

When I clean out my closets for summer this year, I'm going to donate my clothes to Harborview Hospital's Emergency Room. If you live near a hospital, I'll bet your hospital could use some of your clothes, too.

Our Fair City

Seattle's mostly white. It's all over the news. Seattle is the fifth whitest city in the nation. Portland is first. That's what the 2010 census shows.

Before bin Laden's death, Seattle's whiteness was the talk about town. Lots of responses to the census figures were defensive. After all, Seattle's progressive and liberal, and we like to think of ourselves above the muck of racism. Besides, we also have the most racially diverse zip code.

I'm not surprised about the finding. When I first moved to Seattle in 1991, I lived near the university and, though I'm white, I felt uncomfortable about all the white people. I'm from the South, and I'm used to seeing more color. I went down to the south part of the city to Helen's Soul Food kitchen to eat beans and rice one day, and to find black people. I live near near Helen's Soul Food Kitchen now, and I have for some time, but now a lot of the black people in my neighborhood are moving further south in the city again.

When I completed my teaching certification program for Washington State, an African-American woman in my program from Alabama told me how uncomfortable she felt in Seattle, seeing white people in her grocery store and all. She preferred the South: "At least you know where you stand there. Here I don't know if people are really nice or not real," she said.

I was born in 1964 in a segregated hospital in Atlanta, and I went to an all-white elementary school for first grade before busing integrated my schools. When I was in second grade and my school was integrated, Michelle, an African-American second-grader with thick, tight braids, came to my birthday party. Apparently, this was a surprise. The generation before me just didn't have people of another race into their homes. Times can change quickly, however, and I was surprised by the surprise.

One of my first surprises in moving to Seattle was how white the north part of the city was. Another surprise was that I heard people talk regularly about the prejudice in the South, as if prejudice were absent in the Pacific Northwest, and all prejudice had pooled in the land of my birth.

When I was first teaching in a town just east of Seattle, I walked into another teacher's classroom, a history class, looking for a student whom I needed to talk with one afternoon in 1994. The teacher, a white man who was blind, didn't see me walk in. He was teaching students about the southern part of the United States. He talked about how it was a place of prejudice and bigotry like that was the only thing that was there. I almost got offended, but when I noticed that none of the students were paying attention, I decided not to worry about it.

I love Seattle. It's my adoptive home. I love its mountains and lakes; I love its fleece-wearning folk; I love its farmer's markets and its progressive politics. I belong here.

I still bristle, though, when I hear about the American South as if it's the pigsty of bigotry. There is bigotry in the South for sure. To me, the South's identity is inexorably tangled with the history of Civil War, with the identify of itself as a defeated nation seeking to maintain its heritage and its traditions in a new world where some of its traditions are clearly bigoted and, now, illegal--unconstituional even.

My birthplace not just a pigsty of bigotry; it is also a place of rolling mountains and long sandy beaches, fried chicken and shredded pork sandwiches, big family meals and churches on every corner. It's a place of syruppy accents and has a concentration of universities and research. At one point, a friend in Ireland told me that Research Triangle Park has the highest per capita of PhDs of any place in the world. Maybe it still does.

The South is bigger than its bigotry, just like Seattle is bigger than its whiteness. The census can't tell you that. For that, you have to go there. So if you're a world traveller and you haven't been to the American South yet, it's time you go discover its complex culture.

I can hook you up with a cousin for sure. Just be sure to mind your manners: say please and thank you and Ma'am and Sir.

The Times, They are a-Changing.

Today I celebrate the end of my forty-seventh year. That number is starting to sound awfully close to fifty, which is of course half a century.

As a child, I imagined that everything new--telephones and televisions, cars and planes and in-door plumbing--had been discovered in the years before my birth, and that I would live in a dull era. Then the internet was born and so were cell phones, so life has not been so dull after all.

I will have stories to tell my great-nieces and great-nephews of the days when I typed my papers on a clunky typewriter, using white out when I made a mistake and making sure not to type too far down the page. I will tell them about the time, back in my day, when I listened to music on a large round, black disk called a "record," which I played on something called a "record player." I will tell them that when I talked on the phone, I was tethered to the wall. Back in my day, no one talked on the phone when they were on the toilet. They'll be amazed.

Already, I find that teenagers cannot imagine my childhood world. The first time I ever felt that I was aging was when, at the age of 22, I overheard my students preparing for their American History test. As I had memorized the dry details of the Napoleonic Wars, these students reviewed Watergate.

Watergate was my first political memory. Though I did not understand its details at the time, I sat with my parents each night as we watched the news updates on our black and white television. When Nixon resigned, I knew that something momentous had happened. My students were trying to remember the details for their test: "There was a hotel and these guys broke in and stole some tapes." They reviewed the details dutifully. "No!" I shouted, "This was Watergate!" I held my face in my hands, attempting to communicate the drama, and yelled again, "Watergate!" Nonplused, they returned to their note cards.

Friday I worked with high school freshmen Isaiah, a tall African-American boy who wears glasses like Malcolm X and has Malcolm X's bearing, and Jasmine, a Latina girl who wondered why I didn't refer to the brown people in North Carolina when I grew up. "Though there are lots of Latinas in the Carolinas now, I told her, I never knew anyone growing up who was Latino. If you were a person of color in my town, you were black.”

I worked with Isaiah and Jasmine, who had written their own poems, on how to get feedback on a poem. I read to them my poem, inspired by George Ella Lyons's "Where I'm From" and asked them to tell me what they liked in the poem, where they were confused, and where they wanted to know more.

Isaiah was confused that I was born in the white wing of Grady Hospital. He tried to imagine a hospital flying, thinking this was some metaphor. I told him that when I was born in Atlanta, Georgia, the hospitals had areas for white babies and areas for black babies. Each area was called a "wing." His jaw dropped, and he seemed to doubt me.

I told Isaiah and Jasmine that when I went to E.C. Brooks Elementary School in Raleigh, North Carolina, as a first-grader, no black kids were allowed to go to my school, and no white child even thought of going to school with black children. "Ohhh," Isaiah said, "I've heard of that. Like in the time of slavery."

I'm old, but not that old. Happy birthday to me. Mary

Lecturous

Because my dad has often given me unasked for advice, and because we lived by the "Do unto others..." rule, I thought for a while that he wanted me to advise him as well. When I returned from a tough day in second grade, I reported to my father that my friends and I had been guessing our fathers' ages and that my friends thought he was old, maybe even forty. I recommended Grecian Hair Formula. Now that we would both take forty as a compliment, his hair is bright white. I guess he assumed that I, living by that golden rule, wanted him to ignore my advice as I so often ignored his.

When Sister Jenn was in junior high school and Dad was advising her, she asked him, "Why do you have to be so lecturous?

When Dad and I travelled to Alaska with elder hostel (he was elder and I was hostile), he arrived at the bus that was to take us into Denali National Park wearing a plaid shirt and khaki pants. This outfit seemed sartorially inappropriate for a hike to me, and I said to him, "You look like you're dressed for the movies." Later that week, he went into town and paid more for a poop-colored pair of zip-off hiking britches than he had ever paid for work slacks.

Last weekend, on our weekly phone call, Dad begn to tell me a new theory about women: "What I've noticed about women is..." I interrupted him, encouraging him to pause and to think because his sentences that begin this way gernerally lead him to the dog house, and he always seems surprisedto find himself there. Ignoring my admonition, he continued.

I cannot blame him for ignoring my cautions. I have often ignored his.

For all this, I have in many ways been inspired by his life and sought to emulate him. Ralph Waldo Emerson's often quoted  “Letters and Social Aims” works in Dad's favor: “Don’t say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.”  Dad's deeds speak loudly of a commitment to the value of every individual, to the importance of saying thank you, and to the belief that we are here to make the world a better place.

Dad had two overtime jobs for most of his work life: one a job that paid and the other a job of social conscience. I, too, have often overworked, though since my surgery some would argue that I overnap, and like him I have worked for social justice. His work was on behalf of children, many of whom lived in poverty, without health insurance. All children, he argued as President of the American Academy of Pediattrics, have the right to health care. Following in his footsteps, I have worked on behalf of underserved children, many of them poor and immigrants to the United States, though my work has been in the educational arena.

When I was in junior high school, I went with Dad to the small town where he grew up to pick up a carload of children that he was sponsoring to go to summer camp. Like my father, I sponsor children to go to camp, though the camp I sponsor is for older children and is called "college."

When I was in high school, my dad gave the sermon at the church in the small town where he grew up. We, his children, counted the number of times he said, "Um," but I also heard his message. He thanked each person in that church who had helped to raise him. Like my dad, I seek to say thank you to those many people who have made my life better.

After attending a conservative church in Wichita Falls, Texas, when Dad was in the Air Force during the Vietmam War, Dad determined that he would never again attend a church where everyone was more conservative than he. Sensing that he had much to learn from liberals, he and my mom chose a liberal Southern Baptist church to attend and in which to raise their children. I am certainly more liberal than my father, so for me understanding another perspective means respecting and trying to understand those who are more conservative than I am (that's most people.) I am not so fully committed to this broad-mindedness as he was, as my current church is clearly on the left as was the church of my youth,  but I do seek to enter into friendships with those whose backgrounds and experiences, including those who are conservative, give them different perspectives than mine.

In this time of tumors, I have relied heavily on Dad for advice and support, and I have also relied on him to know when not to give me advice. I am sure that this has been hard for him. More important than his advice, however, has been his constant support and love, his dedication to helping me live a full life. Just as Dad has sought new venues for play and passion in his retirement, I seek new venues for work and play as I learn to live fully with these darn disbilities. Dad and I are perhaps both old dogs learning new tricks, though he is older. Today is his birthday, so he is even further over that hill.

Happy birthday, Dad. I love you. Mary

P.S. 10 No news is good news.

I grew up in a suburb called, "No News is Good News." It's menacingly close to a larger city, "Doom, Despair and Agony, Oh Me!" We just called the city Doom for short.

Being from "No News is Good News," I figure one should avoid bad news, so when my doctor left a message after my CAT scan a few years ago asking me to call her back, I did not call back. When she called again the next day, I was too busy. The following day was beautifully sunny, not a day to ruin with bad news. When she called on the weekend and left me her home phone number, Ann and I went to the spa and then had cosmopolitans on the deck. Still no news.

When I recently told my friend Rose this story, she was surprised. She didn't take me for someone who would be in such denial. I thought about her surprise. I was not in denial. I knew from my time growing up near Doom that news would be bad, so I stuck with good news, which was no news. Where's the denial in that?

Mary

P.S. 7 Who am I?

Who am I?

The too-early child of a nurse and a doctor,

I am from Grady hospital's white wing.
I am from a house on a hill,
from copperheads in the lawn,
from a cul-de-sac,
from a suburban acre
in the piney woods.

I am from
the magic word and
the golden rule,
from "Oh, I'd like to thank the Lord,"
from "Have you done your homework yet?" and
Mahalia at Christmas.

I am from
Yellow roses in a yellow room,
from the nighly stock report,
from Hotlips and Radar.

I am from
the backyard basketball court,
Sunday soccer games after church,
the volleyball gym.

And I am

a child of the seventies,
of Watergate and
Add-a-beads.

I am
a woman in love
with a woman.

I am
of the Land of Starbucks,
the Mountain,
and the U.

I am
a teacher in schools
where brown rain falls through the ceiling.

I am
a survivor:
two brain tumors, three surgeries, six weeks of radiation.

I am the woman down the street
who walks with a cane.

I am a daughter,
a sister and a cousin,
a niece and an auntie,
a writer,
an adventurer,
a friend.

"I contain multitudes."

Mediocre in Spanish,
child of Senora Alissa Lopez,
Romero y Father Grande.

I aspire

to courage
and kindness
and right.

I aspire
to wander beyond the boundaries of
Who I am and
Where I am from.

PS4 who am i

Like many poetry-reading teenagers, I connected with Emily Dickenson's "Are you a nobody? I'm a nobody, too." When my sophomore English teacher Mrs. Smisson invited us to create a graphic symbol of ourselves, I cut out a large question mark. Today, I'm more of a semi-colon than a question mark, but the question still intrigues me: Who am I?

The too-early child of a nurse and a doctor,
I am from Grady hospital's white wing.
I am from a house on a hill,
from copperheads in the lawn,
from a cul-de-sac,
from a suburban acre
in the piney woods.

I am from
the magic word and
the golden rule,
from "Oh, I'd like to thank the Lord," and
Mahalia at Christmas.

I am from
Yellow roses in a yellow room,
from the nighly stock report,
from Hotlips and Radar.

I am from
the backyard basketball court,
Sunday soccer games after church,
the volleyball gym.

And I am
a child of the seventies,
of Watergate and
Add-a-beads.

I am
a woman in love
with a woman.

I am
a teacher in schools
where brown rain falls through the ceiling.

I am
a survivor:
two brain tumors, three surgeries, six weeks of radiation.

I  am the woman down the street
who walks with a cane.

I am a daughter,
a sister and a cousin,
a niece and an aunt,
a writer,
an adventurer,
a friend.

"I contain multitudes."

Mediocre in Spanish,
child of Apparicio y Maria,
Romero y Father Grande.

I aspire
to courage
and kindness
and right.

I aspire to wander beyond the boundaries of
Who I am and
Where I am from.

Summer #21: Down to the River

Summer #21: Last Saturday, Ann and I went on my longest bike ride since radiation with our friends Renee and Alex. We took the Cedar River trail from Renton and rode about ten miles to a place by the river where Latino families were picknicking in the shade and playing with kids in the shallow water, and teenagers with innertubes disembarked from their ride down the river, generally towing a cooler behind. It was a hot summer day for this area, in the high 80s, but we've just returned from North Carolina's high 90s, so to us it felt beautiful. We had our own picnic in the shade: local cherries, ham from PCC and bread from a local bakery as we watched the families play in the water. I said the scene reminded me of the swimming hole (tanke)  I frequented the summer I lived in Michoacan, Mexico. Alex said it reminded her of Mexico, too. Renee said it reminded her of Pennsylvania. Maybe there's a universal river scene that makes us all nostalgic.

The summer I lived in Michoacan, I lived in a small town with three other Americans volunteering with a program called Amigos de las Americas. On hot weekend days, it seemed that everyone in the town went to the tanke to picnic in the shade and rest or play in the water. In the shade, families built smoky fires and snacked their treats. We were more interested in the water. We watched the scene for a while and then slipped, unobtrusively, we thought, into the water. The sixty or so people in the water, unaccustomed to white people in their tanke, moved immediately to the edge, sat on the rocks and, silently, watched us. Fortunately, Juan, whose parents were originally from Mexico, had foreseen this possibility and had brought a football and a frisbee, and finally the kids slipped back into the water, coaxed by the fun of play.

As a teenager, I spent my summers first as a camper and then as a counselor at a sailing and waterskiing camp on the Neuse River, near North Carolina's coast. I love being outside, getting such fun exercise in the sun and heat. Many campers' best loved "jeep rides" where campers would pile into trailers at the back of jeeps and go off-roading, generally getting wet and muddy in the process and in the end eating an ice-cream treat. Despite the temptation to ice-cream, I loved this time best because much of the camp would empty and I could sail or waterski or shoot at the shooting range without waiting in line. From a cabin in the river's bank, I watched the most beautiful lightening storm I have ever witnessed. the lighting fell onto the water as counselors, sillouettes against the night sky,  pulled their sailboats to safety. I wondered about their safety, especially when lightening struck the nearby boathouse when such a loud bang that, after checking to see that the sillouettes were still there, I abandoned the dance of light and storm and went back in to my own caccoon.

One tradition in our church's delegations to a sister community in Chaletenango, El Salvador, is a trip with our hosts to the Rio Sumpul. Though the scene of a massacre during their "civil war" in the 1980s and 1990s, it's now a beautiful spot again, and our hosts pack up tortillas and chicken and such and we spend the day celebraing in the river together. On one trip, an American teenager named Graham and his Salvadoran friend Mario swam to a large rock, climbed onto the rock, and talked in the sun for hours. At the time, Graham didn't speak Spanish and Mario didn't speak English, but somehow they managed quite an extensive conversation.

So, as Allison Kraus sings, "Let's go down to the river to pray," which might look a lot like play. Mary

Summer #8: I heart grits.

Summer #8: Finally, the month of Junuary here in Seattle has passed, so maybe we can get on to our beautiful Northwest summer. Though Seattle feels like home to me, I have not yet adjusted to cold and cloudy April-May-June weather. As a Southerner, I know that June should be in the 90s, both in terms of temperature and humidity.

Growing up in the South, from time to time someone would say to me, "You don't seem like a Southerner." Maybe that was code for, "You seem like a lesbian," but I never seemed like a Southerner to myself either. In my advancing age, though, I recognize my Southernness. I heart grits. I love a good story and know that hyperbole, more than precision, reveals a narative's truth. My favorite places are the white sandy beaches and blue-green waters of the North Carolina coast. I have a healthy respect for lightening and do not shower or talk on the phone during a thunderstorm, like some fools here in the Northwest do. I love the banjo in bluegrass music and feel at home in a church. Steel magnolias, strong Southern women, are my role models. In the Southern woods, I am aware of the dangers of tics and copperheads.

Like many of my immigrant students, I have two homes. I am a Southerner, but I am a Northwesterner, too. Years ago, at an education conference, a Boston speaker stopped to comment on my fleece and Birkenstocks: "You're dressed like a stereotype, aren't you?" this bow-tied, round-eyed glasses Yankee said to me. I laughed at the irony of it. I suspect he interpreted my laughter as an acknowledgement of how clever and observant he was. I dress like a Northwesterner. I eat my tofu and organic Spinach. I march for immigrant rights, Martin Luther King and gay pride. I protest war. I remain seated in my two-inch high chair at outdoor concerts, even in the rain. I love folk music. I wear gortex and sensible shoes. My favorite places are the blooming hillsides reaching towards snow-capped Mount Rainier. In the Northwestern woods, I watch for bears.

Not only am I bicultural, but I'm bilingual, too. I know that in the South "ya'll" is always plural and in the Northwest, "liberal" has a positive connotation. Imagine that. Mary

NL #42: Words, words, words.

NL #42: When I went into brain surgery, my biggest fear was not that I would die. My biggest fear was that I would lose my sense of myself. Fortunately, I seem to have sustained little cognitive disruption. I do from time to time notice struggles, though. I seem unable, for example, to maintain and keep up with a calendar, so I'm always having to call my various health care providers to ask them when my appointment is. Once, I called one woman three times in a row. She maintained her sense of humor, but I'm not sure how much longer that might have lasted.

Sometimes I can't find words that I don't use especially often. As a logophile, this is a new experience for me, and it can be frustrating. I remember where and when I learned certian favorite words like other people remember their favorite song from seventh grade. When I was in junior high school, my aunt Myra joined us for Thanksgiving dinner. She marvelled at the words "gauche" and "panache" which she had just learned. In eighth grade my favorite word was "dappled" and in ninth grade it was "mnemonic." As a new teacher my favorite was "penultimate" because it came in handy so often and later "detritus" because it, too, came in handy. As a college junior in Ireland, my favorite word was "conundrum." I think I had known it before, but I loved it when my taxi driver entered an existential wondering and kept craning his head to say to me, "It's a conundrum." As a teacher in an urban public school, I've loved "Snaps!"

A few weeks ago, I couldn't remember the word for "fire extinguisher," so I had to call it "that red thing we sprayed when I set the kitchen on fire" (by mistake. another story. It was a long time ago.) I sounded like David Sedaris and his international French  class as they tried to explain their religious traditions to one another: "The Jesus boy. He good."

Last week, sending a colleague an email, I couldn't remember the word "split," so I rearranged the sentence and used "bifurcation." Why can I remember "bifurcation" and I can't remember "split"? Should be interesting trying to order a banana bifurcation at the Baskin Robbins in North Carolina. I remember "Baskin Robbins."

Joan. Sally. No...Mary

NL #37: The Keys to Understanding Southerners

NL #37: Some poeple think that the key to understanding Southerners is understanding the Civil War. That's true, but also understanding hyperbole, vocabulary (like y'all) and cultural phenomena (like grits) are keys to understanding Southerners.

Here are the main things you need to understand about the Civil War: 1) It is called The War Between the States or The War of Northern Aggression 2) It is not in the past. It is ongoing. When my grandmother M. used to say, "That wind came through here like Sherman marched through Georgia," no one would ask, "Sherman who?" That's like asking, "Michael Jordan who?"

When I was teaching a US history class a few years back, my original teaching partner had a nervous breakdown (no, I do not think I drove her to it), and my colleague Don took her place. Because it was November and the class was still in Plymouth, Don and I agreed that we needed to decide what to teach and what to skip. "Let's skip the Civil War," he suggested. "It's not that important." Don grew up in the Northwest. Raised in the South, I nearly dropped my teeth.

About language, an arena in which Southerners excel, the word, "y'all" is probably Southerners' most significant contribution to American English. "You guys" leaves out half of the population and the Spanish "ustedes" is too formal. "Y'all" is the word. By the way, it's plural. You don't say "y'all" to one person.

The elegance of hyperbole may be the Southern storytellers' greatest contribution to literature. Ann is from Texas, not the South, and I have finally taught her not to correct me when I say something like,"That meeting took twelve hours." The point is the experiential truth, not the fact of the meeting's length. That meeting (pretty much any meeting) seemed like it took twelve hours. My friend Marion, from New York, excels here as well. Marion also loves musicals, so in her soul I suspect she is part gay Southerner.

Of course, we use hyperbole all the time to talk about our misery: I'm starving. I'm dying. I can't take another step. Sometimes I wonder how people who have experienced starvation, the threat of death, and such exhausion that they cannot take another step hear these expressions. I know when people say (and they often do), "My head is killing me," I want to say, "Really?"

In terms of Southern cultural phenomena, I can't really explain grits. You have to eat them. Eat them before they dry into a plastic pancake. That's my tip. No Southerner allows food to stay on the plate long enough to get cold like that. Also, don't put sugar in them. Texans may do that, but Southerners do not.

See y'all tomorry. Mary

NL #31: Oysters' essential questions

NL #31: "When human beings try to describe God, we are like a bunch of oysters trying to describe a ballerina.We simply do not have the equipment to understand something so utterly beyond us, but that’s never stopped us from trying.” (our minister Jim Carther quoting Barbara Brown Taylor referring to Robert Farrar Capon's Hunting the Divine Fox).

I remember first being interested in the question of what we cannot know because our minds don't have broad enough experiences when a museum educator visited my fourth grade class. She asked us what color things were: our jackets, our socks, etc. and then she used a black light, which showed me that white was purple and that what I thought was clear and immutable was, in fact, just a figment of my eye's experiences.

Maybe earlier than that, Dr. Seuss got me thinking. After Green Eggs and Ham, my favorite Dr. Seuss book was Horton Hears a Who. It still is. I can imagine worlds within worlds, getting smaller and smaller just as space gets bigger and bigger: universes like those wooden dolls that fit into one another. I can imagine not having the capacity to sense those other worlds. After all, I can't hear a dog whistle.

Perhaps because of this habit of mind, I love words that try to capture the unknown. One of my favorite words is "conundrum", a word I first recognized from a Dublin philospher-cab driver.( I went to Ireland because there were so many Irish poets travelling the US circuit and I'd read Joyce and wondered if everyone in Ireland wandered the streets and settled into the pubs speaking lyrically. They do. )

As a teacher, from time to time I would write on the board (first a chalk one and then a white one) Walt Whitman's quotation, "Do I contradict myself? / Very well, then. I contradict myself./ I contain multitudes." If anyone understands the fickle concept of the self, it's teenagers.

We are more complex than we imagine and our God, fittingly, is too. That's tight.

I realize that not everyone thinks that's tight. My brain, having sustained a liberal Southern Baptist upbringing, two tumors, a splitting of my cerebellum and radiation, is not the average brain. Lots of folks prefer answers to questions. A student once asked me, "Why do you always answer a question with a question?" In one of my best teachimg moments, I responded, "Why do you think I do that?" The student paused to think and then brightened, "See! You did it again!"

Perhaps the world is divided into those who love answers and those who love questions. (Yes, I know, the world is divided into people who divide the world and those who do not.) Perhaps we are all either Hamlet the philosopher or Horatio the pragmatist. As Hamlet says to Horatio, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,/ Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

That's what I want to say to folks who are so clear on knowing the nature of God through literal readings of scripture and those who know human nature through their own lens: "There are more things in heaven and earth,...Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

Do oysters have eyes? Could they even see Swan Lake? (Of course, I don't really understand ballet--or opera or baseball--either.)

Mary

NL #30: Angels

NL #30: My Granddaddy M. always wore a hat. My mother tells the story of the time the family was going on vacation. Granddaddy and Grandmom were in the front seat with the kids in the back. Granddaddy, who was driving, kept turning around to say, "Where's my hat?" or, "Don't sit on my hat." As they approached a bridge, my exasperated grandmother finally said, "Gimme that hat," and she threw it out the window. I love that story.

Granddaddy was a big man when he died: six foot four and over three hundred pounds. I have a picture of him and Grandmom before they were married, both skinny. His ears stuck out from under his hat. He loved to have us when we were young stand in the palm of his hand as he would lift us high over his head. I admit that I hated that, but he was so amused that I'd hold my breath and do it anyway.

Granddaddy loved to grow vegetables in the back yard. Having only eaten store-bought tomatoes that tasted like cardboard, I refused to eat his tomatoes. He would always say to me, "Girl, you don't know what's good." He was right.

My favorite story about him is one he told on himself. Once, when the family returned from being away, the home had been burgled and everything was thrown out of drawers. While they awaited the police, Granddaddy took his gun and caught up with the burgler, who refused to stop walking. So Granddaddy followed him. Finally the burgler turned to this crazy man with the gun and said, "If you don't stop following me, I'm going to kill you." At this part of the story, my granddaddy would stop, repeat the line, and laugh in the way he did: his whole face laughing but the rest of him still.

My other grandfather died when I was three years old. Though I don't remember him well, I am the only grandchild who remembers him at all. He was prouder of me than I deserved. Once, when we were walking around the block, we came to some broken glass on the sidewalk. "Some bad boys did that, probably," I said. He was struck by my vocabulary and the conceptual understanding of probably.

Another time, he wanted me to go with him to "the farm," the home where my grandmother grew up and where great aunts and uncles still lived. Already somewhat bossy, I told him I would go only if he would drive the blue pickukp truck that he and Uncle Johnny used for the hardware store they owned. Apparently, he went to some trouble to get ahold of that pickup truck.

The only memory of my Grandfather E. that I know is mine because no one has told me about it is the memory of climbing up the bridge over the railroad tracks and trying to throw a penny on top of the train as it moved under us. Years later, I went to do this on my own, but it wasn't as fun as I had remembered. Probably because he wasn't there, and I wasn't three anymore.

I think of my grandfathers as my guardian angels, men who loved me and had fun with me and required little of me in return. I'd like to be a guardian angel for my nieces and nephews, but I wonder if I have to die first. If so, I'll pass for now. I'll just love them and enjoy them.

Mary

NL #27: Sounds like home

NL #27: In my dreams, I am a 25 year-old African-American man running gracefully by walkers struggling to drag their tired bodies through an endless series of white arches. I fly above a sea or a river, able to see someone I love in trouble below me but unable to help them. I walk across a dessert, through a nest of snakes, realizing that though they may bite me, they will not harm me. When I awake, I am often confused. Where am I? Who am I?

My dreams seem to be silent, so the sounds of the world around me help me locate myself in place and time. I love the sounds of my Seattle block. Old Cadillacs thump and bump themselves down the street. Tennagers returning from the park bounce their basketballs up the sidewalk andyounger ones pedal their big wheels, the sounds of their wheels scratching on the asphault. A three year-old stops the adults ccompanying him to announce: "I want to play...[footstomp]. Now." Songbirds take their places on the scale, and crows make that knocking sound with their throats. Antique planes fly overhead. The drone of commercial planes sounds more distant.

If I'm in our suburban home in Raleigh, NC, where I grew up, the birds try to outdo one another singing, and the crickets have their own chirping contest. It's the natural world of the Southern piney woods, and it's loud.

If I'm in El Salvador, I hear the six others in the room with me, the children mumbling in their sleep and the adluts breathing through their mouths. Roosters crow. (I don't know who created the myth about roosters crowing at dawn. In my experience, they crow all night. Right outside my window.) I hear the tinny trill of Mexican music on a tape player; the slap, slap,slap of women making papusas.

If I'm in Michoacan, I hear bicycles on a gravel road and a barking dog chasing a flying pig, the steam of tortillas on the grill.

And at the beach in NC, I hear the continuous thrum of the ocean touching the shore, the bass drum of thunder, the high pitched squeals of children running from the waves' foam.

The world sounds me back to my self and my home, and I am glad to be here. Mary

NL #19: Where I'm From

NL #18: My friend Miss Marion says that my writing is getting increasingly Southern. Not a surprise. Right after brain surgery, friends said that my Southern accent got much stronger (maybe that was because my parents were there or maybe the doctors triggered something in my brainstem.) When I returned home after surgery, I craved the foods of my childhood: spaghetti (my first word), “pineapple delight” (a kind of green Jell-o fruit, nut and marshmallow concoction), a banana and mayonnaise sandwich on Wonder Bread and chocolate milk. After radiation, I craved banana and mayonnaise sandwiches, only we don’t have that tasty Wonder Bread, so I have to make do with a flaxseed muffin, which doesn’t squeeze into a tasty dough ball like Wonder Bread does, but it’s adequate.


I find that for most people in the Northwest, the South is an unknown and uninteresting collection of red states, bigotry, and chauvinism. While there is some truth to the stereotype, the area is of course much more complex than that.

My final year of teaching, I opened the year teaching freshmen a unit on reading and writing poetry. I borrowed heavily from Linda Christenson’s excellent book, Reading, Writing and Rising Up, and we studied George Lyons’ poem “Where I’m From,” using this poem as a model to write our own. As usual, I wrote with the students, modeling my process and, in this instance, seeking their input for my revision. In the flurry of cleaning out my classroom before my brain surgery, I lost that poem, but I’ve written a similar one below.

In the poem I wrote for that class, I attempted to articulate something more complex about the South for this group of students, most of whom had never been to the Southern United States but many of whom had grown up in places in Africa and Latin America and knew plenty about stereotypes of homes they have left. Students helped me revise that first poem, so it was much better than this one.

Here and There

Grits and fried chicken, pulled pork barbeque sandwiches, fried okra—
Fried anything really:
The foods of my childhood.
White steepled churches in every block,
A white and a black part of town,
The A & P and Piggly Wiggly:
The images of my childhood.

“Yes, Ma’am” and “No, Sir” and “I’d know you anywhere.”
“Ya’ll come back now, ya hear?”
White sandy beaches, hot enough in summer to blister my feet and
Rolling mountains painted swaths of autumn greens, reds and golds.
Winter snows on Christmas lawn displays,
Spring’s blooming dogwoods and daffodils,
Summer thunderstorms, electric over the graying ocean.

“Amazing Grace,” “Over the River and Through the Woods, to Grandmother’s House We Go,”
And “In My Mind, I’ve Gone to Carolina”:
The music of my youth.

Here in Seattle, my second home,
We eat tofu and organic greens,
Ride our bikes miles to our church,
Shop at the Pike Place Market,
Nod our heads to say hello.

A season of wet and
A season of dry,
Tulips and crocuses drooping in the rain.
Christmas trees frocked with the white of real snow,
Still growing in the winter woods.

Tourists clog downtown sidewalks, studying their maps,
They ride the elevator to the top of the Space Needle
And ride the Ducks, two layered amphibious carts,
Around town, blowing their kazoos.

Here and There I sing,
“What a Wonderful World.”

NL #18: The Things I Carry

NL #18: I have never carried a purse. They're so impractical: too small to carry the things I need; too large to carry comfortably on one shoulder. For a while I carried one of those purses I could strap to my waist. That way, I kept my wallet and keys with me and didn't really notice it was there. There's a picture of me digging a large hole for a french drain in our front yard. I'm dirty, wielding a shovel, and look tough except for the purse at my waist.

This fall, I tried to carry a purse, what my colleague Jenn referred to as my "training purse," but it just didn't work for me, so I went back to my backpack, which my colleague Kate says gives me a "jaunty" look. I like that.

In my backpack, I carry three pair of glasses (and wear a fourth), toothpaste and toothbrush (I still remember my 7th grade science teacher who got food stuck in his braces), a wallet (red, so I can find it), pens, a magnifiying glass, a quart of water, lunch in a new, brightly dotted lunch bag, journals for each of the four places that I work, a seldom charged cell phone, a luna bar for emergencies, and so on.

I carry frustration, for the things I can no longer do and the things that are difficult now, for this world as it is and as it could be--but I carry frustration more in my shoulders and neck than in my backpack. I carry fears of what I have lost and what I have to lose. Like Pandora in her box, I carry hope in my backpack, but unlike Pandora, I let hope out as often as possible. Ann and others think my backpack too heavy, but hope lightens the load. And I certainly wouldn't want to go in to work with a teacher without my own writing utensil. I would get a dirty look, for sure.

Mary

NL #16: Small Town Cool

My father grew up in the small NC town voted most like Andy Griffith’s Mayberry. His father and uncle owned a hardware store together in the downtown, and he went to school with most of the white kids in town and from the country. African American kids who lived, literally, on the other side of the tracks led separate lives.


Each summer, our family went to the beach with three house-loads of grandmothers, aunts (pronounced “aints”) , and first, second and third cousins once, twice and thrice removed. Uncle Don’s family and Aunt Sumner’s families both had ski boats, so we would take the boats to the sound and spend the day waterskiing while the older folks sat on the shady bank to eat watermelon and cheer us on. In the mornings, Uncle Jake and Jake, Jr. would go fishing in the surf and then, when the sun got strong, would haul their plentiful guts back up to the deck, drink Budweiser from a can, and gawk at bikinied girls through binoculars. Sometimes they would holler out. I knew even then that this was not cool--small town or otherwise.

My father recently suggested that I put a clothespin on the spoke of my "tricycle" so that I would make that thumping noise as I ride. This, he explained, is what he did as a child. This was small town cool. I pointed out that my "tricycle" is a trike--much cooler and adult.
I remember that when Dad got older, he and his friends drove around town in the summer heat with the windows rolled up so that folks would think they had air conditioning. (If you've not been in NC in the summer, it's about 100 degrees with 100 percent humidity.) This, too, was small town cool.

My theory is that some people just understand cool and others don't. My dad, like my siblings, probably would have been cool anywhere.

I grew up in suburban Raleigh and was never suburban cool: I didn’t smoke pot on the school bus (or anywhere else); I preferred the Rocky Horror Picture  Show to Friday the 13th part eight; I preferred James Taylor to Molly Hatchet; I preferred to curl up with a book than a boy.

Now I live in the city and I’m not city cool, either, but fortunately I’ve aged out of the importance of cool.

Yo--mary