Heaven's Peak through the burn. One year after the Trapper Creek Fire. Loop Trail, Glacier National Park, Montana. 10 Aug 2004.

One of my delights (there actually have been some!) in the past few days has been my friend Janson Jones updating his blog Floridana Alaskiana from v2.5 to v4.0 &  posting his marvelous photos again.

This morning he posted a photo of Avalanche Creek in Glacier National Park — just an hour’s drive or so from where I grew up in Northwest Montana.  Feelings of nostalgia… so I decided to post a photo from my last trip to visit my family in Montana in August 2004, from a hike I went on with my brothers & niece along the Loop Trial not that far from where Janson’s photo was taken.

Glacier National Park played a prominent part in the first 24 or so years of my life, before I came up to Alaska.  In fact, one of the earliest photos of me was taken on the shores of Glacier’s Lake McDonald —

— but for a better view of the lake itself, here’s a photo from the same August 2004 trip of my brother Dave when we stopped by to refresh ourselves after our hot sweaty hike that day.

But I think my favorite of my own photos of Glacier is this one of a beaver dam along McDonald Creek, from a hike with Dave & Linda (my sister-in-law) during a visit in November 2003.

Except for a three-year exile to Seattle from 1987–1990, I’ve lived in Anchorage since 1982. But while I’m now an Alaskan, I can never forget the home where I lived the first half of my life. Thanks to Janson for bringing me such a stunning visual reminder of the place where I grew up, which is still a part of me.

See Floridana Alaskiana v4.0 for more & continuing visual treats.

And for a little more of Glacier Park, here’s a slideshow of those Glacier photos I have in my Flickr photostream.

Related posts:

1. Beaver dam on McDonald Creek
2. True Diversity Dinner 1 & 2: Video by Janson Jones
3. True Diversity Dinner video, part 3: Hotel workers, & Elvi's speech

Mars mosaic from a compilation of images captured by Viking Orbiter 1. At center is the entire Valles Marineris canyon system, over 3,000 km long and up to 8 km deep. To the left are a volcanoes of the Tharsis bulge — Ascraeus Mons to the north, Pavonis Mons in the middle, & Arsia Mons in the shadow. Photo credit: NASA/USGS (via JPL Photojournal)

Worldbuilding, Wikipedia helpfully tells us, is

the process of constructing an imaginary world, sometimes associated with a fictional universe.

The Wikipedia article focuses on the creation of worlds & the cultures that live in them by writers of science fiction & fantasy — for instance, Tolkien’s Middle-Earth in The Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings trilogy, or the planet Cyteen in C.J. Cherryh’s novels Cyteen and Regenesis, to name but a couple of my favorite imaginary worlds.

But to my mind, worldbuilding isn’t restricted only to completely imagined worlds & people — really, any writer of fiction engages in worldbuilding, even when writing the most mainstream fiction that takes place in a world looking “just like” the world you & I live in, because any fiction involves presenting the particular world(s) & worldview(s) of the characters that inhabit it.

As if you & I actually lived in the same world.  Because isn’t your worldview, no matter who you are,  so much different than mine?  Yet there are some things we can agree on, at least most of us can — if only that rocks are hard to the touch, & water is wet.  Consensual reality, it’s called.  And that’s the point, at least in these coupla paragraphs of this blog post: there are some things a writer can generally assume her audience is familiar with, so that she doesn’t have to explain them; but other things that exist outside your normal frame of reference — that she has invented — yeah, of course she’ll need to explain.  (Or show. As that familiar writer’s proverb goes, show don’t tell — though, as with all rules, there are exceptions.)  Mainstream fiction, so-called, differs from science fiction & fantasy mainly in how closely it adheres to consensual reality, how much worldbuilding it has to do.

I could go on a lot longer about my thoughts about the different types of worldbuilding in different types of fiction (or, arguably, nonfiction), but then I’d never get to the point of this post — which is my worldbuilding, & how the recent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC — along with everything else in U.S. & international law & custom that grants undue influence in how our governments & economies & lives are run to the fake persons known as corporations —  is really really really good for my worldbuilding.

But really really really sucko for the world I actually live in.

Good for my worldbuilding

Artist's conception of Mars in process of terraformation from Wikimedia Commons. Used in accordance with GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2.

In early 2007 I decided that to jumpstart my writing after “life,” as usual, had decided to interfere with it, I was going to do National Novel Writing Month that November.  The good people of NaNoWriMo itself suggest that it’s best not to do NaNoWriMo with a project one already has underway — which in my case would have been Mistress of Woodland — so I pulled an idea off the backburner of my mind & decided to work on a new project,  Cold, which would be about two young women on a planet in the late stages of terraformation.

I told my friend Chris about it, & he told me I should read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy — Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars.  My brother Dave had previously recommended those books to me too.  So, over the late winter & spring of 2007, I read them.

Good call, guys.

If I were to summarize the story of Robinson’s trilogy in one sentence, I’d say, It’s a science fiction story about terraforming Mars.  Hence Red Mars — what the colonizers of the planet find when they get there; Green Mars — how it becomes green with growing plants; Blue Mars — how it becomes a second blue marble in the sky, like our own Earth, rich with liquid water on its surface & in its atmosphere.

But really, that’s only one theme of the trilogy.  There’s also an ecological theme: is it right & ethical for us, humans from planet Earth, to remake another planet — even a presumably “dead” planet like Mars — into a second Earth?  And meanwhile, what’s happening environmentally on the real Earth? — climate change, global warming, melting of Antarctica, rising seas, continuing overpopulation & pollution… in short, planetwrecking, at least in terms of keeping it habitable for human beings & numerous of our fellow species.

There’s also a third dominant theme: the long & arduous struggle of Robinson’s Martian colonists for freedom from the political & economic domination of Earth. Freedom not only from Earth’s numerous governments — but especially from Earth’s corporations, which have become so powerful that they are in many ways more powerful than governments themselves, both on Earth & on Mars.

Sound familiar?

Robinson isn’t, of course, the first SF writer to extrapolate from the scary situation we’re already in today vis-à-vis corporate power into some even scarier futures, with megacorporations having for all intents & purposes replaced any semblance of government of, by, & for the people.  (Unless, of course, you persist in perversely insisting that corporations are people, like the U.S. Supreme Court does.)  The science fiction subgenre called cyberpunk comes particularly to mind.

My imagined science fiction future is already extrapolated from the present, & the power corporations have is part of that.  During NaNoWriMo 2007, for Cold, I started inventing a government called, simply, Consensus, which really is a government of, by, & for the people, but it was during NaNoWriMo 2009, for Long Dark, that I discovered how Consensus came into existence.  I was writing stuff in the same story universe as Cold, but about three centuries earlier in the timeline; there, it became more apparent that the Consensus government came out of particular (invented) historical circumstances: namely, a rebellion by people living & working in the Asteroid Belt & outer solar system against the tyranny & exploitation of corporations, which, as usual, cared more about the corporate bottom line than about the welfare of their workers & their workers’ families.

So you see, that’s what’s so great about the Citizens United decision, & other corporate-power related phenomena. Here’s another word for you: verisimilitude:  the appearance of being true or real. The more our public officials hand over the reins of government to corporations, the more plausible the story world I’ve built becomes.  Wow, thank you Supreme Court!

Except, uh… like I said.  This shit is —

Bad for my world

No, corporations aren’t the only things — er, I mean “people” — whose greed, thoughtlessness, short-sightedness, stupidity, self-aggrandizement, etc. etc., are bad for the world.  They’re just on the current cutting edge of it.  And the more we, or public officials supposedly acting in our name, hand political power to them, the more deeply cutting their edge is.  The Citizens United ruling is just another step in that direction.

And nice as verisimilitude in fiction is, what would be even nicer would be to live in a world in which, for instance, we could trust that our elected officials were really responsible to us, instead of to corporations whose paid propaganda (so called “free speech”) put them in office.

In May 2007, when I was an active Wikipedia editor, I spent lots of time researching the career of Tom Anderson — in fact, I wrote most of  the article about him in Wikipedia. Alaskans will recognize Tom Anderson as the first of our former legislators to be tried and convicted in the federal probe into political corruption in Alaska.  I wrote the article in my typically geeky, super-detail-oriented style, with lots & lots of cites… & it took a lot of energy & effort.  It’s certainly a lot more detailed article than you’re typically going to find in Wikipedia on a two-term state legislator, corrupt or not.

But for me it was well worth it, because compiling that biography, based solely on the written record (mostly articles from the Anchorage Daily News and the Juneau Empire) really brought home the lesson: whenever you bring corporate money into contact with public elections & officials, there are inherent conflicts of interest for those public officials which will erode their ability to serve the people who elect them. Sometimes, a public official will be so bollixed up by the conflict that they won’t even recognize it.  Tom Anderson’s case is particularly illustrative.

For example, consider this instance from Anderson’s career, involving his relationship to Northeast Community Council, the council for the same part of Anchorage that Anderson himself was elected to represent in the Alaska House of Representatives.  (Note that I’ve removed the citations contained in the article for ease of reading; see the article for citations.) —

Anderson played a significant role over two years from 2002 to 2004 in changing the composition of Anchorage’s Northeast Community Council to reflect more conservative political and economic views. Anderson encouraged friends and allies, including pastors and members of the locally influential Anchorage Baptist Temple, to pack the town meeting-style community council elections. By May 2004, six of the nine community council board members, including its president, were friends and political allies of Anderson. While Anchorage’s community councils have no real authority, they are influential with the Anchorage Assembly because, according to Dick Traini, then chair of the Anchorage Assembly, “they are the active people in the community that choose to be involved.” Community council involvement has been a first step in the political careers of several Alaska politicians.

In July 2004, Anderson was criticized in an Anchorage Daily News editorial for signing a $10,000 contract in 2003 with the Alaska oilfield services company VECO Corporation to consult “on local government and community council affairs.” Anderson had earlier told the Anchorage Daily News that he’d been approached by VECO after the end of the 2003 legislative session because it was aware he’d done similar consulting work before he became a legislator. He told the newspaper that most of his work for VECO was in seeking out civic and charitable events for the company to get involved in, and that he also monitored Anchorage’s community councils to see if there were zoning cases or other issues under discussion that might affect VECO. The newspaper noted that Anderson had received about $4,000 in campaign contributions from VECO employees or their spouses in the 2002 election that won him his first term in the Alaska House. By July 2004 he had received at least $3,500 in VECO-related contributions for his 2004 reelection bid.

Members of the community council later recalled Anderson attending all their meetings during 2003, and assumed he was attending as their representative in the state legislature. They did not learn he was there as a consultant for VECO until 2004, when his state financial disclosure form was filed with the Alaska Public Offices Commission, as required by law.

By the April 2006 election for Northeast Community Council, the effects of the 2004 takeover had been partially reversed, leaving the council nearly half and half liberal and conservative.

Indeed, who was Anderson representing when he attended community council meetings — his constituents in the Muldoon area of Anchorage (including my brother’s family)? or VECO, which was not only lining his pockets as a supposed “political consultant,” but also helped fund his election in the first place?  (Some folks might also have interest in the connection between Anderson & Jerry Prevo’s megachurch the Anchorage Baptist Temple.)

Here’s another instance, from a couple years later —

In July [2006] Anderson was hired by the Anchorage Home Builders Association for $2,500 per month. The following month he testified before the Anchorage Assembly in favor of two stores that Wal-Mart wanted to build in his legislative district. The Northeast Community Council opposed the stores. At the Assembly meeting, Assembly chair Dan Sullivan introduced Anderson as “Representative Anderson,” but Anderson corrected him, stating that he was at the meeting in representation of the home builders association, which favored the Wal-Mart stores.

Again, who was Anderson representing?  His legislative constituency?  Or the home builders association & Wal-Mart?  Obviously, he believed all that was necessary to keep himself in the clear, ethically, was to take off his “Representative” hat & put on his “paid consultant” hat, & magically the two roles would be kept completely separate.  Right.  Based upon the law as written, Anderson was not acting illegally.  But the presence of conflict of interest is obvious — however oblivious he himself was to it.

Anderson was ultimately convicted of seven counts involving extortion, bribery, conspiracy, and money laundering after taking $26,000 worth of bribes funneled by Anchorage lobbyist Bill Bobrick through a sham corporation that Anderson was supposedly “consulting” for.  The scheme was supposed to be for the benefit of a private prison company, Cornell, which was reportedly unaware of any of this; one of its employees, Frank Prewitt, was funneling the money as a confidential informant for the FBI.

I ran out of steam to write more detailed coverage on Anderson’s trial & its aftermath, but I remember quite well that his obliviousness to his ethical lapses extended into his public statements about his conviction.  He still (or so he claimed) believed he’d done nothing wrong.  Other former lawmakers convicted out of the same federal corruption investigation seemed similarly oblivious.  Vic Kohring, Ted Stevens (who in my opinion is guilty even if his conviction was set aside because of prosecutorial misconduct) — all of them claim I did nothing wrong — even Pete Kott still claims this in spite of being caught on camera taking a bribe.  I did nothing wrong.  They take it as a given that it’s okay to take money, gifts, not to mention campaign donations, which will now be supplemented by unlimited campaign advertising from corporations so long as the corporations like them.

A lot of members of the public take all this as a given too.  A lot of the public is going right along with the Citizens United decision, stating it as a great victory for “free speech.”  Uh, s’cuse me — don’t you mean paid-for-with-megabucks speech?

Why do they take it as a given?  Name your own theory, but here’s mine:

Most of us have become desensitized.  We’ve grown so accustomed to the power of corporate money in every aspect of our lives that we take it for granted.  It’s the famous “boiling frog” thing all over again.  Over the span of many years — more than a century, now — as our lawmakers & law interpreters (the courts) progressively hand more & more power over to corporations —

• corporate “personhood”
• privatization of government functions — e.g., prison privatization, use of  corporate private armies (mercenaries) like Xe (formerly Blackwater), etc.
• deregulation
• granting corporations “ownership” over segments of nature, like water, genes, microorganisms, etc.
• unlimited corporate “free speech”
• etc.

— we’re gradually, just like that frog, having the heat on us slowly turned up higher & higher & higher.

Okay, so the Citizens United case was a bit more widely noticed.  See how many people are looking around and asking, Whoa… how’d we get here? This is fucked up.

Most of us do know that something is wrong, but we can’t seem to agree what the problems are, & therefore their solutions.  And thanks to the power our government has handed over to corporations, they are free to use their “free speech” (that is, their money) to influence & distort our perceptions about what the problem is.  So we continue to point our fingers at the wrong causes,  propose the wrong solutions, fight about it all — & the heat keeps turning up, & corporations continue to enrich themselves at our expense, & accountable honest government slips ever further out of our hands.

Big Government (the kind the Tea Party folks don’t like) & Big Corporations are just two different faces of the same phenomenon: the fading away of democracy.  The replacement of government of, by, and for the people with government of, by, and for the powerful few in order to control & exploit all the rest of us.

You know what I’m saying — that psychopathy thing I talked about a couple of weeks ago with reference to corporations.   But y’know, psychopathic Big Government like, say Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union under Stalin, or a theocracy like those which Christianists are aiming for — in which anyone who doesn’t agree to toe the line of whatever arbitrary set of rules established by whatever arbitrary set of preachers or priests who claim to hold the blueprints of the heavens of some arbitrary bully-god — none of that crap is exactly desirable either.

What is desirable?  Real democracy, of course.  Real government of, by, and for the people. Government in which every stakeholder has a say and every stakeholder’s rights are protected and honored. Every stakeholder means every single person (real persons, that is, not fake “corporate persons”) who has any stake at all in how we operate our society. Which is to say: every. single. one. of. us.

That’s not how the U.S. government was set to operate, unfortunately. Our Founding Fathers did their best according to their own lights, I suppose, but they left a lot of stakeholders out of the loop. Women. Slaves. Children. Etc. Some of these oversights have been partially corrected through constitutional amendments, but the fact remains that real franchise — real ability to have a say in how society operates, & to have one’s own rights to life, liberty, & the pursuit of happiness — is still heavily restricted according to various kinds of status. Most of us still live under other people’s thumbs in one way or another. Some people win. Some people lose: their jobs, their homes, their families, their lives.

It’s just the way of the world, you say.  But why?  Is there another choice?

So here we are, back to worldbuilding

How can a society that is based on “some people win, and so does everybody else” be built?

That’s in essence what I’m trying to do in inventing the government of which my characters are part in Long Dark & Cold, which I named, simply, Consensus.

Notice that I said the government of which my characters are part.  Not, by which my characters are governed.  Because in this government, being a part of the government & being governed by it are one & the same thing.  Nobody is not a member of the government.  It truly is of, by, for the people.

Whoa, now, but wait a minute.  Isn’t that pretty damn unrealistic?  What about, y’know, that big word I used earlier?  Verisimilitude.

Well, that’s the thing.  I think it is realistic.  Not only that, but just as the corporate exploitation against which my characters’ ancestors rebel can be easily extrapolated from the stuff we’re already living with in the world we live in here & now, so can I extrapolate my society’s Consensus government from forms of governance that already exist & are used successfully in the world we live in here & now.  There are places, there are people, who are doing it now.

So nowadays I’m reading a lot about consensus, sociocracy, collective intelligence, & related ideas, on top of all the thinking & writing about this stuff I did on the fly during NaNoWriMo 2007 & 2009.  I’ll be writing more about this in other blog posts.

Meanwhile, may these ideas be the foundation of more worldbuilding in the here & now of 2010 planet Earth. I see little hope for the old tried & untrue methods of adversarial & often antagonistic systems of governance that we’re more accustomed to.  Health care reform debate, anyone?

How very pretty & hopeful our world looks out of the hostility & namecalling between political rivals these days.  Not.

Related posts:

1. Building Consensus
2. Toward a 28th Amendment: Corporations are not human persons
3. Terraforming notes

And so I begin the new year by coming out of a period of silence.

A silence, to be sure, less profound than the one I inhabited this time last year.  And for different reasons.  In the last month or so, mainly I’ve just needed a break.

1. The cave

But on New Year’s Day 2009, I was living in a kind of emotional cave, with no desire or wherewithal to communicate with anyone outside my day-to-day life except immediate family.  Especially my dad, who I’d learned just a couple of weeks before had been diagnosed with a terminal lymphoma. That news came on top of stuff I’d already been struggling with for some months, after my then-partner, Rozz who is now Ptery, made the decision while in school in Seattle to transition as a female-to-male (FTM) transsexual, & made accompanying decisions that have essentially ended our partnership as-it-was.

Thus, the cave, about which I wrote on April 2, a few days after coming out of it,

I seem to be have come out of the cave now. Not just feeling better — I’ve felt better a number of times (only to then go back into the grey again) — but actually able & willing to communicate. Maybe it was that I’m finally accepting the inevitable with my partner. Maybe it was finally getting the plane tickets bought to fly down in late April to see my dad. Maybe it was taking enough 5-HTP to keep the serotonin cooking in my brain. Maybe it’s the light coming into the days after a looooooong winter. Maybe it’s all just been perimenopause. Anyway… seems I’m back in the world again.

Now, before I go on, let me explain: this post isn’t just about the history of what I did or experienced in 2009: it’s also about what it meant.  Or, better yet, the meanings I’ve made of it — because that’s what it’s all about, for me — the story, the stories each of us make of our lives.  And this is my blog, of course, so this is my damn story.

And the story of coming out of the cave also has these meanings attached to it:

(1) The cave itself became a new term, describing a new form, of that rather large aspect of my life popularly known as depression (or, sometimes, despair): along with the grey, along with the pit, along with limbo — all of which are described in my late 2006 post The grey — the newly-discovered environment of the cave can include any one of the first three, or exclude all of them; it is chiefly characterized by that deep inability & lack of motivation to communicate.  Big whooptie, a new term — but I do find the language useful in understanding myself around this stuff.  Since, hey, halfway through my life give-or-take, I don’t see the depression/despair gunk suddenly evaporating from my life.  It’s a part of who I am.  I’m just lots better at handling it than before, & part of that is in refining my understanding of how it works in me.

(2) If I were to mark the exact date the cave walls dissolved around me, it would probably be March 30, 2009, which coincided with some important phone calls with Ptery, & also with my brother Mark & I buying our tickets to Spokane to see our dad for what we both understood would probably be the last time this side of our own deaths.  And also on that day, I wrote a lengthy post in memorial to Nicholas Hughes, a fisheries biologist formerly at University of Alaska Fairbanks who had taken his own life the previous week.  I hadn’t known him, but he was the son of the poets Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes, & Plath especially had been an significant figure in my life.  Not for the right reasons, initially — but the post explains that: it was my effort to honor Mr. Hughes not as mere adjunct to his famous parents’ biographies — as many of the news accounts of his death seemed to view him — but for who he himself was & for what he brought to all the people in his life, who were mourning him that day.

(3) My dad knew I’d been having a hard time. He was at peace with his own approaching death, & wanted us to be too.  But beyond that, he wanted our happiness.  He was so glad when he heard I’d come out of the cave.  That was one of the very best things about it.

2. Lima beans against WAR

Wow, after the Summer of Hate experienced by the Anchorage LGBT & allied community over Anchorage Ordinance 2009-64, one almost forgets its political prelude, when then-Gov. Sarah Palin named Wayne Anthony Ross — widely known by his license-plate acronym as WAR — to succeed the disgraced Talis Colberg as Alaska’s Attorney General.  Alaska’s top LGBT blog Bent Alaska informs us that its post about WAR, “Palin’s AG Pick Called Gays “Degenerates” (3/29/09), was one of its two 2009 posts to go viral — & that was even before he compared gays to lima beans, a vegetable that he “hates” but still claimed he could represent if he were, say, the lawyer for “United Vegetable Growers.”  We lima beans were, needless to say, not favorably impressed.

Ross also had a history of biased & even misogynistic attitudes in relation to domestic violence, sexual assault, & violence against women; hostility to Alaska Native sovereignty & subsistence rights; a mediocre reputation as a practitioner of law amongst his fellow members of the Alaska Bar Association; & a pretty shaky attitude about executive branch ethics.  Bad news all around: it motivated me to spend a considerable amount of time & energy researching him, listening to legislative confirmation hearings, & writing a very long letter to legislators, which I posted on my blog — thus embarking upon a part-time career as an occasional political blogger.  I wrote a few other posts about WAR, & commented on other sites’ coverage of him (especially Bent Alaska), & celebrated with most of the rest of Alaska when the Alaska Legislature rejected him by a vote of 23 yeas to 35 nays — an unprecedented rejection of a governor’s cabinet pick.

It took a day or two for the Alaska Department of Law to remove WAR from its website. This screenshot was taken on April 16. The red X is mine.

3. Dad

I flew to Spokane with my brother Mark in late April to visit Dad.  We also saw my sister Mer & brother-in-law Julius, with whom my Dad lived, and my brother Dave drove over from Montana.  Ptery hitchhiked up, at my request, so I got to see him too.

Dad was so happy to have all of us there. He had a lot of energy too, considering how ill he was; but near the end, as we began to return to our homes, he took a turn for the worse, as if he’d been holding to life so that he could see us all before he left us to be with Mom.  She had died in November 2005.

I took this picture during that trip: Dad telling one of his wonderful stories about growing up in the lumber camps of eastern Oregon in the 1920s where Grandpa Claude ran locomotives on the Sumpter Valley Railroad for the Oregon Lumber Company; or about the bootleg operation he & his pals in the Army Air Corps had in England during WWII; or about how he met my mom when he was looking for a job, & guy at Ellingson Lumber Company suggested he head to Izee because the camp cook there had two beautiful daughters. It was the younger of the two daughters, my Auntie Pat, who actually introduced my parents after Dad gave her a ride into John Day, where Mom was then working.

That photo on the wall behind Dad was his favorite picture of Mom, taken by a professional photographer shortly before they met. When I look at this photo, I feel his yearning to be with her again.

I last saw him on April 29.  He died not quite a month later, on May 27.  My sister was with him.

I’ve been at peace about Dad’s death almost from the beginning, partly because the peace he himself had about it put me at peace, & partly because of what for lack of better words I will call the messages that came, three of them — two of them to other family members, & the last one to me. My message was from my mother, in the form of sunflowers.  It told me that Dad was with her, & they are both okay.

On July 12, as many family members as could make it, including me & my sister & brothers, all gathered together in Spokane to remember Mom & Dad & to celebrate all that they gave us.

I love you, Mom & Dad.

4. Anchorage Ordinance 2009-64

The Anchorage equal rights ordinance AO 2009-64 was introduced in the Anchorage Assembly on May 12, & thus was my career as an occasional political blogger made much less occasional.

AO 64 would have added sexual orientation and gender identity to the list of personal characteristics in Title 5, Anchorage’s equal rights code, which prohibits discrimination based on those characteristics in employment, housing, financial practices, education, and practices of the Municipality of Anchorage. The summer of 2009 in Anchorage featured a protracted period of public testimony at the Anchorage Assembly, with accompanying sign-waving and letter-writing both by ordinance supporters and those who opposed equal rights — led in particular by Jerry Prevo of the Anchorage Baptist Temple, who used “perverted” and other hate-terms to describe LGBT people, hence the name given the summer by commentator at the Anchorage Press: the Summer of Hate.

Identity Reports (1989) and One in 10 (1986)

From May to September, I wrote in the area of 60 posts about the ordinance, including a number that delved into the background & prevarications of its most vociferous opponent, Jerry Prevo.  I also testified in support of the ordinance on June 16 ( the second of five nights of public testimony). My testimony was based on two major research efforts in the 1980s for Identity, Inc. in which we documented the rampant discrimination in Anchorage & in Alaska based on sexual orientation. (Our research unfortunately did not cover discrimination on the basis of gender identity, which we knew little about at the time.)

The ordinance passed the Anchorage Assembly on August 11, 2009, but was vetoed the following week by Mayor Dan Sullivan — the third time in Anchorage history that equal protection for at least some LGBTQ people in Anchorage was first granted, & then stripped away again.

We weren’t real happy.

5. Friends & allies

The Summer of Hate wasn’t all hate & horror.  There was also some really cool stuff.

Cool stuff was people like Vic Fischer, Jane Angvik, & Arliss Sturgulewski testifying for the ordinance — people with just a teensy bit more credibility than, say, self-declared homophobic Bible-thumping Nazi “rascist” Eddie Burke.

Cool stuff was the huge number of people who turned out on the lawn of the Loussac Library to dance, blow bubbles, & hold signs upholding equal rights for all. The second week of public testimony, on which testimony was heard on two successive nights (June 16-17), was also the run-up to PrideFest, & every time I stepped out of the Assembly chambers for a breather, I felt like PrideFest was already in progress (once, that is, I got past the ABT redshirts & their hot dog tables).

I remember going out there one day & seeing how everyone — members of the LGBT community, & lots of non-LGBT folks including my nephew Miles & some of his friends — was celebrating equality & love for their fellow human beings, as sour-faced, red-shirted opponents stood nearby with their preprinted “Truth is Not Hate” signs agitating against equality.  I thought to myself, I’m so proud of my people — & I found myself for the first time consciously including in my people not just other LGBT people, but all the numerous non-LGBT allies who took it for granted that equality meant all of us.  And were as dumbfounded as we were at the “Truth is Not Hate” hate speech dropping out of the mouths of red-shirts both inside & outside the Assembly chambers.

On a personal level, I was lucky to make some new friendships.  John & Heather Aronno, both now of Alaska Commons, who I met a few days before the first public hearing, became my favorite folks to sit next to at Assembly public hearings: three bloggers, all in a row.

One of my other favorite new people was (& is) Janson Jones, whose fantastic photography at Floridana Alaskiana v2.5 (including of the ordinance battle) first drew my attention. He’s also an all-around cool guy who also became a new dad over the summer — & his photos of his precious daughter Aurelia are pretty wonderful too.

Thanks to the ordinance battle, I also got reaquainted with a friend from way back, Linda Kellen Biegel of Celtic Diva’s Blue Oasis, who I hadn’t seen in years. I’d known Phil Munger of Progressive Alaska through email, but not until this summer did I meet him in person. I’ve known M.E. Rider of Grrlzlist, E. Ross of Bent Alaska, & longtime activist (& maker of Equality Works buttons) Stef Gingrich for years, though it was only through the summer that we saw much of each other, since normally — yes, true story — I’m pretty much a hermit.

It was the ordinance that brought me out, for ill & for good. Despite the ordinance’s eventual fate — for me personally, thanks to people like these, it was mostly for good.

6. Palinesque

Somewhere in the middle of this was Sarah Palin’s announcement on July 3 that she would be resigning her position as Governor of Alaska.  I don’t blog that much about Palin — there are other Alaska bloggers who cover her quite thoroughly (thank goodness!) — but within a few days after her announcement, I got fed up with how the national mainstream media was uncritically passing along what I dubbed the 2 million dollar meme: Palin’s claim that $2,000,000 taxpayer (or rather, oil revenue dollars — this is Alaska, after all) had been spent on responding to ethical complaints against her. So I started taking it apart, & continued to do so over at total of six blog posts.

Wow did that raise traffic on my blog. I got nearly 1,800 hits on the first post of the series the first day after it was published; to date it’s gotten 5,530 hits, making it the most read post on my blog.  The pie chart I created for that post also proved to be pretty popular.

My stuff didn’t stop Palin from repeating her lie; but then, who expected that it would?  I’m no fool.  I just hoped the damn mainstream media would wake up & do the job they’re paid to do — so that bloggers like me wouldn’t have to do it for free. I am proud to say that my efforts, which Anchorage Daily News reporter Sean Cockerham picked up on, contributed to Linda Perez of the Governor’s Office being forced to admit there were errors in the hokey spreadsheet the Governor’s Office had cooked up in an incompetent attempt to back up Gov. Palinocchio’s claim.  Cockerham’s story (posted, as far as I know, only on the ADN’s Politics blog, but not as a full-fledged ADN story) said that Perez was going to follow up on further questions he’d brought up — I’ve seen no sign that she ever did, or that ADN itself cared.  I didn’t follow up further myself because by time Perez ‘fessed up as much as she did, I was in Spokane with my family remembering my mom & dad.  I have a feeling everyone who had actual responsibility (because, of course, they were more than mere “community organizers”) decided to drop it.  Gee. I wonder why.

7. I got a new couch

More properly, it’s a futon loveseat. Whatever.  I got it in August, & I’ve been vegging more happily (when I vege) ever since.  My cat loves it too.

8. An effort to up-end the Alaska Judicial Council

Other things were going on in my life too, of course.  But the political stuff stands out, because political blogging is not my great purpose in life — writing my own stuff is. And yet, I kept doing it.

And so it happens that in late August I learned of a lawsuit by which certain Alaska conservatives, most if not all of whom have ties to the so-called right-to-life movement, had filed suit nearly two months before — a fact not covered at all by Alaska’s mainstream media in spite of all of them having received the press release when the suit was filed — which would, if successful, overturn major provisions of the Alaska Constitution with regard to the selection & retention of state court judges. The lead attorney for the plaintiffs, James Bopp, Jr., is a big name: he has litigated similar issues elsewhere.  My own feeling is that this guy is more likely to have shopped around for the Alaskans who could be named as plaintiffs in this case, than that the plaintiffs shopped around for him.  His agenda appears to be a nationwide effort to politicize judicial selection, so that candidates can be selected through popular vote based on litmus test questions on hot-button issues (“What is your opinion on abortion?” — “What is your opinion on same-sex marriage?”), instead of being selected for their judicial integrity & knowledge of the law.

Through my job on staff of the Justice Center at University of Alaska Anchorage, which I’ve held since 1990, I’d become very familiar with Alaska’s judicial merit selection process, & have a lot of respect for it too, & for the quality of judges we have in this state.  Not perfect — but a helluva lot better than in states that have the politicized & often politically corrupt types of selection processes that Bopp seems to prefer.

So, I read about Miller v. Carpeneti, & I wrote about it, & I even took a day off work to attend the hearing before Judge John W. Sedwick in the U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska on September 11.   I’m not a lawyer, but I read through most of the briefings, & it didn’t seem to me that Bopp’s arguments held much water.  Judge Sedwick apparently agreed: he heard arguments from both sides & then dismissed the case. His opinion was published on September 15.

But we haven’t heard the last from Mr. Bopp: he’s appealed the case to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and, last I heard, the last briefs in the case must be filed no later than February 10, 2010. Oral arguments might then follow.  If Bopp fails at the Ninth Circuit, there’s every possibility he might appeal all the way up to the Supreme Court — he’s argued before them before, & won.

Meanwhile, I continue to wonder what in hell is wrong with the Alaska mainstream media, including our supposed paper-of-record, the Anchorage Daily News. First they all failed to follow up any further on Palin’s spreadsheet-of-hooey in support of her 2 million dollar meme-of-hooey; now it turns out they sat for nearly two months on a press release issued in early July about a lawsuit that could theoretically undermine our state constitution with regard to judicial selection.  Phil Munger at Progressive Alaska has drawn attention to numerous other instances in which the press has sat on its duff instead of investigating & reporting stuff that in some cases is right in front of their faces — for instance, the numerous lies propounded throughout Palin’s putative “memoir,” which the ADN has yet to write any review on.  What else are they sitting on?  How are we to have democracy that way, if the MSM isn’t doing its job?

Oh yeah, I remember now.  Bloggers like me are supposed to do that job nowadays.  In our spare time.  For free.

(All due respect to those reporters who as far as I can tell are doing their best to do their job — but are being shut down by management. I know you guys are out there.)

9. True Diversity Dinner

In the aftermath of Sullivan’s veto of AO 64, several of us bloggers who had been heavily involved in writing about it started talking about what we might do keep the flame alive.  Several of us met at lunchtime one day, & out of someone’s suggestion — I don’t remember whose — next thing you know, the True Diversity Dinner was born.  Its immediate impetus was that the upcoming Mayor’s Diversity Dinner, an event originally created during the administration of Mayor, now Senator, Mark Begich, had been renamed Mayor’s Unity Dinner by Mayor Dan Sullivan — the same guy who had just vetoed equal rights for Anchorage’s lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transfolk.

Instead of protesting, we decided to celebrate the rich diversity that the Mayor’s renaming of the dinner seemed designed to whitewash away. The True Diversity Dinner was our alternative, with the motto, “Because we all deserve a seat at the table.”  It was organized by the bloggers of Alaska Commons, Anchorage Won’t Discriminate, Bent Alaska, Floridana Alaskiana v2.5, Grrlzlist Alaska, Henkimaa, and SOSanchorage.net — but especially by John & Heather Aronno (Alaska Commons & SOSAnchorage.net), who I fear fell far behind in their studies thanks to the dinner.

But it was well worth it, right guys?  It was a tremendous event, with great speakers including my Assembly person Elvi Gray-Jackson, former Congressional candidate & longtime activist for Alaska Native rights Diane Benson, Rev. Marquita Pierre of the Center for Spiritual Healing, & radio host & blogger Shannyn Moore.

On top of that, I was honored to be the recipient of a True Diversity Award for Excellence in Online Media for coverage on my blog of the battle for the Anchorage equal rights ordinance.  Booyah!

10. Hilton workers

And more occasional politics.

When the True Diversity Dinner was first thought up, I hadn’t known that Mayor Sullivan’s Unity Dinner was booked for the Hilton Anchorage Hotel — which was (& still is) under boycott by its workers due to the bad faith practices of its management on orders of the Hilton’s owners, Kentucky-based Columbia Sussex Corporation.  A blog post by Shannyn Moore brought my attention to the fact that the Mayor’s Unity Dinner was also a union-busting dinner. I spent some time researching & writing about the labor dispute, & also attended the Hotel Workers Rising March from the Sheraton (which is now also under boycott due to similar management abuses of workers) to the Hilton two days after the True Diversity Dinner was held.

11. But I’m really about writing my own stuff, & that’s what I need to do now

I’d like to follow up on the hotel workers struggle, both at the Hilton & now the Sheraton.  I hope someone will.  But I can’t.  Here’s the deal.  There are people on this planet, there are people in this state, who thrive on political blogging, & what’s more excel at it.  I think I’m pretty damn good at it when I’m doing it — but I don’t thrive on it.  I start with enthusiasm, but over time… I wear down, my spirit flags, & pretty soon it winds right back into what I started this post with: depression & despair.

Midyear, in the post in which I claimed to be an occasional political blogger, I wrote,

The main reason I set up this site & blog was to help me get back into the flow of writing, of living my life as a writer.  And while writing about politics is writing — well, it’s not my writing, the stuff close to my heart.  Besides, I also work a full-time job.

Besides, sometimes the political stuff can really whack me out….

Another factor about how I handle political posts is that my style isn’t really amenable to fast-response writing, which is a feature of a lot of the best political bloggers I read.  But me, I like to think a lot about what I’m writing.  I like to go deep.  I like to be thorough & as comprehensive as I can.  I like to source all my references thoroughly.  I like — apparently — to write term papers.  (I sure never thought so when I was in college).  And that takes a long time.  Especially since, as previously mentioned, I work a full-time job.  And I also need a certain amount of down time or I am liable to put myself into a depression.

Sometimes, writing my own stuff actually feels like down time.  Reason: I said it above, it’s stuff that close to my heart.

So October saw me returning to writing — at that time, mostly background stuff or responses to stuff that I was reading in preparation for National Novel Writing Month 2009 (NaNoWriMo).  In looking back, I remember that True Diversity Dinner month — that is, September — also saw a bit of focus on writing: a couple of politically-oriented pieces about homophobia in science fiction, including one involving a publication I was writing a story for.  As it happened, I wasn’t far enough along on that story to meet the submission deadline of September 30 — so I picked up & polished an older thing instead.

And whaddaya know! in early October, I was told they wanted to publish it!  Which did much to make me feel like a writer again.

“Cold” was published on October 31, 2009 in Crossed Genres Issue #12, the LGBT issue, & you can still read it online there.  (When it’s no longer live there, & my contract with Crossed Genres permits, I will republish it right here at Henkimaa.com.)  “Cold” was also selected for inclusion in Crossed Genres‘ first-year anthology, which will include one story from each of the magazines first 12 issues.  I think it’s still on schedule for publication in February.

My username on NaNoWriMo: yksin.

November for me was the headlong hurry of NaNoWriMo.  As a result, as anyone who knows this blog saw, I didn’t do much blogging at all.  Such blog posts as got posted were mostly automatically generated “Daily Tweets” posts from my Twitter feed.  And I haven’t done much blogging since NaNoWriMo ended, either.

But whoa! I did a lot of writing — 51,607 words worth of it in November, making me a NaNoWriMo winner this year…. er… I mean, last year.  I was writing in the same story universe as “Cold,” which is about two young women on an extrasolar planet (that is, in another solar system) in the late stages of terraformation, which I’ve finally named Oikos — but my NaNovember 2009 writing was mostly about three centuries earlier in the timeline, before & around the time the ships that will eventually arrive at Oikos leave our solar system.  I called it Long Dark.

And a lot of it was background writing, rather than the story itself.  Because there is so damn much science that I need to have at least some kind of grasp on before I can do the story for real.

Though I came up with at least four stories over the course of the month that I know I can shape into good damn stuff.  And I also discovered that a character of mine from a supposedly completely unrelated project is, whaddaya know, an important historical figure for the society in Long Dark and Cold.  And since that character is very closely based on me… whoa, it’s an awful lot like, well, writing myself into history.  How cool is that?

(Or how egotistical?)

12. Since then…

… that is, during December — what have I been doing?  Not blogging, clearly. Except for one extensive rant about the leakage in various portions of my ceiling.  (Now cured, but the holes in the ceiling still need patching.)  Other than that, lots of vegging out, some writing, lots of reading — my latest topics have included atmospheric pressure, altitude sickness, & spacesuit design (background research for a story in the Cold universe) & how people with strabismus or amblyopia (the latter being the case for me), most of whom grow up stereoblind, might be able to develop stereo (binocular) vision.  Even at 50 years old. Which is what I am now.

50 years old, soon to be 51. And now I reflect on where I was at when I turned 50, early in 2009.  I was still in the cave.  But there were inklings of possibility.  I was still in the cave, for instance, when a confluence of ideas led me to decide how to go about my writing life, which included blogging & other forms of social media to get my stuff out there, instead of just through the old “send out craploads of query letters & get a shitload of rejection letters back before someone finally decides your stuff is good enough to publish” method that has been standard for a very bloody long time.  I knew I’d feel a lot more at ease finding my own audience through social media than going through the query letter drudgery.  It was still pretty remarkable that I made such a decision at such a time, though: social media? for someone who, at that point, was incapable & unmotivated to communicate at all?  But then, I knew the cave walls would dissolve sooner or later.  And they did.

I was also deciding, back in February of 2009 that age 50 was a good time to reach the milestone that I had apparently reached in the sorrows of that time.  The boy that I & Rozz-now-Ptery raised from age 9 was now 21 (& now, some months later, is actually 22), & is setting out on his own course in the world.  He’s in a residential job training program; I seem him some weekends when he comes into town.  Ptery is embarked on another course, living a nomadic life mostly off-the-grid in the Lower 48; we are no longer partners, however much we still love each other. So, I am single &, except for my cat & the boy’s dog, essentially alone.

When I was in college & took a class on Hinduism, I learned that the traditional life path for very pious Brahmin males was supposed to consist of several stages — four of them, I think — with the third stage being that of husband, father, & householder.  When the householding stage was over, these guys were apparently supposed to just up & lickety-split out to the forest to become religious ascetics.  Or something like that.

And when I turned 50, I thought: that’s it, I’m no longer a householder.  Well, I still have my apartment.  And I don’t plan to go live in the woods as an ascetic.  (Ptery’s path is a little closer to that, really.)  But I no longer have the responsibilities of a spouse/partner or of a parent to a minor child.  I can do what I want.  And what I need.

Which is to write.  But dang, it sure takes me a long time to get the politics out of my way to do it.

But I got to that point, & now I plan to continue.

That’s my story.

I’m such a cathead.

Related posts:

1. True Diversity Dinner 1 & 2: Video by Janson Jones
2. True Diversity Dinner video, part 3: Hotel workers, & Elvi's speech
3. True Diversity Dinner: September 25, 2009

Lauren Green as Cinderella in Davenport Theatrical's production of "Into the Woods"

This is the first of what’ll probably be two or three posts about my trip last weekend to Spokane.  The main reason I went down there was to join my brothers Dave & Mark, sister Mer, nieces & nephew, & extended family in celebrating the lives of my mother, Rauha Elizabeth (neé Siukola) Green (1928—2005) and father, Rial Eugene Green (1919–2009).  But while I was down there, I also had a great Saturday visiting a local winery with Dave & his wife Linda, & we got to see members of the extended Green-Brewster family (Mark & my other sister-in-law Linda’s family, & Linda’s brother Steve’s family) and other talented people perform in a production by Davenport Theatrical of Davenport, Washington of the Steven Sondheim musical Into the Woods. I decided to write about Into the Woods first because there are still three performances to go, & just maybe there’s someone reading this who’s down in eastern Washington who might want to see it.

Davenport Theatrical was established in 2008 by Karen & Steve Brewster and Drew Kowalkowski to provide, per its website, “high quality community theater for Lincoln County and the surrounding area of Eastern Washington.” Its performers come from Davenport and the nearby communities of Davenport, Harrington, Spokane, Spokane Valley, Reardan, Wilbur, and Ritzville, with some coming from as Bellingham and — yep — Anchorage.

Into the Woods by Stephen Sondheim (music & lyrics) & James Lapine (book) is Davenport Theatrical’s third production.  As described in Wikipedia,

the musical intertwines the plots of several Brothers Grimm fairy tales and follows them further to explore the consequences of the characters’ wishes and quests. The main characters are taken from the stories of Little Red Ridinghood, Jack and the Beanstalk, Rapunzel, and Cinderella, tied together by a more original story involving a Baker and his wife and their quest to begin a family, most likely taken from the original story of Rapunzel by the Brothers Grimm. It also includes references to several other well-known tales.

This production had lots of family in it.

Lauren as Cinderella in the Act II finale

My niece Lauren Green played the role of Cinderella — the role played by Bernadette Peters in the musical’s original Broadway production in 1987.  I’d seen Lauren in UAA Theatre & Dance‘s production of Into the Woods in its 2002–2003 season — the only other time I’ve seen this musical.  Lauren played Rapunzel that time; but Cinderella is a much larger role, & that made me very happy because Lauren (besides being my niece) is a wonderfully talented performer with a tremendous soprano voice. She came to this role after an already busy summer: she was in Valdez in mid-June for the  17th Annual Last Frontier Theatre Conference at Prince William Sound Community College, and before that she was in Winston-Salem, North Carolina at the American Singers’ Opera Project (ASOP), where she sang the role of Fiordiligi in ASOP’s workshop production of Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte, a part she had worked pretty darn hard to memorize before traveling down.  Earlier in the year, Lauren took first place in the “upper avocation” division in both the Classical Voice and Musical Theater competitions held by the National Association of Teachers of Singing Alaska (NATS), about which I blogged back in April.

So pardon me if my photos of this production focus a lot on Lauren, because I’m pretty damn proud of her, & it’s my privilege to brag her up.  Needless to say she was pretty fantastic as Cinderella, too.

Linda Green (center) as Cinderella's mother

But there was plenty of other talent, both family & otherwise, in the production as well.  My wonderful friend & sister-in-law Linda Green (Lauren’s mom, sister of company co-founder & technical director Steve Brewster) played Cinderella’s (real) mother as well as the giant widowed when Jack of the Beanstalk fame killed her husband. Besides running the Green Teaching Studio in Anchorage, where she teaches piano & trumpet, Linda is also a working musician with a boatload of experience arranging instrumental & vocal music, & she’s a resident artist with The Character Workshop, an Anchorage community theatre group which amongst other things has toured Gilbert & Sullivan plays around public libraries in Anchorage & the Mat-Su.

Mark Green in the orchestra on flugelhorn

Lauren has also been a longtime Character Workshop participant, as has my brother Mark Green, who was in the “Into the Woods” orchestra on flugelhorn.  Mark is of course a working musician too — along with Linda, he’s a member of “Alaska’s Hottest Funky New Horn Band,” Power of Ten, where they both play trumpet.  They’ve also played in a number of other groups in the Anchorage area, like their own Swing Dawgs, as well as Conexion Latina, Anchorage Blaskapelle, Sonora Sensacion, Anchorage Jazz Ensemble, etc. I have a talented family, what?

Then there’s the talent in Linda’s brother’s family, including Steve Brewster himself, who is one of the the company’s co-founders as well as its technical director, and hiw wife & company co-founder Karen Brewster, who played the Witch.  A few other Brewster family members also in the cast & crew, including Emily Brewster as Little Red Riding Hood and Kellie Halverson as Snow White, not to mention the other incredible talent local to Davenport & the surrounding area. See the full cast list.

Act II finale

Greens & Brewsters in the cast & crew

Because of family connections, this production was opportunity for a family gathering of the extended Brewster & Green families.  Audience members on the afternoon of July 11 included me, my brother Dave Green (another talented musician who plays around & about the Flathead Valley of Montana) & his wife Linda — or “Linda 2″ as we call her when both Linda Greens are present (due to the order the marriages took place).  We got there about 20 minutes late, thanks to some mistaken directions about which way to drive out of Spokane — we’ll never let Mer & Julius forget it!  (North Division!!!)  Linda 1′s sister Sherrie also drove out from Spokane, & Linda 1′s mother Barbara with her fianceé Gene, who are due to be married this coming Saturday, July 18 — the one date they could squeeze in while the Alaska contingent is still down there, between the last two performances of “Into the Woods”. Afterwards we had an informal Brewster/Green & friends dinner in the hallway of Davenport High School just outside the theater, organized by Sherrie.

At this writing, there are still a few performances on schedule. If you’re in eastern Washington, go see it! Tickets are only $10.00.   All performances are held in a lovely little theatre at Davenport High School in Davenport, Washington.

Friday, July 10 • 7:00 PM
Saturday, July 11 • 3:00 PM
Thursday, July 16 • 7:00 PM
Friday, July 17 • 7:00 PM
Sunday, July 19 • 3:00 PM

Here’s a slideshow of my full set of photos from the July 11 performance, courtesy my Flickr photostream, where you can also view this set. You can also expand the slideshow to view it full screen; in full screen, click on “show info” in the upper right corner to get the photo’s caption.

All these photos were taken with a Nikon Coolpix S10, without flash, from my seat in the audience. (Different seats between Act I & Act II.)  Very nice to have 10x optical zoom along with some reasonable exposure control.  A nice little camera.

Related posts:

1. Glacier National Park, Montana
2. Green family
3. Lauren Green sings

blinks.  He posted a brief little meditation about it a few days ago, & this morning a wonderful short poem called “Blinking” that I wish I could post here but I haven’t asked him so I won’t.  But his poem led me to dig up a nonfiction piece I wrote many years ago, 1994, in an undergrad nonfiction workshop taught by Gretchen Legler at University of Alaska Anchorage.  It’s about memory.

At the time of writing, my partner Rozz and I were early in our relationship, & had lived for about a year together in a small rented house in the Mountain View neighborhood of Anchorage — the first place we shared.  My mom was still alive, & my parents still lived in the same house in Columbia Falls, Montana where I grew up.  I still had my cats Lemminkäinen (Lem for short) & Eight Lives, & Rozz still had her dog Whylie.  A lot has changed since then.  Which makes the blinks described here, both of 1962 (or whenever) & 1994, all the more precious.

Blinks

I lie in a bed, warm.  It’s my parents’ bed.  I lie on my left side with my back to whoever lies in the bed with me.  It might be my mom, or maybe it’s my dad.  Maybe it’s both.  But I can’t see them because they are behind me.  The room is dark, but the door is open and light spills in from the next room.  I hear voices from the next room, and feet, stamping.  It’s my brothers, getting ready for school.  Outside, I know, it’s raining.

This is my first memory, lying in my parents’ bed, warm, aware of other people’s presence — the weight of my mother or father behind me on the mattress, my brother’s voices — but seeing no one, seeing nothing but the dark room and the light coming from the next room.  It’s as though I blinked into existence merely to collect this memory, and blinked out again once I’d retrieved it.

But I blink in equipped with some knowledge, for while there’s a lot I don’t know, there are some things I do.  That I have brothers, for instance.  I don’t see them, and while I hear their voices, they are blurry, indistinct, unsexed.  I don’t know their names.  But I know it’s them and I know they’re getting ready for school.

What is school?  In my memory it’s merely a word to describe a place they go when they’re not here, where I am.  And where is that?  In my parents’ bed, but I’m not sure which house.  I want to say it’s the big two-story house where my parents still live, but that may be only because it’s the only house I remember in detail.  But my parents have told me we lived in a different house for the first few years after I was born, so it could be my first memory takes place in a room of that house.  But they’ve pointed that house out to me — I’m certain it had only one floor.  Yet I can’t hear the rain — surely in a one-story house I would hear the rain hitting the roof.  So I must be in the big house, I must be in my parent’s bedroom where I slept in a crib till I was five, because there weren’t enough bedrooms to go around, because my dad hadn’t yet built the bedrooms in the attic.

But why am I in my parent’s bed, not in my crib?  Maybe I was crying in my sleep and Mom or Dad came and got me to comfort me, and my blinking into this scene was my waking up.  But no, there’s no sense of sadness or discomfort as I lie there, nothing to indicate I was, or had been, distressed.  Maybe one of my parents got me up for the day, brought me out of the bedroom for breakfast, or to the bathroom — surely I’m out of diapers by now — and when I got done, I found my other parent still in bed and jumped in, wanting to cuddle.  Yes — and that would explain how I know it’s raining — I’ve been about in the house, I’ve seen the rain out the window.

I feel like a detective.  Why am I aware of my brothers and not my sister?  She was born before me — she must be around somewhere.  In my early childhood she and my brothers shared the bedroom next to our parents’ room.  She slept in an old-fashioned trundle bed, a little bed on casters that was rolled under my brothers’ bunk beds during the day.  Maybe I’m not aware of her because she’s not getting ready for school.  Maybe she doesn’t go to school yet.  And if that’s so . . . I can learn how old I am.  Mer is just a year younger than Mark, so if he’s going to school and she isn’t, he must be in first grade.  That would make him 6 years old, and Mer 5.  Dave would be 10.  And I would be 3.  It would be 1962, a rainy fall day, far away in Montana where my parents still live, in the house they still live in, in the room that long ago, after Dad built the upstairs bedrooms, turned into the “sewing” room, then the “utility” room, then finally — more honestly — the “junk” room.

But in 1962 it was the bedroom, my parents’ and mine, and I lie on my left side seeing the dark of the room and the light of the next room and hearing the voices and feeling . . . how?  Not distressed, that’s been established.  But I don’t feel ecstatic, either, not transcendent or joyful or anything one would consider so remarkable as to pop me into existence to experience that moment.  I just feel . . . okay.  Warm.  Comfortable.  Dry.  Secure.  Like so many moments of my life it’s a moment I imagine someone outside myself would find endlessly dull and prosaic, but to me it’s fascinating, something I return to.

As I will return to this morning.  Rozz has already gotten up, gotten dressed, made breakfast, made lunch, and written some in her journal.  Now she comes in to snuggle with me for a few minutes where I lie on my right side, facing toward the window with its venetian blinds, my right hand tucked under Lem’s warm purring belly.  My other boy, Eight Lives, regard me with benevolence from atop my left shoulder.  Probably he’s purring, too.  Rozz is behind me, her left arm thrown over my waist, her breath in my hair.  Whylie, her dog, is probably behind her somewhere, on the other side of the bed.

I know it’s raining outside because I can hear it — we live in a one-story house.  I feel wonderful and lazy, except I know in a minute Rozz will tell me what time it is.  Then she’ll get up and take Whylie out for a quick walk, and I’ll have to get up and get dressed and put on my shoes and wash my hair and comb it and be ready, by the time Rozz gets back with Whylie, to drive us both to work.  I’m not so lucky as the little girl of 32 years ago, who gets to lay about warm and sleepy while others go out to the work of the world.  But until it blinks out, there is this moment.

[October 6, 1994]

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3. Continuing the new routine