585. Queequeg

For the month of April I am participating for the ninth time in the annual A-to-Z blogging challenge, writing a post for every letter of the alphabet. My theme this year is the world, the world that is always with us, that we must not keep out and cannot do without.

First, I need to make a confession: although I have now lived in the United States for more than half a century, I have not yet completed even one reading of Herman Melville’s great American novel, Moby-Dick; or, the Whale (1851). I did start reading it one year while I was sick in bed with my customary end-of-teaching-semester bout of flu; but I got better and the tome was set aside, to be taken up at some future time. I had got to page 250, but Ishmael and Queequeg had not yet managed to get out to sea. Still, my introduction to Queequeg, and C.L.R. James’ Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In will enable me to make one simple point.

  Queequeg (Ill. Rockwell Kent, 1930)

Ishmael, Moby-Dick‘s narrator, meets Queequeg when they are roomed together in New Bedford’s Spouter Inn (in fact they have to share a bed, since the inn is fully occupied), and after his initial shock of meeting the “head-peddling harpooneer”—and pagan to boot—the two rapidly become bosom friends. When Queequeg signals for Ishmael to join him in his evening worship, Ishmael reflects on the invitation as follows:



I was a good Christian; born and bred in the bosom of the infallible Presbyterian Church. How then could I unite with this wild idolator in worshipping his piece of wood? But what is worship, thought I? Do you suppose now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous god of heaven and earth—pagans and all included—can possibly be jealous of an insignificant bit of black wood? Impossible! But what is worship?—to do the will of God—that is worship. And what is the will of God?—to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man to do to me—that is the will of God. Now, Queequeg is my fellow man. And what do I wish that this Queequeg would do to me. Why, unite with me in my particular Presbyterian form of worship. Consequently, I must unite with him in his; ergo, I must turn idolator (Melville 74-5).

Queequeg is a South Sea islander, the son of a High Chief and the nephew of a High Priest. Rather than follow his hereditary destiny, he longed to see the wider world, and stowed away on a ship returning to Sag Harbor, Maine. However, after becoming acquainted with the ways of white men, he decided never to abandon his native beliefs and practices. As Ishmael recounts, it: “Thought he, it’s a wicked world in all meridians; I’ll die a pagan” (Melville 82).

In her recommendation of the best books by and on Melville, Prof. Hester Blum introduces Mariners, Renegades and Castaways as follows:

In the mid-20th century, C. L. R. James made the brilliant argument that Moby-Dick’s real hero—the novel’s central interest—was not Ahab, or Ishmael, or Moby Dick himself, but the multiracial, multiethnic, multinational crew of the Pequod. In James’s view, Melville imagined (but was not fully able to realize) a novel that elevated and celebrated the polyglot crew over its white officers and white totalitarian captain. James, a Trinidadian intellectual and anti-Stalinist Marxist, wrote Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (1952) while interned on Ellis Island awaiting deportation; he sent a copy of the book to every member of the US Senate. If only they had read it—it resonates still. 

In Mariners, James points out that Melville introduces us to the ship’s officers and crew before he explores the character of Captain Ahab. As Blum mentions above, James writes, “It is clear that Melville intends to make the crew the real heroes of the book, but he is afraid of criticism” (17). James offers us this passage from Moby-Dick:

“If, then, to meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways I shall therefore ascribe high qualities, though dark; weave round them tragic graces; if even the most mournful, perchance the most abased, among them all, shall at times lift himself to the most exalted mounts; if I shall touch that workman’s arm with some ethereal light; if I shall spread a rainbow over his disastrous set of sun; then against all mortal critics bear me out in it, thou just Spirit of Equality, which has spread one royal mantle of humanity over all my kind!” (James 16-17)

Melville did in fact create, elevate, and celebrate his extraordinarily “multiracial, multiethnic [and] multinational” crew. Besides Queequeg, the harpooneers  included Tashtego, “an unmixed Indian from Gay Head, the most westerly promontory of Martha’s Vineyard. . .which has long supplied the neighboring island of Nantucket with many of her most daring harpooneers”, and Ahasueras Daggoo, an African who, “[i]n his youth, had voluntarily shipped on board of a whaler (172-3). Other crew members came from the Azores, Greenland, and the Shetland Islands; “[t]hey were nearly all Islanders in the Pequod” (174). They hailed from the Isle of Man, Sicily, Tahiti, Malta, Iceland, France, Spain, Portugal, England, Ireland, Holland, China, Alabama (little Pip), Long Island, and Nantucket, of course. They were rugged, brave, and eminently capable. But, says C.L.R. James, “[w]hat Ahab really wants in order to attain his purpose is to finish away altogether with men who think” (55). In creating him, Melville anticipates Hitler and Stalin, whose madness “was born and nourished in the very deepest soil of Western Civilization” (James 10).

It will not do justice to either Melville or James for me to go much farther, so I will just say that Melville draws Queequeg vividly as a free man, loyal, generous, and utterly free from hypocrisy. He is one of a globally diverse crew, essentially democratic in its spirit–if it were not for its leadership, which, if given free rein, would destroy civilization altogether. As Melville writes in another work, Redburn, quoted by James in an epigraph: We [Americans] are not  a narrow tribe of men. . . . No: our blood is as  the flood of the Amazon, made up of a thousand noble currents all pouring into one., We are not a nation, so much as a world. . .” But in Captain Ahab, Melville, fully conversant with the current of his times, foresaw the modern era and the rise of totalitarianism.

The history of the whaling industry in North America is not a pretty one, but it is the stuff of epic. The young Herman Melville did in fact go out on a long whaling expedition like his narrator Ishmael, so he saw its operations firsthand. Whales were hunted for “sperm oil, spermaceti, whale oil and whalebone and occasionally ambergris if any were discovered” (Whales and Hunting, New Bedford Whaling Museum). British settlers employed Native Americans, skilled in hunting whales, as skilled crewmen, but although their skills enabled many to rise to positions of authority on whalers, racism prevented most from rising to the position of captain. Whaling was so rapacious and so lucrative that whales became endangered. As early as 1850 concerns were raised over their possible extinction, but it was not until 1986 that a global anti-whaling movement  movement eventually succeeded in getting a ban on commercial whaling, with some exceptions for scientific research. In its heyday, whaling was indeed a massive North American industry that sent its ships on distant expeditions for long periods of time, employing crews from all over the world. Now, no one uses whale oil anymore, and there is precious little demand for whalebone corsets. But the North Atlantic Right Whale, so named because it was the “right” one to hunt, has been driven to the brink of extinction, with only 360 individuals left, and deaths outpacing births.

Moby-Dick is an American epic that emerged from its time and place, but anticipated our own era and speaks to us all. Melville introduces us to Queequeg and the rest of the crew first, Captain Ahab later on, and at the last leaves us wondering who the savages are.

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552. Blow Away, Dandelion

Yesterday was a perfect day for gardening, and I worked with purpose for a couple of hours, raking a new bed, planting seedlings, and protecting them from the rabbits, chipmunks, and woodchucks, or trying to, using hoops covered with netting. Then I found one of Andrew’s garden tools and spent the next hour or so trying it out on the dandelions that had put down roots in our new-mown lawn.

Bad workmen blame their tools, they say. True enough. But bad work is often the result of not using the right tools. If you’ve tried pulling up a dandelion with your bare hands you know what I’m talking about. It almost inevitably breaks off at ground level leaving the whole root still in the ground, your wrists sore and your fingers coated with sticky, milky dandelion sap. A losing battle.

There is a simple but ingenious tool, though, that makes the job easy: a weed-puller. Andrew has two of them, and I don’t know why it took me so long to try using one. I did so today, and it worked perfectly. With just a little practice and concentration, I could pull up the long taproot along with the leaves and flowering stalk, leaving very little disturbance in the surrounding soil.

I think the success went to my head, because I got carried away, yanking out plant after healthy plant, all thriving in our pesticide-free garden. Some were flowering and others had already gone to seed, but all their leaves were lush and green. I remembered a scene from our years on the farm in Winchendon: little Nikhil, just-walking, trying to keep his balance in the front yard amidst masses of golden dandelions in full flower. And I thought, belatedly, This is a battle that doesn’t have to be fought. Humans and dandelions go back a long way together. In moderation, dandelions are good for us (well, most of us) and good for the garden. We wait until the violets are past blooming before we mow the lawn. Why not wait for the dandelions as well?

They say that humans are tool-using animals. I wonder, did I feel more human as I super-charged my weed-pulling power? What about when I tended the garden by hand? Was I more human then, or more brutish? Or were both activities evidence of my human-ness, at least in their relatively benign manifestations vis-à-vis dandelions? Perhaps I’m on the human spectrum, sometimes drawing upon deep reserves of the best energy, at other times regressing into inertia or worse.

© Marcus Lindstrom

As children we played with dandelion “clocks,” counting the puffs of our breath that it took to blow all the seeds away. But yesterday, after my purposeful planting and my manic bout of dandelion-pulling, I totally lost track of time. Squatting on the stone terrace, I started weeding the mass of little plants growing out of the moss between the stone squares. Every so often I came to for a few moments and reminded myself that I had to prepare for a doctor’s appointment later in the afternoon, but then fell right back into my weeding reverie.

In the early days of her dementia Mum would go out into the garden and similarly lose track of time, weeding. If we didn’t remind her, she would stay out there so long that she would get bug-bitten and over-exposed to the sun. I wondered whether the same thing was happening to me. My mind continued to wander as I remembered the old Rolling Stones song, Dandelion.

Dandelion don’t tell no lies
Dandelion will make you wise
Tell me if she laughs or cries
Blow away dandelion, blow away dandelion
Blow away dandelion
Blow away dandelion
Blow away dandelion

After some time, I don’t know how long, I rose to my feet and went back inside. The doors were open to the terrace and there was a through breeze.

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519. Out of Time?

You’re obsolete my baby
My poor old-fashioned baby
I said baby, baby, baby, you’re out of time.
               —Mick Jagger and Keith Richards

Out of Time is a Rolling Stones song, on their 1966 album Aftermath. In 1971, our senior year of high school, we played and sang along with it again and again on the funky record player in Andrew and Michael’s tree house (TMA #4, The Tree House).  Aftermath was one of the 33 rpm records that inaugurated the album era, replacing 45 rpm “singles”, and was also the first Rolling Stones album for which Mick Jagger and Keith Richards composed all the tracks, rather than simply covering songs by other artists (mostly African American blues singers). The song is about an old girlfriend who has returned from a time away only to find that she has been replaced and is sadly out of touch. Like so many songs of the era (The Times They are A-Changin’ and Roll Over Beethoven, just to mention a couple), its message to old fuddy-duddies was, Get with it or get out of the way. But 50 years later, I am in danger of becoming one of those old fuddy-duddies myself, someone who makes people roll their eyes when she speaks. I have to decide either to get with it or to make my peace with becoming increasingly irrelevant.

I wouldn’t have had to explain all of the above back in 1971, because everyone would have understood. It was our time, after all or, at least, so we felt. In July of that year the U.S. Congress ratified the 26th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, lowering the voting age to 18 from 21. It is illuminating to read Senator Edward (Ted) Kennedy’s March, 1970 case for the change, in which, among other points, he argued that it was wrong for young Americans to be able to be drafted to fight and die in Vietnam when they couldn’t even vote. He also argued that young people were better educated, more mature, and more politically active than their parents and grandparents had been at the same age, and they needed recognition and representation. (Sadly, half a century later, it is questionable whether 18-year-olds have taken advantage of the opportunity, since in the 2020 presidential elections the 18-24 year old age group had the lowest rate of voting, at only 51.4 percent, while those in the 65-74 age group had the highest rate, at 76 percent.) But I digress. My point is that at the time, our music, our slang, our political views all occupied center stage. Although the youth didn’t run the country politically, we did own the culture. We felt that we had our fingers on the pulse of the times, and that everybody else was hopelessly out of touch.

I’ve confessed elsewhere (TMA #140, Music Alone Shall Live) to being decades out of touch with popular music—and with popular culture in general, if truth be told. Constant contact with undergraduates in the classroom has given me at least a minimal name recognition of the music, television, and movies of the 18-24 age group, and—my subject today—of the language they use. It has been my job to teach them Standard English and to help them use language that is appropriate to different settings. While I believed that the language they used with their friends was valid on its own terms, I also felt that they needed to learn how and when to code-switch, changing their writing as appropriate in different media, from texting to formal essays and reports, and everything in-between. But increasingly, I found myself performing the role of the pedantic English teacher, and feared that I was actually becoming one of those old fuddy-duddies in their eyes. It was time for me to get with it or get out of the way.

Something that shocked me recently, and gave me a serious wake-up call, was a complaint by one of my husband’s siblings that my written language in emails and texts was pompous and gave them the distinct impression that I felt superior to them. My first reaction was high-handed indignation: this was just how I spoke, how I had always spoken. Was I to be expected to adjust the language that came naturally to me—to amputate myself, in a sense—just to make other people feel better? Shouldn’t they love and appreciate me as I was? But after some soul-searching, I have realized that my proper response demanded of me exactly what I have been teaching my students all these years: to recognize that there are different audiences as well as different forms and formats that demand different styles of writing and language usage. Using a formal letter format (Dear So-and-So) to introduce oneself in a text message just looks ridiculous. And yet I’ve been doing exactly that in what must be an infuriatingly self-righteous way.

As my sister reminded me in a recent conversation, adjusting one’s language to suit the setting, situation, and audience is not necessarily dumbing down—a term that betrays precisely the kind of superior attitude that diminishes and devalues all but users of the dominant form of Standard English. My sister, who has been working to bring her department’s public documents in line with The Plain Writing Act of 2010 (requiring that “federal agencies use clear government communication that the public can understand and use”), noted that making one’s language more culturally and linguistically accessible is not dumbing it down, but becoming smarter about being understood and getting one’s message across, which is, after all, the purpose of writing in the first place.

Take idioms, for instance—figures of speech. When writing for Tell Me Another, a personal blog to be sure, but also a public forum, I am ever-conscious of the probable unfamiliarity of many of the terms I use. Rather than code-switching to something more current in American speech, I tend to hyperlink to a definition of the term. To take one or two at random, I have hyperlinked Britishisms like going “back to the year dot” or South Asian English expressions like wanting to give someone “one tight slap” (both culturally specific and politically incorrect). I also regularly hyperlink dated or culturally specific words to their explanations, words like “corrasable” or “satchel.” But, at least until now, I have been steadfast about continuing to use the language I use, even if it meant that I was fast becoming a relic.

When I talk to age-mates, people who have grown up with me or who come from shared cultures and subcultures, I don’t have to explain myself. What a joy, to know that one will be understood! In such intimate company one can use language that would not fly with a general audience. Most of the time, however, one has to perform a version of oneself that is more broadly acceptable—and rightly so. As a kind of compromise, I have tended to put new usage in quotes (inverted commas, as my older self might have said) as in, My students are having “issues” with my reading assignment. Or alternatively, I might have followed it with a parenthetical “as they say” in order to distance myself from it, whether culturally or generationally, as in, The poor are being disproportionately “impacted” (as they say) by the new government’s policy. Impacted, like wisdom teeth? I ask you.

In the end, has this been an exercise in self-improvement or self-justification? Yes, I am increasingly at risk of getting out of touch, and I’m running out of time. No, I have my reasons for wanting to continue to write as I do. Is there anything at all that I have taken on board (as they say)? Well, yes. I recognize that if I want to reach a particular audience I have to use language that is intelligible to them (duh). If I must use obscure language, then I must define it. If I want to convey the necessity of code-switching in our increasing plural societies, then I must model that code-switching in my own writing. And I must practice what I preach by tailoring the length and style of my writing to the format and the audience. I do not want to go gentle into that good night. I must “burn and rave at close of day”. Although I insist on making a noise, I don’t want to be made a laughing stock or, worse still, to become irrelevant. I want to hook my readers, make them shout out, with Chuck Berry, “gotta hear it again today.” But I may just have to accept that to most, I will never be anything more than a pedantic English teacher. Gotta own that.

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511. Start as you mean to go on.

It’s going on 11 am and here I am sitting up in bed with end-of-term grades to submit, two outings to dress for, my daily walk still ahead of me, and a To Do list as long as my arm. One is supposed to get the grades in before starting in on the summer proper, but as usual I have allowed life to flow in and utterly derail me. I had resolved that because I have a lot on next week, I would get down to grading single-mindedly and submit the final grades for my classes early—for the first time ever, mind you. But here I am again, doing everything but, and with every hour that passes, dooming myself to an inevitable all-nighter a week from tomorrow.

But this is all very tedious. Let me tell it differently, with reference to literature. In R.K. Narayan’s delightful second novel, The Bachelor of Arts (1937), the wayward college student Chandran finds himself “face to face with November”, and the realization that half the college year is “already spent.” His B.A. examinations are looming and he has done nothing to prepare for them. “What one ought to do in a full year must now be done in just half the time.” So in a grand gesture that I well recognize, Chandran resolves to begin a rigorous programme of right living: to rise early, bathe in cold water, and give up smoking—just for starters. Then he draws up an ambitious programme of study.

He took out a sheet of paper and noted down all his subjects. He calculated the total number of preparation hours that were available from November the first to March. He had before him over a thousand hours, including the twelve-hour preparations on holidays. Of these thousand hours a just allotment of so many hundred hours was to be made for Modern History, Ancient History, Political Theories, Greek Drama, Eighteenth-century Prose, and Shakespeare. He then drew up a very complicated time-table which would enable one to pay equal attention to all subjects…Out of the daily six hours, three were to be devoted to the Optional Subjects and three to the Compulsory. In the morning the compulsory subjects and Literature at night.

Chandran duly arises at 5 am the next day; but from the very outset, the comedy of life begins getting in the way of his elaborate schedule. Something of great urgency turns up and utterly consumes his time for a fortnight. He has no option but to revise his initial programme to make up for the lost time.

He consoled himself with the fact that he had wasted several months so far, and a fortnight more, added to that account, should not matter…The time wasted in a fortnight could…be made up by half an hour’s earlier rising every day. He would also return home at seven in the evening instead of at seven-thirty. This would give him a clear gain of an hour a day over his previous programme. He hoped to make up the ninety study hours, at six hours a day, lost between the first of November and the fifteenth, in the course of ninety days.

But, notes the narrator wryly, “Man can only propose.” Chandran is inevitably drawn into other escapades that threaten to derail his programme yet again. And as it was with R.K. Narayan’s protagonist, so it was with me. As a junior faculty member facing the deadline for the submission of my book manuscript, I too drew up a rigorous—and altogether unrealistic—timetable with a certain number of hours per day and week allotted to the preparations. When, inevitably, I found myself a few weeks down the line having made no progress to speak of, I too sat down to revise my schedule by increasing the required number of hours of work per day. I consoled myself with the thought that I was not the first to have to revise my programme in this way. After all, the wildly prolific R.K. Narayan’s protagonist had had to do the same thing, hadn’t he?

But a few weeks soon became a few months, and, like Chandran’s, life had broken in and steamrolled over my best intentions. Once again, I found myself re-calculating the number of hours remaining until the hard—and fast-approaching—deadline and once again revising upward the number of hours per day that I would have to apply myself to the increasingly daunting task. I’m ashamed to say that this happened yet again, and yet again, I consoled myself with the example of my fickle—and, I neglected to acknowledge, entirely fictional—literary predecessor.

Somehow I muddled through, and the materials were duly submitted, though not before I had put my family to a lot of unnecessary heartache. For they were packed and ready to set out on our cross-country road trip with the motor running while I assembled the final manuscript and revised the cover note for the umpteenth time. We mailed the package Priority Mail on our way out of town. But this is not my point.

Some time later I returned to The Bachelor of Arts to revisit my hilarious and reassuring fellow-procrastinator who had had to revise his unrealistic timetable repeatedly. But although I went through the text with a fine-tooth comb, I couldn’t find it. Eventually, I had to accept that it wasn’t there. Sure enough, in chapters two through five, Chandran had drawn up his programme and then had had to revise it after events in his life overtook it. But he had only had to do so once. After that initial two-week delay, he had in fact stuck to his punishing schedule of rising at 4:30 am and not retiring to bed until 11:00 pm. He had not lapsed again.  He had not had to ratchet up his hours per day yet again. I, on the other hand, had fallen away from my initial resolve repeatedly and had to revise and re-revise my daily timetable. My consolation, that the great R.K. Narayan’s comic hero had done the same, turned out to have been an utter fiction.

The realization shook me, but I managed to shake it off and soon returned to my bad habits, though now without the reassurance of fiction. Now I just hated myself.

So here it is, past noon now, and, as Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers used to say on National Public Radio, “you’ve done it again, you’ve just wasted another perfectly good hour.“ As retirement sets in, I am inevitably making resolutions. It is important to start as you mean to go on, I tell myself—and not for the first time. I am at the other end of life from the young Chandran, who was just starting out. But I recognize his feelings as his college career came to a close:

As they dispersed and went home, Chandran was aware that he had passed the very last moments in his college life, which had filled the major portion of his waking hours for the last four years. There would be no more college for him from tomorrow. He would return a fortnight hence for the examination and (hoping for the best) pass it, and pass out into the world, for ever out of Albert College. He felt very tender and depressed.

Chandran does pass his exams and another, very poignant, chapter of his life begins. If you haven’t read R.K. Narayan’s early trilogy—Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts, and The English Teacher—you have a treat in store. For my part, I still intend to start as I mean to go on. Stay tuned.

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510. School’s (Nearly) Out

As retirement looms—why does that sound ominous?—I’ve found myself thinking back over all the jobs I’ve done over the years. Counting them up, I’ve remembered at least twenty-five, from waitress, house-cleaner, and gas-station attendant to teaching assistant, research assistant, college professor; and everything in-between. It has always irked me that people outside the teaching profession think that college professors have a cushy life when, in fact, we’re always on the job, the classroom hours being just the tip of the iceberg. As I prepare to retire I’m still feeling defensive about the work I’ve done because to my mind it will never have been enough. I think the praise I value most came when, at age 21, I’d put in a day of hard labor on a farm and the manager (Pete Hill, our friend Michael’s dear father), said—with some surprise—that I certainly knew how to work. How much I’ve put that knowledge into action since then is one of the things I find nagging at me as the countdown begins.

I’ve already written about the paper round, Godine Press, the Merit gas station and the Blue Parrot, house-cleaning, the Posh Bagel, and Whetstone Press. There were so many more jobs in my early, checquered career: shop assistant at Party Favors in Coolidge Corner, circulation assistant, Widener Library, caterer in Belmont, free-lance laddu-maker, greenhouse worker, technical editor, Environmental Research & Technology, first employee of an (anti-)nuclear information and resource service (NIRS), newspaper editor and board secretary at a food co-op federation (NEFCO), newspaper stringer, The Winchendon Courier, medical receptionist (for a week), substitute teacher (for two whole days). And none of the above counts my unpaid or volunteer work. 

Teaching was a profession I came to late, in my thirties, and have been at for the past 35 years, in different capacities and at five different colleges and universities. Strangely enough, I haven’t written much about it—the so-called life of the mind.

I wonder why not? Something about not telling tales out of school, perhaps. Something to revisit after retirement?  In my current state of exhaustion I think, not bloody likely. For now, here’s a handful of teaching stories—one set in the 1980s and the rest between 2017 and 2020:

Reaganomics 101
teaching in the 80s

Why Should Not Old Women Be Mad?
an end-of-semester rant or, I’m so old that. . .

Scattergram, April 2017
teaching in the age of Trump

Free from Thought
still in the age of Trump

Zoom
during the pandemic 

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498. Remembering Mum on Mother’s Day

                Mum’s bleeding hearts

On this glorious early-May Mother’s Day, I sit in bed with my second cup of tea, thinking of my mother, who passed away three years ago. Though she is still very much with me, I so miss the quality of her active presence in the world—my world. As I contemplate retirement and feel overwhelmed at the very thought of all that must be done to prepare for it, I think of Mum, who plunged into every task and saw it through with determination. She worked so hard to make life for our family easier than it had been for her and her brothers and sisters when they were growing up, and even when she could have sat back and rested on her laurels she couldn’t let go of the lifelong habit of hard work. The house my parents bought at retirement was the biggest one they had ever owned, but Mum never even considered hiring anyone to clean it. She did it all herself until Alzheimer’s Disease prevented her from doing it any longer.

Dad told me a story about Mum from the time when they were first courting. Visiting the flat that he shared with another bachelor, she was shocked at the state of it. She entreated Dad to let her clean it for him, and he eventually acquiesced, although he had some qualms about allowing his girlfriend to do such dirty work. But for Mum, work was never dirty, and cleanliness was next to godliness. Dad said that when she was done he could hardly recognize the flat, sparkling clean; and when his roommate returned he was absolutely astounded.

Mum didn’t limit her cleaning to her boyfriend’s digs, but also took on his washing and ironing. Again, Dad said he made an effort to deter her, but I suspect it was a rather feeble effort, because he loved dressing well, and must have found it hard to maintain his own high standards in that tiny apartment in cold, damp, sunless London. Mum took his shirts away with her and returned them to him spotlessly clean—washed, dried, aired, and ironed.

All this Dad told me in wistful tones, as if he hadn’t fully appreciated all Mum’s hard work through the years. Even as the Alzheimer’s took hold, she continued to try to clean the kitchen, tearing off strip after strip of paper towels and wiping down the countertops with an energy born of the frustration that she was unable to do more. At first Dad, thrifty as both our parents were, was annoyed by the number of paper towels Mum was wasting, until I pointed out to him that she was only trying to hold on to some remaining control in her own kitchen, most of which had been taken away from her. As was always his way, Dad was instantly penitent, and never complained about waste again.

Sadly, it wasn’t long before Mum couldn’t even wipe down the surfaces anymore, turning instead to untangling and smoothing down the fringes on the woven placemats as she sat at the dining-room table. For my part I remembered wistfully how, before Alzheimer’s, she would race to wash all the pots and pans before sitting down to dinner while we entreated her to join us so that we could begin our meal without guilt. She did this because she knew that after the evening meal was over and it was time to relax in the living room, she would instantly fall fast asleep, exhausted, even while her tea was still hot. For Mum was a lifelong early riser, up for hours before the rest of us even stirred in our beds. The only exception was Baby Nikhil, also an early riser in those days. Whenever we were staying over at our parents’ house, Grandma Gladys—or GG—would play with him energetically while I, never a morning person, took my own sweet time to get myself in gear.

Mum, detail from one of Dad’s paintings

So here I am on Mother’s Day, looking out at the garden and contemplating my To Do list. Thanks to dear Andrew I have now breakfasted and had both my morning cups of tea. The bird feeder and bird bath are full, freshly-potted marigolds glowing orange in the courtyard, and sunlight streaming in through all the new Spring greenery. Mum would have loved to sit out on the terrace with me underneath the umbrella, bird-watching or doing the Times crossword. To be honest, though, with the exception of her first cup of coffee at the crack of dawn when her mind was the sharpest and she would whizz through even the hardest crossword in record time, she never sat still until, perhaps, late afternoons in retirement. Then she would join Dad under the umbrella in the back garden, her flower garden in full bloom, enjoying a cold glass of her favorite Miller Lite and, finally, allowing herself to look upon her handiwork and see that it was good. Here’s to you, dear Mum!

NB: Lest you get the impression from the above that Mum was all work and no play, nothing could be further from the truth. She had a passion for life and, ever restless with the status quo, longed to live it more fully than ever. Endlessly interested in people, she tended to make friends with women much younger than herself because she was forward-thinking and young at heart. She adored children and never tired of making up games to play with them. She never stopped teaching or learning either. Mum loved music and dancing, as I have written in other posts. And she never could resist a Kit-Kat.

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491. Anticipation, Not Dread

I’m one of those people who can go from zero to sixty in an instant: a human panic button. It doesn’t matter whether the precipitating factor is a trivial matter like the milk for my tea going bad or an enormity like the war on Yemen: in either case I’m on a hair trigger. I’ve always insisted that I’m not really anxious, that it’s just my way of letting off steam; but this has allowed me to dismiss the corrosive effect of my explosive behavior, not only on my own well-being, but also on people around me. It must be exhausting to interact with someone who is perpetually on high alert about one thing or another. And, I’m increasingly recognizing, it can be exhausting to be that person.

“There’s no problem here.” This proposition has presented itself to me two or three times in as many weeks, raised by different people in different settings. My initial reaction was to dismiss it as irresponsibly acquiescent, when vigilance and resistance is required at this time. Of course this world is rife with problems. But as Pete Seeger reminds us in Turn, Turn, Turn, there is a time and a season for everything. And nobody would accuse the author of If I Had a Hammer of acquiescence. 

What would it mean to tell oneself that there was no problem here? Our meditation teacher has asked us to give this question some consideration. Of course there are many problems, internal and external, small and large. But what purpose does it serve to identify with every problem? Perhaps it does nothing but get one’s knickers in a twist. Might it not be better all round to be able to discern whether or not a given situation needs to be considered a problem in the first place, and whether making it a problem does anything but give one an adrenaline rush?

Moving from the impersonal “one” to the first person—me, that is—how might it be different if I pushed a mental pause, rather than a panic, button when each new situation presented itself? It would give me time to think and space to breathe. It would allow me to assess the seriousness and scope of the situation. It would enable me to determine whether it was something I could affect positively by my actions, and if not, to simply set it aside rather than fretting needlessly about it. And if it was something critically important to me, that pause would allow me to consider how I might address it most effectively.

An example that I’m dealing with now. Next week I start teaching again after a semester-long sabbatical leave. During this time my colleagues have been learning how to use videoconferencing platforms such as Zoom to conduct their classes online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which means that I have a lot of catching up to do. I could sound off about it—and believe me, I have—or I could start addressing the situation. Is it a problem? Not necessarily, because I have the time and the tools to deal with it before it becomes a problem. However, my default mode would be to make a tremendous fuss about it and demand that all my friends and my long-suffering spouse make a fuss about it too. Wouldn’t the best course of action simply be to get on with it, asking questions and getting answers, revising my syllabi for the new situation, and reminding myself that my students are likely to be struggling with it much more than I am. It is in the nature of this situation that we will encounter problems—personal, political, psychological, technological—but we are in it  together and we must deal with it together. The trick for me is to look upon my return to teaching not with dread, but with anticipation, and to prepare for it accordingly.

I can’t do anything about the zero-to-sixty phenomenon that seems to have turned me into a Senior Citizen overnight; but I can adjust the hair-trigger 0-60 setting on my fight-or-flight response. In fact I must: it’s unsustainable at my age. What I’ve come to see is that a panic response makes it impossible to deal with any situation optimally. Quite the opposite: it turns every new situation into a problem.

Yes, there is a problem here, but it’s one of my own making.

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486. Fingerprinted and Found Wanting

immigration fingerprinting (Chris Schneider)

After decades of living in the United States as a Permanent Resident Alien, I began the process of applying for citizenship. I suppose I had waited a long time to take the plunge, so perhaps it was only what I deserved to be kept waiting in turn–interminably, it seemed. I filled out and submitted my application for naturalization back in July 2007, in plenty of time to be able to vote in the 2008 presidential election, or so I thought. But nothing happened for a very long time, and all in all the process took nearly two years. My citizenship test and interview were not scheduled until August, 2008, and it was not until March 2009, when the election had come and long gone and the new president had already been inaugurated, that I finally attended my own inauguration into U.S. citizenship, the mass swearing-in ceremony. But the first sign that the wheels of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) were starting to creak into action had come in mid-December 2007, when I received a letter informing me of my appointment to be fingerprinted.

Both the citizenship interview and the swearing-in took place in Boston, but the fingerprinting operation was in Hartford, Connecticut—a little bit closer to home but, as it turned out, much more alienating. It took place in a crowded, dingy office where I was given the distinct feeling that we were already considered guilty until we could somehow prove otherwise. The waiting area was the most unwelcoming place, rather like an old Greyhound Bus station in the sleaziest part of town. All the applicants—whether pregnant, elderly, or infirm it made no difference—were treated with casual disregard if not outright hostility. Although I knew I was a privileged immigrant and had had an easy time in comparison to many others, in that office I got just a taste of what it felt like to be just one of many miserable supplicants abjectly seeking entry into the most powerful country on earth.

At last my name was called. The man rolling and squishing my inked fingers made no effort to be personable, to soften the humiliating ordeal, and as he worked his irritation seemed to increase. Finally he remarked that my fingerprints were very worn, and managed to make it sound like an act of defiance on my part, or if not, then some kind of character defect. I had been tried and found wanting. Was he suggesting that I had deliberately worn down my prints so as to pervert the course of justice? Or simply saying that I was an inferior specimen? I did my best to disregard him, but again, was given the distinct impression that I was a dirty foreigner who didn’t deserve the honor I had had the presumption to seek.

Apparently bricklayers, who handle rough materials, and secretaries, who handle lots of paper, are the most susceptible to the wearing-down of their fingerprints. In my early 50s by then, I had done both–heavy manual work at the greenhouse and the farm and plenty of paper-handling at the press, not to mention mountains of washing besides. But I was not ashamed of my washerwoman’s hands, evidence of hard work (and of forgetting to wear rubber gloves when I did the dishes). So yes, my fingers were work-worn; what did they want to make of it?

My prints may now be part of a massive digital fingerprint file going right back to the 1990s. In 2018 the USCIS announced a plan to digitize their entire archive of fingerprints taken from applicants for naturalization, in a move to be able to deport people retroactively, even after they have already become U.S. citizens. Just knowing this keeps you on edge which is, no doubt, the intention. Don’t get too settled! You’re still an outsider.

Here are a couple of songs for all the hard-working immigrants out there—Hoyt Axton’s Boney Fingers and the Rolling Stones’ Salt of the Earth. Hold your heads high. Make no mistake, no matter what Homeland Security and the Border Patrol might say, America needs you; it is not just you who should have to prove yourself worthy, but this country that should have to earn your respect.

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478. Sheer Cruelty

 

In 2018, 18.3 million people lived in mixed-status families in the United States. A mixed-status family has at least one member who is an undocumented immigrant. Hundreds of thousands of young DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) recipients live in these mixed-status households with one or both parents undocumented as well as younger siblings who are citizens. Everyone in these households is subject to tremendous stress at the best of times, living in poverty, having to keep their precarious status a secret, and living with the knowledge that one of their loved ones could be deported at any time. Even when the citizen children are old enough to sponsor family members there are roadblocks put in their way; and family members who are citizens are frequently denied benefits for which they are eligible.

Soon after Donald Trump took office as President he announced his intention to do away with the DACA program, established by President Obama in 2012 as a stopgap since Congress had been unable to pass the DREAM Act, which would have offered a path to citizenship to millions of hard-working, tax-paying, law-abiding undocumented Americans. At one point he floated a deal to DACA recipients that he would offer them a path to citizenship in exchange for getting the funding he wanted to build the massive border wall between the U.S. and Mexico . To their credit, DACA recipients refused to throw their even more vulnerable fellow-immigrants under the bus in return for their own security. Now DACA is before the U.S. Supreme Court and hundreds of thousands of young people are waiting anxiously for the decision that is due any day now.

Now add the COVID-19 pandemic into this nightmarish situation. Here are two diabolical moves that the administration has made:

First: According to the Migration Policy Institute, there are 15.4  million people in mixed-status families who have been denied their federal stimulus checks. Joint filers cannot receive a stimulus check under the CARES Act if one spouse does not have a Social Security Number (SSN). Stimulus checks are even being denied to immigrants who have Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers (ITINs) instead of SSNs. According to the Center for Migration Studies, “ITIN filers pay over $9 billion in withheld payroll taxes annually.” Several lawsuits have been filed challenging this CATCH-22, on the grounds that it is unconstitutional for the federal government to exclude someone from financial assistance because of who they married. Meanwhile millions of hardworking people are being denied emergency help.

Lorena Espinoza de Piña, ready for work as a registered nurse

Second: US Foreign-Born Workers by Status and State, and the Global Pandemic, a May, 2020 report from the Center for Migration Studies, shows how many immigrants are putting their lives on the line as essential workers at this time. The report shows that there is a larger percentage of immigrants than US-born Americans working in essential jobs. It lists by state and occupation the numbers of immigrants doing essential work, and breaks it down by immigration status. You can see for yourself how many undocumented Americans are risking their lives taking care of our elderly and sick, cleaning our buildings, and growing and processing our food, among many other essential occupations.

President Trump and his senior adviser Stephen Miller are itching to crack down even further on immigration, taking advantage of COVID-19 fears to make sweeping changes to the U.S. immigration system. In this climate, will the U.S. Supreme Court vote to strike down DACA? According to the Center for American Progress, more than 200,000 DACA recipients alone are working on the front lines of the coronavirus response. Public health experts have made the case to the Court that their deportation would be catastrophic for the nation at this time, vital as they are to the fight against the coronavirus. Of course, it would be catastrophic for them as well and for their families: sheer cruelty.

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457. Farming

This is the sixth entry in a month-long series, Fifty years in the United States: An immigrant’s perspective, as part of the annual Blogging from A to Z Challenge.

Farming.

From 1984 to 1990 Andrew and I lived with friends from the Boston area on a 60-acre farm in Winchendon, a small town in North-Central Massachusetts. In truth it was mostly woods, with less than 20 acres of cleared land, an old red farmhouse and barn, and a run-down chicken coop. We had been having conversations since 1977 about forming some kind of collective and moving to a farm, sustained economically by some of us having paying jobs in the community; but when push came to shove most of the others bailed out, all of them economically more solvent than we were, and in the end there were just five of us. Since 1980 Andrew and I had been running a small press in the Boston area with his sister Eve, moving to the farm meant shuttling back and forth to Boston every week, which we had to do until we could move the operation to the repurposed chicken coop. Letterpress printers don’t make much money, still less when half the customers, mostly environmental groups and community organizations, get a political discount; but we had to keep working at the press and couldn’t afford to get involved in another marginal start-up. In the end our housemates started a small business growing perennials and eventually added a CSA, delivering vegetables in season to local families and our friends in the city, while all five of us maintained a big kitchen garden for our own use, including putting by large quantities of food to carry us through the winters.

It was hard farming in Winchendon, which turned out to be just about the coldest town in the state, so the growing season was very short, from after Memorial Day in late May to the week before Labor Day in late August, so one couldn’t grow crops that needed an extended period of heat, like okra or peanuts. But we were still able to grow a few crops that normally thrived in the heat because we ordered from Johnny’s up in Maine who developed seeds especially for northern climes, including a terrific variety of hot chili pepper.  Maureen and Rudy had the forethought to put in strawberries and asparagus for rare times of pure extravagance, and we produced a wealth of potatoes, onions, carrots, peppers, tomatoes, eggplants, beans and leafy greens of all kinds, and lots of culinary herbs. I say “we” loosely: I was never really a farmer, though I benefited from the hard work and expertise of the others. I helped a little with the weeding, killed potato beetles and tomato hornworms when they threatened our precious crops, collected eggs from the hens, picked when it was time to harvest, cooked, and ate my share—and then some.

But however isolated the community, inhospitable the climate, and rocky the soil, living on a farm was idyllic in the dark decade of the Reagan Years, when all our social activism of the previous decade seemed to have come to nought, when the very concept of society and community was under challenge by the defunding of the public sector and an ethos of individualism. We were actively engaged with raising our children–Andrew and I had one child and Maureen and Rudy another, three months apart, so Nikhil and Eric were brothers. They played at farming with Playmobil (Eric’s first word was “tractor”) and grew their first crop of scarlet runner beans at age four out of a seed packet they’d brought home as a party favor from the birthday party of a little friend of theirs, whose parents were also farmers.

In the mid-1980s, at the very time when we moved to our little farm, American farming was in crisis. Many farms, particularly in the Midwest, were up for sale. Farm debt had recently skyrocketed and now prices had collapsed and incomes were plummeting. It all added up to a consolidation of land in big farms, and small and medium-size farmers going out of business.  According to Iowa PBS, the “trend toward very large farms was initiated during the 1980s and it continues unabated up to the present day.” In September 1985 dozens of artists, organized by Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, and Neil Young, organized Farm Aid, that started as a benefit concert that raised $9 million to save family farms, and still continues as a nonprofit organization whose mission is to keep them on the land.

Interestingly, a parallel movement to the consolidation of land in mega-farms has been a “concurrent, ongoing trend. . .for the development of small family farming enterprises, mostly organic, that is producing many new farm people” (Iowa PBS). The little farm we lived on, at least the business side of it–I can’t claim any credit for the work–was part of that movement as a member of NOFA, the Northeast Organic Farming Association, catering to the growing desire for high-quality organically grown produce (hence our hand-culling of potato beetles and tomato hornworms).

Although compared to the average American farm, our production was small potatoes (our ascerbic housemate Charlie Gamble got a kick out of near-obsolete agricultural idioms); although it never made anyone a living; and although complaints about the weather and arguments among the adults were a-plenty, we certainly put in our share of honest effort, and our son spent his formative years unplugged, in small-town America, living on a farm.

Here’s The Who singing Now I’m a Farmer: and I’m digging, digging, digging, digging, digging.
And here are more stories of life on the farm:

127. Going Up the Country

69. Wonders in the Woods

10. Ghosts of New Boston

86. Bottled Sunshine

177. The Sugar Snow

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