Ditz

My husband wanted me to pick up 20 pre-stamped postcards as we needed them to mail off in some contest materials. If you send a self-addressed, pre-stamped postcard, the person at the other end will send it back which assures you that your entry got to where it needed to go.

At our local post office, there were no pre-stamped postcards to be had. The postal clerk said some guy came in and bought them out, over 100 cards. Come back next Monday.

I wonder why someone needs that many?

Not one to wait, I sat in my pickup and wrote out my contest submission checks, attached them to the various stories and poetry, and licked shut the envelopes. I drove to a neighboring city where it hit me that even if I got the postcards, it would do no good since I had LICKED SHUT THE ENVELOPES. Drat, dang, and crap!

So I thought, well, I drove all the way here and my husband wanted the postcards, so I'll get them and mail off the envelopes, which is what I did. I hope.

The clerk seemed spacy, off in woo-woo land. She didn't ask any of the 15 questions the clerks at the local post office do, like do you want express or priority or first class, etc. Is it hazardous, dangerous, or will it stink up the whole post office like a bad fart? She just weighed the envelopes and started sticking on stamps. On two of them. I asked for 20 pre-stamped postcards which have some lovely fish on them, by the way. I paid. I left.

At my pickup, I realized I needed verification for my taxes, so I went back in and asked for a receipt. She tore off what she'd done on the adding machine, stamped it with some official stamp, and gave it to me. But my other envelope sitting on her counter still had no stamps on it. As I left, she was looking at it as if it were an unrecognizable species from another planet.

"Hmmm. What do I do with this?" she seemed to be thinking. I swear I felt her woo-woo vibe clear out in my vehicle.

Now I'm worried. Especially with no pre-stamped postcard coming back to me saying my contest submissions were received. Did she actually put stamps on that last envelope and put the three packages in the "out" bag to be mailed?

Only time will tell. It does not pay to be a ditz. Or go to a post office where one is working.

Magnolia in Savannah

In May, I went to Georgia to visit my friend Martha West at her lovely Lake Hartwell home.

After that wonderful experience, I joined my friend Roseann for an Elderhostel tour of Savannah. If you like learning when you travel, I can't recommend Elderhostel highly enough. It's the only way to go, for me.

This is a magnolia I saw during a Savannah stroll.

Cabbage

Cabbage.
Sliced.
Sprayed across the upper kitchen cabinets.
Decorating the blender and the toaster.
Adorning the counter top.
Clinging to my knees, toes, arms, and hair.
Nesting in my cleavage.
Resting on the floor.
Soaking in salt water.
Crocked.
Sauerkraut-making day.

Sanctuary

SANCTUARY
--for Stephen

You came to us
on broken wings,
settled warily
to convalesce
in our sanatory
nest.

You rode your skateboard
fast and high
endlessly
seeking
Air--
that painless instant
of peace
where nothing intrudes.

Now, a monitor of purity,
you climb smokestacks,
eradicate abuse.

Weekends,
you glide higher still,
you and the hawk on your shoulder
soaring far above us
in search of what sustains you--
a profound quiet,
two synchronous hearts.

Maybe Vance Can't Dance But I Can

“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. If you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.” Martha Graham, dancer

Kathy Anderson, me (my red back) and Susan Bartron Reents

“Vanz Kant Danz”—John Fogerty


MAYBE VANCE CAN’T DANCE BUT I CAN

An acquaintance recently made a chance comment that set me off down a path where I’d been before, a path I didn’t like the first time. I liked it even less this time.


The blithering acquaintance said, “The last thing I wanted to see was some fat person out there sweating and dancing.”

Really.

I am a fat person, what Alexander McCall Smith calls a woman of “traditional build.” I love to dance. When I dance, I sweat.

The vacuous, insensitive comment took me right back to the day I sat in the faculty section of the auditorium at the high school where I taught. Next to me was a small-boned and slender teacher, a lover of the arts, a runner. She ate fiber crackers and maybe a few grapes for lunch, and a soft-boiled egg for dinner, tiny bits in order that she might stay thin.

We were looking at the stage where the high school dance team was performing a number. One of the young dancers was more robust than the others.

The non-eater said to me, “That is ugly. Fat people should not dance in public.”

She said that to me as if my largess was invisible. Her BIG-otry shattered me.

I always find dancing magical and mesmerizing. Music and movement in their exchange of molecules elevates us to a higher place. In a blur of bodies and rhythm, synchronicity resides. To my eyes, the young woman of traditional build was by far the best dancer on the stage, entranced and entrancing. She was joy personified. How ironic to hear Miss Thin say this dancer out of all of them onstage shouldn’t be there.

Stunned, I kept quiet but I was sure the dancer and I had just been put down by a big chunk of fatism.

No wonder people are afraid to dance when critics like these lurk, waiting to strip them of their joy.

I have to endure “women-sized” clothing designed as if giant squares of cloth sewn together is considered stylish. I have to endure outdoors companies telling me, “We don’t make winter coats for women your size,” as if we shouldn’t be allowed to hike, ski or snowshoe along with our friends.

I will no longer endure rude comments by those who also feel other fat people and I should not be seen dancing. Hello? Have you seen Queen Latifah dance? How about Marissa Jaret Winokur, that cute woman from Hairspray? How about sports analyst Warren Sap, who made it to the finals of Dancing With the Stars, not because of his precise technique but because people all across America loved witnessing his absolute joy of dance?

Dancing is what humans do to show who they are and how they fit into this world. Dancing is how we demonstrate happiness at being alive. Dancing is ritual and tribal trancemaking. My favorite music is the kind that makes me want to jump up and dance. I do.

Nobody’s going tell my sisters and me that we can’t break into dance when we hear a good song at the grocery store. Not only do we dance that song, we sing it too and we have BIG voices. We’ve been dancing amongst the oranges and grapefruit for years.

A bunch of folks have taken our lead. On the internet, check out Antwerp’s Centraal Station in Belgium or “Brian and Katie’s Evolution of Dance Wedding.” Watch Judson Laipply in “Evolution of Dance,” or “Matt Harding’s World Dancing Tour.” Have you seen those videos on You Tube? If you need more, watch T-Mobile’s ad made at the Liverpool Street Station or the Grand Central scene in the film, “The Fisher King.” Everyone, from large to small, is having a good time.

I’m older now, besides being fat. Next thing you know, we old, fat people are going to be told no one wants to see us dance. Those Nasties better not be coming to my Zumba class then because nobody is gonna stop my feet or my hips once I get them started!

As prescribed by his doctor, my 85 year-old uncle dances three times a week and he’s still going strong. I’d say that’s a hell of a lot better way to die, if it comes to that, than sitting in a stupor in front of a TV screen.

The truth is that we’d all be healthier if we danced every day no matter what our size. We’d be more joyful. Dancing is a blessed felicity that builds on itself.

When I get hit by happy, it just has to come out and the best way it comes out is by dancing. If seeing me bouncing about bothers you, just turn your head because I’m not stopping. I’ve got a move on.

Northeastern Oregon Women

When I first met my friend, Elaine, I was a high school English teacher in a rural coastal town. She ran the office. Her daughter was my student. Maybe it was my black tights that fooled her or my bookish ways. Maybe because I can speak French.

Now she tells me that she still cannot believe that I garden, she cannot believe that I dig in the dirt, that I pull weeds, that I haul manure. Even more fabulous to her is that I then preserve, either by canning, freezing or drying, all that I grow. She loves my pickled beets and blackberry cordial.

“It just doesn’t seem like you,” she says. “I saw you growing up in a loft in New York, not in a quarter-acre garden in soil-encrusted jeans, an old straw hat on your head, a red bandana handkerchief hanging from your pocket, with sweat dripping off your forehead.

“You’re not carrying around a bucket full of hand tools and a bottle of water, a hoe and a shovel. No, in my mind’s eye, you have a bag from Neiman Marcus or Macy’s or Filene’s Basement and a bunch of flowers. Maybe a cheesecake from Junior’s.”

That she pictured me in a New York loft, so cosmopolitan, so cultured, makes me smile. That she saw old farm-girl me as a sophisticate pleases me.

Truth to tell, I no doubt could live that way, in a loft with books and art all around, good restaurants and even better theatre within walking distance. A place where I could find poetry and movies and stores providing every item I might want without driving two hours over treacherous mountain passes. Imagine the symphonies, the ballets, the lectures. And yes, the famous cheesecake might make its way to my hands and further yet.

A month maybe. If it were spring, maybe three. I could last that long. But then, oh then, my need for an open, flat valley with sun morning, noon, and night, a valley ringed by hills and evergreens, a valley full of pastures, crops, and animals, a valley of crossroads lined with turn-of-the century farmhouses and weathered barns, that need would overcome me. I would have to fly home where I could reach my arms out and not touch anyone; home, where I could walk a quarter mile and not touch anyone. Home, where I would not have to look straight up to find the sky.

We Northeastern Oregon women are like that. Our love of land is epigenetic, bred into us, I’m convinced. Elaine knows. She’s a Northeastern Oregon woman too. Even though we both live in Western Oregon now, as far west as you can go without falling into the sea, we chose a rural town in which to settle. We live on farms in valleys encircled by hills and trees, in places that look as much like Northeastern Oregon as we can get. Still, something is not quite the same. The sunlight year-round, the summer heat, the smell of dust and wheat? Sitting around the bonfire at night next to the slough catching catfish? The rustle in the grass that means snake?

Growing up when and where we did, we learned to be thrifty, to be gleaners. Instead of throwing things away, we saved things and figured out other ways to make use of them. We lived in a way that’s now back in fashion, now called “sustainable” and “organic.” Back then it was called making something out of nothing because nothing was what our parents had a lot of.

We Northeastern Oregon women can catch a chicken, chop off its head, pluck it, gut it, and cook it up, all in the same day. We can drive in snow up to the hoods of our vehicles and call it a good day outside. We can spend the day herding cattle and whip up a barbecue that night. We can sew our own clothing and have it win awards at the county fair. Our houses are decorated with natural treasures such as birds’ nests, rocks, and oddly-shaped wood. Moss and dried twigs, plumes of dried grass and cat tails.

We find our joy in other people. When you grow up living long distances from another human being, you cherish the times when you get together--dances, 4-H meetings, weddings and funerals. You care. You share, willingly, because you know each other. You come together because you want to, not because you are forced to by small or crowded spaces. Even if you move away, your Northeastern Oregon cells locate each other.

We find our joy in nature. We are poets and essayists, women of words, spoken or written. We are painters and musicians. We live where there is land between houses. We grow flowers. Don Gray’s paintings of Union or Cove or Joseph, rounded brown hills and bird-filled marshes, bring tears to our eyes.

That loft in New York would be nice and exploring would keep me busy. Just not for too long. I’d get nervous, needing my fix for home.

When we go home to visit, we breathe easier. We feel at peace. We may not live in Northeastern Oregon any longer but Northeastern Oregon is alive in us.

Rush

Here's a little poem I started writing in my head on the way home. It's not finished (or maybe it is) but I couldn't wait to share the sentiment:

Don't shush Rush.
We need an idiot
to know we are on the right track.
Kings had fools, right?
We have ours.
The Republican Party
Rigoletto.