ANCILLARY MERCHANDISE!

I'm posting this here in case anybody reads it who doesn't look at Facebook:  I recently published a novel on Amazon!  I'm not all that technological but today I think I pressed the right series of buttons to make it available on Kindle as well.  Eventually.  In the meantime, though, if anybody's interested in a paperback romance -- well, sort of a romance -- HERE'S A LINK:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Woman-Who-Loved-Sea/dp/1481862782

Robin and Mary's New Orleans Misadventure: The Denouement

     I can only fit so much into those newspaper columns, and I was determined to finish this chronicle without an endless slew of "To Be Continued"s.  Thus I rolled the universe into a ball for the newspaper, then worried it was choppy and incoherent.  So here I have expanded on this week's newspaper piece a great deal indeed.  If you think I've been TOO complete, feel free to read in increments.

Part III:  Robin and Mary’s Mardi Gras MisAdventure:  The Denouement

By Robin Ford Wallace

“I imagine alcohol was involved?” 

That’s the first thing the bearded young doctor said to us when Mary was wheeled into the curtained-off treatment cubicle in the ER.  

It struck us as an odd thing for a doctor to say; but later, after he had come back shaking his head grimly over Mary’s X-ray, we wondered if he wasn’t a doctor at all but someone who had escaped from a nearby asylum.  I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d whipped out a rifle and shot her.  Whatever happened to, “You’re going to be just fine”?

However he delivered it, though, the message was clear:  Mary had broken hell out of her leg.  It would require enough pins for a bowling alley.  Mary, who hadn’t been in a hospital since her tonsillectomy at 6, was here for a while.

So it began:  People began arriving in the cubicle to ask:  How old are you?  How tall?  How much do you weigh?  Do you smoke?  Apparently nobody wrote down the answers because the next person would ask the same questions. 

At perhaps the 10th repetition, though, there was a surprise:  The orthopedic surgeon noticed the age Mary gave didn’t match her year of birth.  Her birthday this year fell on Mardi Gras; she knew that.  But she’d been in denial about which one:  This one had a zero at the end!

This orthopedic surgeon was a tiny, beautiful Asian-American woman, young and modern, but what she did next could have come out of an old Western, or the song where Lorne Greene saves the life of Ringo (“But a spark still burned so I used my knife”).    “This is going to hurt,” she said.  “Now or later?” 

Mary said to get it over with.  The doctor put her little hands on Mary’s leg, reared back and –

Oh – my – God.  Such screaming. 

I slunk off to the waiting room.  Mary was pumped full of dope but still in terrible pain.  The doctor said she’d operate in the morning if it could be arranged. 

It could not.

I am flopping around here trying to find words to tell you the reality of Mardi Gras in New Orleans.  It’s huge, overshadowing.  Wherever you need to go, there’s a parade between you and it, sometimes two.  I think sooner or later they’ll have to outlaw it, it’s just too dangerous.  But people love it there and the nurses in the ward would call, “Happy Moddy Gras” as they went off shift, like we say, “Merry Christmas.”

Mary was prepped for surgery three times that first couple of days, Saturday night into Monday.  But they never could get the surgeon and the equipment in the same room at the same time, and on Monday afternoon they gave up until after the holiday.  So Mary just lay there until the surgery finally happened the ensuing Thursday, at $1200 a night.  She didn’t have it, or health insurance.

I didn’t, either.

I spent Saturday night wondering if Hell was a waiting room.  This one was full of Mardi Gras casualties, young revelers and old drunks and a middle-aged couple gorgeously dressed for a ball.  Their names would be called and off they would walk or hobble to their final destination.

Nobody called mine!  I hadn’t asked for medical attention, though as the night wore on it became clear I hadn’t emerged unscathed from being hit by a car after all.  My right knee began to swell and throb as I shifted miserably in the hard plastic chair, and when I got up to check on Mary I dragged the leg like Igor.  I just hadn’t wanted to be scathed!  At ER prices, I couldn’t afford to be scathed!  Anyway, all I wanted now was sleep.

Sunday afternoon, I got my wish, courtesy of two Chattanooga friends who had traveled to NOLA with us on the train-turned-bus, then gone their ways, planning to meet us later.  One of these, Jeannie, had since mysteriously gained access to a car; the other, Elizabeth, to a house on Dauphine where she was dog-sitting.  So they swooped in with the one to deliver me to the other.

I’d asked them to bring our luggage from the Frenchwoman’s place in the Ninth Ward.  They had, and they’d also brought the Frenchwoman!  So everyone paid respects to Mary, then off we four sped into the streets of New Orleans, Elizabeth Andretti-like behind the wheel.  The Frenchwoman turned whiter and whiter, and finally leapt out at a stoplight and vomited into a trashcan.

It is true the Frenchwoman was unused to car travel.  It is also true Elizabeth drives with a certain dash.  As she does everything!  I cannot mention her here without noting she is the source of the fashion angst that keeps cropping up in this narrative:  She never goes to the grocery store without a feather boa, minimum.

On our way we stopped at a wonderful downtown grocery store, Rouse, a New Orleans institution.  I mention this because of course all we foodies got separated as we gaped at the goodies, and when I checked out – after wandering bedazed for what seemed hours, so I was worried they’d left me – I took the wrong door and ended in a city street.  Then I found the parking lot and realized I didn’t know what the car looked like!  And then I realized I’d spent all the money I had on me, my wallet was in the car, and my cell phone had died!

I had almost given up, and commenced to keen, when Elizabeth mercifully emerged from the store and walked straight to the car – where the whole time the Frenchwoman had been sitting in the passenger seat!  She was hunched over biliously from the car ride but still visibly and inexorably the Frenchwoman, like a beacon.

Anyway, we got to Elizabeth’s dog-sitting house and there I slept until Monday, when our friends returned me to the hospital.  By then my every fifth word was AUGHHH as I stepped on the dog’s chew toys or tried to dress.  So I was resigned to scathehood, and from the hospital I hitched a ride on the institution’s shuttle bus to an urgent-care clinic Mary’s nurses told me about, for an X-ray. 

There I was examined by a peppery lady GP with the peculiar name “O’Bear.”  Or so I thought until, two days later, having at last found a drugstore and succeeded in locating the prescription she’d given me at the same time, I saw her name typed out:  Vicky Hebert, M.D.  It’s French and pronounced “A. Bear,” and apparently it’s the New Orleans equivalent of Smith or Jones.

Dr. Hebert gave me joyous tidings:  My knee wasn’t broken, just bruised.  But when I asked how to get back to the hospital, the news was not so good:  “You can’t.”  There were not one but two intersecting parades today, Dr. Hebert told me, so neither taxis nor trolleys were running.

Thus I set off on foot – note singular! – Igoring it along beside one of the parades, and paced by a float carrying the usual Greek god, plus a clump of men dressed as chefs – hell, maybe they were chefs – throwing beads.  It still hurt when I stepped wrong but I was so elated I wasn’t broken like poor Mary that I was walking on air, and I quoted Shakespeare cheerfully to myself about love’s light wings o’erperching walls 'n stuff.  

But mostly I was thinking about: food.  I hadn’t been able to interest Mary in takeout orders– she had to use a bedpan and said it all just turned into poop – but New Orleans is partly about eating out and I hadn’t had my crack at that part.  I was torn between poboys – authenticity – and Vietnamese – proximity; there was a restaurant right beside the hospital.

But when I went in to check first with Mary, the nurses were just packing her up to be transferred to the big bleak charity hospital across town.  They said I could ride in the ambulance with her, and since she would have a private room at the new place I would be allowed to sleep on a cot beside her.

This hospital, University, was in a bad section of town and when we got there the staff warned me not to venture outside at night.  So I dined that evening from the vending machines in the basement, and subsequently I would eat the food off Mary’s plate that she wouldn’t touch on the poop principle.  So much for the fabled cuisine of New Orleans!

At the first hospital, Touro, everything had been posh and carpeted and everyone was nice to us except one nurse with an ugly voice.  At the second everything was bare and tiled and everyone was mean to us except one little sweetheart nurse who had dimples and called Mary Twinkletoes.  She was the only one who could make Mary smile.

I slept on the cot until I had to leave town, not just because I had nowhere else to go – I mean, there was that – but also because I was worried that the big mean institution would kill Mary if I didn’t remain vigilant.  Mary said, “Don’t be ridiculous, Robin; I really believe in socialism.”

But if it was socialist in décor, that hospital later sent Mary a bill as running-dog as anything I’ve ever seen!  Mary said Touro was more reasonable about adjusting downward. 

Anyway, that next period was our really miserable time.  If I’d worried the nurses would neglect Mary, they did anyway come every four hours through the night to check her vitals; then the bright young residents rolled in with their stethoscopes and their new white coats at 6 a.m.  It didn’t bother Mary because she was too miserable during the day to do anything but sleep or watch television; but for weeks after I got home I couldn’t sit down in my reading chair without passing out.   

People kept putting paper bracelets on Mary every time she was transferred or prepped or sedated, until she had a collection on her wrist she had me photograph because she said it was as close as she would get to racking up Mardi Gras beads.

Mary was depressed.  Well, that’s inadequate.  It’s not wrong but it doesn’t cover the facts.  Mary, who is usually hopeful and friendly and New-York tough, your veritable little Yankee sunbeam, was a small shrunken figure under the sheets with a whispery toneless voice, who wouldn’t turn off the TV. 

And on Tuesday morning – Mardi Gras, and her 60^th birthday – she tossed me out of the room so I could witness the holiday, and she could suffer alone.

I limped down Canal Street, incidentally getting socked in the left eye by two strands of beads thrown from the usual parade – 

A word on parades:  All that nonsense you hear about procuring Mardi Gras beads via a roguish display of the full frontals?  My frontals aren’t that full and anyway I promise you they stayed primly within their sartorial confines, I was in no mood here, but I was dodging beads like shrapnel!  At Mardi Gras you have to run faster than I do to come home beadless.

– and thus arrived at the French Quarter where we began this chronicle, and where I saw a T-shirt with the New Orleans motto:  “Sin.  Repent.  Repeat."

Sin?  Mary and I had only wanted to drink a little beer and watch the fun in the Quarter.  Where’s the sin in that?  But the Big Easy smacked us to the mat on day one while others stayed drunk in the street all week and took no harm.  Really, we later speculated Mary might have landed more gracefully from that bicycle had she been a little more lubricated.  

Anyway, what sense does it make I should be hit by a car and Mary should be the one with $100,000 of medical bills?

I think the message here is there’s no logic in destiny:  No matter what those Baptist preachers say about sin and subsequent perdition, you can’t tell God what to do.  

And you sure as hell can’t tell New Orleans! 

END

Robin and Mary's Mardi Gras Misadventure, Part II

     Everyone has been so sweetly eager for Part II of our misadventure it has made me terrified to post it!  I am bound to disappoint.  And here's something else:  I did want to talk a little about the insane health care situation we -- mostly Mary! -- got into, so the fat lady ain't sung yet:  There is, I'm afraid, going to be a Part III.  Sigh -- 950 words is just not that much space for a person of my proclivities.  I kill about 200 blowing my nose.

Robin And Mary’s Mardi Gras Misadventure:  Part II

(We resume this narrative where Part I left off, with our hapless heroines following a subtly menacing Frenchwoman into New Orleans on oversized bicycles, amid signs and portents that made streets flowing with blood look like BALLOONS AND A FRUIT BASKET.)

Mary and I followed the Frenchwoman out into the Ninth Ward, which had been deep underwater during Hurricane Katrina.  The houses were modest and some were missing altogether, along with churches and schools that had never been rebuilt.  Still, the residue of that terrible flood gave the place a certain seaside ambience and from the standpoint of somebody riding a bicycle it was anyway flat.

And it was spring!  It was early February but in New Orleans azaleas were blooming and lantana, and those Japanese magnolias that take a girl’s breath away.  I circled back to admire them, always bringing up the rear. 

Outside places are my chief joy but I am willing to admit I move across them with the ponderous sick inevitability of the Russian Army.  I do eventually roll into Berlin, but perhaps others find me pokey.  Mary would zoom past me like an SST, smirking, and the Frenchwoman said:  “Myself, I ride 25 miles each day without fail.” And another time:  “I love to eat and would be big as a house if it were not for my bicycle.”  (This was at lunch, while I was cramming something in my mouth.) 

We helped the Frenchwoman with her pet project, a “street library” for the Ninth Ward children.  That day it was in a community garden.  We read kid-books about gardening, then planted raised beds into which, despite our best efforts, the children sowed enough seeds for Kansas.  “These are my friends from Chattanooga, Tennessee,” the Frenchwoman told them.

Mary corrected her that it was Dade County, Georgia, and the Frenchwoman said:  “Whatever.  Just keep ze children from killing each other with ze hoes.”       

Mary and I enjoyed the children but were unaccustomed to their rampageous ways, and when they had dispersed I said, with feeling:  “I understand beer is sold in New Orleans?”

The Frenchwoman replied:  “But we will be late for ze parade!”  So we rode on. 

A word on cycling:  There is a reason bicycle pants are padded in certain key areas.  Neither Mary nor I had ridden a bicycle for so long in years and by midafternoon we had discovered that reason.  But we rode on!

Things I remember from that long, long day are: the Mississippi River, the levee and the “wedding cake houses” built for riverboat captains. We visited an open-air market where I snuffled hopefully around for beer but found only handcrafted soap.  We’d meet men and the Frenchwoman would introduce us – “These are my friends from Chattanooga, Tennessee” – later explaining confidentially:  “One of my former lovers.” 

A terrifying drawbridge separated us from the main part of town.  I took a picture of Mary and the Frenchwoman watching it lower after letting a ship pass.  When it was down again cars zipped across looking like the Scary Traffic scene in cartoons.  We felt like bugs about to fly into the zapper and the Frenchwoman allowed us to push our bikes through an underpass, but she said coming back that night we must cross the bridge or risk murder.

Later, my husband said, “You were riding bicycles in traffic?  At Mardi Gras?  Where people are drunk?  Without helmets?” 

But I never thought about helmets, only:  hats.  Mary is an artist and dresses with a certain flair.  The Frenchwoman was, well, French.  In the bridge photograph, Mary wears a hat with a feather and the Frenchwoman a small flattish affair she’d chosen after discarding another, pronouncing:  “Eet ees not me.”  With my jeans and cotton BOPs (“big ole panties”), I was consumed with fashion angst. 

We rode on.

Night fell as we watched the (endless!) parade.  There were marching bands and Greek gods and people in malevolent masks throwing beads.  It went by so slowly I felt it was the sidewalk moving instead, with me on it, and I realized I was dizzy with fatigue.  Across the street a shop sign flashed POBOYS and BEER and I ached with longing.

But it was not to be!  After the parade the Frenchwoman said:  “This is a madhouse.  I know a quiet Italian restaurant nearby.”  So back to the bikes!  And after that:  “Ze jazz club opens at 10.  It is just a few blocks.”  

It was never “a few blocks.”  It was miles.  The Frenchwoman charged ever forward, sailing through red lights without pausing.  I think it was the jazz club she was aiming for all night, that someone special was in the band.  But what a scene from hell that was!  Men in tutus, blowing cigar smoke at us.  We rode on!

It had to end somewhere and it did.  The Frenchwoman went through a green light on Chartres Street, then Mary, and I was bringing up the rear as usual when a car slammed into me.

There were brakes screeching and people screaming and I realized I was dead.  Then I thought:  OK, maybe crippled.  Then I got up from the pavement without a scratch.  So.  Maybe I really am the Russian Army.

The Frenchwoman offered to call a taxi but I didn’t want to be any trouble:  How would we get the bikes home?  So we climbed back on.  And not 10 minutes later, for no apparent reason – fatigue?  saddle sores? – Mary went sailing in slo-mo off her bicycle and –

Splat! 

It was some kind of cosmic error, I expect, but our joke in the ensuing days was:  “Robin got hit by a car and Mary’s in the hospital.”

Let’s leave the story there, the Frenchwoman alone with three bicycles – I don’t care, I hate those bicycles! – while Mary and I speed off in an ambulance to an ER, only to be greeted with the words:

“I imagine there was alcohol involved?”

(To be continued…)

 

Robin and Mary’s Not-So-Excellent Mardi Gras Adventure, Part I

     As we approach Easter, I have finally gotten around to writing about Mardi Gras.  Well, Part 1 of Mardi Gras, anyway!  I found there was no way I could tell my tale in 950 words, which is about as much space as anybody can get away with in a newspaper column, so I broke my story into segments.  Here, then, to be published in this week's Sentinel, is the first installment in  ...

Robin and Mary’s Not-So-Excellent Mardi Gras Adventure

(Featuring Pink Feathers, Perdition and One Sinister Frenchwoman)

By Robin Ford Wallace

 

I’ve been thinking about sin.

It’s mostly the timing.  One Sunday, in the interest of journalism, I was pulling on my old purple dress to attend a Baptist church where women wearing pants was judged a sin and homosexuality right up there with murder and rape.  An eye-blink later I was in New Orleans, where even the manliest men wore tutus or flippy little cheerleader skirts as they staggered through the French Quarter, drinking cheerfully.

And this was a religious observance, too. 

Well, sort of.  Mardi Gras is part of the Roman Catholic calendar, the mad “Fat Tuesday” celebration just before Lent.  One of these days I’m going to look up the holiday’s history and how on earth it led to people dressing the way they do.  I was unprepared for it, though my friend Mary and I had been told if we wanted pink feathers we had better bring them with us, because by Mardi Gras there wouldn’t be one pink feather left in New Orleans. 

Pink feathers, my blue-jeaned butt!  Pink feathers are the Mardi Gras equivalent of black dress and pearls.  Yes, people wore feathers in their hair, or in their lurid blue or purple wigs (often topped with devil horns); but on the rest of their bodies they had on nothing even recognizable as clothing in Dade County. 

One man wore a barrel, like in the cartoons to signify poverty.  Other people were dressed as animals or types of food.  A woman had added another pair of secondary sex characteristics to the ones she’d come by naturally, all four proudly displayed in skintight Spandex as she followed her adult beverage down Bourbon Street.  And one man had costumed himself as a certain prized but usually unexhibited feature of the male anatomy, the whole effect intensely embarrassing but oddly reminiscent of U.S. Rep. Scott Desjarlais.

            Enter your narrator, alone and peering myopically at a street map.  I had asked a cop how to get to the French Quarter and he’d said:  “Three blocks that way.  You gone know.”

            He was right, I did know, not just because of the quaint architecture but because of the reproductive organs reeling down the street swilling liquor.  There were also plenty of people dressed as pirates and sorceresses and skeletons, and I remember thinking that New Orleans was sort of a Disney World for your drinker.

Me personally, I wore the usual blue jeans, spectacularly dirty by now.  In planning the trip, I’d been worried about my lack of sartorial splendor, and Mary and I had bought pink feathers and even purple wigs.  But by Mardi Gras proper, we’d been separated from our luggage for days, ever since I rode with Mary in the ambulance  –

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  I haven’t even told you about the bicycles. 

This, then, is the story of our Mardi Gras misadventure.  I wanted to tell it here because people keep making knowing little comments like:  “I imagine there was alcohol involved.”  Ha!  Like we ever got that far.

That had, of course, been the general idea.  Neither of us had been to Mardi Gras before, but we’d heard stories and read exposés – music, drink, dancing in the street – and we wanted in.

Mary is an artist and I write, which means a double case of shallow pockets, and we never could have afforded the trip except that back in September we’d learned that if we booked far enough in advance, we could ride the Southern Crescent to New Orleans for $42.  Plus Mary had a friend in New Orleans, a Frenchwoman, who invited us to stay at her apartment.  A gracious offer, but the Frenchwoman (as in so many New Orleans stories!) was to be the instrument of our downfall. 

Our hostess had grown up in Paris and moved to New York, two places where a car is more liability than asset.  So she’d never learned to drive and she got around New Orleans entirely on bicycle.  We hadn’t fully grasped that, nor the scope of the city.

            The Frenchwoman had borrowed two bikes for Mary and me so we could tour the city with her.  Both were large.  I took the bigger because I’m a bit taller, but the other was still too large for Mary and she had trouble starting and stopping. 

Are you beginning to sense doom yet?  There had been portents even before! 

First, the train:  The Crescent was canceled altogether for track work the first day we booked.  Then, the day we rescheduled, our train killed a man walking on the tracks further north.  There was an investigation, and the train was delayed for 18 hours.  We despaired, but at the last minute Amtrak put us on “alternative transportation,” meaning:  a bus. 

We’d been looking forward to the train ride, but:  a bus?  I’ve always thought when I die and go to Hell they’ll send me there on a Greyhound.  Still, we climbed aboard; then, on a desolate stretch of highway somewhere in Mississippi, the bus broke down. 

In the end, a kindly Cajun in a rusty Ford pickup with barbed wire across the front grille stopped and fixed the bus.  Still, the message was clear:  Don’t go!  Or at least:  Drive.

But we did go and we didn’t drive, so let us return now to that Saturday, our first day in the city immortalized by Tennessee Williams, where the streets have names like Desire and Gentility so that at one corner you can stand where Race meets Religion.

And where, in Part 2 of this epistle, Mary and I climb on our bicycles and follow the Frenchwoman to where Hope meets –

Splat!      

(To be continued …)

No Kale In Cabbage: An Earnest Treatise on the Root of All Evil

I’m afraid this is a little prissy.  Thus the title.  Sometimes one is impelled to state the obvious, even at the cost of wit and charm.

           I was struck in New Orleans, where I spent Mardi Gras hanging around two hospitals after my friend Mary was scraped off the pavement, how silly it was I couldn’t ask the clean, efficient medical people who bustled around me there for help with my own wounds.  I’d been hit by a car moments before Mary had her accident.  I’d walked away, but as I sat in the hard little chairs in the waiting room my leg started to swell and throb until I was crippled and every fifth word I said was AUGHHH.
          (I’m working on an account of “Robin and Mary’s Not-So-Excellent Mardi Gras Adventure” for a future edish, by the way.  Hold your breath!)

But the hospital people didn’t even offer to help because they understood the problem:  Money.  Poor Mary had no choice, but I could wait until Monday and limp off to where the bill was something my credit card, if not checking account, would cover.

So it’s stupid!  Whether it’s because medical costs are artificially inflated or because people at the top are robbing people at the bottom or for whatever reason, the money system prevents hospitals from taking care of hurt people, just like it prevents most humans from doing whatever it is we were put on earth to do.

The system doesn’t work!  It’s broken!

OK, that’s not prissy, it’s rabid.  I’ll leave you to read the column already.

               No Kale In Cabbage:  An Earnest Treatise on the Root of All Evil

By Robin Ford Wallace

You can’t be much of a writer if you care about money.

Everyone dreams of writing the breakthrough novel but for most of us the reality is nobody pays you to write anything amusing.  The best-paid writing job I ever had was for a company that told car dealerships why their customers hated them: 

“You treat them like dirt.  Next!”

Not really.  That would have saved time, but instead I had to blather on for 20 to 30 pages about listening skills, crap like that.  Still, it beat the gig before that, penning PR pieces about plastic pipe for plumbing publications. 

I was desperate enough for fun to enjoy the alliterative possibilities:  “PVC, pliable and practical, puts paid to plumbers’ persistent partiality for pricier products.”  But they didn’t let me get away with much of that and in fact they didn’t let me get away with much actual English.  If I wrote “cheap,” they thought it made the product sound – well, cheap.  They liked phrases like “relatively inexpensive” and “innovative yet affordable,” which if you are any kind of writer at all is the kind of thing that makes you ache for your old job waiting tables.      

Writers wait a lot of tables. 

So do artists.  You can’t be much of an artist if you’re interested in money.  You may have noticed that the ones who fetch the serious bucks tend to be dead.  The living ones tend to cut off their ears.  What earthly use are ears to an artist?  It’s hard to concentrate on painting with the noise of trucks whizzing by over your home bridge, to say nothing of everyone yelling at you to get a real job.

            We can go on with this.  Tony Hillerman, author of the Joe Leaphorn Navajo novels, wrote in one of his books that you couldn’t have money if you were much of an Indian.  Indians must listen to the land and their sacred spirits, not the siren call of the big bucks.

            I read in the newspaper recently about Atlanta policemen moonlighting as bodyguards for drug dealers.  They patrolled parking lots during narcotics sales, and one even volunteered to shoot people if the drug lord gave him the high sign.  You can’t be much of a cop if you care about money. 

How many politicians lose their power when they get caught selling it for money?  How many evangelists?  No, you can’t be much of a leader if you care about money.

You can’t be anything real if money is what you want, not even a basic person.  Mothers don’t get paid for birthing babies or fathers for nurturing them.  Farmers have never made squat for growing food.  Hardly anybody gets paid to think.

This isn’t new!  Jesus was fussing at the moneychangers 2000 years ago.  Everybody knows money is the root o’.  It’s why priests and nuns take vows of poverty and lamas carry begging bowls.  Yet we keep basing civilization on money anyhow.

I maintain, though, this is finally going to change.  Money was originally a placeholder, to facilitate trade:  Instead of swapping your carrots for cabbage, you’d get a coin you could use either to buy cabbage or save for a later purchase of bricks or camels or a new wife.  It was handy.

Now, though, we don’t think of money in terms of stuff it will buy but stuff in terms of how much money it’s worth, even quite necessary stuff.  That’s why farmers grow soy and corn for the processors instead of produce that will keep people healthy:  There’s no money in carrots and cabbage.   

So money isn’t handy anymore, it’s topsy-turvy.  A couple of weeks ago, that was brought home to me when I was dragging my leg like Quasimodo, occasionally yelping in pain, because I’d been hit by a car.  Meanwhile, I was in a hospital surrounded by doctors and nurses whose training and education, whose whole purpose in life, was to take care of hurt people. 

But they didn’t help me and I didn’t ask them to, because everybody knew I couldn’t pay the thousands they’d charge to treat me.  Instead, they referred me to a clinic across town and I limped off into the crazy world. 

You can’t be much of a hospital if you care about money.

But that’s not why I think things will change.  That’s normal. 

It’s the free stuff!  The trend has been toward commodifying things that used to be free, like death – old women in the family used to lay out corpses; now we pay $12,000  – but now technology makes things free that used to cost money. 

Information, obviously.  Why buy reference books when there’s Google?  But entertainment, too.  Writing this, I’ve been listening to a medley of music custom-mixed for my preferences (protest songs, what did you think?) by a free Internet service that did a better job than a DJ, or my husband, could have. 

And now there’s this “3-D printer” thing that’s basically a Star Trek replicator.  Put in a little toner and it spits out anything, not just “Earl Grey, hot,” but tools with moving parts, or human ears and vital organs, all with no manufacturing costs.

Add to that the existing social organization – at that hospital, if I’d been on welfare or in prison, they’d have looked after me gratis – and you’ll admit that money is no longer a logical way to organize the world.  

I don’t have an alternate plan, but I’m rooting for a system that allows farmers to grow food, mothers to mother, doctors to heal, police to protect the innocent and maybe even writers to write.

But never more than 950 words!  So:  Until next time.

END

You wanta know, I wasn't entirely satisfied with this one. I really had meant to write about growing onions, not just cooking them. But when you feel compelled to tell long, fantastically boring stories about slutty women you knew in past lives, sometimes you have to skimp on horticulture. In any case, I have resolved to get back to writing BLA in this new year, and just wanted to get one out.

Onions Make Excellent Paperweights.  Sort Of.

By Robin Ford Wallace

There is nothing like an onion for a paperweight.

I mean that in the Lewis Carroll sense:  There are lots of things better.  Just about anything that’s not round, in point of fact.  The onion on my desk takes a nosedive every time I pick up the phone, while the one on the bedroom nightstand – 

            No, the one in the bedroom is not a paperweight.  Actually, the paperweight function is ancillary; the onion on the nightstand is there for the same reason as the one in the bath and the one teetering atop the stack of National Geographics in the living room.  They are hard at work, protecting me from sickness of any kind.

            Ah-choo! 

            OK.  So the onion theory doesn’t work. 

In fact, it’s an indefensible piece of crap I read on Facebook.  It went like this:

A doctor arriving in a village ravaged by epidemic found everybody there sick or dead except for the occupants of one cottage, where the whole family was yodeling with health.

“How do you do it?” the amazed medical man asked the rosy-cheeked farmwife.

“Why, sir,” replied she.  “I simply place an unpeeled onion in each room of our miserable hovel, and it keeps us all in the pink of health even as the ground shakes from neighbor after neighbor keeling over in death.”

The article then goes on to detail how, if a person has pneumonia, you may save him by putting a sliced onion at his bedside.  In the morning the onion will be blighted and black but your patient will be beating his chest with the joy of breathing free.

It was at this point – while you are probably saying, “What indefensible crap!” – that I began going from room to room distributing onions from my little basket like the Easter Bunny on drugs.  If there’s one thing I believe in, it’s onions.

Once I was being driven around outer Atlanta by a Minion of Evil I’d met through some job training we’d taken together.  All I knew about her was that she was the one who was always sitting under the NO FOOD OR DRINK IN COMPUTER ROOM sign eating lunch from a Wendy’s bag.

Now I was in her car and she was negotiating I-285 while telling me about her love life.  She was dating a divorcee who took her to nice restaurants where he ordered everything a la carte.  She said that so much and so proudly that I wondered if she knew what it meant, which is of course that the item comes by itself instead of as part of a dinner.  So I said, “Do things taste better a la carte?”  And she said, like I was stupid, “They cost more.”

So the guy was spewing money on her but he had one disadvantage:  weekend visitation with his children.  The Minion worked hard during the week and didn’t like wasting Saturdays on somebody else’s kids.  It was such a drag that sometimes she wished she hadn’t bothered breaking up his marriage –

Skreeek!

The Minion slammed on the brakes.  She hadn’t been paying attention but we were on an exit ramp and traffic had stopped dead.  Her sudden braking avoided a collision with the car in front of us, and the car behind also managed, just, not to hit us.  But the cars behind it that had been following behind the Minion trustfully went BANG BANG BANG as they piled up one after another.

“Whew!  Glad that wasn’t me,” said the Minion, and drove on without a backward glance.

She took us to a sub shop where she parked in the handicapped space.  “They don’t tow you on the weekends,” she explained, and in case you are wondering what any of this has to do with today’s subject, when the Minion ordered her sub she said:

“HOLD THE ONIONS.”

See?  It’s like vampires and garlic, though the Minion explained coyly it was because she had a date.  Apparently onions cramped her love goddess style.  That was ironic to me because my own sole claim to love goddesshood is I cook, and almost all my recipes start out, “Take an onion.”

Look out!  Here comes one now.

ONION SOUP:

Take six onions, coarsely chop and sauté in butter or olive over medium heat for at least 40 minutes, until caramelized and greatly reduced.  Generously dose with sherry to prevent sticking.  Then add five quarts broth (beef is traditional, but lately I’ve been using a homemade vegetable stock), add more wine and simmer another half hour or so.  Eat as is or melt cheese in it for additional calories.

But back to the Facebook story:  After I’d put onions in every room, I returned to the computer and read the rest:  Onions perform their medical miracles by sucking up all the germs in the air, which means you should never eat one that has been cut open any length of time; even refrigerated and tightly wrapped, leftover onions are deadly poison.

Right!  If that were true, I’d be dead enough times to be a zombie invasion apocalypse all by myself.  But it was presented as corollary to the pneumonia story, implying you couldn’t believe one without the other.  It made me remember, sourly, an earnest young man I heard once explaining why you couldn’t believes in angels and not in demons.

Still.

I can’t tell you how many colds I’ve fought off with that onion soup!  And medicinal function aside, just about any dish that starts with frying an onion is going to end up love-goddess-level good.

So I left those onions in situ.  It’s true they make miserable paperweights but what harm do they do?

Anyway, a girl’s got to believe in something.             

END

Blue Velvet: The Swamp Thing, Democracy and Masochism

     Out-of-town readers will probably not grasp the local politics in this one, which I wrote as a Radio-Free Robin, or political column; and local readers, presumably, can wait and read it in the Sentinel.  So why do I bother?  I guess because I haven't posted anything here in so long!  As this column points out, I've been tied up covering the election in Dade, including the highly charged sheriff's race mentioned here.  In the course of that I got attacked by supporters of both candidates; but my friend Mary assured me I was equally poisonous to both, and was seriously screwed whoever won.  How fortunate that I plan on committing no crimes ...

Blue Velvet:  The Swamp Thing Pontificates about Democracy and Masochism

By Robin Ford Wallace

 “Heet me.”

That’s a line I half-remember from a movie called Blue Velvet I sort of saw in the 1980s. 

In Atlanta back then there were establishments called cinema drafthouses where for a buck or two you could drink beer and watch second-run films.  It was cheap entertainment, but the big negative was that during the workweek, when a girl got up early, one beer and a darkened room would send her off to Dreamland before the credits had faded.

So from Das Boot all I remember is a handsome blond U-boat captain with blue eyes and a black sweater looking through a periscope and saying, “Goot, goot.”  Then the next time I opened my eyes there was water pouring in and it emerged I had slept through World War II. 

All I retain from Out of Africa is Meryl Streep Accent No. 432 – “I hod a farm in Offrica.”  My date told me that later on Meryl makes a few wisecracks while gnawing on a carrot, then dives down a rabbit hole.  But then, this was the same guy who told me all Japanese were issued cameras at birth, which, incidentally, I believed for two years.  (Reader, I married him, and you still couldn’t beat it out of him with a stick.)

Blue Velvet was a detective movie – I think – and as I recall the Italian torch singer who says, “Heet me,” is suffering from survivor guilt, her husband and child having been kidnapped as part of a convoluted film noir plot.  That’s all I can tell you because I would only wake up when somebody screamed. 

Anyway, the reason I’m saying “Heet me” myself is that I’ve concluded only masochism can account for my devotion to the democratic process.  What an election year! 

Regular readers may remember with what reportorial verve this newshound lunged into local politics in January –  “White House, Shmite House!  Practically every elected office in Dade is up for grabs!” 

Now, post-election, what you see lying whipped and beaten before you, with its tongue hanging out, is more hangdog than newshound, though it does manage the occasional feeble tail wag, because – 

IT’S OVER!

There comes a point when it doesn’t matter who wins, just that the hurting stops.  I can see myself dancing around in prewar Germany, singing, “We just elected Hitler, tra-la-la.”

Reader, I caught as much grief as the candidates!  One week I’d be attacked for bias toward one hopeful and the next for my slant toward his opponent.  There was a man who said I did drugs and a pleasant middle-aged matron I thought was going to break my nose.  One week I got denounced publicly three times.

It made me remember wistfully how I once wrote in a Bob’s Little Acre about witchcraft that peasants with pitchforks and torches would make me feel pretty and popular.  Wrong!  My idea was that negative attention was still attention, but the reality is that I’m feeling less homecoming queen and more Swamp Thing than ever, thank you very much.

Still, since I can’t possibly get less popular, here’s some stuff I can now get off my swampy little chest:  I did not, either, lean toward either sheriff candidate.  I had issues with both.  What we had was one guy going around saying the president planned to impose martial law in Dade and another guy who had done it himself.

So what I had against the candidate who wanted a second crack at sheriffing was:  the first crack.  Maybe some people enjoyed driving from roadblock to roadblock meekly showing their papers.  I can’t say it did much for me.  And there may be perfectly good reasons for law officers to beat up harmless citizens who had broken no laws; but I’m not bright enough to think of any.

What I had against the other candidate was:  fundamental concepts of honesty and truth.  How can you trust a guy to testify in capital cases when he spends his campaign promising to defend Dade from a federal invasion aimed at stripping citizens of their right to bear arms?

I think there’s a class of things grownups believe in only halfway, not because they’re feasible but because they enjoy believing in them, like the Loch Ness Monster and that somewhere there’s a pair of jeans that won’t make their thighs look fat.  I think the federal invasion falls into that class.

A candidate in another race said that people vote their pocketbooks.  Ha!  I think it’s more likely they vote the messages they receive through their fillings from outer space.  If they voted their pocketbooks, poor people wouldn’t vote for rich people who despise them, and candidates who go bankrupt because of crushing medical bills would support a president who is trying to reform health care, not go around telling people he is fixin’ to steal their Bible and shoot their dog.   

There’s lots more:  Why, if candidates believe in equal rights for all citizens under the law, do they say “gay marriage” the same way they say, “The dog had diarrhea in the living room?”  And how can serially married candidates say, “Put your God first and your wife second?”  Shouldn’t it be, “Put your God first and your third wife second?”

But we’re out of room, so let me just end by paraphrasing Churchill that democracy is the worst form of government, except for those others that have been tried; and add from my own observation that if it works at all, it works here at the local level.

 Anyway, it’s heady stuff, and if life ever offers to deal me in for another hand of it, I expect I’ll wince a little but I’ll still say:

“Heet me.”

 

END