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

Insects and the Single Girl Part I: In Which Bob Dances the Flamenco

      You'll note this is just Part I.  I have too much to say about insects, and too many metaphors in which they are useful, to exhaust them all in one go.  But here I have finally finished the first episode 1.   A consummation devoutly to be wished!  XX

Insects And The Single Girl:  Part I, In Which Bob Dances The Flamenco

       By Robin Ford Wallace         

 

Behold, Gentle Reader, the figure atop yonder hill, silhouetted by the sinking sun.   Head thrown back against the flaming sky, both hands raised, leg bent at knee, the shadow claps and stamps as if in time to some unheard rhythm. 

Is this some character of romance?  Some doomed soprano of Italian opera?  Some flamenco dancer with flashing black eyes and rose between teeth?

Hello?  It’s me, Reader.  You were expecting maybe Carmen Miranda? 

No, this is not an opera, it’s Bob’s Little Acre, where roses abound but where no one chews on them but the Japanese beetles.  Then what, you may ask, is all this happy horse patootie about dancing?  It happened like this:

            Some readers know your humble narrator only as that fun-loving farm girl who fills both lawnmowers and frosty mugs with yellow fluids that come from cans.  They may be surprised to learn that their HN’s day job as a crusading journalist keeps her locked in a constant death struggle between the forces of darkness and the keen brave light of civilization. 

Not the worst job I’ve had, honey, I used to wait tables, but the thing about your classic battles between Good and Evil is sometimes a girl loses them.  Faithful readers will know which one I mean, so I won’t beat that horse, though I may not be able to resist the occasional waspish rejoinder.  Oh no!  Here one comes now:

Golly!  I wish I were as smart as those people who don’t need libraries!  

            CLAP!  CLAP!  CLAP!   

            And that, Gentle Reader, is the first part of our flamenco.  It’s something I learned from one of those self-help-for-psychos columns.  Brace yourself for a backlash of positivity: 

Happiness is a choice!  Self-pity is a disease!  We forgive those who wrong us not because they deserve forgiveness but because bitterness gives us those ugly lines around the mouth.

Yes, Gentle Reader, I used to sneer at this kind of crap, too, but adversity has made me a believer.  Rage and indignation must be pleasurable on some level, because we find them as hard to give up as cigarettes or heroin; but in the end they do us just as much good.  How much healthier to banish wrath and sail through life with a beatific smile that repels anger, spreads goodwill and smoothes out the flaws in our lipstick!

Still, hard as a girl tries to be Ms. Sunshine, negative emotions do creep in.  When that happens, what the psycho advisor says is:  Clap your hands at them until they go away.   

Laugh if you will, GR, it works!  Since I learned this trick, I’ve clapped away enough rage to fill Sing-Sing.  Yes, one gets mistaken for an epileptic, and yes, people who annoy one sometimes think one’s applauding them; but it is simpler to deal with stares of incredulity than murder charges. 

Here, though, is another thing about your classic battles between Good and Evil: Anger comes in dead handy.  I remember from my formative years the gently contemplative look on David Carradine’s face as he sailed through the air in slo mo, kicking bad-guy butt on Kung Fu; but me personally, when I’m storming the gates of Hell I’ll take the grapes of wrath over the milk of human kindness every time.  Anyhow, how’s a girl supposed to feel as she watches those in charge of education marauding through town like Cossacks, banning books, closing libraries, stamping out the keen brave light of civilization wherever it –

CLAP!  CLAP!  CLAP!

Well, you see the problem.  These past few months I’ve been clapping more or less full-time, determined to return to the serene earth mamahood you used to see depicted so winsomely on bottles of Herbal Essence shampoo.  How ironic, then, to find when I limped home in defeat:

War!  It was high summer, and while I was off storming Hell, insects had swarmed in to occupy my acre of Heaven.

Armies of ants!  Waves of weevils!  Squadrons of squishy squirmers that squiggled from the squash, eliciting from your narrator a high-pitched

“EEEEEEEEE!”

Sorry.  There’s something about the larval life stage that brings out a girl’s girlie side.

But here’s the thing about your classic battles between girl and insect:  You can’t win.  Of the billions of pounds of insecticide used in agriculture, only a tiny percentage ever makes contact with an actual bug.  So why poison fish, birds and ourselves? 

Still, there are limited-engagement measures the gardener can take.  This spring, I used floating row covers for my squash, and they really did prevent borers from inflicting sudden death.  The name sounds graceful and science-fictiony, but really they’re just cheesecloth-like sheets you keep over your plants from seed to blossom, in my case weighted down at the sides with rocks and propped up in the middle by a volunteer potato plant.  It looked like Tobacco Road but my squash was still there in August to be invaded by the squishy squirmers. 

Also this year I proved my friend Mary’s trick for killing ants:  Dawn dishwashing liquid, the blue kind.  What’s funny is the label says, “Dawn saves wildlife,” when with just a couple of squirts in a gallon of water you can commit multiple genocides.    

For Japanese beetles, it is meanly satisfying to hard-prune your roses and burn the clippings.  For other bugs – well, there’s always the other part of our flamenco:

STOMP!  STOMP!  STOMP!

Which brings us, with sick inevitability, to our concluding metaphor: that in life we stomp what we can and clap at the rest.  If it’s a war, we mostly lose it; but I’d rather think of it as a flamenco.  It sucks but a girl keeps trying, backwards and in high heels.

So.  May I have this dance?

END

            Last night the Dade County Board of Education finished murdering the Dade County Library.

            What the board did is slash all funding from the schools.  The school system is supposed to share the burden of the library with the county and city.  The library director says the library can muddle through another year on the lesser funds but at the end of that time the state will pull its own support because of its “maintenance of effort” requirement.     

            The only hope left for the library is that the county will take over the local funding, perhaps through dedicating a percentage of a millage rate point as suggested on a nonbinding straw poll question on the July 31 primary.

            I, like everybody else who cares about the library, have been living, breathing and vomiting the issue, and I wrote this “Radio-Free Robin” piece before I knew what the miserable outcome of last night’s board of ed meeting would be, urging readers to vote yes on the straw poll question.  

Counterrevolutionary Cookies:  A Recipe for Saving the Library

By Robin Ford Wallace

            A man I know recently entertained me with stories of a job he’d had during the Cold War

writing propaganda for Radio-Free Europe.  The program he worked on was a cooking show aimed at

converting housewives in Soviet satellite countries to American-style capitalism. 

            In a show about making cookies, for example, one of the radio hostesses might say, “Darn!  I’m out of sugar.  Excuse me while I buy more AT THE STORE RIGHT AROUND THE CORNER.  I’ll only be a minute.”

            The point was to demonstrate to the poor little Soviet mamas, who had to wait in long lines at centralized distribution centers for their groceries, how easy and quick it was to get anything you wanted in a free-market economy.  The radio show would resume with:

            “That looks heavy.  Let me help.  How much sugar did you get, anyway?”

            “Oh, it was so cheap I bought 50 pounds.  But meat was on sale too, so I stocked up.  At our house WE EAT MEAT THREE TIMES A DAY.”

I challenged my friend on the morality of selling a political system through hunger pangs.  Presumably these had been impoverished peasantries before Communism and it wasn’t likely they had eaten all that well while being chased by Cossacks up and down the frozen Steppes. 

My friend could have argued that BSing housewives was a more peaceful way to change society than, say, hydrogen bombs.  But whether he was wrong or right, or whether his counterrevolutionary cookies did any good in the world, is not the point. 

The point is, I’m jealous!  Why can’t I have a cool job like that? 

What my friend was writing was, essentially: come around to my way of thinking and you’ll eat more cookies.  I could do that.  I want to do good in the world, too, and I am crazy about chocolate chips. 

Instead I’m stuck with journalism, which confines a girl to the stark and cookieless truth.  I’ve got to sit here churning out articles about the county commission’s newest anti-tobacco-chewing ordinances when I’d much rather tell you the guys had been naked-wrestling in there.

Oh, I get accused from time to time of misquoting somebody or – and this is my fave – “twisting my words.”  At least one person who’s tried that one on was subsequently arrested, having presumably been misunderstood by the FBI as well; and I think the most recent one was just mad at me for revealing she didn’t know something she should have known if she’d been staying awake.  How far, after all, can you twist, “I have no clue?”      

Anyway, whatever detractors may say I have no experience writing lies beyond the weight I fill in on driver’s license applications.  But I bet you I could churn out propaganda just as thick as anything my friend wrote about cookies.

Say, for example, I wanted to promote yes votes for the straw poll question on July 31’s primary ballot, which asks if Dade County’s public library should be granted a secure funding source, here is the radio show I would write:

First a newspaper reporter, maybe a female one, maybe one with a breathy voice who says “you know” every third word, would say:  “What do you think of this straw poll question about giving the, you know, library a secure funding source, Mr. County Executive?”

Then a man with a friendly, folksy, Dade County kind of voice, the kind of voice that is always talking about two-headed calves, or offering you a bobby pin to get the wax out of your ear if you don’t hear good, would answer:  “Why would folks vote themselves what might turn out to be a tax increase?  Anyway, we don’t need that here in Dade County.”

He would go on to explain that we didn’t need that here in Dade County because since the dawn of time, funding Dade’s library has been the joint responsibility of the county, the city of Trenton and the school board.

The reporter would ask, “But what if one of them didn’t pay up?”

The county executive would repeat the word “responsibility,” then offer her a bobby pin to get the wax out of her ear since she doesn’t hear good.

Now:  Enter a new schools superintendent with an out-of-town accent so thick that when he talks about bullying in the schools, our girl reporter scratches her head and wonders, “What’s wrong with bowling in the schools?”

The out-of-town superintendent hires an out-of-town consultant and, together with an out-of-town attorney so clueless he once tried to reassign a polling station on Sand Mountain to a voting district on Lookout, they decide to save money by – guess what? –cutting off all funding to the Dade County library. 

Alarmed, our girl reporter scurries around questioning the board of education, most of the members of which say, “Libraries?  We don’t need no stinkin’ libraries,” and the chairperson of which says, “You twisted my words!”

            OK, OK.  I’d better stop here for fear of confusing the reader.  Campy and unbelievable as it sounds – and honey, if you want camp, you should have seen the sole anti-funding speaker at the public hearing capering for the cameras as she defended the right of her grandchildren to grow up in a county free of libraries – this is no radio play but what really is happening. 

As I write on Monday morning, I don’t know yet whether the Dade County Board of Education will kill the Dade County Public Library or not.  But whichever way it turns out, nobody could have written a better radio play to demonstrate that the library needs a secure funding source.

In conclusion, Gentle Reader, vote yes on the straw poll question, and I’ll give you this cookie.   

END