Old friends

Bink, myself, Mrs. P., Jujubi, Spudwhip, and friend
Halloween 1989

Best Laid Plans

My first year on the staff at Odyssey I was very close with one of the other staffers, Somwell. Somwell was large and gentle, always gave people his full attention, told the truth about how he was feeling (most of the time), and was basically magnetic. We were attracted to each other, and it felt, that week, as if we were attached at the hip in the few off hours that we had during camp. I remember one time when we sat so close that I felt his beard on my cheek while we were chatting with some other staffers.


Many of those hours of chatting happened late at night. The youth staff took over around 10pm, and the younger set of the adult staff would hang out in the lodge for a couple of hours afterwards. During training Somwell and I had hung out until the early hours of the morning, and during camp we did too. Camp was emotionally and physically draining, but it was hard for me to wind down at night, and I had never liked going to bed anyway.


We had a staff meeting every morning directly after breakfast. Halfway through the week, at the meeting I made an announcement asking people to encourage me to go to bed by midnight. Everyone agreed. That night, while shooting the breeze in the lodge, several people noted that it was creeping toward midnight and that I had asked them to tell me to go to bed. I agreed that I had, and I thanked them and headed out.


Sitting on the picnic table about ten yards from the lodge was Somwell. He was looking at the night sky, and it seems that I can remember he was looking at the moon or that he was looking at the stars. The place where camp was held was in a pretty rural area, so the sky would have been lit up either way. He called to me, and I walked over. I hadn't seen him as I had passed the table. He asked me where I was going "so early" and I explained that I had asked people to help me go to bed at a reasonable hour. He didn't remember that; it turned out that he had missed the staff meeting that morning. Of course if anyone was going to keep me up it would have been he, and we talked for at least an hour.


I got back to the bunk cabin I shared with some other staffers, crept in to get my toothbrush and paste, and went to the bathrooms to get ready for bed. As I walked away from the cabin, again I heard my name called, this time by one of my bunkmates. She had followed me out because she really wanted to talk about something that she felt she could only share with me. She'd heard me ask for support for my relatively early bedtime and had been waiting. That led to more conversation in the bathrooms after I was done brushing my teeth.


I remember this specifically: The clock by YaYaWOT's bunk read 2:20 when I climbed into my bed.

The Loving Decision

I heard on NPR the other day that it was the 40th anniversary of the Loving Decision, which resulted in the nullification of all miscegenation laws then still enacted in twelve states. While it wouldn't have been less important a decision if the Lovings had been named, say, Smith, I think that it's pretty great that a lawsuit about on a couple's marriage was named after a couple named Loving, because that's what they were doing: Loving.


The couple's lawyer, Bernard Cohen, says that "They just were in love with one another and wanted the right to live together as husband and wife in Virginia, without any interference from officialdom."


While I was listening to this story I was thinking about how much pavement the first civil rights movement laid on the road that queer people are walking on now. So much of it sounded familiar. It seemed like I could replace "husband and wife" with "spouses" and refer to places other than San Francisco, Vermont, or Canada and the story would be, as they say, today's headlines.


Forty years ago is practically in my lifetime, which in one way is shocking enough. It's hard to believe that there would be any reason to forbid by law anyone's loving anyone else just because of a difference in skin color. In a way this gives me hope that stupid things like the Defense of Marriage Act* and anti-gay marriage laws in states will someday tumble, just as miscegenation laws did.




* When I found this link via Google, there were two ads at the top of the page with the cite: One for divorce attorneys in Omaha and one for couples counseling. Ha ha ha!

I thought I was going to write about what I want to get out of my supervisory experience.

But it's turned out to be about what I want others to get out of my supervisory experience.


A few years ago I applied for a position in which I would be supervising other financial aid counselors. I didn't get the position because I didn't have any (actually very little) supervisory experience on my resume. When I talked to my financial aid career mentor, she suggested that I get involved in some volunteer activity that would result in my supervising people, which I could then indicate on my resume when applying for associate director- and director- level positions. Later I decided that I didn't want to be a financial aid director while I was listening to a speaker in a professional development seminar talking about how the "subject matter experts" get promoted away from the things they love to do. I realized that directors generally have very little student contact and a lot of administration contact. Now I don't know if I even want to go back to FA, in any capacity.


At the food bank I am suddenly supervising a whole lot of people, ranging from two to ten individuals per day. I think the food bank has about sixty volunteers, including drivers; technically, by my being Program Coordinator, I'm their boss. Not that it feels that way - the food bank is definitely an ensemble production, and most of the current volunteers have been working at the FB much much longer than I have been. I've told some of them that the only decision they could make of which I would disapprove would involve them putting their hands on a client.


I've decided that I will not be the kind of boss who asks others to do tasks I am not willing to do myself. I hate mopping floors, but I asked someone to do it because I know he likes to do things he knows how to do, and then I told him he is my hero because I hate mopping. This afternoon when I was moving our trash bins around (we have four kinds of trash bins, and probably a dozen bins total) to bring the empty ones to easier access, I was thinking to myself that I don't want to be a person who tells someone else to do something like that just because it is icky, or a "supervisor-only" type boss.


The kind of boss (and I use this term very very loosely) I want to be is one who is willing to do any of the jobs in the place. I want to lead us further into a culture of inclusion and welcome, and I don't mean that in terms of some diversity BS listed in every college mission statement I've seen. I want our mentally ill and disabled volunteers to feel like they are participating in "normal everyday life." I want to encourage people to make good decisions and to trust the decisions they make. I want people to have fun at the FB because we aren't paying them in anything other than thanks. I want the people who come to work some community service hours to want to come back, or at least give us a cash donation come Christmastime, because they remember our project with fondness. I also want the clients to feel respected and recognized as human beings with a story and characteristics beyond "being poor."


When people come to the food bank, I want them to feel fed in their bellies and in their hearts.

A thousand pictures tell...

June 9, 2007

Zirpu and I start the I5 Boogie.


















Mount Shasta

Zirpu's sister and her dog Izzy

Zirpu's mom's canine companion Dusty 2, who's not very bright even for a cocker spaniel.

Yard art in Zirpu's dad's and stepmom's yard














Happy birthday Rat Chaser!

One of the nieces with the lighter

Lilwil and Bink

Buttheads

K-Bob and Zirpu get in one last game before bed













June 10, 2007

Zirpu at Powell's City of Books

Shobi-wan's family

















I've been living in Hayward long enough to be impressed with restored vehicles, but the Harry and David's store in Medford is pretty good too.

Bug and Pia take collections for Bug's college fund

Boy gets tossed in the pool for some infraction















Half the crowd who met for breakfast at the Lumberjack Restaurant in Redding

Bug's fellow gets some treatment for his hangover

Pia's son Otter practices raspberries while I smile at the camera














Pia walks on water on Bug's second-place winning physics project

June 11, 2007

Home again: 2,122 miles round trip

Hayward --> Clackamas --> Bellingham --> Anacortes (I took the ferry from there) --> Bellingham --> Tacoma --> Portland --> Redding --> Hayward

There should be a picture of Miss Cuteness and the Fireball, but they were having such a frenzy when we saw them that it wasn't possible to capture it. There are no pictures from the ferry ride because it was so beautiful and grey-green that they wouldn't have translated to film (or should I say "film" since it's all just electrons anyway?).

Hello, Life.

So, I did write every day this week, but not here. I did my writing in longhand, in the blue Mead notebook I'm currently using as a journal. I had some access issues: keeping Zirpu's laptop powered up, getting somewhere with WiFi, and it is, after all, Zirpu's laptop and not mine...

Unlike last week, though, I will not be transferring what I wrote in my journal into this blog. Believe it or not, I do not post about everything I'm thinking, and a lot of what I have been thinking is about other people and those things are those people's stories to tell. You'll just have to take my word for it that I wrote every day. I have come up with some good ideas for future posts, too.

+++

Bug is graduating from high school tonight. I keep thinking that this should blow my mind, because it seems impossible that Bug and Boy should have grown up this much while I haven't changed in the last eleven years. However, Bug is way ready to be done with high school and start her "real life" in the fall.


It's not how I remember ending my high school years. I had applied to just two colleges which could not have been more different, San Francisco State and University of Puget Sound. I had decided to go to Puget Sound while standing in line at a grocery store with Mom. My thought process was this: "I think I should see what it would be like without this circle of friends. If it's terrible, I can always come back at the semester break."


I attended an unusually small public high school in San Francisco and there were just 154 of us on stage that afternoon. Each of us was going to give the principal a penny as she gave us our diplomas, but some students persuaded the rest of us that it would be disrespectful and "ruin graduation." A friend gave me a bottle of bubbles and we blew bubbles during the ceremony.
Afterwards the family, some family friends, and I went out to dinner to celebrate. I was not in a celebratory mood - in retrospect, I think I was frightened about leaving home, both my mother's house and my high school, which I loved and had been such a relief after junior high.


My friend Chuch had invited me to the graduation party his parents were hosting, and I spent the dinner waiting for it to end so I could go to his house. Chuch was in one of the circles in which I traveled, but we didn't spend a lot of time together, just usually in the early mornings in Mrs. Myszak's classroom. We knew each other, because everyone in my class did, but he wasn't one of my close-close friends.


The dinner went long. There were a lot of adults. Finally we got back to the house and I took Mom's car to Chuch's. When I got there the party was over and his folks had either gone to bed or out. Chuch pulled a bottle of champagne out of the ice-filled washing machine and we walked to a playground nearby.


I only remember that we sat on the swings, drank from the bottle, and talked. I've recently been in touch with Chuch and that's what he remembers too. Both of us remember that part of the evening as if it was the event that sealed our friendship, though we were at the end of our daily contact.


I remember that it was a warm, quiet night with the stars twinkling above us and the city lights twinkling below. I remember that we talked about Life, and Adulthood, and Leaving Home. "Real Life." I remember that I felt like Chuch understood me better that night than anyone else had for weeks.


If that's not how it was, well, it's my memory that matters.

Three In One

June 1, 2007

I drove this morning from the hotel in Clackamas to Everett. I'm not as familiar with 205, which bends around the east side of Portland, as I am with I5, but last night I knew that we would be more likely to find a mid range hotel and that we would be less likely to get stuck in rush traffic this morning if we took 205.


The Stark Street exit offered me a glimpse of my old stomping grounds. I found myself telling Zirpu about the clients I'd driven for one of my jobs, severely physically or mentally challenged (or both) people who needed rides from their homes to their work sites. One of them was a blind man who would carefully listen to the traffic reports and make sure I heard about the crash on this highway or the stalled vehicle at that exit. I always thanked him while conversing with his best friend, another one of my passengers, about the Van Halen concert he attended in 1985. Whenever a school bus pulled up alongside us, everyone would shout "School bus, Dougie!" for my passenger who loved yellow. I drove all over east and southeast Portland with my eight passengers, looking for school buses and reliving my eleventh-grade year (mine didn't include Van Halen concerts).


I often wonder what my old clients are up to. The oldest clients I had at Harry's Mother emergency youth shelter are 28 now, the youngest 22. Have they been able to repair their family relationships, or been able to go forward, into college and/or a trade, without them? The babies I knew at Letty Owings Center (for drug treatment) are in junior high school, if they weren't too impacted by Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. I wonder how many of their mothers stayed clean and sober after they graduated from LOC, and how many times they relapsed before they did (and, inevitably, which children ended up in foster care because of their parents' drug addiction). I don't want to sound like I didn't have faith in the women I worked with in those days, I just know that something like fewer than 30% of addicts stay clean after six months following rehab.


Driving through Tacoma was a different experience because I5 goes right through the center of the city, and not near my university. Also, the road has changed a lot in Tacoma, as has Tacoma itself as people were priced out of Seattle in the 1990s. Everyone I knew in Tacoma has left, except for Mrs. P, who is still teaching at the same school she started in in 1991. Even so, driving through Tacoma was like driving past the home of old friends.


Driving through Seattle, a city with which I never became familiar, I only recognized the exits that would have taken me to my friends' homes in those years that everyone lived there but me and Shobi-wan and Jujubi (who was in graduate school in Canada).



June 2, 2oo7

Bellingham: A pretty city, surrounded by water. Lots of green, with the big yards I associate with Washington and Oregon, and Japanese maples and rhododendrons outside almost every front door.


When I go to a city I like, I often find myself wondering if I could live there. With so much of Zirpu's family here, I have a dozen relatives in this town. I've never lived in a city this size, though I have lived (sort of) in one much much smaller. One thing I've become aware of since moving back to California is the diversity I see there, and I know that I wouldn't see that here (I didn't see it in Portland, either). I know I would miss the bi women's group, not to mention the friends with whom I have cultivated strong relationships, and my own family, whom Zirpu and I see a lot (I know this shouldn't count, because the fact that we live near them is what makes us see them so often, so that would be an even trade).



June 3, 2007


It turns out that two of my brothers-in-law host a home improvement radio show called "Around The House" on Sunday mornings on KGMI. I think it's pretty cool; Click and Clack started with a small show on a local station, and now they host one of NPR's most popular programs. Today they had a guest who is a landscaper and after discussing lawns they got on the subject of moles. I wanted to call in and ask for a drought-resistant solution for our front yard at home in California; I don't care about grass, but I want something out there in our ten-foot-square front yard other than weeds and these flowers. Of course, I wonder what a Bellingham landscaper would say in response to a request for advice about drought-resistant lawns.


I was enjoying the program so much, though, that just as I was reaching for the phone they were asking the guest for his final remarks. My brothers-in-law gave a "shout out to the California contingent" at the very end of the show, and one of them mentioned on the air that I hadn't called in. Someday I will call in and ask something, even if it means that I have to call my parents-in-law and ask them to hold the receiver to the radio so I can hear the show.



Note: I wrote most of this third post this morning, but then we lost internet access for most of the day. As I write this, there are lightning and thunder and it's raining like a cow pissing on a flat rock.