Damnit.

Sometimes only a curse, if only a mild one, will do. And it was certainly the only word that occurred to me this afternoon, as I pulled up to the house and saw the white truck.
He's back.
Two weeks ago, I stood on the sidewalk in front of "Kelly's" house. Her boys, the older one my son's best friend, had come over to say good bye.
"Grandma's taking us to her house," one said, "because mom and dad are fighting so bad."
I'd planned to take the boys swimming, so I walked over to see if I could pick "Dylan" up at his grandma's.
She paced the sidewalk, cell phone in hand.
"He won't leave," she said.
The screaming coming out of the house was loud, and, though I couldn't pick out the words, sounded aggressive. Things, I hoped not Kelly's body, were hitting the floors and walls.
"I can't leave until he does," her mother said. "I'm afraid of what will happen."
I herded the boys toward my house. They didn't need to hear the fight, even from the sidewalk.
"You need to call the police, " I urged Kelly's mom.
"I just wish he'd leave, " she said.
I took the boys for the afternoon, gave them lunch, dropped the younger one off at grandma's and took Dylan and Jake swimming.
I thought about calling the police myself, but surely that was Kelly's mom's call to make.
We came home and toasted marshmallows; it got dark and it was time for Dylan to go home. Earlier, Kelly's car had disappeared, but "Greg's" truck stood on by the curb, door open. Now it, too was gone.
I called the number I had for grandma.
"Kelly's just coming back from the hospital," she said. "Greg tore an earring out of her earlobe, so she had to go get stitches."
Well, I thought, maybe he'd get arrested for that. I spoke with Kelly the next day. She was still quite tired. She said it was over now between them, "thank god."
I thought about calling a few times since, just to see how she's doing. But Kelly and I mostly just have the boys in common. She's probably twenty years younger than I. A few years ago, she was in a car accident, and her life since has been a cycle of pain and surgery. Both knees, both elbows, I think the back too. She's on full disability. She speaks of some day going to college and becoming a nurse, but for now she summons energy only for occassional outings with a friend.
Now, Greg's truck is parked in front of her house again. When it began appearing a few days ago, I told myself that perhaps he was just there to get his stuff. Then, perhaps that it was just parked there while he was in jail. When it left and came back at regular intervals, I realized things were back to what, in Kelly's household, passes for normal.
Kelly and Greg, according to their son, fight often. And as with all couples, a bit of the fault lies on both sides. Kelly sometimes sleeps all day. Dylan tells me that it wasn't always so. Once, before her accident, Kelly's family would go camping. They too would toast marshmallows then, he says. And Greg hogs the living room with his elaborate game system. The younger boy is biologically his, and he frequently punishes the older one, excessively it seems to me, for being an inadequate older brother. I can't count the number of times Jake's asked if Dylan can come over to play, only to be told that his friend was grounded again for some imperfection. That this consequence does not seem to improve the boy's behavior is lost on his pseudo-stepdad. That he seems to be acting out the age-old story of favoring his own genes over another man's seems beyond his comprehension.
He's back, and I shake my head. Because this is such a well-worn story, it's almost not worth telling. Greg will hit Kelly again, and maybe next time he'll hurt her hard enough that she'll press charges. And that could be the best outcome. The others don't bear thinking about.
I think about Kelly, there but for the grace of God. There go I, except for my parents' ability and willingness to pay for my education 'till I got a degree that results in a middle class income and a stable position, so I don't have to depend on a man to pay the mortgage. There I go, except for the reverence for physical culture that they passed down to me, that had me out walking two days after a head injury.
And I know how hard it is to leave, or to be left. I was never hit, but even when it was made brutally clear to me that my ex-husband didn't want to be in the same room with me, I still wanted him to stay, on the chance that things might get better. You've built a life, and it seems impossible to leave it behind, when there are even tiny things, a smile here and an evening there, that make it bearable.
But Kelly, next time, it'll be ME calling the police.

Red Meat and Taxes

Tim and I sat across from each other at Johnny's, both eating our sinful Saturday dinner, red meat and french fries, MGD and Laughing Lab. Around us people were flirting, working on their second or third drink, watching the baseball and football games that festooned the upper walls.
I was lecturing.
Tim had asked, "Would you be willing to pay 20% sales tax?"
"No, that's a regressive tax!" I quoted my liberal-for-Fort-Worth college econ teacher, went on about how we all have to buy toilet paper, but a 20% tax on a $6.00 roll hits a minimum-wage earner much harder than Tim or me; never mind the rich folks.
I'd just gone on a rant about 2C, and how a city isn't a city, not really, if there are no parks or museums or public pools.
Don't blame me; I spent the afternoon at the Eco Fair at Rock Ledge Ranch, buttonholing people about the need to approve a comparatively minor increase in their property taxes to enable the city to provide these services. And I have the yard signs to prove it.
Over and over, I got the comment, "well, if the city would manage the money they already have, better, they wouldn't have these problems. "
But nobody was able to tell me what exactly they wanted the city to cut. A middle aged man did suggest that the city manager didn't need to make as much.
"How much does she make?" I asked the knowledgeable city employee next to me.
"$245,000, or so," he replied.
A lot of money, but not as much as the CEO with a comparable number of employees would make.
An elderly lady stopped by, and wanted to know if the taxes would keep increasing at the rate set for the 5 years forever. No, of course they wouldn't; but I had no proof.
So it went; actually, most of the people who stopped by the booth were quite positive. But this was, after all, an Eco-fair; we were getting the most liberal slice of the population.
Now, Tim asked another question. "How much is enough?"
"Enough what?"
"How much is enough money taken out of your paycheck for taxes? 30%, 40, 50 90%?"
He was being ridiculous, but I was too relaxed not to rise to the bait.
"It would depend on what the money was going for, wouldn't it? I mean, I don't like my money going to military contractors, or to service loans the Feds have taken out to fund a war that is unnecessary and wasteful.."
My voice was rising. I suddenly noticed that the men seated behind Tim had military-style haircuts. Time to alter the tenor of my rant a bit.
"I don't have a problem with military pay, understand. I just don't like it going to Halliburton subsidiaries who, on top of everything, do shoddy work."
And so it went. Tim, of course, works for one of the biggest military contractors of them all. Sometimes I wonder how he puts up with my slant, and my tendency to lecture about it.
Especially since he'd just spent the day helping the son of a friend move, and was so tired he visibly listed on the way to the bathroom.
I guess he likes curly-haired, argumentative women.

Coming to America; or, Then and Now

When I was sixteen or so, I went with my honors English class to see the play Emperor Jones. It made a huge impression on me, and I wish I could remember the name of the actor who played the title role, because he might be famous now.
But that, as Arlo Guthrie once said, isn't what I came to talk about.
We wandered around what passed for Dallas's art district later.
"If I didn't speak, could you tell I wasn't American?" I asked my boyfriend.
He assured me he could, in a second. I wondered about this for years; eventually, I think, it stopped being true.
But I was reminded this week.
We have a new student at my school, a Peruvian. He arrived in this country, I guess, last week sometime. And yes, even if he keeps his mouth shut - and he does - it's easy to guess he's a new arrival.
It isn't just his classically Inca face, which could be the model for the codices the Spaniards and Portugese found in their ravages across Central and South America. His entire appearance speaks of his foreign origin. He wears small, neat shoes that no Norteamericano boy would be caught dead in - almost girls' shoes, shiny leather and the kind of Keds - styles American women favored in the late 60's. With white socks, and neat pants and shirts. Yesterday he had a velour tracksuit - not particularly outrageous, but nothing I would consider purchasing for my ten year old. His hair has a kind of bowl cut that is neither short nor long enough to be fashionable, even by middle school standards.
And oh, my heart goes out to him. I got here when I was exactly a year older than he is now. In Czechoslovakia, hot baths were a once-a-week thing, which meant that you washed your hair about every two weeks. Really! So for the first few months, I mostly went to school with hair so greasy that, nowadays, I would be calling my parents to see if they could do something about the grooming issue. I wore the same dress every day for the first week, and I don't think it got laundered in between. It was simply the only thing I had that had come from the United States, shipped to Vienna ahead of time, and thus the only outfit of whose acceptability I was certain.
The only thing I remember distinctly from my first day of American school was that I broke the slide with the algae in my science class, roughly 5 minutes after my arrival. All I knew to say, to most inquiries, was "I don't understand," a phrase I used so often that it became a single, garbled word.
But I learned. By Christmas, I had no trouble memorizing the words to the carols the choir sang, and had taught the class, phonetically, the Russian words to "Katyusha" (incidentally, the song at the end of the wedding in The Deer Hunter..). I was on the honor roll from the first quarter - and yes, those first grades were charity, but after that I earned them. My math teacher, Mr. Graham, stayed after school with me one afternoon, and taught me how not to roll my r's.
"Put the tip of your tongue against the roof of your mouth," he said. All it took.
My sister still rolls her r's.
That summer, my parents enrolled me in summer school. Having no other options, I didn't object - and by the end of it, earned vocabulary scores in the 90th percentile. And my verbals on the SAT and GRE and all those other tests you take to prove your academic worth continued that trend.
Beyond my math teacher's informal intervention, I never got help of any sort to help me learn the language from the public schools. My mom, bless her, taught me most of my early skills; at first, sitting on athletic mats in the emergency displaced-persons center in Vienna, then in the room where she and my father slept, as we together decoded a children's biography of Clara Barton. By the end of the book I had passable English skills.
The Peruvian student's world is so very, very different.
The educational assistant assigned to him waved to me excitedly today from her seat next to him in science class.
"Look what I found!" she crowed.
It was a science book in Spanish. She was so very pleased, because it defined, in his language, exactly the terms we discussed.
I smiled encouragingly.
But, I wanted to say. Will this help him learn, really? Does it help us, any of us, travellers in foreign lands, to have the option of using our native language? Or does it instead cripple us?
In Vienna several years ago, my sister and I stopped by a uniquely non-English speaking flower seller to purchase a bouquet for a friend.
"How much?" she asked louder and louder, an unwitting caricature of the American tourist. It wasn't working.
I combed the memory banks for my high school German class.
"Wie Viel?" I finally remembered.
"Drei Mark." was his pre-Euro reply.
Would I have bothered to remember, if, like the desk clerk in our hotel, he spoke English fluently? Doubt it.
I've taken the classes in sheltered instruction for non-English speakers. I recognize that my situation was special, because my mother spoke the language of my new home, and that perhaps languages come more easily to me than to most, because I'm an auditory learner.
But I keep thinking about that quiet Inca, reading his Spanish science book. Are we doing him a favor? Or are we assigning him a de facto disability?

8 best things about my head injury

One minute I was happily riding my bike down a wet Gold Camp Road. Well, perhaps not happily. Contemplatively. Carefully. Composing a snappy email to an old flame who'd just married, in my head -ly. The next moment I was looking up at a beautiful EMT with long dark hair who was feeling my limbs for possible fractures.
"I've a marathon in 8 days - can I still run it?" was literally the first thing out of my mouth. After that, it was a dreamy in-out rush to the hospital, and hours of lying on a backboard whilst getting poked and scoped, all to find out that I'd had a brain concussion, accompanied by orbital and sinus bone fractures, as well as some fierce vertigo that stalked me and threatened to overwhelm me whenever I moved my head.
So what's good about that.
Something has to be, I thought, and as I pondered, it occurred to me that most of the good things came down to appreciation, of all the stuff that I, that we, take for granted, but that can disappear in a seconds-long loss of control followed by a minutes-long loss of consciousness.
Here it is, that appreciative list:
1. That my doctor parents, who so often drive me crazy with their concerns for my well-being, can close together in a long-distance, effective rant about the difference between concussion and contusion, and how I WILL recover, I WILL be fine.
2. That my older son can drop everything and rush to my side - even though, and perhaps because, once he's satisfied that mom is fine, is happy to spend his time with his friends instead.
3. That my man Tim can be at Penrose Main roughly 3 minutes after they call him, can make me form a misshapen smile with his wry face at the shape I'm in, and ask the one question that's guaranteed to cause another smile, and ascertain that I still have a brain at the same time - "What kind of bike do you have?"
And then take me out even though I look like hell.
4. That, having had my own brush with brain injury, I now come a little bit closer to understanding all the adults with TBI that I'd tried to help all those years ago - and to being completely astounded at their flat-out courage.
5. That my doctor, whose competence at dealing with my complicated medical history I sometimes question, but whom I keep because he's just so darn nice and besides we've gone gray together, said to me yesterday, when I despaired about my vertigo, "you know, it's your inner ear that's causing it... not your brain."
My ear? Heck, I can deal with a stupid ear problem!
6. That the ADT marathon people changed my registration to a half-marathon in the time it took to type this sentence, once I'd notified them that I got hurt. I'll be walking it..mostly.
7. That the above-mentioned, beautiful EMT ended her report to the Penrose Main Trauma people with "She's an athlete!"
8. That my friends.... were simply there. Being friends.

a serious waste

Every year, the big districts in this area gather all of its employees in a gym at one of the high schools. The purpose of this gathering is, purportedly, to get everyone jazzed up about the school year.This is not what happens.What happens is that the thousands of teachers, administrators and assistants, who have spent the last few days frenetically preparing their classroom/leson plans/minds for the little angels they will attempt to beguile into learning, and who still have an unmanageable amount left to accomplish before the first bell rings, sit, for an hour and half, while the school superintendent bloviates.And if you think city councilment/countycomissioners/senators know how to do this, I have news for you. Every school superintendent I have ever listened to at these meetings has forgottem more about putting on a long, desperately meaningless mess of jargon and line graphs than any glorified city or county aparatchik has ever learned.What is more, they are able to present this stunningly dead series of slides accompanied by commentary combining the most obvious statements (we want all our students to graduate!) with the most fantastic claims (by 2014, all our students will be proficient or advanced [really? the little 6th grade girl I met earlier today, who does not speak understandably, and who needs her mother to literally hold her by the hand and lift her into seats, will be proficient or advanced in high school? Praise Jesus!!]), all delivered in a monotone worthy of, well, Ben Stein if Ben Stein wasn't funny, to thousands of caffeine-deprived people sitting in bleachers. Have you ever sat in overcrowded high school bleachers while listening to an hour and half long speech? It's pretty much pure hell. But we are the ultimate captive audience, aren't we? We have to be there; we're happy to be employed (like Dylan once sang); and about the only recourse available to us is to refuse to applaud. Which I pretty much did.And oh, yes, there is usually a cute little joke, or, in this afternoon's case, a mime of a children's book enacted by the school district big shots, that is supposed to make you leave laughing and feeling better about the whole dreadful affair.It didn't work.

Interns

Interns
I was about to turn the radio off and go weed my garden, when I heard Scott Simon’s interview with the intern in her 40’s. Cute, I thought at first; then my mind crashed back 40 years to the first time I heard that word, “intern.”
When I was 12, my parents made the incomprehensively brave decision to move our family from our relatively comfortable home in Czechoslovakia, to America, where they had never been. Prague Spring had just ended with the invasion of the armies of the Warsaw Pact. They’d both been children under the Protectorate during World War II, and, in their words, did not want their daughters to live under an invading force.
We spent the first six months in America living with kind relatives – but put eight people in a three bedroom house with one bathroom, and the most marvelous intentions turn to pure hell. I was a communist-schooled atheist back then; still, I prayed, for the first time in my life, for my parents to pass the ECFMG, the exam foreign medical graduates must complete to practice in the United States.
They did. And so that we could move out on our own as quickly as possible, my parents got the only jobs they could - as interns at the Doctors’ Hospital in Seattle, Washington. I can’t imagine their humiliation. My father had been the head of pediatrics in a largish county hospital; my mother had developed relationships of trust and candor with tens of thousands of mothers who came to her clinics. Suddenly they were glorified students, expected to answer difficult medical questions about topics they hadn’t addressed in decades.
At the first birth at which he officiated, my father was told the parents had decided on the name “Jason.” Did they know where the name came from, he asked. And there in the delivery room, in what must have been barely understandable English, he told the story of Jason and the Argonauts to the parents, the nurses and the other doctors.
Some intern.

Traveling Dreams

We were driving through the Klamath range in northern California. Somewhere between Burnt Ranch and Weaverville (I kid you not, these really were the names..) we saw the huge plume of a forest fire. Lit from below, it glowed purple and a vivid yellow and reached far, far into the midday sky.
We stopped at a tiny store to stock up on caffeine and soda. A couple of guys were just leaving, saying a few final words about the fires - guess there were more than one. The owner/operator of the establishment sat in a folding chair, a settled kind of smile on his face under the baseball cap and white hair.
I pointed to the picture on the cooler. "You got any Red Bull or just the picture?" I teased, somehow knowing that this was the way in this little valley full of twisty trees and sunshine. "Nah, everybody likes that Rock Star stuff now," he muttered contentedly.
I made sure the Rock Star had caffeine (it's vile, by the way!) and as I paid, I asked about the plume we saw. "Yeah, they've got most of the fires under control, but that one's givin' them trouble," he said.
"We've never seen anything like that before. We don't have fires in Colorado," Jake piped up. "Sweetie, we do too," I corrected him. I turned to the man behind the counter. "Ever hear of the Heyman fire?"
"What was that one?"
"Oh, you know, this woman's boyfriend left her, and she was burning his letters, and set the biggest forest fire in Colorado history!" I found myself easing into the country store rhythm, and it felt good, just to tell stories and be all aw-shucks about it.
"Why was she burning his letters?" Jake wanted to know.
"Oh, you know... women!" commented the store owner with a smile and a look under the brim at me.
We were flirting now, with our eyes, in the unabashed way people who know they will never see each other again, can, and I said something about how guys are like that too, only you don't hear about it, and we both laughed and looked.
And just for a second, I imagined what it would be like if I decided to stay there in that sweet valley with the smiling-eyed man. It was silly, of course - no doubt he had a wife back behind the store, and I've a whole life here. But I still thought about it that night, and it's one of those roads not taken that will always stay in my mind. Lovely, and totally unspoiled by reality!