By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Mama, what do angels look like?

This, my small kiddo asks. In the throes of divorce. Of making a game of beans and rice. Of sorrow. Of innocent query and wonderment. This she asks.

How shall I answer? What can I say that would not be a lie passing my lips?

In the speckled dark of a sleepless, starry sky, I sit on our hill as she chases shadows in the warm breeze and a coyote pauses beyond the fence that separates us.

The hill is ours because we love it. I think it loves us. It makes paths for us around the rabbit holes, the tarantula borrows, the grainy mounds of queens and workers in constant toil.

The People say it is a holy place; the altitude puts it a peedy bit closer to the gods.

But I am distracted from the possibility of clutching a deity’s apron strings by whispered anguish calling to me from places I cannot pronounce and some I can.

Will sea turtles discover crude oil lends their shells a fine sheen? Will tar balls become the tender of shrimpers and oyster folk? Will children who play with spent artillery shells transcribe the booming rhythm of war into the next amazing rap sensation?

I search for hope amidst the moonlit carpet of rabbit turds, brown and rich, the prickly stubble of deer grass, recently shaved by a peon’s scythe, the manzanilla, its soothing ways unrecognized in the wild by those who buy it by the box.

The moon catches my girl, catches her dark curls and darker eyes, twirling into a glowing tornado, spiraling up toward the night, up into a future I fret I cannot affect, and my fear pulls her back to earth.

The coyote howls across the hill, and answers echo from a distant canyon. I peer through the grasses to watch her, stymied by the impassable chain-link fence. A border to me, it cuts her world in half. And so she paces, her prey on the other side.

And I chew a manzanilla bud, and rub the tender skin beneath my skirt. The grass makes me itch. It makes me itch because I love to scratch. And so I scratch as I look out over my little town. Indeed it is mine, because we scratch each other.

Why do I love it so here? How dare I raise my child in this place? This place of bitter anger and sweet Peruvian chocolate. Of testicle trees, our avocados, and shocking scarlet bottlebrushes. Of well-repressed, grey-green groves and lusciously chaotic words wending their way behind closed doors, between tussled sheets, into fearful hearts.

The heat of conflict radiates from our bodies, our beds, our lands, entangling the legs of a bawdy blend. And I wonder, what’s not to love?

I lie in the dry grass, caressing the stars, eyes languid and wet, and I sense the loss of something, something I might not have ever wanted.

The coyote, impatient with human encumbrances, glances at us and trots across the border to dine and commune with her own. I applaud her hopeful vision.

My kiddo, delighted with discovering her ability to dance, moves deeper into the dark.

Angels? I call.

Oh, never mind, Mama. I just saw one!

And she spins, spins into the sweeping night. Soars out of reach. She is gone. Gone.

Love,
K-B

© 2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

This piece is crossposted at The Progressive Post.

Note: Painting by Kate Gressitt-Diaz.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

The book was a struggle, but I felt duty bound to stay put in my yard chair and honor the author’s effort to finish the thing. Consequently, even a trail of ants, Fallbrook’s ever-present organic waste abatement crews, distracted me from the chore of reading. I watched the good little refuse engineers tidily toting to their nest the remnants of a mourning dove egg, probably dropped from its cedar nest by a murderous Blue Jay. I’d heard a ruckus the day before and ducked inside to avoid its calamitous end. But damn if fate didn’t catch up with me! At least the ants were swift and effective. Perhaps too effective.

I remembered the gift my father sent to my kiddo when she was small enough to still handle insects as though they were playthings. It had been a surprise, a special grandfatherly treat. And, according to the accompanying literature, we all — yes, children and adults alike — were in for hours of entomological fun as we played audience to the life’s work of the inhabitants of Uncle Milton’s Ant Farm.

Actually, said inhabitants of the green petrochemical-based farm were shipped separately, which meant a wait for all that fun we knew was coming our way. In the meantime, we filled the bottom couple inches of the farm with the lily-white synthetic sand provided, and eagerly anticipated the ants’ Herculean feats, their mind-bending commitment to earthmoving, their fastidious exercise of home economics — all the requisite behaviors of a proper ant.

The estimated day of arrival drew near, and we tacked the ant poster that came with the farm to my daughter’s wall. Together, we reviewed Milton’s ageless discourse on the wondrous world of ants. With a couple of honored bugologists in the family, I thought this might prove a prophetic science experience for the kid, soon to graduate from daycare to real school.

At long last, our ants arrived — as expected, only soldier-workers of ambiguous gender. Queens were prohibited from travel. In we poured our new housemates to their escape-proof quarters, while I considered the years of effort I’d previously expended to keep the little bastards out of our home. Nonetheless, gave them a welcoming honey-water spritz and set them in a place of honor at the dining room table.

Thankfully, Uncle Milton had adequately forewarned us, so we were not surprised when a few ants died the first day or two. This was to be expected. What was a bit disconcerting was the ants’ method of disposing of their dead: They broke down their brethren and, piece by piece, added their teeny black body parts to the white synthetic hills. And, to my maternal dismay, the ants continued dropping like, well, flies. Every day, we awoke to a grislier scene of death and dismemberment as the lily mounds became speckled with the black grains of dissected ant bodies.

In fear for my daughter’s psyche, and not a little grossed out, I poured through Uncle Milton’s brochure, a desperate review in search of advice I might have missed, critical guidance for keeping ants alive and well, but to no avail. The ants continued their unthinking hill building and their dying, only to be recycled as pepper to the sand’s salt by their surviving peers.

As the ant population rapidly dwindled and the hills darkened, I wondered about the significance of the ants’ unnatural existence on my table. Even when confronted with increasing mortality, the soldiers just plodded along, following the mandate of their biology — until the sad day when but one ant remained alive.

A lousy way to start the morning, I groped my way to the kitchen for day-old coffee and the eye dropper of honey-water, and returned to find the sole survivor atop the tallest hill peering skyward. I was grateful that the poor thing was too brainless to experience the bitter isolation of such utter aloneness, too rudimentary to beseech some great ant god in the artificial green sky to end this brutal abandonment. Unwilling to expose my daughter to such angst, I shattered the plastic and dumped the last ant outside in the garbage — to eat himself to a happy end.

I was certain then, as I am now, that we are not intended to keep ant farms on our dining room tables. Any more than we are intended to live in petrochemical plastic and perpetuate our soulless behaviors into our own extinction — our reckless Wall Street finanigans, our natural resource guzzling, our political demolition derbies, our hate-mortared border walls.

But, hey, it was just a bunch of ants, you might say? Yes, and if we don’t do any better than Uncle Milton’s ants, the species in my yard is likely to outlast us all, tidily toting our remnants back to their nests.

Love,
K-B

©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

My mother planted lilies of the valley along her garden’s edge. It was a rare mundanity, and the memory has remained with me. One early autumn day, wearing her orange clamdiggers, matching gloves and shoulder-banging earrings, she carried a bag of bulbs, a spade and a small braided rug to the garden.

She rolled out the rug to kneel on, to protect her knees from the damp earth. She had shattered them both in an accident years before I was born. A truck, oblivious to the winter’s effect on the winding country roads, skated around a bend and over the top of my parent’s little car. I’ve imagined her lying there, a mouthful of shattered windshield burrowing into her gullet like seventeen-year locusts into the ground, her bright blood sketching her outline in the sterile snow.

Mother was not expected to live. Even Maud, the mighty Southern Baptist mother-in-law, abandoned her latest disownment to declare a bedside farewell. But, as is Mother’s wont, she outraged the family yet again. With a turban around her shaved head and extravagant rings dangling all from one ear, she left them slack-jawed at the hospital as she traipsed off with a limp to other eyebrow-raising pursuits.

Indeed, planting bulbs with me was one of the more temperate of my mother’s moments. She knelt on the rug her mother had braided with remnants from her prodigious sewing basket: scraps of worsted wool from Grandmother’s childhood skirts, bits of camel’s hair coat handed down from the generation before, remains of the blanket she had suckled when her mother was not at hand. Settled on her legacy, Mother dug down into the rich, moist soil to place the bulbs, to bring definition to her garden path. While she sowed, she taught me the lilies of the valley song in her voice that had lost its music to the ravages of swallowed glass.

White coral bells upon a slender stalk
Lilies of the valley deck my garden walk
Oh, don’t you wish that you could hear them ring
That will happen only when the fairies sing

In the spring, she said, we would see the graceful stalks and ribbed leaves draw the garden’s border, and the blossoms would soon follow. I watched and watched where the bulbs had disappeared and cared only to hear the bells ring and to catch a fairy in the house I’d made of twigs and berries. But autumn prevailed, spring would not come, and I was distracted from my vigil by the joys of lining up pilfered apples, roadside to roadside, and watching cars press them into apple butter as we, my siblings and I, rolled in hilarious fits behind the hedge, delighted with our miscreant deeds. I suppose my mother watched us from the window, pleased with our simple pleasures and wishing they could stay that way. She certainly knew better, though — she has forever been anything but simple.

My mother did not bake cupcakes. Instead, she filled our little brown bags with cream cheese and caviar sandwiches, a dash of lemon juice and grated onion to temper the salt. We desperately tried to trade them for peanut butter and jelly or baloney or even Velveeta, but to no avail.

She did make her own green tomato relish, for the bridge club — the best in town, so they said — and she decorated the tally cards with whimsical caricatures of unnamed women. Little did they know that the buxom gal with the rhinestone beauty mark, the card that set them all atwitter, was one of their own. She delighted in telling the ladies, as they politely nibbled her cucumber and watercress sandwiches and savored her relish, that the tomatoes grew wild over our septic tank.

On occasion, though, Mother did try to comport herself within the bounds of normalcy, she tried in her way. The day she stood behind the elementary school lunch counter, lovingly handing out milk cartons to my peers, she wore her outrageous hoop earrings — two on one ear — and her flowing caftan reached well below the accepted hemline of the day. The children wanted to know if that Gypsy was my mother. I fled the milk line to hide in the girl’s lav until lunch was over.

Some years later, they redefined my mother as she sat on the floor of my attic room amid my circle of friends. They liked to come to my house, they said, because my mother was groovy. She let me sleep on a mattress on the floor, with Indian beads and fabrics decorating the slanted surfaces of the garret and incense poking out of the fieldstone chimney’s chinks — incense she’d selected because it reminded her of me, she said. That night, the savory smoke filling our adolescent heads with unspoken notions, Mother asked if we got high. Then my friends knew she was truly cool, and I knew the only thing to do was crawl behind the decorations of my groovy room and silently suffer a humiliated teenager’s death.

But eventually, having a daughter of my own, I came to wince at how my mother must have ached while I hated her. I’d been so certain she didn’t — couldn’t — understand, and I did punish her for that. And I feared my daughter would be as cruel as I — and her daughter to her. Yet, when I first gazed down at my nursing child, I was finally able to define that warmly, wonderfully safe feeling that thoughts of my mother often bear with them today. She, of course, had nursed me as well. Even now, I can rest my face on her bosom and know indeed all will be right.

Except when mother told me she ate in lieu of sex. I had come of age, and I understood, though it saddened me, that she and Father had sex and that they didn’t. A little loss of weight was a cheery sign they were once again intimate, and it made me squirm. Midnight raids on the fridge meant the worst, and allowed my puckered fanny to relax. That fridge was the source of so much consolation.

When I chose to no longer be pregnant, my mother reached into the fridge and fed me comfort, all my favorite things — chocolate éclairs, Napoleons and, yes, caviar and cream cheese. She put her hand on my brow and asked me about it. I told her of the vacuum, slurping from my womb like the dregs of a strawberry soda. She cried with me and brought more tasty morsels to sooth our sadness.

Now I wonder, where does my mother end and I begin? I’ve always been afraid of becoming her. Would I have her girth? God forbid! Or her bent toward excess? Please, no! But her social grace and her clever humor: that is my unattainable desire. Oh, to make the most awkward of guests feel honored at my table or to give the dyspeptically staid a case of the vapors with a line as smart as it is unseemly or to bring back to earth the loftiest of egos — all with the eloquence and wit of a finely-crafted quip. Well into her eighties, Mother could still be a contender at Dorothy Parker’s table.

But one day my mother will die. And I, I will wade along the shore of sorrow, waves lapping at my legs, in and out, in and out. I will look to the fridge for solace, searching for sweetness to surround the pain, opening and closing the door fruitlessly. I will resort to cinnamon toast, sprinkling more at the edges, as she did, to make the crusts easier to bear. I will dream of her, burying my face in her pillow-chest. And I will re-braid the unraveling ends of my mother’s mother’s rug with the clothes of my childhood. Then I will take my daughter to the garden. We will kneel on the small and well-loved rug, and we will plant lilies of the valley while we sing.

Love,
K-B

©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

My daughter loves balloons. Me? I’m uncomfortable with the little bastards. They burst mid-blow, slap your lips with stinging rubber, startle the boogers out of you.

My kid, though, she loves them. How could she not?

The day my daughter was born, my best friend brought day-old, helium-filled birthday balloons — her husband’s — and she and my husband tied the flagging orbs to the ceiling fan above our bed.

Earlier in the evening, we had planned on a movie — I don’t recall which one. Beetlejuice, perhaps, Tim Burton’s image of death and a darkly disturbed daughter. He must not have yet had one. Or Bagdad Cafe, Percy Aldon’s story of luscious rebirth in a Southwestern desert. No matter: We didn’t make it. I left a trail of dribbles back to the car.

And settled at home, when we were all certain it had started, we lowered the lights. We played Mozart — or was it Brahms? Maybe some womanly Celtic stuff. It’s all a bit fuzzy.

I remember going to the kitchen, to make chamomile tea, to move, to breathe, to wonder what was coming next. She wanted to help, my friend, as did my husband, but I think I wasn’t ready for that. Our midwife knew better than to offer.

And then we waited, while I tried to imagine her an adult — I knew it was a girl, untested but certain. Would she be an artist? Would she be whole? Would she survive?

I went to make more chamomile tea, to move more intently, to breathe deeper, to get down on all fours and howl. I knew what was coming next.

The pain, the abstraction, the focus, the detachment, the pain again.

And in between, I thought of Mother, the four she birthed, the one she lost. She also had been born at home, in the safe comfort of loving hands that would swaddle a healthy babe and let loose those not ready to join the living. Did Mother remember, could she recall her sequence, the progression from water broken, the length of her labors, the moments the contractions gave way to release and bliss?

Why don’t we ask these things, ask before it’s too late for answers?

But no matter; we were done. My daughter lay on my chest, umbilical cord still pulsing. Her father glowing. Balloons fluttering between gently turning fan blades, too soft to lift drenched hair from my forehead.

And to this day, my daughter loves balloons. Me, I remain uncomfortable with the little bastards. Although if someone else inflates them, I admit they make me smile. And still, I try to imagine her, well into her adulthood. Will she be an artist? Will she be whole? Will she survive? I don’t know.

But I do know that home births are slightly more common today than in recent years past, as they should be, though not yet the norm they were before hospitals took over. And if Congress has the resolve to reduce the cost of healthcare, insurers will be required to cover them.

© 2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

(Balloon photo by Aaron Hockley via a Creative Commons license.)

Prayers for Bobby

Based on a true story, Prayers for Bobby portrays the Griffith family’s struggle to adjust to a gay teen son, Bobby, amid his mother’s belief that God will “cure” him. For Bobby, suicide is the resolution; for his mother, finding faith in unconditional love is the cure.

Prayers for Bobby might enlighten parents who believe God condemns their homosexual children — and it could save a child’s life. MAMMA says give unconditional love a chance.

The book is available in paperback and the movie, currently unavailable for purchase, can be seen on youtube.com, in nine segments.

Learn more about the story at Lifetime.com.

And, thanks to MAMMA Kim for the heads up.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

She sent me a link to the pictures, blithely posted on Facebook. Her closed eye was engorged to the size and tone of a plum, a large, ripe plum big enough to stifle — oh, I don’t know, Rush Limbaugh, perhaps. Surely big enough to indicate serious damage and pain. Indeed, big enough to pucker my motherly derriere up to my earlobes and launch me from Fallbrook to the University of California Santa Cruz, where my precious, bloodied child needed me.

And then she stood before me, teary-eyed, swollen and bruised, waiting for me to fix it.

But what could I do?

Well, try not to cry, for starters. Pull her to the comfort of my maternal bosom. Hold her and tell her it’ll be okay.

“But, when?” she implored. “And what if my eyebrow doesn’t grow back? I hate my life.”

So much for my comforting bosom.

At least we could both take comfort that it was not an abusive fist that battered my kid, but an unkempt road, a road harboring over-sized, bicycle wheel-grabbing gaps between old train tracks and lumpy asphalt.

It’s a road that deserves a good jackhammering, but it’s too low on the Santa Cruz totem pole compared to the need to invest in social awareness campaigns; for instance, the Domestic Violence Awareness Month banners I noticed driving into town. Those puppies were well hoisted, while the dastardly train tracks dumped a near-death experience on my baby.

Well, okay, I exaggerate. And, truth be told, I like the banners. In fact, I love the banners. I pointed them out to my daughter on the way to pick up copious amounts of feel-good food. I asked her if anyone had tried to rescue her from an abusive partner, a black eye being such a common red flag for domestic violence — you know, the old “I walked into the closet door” alert.

But nope. In this enlightened town of progressive academics, gracefully aging hippies, medical marijuana peddlers, tree-loving hemp wearers, locally roasted and cold-brewed coffee vendors, devoted political activists and banana slugs,* no one checked to make sure she wasn’t a victim of abuse. Not a professor, not one feminist studies student, not a single concerned and domestic violence-aware person.

So much for the banners.

Oh, she did get plenty of stares — from students, from kids in the grocery store checkout line, from the equally battered and downtrodden homeless on Pacific Avenue — and her adorable Latin professor kindly asked if she were okay.

But no one uttered the most important words, the most hopeful words, the words that can mean the difference between life and death for a battered woman: Did somebody hit you? Because if somebody hit you, it’s not okay. You don’t deserve it. It’s not your fault. It’s a crime. If somebody hit you, let me help you.

These are the words of someone who is truly aware of domestic violence. They were spoken to me one hot summer’s night in a hospital emergency room. They saved my life — and allowed me to eventually have my daughter.

I like these words. In fact, I love these words. I suppose they’d make a lousy patch for the crummy road, but I wonder if maybe they’d make a good banner.

For more information:

If you want to help, use those words whenever you find yourself wondering, and visit your local domestic violence prevention agency or the Family Violence Prevention Fund.

If you are a victim of violence, leave your abuser, go to your local shelter, visit the National Domestic Violence Hotline website or call 800-799-SAFE (7233). Save yourself, Sweetie.

Love,
K-B 760-522-1064 — call me, because being hit once is indeed domestic violence

*The banana slug is the UCSC mascot. No kidding.

©2009 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Note: This piece is cross-posted at the Santa Cruz Sentinel.

(Photo from the Santa Cruz City Commission for the Prevention of Violence Against Women.)

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

He left through the side door of the court building and started across the street mid-block, leaning with years, awkward but sturdy, the sun igniting his silver hair. His blue overalls were hitched up at the waist with a workman’s belt, a trick of the shrinking elderly.

I slowed down, not annoyed by his jaywalking, but certainly noting it. Then his pace got the better of me and I enjoyed the moment it allowed to watch the sun find its way through the wind and the trees to drop blind spots on my windshield. The city isn’t so terrible when there are trees, and I imagined the old man, pruning his own.

He would trim them with care, cutting only the weak, the unnecessary. Strong arms shaping strong arms. And tending a small urban garden, perhaps. Tomatoes, certainly, some peppers, maybe snap beans. He’d bring his grandchildren to the plot to teach them the miracle of planting and nurturing food from the earth. For them, only the crisp sweetness of beans fresh from the vine, the warm joy of afternoon tomatoes, blood red as God meant them to be.

The old man stumbled, hesitated for a moment and hopped a step or two. I pulled up, not too close, and waited for him to finish crossing, hoping for his parking place. He was not, after all, so old, maybe a middle-aged man, Latino perhaps. The thick, purple-black hair of his ancestors remained with him still, shielding him from eons of heat and rain. Its sheen must have reflected the sun’s rays. That’s what I had seen, not the halo of a silver-haired old man.

And what had seemed the stoop of age, was, more likely, the twisted result of bending over to pick the produce of another man’s vines. Bending and reaching, bending and reaching, but never tasting the fruit. Maybe he left a family in his homeland, as eager for the spare words he scribbled to them each month as for the currency he sent, while he risked his dignity to a hostile nation. Cowering in a canyon at night, among his compadres, they would seek flickering warmth from their shared misery, feed one another on the constant desire for something better.

In the center of the road, he stopped and looked toward me, so I waved him on. He raised his hands slightly, oddly, gesturing something, I wasn’t sure what. I smiled and nodded to reassure him he was safe, I would not hit him, and I waved him on again.

He turned back to his destination as an animated branch blocked the sun from my windshield, and I saw his workman’s belt become straps and steel, and the chain forcing his slight stoop, thick enough to keep a bull in tow, shackled his limbs to the impenetrable leather at his waist. Then the sun meandered through some shifting leaves and found the man’s hands, only to be frightened off by the muzzle of the flat-black gun he clasped.

He stumbled again, and the chain snaring his legs clanged against the ground before him. He squinted at me once more over his shoulder.

Looking around the sun’s rays, I caught his eyes, dark and frightened. He was eighteen at most, and sad, fearfully sad — a lost soul loved only by a mother fettered to her child’s failure. A mother hoping to save her boy who was hopeless. She would kneel every night and pray to the Madre de Dios for his salvation, for him to know some peace, for him to escape his anguish. Then she would sob, not trusting God to give her weak one this miracle.

Did his mother know, deep in her heart, his only escape would be found the next day in the angry aim of a policeman’s gun, in the speckled shade of a backyard garden, his crimson fluid seeping into the earth, feeding the tidy rows of tomatoes and snap beans?

The boy ran a hobbled race the final yards, his prison blues marked with the sweat of his effort. A passenger door swung open, an engine revved. He looked back toward me one last time, and I waved him on again.

©2009 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

(Photo by Vicky Sedgewick via a Creative Commons license.)

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Many moons ago, before the birth of my daughter in California, my mother and father made the trip from the other coast to bestow their approval on our new home. They came bearing love gifts and rituals, tales of family who dared be absent, the comforts of a senior generation. We sat down to dine on the opportunity — the tumbling repartee and laughter that is our wont. We ate and gossiped and reminisced, and then did it some more.

Those who know our family, would not find it odd that we also determined the visit a fitting moment to explore the far end of life’s spectrum: Mother, a positively inveterate social worker, and I took a class on aging and family.

The course was interesting, fun, poignant, challenging, great fodder for dinner table conversation — and ultimately useless.

It did not result in our soundly preparing for my parents’ oldth and eventual demise — our own error. We did not follow the course’s wise counsel to create a financial plan for their elder years, to plot a rational and sensitive path to a final home where physical and emotional wellbeing — and independence — could be best assured within their projected means and sensibilities. We did not define roles and responsibilities suitable for each offspring to take on as our parents’ capabilities diminished.

Oh, we knew what we should do, the right and reasonable things necessary for when that distant time comes, we even gave them a nod or two, but we just never got around to doing them. Life was far too busy for us all to lend thought to aging and death.

And then Father up and died — first! — surprising everyone, most of all Mother.

Well-entrenched in congenital math anxiety and her generationally ascribed role, she was not disposed to address their small investment accounts and tangible assets. She was not prepared to manage the documentation of life that had been Father’s bailiwick. She was sure as hell not ready to be alone.

And so, we have gradually cobbled together a semblance of a care system, the nearest offspring providing Mother a nest, the analytic one taking on things financial and legal, the others providing counsel and encouragement. It is not enough, it is imperfect, it is riddled with ill-defined expectations and sibling dynamics, but it is imbued with love.

Still, for all the eager voices in our family, we are stunningly silent about the inevitable truths that roar around us. Amidst the roiling waves of emotion, we harbor concerns and conceits, doubts and distrusts; fear and sadness are muzzled. And the gossip that would entertain us at dinner is spun into pain. The mourning of loss, current and foreseen, is silenced with discomfort. Questions become accusations. Sorrow becomes depression. Goodwill becomes dismay.

Yet life persists.

We bumble along and babies are born. Hurts are soothed. Marriages are made. Familial waters are calmed, until the next storm. And our younger generation chalks it all up to humorous family dysfunction, overlooking the quiet shadow of age that gently embraces their own parents.

And what of my progeny, an only child; have I set upon her the prospect of an unbearable burden of elder care? Or can we do any better?

It’s possible.

With the lessons of many moons ago and those of today, our plan can be made, falteringly at first, but surely with good intent, perchance with the realization denied my parents. Things will go in my getting-old file — advance directives, wills, a reminder to toss the ashes on the vegetable garden. And I hope my daughter and I can ultimately give voice to our aging, the celebration of life entertainingly-lived, the acknowledgement of limitations and gifts, the acceptance that we each come to an end, one way or another, but preferably with grace and love intact, however imperfect, and the tumbling repartee and laughter that is our wont — and that, in our oldth, makes us clench our kegels.

Love,
K-B

©2009 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

When James Leaves

By Carrie

When James leaves Fallbrook, what memories will he retain of our “friendly village”? He likes to say that he hasn’t been taught the three Rs in school, but, instead, the three Ks — Klu Klux Klan. I know I’ve learned that if tolerance is a Christian virtue, Fallbrook is not a Christian community.

When James leaves, we no longer will need a trace on our phone to stop the incessant calls that jar us awake in the middle of the night.

“Is James there? No? Well, tell him Big Mike called. Big Mike with the big dick.” Screams of laughter before the phone hangs up.

We will no longer have harassers calling again and again while we’re eating dinner, not saying anything, or moaning.

When James leaves, we won’t have to wash the car everyday. We are tired of wiping off the words “Die faggot,” “Queer,” “Fudge-packer” and “Butt-pirate,” written in felt marker or dust on the car. We won’t have to alternate which car he drives, to keep it from being keyed, to protect him from being ambushed.

When James leaves, my younger son, Mark, might have an easier time at school. Perhaps the student body will suffer memory loss, and he will no longer be tripped, called names and asked if his older brother comes into his room at night and screws him.

When James leaves, I will not have to go to the sheriff’s office with death threats that have been left on our car. Notes that read “Die, you fucking queer. We don’t like yo’ kind ‘round here. I’m going to kill you and shit on your face.”

I won’t have to watch the officer, smelling of body odor and alcohol, look up at me and ask, “Why do they think he’s a fag?”

“Because he is — gay, that is.”

I won’t have to watch the cop straighten his shoulders with a macho shake and say, “Well, I don’t have a problem with them, as long as they don’t come on to me.” As if anyone would come on to this smelly, unshaven officer of the law.

I won’t have to listen to reassurances by him and others that I needn’t worry about it, because, after all, they’re just kids, just messing around.

When James leaves, he’ll attend a university in a metropolitan area with a greater mix of ethnic and social groups than in this little town. He’ll escape a school system where he was beaten up and knocked unconscious in gym class; held down and punched repeatedly on the arm until he repeated ten fruits; told by his teachers that his “odd” voice could be corrected by a speech therapist; called names between each of his classes and during assemblies when receiving awards.

I’m not saying that when he leaves Fallbrook he won’t be harassed again. Homophobia is too rampant for that. But at least in a larger, dare I say more liberal, community, he’ll find more people who will support him, who will accept him.

When James leaves, perhaps lost friends will acknowledge me again. Maybe I’ll be able to walk by people I’ve known for fifteen years and not see them avert their eyes. Not that I want to know them anymore.

I don’t know if I’ll ever forgive this town for making me look forward to when James leaves.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

What should we do? What should we do with the four self-described elderly claimants from the Milwaukee branch of the Christian Civil Liberties Union (CCLU)? Their complaint filed with the City of West Bend, Wisconsin, seeks to publicly burn, bury, shred or otherwise dramatically destroy Baby Be-Bop, a novel so offensive to them that they require damages of $30,000 a head to compensate for exposure to the book’s mere cover, egregiously displayed at the West Bend Community Memorial Library. CCLU reviewed Baby Be-Bop as “explicitly vulgar, racial and anti-Christian,” a “hate crime” for, among other perceived sins, use of the words “nigger” and “faggot.”

“Obviously, not one of those people even read Baby Be-Bop,” my daughter Kate said, “because if they had, they would know that it promotes love, peace and acceptance, not hate crimes and violence. What the hell are they doing sniffing around the young adult novels anyway? Shady old creepers! It’s people like this who give Christianity a bad rep for being all about violence, hatred and idiocy.”

Spoken with edgy but well-informed passion: Kate devoured Baby Be-Bop and every other book by Francesca Lia Block in print during those excruciating years that most folks manage to forget by the time they’re old enough to read to their own kids. When Kate wouldn’t speak to me, I knew she was safe in the arms of Francesca’s loving words, delivered with the candor, the sensitivity, the magic of a writer who spies the world’s beauty through the painful mire of growing into self-acceptance. “Francesca Lia Block’s stories helped me realize I could love myself for the little freak I was during a time when it seemed impossible to love myself.”

Block, a best-selling author who describes Baby Be-Bop as “a gay coming of age story about the healing power of love,” said of CCLU, “Of course I’m using the racist word to expose and criticize racism. But they’re making it sound [as though I used it] in a different way. Either they didn’t read the book or they’re misrepresenting it intentionally.”

And it is “intent” that makes this all curiouser and curiouser.

The CCLU complaint followed on the heels of the ad hoc West Bend Citizens for Safe Libraries (WBCFSL) campaign for a hit list of supposed “pornographic” books, including Baby Be-Bop. WBCFSL’s goal? To remove, re-label and/or physically sequester away from youthful readers anything that addresses their budding (or broiling) sexuality — hetero, homo, bi, tri or otherwise.

Like any savvy writer, Block saw some advantage in the two groups’ mischief: “My first reaction was, ‘Cool, I’m banned!” But then it sank in. “I felt it a little bit more as a direct threat, with the climate right now.” Nonetheless, Block said she has probably received more media in the last week than in the last twenty years. “That tells you something about where the world is today.”

But WBCFSL — whose acronym is as unfortunate as its attack on a hefty list of books that give the group’s instigators, West Bend grandparents Jim and Ginny Maziarka, the vapors — failed on June 2 when the library board voted 9 to 0 that the books would stay put.

All the Maziarkas and CCLU have achieved to date is eliciting some unhappy publicity for a nice little town and rousing to action West Benders with a fondness for free speech and the Library Bill of Rights (drafted in 1938 in response to “growing intolerance, suppression of free speech and censorship affecting the rights of minorities and individuals”). Of course, there’s also the probable increase in sales of the targeted books, in particular Dangerous Angels, the collection of Block’s Weetzie Bat books that includes Baby Be-Bop.

And Block is in good company: Her book joins such challenged classics as To Kill a Mocking Bird, Catcher In the Rye, Go Ask Alice and the many contemporary books that address coming of age with honesty — particularly for kids who are gay — and, consequently, bring out adults who persist in burning, or at least spurning, what scares them.

West Bent parent Maria Hanrahan saw what was happening in her town of small appliance manufacturers and happy summer reading programs, and she didn’t like it. “[WBCFSL] began by focusing on a category called Out of the Closet — lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender themed materials. They wanted that reading list removed from the library’s website. Then they wanted to move the books out of the young adult section and into the adult section. Then, when they realized that wasn’t going to work, they changed their complaint to the materials being too explicit. I said to myself, ‘Someone has to speak out against what they are trying to do.’ Well, I’m somebody. I’m a resident here. I have a right and a responsibility as a library user to speak out against this.”

So Hanrahan organized West Bend Parents for Free Speech and had a potluck.

“Then the CCLU filed their case,” Hanrahan continued. “We didn’t think it was surprising that it came on the heels of this other complaint. We haven’t been able to find too much about this CCLU. They have no website. We know from the claim there are four [claimants] — only one is local — and they’ve been involved in other similar litigation. It’s not surprising that something like this would happen following the publicity about the [WBCFSL].”

Neither would it have been surprising — and it would surely have been lovely — if WBCFSL and CCLU had simply re-shelved the books they didn’t like. Or if they had wisely counseled their offspring on what they may and may not borrow from the library and trusted in other parents to do the same. Or if they refrained from using the library as a babysitter, setting the stage for their children to gobble up any books, regardless of parental preference.

But they didn’t do the commonsensical thing, and the curious battle isn’t over.

“I’m feeling very good,” Hanrahan said,” because so many people have come together in support of the library and in support of parents being able to make these decisions for themselves. I’m almost gleeful that so many more people are signing up for programs at the library. That’s a clear indication that the community doesn’t agree with this group. But it is worrisome they are not just going to go quietly into the night. … The [Maziarkas] are prolific bloggers, and they have said the issue is not over for them. They plan to promote the library as being an unsafe place for children, although they haven’t said how they’re going to do that. But they’re not going to let it drop. … We never expected West Bend to become such a hotbed of controversy. After all this, it was, ‘Wow, West Bend is not just about slow cookers anymore!’”

And just what is it the CCLUs and WBCFSLs are about? Just what is their intent? Just what should we do with them? They seem so angry, so fearful, so uncomfortable in the world.

But there’s something about Baby Be-Bop they don’t seem to grasp; something about the books that encourage our children to love themselves; there’s something magical. Perhaps the WBCFSL and CCLU folks should settle in with a nice cup of tea and read the books they would ban, in whole, not the miniscule excerpts bandied about by would-be censors. Perhaps then, they would learn to love the world’s children for who they are.

If not, Harry Potter could just wave his wand and make them disappear.

Love,
K-B

©2009 Kit-Bacon Gressitt