In the daily verbose on
18 June 2010 with Comments Off
Tomorrow will mark my third Saturday morning going to acupuncture. There’s something about listening to bad New Age music on a CD with a needle sticking out of the tops of my head and feet that is actually calming. It makes me think of the Year of Living Alone – how all that time to myself meant productivity, a 4.0 GPA, writing 2,000 words a night, running before the heat of the day at 4:30 in the morning. There were road trips and very late nights, fraternity parties and anti-war groups. Staring up at the stars at a playground downtown or serving as designated driver to a liquor store in the middle of a cornfield due north of Union City, on the state line. I was twenty years old.
I feel like I am approaching — if I am not already in — another time in my life that I will look back on and think of fondly as a very good era like that. But, too, I remember the anxiety and the frustration and the wondering when my turn was; all that feels very real to me right now.
There was a commercial jingle when I was very little: “we girls can do anything.” Between that and my Dad, who did an admirable job of making sure I believed I wasn’t limited by my sex and gender, I stumbled into adulthood really and truly convinced of that. Convinced that other people believed that, and it was a matter of time until all the dinosaurs died off and we could all sigh a big collective sigh of relief and go, “Okay, enough with all that foolishness,” and move past the inequalities our mothers and grandmothers endured. But, without delving into details, I’m finding that’s not the case. And what is most surprising is where I am encountering these attitudes.
I am waiting. It is so, so frustrating, to have to dig my heels in where I am supposed to be able to move freely forward, but I think that is the key to all real progress – refusing to walk away.
In the daily verbose on
13 June 2010 with Comments Off
We’re not that good about making it to church lately, and my husband isn’t that good about talking about his feelings. So, when he spoke up — to my great surprise — during joys and concerns during today’s services, asking for prayers for the wife, toddler son, and family of his fraternity brother who died in Iraq on Friday, I was not prepared. I’m not sure he even asked for prayer for his own grandmother who lost her battle with cancer this time last summer.
I will always remember Sgt. Israel “Izzy” O’Bryan as a somewhat reserved person. Stephen’s suitemate in Cooper Hall. Just starting a life, only a few months older than my own little brother.
It just breaks my heart that we lost such a nice guy in the prime of his life, even if I hadn’t seen him in five years.
In the daily verbose on
16 May 2010 with 2 comments
I’ve always believed myself to be rather cynical, but maybe I’m not cynical enough.
I’m not one who believes that my city holds some indelible quality that endears it to God any more than other disaster-afflicted regions. I don’t believe that those who were less affected than others by the flooding were spared because they prayed harder, as Charlie Daniels implies in this piece, or for any other reason than accident of geography or engineering. I don’t quite understand the desperate need to compare Nashville to New Orleans, as if a week’s warning that levees would break in a city in a bowl next to the Gulf is the same as flash flooding on hilly terrain along a river. And I most definitely can’t fathom why a candidate for office would decide that government is detrimental because government isn’t a panacea.
Why would anyone devote mental energy to that when there are real problems in need of solving?
Or, to put it succinctly:
This month I’ve seen volunteers alongside municipally-employed heroes, working together for the common goals of rescue and recovery. I’ve seen more facial hair than usual in my sometimes painfully trendy neighborhood, as men have abstained from shaving “flood beards” to show water-conservation solidarity. I’ve seen capitalism at its best as shrewd businessmen deftly adapted offerings to meet emerging markets and appealed to the shifting consciences of their customers. I’ve seen Tennesseans of all races, creeds, and genders giving blindly according to their ability to Tennesseans according to their needs.
So quickly we come together, so quickly we fragment.
The breaks we’d long ignored, or camouflaged, or never noticed become more apparent. We are Nashville … but some are more Nashville than others?
Nashvillians pass word around that insurance companies are cutting checks on site in Cottonwood, and telling residents of Bordeaux to wait 2-3 weeks.
The digital divide becomes more painfully apparent, as newsroom cutbacks mean that there are fewer reporters and fewer column inches to devote to covering a 1,000-year flood and a labor of love becomes a major metropolitan area’s best source of information. Overconnected millennials grow “#floodbeards” while working-class Baby Boomer neighbors without internet access wash river mud from their cars.
In short, we’re returning to normal.
In some ways, that’s a good thing. It means the immediate danger is behind us. It means that the problems we’ve ignored – whether for a few years or a few generations – are now laid bare for us to tackle. However, I’m still disheartened. If we can’t keep up momentum longer than two weeks, effecting real change is going to be more Sisyphean than I’d ever thought.
In the daily verbose on
6 May 2010 with 4 comments
We have people in Nashville watering their flowers, as if thirteen inches of water in two days isn’t enough. I find myself wondering aloud if perhaps there is an abundance of idiot gardeners here, ones who would pick plants far too thirsty for our climate.
The truth is that information post-flood is segmented: those who use social media and anyone else. Maybe they really don’t know.
The truth is that everyone keeps waiting for everyone else to make the sacrifice. I think I can handle about one more day of not washing my hair before I threaten to go shave it or start some locs.
The truth is there is probably an abundance of people for whom watering the flowers was part of their daily routine, and following it is possibly the only thing between them and snapping.
Driving around town, you can almost pretend at points that all is normal, that this is temporary, that any moment we’ll return to our regular lives, already in progress. And then your muscle memory does something – tries to scratch an itch that is painful to relieve with arms that slung sandbags up a hill; tries to take you up, say, the Jefferson Street bridge and you’re met with blue lights parked where your hands were trying to take you.
And there you are: the city is drowning. We are watching a 1,000-year flood recede. Every time, really, it’s jarring.
Tonight around ten of us – a sassy bunch of mostly women, with one husband and three adorable babies – caravanned around Inglewood and East Nashville, taking food, water and wipes to flood victims just coming back to their homes. The reactions were all fundamentally the same: confusion, especially when they learned we weren’t with an organization, followed by a level of gratitude that made me feel a bit dirty and embarrassed. Who am I to be thanked? My home is dry and undamaged and I am able bodied.
One woman, fighting back shock and tears, told us how everything in her home was going to have to be ripped out to the studs. Her husband was older than she was, she said, and so they were going to have to hire someone to do the work for them. Alison handed off her business card and urged the woman to contact her when it was time to start. “I’ll get some people out here, all you have to do is call,” she said.
The woman shook. She invited us to come into the house of the elderly neighbor who had taken them in so we could meet her husband. It was immediately evident that, in addition to hearing loss, his memory might not be faring so well either. She introduced us – and I at twenty-seven was the youngest – as “these girls who brought us dinner.” We stared out the back window at the shockingly close Cumberland. The woman told us she would call us, but not to feel bad if she couldn’t remember our names. We waved it off.
“I have a brain tumor,” she said. “So it affects my memory.”
We murmured quick comfort, choked back tears, then headed back to it, stopping when dusk became night.
We talked to a lot of first responders. You’d think after four days of this they’d be irritable at the sight of four carloads of women getting too close to the flood waters, thinking us disaster tourists or worse, but every Metro police officer was kind and gentle-voiced and thanked us for being out there. When, after dark, we dropped off the food that still filled the backseat of my car at the neighborhood fire station, we were met with a kind of surprise.
“Saturday and Sunday,” the firefighter who took pizza and oranges back for the next shift said with a sigh, shaking his head, before looking a little puzzled. “Why are y’all doing this again?”
As if, aw shucks, ’tweren’t nothing.
On the way to see if there was anything else we could contribute to the Donate Nashville project, Alison and I passed through Five Points, teeming with freshly-washed hipsters who ignored Do Not Walk signals, eager as they were to celebrate Cinco de Mayo. I grit my teeth, both hands on the wheel, and drove.