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“They Grow up so Fast”–#nonfiction

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Has Anybody Seen My Teeth?

1

“They Grow up so Fast”

            Sometimes, nothing makes you feel older than your own kids.

            One day, you’re watching them come into the world. The next, they’re studying for their driver’s exam or asking your advice on mutual funds.

            When my oldest daughter Shauna was born, I was eighteen years old. That same year, the Berlin wall came down, but not before George Herbert Walker Bush’s inauguration as the United States’ 41st president. Stamps cost twenty-five cents. The San Francisco 49ers won the Super Bowl; the Oakland A’s won the World Series. Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club was published. Rain Man won the Best Picture Oscar; luminaries such as Lucille Ball, Robert Penn Warren, Salvador Dali, and Laurence Olivier died. And sitting at the top of the music charts? Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry Be Happy” and George Michael’s Faith.

            In the time since, we’ve already experienced a second Bush’s (so-called) presidency. Stamps have more than doubled in price; don’t even get me started on gasoline. To my children and most of my current students, a divided Germany seems like ancient history, right up there with the Crusades and the invention of the wheel. The San Francisco 49ers can’t even win a division that, in 2010, sent its champion into the playoffs with a losing record. The A’s? Aren’t they that team that keeps dumping its talent for cheaper versions of same? Or am I thinking of the Florida Marlins, who didn’t even exist in ’89? And who the hell are Laurence Olivier and Robert Penn Warren? Meanwhile, both “Don’t Worry Be Happy” and George Michael have become cultural jokes, even though Faith is a damn good album.

            Oddly enough, my son was born in 1995, a year in which San Francisco won another Super Bowl, this time over the San Diego Chargers, whose coach cost me twelve hundred dollars in our local pool by going for two at the end of the third quarter. But that seems like the only holdover from 1989.  The times, they were a-changin’, as Bob Dylan said (I can hear next year’s freshmen saying “Who?” already).

            Brendan came into a world that seemed less certain and more violent than the one we had lived in just six or seven years earlier. Conflicts in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Croatia fractured the globe—except in those regions where nobody cared what was happening to a bunch of foreigners. O.J. Simpson was found not guilty of murdering Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. Right-wing military groups gained national infamy when Timothy McVeigh blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City. Forrest Gump won the Best Picture Oscar; the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame opened. Mickey Mantle and Jerry Garcia died. So did Howard Cosell, leaving Muhammad Ali without a verbal sparring partner.

            What about 1999, when my youngest daughter Maya was born? Well, the world didn’t end, meaning that we could no longer trust Prince as the major prophet in our lives. Nelson Mandela took over as President of South Africa, righting an enormous historical injustice; on the other hand, Yugoslavia imploded. Since Prince was wrong, computer scientists scared us all silly, prophesying that the dreaded Y2K bug would send us all hurtling back to the Stone Age. The Senate tried to impeach Bill Clinton for getting a blowjob in the White House, leaving the rest of us to wonder if they were jealous or just plain bored. John F. Kennedy Jr. died; racist asshole John William King was convicted of dragging a black man to death; and two disgruntled Columbine High School students massacred fellow pupils and teachers, prompting us all to revisit our notions of school security and the roles guns play in our lives.

            Well, all of us except the NRA, which kept insisting that guns don’t kill people; people kill people. Maybe so, but guns sure do help. One wonders how soon Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris might have been stopped if they had been armed with automatic switchblades, or a two-by-four with a nail in it.

            Gene Siskel and Stanley Kubrick died. Jerry Falwell’s homophobia extended to a Teletubby. The Blair Witch Project scared some of us half to death and bored others to tears. Shakespeare in Love won the Oscar that, with all due respect to a fine film, should have gone to Saving Private Ryan. George C. Scott died, meaning that Hollywood had lost one of its most gutsy, individual performers.

            So what does all this mean? Well, in some ways, nothing ever changes. Some guy (and it’s always a guy, and usually a white one?) moves into the White House; a bunch of people celebrate, while others throw tantrums. Great art is produced even as great artists die. Someone somewhere blows something up or shoots somebody; sports teams rise and fall and rise again.

            If you live long enough, you start to notice these similarities, patterns, and cycles. And once you start noticing them, a disheartening realization crashes in on you. “Jeez,” you might say, “I’ve been around a long time.”

            With some exceptions—Byronic teenagers, people with specific untreated mental or emotional conditions, a certain brand of religious lunatic, Wile E. Coyote (who by now has to realize that the boulder’s always going to fall on his head, not the Road Runner’s)—most of us want to be around a long time. But none of us want to face old age, do we? That first liver spot on the hands, the crow’s feet around the eyes, the gray hair, the aching back, the prescription reading glasses that sit on the end of your nose—these things send us running in blind panic to our mirrors, our cosmetic counters, our plastic surgeons. Our bodies function as Age’s roadmap even as it drives its steamroller directly over us, and when we consider all the events great and small that we’ve lived through, it only underscores how long we’ve been here. In turn, these realizations make us wonder how long we’ve got left.

            Our kids remind us of whom we used to be and what we used to look like—young, flawless (except for that zit that always seems to erupt on your nose on school picture day), energetic, idealistic, and vital. When Shauna was born, she looked purple; when I asked why, the nurse said, “Because the temperature in here is somewhere in the seventies. She’s used to 98.6.” That made sense. Then the nurse put her on the scale and said, “Nine pounds, thirteen ounces? Is that right?”

            “How the hell should I know?” I said. “You’re supposed to know how to work all this junk.”

            If you’ll allow me to use a cliché here, I can tell you with all sincerity that Shauna’s birth doesn’t seem to have happened twenty-two years ago; I remember it like it happened yesterday. But the evidence stands in front of me every time I see her. She’s grown, with a life of her own—an apartment, a job, an educational outlook, a political sensibility, a boyfriend, this last even though I told her a thousand times that she’s not allowed to date until I’m dead. Kids today just don’t listen.

            The scary thing is that she’s old enough to have a family of her own, and though she wisely doesn’t seem to be in a big hurry to do so, I know she could change her mind. A note to everyone reading this: I am too young to be a grandfather. Don’t even try to argue with me, or I’ll come to your house and staple your lips shut. Too young, do you hear? Too young!!

            My son’s now almost old enough to drive by himself. I distinctly remember what that was like—the freedom, the sense of adulthood, the deep red rage when I realized that my new milestone had doomed me to “run to the store” a million times. He’s also a football player, just like his old man. Well, not just like me—he’s much bigger than I was. When I played, I was a 120-pound wideout with okay hands and speed. I also had the vertical leap of a professional—professional sumo wrestler, but still. Seriously, I could clear six inches easily. But ask me to snag a pass much higher than that, and we were both going to come away sorely disappointed. And I would probably stagger off the field gasping from that linebacker who planted his helmet in my floating ribs.

            Brendan, on the other hand, weighs about as much as I do now—north of 190, south of 200—and he’s pretty fast, too. He’s currently playing defensive end. If he keeps growing without losing any speed or dexterity, he’s going to be a handful, even for the meatiest offensive linemen.

            So when I look at him, I often see a stronger version of my younger self. More dedicated to sports, too—I loved the games but hated practice. Hated it. When I was his age, I went to practice with only slightly more enthusiasm than a death-row inmate walks toward the electric chair. If somebody had told me that I could play in the games without practicing if I agreed to get publicly flogged and caned, I’d have had to think about it seriously. That’s why he’s almost guaranteed to be more successful than I was. He loves the whole experience. He’s the kind of player I wish I could have been. I’ve done well for myself academically—Ph.D., people!—and that started in grade school. But when I wish I could go back and tell my younger self to shape up in practice, I think of Brendan and know that he’s doing better without all the hindsight I’ve stockpiled.

            Still, knowing that my son’s playing varsity this year—not Pee Wee or Pop Warner, not eighth grade, not junior high, but varsity—I look in the mirror and wonder how it got to be so late.

            Sometimes my kids are quick to remind me about the chronology of my life. When Shauna was graduating high school, I and several other members of my family—Kalene, Brendan, Maya, my mother, my grandmother, my aunt Sandra, my cousin Holly—went to the ceremony. At the hotel, Brendan’s face lit up, as if he had just figured out how to bend the space-time continuum. Then he said, “Hey, Dad. If Shauna’s eighteen, and you’re thirty-six, that means you had her when you were—”

            “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said. “Now you decide to use math in the real world? Let’s drop it.”

            Yes, Shauna got her diploma four and a half years ago and is, as of this writing, contemplating a return to college. Brendan enters tenth grade this year. And Maya will be twelve in November. She’s almost a teenager. I have no more babies.

            It’s odd how being around my kids can make me feel so young and so old at the same time. I feed on their energy even as it exhausts me. I revel in their lives even as I shrink in horror at how those lives are moving so quickly away from me. With Shauna’s job and the physical distance between us, we can only see each other a couple of times a year. Brendan is at the stage where his friends and social life seem more important that hanging with Dad; I’ve been there, so I understand, but it’s still tough. I’m glad he still comes for holidays. As for Maya, she spends the summers with us, and that’s always fun, but I’m sure the time is coming when her own friends, and interests, and those fearful romantic stirrings take precedence.

            And when the nest is empty, when the kids have all finished their educations and gone off to live their own adventures, even a non-custodial parent like me will probably feel ancient. It’s a moment that will fill me with pride and regret. And when that moment passes, I will probably sit down next to Kalene in the matching rocking chairs we’ve recently bought. I’ll probably take a nap during the ball game. I doubt I will ever catch her knitting or doing those other typical grandmother things, but I’m sure she’ll be reading a good book as our life enters its early afternoon.

            And when I wake up and stretch my increasingly creaky bones, I’ll probably look around me and say, with a mixture of pain and satisfaction, “Where did the time go?”

            Follow me on Twitter @brettwrites.

            Email me at semioticconundrums@gmail.com.

            Thanks to www.infoplease.com for reminding me of what happened when, especially from the following pages: http://www.infoplease.com/year/1989.html; http://www.infoplease.com/year/1995.html; http://www.infoplease.com/year/1999.html.

January 3, 2004–flash fiction #writing

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January 3, 2004

            This morning I got up early and ate a bowl of Total, not realizing how lucky I was to have made such a decision without the benefit of foresight or research. Not ten minutes after finishing the last bite and drinking down the milk—a habit I’ve kept from childhood—I saw this commercial on TV about how many bowls of other cereal would equal the nutritional benefits of one bowl of Total. I’d have to consume three bowls of Grape-Nuts and more All Bran than you’d ever want to eat in your life.

             Realizing how much time, effort, stomach cramps, and bowel movements the makers of Total had saved me, I decided to phone the home office and thank them. I called their 1-800 number and followed the instructions on the automated menus; I listened to some sort of what I suppose you’d call music, though it sounded more like Mozart by way of the Armpit, Mississippi Glee Club. I finally connected with Judy, a customer service operator.

            I told her that I was calling to thank the General Mills Corporation for the valuable services they had performed in my honor. I told her that I couldn’t imagine eating three or four bowls (I had forgotten which) of Grape-Nuts, which taste like artificially produced hay, and that I was very happy with their method of providing so much daily nutrition. I finished my speech by assuring her that I would buy Total as long as they continued to produce it at high levels of quality and consumer commitment.

            Judy hung up on me. I stood in my kitchen, still tasting milk and small particles of Total underneath my tongue. The empty bowl gleamed dully under the phosphorescent light.

Has Anybody Seen My Teeth? Introduction #nonfiction #writing

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Has Anybody Seen My Teeth?

 Introduction

             On October 26th, 2010, I woke up and realized that I was forty years old. Now understand that I was an English major, so any time I find myself doing math, I have to apologize in advance. But I’m pretty sure that means I’ll be forty-one this year. My fifth decade on Earth has begun. I have three college degrees: a B.A., an M.A., and a Ph.D. I’ve been married three times and divorced twice. I have three children, the oldest of whom is twenty-two years old as of this writing. I first moved out of my parents’ house twenty-three years ago; I got my first job that same year. I’ve been writing my whole life, though only trying to make it good and sharing it with others for perhaps three years. I have taught in colleges and universities since 1996. I’ve stockpiled all these experiences, and now, at what I hope is not even the mid-point of my life, I have found that one question seems to override all the others.

             How the hell did this happen?

             How did I get to be forty years old? Don’t get me wrong; I’m grateful to be alive and healthy. I hope this ride continues for at least another fifty years. But forty? Me? How did it happen so quickly? Just yesterday I had just turned twenty-one! I specifically remember going out to a restaurant and ordering a drink, mentally daring them to card me. But nobody did.

             Heck, only two years earlier, my oldest daughter Shauna was born. I can still remember seeing her come into the world, hearing her first cry, asking the nurse why she was so purple. I remember stepping out into the hospital hallway with her in my arms and spotting my school chum Jennifer Tedder, who was there visiting someone. All that couldn’t have happened so long ago.

             No, scratch that. Only yesterday, I turned eighteen. I did so too late to vote in the 1988 elections, but still, I vividly recall feeling proud when I knew that I could go to a polling place and participate in the Great Democratic Experiment. Yes, Ronald Reagan may have come and gone without having to worry about my voice in the opposition, and maybe George H.W. Bush squeaked his Presidency in before I could do anything about it. But from then on, buddy, you’d better believe that I would stand up for what I believed! Unless, of course, I ever convinced myself that my vote no longer mattered, that politics had become too corrupt and the process too labyrinthine to seem worthy of my involvement. After all, one vote couldn’t possibly make much difference, could it? If only I had been able to foresee Florida in 2000, I might never have gotten so complacent. But back in 1988, I embodied the spirit of American youth—optimistic, fiery, opinionated, and arrogant.

             But wait—just yesterday, wasn’t I actually twelve years old? Hadn’t I just had my heart broken for the first time when my first serious girlfriend (hi, Angie!) dumped me, wrongly thinking that I liked her best friend? Of course, that relationship could hardly be termed “serious” in the context of adulthood, but back then, it seemed like the most important thing in the world. I remember sitting in my parents’ driveway, the gravel warm under my ass, sweat dripping down my face and back as I scanned the rural neighborhood we lived in. I could honestly not understand why people thought that life was so damned charming. I moped so much that my mother tried to intervene, God bless her, stopping my now ex-girlfriend in the street and telling her that I still liked her.

             Boy, was I mortified. When you’re a kid on the cusp of teenagerdom, the last thing you want is for someone to remind you that you’re still a child. And watching my mother stick up for me made me feel like a pre-schooler whose favorite toy had been confiscated by the local bully. She meant well, of course, and as a parent, I honestly don’t know what I would have done in her place. Probably the same thing. And that’s another way you know you’re getting older; you realize that, about some things at least, your parents were right.

             Hang on, though. I can’t possibly be forty because I can still remember the first time I went to tee-ball practice, and my first day in kindergarten, and my first “girlfriend,” a neighbor’s child who often came out to play still carrying her pacifier. All these memories don’t seem so far away, so how can they have occurred so long ago?

             Other things seem to have happened to someone else. The time my cousin broke my leg and knocked me out by running over me with his mini-bike. The time I got shoved into a water-filled ditch and came up covered with welts, some sort of chemical interacting with my sensitive skin—the panic that came crashing in as my body started to change, the feel of my parents’ hands on me as they dragged me to the car for the speedy trip to the emergency room, the look on my best friend Steven’s face as he wandered in the yard to see what I was up to, only to watch me being carted away, screaming like a criminal run to ground. The time I shoved a kernel of popcorn up my nose, just to see what would happen.

             But they all happened to me, and all of them—the good and the bad, the somber and the silly—helped shape me into who I am today. I accept them all; I need them all to be me. But still—forty? Soon enough, forty-one? Where did all those years go?

             Any of the aforementioned events would make a good subject for a reflective essay. I could write a book on what it’s like to be a parent and to have become one at such a young age. I could tell you about my marriages and how I’ve succeeded in some ways, failed miserably in others. I could tell you about my early encounters with racism and religion and sex and alcohol and the searing pain of losing people close to you. I hope to write about it all and more one day, Lord willing.

             What concerns me here, and in the series of essays that will occasionally follow, is the idea of aging itself—the comedies, the little tragedies, the absurdities. Mostly these writings will ruminate on ways that you can tell you’re getting older, even if your body still feels pretty good and your mind tells you that you’re still the twenty-one –year-old kid who can drink all night, work the next day, come home and play video games with your friends, and get up the next morning, ready to do it all again on two hours’ sleep out of the last forty-eight. I’d like to examine the paradoxical attitudes we take toward aging—how as children we can’t wait to grow up so that we can do what we want, the way that our young adult selves strive to break from our role models and build a life of our own, and the later realizations that suddenly we are the role models, the standard that has to be surpassed. How we wish we were kids again, so we could do whatever we wanted.

             Mostly, I’d like to share with you my shock at finding myself forty-plus years old and an authority figure—a grown-up, a teacher, a father—when inside I still feel as fresh as a spring morning.

             What you will read, should you choose to walk through this series with me, is a set of thematically-linked but not necessarily chronological ruminations. And you will read them in early-draft form, warts and all. I will likely engage in one revision and some sentence-level editing, reserving the right to revise much more thoroughly later.

             What this means is that you, reader, can participate in the creation process. Do you have questions that I haven’t answered? Tell me about them and, should I ever revise these works for a book project, I’ll take your advice into consideration (even if I self-publish—I can’t see ever abandoning the prestige and potential benefits of the publishing industry and its passel of excellent editors, agents, readers, and writers, but with some projects, self-publishing appeals to me greatly). Do you find that the organization or sentence-level writing needs some work? Tell me about it and I’ll take a look. Do you really, really want me to write about a particular thematically-related subject? Tell me about it, and, if I think I have something to say, I’ll oblige. In other words, this project in its current stage can be, to some extent, interactive. The writing will be mine; the life I write about will be mine. But you can help shape it if you like.

             If you don’t, I hope that something in the work speaks to you. I hope you find it worth your time. If not, well, maybe my next post, or story, or poem, or book will reach you better than these do.

             As for aging itself, it’s certainly better than the alternative. Besides, forty isn’t old. Heck, I refuse to call myself middle-aged until I’m at least fifty. In this way, at least, I’m an optimist. I’ve got too much to do and see; I can’t get old for a long time, God willin’ and the creek don’t rise, as we say in the south.

             Still—forty? My parents, maybe, but me? Forty? Already?!?

             Ah well. For now, I must finish this little introduction and get on with my day. It’s getting late, and I still have to eat before I take my fiber and cholesterol medication, fire up my C-PAP machine, and get some sleep. Now…has anybody seen my teeth?

 Follow me on Twitter @brettwrites.

Email me at semioticconundrums@gmail.com

January 2, 2004 #writing #flashfiction

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As I’m posting some of my existing short-short work (still avoiding writing new short-short work for the moment), I’ve been going out of order, so I’m afraid I may be repeating myself. If I’ve done this one before and have overlooked it, sorry about that. It’s based on our late cat Judas, though it’s really a fictionalization.

January 2, 2004

            I decided to vacuum because of the cat litter scattered all over the bedroom. Our cat has never learned to operate her litter box. She climbs in and out indelicately, tromping through her own piss, dragging litter out between her fuzzy cat toes. I hate it. It would be like dipping my hand in the toilet and flinging water all over the house. It’s not only unsanitary; it’s just plain rude.

            But then our cat has never had any manners. She likes to sit on your chest in the middle of the night, just when you’ve drifted into the deepest of sleeps, the kind that brings dreams of the pasts you’ve lived through and the futures you hope to see. The sweet images of a former lover disintegrate, fade, and you open your eyes to see a ten pound cat staring in your face, her claws prickling your chest.

            Last night, for the fifth night in a row, she ruined a great dream. She leapt onto the bed and landed squarely on my crotch. I cried out and sat up, instinctively throwing her off the bed. She landed on all fours near the closet, gave me her best go to hell look, and padded away to conduct some other cat business. I discovered this morning that she had ripped the duvet when I shoved her away, three neat holes gaping up at me where her paws had been. I can’t explain why she failed to rip four holes. Perhaps she thought it would be in poor taste.

            So today I vacuum her litter, her shit nuggets, probably her fur as well. I do so with aching balls. I do so with my torn duvet smiling at me like a jack-o-lantern. The litter crashes against the insides of my vacuum like gravel against the undercarriage of a car. From the hall the cat watches me, suspicious, and washes her ears.

Things My Childhood Taught Me #nonfiction #rants

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Things My Childhood Taught Me

            DISCLAIMER: This essay probably doesn’t have the kind of purposeful ambiguity that makes for good creative nonfiction writing. It is, in other words, probably a bit too straightforward and preachy. But I feel the need to say it anyway, given recent events. I therefore call it a rant—the first in a series, probably. Thanks for understanding. 

            DISCLAIMER #2: In this writing, I talk about unnamed family members, friends, and acquaintances. The experiences I discuss below are not necessarily indicative of what these people are like in most respects, nor do I claim that they constantly evince the attitudes attributed to them below. I am merely demonstrating how I learned what I learned.

            Recently on Facebook, I found myself in the middle of an argument about abortion. I don’t know how I get into these things. I had linked to a recent article detailing the new Texas law requiring abortion-seeking women to get a sonogram and have a doctor explain its meaning before undergoing any procedure. I see this law, and others like it, as part of the right-wing war on women, the same war that has resulted in other unconscionable laws being proposed and, in some cases, passed. I’m sure there’s another essay or six to be mined from proposals that want to redefine rape for the benefit of men or that, in one case, distinguishes between rape and “forcible rape,” as if any other kind exists. Much of what I’ve seen on this subject seems flat-out insane; even more seems dangerous and regressive.

            The odd part about my posting the article on the Texas law? I did not say one word to defend abortion. I simply asked why, if such a law is going to exist, it doesn’t make a similar requirement of men.  “It takes a man, or at least a man’s sperm, to get pregnant,” I reasoned. Men enjoy the privilege of walking away from a pregnancy if they wish, and their choices to do so—as well as other factors like the mother’s education, her employment situation, the parents’ families’ willingness to help out, and the existence (or lack thereof) of aid programs—affect a woman’s decision to abort or not just as much as her own self-interest or morals. Are there callous women who use abortion over and over as a means of retroactive birth control? Probably, and I admitted as much. But I believe that the majority of women who seek abortions do so for a plethora of reasons, not simply for convenience, and I know for a fact that these women suffer all kinds of consequences for their decisions—emotional, mental, financial, religious, physical, social. My wife Kalene recently read an article in which a doctor stated that 40% of American women have had abortions. I have no idea how accurate that statement is, but in any case, it is dangerous to characterize abortion as an uncommon act perpetrated by a few immoral women who simply don’t want to bother with a baby. Such an attitude encourages us to ignore the very real trauma that leads up to and follows an abortion.  

            The Texas law, and others like it, oversimplifies a complex situation by dumping all responsibility on the woman instead of sharing her burden (or blessing, or responsibility, or whatever you want to call it) with the man, the potential grandparents, or the state. That was my point—not to praise abortion per se, but to support women. Still, the discussion thread that followed sidetracked us all into a discussion of abortion itself—whether it should be legal and why, whether it can ever be considered a moral decision, whether we can understand why some women choose it, who should get to make that choice, and, finally, whether the Bible has anything to say about the situation.

            Should anyone like to know my actual views on abortion and why I am a staunchly pro-choice Christian, I’ll be glad to write a column about that in the future. But today I am interested in discussing how the abortion debate led me to consider my formative years and what I learned then.

            During the Facebook conversation, my own mother chose to articulate her own view on abortion. From her fundamentalist point of view, abortion is always wrong, no matter the circumstances; the Bible, she says, remains clear on this matter. As proof, she offered multiple scriptures that, in her view, baldly stated how life begins at conception and that abortion therefore constitutes baby-killing. When I read the scriptures, I found that none of them seemed to address the genesis of the soul, or the point at which life begins, or God’s stance on abortion. At best, they were ambiguous; at worst, they seemed completely off-topic and/or out of context. Thus, while I admired her conviction and her courage in standing up for her beliefs, I doubted that her evidence would convince anyone not already on her side. What really troubled me, though, was a statement that she later made: “We were not by any means perfect parents. We made many, many mistakes, but we did our best to instill Christian morals and beliefs in [Brett] as a child. We no longer have any say in what he does or what he believes, but I know he’s a good man, and I stand on the promise that God will bring him back to his Christian teachings.”

            Upon reading this, I felt simultaneously proud of her assessing me a good man and angry about the rest. Here’s how I responded to that particular comment: “I take offense at the idea that I’ve got to come ‘back to my Christian teachings.’ I’ve never left them. I have a strong relationship with my God and, for the first time in my life, spiritual peace. I have achieved that peace by rejecting much of what I learned when I was a kid–not necessarily from my parents or family, but from society at large. But the teachings that I base my life on–faith, and love, and charity, and helping one’s neighbor, and so forth–stem directly from what I believe God wants me to do and what my own conscience tells me is right. I don’t hold all the political beliefs that my parents do–perhaps not any–but I reject the notion that I’m somehow spiritually bankrupt because I believe in a woman’s right to choose what happens with her own body.”

            Though I’ve taken a rather circumlocutious route to get here, these ideas, readers, represent the crux of what I’m after today. I am forty years old as of this writing—older than I can sometimes believe, especially given that I’m just now able to concentrate on my writing as a career, but still young, hopefully not even middle-aged. I am who I am today because of what I learned in the past—the past as recent as yesterday and the past as far back as the beginnings of my memory. Much of what I learned seems positive to me. Other lessons were negative, and many of these were taught me in the context of “good Christian morals” or “political ethics.” Allow me to illustrate, with a series of anecdotes, why I believe that rejecting much of what I learned as a child has molded me into the man I am today, for better or worse.

            I come from an immediate and an extended family that is deeply steeped in Christian tradition. My mother’s family members mostly go to the same Assembly of God church in Crossett, a small town in southeast Arkansas. My paternal grandfather was a Baptist deacon; my father has served in the same capacity. Some of my aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents on my mother’s side used to tour the area in a gospel band, singing in all kinds of churches. They did so after and beyond their work hours and their family responsibilities. If someone needs a meal, or prayer, or clothes, you won’t find anybody acting as fast or with as much conviction as my family. These are good people in most ways.

            But they have their blind spots. Once, I sat with an aunt at a family gathering. She was praising a local sports team’s accomplishments—games won, tournaments conquered, teamwork represented. Then she said, triumphantly, “And they did it all without any blacks!” She did not explain why that might be considered an extraordinary accomplishment, as if her conclusion was self-evident.

            Another time, at a Christmas gathering and right after a heartfelt prayer for blessing, one of my cousins and I were talking college football. I was extolling the virtues of LSU, my alma mater, and he was arguing in favor of the Arkansas Razorbacks. He has no connection to the Razorbacks that I know of, other than that they play in the state he lives in. He said, “You know, LSU should change their team colors from purple and gold to green and pink.”

            “What are you talking about?” I asked, genuinely puzzled.

            “You know, watermelon?” he said. I still looked puzzled, so he sighed and said, “Niggers! That team is full of niggers!”

            A college football team with African-American players? Perish the thought! I had no idea how to respond to his statement, because I felt so taken aback at the very thought of disliking a team for its racial components. I thought we were living in the 21st century, not the early 19th. I also never learned why he thought Arkansas’s black players were somehow exempt from his attitude. Ah, the “logic” of racism…

            Another time, again not long after a family prayer thanking God for His blessings, an elderly family member opined that her neighborhood was falling into disrepair and squalor. For her evidence, she mentioned the recent increase in noise, attributable to “the blacks who have been moving in.” Personally, I didn’t know that African-Americans brought with them ambient noise.

            These are three of the milder examples I experienced. Countless times when I was growing up, I heard some of these good Christian people use the term “nigger” uncritically, spitting it out of their mouths like rotten meat. Show them an individual black person in need, and they are as quick as anyone to help in any way they can. They are empathetic and compassionate. But remove the individual from the situation and the faceless mass of “niggers” becomes an object of dread, spite, even hatred. I have remained unable to locate the disconnect between this racism and the rest of their values, but it exists.

            I saw more evidence of such a disconnect in school, where student groupings often broke down on racial lines.  Oh, we all played on the same sports teams and went to the same classes; during those times, you might have been fooled into thinking that racism had gone extinct in the south. But after school, or even during lunch, racial groups went their separate ways. I can’t speak to what happened in other groups, but amidst my group of white friends—again, good people in most ways—the term “nigger” was used freely and uncritically. So were terms like “faggot.” I would see these same people in church, praising God and discussing the values of love and charity and human connection. And it bothered me from an early age. I wasn’t always thoughtful or courageous enough to act on my feelings, but I knew in my heart that what I saw and heard often wasn’t right.

            At the church my parents made me go to during my teen years—a place that I hated, a place that made me feel farther from God than I ever have—I once heard a prominent member say that if any niggers ever walked in the church doors, they would walk right back out again, or he would.

            And so, as I grew up, I learned that it’s okay to be Christian and still hate people who looked different than me, especially if they were black. I learned it at school, in church, and at family gatherings. I even learned it when I drove through town, knowing that most black people lived in the section between the western city limits and the highway known as the “truck route.” Racist white people often referred to this section as “nigger town,” as if it were a separate place altogether. I’ve searched the scriptures and my own conscience over the years, and I have never found one single shred of evidence that Christ justifies such hatred and exclusion. Not one. Yet so many Christians obviously harbor hatred in their hearts.

            I mentioned above that many of my professing Christian friends used the word “faggot.” They also used “queer,” “fag,” “chocolate-churner,” “ass-bandit,” and just about every other pejorative name you can think of. These terms served to ostracize people who already did not fit in, regardless of what their actual sexualities might have been—the comic book readers with thick glasses and bad skin, the poor kids who could not afford good clothes and whose parents did not seem to own a washing machine, the gentle boys who were not interested in sports and the thickly-built girls who were. Back then at least, the children of that town seemed hyper-aware of sexuality and perfectly willing to verbally abuse, shun, and even beat up those who exhibited even one highly-stereotypical characteristic that supposedly connoted “gay.” I watched some good kids go through high school miserably, having been saddled with a label that they did not understand. Others who were gay, but closeted mostly out of self-preservation, stayed constantly on guard against themselves, lest they betray a sign of who they really were. They could not seek love, or physical contact, or acceptance because they would have been mercilessly mocked or worse, and by the people you saw in church every Sunday. This happened in late 20th-century America, in a town with more churches than you could count.

            I do not claim to be a Biblical scholar, but I do not remember a single scripture in which Christ speaks out against homosexuality. There are some Biblical passages that seem to, but most of these are taken wildly out of context or refer to historical circumstances that no longer apply. I have read the works of Biblical scholars who feel the same way. In no case do I find that the Bible supports hatred of gay people or violence against them, or anyone else for that matter. Yet those who enact the worst violence against alleged gay people—and others assumed to be gay who are in fact not—often do so in God’s name. I wonder what He thinks of that.

            Once, during my first divorce, I moved in with a friend and his father, who happened to be bisexual. I needed a place to go while I sorted things out, and they took me in without question. Later, when talking with a close family member who was extraordinarily active in his church, he said, “I hope you’re having a good time living with that queer,” pronouncing the word as he might “demon” or “Nazi.”

              And so I learned—in school, with my family, and in and around church—that you can be Christian and hate gay people.

            Familial relations appear to be a problematic area, too. Once, while I was attending my first wife’s church, one of her brothers had been scheduled to sing during service; I’m sure anyone who has gone to church is familiar with the “solo.” This church was fairly large, so it had a good sound system that piped the music and vocals from the pulpit to speakers at the back of the hall, into the vestibule, even into the nursery. Someone controlled the sound from a mixing board located in back of the church; on the day of my ex-brother-in-law’s solo, his own uncle was running the board. But as the song commenced, the sound faded in and out, usually during the most emotive portions. I looked back at the uncle, and he did not seem alarmed or even aware that anything was wrong.

            After the service, I asked my ex about it. She said, “Yeah, he was mad that his son hadn’t gotten to sing, so he was messing up the sound on purpose.”

            And so I learned that it’s okay to be Christian and to screw over your own family because of petty jealousy and spite.

            In this same town lives a man who drives an old lawnmower everywhere he goes. Something is wrong with his head, and I don’t mean that metaphorically; his skull is actually crooked, tilting far out of true. This man is poor; he doesn’t drive a lawnmower because of the gas mileage. He is dirty; I have never seen him wear anything but the same pair of grimy, grease-and-dirt-stained overalls. He usually goes barefoot. He works, if I am not mistaken, odd jobs. He is, in other words, a good example of the financially downtrodden, the physically afflicted, the outcast. He is the kind of man that I believe Christ would be drawn to.

            But in that town, people make fun of him because his head is crooked, or because he drives that mower down the shoulder of our roads, or because he isn’t clean. I have heard such comments made in a church parking lot as the man puttered by on his mower. And so I learned that you can be Christian and reject those in need, that you can be pious and make fun of others’ misfortune.

            Did I learn anything positive while I was growing up? Of course I did. I learned positive lessons from my parents, my schools, my friends. But many of the lessons I learned were also negative; in other words, I learned what kind of man I did not want to be through the examples I saw around me. I did not do so immediately; I don’t claim to be better than any of the people I’ve discussed. When I was much younger, I too used words like “nigger” and “faggot.” I too made fun of the poor and negatively judged women who found themselves in adverse circumstances. I too shunned people who weren’t like me; I even participated in some of those verbal and physical rejections of difference that I discussed above.

            But I did so, I can now honestly say, to my everlasting shame. Even back then, when I heard such words and saw or even participated in such actions, a voice deep inside me cried out, “This isn’t right! You’re a liar and a hypocrite! You don’t really feel this way!” And as I grew up, I discovered that the voice was right. I was professing to be a good person, a good Christian, while my actual life exemplified beliefs that contradicted progressive politics, Christian teaching, and my own conscience. If I do any time in hell, I believe it will be because of what I did and failed to do in those early days, not because I believe in a woman’s right to choose or because I can understand why some women feel abortion to be their only choice.

            What I have done differently from so many of my peers and relatives—and I only say “differently” because you have to judge for yourself whether my beliefs are any better or worse than theirs—is that I have tried to reject those negative lessons. Rather than refusing to think about the contradictions in my stated values and my actual life, I have tried to bring the two into a kind of harmony. Rather than dismissing my own early complicity in hatred, I have tried to own it and make up for it. I don’t do so out of guilt alone; I don’t believe in civil rights for everyone, for instance, only because I feel bad that I once ignored any societal problems that didn’t directly affect me. I do so because I truly believe that it’s right—that it is what my own conscience, and my God, would have me do. I have tried to make myself a better person so that I can make the world better, and I have tried to pass those values onto my children as a counterbalance to the negative lessons that I know they, too, are learning deep in the American south.

            Does this make me (or people who think like I do) some kind of role model or paragon of virtue? No. But for the first time in my life, it does allow me to look at myself in the mirror and like what I see, to sleep at night knowing that if I didn’t contribute anything especially transcendent to the world today, then at least I didn’t make things worse. I have tried to take the positive lessons of my youth and apply them. And I have tried to take the negative lessons and build something positive from them. I try to serve as an ally for those in need, those I might have once mindlessly rejected. I don’t try to speak for them, because they can speak for themselves, but I try to do my part, and I am honored when they allow me to be a part of their missions. I strive to live by the principles of love, faith, hope, charity, and acceptance, and on those occasions when I still fail, I wake up the next day, ready to try again. I am at peace with myself and with God.

            And in this imperfect world, perhaps that has to be enough.

Follow me on Twitter @brettwrites.

Email me at semioticconundrums@gmail.com.

January 6th, 2004 #flashfiction #writing

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January 6th, 2004

            You stopped walking long enough to tie your shoe and in that moment everything changed. The cessation of your quick and determined pace allowed your pulse to slow down, almost imperceptibly. Because of the fatigue poisons coursing through your body, you took longer than you normally would to make a knot. As you hunched over, the other pedestrians swerved around you, some almost unconsciously, none giving you more than the most cursory of glances. They had other places to be and only so much time to get there, after all. You did not look at them; you were staring at your shoe, thinking of nothing in particular. The stream of slacks and blue jeans and skirts pocketed you against the wall. And so when the first shot rang out and the first person fell, their brains and their blood marking the wall in abstract patterns of finality, you were hidden, safe, saved not by the jogging you had done every daybut by an untied shoelace that might have remained fast on any other morning.

Whose Language Is It, Anyway? #nonfiction

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Whose Language Is It, Anyway? Musings on Words Fair and Foul

     Several years ago, I found myself in an annoying online conversation with one of my oldest daughter’s friends. It started out civilly enough, but eventually, due to the sensitive nature of the subject, I had to let him know that what we were discussing was really none of his business. At that point, like many keyboard warriors of the Information Age, he got awfully brave, knowing that he lived what he considered to be a safe distance away from me. His messages began to border on the disrespectful, at which point I advised him to stop talking. His reply should be familiar to anyone who has tried to tell a teenager that he or she should watch his or her mouth: “I have free speech, so I can say what I want to.”
“Son,” I replied, “just because the government won’t come and arrest you for saying something doesn’t mean I won’t show up at your door and kick your ass.”

     The problem with this kid’s thinking was that he believed “free speech” means that anyone can say anything at any time. But “free speech” does not mean “speech without consequence.” Whenever you say something to anyone, in public or interpersonally, you have to gauge the possible consequences of your language. Otherwise, you might find yourself in jail (if, say, you yell “fire” in a crowded theater when no fire exists) or expelled (if, say, you use hate speech in a university classroom) or beaten to within an inch of your life. Other possible consequences include losing friends, being socially censured, and having to defend your ideas and diction.

     As a writer and an academic, I am hyper-sensitive to language, its uses, the forums in which it is used, and its consequences. I firmly believe in a free press, in free speech, in freedom of expression. I hate censorship in any form. But I am also aware of the difference between censorship and disagreement, between free speech and rudeness or hatefulness. I don’t believe that I can control others’ language or that I should try, though I do often call attention to how that language might be perceived and whether or not it should have been used. In the example above, I wanted to stop the discussion about private family matters because they were private, and I wanted him to reconsider his tone not only for my sake but for his; after all, if I didn’t bother to kick his ass, someone else likely would in the future if he kept trying to hide his rudeness behind an imagined shield of unimpeachable “free” speech. I’m still waiting for him to thank me for the lesson.

     Another example—my students are, by and large, decent and smart enough not to use words like “nigger” or “faggot” in class, knowing that such words constitute hate speech and that such language would create an uncomfortable learning environment for everyone else. I want to believe that they don’t use such words because they know that doing so would be morally and ethically wrong, but even if they avoid those words out of their own sense of self-preservation, at least that’s something.

     They often don’t consider the implications of more innocuous hate language, though. I still hear them say “that’s so gay” when describing something that they consider stupid or ridiculous. Somehow they don’t make the connection that using “gay,” a state of being, as a synonym for “stupid” or “silly” is just as offensive as calling someone a “faggot.” I have a friend who asks her students, “Would you be comfortable talking about the same thing and saying ‘that’s so black!’?” Most of them have never really thought about it like that before, and some of them reconsider their use of the phrase in private or in other social situations, having learned that the ability to say something legally does not always mean you should do so ethically or morally. If they still choose to use such language in their homes, at their parties, and the like, I have two choices: 1) keep trying to educate them and hope they eventually see the light, and, failing that, 2) avoid them. I can’t force them to be good people at heart; I can only make a good case and hope.

     If they do use language that is universally considered hate speech (except, of course, among bigots, who often firmly believe that they aren’t bigots, evidence and common sense be damned), they are rightly subject to discipline. If you call someone a “faggot” in class, for example, I will ask you to leave (and call security if you refuse) and report you to the administration. The university will determine your punishment. We, the faculty and administration, are not forcing you to like and accept gay people; we are not prohibiting you from using such language on your own time or in other forums. We are simply saying that hate speech is unacceptable in our forum, not because you don’t share our values (though if what you value is hate, you don’t speak my language anyway) but because you make LGBTQ peoples and their allies feel afraid or uncomfortable in an environment where everyone should feel safe and cared for and nurtured.

     Similarly, take a major publication like The New York Times or Rolling Stone magazine. They are not guilty of censorship if they refuse to provide column space for, say, a Ku Klux Klan grand wizard or a neo-Nazi leader or a Republican like Sarah Palin, Rick Santorum, and so forth. They are not obligated to give everyone a forum, just as the New Republic is not required to provide space for Keith Olbermann or Rachel Maddow. They are not guilty of censorship if they run columns and articles against those with whom they ideologically disagree. They are not guilty of censorship if they refute alternative ideas and suggest that other people shouldn’t support such concepts.

     They are only guilty of censorship if they try to quash—not question, but actually stop— the opposition’s ability to produce their own forums, to disseminate their own ideas in their own spaces, and to make their own lingual and ideological choices in private.

      For an example of how to cross this line, take the Parents’ Television Council—please. This conservative, allegedly Christian watchdog group scrutinizes television shows and reports on any “objectionable” content. Objectionable according to whom, you ask? Why, according to the Parents’ Television Council, who seem to believe that they speak for the rest of us. Now when they watch those TV shows with their own agenda in mind, that is not censorship. That is their right. When they publish their findings on their own website and their own newsletters, that is not censorship. That is their right. When they tell us that we shouldn’t watch these shows because the programs don’t evince the right values, that is not censorship. That is their right. They are expressing an opinion and allowing people to consider their point of view.

     However, the PTC often does not stop there. They often try to organize boycotts of the shows’ sponsors and write to the networks, demanding that the shows be removed from our TV screens. At this point, they cross the line into attempted censorship. They don’t want to provide an alternative viewpoint; they want theirs to be the only viewpoint. They don’t want to influence my choice; they want to take it away. This is wrong. It’s unethical and un-American.

     Much of the debate over what we should or should not be allowed to think comes down to the language we use. A lot of those “objectionable” shows use so-called adult language—though, having once been a kid, I can personally testify that adults aren’t the only ones who use such words. And no, I didn’t learn the words from popular culture or art; I learned it from adults.

     Someone recently raised the question of what is or is not acceptable language on Facebook. One of my friends, a 63-year-old Christian politician who often disseminates progressive ideas on his personal page, used the phrase “Life’s a bitch” in a status update. The consequent debate over the word “bitch” should fascinate any linguist; were that my area, I’d probably write and publish a paper on it.

     Many of his conservative Christian friends attacked him—not questioned or debated him, but attacked him—for his use of the word, even going so far as to question his own religious beliefs. I personally don’t remember the Biblical passage that says “bitch” is an affront to God, so I didn’t really see their point. I’ve been lectured to more than once about using so-called “foul” language on Facebook; my usual response is that you’re questioning my use of the word on ethical or moral grounds, and I don’t agree with your ethical or moral definitions, so your argument doesn’t convince me. In fact, I think that “foul” language represents some of the most versatile words in English. Let’s look at a few of them.

     The word “fuck” is often unpleasant for people to hear, but it has become almost ubiquitous due to its adaptability. Taken on its own, it is a verb, one that means “to have sex,” though people often contrast it to “making love,” which has a tenderer connotation. Put a “you” after it, though, and it becomes a combination insult/aggressive response. Follow it with an “off” and you have an imperative sentence that, at the very least, seems unfriendly. If you preface it with a “to” or add an “-ing” suffix, the results are verbals that can act as nouns, meaning that they can function as sentences’ subjects, direct or indirect objects, and so forth. Pair the “-ing” form with a helping verb and you get a different verb tense than if you simply add “-ed.” Take the word by itself and put an exclamation point after it and you get a popular interjection. The “-ing” form can also function as an adjective, as in “holy fucking shit,” a phrase you often hear in the movies. Yet that form can also be an adverb, as in “fucking gross.”

     Are these expressions crude and, in certain situations, impolite? Sure. But sinful? That’s debatable. Unless “Thou shalt not say ‘fuck’” is the lost eleventh commandment, it seems that the only way to call this word “sinful” is if you stretch the definition; one might argue that since the word as a noun refers to a sexual act, and not necessarily one that takes place inside a monogamous marriage recognized by a church, then using it might—might—be sinful. But still, it seems to me that using the word itself is no more sinful than using the word “lying” or “stealing.” We might consider its use uncouth because talking about sex in public settings goes against certain social conventions, but that does not necessarily indicate sin.

     The same is true of words like “shit” and “piss.” They refer to bodily excretions, or to things that we compare to bodily excretions, and they are blunter and cruder (to some listeners, anyway) than more euphemistic words or scientific-sounding terms like “defecation” or “urination” or “excrement.” Perhaps they aren’t pleasant for some people to hear or contemplate, but that hardly makes them sinful. “Crucifixion” is unpleasant to contemplate, but we don’t censor people for using that word in public. Again, it seems to me that we’ve conflated sin with something else, whether we want to call it impoliteness or crudity or bluntness—or simply the use of colorful language.

     “Bitch” and “bastard” are considered acceptable if used in certain contexts—i.e., to mean “female dog” and “illegitimate child,” respectively. But if we talk about someone’s bitching about something, or mention that bastard at work who keeps stealing our stapler, or say that “life’s a bitch,” then the words become, to some people, unacceptable. But it’s still tough for me to understand how they can be considered sinful.

     The term “god damn” or “goddam,” as some writers (like me) spell it, could be considered sinful from a Christian perspective, given the commandment not to take the Lord’s name in vain. So I suppose I could understand if self-appointed lingual guardians took issue with it. When I use it in my fiction, though, it’s for purposes of realism or emphasis, not because I or my character is asking God to damn something or someone. Is that still sin? This word seems to exist in a moral gray area. Of course, for non-Christians, using the term is likely a non-issue.

     My point here is that the complainers on my friend’s Facebook page seem to be arguing for a version of Christianity that might not exist and is certainly not universally agreed upon. This makes their implications that my friend is somehow less Christian than they seem especially offensive. You might find his word choice blunt or crude or impolite, if you are of certain mindsets, but that’s as far as I’d take it. To the best of my knowledge, no one tried to have my friend exiled from Facebook, so no one is guilty of censorship; but I would suggest that there are better, more conciliatory ways of making your point about his language than deriding his faith. To judge him as less of a Christian based on his use of one word in one context seems too judgmental and unlikely to make your point; it would probably only anger him and lead to his de-friending you.

     In fact, the nature of Facebook as a social networking site implies that you are there voluntarily. No one’s holding a gun to your head and forcing you to be friends with anyone. It’s not a shared, paid-for, goal-oriented community like a college classroom. Thus, if someone’s language offends you, you should feel free to take issue with it as long as you do so in a way that makes your point, that encourages discussion and debate rather than destroying the possibility for them. And if you can’t convince them with your logic and evidence and reasonable arguments, if they still want to use language that bothers or offends you, you can always hide their posts or de-friend them. If the consequence of their language is that you will no longer be their Facebook friend, and they are willing to accept that consequence, then you have little recourse.

     What you shouldn’t do is try to censor them; it’s their page, and you don’t have to read it. You shouldn’t insult them; to do so is to react to a possibly controversial word or idea in a definitely unacceptable way. You shouldn’t assume that you know what God (or, for that matter, Mark Zuckerberg) wants and thinks better than they do just because their ideas are different. And you shouldn’t expect everyone to share your definitions of what is moral, ethical, or sinful. It simply won’t happen.

     We should not use language that devalues someone based on their states of being—language that is homophobic, racist, sexist, classist, and/or xenophobic, for instance. Everyone has a right to be who they are without someone’s using language, laws, and/or violence to oppress them. If you disagree, I won’t try to censor you from spouting your views, no matter how dangerous and sickening I find them. But I will choose to debate you civilly or ignore you. That is my choice, my freedom. Likewise, if I say “bitch” and it offends you, feel free to tell me why, as long as you’ve actually got an argument, not a knee-jerk emotional judgment. In that way, perhaps we can learn something from each other. If not, there’s always the “de-friend” button.

     Hateful and bile-ridden responses, though, teach us nothing. They leave us all in the dark, grasping for illumination. To echo Full Metal Jacket, they leave us in a “world of shit,” an ugly metaphor for an ugly situation.

     See? Sometimes the “bad” word seems like the right word, even if it makes you cringe.

Follow me on Twitter @brettwrites.

Email me at semioticconundrums@gmail.com.

January 15th, 2004–flash fiction

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I don’t think I’ve posted this one before. Sorry if I have. Coming soon–a nonfiction meditation on foul language.

January 15th, 2004

     Another new phone book arrived on the stoop today. That makes three this year. I can’t see much difference in them. One seems to be the usual directory that we’ve been getting every year of my life; the other two seem like commercials. They’ve got corporate logos on the covers, like something handed to you on a tour, along with your key chain and your letterhead notepad.

     I’m using the first two as doorstops. I needed a way to keep my bedroom door from closing at night, because it swings shut on its own, prohibiting the cat from reaching her litter box. I’ve got another one on the bathroom floor, because that door won’t stay open, either, and it gets too hot in there when I’m showering. Once I stepped out of the tub and saw that the cat had somehow gotten onto the counter. She was staring at the fogged-up mirror, as if looking for the image of herself that had always been there before. While I watched, she reached out and brushed the mirror with her paw, wiping away part of the steam. The clear spot looked like a comma without a sentence to punctuate.

     Sometimes she sits on the phone book in my bedroom. Her tail curls up around the edge. It’s as if she’s sheltering it from something, perhaps from disappearing into the mist like the cat in the mirror.

A Hole in the World: Life, Death, and What We Leave Behind #nonfiction

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     My next nonfiction piece here was going to be about language fair and foul. That column is still coming, but I felt that this one was more pressing. Thanks for indulging me.

A Hole in the World: Life, Death, and What We Leave Behind

     Yesterday, Kalene walked into the room, her eyes filled with tears.

     “What’s wrong?” I asked.

     “Tom Pilkington died,” she said, her voice broken by deep sobs.

     I felt shocked like I suppose you always do when someone you know dies. I began calculating his age and knew that he was, by my standards, far too young; I think that with today’s medical technology, anybody’s too young to die unless they’re at least 85. Tom was much younger than that, and, I had assumed, healthy. But after her crying abated for a time, Kalene told me that he had in fact been severely diabetic, a condition that likely contributed to his death. It’s too soon for us to know all the details, but the very suddenness of his passing seems too tragic and frightening to ignore. I guess we’re all truly living on borrowed time. To echo Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption, we’d all better get busy living, because we’re already busy dying.

     I suppose that’s morbid, but it’s also true. I think about what I’m doing with my life all the time—the work I’m doing, the effects I’m having or lack thereof, and so forth. We probably all do it, especially when someone we know dies.

     I didn’t know Tom Pilkington well. I met him once, ten years or so ago. He struck me as a fine man—kind, generous, intelligent. He was an academic who took his profession seriously, yet he did not strike me as the kind of man who only thought about overblown theoretical abstractions. More to the point, he served as Kalene’s professor, Master’s thesis director, mentor, and friend. She thought the world of him, and that’s good enough for me.

     Word of his passing spread quickly. Kalene found out from a friend’s Facebook post. She called her other friend and mentor, Dr. Mallory Young, and together they commiserated, sharing information and memories. I did not listen to their conversation, but knowing both of these wonderful people as I do, I know they were supportive of each other and devastated that such a good friend and colleague had passed on.

     Tom’s death has left a hole in the world. People like Kalene will miss him greatly for the rest of their lives. He made a positive impression on people. He leaves behind a body of academic and critical work that will keep his name and spirit alive. His death created ripples that touched everyone who knew him and set off a chain of Facebook posts, phone calls, and, undoubtedly, emails and face-to-face conversations in which the news spread quickly, running just ahead of the sadness and pain.

     By contrast, let us consider the case of Yvette Vickers, the 82-year-old former actress and pin-up queen. On April 27th, the same day that tornadoes ravaged Alabama, a desiccated, nearly mummified corpse was discovered in her home. According to Entertainment Weekly and other sources, the body is believed to be Vickers’, though its condition will slow identification. Authorities believe that Vickers, if the body is indeed hers, may have died nearly a year ago.

     At the end of the fall 2010 semester, I took a portable DVD player to school during finals week. I also packed a cheap collection of old horror films, just to pass the time as I waited for students to show up and turn in their final papers. I reached into this collection, which contained some true gems like Metropolis and Nosferatu but mostly covered B- and C-pictures, and randomly pulled out Attack of the Giant Leeches.

     This film just happened to star Yvette Vickers.

     She played Liz Walker, the hottie cheating wife of a local store owner. If you should ever have the misfortune to watch the film, you’ll probably find that Vickers’ portrayal of a backwoods cuckoldress is about the only memorable part. The acting is forgettable (including much of hers); the “monsters” look less like leeches and more like men dressed in poorly-painted garbage bags. At barely over an hour, the film’s running time doesn’t even qualify it as feature-length by today’s standards.

     But Vickers’ character is much more interesting than the rest—the annoying lover who glad-hands the cuckold husband until they get caught, at which point he happily throws his lover under the bus; the overweight husband who, the audience is encouraged to believe, should never have been with this woman in the first place for all kinds of reasons; the bland hero and heroine, who seem to have nothing better to do than paddle around a swamp all day. Vickers’ Liz Walker dismisses her husband as the hick buffoon that he is, her voice dripping with condescension. It’s a mostly one-note performance that calls for little else beyond a bit of screaming and lolling about in underwater caves, pretending to be exhausted from all the blood-letting. But she plays the one-note well enough to stand out in such a crummy film.

     Vickers starred in other cult films like Attack of the 50 Foot Woman and even had a part in HUD. She was hardly Elizabeth Taylor or Meryl Streep, but she worked in film and TV for years. She was not homeless; in the news articles I’ve read, neighbors described her as a quiet person who kept to herself, who seemed to love her flowers and her privacy. She was not, unless I’m mistaken, a shut-in, given that people had seen her outside her home enough to recognize her.

     In the age of Facebook and Twitter, of cell phones and Skype, of iPads that can track your location and GPS systems available for cheap on the Internet, how does a person like Yvette Vickers disappear for nearly a year without anyone noticing?

     Though we should be disgusted and saddened at the fact, we would understand if she had been homeless or a completely isolated agoraphobe. Our society seems to view certain people as disposable; in fact, we seem to have implicitly agreed to a hierarchy of existence. Somehow, even though she was white and financially solvent enough to afford a house, Yvette Vickers fell through the cracks. She lived; she died; she shriveled up like a piece of jerky. And for almost a year, no one noticed.

     Even if the body in her house turns out not to be hers, she has still effectively disappeared; in fact, that would mean that two people have vanished as if they never existed—Vickers and whoever lay in her house for all those months.

     How is such a thing possible? How could we have let it happen? Are we so self-involved that we don’t even miss people when they’re gone unless someone calls us or leaves a message on our walls or waves a sign in front of our faces?

     Whenever we think about our deaths, it is, I would imagine, difficult for us to picture the world without us in it. After all, we’ve never known life to go on without ourselves. Sure, we know logically that the universe existed before us and will keep on going long after we’re gone. But it’s one thing to know logically and another to understand on a deep emotional level. When we die, we will leave people behind. Our houses and our cars will still stand where we left them, and someone will have to deal with them. But we all hope for more of a legacy than that.

     For some of us, our kids will be our legacy. For others, the work we do will resonate in the post-us world. I am lucky enough to have both three children who are all turning into good people and careers in teaching and writing. Though nothing is guaranteed, I’ve got a better shot than most people do, the kind of shot Tom Pilkington had.

     But it’s also similar to the kind Yvette Vickers had, and I believe that even the most jaded among us don’t want to end up like she did. We hope people will remember us fondly. We hope they will remember us, period.

     Vickers worked in the horror industry, so I think it’s fitting that I end this piece with a reference to the best horror-romance-comedy-adventure universe in the history of television—that of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In a classic episode of the Buffy spin-off Angel, our main character and his frenemy Spike have ventured into a subterranean realm in an attempt to cure their friend Fred, who has fallen victim to the vengeful spirit of a demi-god. Afraid for Fred and saddened at their failure to find a cure, Angel and Spike find themselves looking down the throat of an enormous cavern that, allegedly, goes all the way through to the other side of the planet.

     Spike, his voice much more somber and restrained than usual, looks at Angel and says, “There’s a hole in the world. It seems like we ought to have known.”

     Tom Pilkington left a hole in the world, and everyone who knew him is standing beside that hole, wishing that he were here to fill it. Yvette Vickers left no such hole; her passing barely made a ripple.

     How will we end up? Who will notice when we’re gone?
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Email me at semioticconundrums@gmail.com

**UPDATE** This week’s Entertainment Weekly has a feature article on Vickers, in which they provide subsequent details. It seems that, suffering from dementia, Vickers did become a shut-in during the last months of her life; the woman who found her reports that she had barricaded herself inside the house. Still, I think the point holds; how could no one realize that she had been dead for so long?**