She walked out onto the porch.  For three days now, the sky had been every possible shade of grey with myriad textures of clouds.  Out one door, the mountains were draped with dusty grey shrouds; peeking out from behind the peaks were thunderclouds of off-white, the last vestiges of fair weather that are often so deceptive.

Countless threads of darker grey virgas sent their moisture to the hills below, speaking to the possibility of rain, yet still not promising it.  Dark stratus-cumulus leviathans crept slowly toward her, while lower streams of vapor above the river marched westward below them.

An occasional rumble of far-off thunder meant rain somewhere; a tease, really, as only a spritz or two of drops had materialized so far.  At least the raging spring winds of dust had finally ended, and some blessed rain had come.  Her skin was still parched from that time: the faint tributaries of a desert-dweller's skin could be smoothed by lotion, but that ritual was often forgotten in the midst of her increasing unease.

So much to do this time of year as the garden hit its peak, the fruits and veggies calling to be picked and preserved for the coming long winter.  She tried to pay it all enough attention, although lately some days it all took second place to her other life...her oddly more necessary life.

She was exhausted and depleted by recent attempts to be heard; to translate the pictures within her mind and body into language accessible to normal humans.  She knew she was in a way an oddity; thinking took place in pictures and images, then had to be turned into words, and back again.  It was an inefficient and clumsy way to communicate; with the coming loss, and other unease bordering on fear, she felt like an idiot, ready to bang her head into the wall.  Feh!

Impending changes were often little deaths; God, did she know that!  If only the storm would break...then she'd cope better.  Maybe go through the stages of grief a little more elegantly (riiiight.) 

She sat back down at the computer and read her messages.  A frustrated sigh escaped her nose, and her lips pooched in consternation.  She booted up her Realplayer to play one of her favorite Dylan poems set to music; it always made her feel brave and full: the line about "using ideas as our maps" caused her heart and mind to get bigger, but the back-story offered a poignant pain behind it.   

As she tried to formulate answers to one, a blast of wind lashed rain into the row of windows at her elbow, the huge drops crashing into, then streaming down the glass.  Without conscious effort she went outside to let the torrent wash her personal dust away. She sniffed the air for salt; this storm had migrated north from the Gulf; she fancied she could smell the sea, and loved the pictures it brought to her mind. 

The rain followed her into the house, and her face grew wetter and wetter; she futzed around with chiles and tomatoes, then sat back at the computer...stared at all the words...questions and answers dueled in her mind...words...so many words, and thoughts; no way to keep them crashing into each other...no way to let them settle into images...she attempted to answer some messages...failed...and walked out into the rain again.

 "Fuck it," she thought.  "What does it matter if my face is wet all day long?  It's not as though anyone will know...

She gazed west, and noticed the queer angle of the sun spiking through the layers of ridged clouds, and went to the open door on the northeast side of the house.  A strange, broad rainbow lit the foothills with bands of color, the flattest arc she'd ever seen; not in the sky, but along the ground.  An omen, she wondered?  A strange portent seemed likely, though she didn't really believe in signs...But in unusual times, a person's mind could meander into strange territory.

She went about her chile-work, slipping the blackened skins off the plump fruits, still fighting a headache and the lump tightening her throat.  Images of the Café window closing mirrored the closing of the window of good change so many of us had hoped for, yearned for, just a couple very long years ago.

Hell, heartbreak didn't last forever...she knew that, but it didn't stop heart-rending images jamming through her consciousness...dark images of the future relentlessly weakening her.  She finally surrendered to the rain. 

She read a couple more emails; so many last-minute considerations...threw in a couple comments at the Café while the rain continued to quietly soak her face.

Ach; it would be so hard that there would be so much to write about, and no one to hear, no one to share. 

Torrents of rain that soaked the ground and her skin, refreshing all; when the rain stopped, it was as though her windshields had been wiped clean.  She'd think about finding shelter in the storm tomorrow; or not.  Maybe a break would be good.  Waiting is.  Maybe I'll make a big old pile of words and smash them with a tenns racquet...  

Fuck it.  Time for some dance music!   Who knows what tomorrow may bring? 

She slept.  And dreamt of corn and travel in muddy places, and of clothing made of wood and metal.  (Never mind.)    ;-)

Notes:  Please; I'm not looking to be fixed here; just trying to express grief through a metaphor some may have needed and may appreciate.  Or not...    ;-)

 Check out this blog of Watt Childress's at Firedoglake; it looks like another place open to temporary refugees:

http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/69824

* Homeless was referring to virtual homelessness; got a nice 12-sided roof over my head still. 

I love and have long-loved the Cafe, and most all of you here.  I hope it returns in another form.  See you then if it does, and I wish the very best to all of you in the interim. 

For any wandering refugees, I'll try to create a Refugee Space on my Posterous account in the next few days so we can keep in touch. 

http://wendyedavis.posterous.com/

His contention is that the purpose of morality is to enhance human happiness, and avoid misery in the world.  For the sake of this discussion, I'd suggest we could also use the terms contentment or well-being, happiness sounding like such a shallow term (my bias), and toward that end, science could in principle provide markers in various areas such as institutions, sociology, child-rearing, war, economics, neurobiology, and presumably education.

He asks and attempts to answer twelve questions in the short article, I'm just hitting a few points here, assuming only half of you will read the article.  ;-) 

When discussing the ways in which different cultures or religious-based groups can be in opposition to more universally accepted precepts of morality, he asks us to think about how most people's lives fare in those societies.  In the case of the Taliban, he concludes, of course: not well, in terms of education, prosperity, health, etc., understanding that they see their adherence to Sharia law as promising contentment in the afterlife.

His mission seems to be to find ways to quantify happiness/contentment factors, graph them, and look at the peaks (good) and valleys (bad, suffering) from a distance.  He call this idea the moral landscape; then proposes that there are ways to effect changes that would provide more peaks than valleys. 

He wades briefly into the taboo of science involving itself in moral choices or values, and cites patterns of ethno-centrism and 'political correctness' as reasons; but we all remember The Bell Curve...and other such books and studies. 

He provides these reasons for 'admitting' there are right and wrong moral answers:

What I've tried to do in my book is give a framework in which we can think about human values in universal terms. Currently, the most important questions in human life -- questions about what constitutes a good life, which wars we should fight or not fight, which diseases should be cured first, etc. -- are thought to lie outside the purview of science, in principle. Therefore, we have divorced the most important questions in human life from the context in which our most rigorous and intellectually honest thinking gets done.

Moral truth entirely depends on actual and potential changes in the well-being of conscious creatures. As such, there are things to be discovered about it through careful observation and honest reasoning. It seems to me that the only way we are going to build a global civilization based on shared values -- allowing us to converge on the same political, economic, and environmental goals -- is to admit that questions about right and wrong and good and evil have answers, in the same way the questions about human health do.

I'd read a bit about the great Joseph Stiglitz working with the French to develop new ways to measure the economic condition of a people, given that GDP is failing in that regard.  They've been working on ways to factor in what they call The Happiness Factor, which is worth an entire blog on its own.  Pretty interesting, and this reminded me a bit of that attempt to find more universal measurements of human well-being.

I'd love to know what you think.  I'm agnostic here, just interested; so don't hold back!

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/blogs/d/o/doctor_cleveland/2010/09/questions-for-reader-blogs.php#comment-4087650  

In the meantime, please post any ideas on the current fixes you may have found to access commenting on Movable Type. It breaks my heart that so many of you are locked out again, especially as workaround after workaround fails after a day, a few hours, whatever... If you try any of the suggested fixes and they prove inadequate, I will offer my services. Let me know, we will somehow exchange emails if I don't have yours, and I will gladly shuttle messages to threads on your behalf, and send answering comments back to you.  It's the least I can do after your acceptance into the Cafe; and let it always be said that: The Reverend WD always did the least she could do.  LOL!

Some threads have been de facto Goodbye Threads, and I hate that many of you haven't gotten in on the Luv., apologies, make-up sessions, etc.  (All that saccharine end-of-the-road shit...)  It sucks, and I'd like to help.  So hang tight, all you darlin's; you all suck, but I do luv you true, misanthrope though I be.

If you've never faced the Dark Night of the Soul, either for yourself or for humanity, or your brothers and sisters in far-off lands: this may not be for you.  You may not have considered ending your life in response to the Dark Night, and you can take this song in different ways, but passionate, it is.  No matter; we all face the future with different attitudes, and many of us have developed coping mechanisms; some of us don't feel things as strongly as others; that's okay.

I have been incredulous about the varying responses to the possibility of Josh closing the Reader Blogs section of the Café.  The categories of responses speak to who we are as people; chronicling them would have made a fascinating blog in itself.  But alas; I didn't clip the comments!

But the thing that really has me buffaloed is the degree to which many of us have already departed; have seen JMM's decision as already written, even while sometimes trying to control things by establishing New Rules based too often on bloggers' own biases or sense of what content mattered most, or which bloggers were to blame!  Feh!

It seems impossible for too many to take Josh at his word: It's the cost!  I, too, want him to heed my cries that the Cafe needs to remain intact, since we have needs to express ourselves, and believe our ideas can spread outward to help our nation recover.   We are smart, we say, and good-looking to boot; our blogs could enhance the site, not be a financial drain.

I ask you: Which covenant with ourselves are we breaking in so doing?  Did you want ease and plenty?  Did you not have a higher purpose here?  Do I post stories here, as some of were accused of, "in hopes of being discovered by some editor in the blogosphere, and getting a writing gig somewhere?"  No.  Do I research for a blog for days for some ego-gratification or other?  Do you?  No.  At least most of us don't. 

We care about our nation, and folks suffering in other lands, often from the deeds and policies of this nation, and we don't want these things done in our names any longer.

We hate it that we seem to be losing the war against laissez-faire Capitalism, and we want to devise group efforts to start winning it.  We can't abide that we spend trillions on war, and it looks probable that our Social Security benefits will be cut, or that SS may be at least partially privatized, and dependent on Wall Street for value; that we are spending less and less on education, on infrastructure, on green energy initiatives...you can go on and on.

We argue about who or what's to blame, but we also get the word out from this site JMM envisioned years ago.  We talk philosophy, and food, and books...tell stories, and read poetry...just as we would at a real sidewalk Café, as Josh envisioned years ago.

All is politics, as far as I'm concerned.  Every innocent who's killed by American drones; every babby who goes hungry; every old person who gets put into a Crap Nursing home that her meager SS payments will afford; every kid who can't afford college, or will never pay back his exorbitant student loans.  Every vet with PTSD who doesn't get the proper care...every vet at the Café who tells his or her story, in comments or poetry: it's all politics to me.

And I am flipping out that we seem to be walking away from all this so easily!  Show me I'm wrong; please!

And another plea: take the time to listen to this song; it inspired me to write this letter to you all.  Take the four minutes...please.

Don't Give Up!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01FE9cPXE3M

My garden's a wee thing compared to the enormous gardens we used to grow, but for now it's juuuust right.  Ah; I wish I could share some of it with you.  Just this week I picked quarts of snowpeas...and cut gallons of fresh basil... and cucumbers and spinach and chard.  I clipped bunches of chives, and the leeks are getting plumper by the day.  The tomatoes are five or six feet tall in giant cages, and the fruits are ripening, and the foliage is so dense you can just cast glimmers of orange and red from the ones deeper inside ...the tiny patch of corn is tasseling, though it's almost decorative or ceremonial: my husband is a former Nebraskan, so there has to be at least an homage to corn, in case you want to toss some pollen to the rising sun, either accompanied by a prayer...or not.

We built our house into a hill, and the downstairs back door opens onto a walkway between two strips of rock garden, starting shoulder high and falling to ground level as you walk down the flagstone walkway toward the windbreak row of poplars and fir and the chokecherries the birds love so much... 

The garden used to be all flowers, but last year I gave a lot of them away to make room for veggies, as The Boss says, "on accountta the economy."  Some are still there: blue delphinium, six feet tall, and pale yellow dahlias as high as the corn they stand next to, flowers a foot across, with polished dark green leaves...morning glories climb and twist their way up the house on supports I've offered them...deep magenta with blue veins and yellow centers.  Several patches of ethereal pale purple Russian sage add a misty quality here and there.  Fall plantings of snow peas and radishes and spinach have broken ground and put on their second leaves....the occasional garter snake will sometimes surprise me when I water, and I never can help shrieking a bit; the Findhorn people in Scotland call those little snakes Devas, and claim they indicate a Happy Garden with Good Juju, or something.  Works for me; but then again, snakes have no legs, if you think about it.  Kinda creepy critters, and shriek-worthy when you're surprised by them.

Who knows why, but the zinnias are at least three feet tall, and about pop out and declare their colors, and volunteer cosmos and Queen Anne's lace dot the extra little spots between the intended crops...borders of Snow in Summer grow along the edges in spots, and the brown stalks and seed pods of former poppies try to stand proudly in lieu of their former flaming-orange grandiosity; likewise the peonies: We'll be back again next year, their bushy greens proclaim.

Some years back, our house was flooded by underground water; what a freaking mess it was.  We needed to affect a permanent fix, and without boring you to death with the enormity of the labor of putting in a second French drain system, the Fix left the area around the house looking as though it had been bombed and strafed.  I began working half-days and working the rest of the day on: Rocks.

Our house sits at the tail end of the La Plata glacial moraine, so we are a bit East of Eden-ish concerning rocks; our daughter's first word was rock, learned from the days when I would load the kids into the pickup and go out and pick the rocks that relentlessly push their way up through the soil and interfere with haying the fields.   I'd make piles of rocks, then clang them into the bed of the truck, drive ahead to a new spot, repeat...and when the springs groaned and said "That's enough rocks," we'd drive to the rockpile in a nearby bit of woods, throw them off, and head back for more.   Ah...Rocks. 

I learned to lay rock veneer on our round chimney in the center of our 12-sided Hogan, and against the exterior walls.  The idea was to make the place like it grew out of the ground; (thanks, Frank Lloyd Wright; wish I'd never heard of ya, by now!)

But now it was time to learn a new rock skill: flagstone walkways and retaining walls of river rocks, to hold back the new dirt, and cover the new dirt and ...oh, my.  Rocks.

So on the weekends, my husband and I would go to the mountains and gather granite flagstone, all different colors and patterns, bring the pieces home and lay them out in loose mosaics in order to show their shapes; shape being the main thing about laying rock walkways.  It's like constructing a jigsaw puzzle, because the idea is to construct something with seams of relatively similar sizes and of course, levels, so you don't trip yourself walking along the surface.  If a rock is close, and just needs a mite of remodeling, you can cold-chisel off the extra bits; it's kinda fun in a way...(okay; shut up...you have to make it fun, see?)

Gawd; we needed a lot of them, and er...building them was down to me.  The front of the house was easier, so I build a little rock garden off the new front porch we'd had to build, and laid the walkways, learning along the way.  I learned to hunt for shapes to fill the next space that was implied by the ones I'd just laid: I need one that looks like Ohio, but with a longer jag on the northeastern angle; or: one like Iowa could work here, with a slightly bigger bump...like that.

Of course, part of the fun is lugging one of the suckers to the spot, trying it, and if it's the wrong one, taking it back and searching for another one matching the shape in your mind.  Or what's left of it.

The back of the house was a bitch: it required two twenty-five foot river-rock walls, a flagstone path seven feet wide, and three stone stairways through the walls.  I spent a lot of time imagining how to build them...and by god, I finally did.  The treads, of course, needed to be oy-veh! huge and heavy, and when one of those rocks wasn't right, it could seriously piss me off.  I had to incorporate them into the walls, which was tricky, but I have a bit of a stubborn streak in me, and I finally finished, and laid the flagstones.

As luck, or fate, would have it, the day I finished it snowed the first time.

I ruined my knees on those rocks. 

And now that garden and those rocks have taken on a special meaning for me.  I know every goddam quart of soil and every goddam rock out there; it occurs to me that I could curse them roundly...but the anger's been mostly burned out of me by now.  And I love the living hell outta that garden for what it cost me.  And I even love those goddam rocks.

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/blogs/r/u/rutabaga_ridgepole/2010/08/sand.php

It got my brain pinging about images and icons and signs, and what they stand for to each of us, and what words or signs or labels stand for us as people.

"What's your sign?' was one of the idiotic questions hippies of a certain stripe would ask each other early on in the getting to know you phase.  I once heard a woman say, rather proudly, I thought, "I never met a Sagitarius who had her shit together.  (This was in Aspen, which is packed with phonies of every socio-economic class, IMO.  (grin) 

Now being a She Sagitarian, I wanted to pop her one in the nose, but I didn't even have the self-confidence to call "Bullshit!"  But I digress...

I thought it might be interesting to ask you all what sign could stand for you.  Not so much astrologically, though feel free to throw that out, too; but what might stand for your true self, or to your aspirational self (might want to differentiate, if it's going to be informative).

I often used to quip, "Slippery when wet" when asked The Question; oh, what a wag I thought I was!

Helpful hints: If yuou Bing or Google "Images of signs" or "Iconic Images" and the like, you can a page of hits, click on one, enlarge it.  If it's the one you want, you can copy the web page and link to it.  Like this:

http://media.ebaumsworld.com/mediaFiles/picture/684679/80541516.jpg

(I'd googled "Images of slippery when wet signs".)

So: What's your sign?  ;-)

Note: since Kirkman has about 20 posts up, I figured there was room for something not-so-very-serious.)

  Our lives are full of things we used to do, even did passionately, and we might glance back at them with fondness, and a realization that we've moved on; maybe reconfigured our priorities; maybe we're now physically incapable of a pursuit.  As in: I used to walk up mountains; well, rats; I can't do it any longer...but...there it is.  We're philosophical about it, accepting of it.  No biggie, right?

  And then there might be the other things; previous endeavors that we didn't let go of willingly, but we've tried to mentally toss into the dustbin of the past that can even now haunt us because they've been left unresolved.

  And hell, I'm writing this to help heal myself a bit, but if I publish it, it's because I intuit that there may be some amount of Universality to my plight.  We'll see; I don't always guess right on that one.  LOL!

  Singing a song is a lot like telling a story; the poetry needs to be good, and so does the melody.  But what sells a song, I think, is the delivery: Can a singer make you feel the song?  Can a singer use vibrato and pitch and growl and timbre and color to show you what the song feels like?  Bring a song forth from the wells of emotion in her body, and color the vocal sounds with import or meaning?  If I'm making it sound too grandiose, then the joke's on me, but I had thought I was good at it, and I'd love it if I could make you laugh, or cry, or understand something in a new way.  And it knocked me out that people sometimes paid me to do it!  Ha!

  We used to put different bands together for different gigs, either paid or benefits for causes and charities, and my husband played bass.  But for a year or two I sang with a female partner, and our harmonies were pretty damned fine.  Sometimes when we were rehearsing, and the blended sounds hit just right, Marilyn would make a Hoo! sound and say, "Oooh; that just made my nipples hard!" which of course was her colorful version of 'Nailed It!'  I'd almost cry laughing...

  Then it all stopped.

  Our daughter had had some very bad things happen to her before we adopted her, and parenting her was always a challenge.  But in her teen years, her problems blew up; some situations with our son did, too.  They're things I'm not able or willing to share, but for our family, they were tragedies of monumental proportion.  And the attempts at solutions for our daughter went on for years, and involved courts and social services and cops and shrinks and the stuff of institutional and bureaucratic nightmares. 

  And the music stopped.

  I heard once that the Japanese have a word for a sorrow so deep, so profound, that a person can't cry; it turns out that it's true. 

  It took a long time to realize that we were both submerged below the level of ordinary waking life; that pain and fear had such a hold on us that it was impossible enjoy the other parts of life.  No singing, no playing guitars, no listening to music, even.  As though we didn't deserve any joy any longer; hell, even smiling must have been rare looking back at it.  Some situations can seem almost worse than a death if they go on unresolved for half of forever; at least death has an ending. 

  I'd sometimes look at my sweet little Guild guitar where it leaned against the dresser; I'd dust it, polish it now again to keep the wood from drying out.  Every now and again I'd try to strum some chords (though always the minor ones)...but I couldn't for the life of me draw enough breath, hold it in the bottom of my lungs...and sing. 

  "Fuck", I'd think; "what's the matter with you, woman?"  Dammit; the woman didn't know; shut up!. 

Look what they've done to my brain, Ma

Look what they've done to my brain

Well they picked it like a chicken bone

And I think I'm half insane, Ma

Look what they've done to my song

---Melanie Safka

  Over time, I got some help from two rather odd practices that were based on acupuncture and brain exercises that were known to be helpful for PTSD and similar traumatic-event issues.  Our daughter stabilized over the years, our son graduated college...you know, we normalized a bit.

  We began to listen to music again...were able to laugh again...I started writing for our local Free Press, and taking bird pictures.  There were a couple other life-changing events that tried my soul (sorry; those are private) and I think some of the suffering served to make me funnier; you know I think I'm utterly hilarious.  (When I find myself typing and laughing at things I've typed, even I know I'm probably over the top!)

  When was it?  Six months ago, maybe, a new friend sent me MP3's of songs he'd written and recorded.  They were inspirational, and I thought I'd maybe found a ticket back to song.  I did breathing exercises, and I worked on strengthening my vocal chord muscles.  But something was missing: as though the fire in my belly had been drowned. 

  Maybe permanently.  I put my guitar away in its case, stuck it downstairs...as though I could stop its silent taunts of failure.

  So now I tell you some stories instead, and hope you can hear them, or find them useful or enjoyable in some way.  I won't grow up to be Aretha Franklin as I used to tease about; I won't be our Woody Guthrie (grin).  I haven't totally given up on singing yet, or I might not be writing this now.

  But hey; do me a favor, will ya?  If ya hear my songs out there somewhere...would ya send them home to me?

One love,

wd

  I spent most of my childhood on a magical island named Catawba, and although it wasn't technically an island any longer, it felt like an island to me.  A causeway had been built across a bit of Lake Erie to connect it to the mainland, which made access a whole lot easier than a ferry boat could, which was the usual mode of transport to the other islands off the coast.

  It was heaven, that island existence, though I of course didn't know it at the time; but when I remember the ease and safety and natural beauty of the place, I see it for what it was: a veritable kids' idyll.

  The grey lake was for swimming and fishing in summer, and ice skating and ice fishing in winter.  There were long expanses of rock walls guarding the houses at the edges of the lake; the tops were smooth and flat, and just made for walking on.  If you were careful, you could leap across the gated openings; if you fell...well, take my word for it, you didn't want to fall.

  The world was safe, so were allowed to be gone as long as we wanted, as long as we'd promise to be home by sunset for dinner.  That was easy; our buttered graham cracker  and apple picnics only kept hunger at bay for so long!

  Well, I should have said the world was pretty safe; there was an old Peeping Tom who'd look in people's windows once in a while, but everyone seemed to know who he was, and figured he was harmless, although from this point in time that seems pretty careless. 

  One night when our parents were gone, I saw his face at the bathroom window, and just about peed my pants; I'm sure I must have screamed.  But he was gone by the time our mom and dad got home; I think they always thought I'd imagined him.  His face was about two feet away from mine, and it took some time to register what I was seeing.  Remember that feeling?  At first your mind refuses to believe in something so out of the ordinary?  And you try to tell yourself it's something else?  And then you get it??  Brrrr.

  There was an old rickety two-story house on the northern end of the island; the mailbox said Myron Kutcher on it: he was the Peeping Tom; I recognized his face and his beat-up old felt hat.  The Kutcher's land had an electric fence around it, and boy, were we afraid of that!  Come to think of it, I didn't even know what an electric fence did, but our collective fear of it was pretty delicious, anyway.  They had chickens, mostly Rhode Island Reds.  To this day, when I hear the Why did the chicken cross the road joke, I think of one of those dudes strutting across that dusty road.

  There was a giant old weeping willow catty-corner to the Kutchers'; we could hide under the branches that swept the ground and keep an eye on the place unseen; the boys in our ad hoc gangs seemed to figure that one day we might get to witness some unnamed crime.

  Marshall might say in his gravelly old-man voice, "Ya think he's got some stolen kids in there?"

  The rest of us would just shiver...

  I went to the same little school from first to sixth grades, so everyone and everything was totally familiar, if not entirely predictable.  Shoot, I can still name just about every teacher I had back then, and picture where they lived; back then you were allowed to visit your teachers at home if you wanted...some of them you actually did want to visit. 

  But not Mrs. Heidorf ; she had to make us come...she'd tell us she'd made us some of her creepy divinity fudge that hurt your teeth and tasted like cat pee, so we had to go.  She'd con us into bringing her some of the black walnuts that grew everywhere, but she didn't know to roast them before mixing up that evil white confection; I'd find places to ditch mine when she wasn't looking.  Ish.

  She had black hair made into some elaborate kind of braided bun at the back of her head, and a baggy neck and droopy cheeks she'd rouge up to make herself look attractive, I guess; but it didn't work: she was sort of a grouch, and looked and acted like a red-faced bulldog.  My mom said it would just kill her when she'd come to visit our third grade.  She'd hear Mrs. Heidorf yelling at us as she came down the hall, and she'd knock on our door, tap, tap.  Through the window, she'd see Mrs. Heidorf swivel toward the door, and the expression on her face would change instantly, and she'd saunter to the door and open it, and say. "Oh, hello Mrs. Weaver; you've come to see one of my little people!" all bright and cheery.  My mom didn't even care that we hated her...

  Anyway, you get the drift.  All the Catawba little people lived in a cocoon; we knew pretty much everyone on the island, and danger only came from nearly drowning (once), or falling through thin ice while skating (maybe twice)...or walking by the Kutcher's house...or getting beat up by my sister, but that was different; no fault of Catawba's.

At the end of the summer after sixth grade, my world shifted, both literally and figuratively.  My dad got a new job in Cleveland, and we had to move. Move?  Leave my friends, and my little garden, and my animal cemetery?  The house with the great sledding hill in back?  That's not fair! 

  My dad left it to my mom to pick a place and a house; I could have chosen better with a freaking Ouija Board!  Or closing my eyes and stabbing my finger down on a stupid map!

She was in love with words; that was her big problem.  She'd drag us off to some nasty house she'd found because it was on goddam Morningside Drive, or Moonbeam Place or some idiotic misnomer. 

  We ended up in North Royalton, on Ridgedale Drive, I think it was.  Pretty dreamy name, right?  The vaulted ceilings didn't hurt, nor did the giant lithograph of the Grand Tetons in the sunroom.  My dear mother, God love her, was sort of a snob, and liked the finer things in life sometimes.  When she'd have too many highballs or martinis, she'd trot out a slightly affected and dreamy, 'cultured accent'.  It really was pretty funny. 

  The house was okay, and it was sort of cool to blast Judy Garland on the stereo in that big, high-ceiling living room.  Damn, my pop loved Judy; and he taught me to.  'Zing Went the Strings of My Heart'.  I used to perform a little medley of her songs, and always figured he was smilin' down at me...How ya doin', Pop? 

  Our house was at the end of a dead-end road, which was pretty nice, since the woods started at our house on two sides.  What wasn't nice about it was that we had to walk almost a mile to the bus stop.  Not only was it a long walk, but along the way my sister and I would be joined by other kids pouring out of their houses, and joining the trek up the hill to the main road.

  The boys outnumbered the girls, and they seemed huge; high school age, and they seemed not to like my sister and me on spec.  They'd say stupid and mean things to us, and we'd try to ignore them.  They seemed to be almost a different species than we were used to.  Greasy hair, pointy shoes, jeans, shirt- and jacket collars up; fags dangling from the corners of their mouths; if they carried any schoolbooks at all, they seemed to carry them with disdain somehow, as if to say, "They're makin' me do this shit, and I resent the hell out of it."

  The girls came in two basic categories: The Prissy, buttoned up Catholic Girls, and the flashy, short-skirted girls with giant bouffers and pointy bras that made their breasts stick out like missiles.  Now I know they might have been Catholic girls, too, but back then I didn't know about acting out Catholics so much.  The hairdos, I learned from my cousins later, took a lot of time to perfect.  You would take a comb and a chunk of hair, and run the comb backwards down the strands, making a static mess, then blast it with hairspray.  You'd repeat it all over your head until you looked like an electrified porcupine, then start smoothing it out on the surface.  When you were finished, your hair might be hard to fit through the narrow bus doors, but the driver would wait for you.  And the 'do made a great place to store pencils and things.  (Shut up; I didn't rat my hair.  Hell, I didn't even wear a bra yet; I was a year younger than the other seventh graders...)

  Now the Weaver girls hadn't developed any of the skills one might need in a suburban area, crowded with people of different backgrounds, and income levels, and accents, and clothing styles and...unknowns.  And we knew exactly zilch about menacing behavior; real twinkies we were.  The boys would throw crap at us, little stones, snowballs, take our books and purses, though we almost always got the things back.  Ignoring them didn't work that well, but even now I can't think what might have worked.  Somebody finally let it slip that they thought we were rich; kind of funny really, since we weren't...Our dad finally went to talk to the parents of one of the worst harassers; we begged him not to,  but he had to go; and of course it made things worse.  Now the Cretin could make fun of our dad, to boot!  Crap.  Bus-stop hell.

    My new school was an old stone two-story edifice with basements and tunnels with plumbing pipes along the walls.  It was for seventh graders only, and over 350 kids went there!  If the enormity of it was daunting, the crush of kids in the halls was utterly intimidating.    

  On my first day, I was shown to my homeroom, where Miss Olzonowitz ran the show.  She was tall and blond and gorgeous, with a generous red-lipped mouth and bright azure eyes.  She was kind as she was beautiful, and welcomed me warmly to the school.  (Okay, you can stop staring at me now, folks.)

  Homeroom was where you started the day, listening to announcements, shuffling papers and books for your morning classes, boys making fart noises and throwing spit wads.  Girls might check their compact mirrors, just in case they had turned into a Miss Olzonowitz during the bus ride, or more likely, sprouted a zit.

  I made it through my morning classes, then followed the crowds to the cafeteria in the basement, waited in line, and got my lunch tray.  I turned to look out at the sea of tables:

Oh my.  Jammed.  I wandered here and there, finally found an almost-empty table, and sat down.

Moments later, I sensed a presence looming over me, and looked up.  It was the enormous Louise Tubbs from homeroom.  She towered over me, and smiled sweetly; one tooth was missing in her smile, her unwashed and stringy blond hair swung toward me as her head bobbed.

  "Can I sit with you?"  I nodded, feeling my crest falling as I did; my smile must have been as rumpled as Charlie Brown's.  I could feel the New Kid Target with its neon arrow pointing at me now:  'Calling all loners and geeks!'  Oh, goodie!  Here comes another one!  Jackie sat down and introduced herself; we talked a little while Louise shoveled her food in; she sure must have been hungry.  Jackie seemed nice enough, although she seemed inordinately proud of her breasts: she wore them under her sweater in a way that seemed to defy gravity, and her nose turned up at the end like the girl in the before part of the Esmerelda book of my childhood.  (Never mind; it was a bad girl does good, gets her wish from the fairy thing...)

  By and by, she excused herself, whispering, "I have to use the restroom; I need to change my napkin."  (Oh, thank you; I needed that information just so I could finish my lunch...)  It turned out she was also very proud that she'd gotten her period...

  When it was time to leave, I discovered I had acquired a satellite: Louise followed me like an enormous puppy that had bonded with the Wrong Mother.  (Just ducky; the New Geek and her Pet Monster tromp the halls.)  Louise looked ever so pleased as she lumbered along half a step behind me; a full step would have been preferable; I forgot to say that she didn't smell all that good.

  (Yeah, yeah; I know.  All you saints were so big-hearted and kind at that age that you wouldn't have minded, and are thinking what a mean cow I was to have wanted to press her flat, fold her up, and wing her out the window like a Frisbee.)  She was my companion for several weeks in the hallways, but I did manage to convince her I didn't need her help in a toilet stall.  (Yep, yep; been doin' this all by myself for years now, Louise!  Be right back!)

  By and by I settled in, and more or less found my way through the tunnels, avoided Louise, and found a few girls for almost-friends.  And learned about passing notes in class.  The reality was that notes from boys were the best, and worth getting caught over. 

  "Check one:  Do you like me?  Yes.  No.  Do you like someone else better?  Yes.  No.  Are you going to the dance on Friday?  Yes.  No.  Erudite missives of that order.  And the notes would be folded into tiny packages that required some effort to break into; they must have seemed more secret that way.

  I had a few boy-crushes, but I mostly flew under the radar.  That fact made this event seem very peculiar.

  I was in homeroom one day when a girl rushed in.

  "Rita Malvestuto wants you in the restroom.  She is challenging you to a can-opener fight!"

  Now Rita looked as though she must have been held back a few times, older and tougher looking than the ordinary female hoods in the school.  She had a giant heads-worth of ratted black hair and wore what was probably a fake leather jacket.  Her nails were long and painted red to match her lipstick; she could have been the girlfriend of The Leader of the Pack; remember that song?  Vroom, vroom?   (James Dean, eat your heart out.)

  Can openers?  What the hell?  I'm thinking she probably means those sharp, pointy can-openers, not the kind you clamp onto a can and twist the little key, right?  The world went still; all the blood in my body fell into my feet; my ears roared with a hot wind.

  People did this? Girls did this?  Uh-oh; I'm really and truly not in Catawba anymore...  All of a sudden I had to pee; not such a good idea to go the restroom with Big Hair waiting for me.  Cripes. Did those girls stash can openers in their bouffers?  What in the world could I have done to piss her off?  She wasn't even in any of my classes.  I was picturing the little triangle gashes a can opener could make.  Arrggh. 

  "Hurry up!  She wants you!"  Message-girl's voice broke me out of my dark reverie.  I must have opened my mouth, but no words came out.  And the bell rang.  O, sweet clanging school bell!  I stalled as students rushed out, students rushed in, finally gathered my books, and peered into the hall.  No Rita.  I crept next door to the bathroom and opened the door a crack: empty.  Sweet Jesus.  I had a quick pee, washed, and hurried to class, where I may or may not have gotten detention for being late; who cared?  I'd been  saved from can opener mutilation. 

  Oddly, I never heard from Rita again.  She must not have known she could have extorted anything she wanted from me; all she'd had to have done was breathe the words 'can opener', and I'd have given her all I owned; including my fourteen carat gold circle pin!

  Not being used to fear, and owning no skills at self-defense or whistling past graveyards, I began to do what any red-blooded geek sub-teen would do: make myself sick.  I developed symptoms: stomach ache, headaches, hair aches...whatever could allow me stay home from school.  I didn't exactly know I was becoming neurotic, but I sure did know I loved sick days home from school.  In winter, I'd lie in bed in the dark in the early mornings, fingers crossed, while the voice on my clock radio listed the school closings due to snow.  Oh, how I loved it when the voice got to "...North Royalton public schools"!  Yahoo!  That winter the Cleveland area broke records for snowfall; some storms would dump three feet at a time.

  I'd be so relieved by the school Snow Days that I didn't even mind the endless snow-shoveling, or trudging a couple miles to the little grocery store for staple foods, and hauling them back on our little sled.  Bliss!

  One night my father was late coming home.  It was the last night of another big snowstorm,  and as the hours ticked by we grew more worried.

  When we finally saw car lights, we practically swooned with relief.  When my pop came in through the door, his face really and truly was green.  As he was driving home, an accident had happened.  Some sixteen cars just ahead of him crashed into a mega-pileup; many people were injured, and some died that night.  It affected him deeply, though he spoke only minimally about it.  Poor daddy.

  Perhaps that was the kicker; I'm not sure.  But it wasn't long before my mother had her maps out again, and was making calls, and seeking out another place for us to live.  We were luckier this time: a college friend of hers talked her into looking at a house for sale in her neighborhood in Kent.  It was, of course, a university town, and the house looked over one of the Twin Lakes the area was named for.  It seemed to be a world away from the nasty place we'd been stuck in for almost a year.  My sister, mother and I begged my father to buy this house.  His commute to work would be longer, but at least not right through the Snow Belt.  He gave in, and signed the papers...we packed our belongings, and bid a hearty hi-ho, fuck youuuu! to North Royalton and its greasers and hoods.  Ta da!