Sometimes I think our job in being human is to watch, listen, and take in our world.
Then both try to find a way to react humanely, but also recognize other's suffering. Relieve it if we can.

Tonight I read an article in the news from the internet. It gets difficult to read the papers for me, though I do take several. It gets harder still to know if the news is the news as is reported, or is this as it was wished. Or asserted. So I read the article in several reputable sources. Every time stopping to consider the implications of the report.  It is basically about returning unconscious undocumented workers (here  I assume to Mexico)- transporting them- because of cost to hospitals, done apparently by hospitals. I'm still amazed. Is something missing here? Is this what families would WANT?  600 or so the article stated.

"Some patients who were sent home subsequently died in hospitals that weren’t equipped to meet their needs. Others suffered lingering medical problems because they never received adequate rehabilitation, the report said." from the article

Sometimes I've taught folks, children, in a 30 year career in several locations, that might have been in that undocumented status, but I don't know because we don't ask. But. Somewhere along the line the Supreme Court allowed us to offer children school. And these issues remain debated in the couches across the land. It's different for me as far as just talking goes, I'm working with real people I know.

I just saw Arlo Guthrie singing. In Santa Barbara at the Lobero Theater. It was a great experience and he sang a song I have loved since first learning to play it over 25 years ago in a town called Greenfield in CA. First hearing it I thought about the people I saw the very first day we drove there. This was 6 hours up from LA to his interview- me waiting on my friend as he interviewed for a teaching job- watching humans working in the fields getting sprayed by a plane full of pesticide. Later I'd get dusted when out on yard duty when winds moved in certain directions. I was single then. We were following a job fair in Monterey County giving a lead for teaching employment.  I was driving around with him, the guy I married, seeing the area where we would both come to work. I saw that spraying just lay down right on my car windshield, wet enough to write your name in  as if fog had fallen,  and looking out there were about 50 people working in a grape arbor. No one was running for cover. I had been looking in silence as we headed toward the Arroyo Seco.  There is a ghostly beauty there. Unlike anywhere on earth really. I got out of the car in almost fury because my father raised me to understand pesticides. Then my next experience that day was sitting in the grape orchards watching people work, up close, for over two hours as I thought about what I might be committing to do with the rest of my life. They were moving through what I personally know to be very hard labor. Making the grapes, that turn into the wine, that some in this country are tossing back as they go about their book reading salons. Unaware and uncaring about ...oh...I'll just pass on more memories. Enjoy that wine, no thank you for me.

I wasn't there as an activist. I was there as a really young teacher, disoriented, following a job lead.
And finding out about where I was.


This article -I'd like to have the skill to write the song it deserves.

I do know a song it makes me remember.



I do know compassion. Surely we do know this in our country. Or are we doomed to repeat....
Surely this isn't done without a scintilla of our compassionate heart.

Focus On The Helpers

I started with that, repeated that, returned to that.
Helpers, there are so many heroes and helpers,
Our world is full of hope in our helpers.
You saw them running towards what others fled, holding on, taking charge, doing what they do-facing life and in that living- danger,

Young children wrote in journals today in my classroom- as we always do-the subject this time evoked yesterdays echoes- they were sounding my name
Coming in full of ready energy-raring to write
 "this is someone that helped me once"
In paragraphs that floated around in a field full of questions, fears, honest inquiry
on the morning after America was blasted by a pressure cooker.

These are the children that I'll always remember
the ones writing me to tell me something
Good, on the start of a really long one
They sat with me through other days
Not so long ago they didn't hear me talk about anything, not a word of Sandy Hook,
As directed from above
It was not something we were prepared to respond to really,
They just waited until I finally said,
"Whatever we face, we will face together-ok?"

"Today," one child wrote, "My teacher helped me because she treats me just
Like her family," adding, "You gave up every Friday to stay late and help me
Build my math, just like my father would,"
My face was red with inadequacy-
But I couldn't mumble anything because my eyes were wet
As I looked at a few other moving, moving tributes
One child stated that if he could have a time machine he'd use it to remove all our mistakes-
Here I was thinking of the helpers, channeling their help
And they called me one.


Last night I went to the Lobero Theater
To listen to a son talk in the voice of his Dad, singing of the City of New Orleans
Echoing Blue Ridge Mountains to Redwoods not so far
From where I sit. A woman there had the arms of my mother in law
Her form, the lights dimmed, music heals and comforts
Wraps us in a lap, a place, a time
I thought, what would Woody write of this day
If he was looking in the paper for things that ain't right.

I think he'd write of the walking,
the miles of running done this day
As those that watched then gave their blood, sweat, limbs to a hell made on this earth
By monster kids, lost, radicalized to lose any compassion-
From that stage this son sang and spoke of how we do not know
How our peace sung into the darkness
Reaches around and wraps its arms
To somehow whisper comfort into the heart of another
Facing the hurricane

With a sense of sadness, yes, briefly I spoke to my students,
Saying that my work is both long division
And seeing that helping work-as they stood listening
Very carefully to our collective breath.

Look to the helpers, they are there, they are us. They are you.

I took a class a long while back, through Chapman University taught at Hartnell College, I even forget the title- somehow on how language shapes our lives.  We focused on the political in this class. The Politics of Language, that might have even been the course title. I learned a lot and read enough to understand that if you control the definition of a term, say of "The American Dream" or "mother" then you control the dialog. If you control the narrative then what happens is the issues revolve around in the universe of your making. The implications are enormous, and this isn't stunning revelation to us in a more savvy world now,  and it has driven the Republican party for the thirty years I've been watching. Anyway in that course I was taught by a Jesuit. And I introduced him to Noam Chomsky among other writers. I could see the class as paralleling other things I'd read. He asked in one class if we thought it was democratic for a minority voice to be forever voted down. He had very solid ways to defend that perception-he was essentially asking if democracy was fair.
Having experienced that in a grade level now in the most real and simple and least sophisticated way possible in terms of my voice, I can answer now I better understand what he was asking. And why. I've often written here "who writes history?" but that is really my recognition and thoughts on power, on those without voice, on how we elevate and promote -often based on violence, ignorance, the interplay of things that seem less educated but more about mass power, through resource allocation other structures at odds with values we state.

But it was a good enough question I've thought about it for years.
I just heard Stockman on Bill Maher talking about minority group politics using this narrative control tool-controlling the narrative-because he was evoking the codes that these special interests somehow hurt us all trying to secure wages, minimum wages and rights for say, immigrant workers or a group in a minority that have been hurt by lacking jobs, opportunity and access to power. When this group denied access to power or resources figured out ways to react-the label of special interest came into being for them-to denigrate them. He neglects to see the wealthy as such a special interest of its own.

However, mostly I have been thinking about that tired narrative of special interest politics that was generated to obfuscate from things like what I just heard on another program. People that are very poor statistically in America don't live as long. Fundamental things that appear to be strengthened in the last few years of securing a permanent underclass. That should be intolerable.

Narratives are ways we explain things, or code things, so that a group can "group think."
They are powerful tools and an amazing human capacity. We transmit culture, values, meaning through this. But like anything this same process has a positive and a negative capacity. Nothing exists that isn't both at the same time.
In my mind this ought to be what critical thought for students is about. Understanding we can step outside and look at what we narrate, what we define, what our meanings are about. The most frustrating part of test based educating is it requires that no time is dedicated in questioning the ethics of what we are doing.
Because that is very dangerous frankly to forget we have responsibilities to question ourselves and why we do what we do, and this can be very hurtful. How to examine what we tell ourselves and why is an important thing to talk about with students. I would imagine training as an ethnographer, anthropologist, cultural anthropologist, linguist so on would assist in gaining tools to approach what we say and why. To gain perspective. Students can look at a story such as one by Steinbeck looking at it from many lenses-historical, social, American, so on.

I've just experienced something that I'm adjusting to regarding the narrative we tell ourselves, far different than on a political level, and within family. My immediate family.

When I write here often it is to look at what I say, examine why, move out of one frame into another around my teaching, my evolution as a person. It is a growth tool. I'd like to explain a way I make meaning. As I demonstrate my narrative.

My mother- I've recently told here- has been very ill. I also shared (in the last week or so over Spring Break) she had an event years ago that changed profoundly both my mom's and my life- when a voice in her head, among other things, took on huge implications for us.
At the same time that happened I  recognized my Mother was creating meaning, explaining it to herself and others-searching for help, understanding, compassion. Her story. She changed in what seemed like a day I blinked my eyes, that sent her to a hospital,  uninsured, and what I saw the next day was her slurring speech, face odd, eye odd, unbalanced and talking of a voice telling her things she identified as someone we both knew trying to take her over. For her this person was in her head and hurting her. Over time as she recovered, or to some extent recovered, she expanded this narrative. The voice.
I would argue it with her, a mistake I cannot retract now,  but I accepted a psychiatrist saying it was schzophrenia.
But he was actually wrong. And if I knew where he was now I'd make sure he understood that and what his mistake meant. Not to be mean, but because that error hurt my mother.

And so was she altered.
However her narrative, her processing of things that happened or unfolded from what she knew, she explained. It was impossible really for her to get to information to change this or to help her-and in a day she became so different. But now we have figured out something profound about it all.
It has rather profound meaning for me and is an exemplar of something I would call "a revelation."

A few years ago too Mom had an event. Maybe 6 or 7 years ago. She began to vomit for days, lost her speech, had a frozen face, lost the use of arm, lost hearing, lost balance. So damaged. It happened at a Spring Break after I'd been in a surgery and I missed really what might have been things leading up to it. She was under a lot of stress. Brain scans did not reveal it til the third time they did them, with some kind of contrast-it showed a lesion in her brain stem. So we knew it was a brain stem stroke-and that was all.
Over time since she has had what I've called TIA's-events that left her arm hanging, face hanging, eye not working with two occurring in the last week. But this time I saw her in the middle of it, a bad one, as her voice returned she reported that the voice was telling her it was paralyzing her, and other things. It was if I was transported back in time to about 1979. This wasn't explaining the event  after the fact by blaming it on this person she thinks she hears-she was having auditory hallucinations.
My daughter who is trained in neuroscience shared some info with me yesterday,  as she has been taking a course in pre-med on the brain. Here it is.
So I recalled to her how in a few hour time years ago Mom (I thought) invented this voice and was forever changed. In reality Mom had a stroke or some brain event then. Same facial issues, same balance issues, same vomiting.

By talking to my daughter with her using her training I better understood the location of this stroke-which we have on MRI from a few years back- and what we might see. What we do see.

I have argued with a raging Mom, part of this, felt the sheer weight of trying to talk out of her the notion a guy was doing this to her. Her fixations, her story her logic. What I now understand, see is the whole of it. I see differently. In another system entirely.


Mom gave blood a bit before this all happened in the 1970's. She was out at the University Hospital in Morgantown with someone doing something, and saw a sign begging for blood donations. She weighed 110- which was too small- but they allowed her to donate. I was at work and I had no idea she was there or doing this. I would have been 17 or 18. When she went to get the bus home, she required 2 bus changes, she passed out as she stepped off the curb hitting the base of her head. She was out a long while, hour,  and kept overnight for a lot of tests. The bus driver got her help. As I recall I had no idea until the next morning where she was-something that never happened. It wasn't like today. No cell phones.

And then this event a short month or so later happened profoundly altering her. This was in a time MRI's didn't exist. They never even took into consideration a stroke, I know that,  but Mom went to the hospital I am told that day, while I was at work, demanding a CAT scan to see this other person in her head, what was actually auditory hallicinations. She could not tell about the distortion in her speech, in her sense of time, in her word finding, balance, in the way her arm was working.

So, now I understand.

Differently. I have also got to face my YEARS of thinking it was something different than what it was.

Recently she developed -as I did, as did my daughter -severe infection. I think it might have been meningitis. But my daughter had a severe ear infection and headaches and could not work for over a month. She resigned a job because she did not know what to do. She hasn't missed a day of school in junior high, high school, college. She never misses days or calls in. But a month in bed. Deathly ill, stiff neck, just ill. My mom had a terrible infection in jaw, head, her jaw locked, she could not eat for a month. She said her head and neck had pressure and pain. She said her head was so sore she couldn't touch it. My mother never complains about anything. (My other daughter calls this inner cranial pressure.)
And this was treated, finally,  with several antibiotics. Ghastly long siege- and it may yet kill her. During it and in the last weeks she's had repeated TIA's-events.

As I said.

And I'm listening to how my Mom talks, lumps on her head, shooting pain in her skull, neck stiff if she hangs up shirts on a hook putting her head back. It's really tough because she goes into these reconstructions or the doctor said, confabulations. It's this guy we once knew who was once my boss and friend.
I think it was then, when the doctor said maybe all of this, even way back was a stroke that I related differently to all of it-that I had insight.

I know where she had the stroke is where auditory hallucinations occur. Brain stem.

Even her deafness which happened immediately after two of these TIA events a few years ago. Even that my daughter could attribute this to the brain stem. So I had to just take in a massive shift in perception. My God.

My first reaction was compassion.
This enormous wave of feeling for her facing in her 50's a stroke or brain event. I have insight into profound change neurologically from my syrnix, and from my back when I lost walking.
But I felt her bravery of facing it -sans any health coverage-Dad made sure he screwed my mother when he "moved on" with a grad student. I just felt that finally I could never argue again that people can't take over your mind-I had another way to think. No point in arguing. It isn't a thing like this.

So I went out to her room and calmly told her.
It's not like she said, "Epiphany." In fact I think she didn't listen too much, kept organizing her thousands of recipes snipped from newspapers. But I went over what my daughter concluded. And I kept at it awhile and repeated. I think for thirty years I've longed to be able to give her a satisfactory reason for ANY of this. I could now.
I don't know if it will alter her narrative but I felt a wave of her feeling the validation of being understood. I explained auditory hallucinations as defined in this literature, and I told her Sylvia would come talk to her more. Later Sylvia said that maybe on an unconscious level she has sought to explain her grandma because for weeks she's been very intently focused on the brainstem. Maybe.

I can't place here how I have lived this, lived her kookie explanations, tried to understand, but I can say that this made more sense if you will. A new narrative took over my being. I suppose it's like lining up the big bang, creation myths for other cultures, Biblical explanation about our origins. Things exist within contexts. But this notion that the reason it happened in a day was due to something occurring in the brain stem-I wonder if from that fall-that had never been revealed to me.

And then it has been.

My mother insisted on control. She insisted on her version of what was happening. I mostly reacted, tried to plead with her to think that as far as we know someone wasn't taking her over, so on. But in doing that-reacting to her narrative I was inside of it. I neglected then looking at the other issues, slurring speech, balance. I'd have thoughts like-why is she saying her vision and eye isn't under her control. I have the reasoning to think of a stroke or MS or something, but it was her insistence on that control and her role as my mother and my age that interfered with my doing so-for 30 years!. When she said the hospital made her slur her speech I accepted that. From someone being irrational! Looking back I'll give over I did not know what a stroke might manifest or look like,  in these other ways- but I never researched it. In fact until these last few years it did not occur to me to do so.

My mistake was in allowing her to define the narrative.

We live lessons. One that I have to understand is that we are designed to create "story" or explanations for what we experience. But they can be as wrong as this was.
As wrong as thinking that a crow stole the sun to bring to the people. This functioned for my Mom but it also hurt her. It illustrates for me how we need the capacity to take in other perspectives. We need critical minds and the ability to question ourselves on our most fundamental beliefs.
I think somehow that has vast implications for me in my life.

I have a new camera. Actually for a month it  sat in a box, but yesterday I took it down to the Getty. I have always liked taking pictures-probably no different than every other person. Leaving my Mom to my daughter and my son I went to the mall in Thousand Oaks, while Jack taught something at Cal Lutheran, and then we drove to the Getty and to have dinner with my daughter at Pomodoro's Italian restaurant in Westwood. It is such a good place to eat. I tried the camera out. The slideshow here just shows me fiddling with it.  It exceeds my capabilities for sure. However it is also wonderful. It was half price and I have gotten the same thing for my daughter's-Sony Cybershot DSC-HX200V. But all on sale. I'm not capable of writing a detailed spec kind of review or anything here or ever. It has a neck loop I really like that. Zooms so far-to me terrific because I haven't had that capacity before. These shots seem so clear.

Yesterday I watched people in the mall as I waited. TO has a very expensive mall. Many women there have very expensive purses. I looked at those for a long time. It seems strange to me but it is a symbol. The thing is I'm not comfortable leaving my Mom, she's so seriously ill now, fragile. I certainly can't shop. However I also want to make the effort to go see my daughter and Jack had to teach this thing yesterday but offered to drive me to see Syl after-I don't like to drive since the last few years. And sometimes you need to get out. I was overall out just looking at people. I'm not sure why.
A very different set of people were at the Getty, clothing very different. When you enjoy looking at people that's a good place to look too. We came home rather late.

Today I went back to bed.
I've been in a pattern of waking at 5 AM. So I was asleep until 1 or so. Because at ten I took a nap. When I came downstairs at 2 my mother was struggling to get a paper towel. She kept swatting at the roll, her right arm hung like a piece of meat. She couldn't talk, kept making the sound sa sa sa sa sa sa. Maybe she'd been trying to call me, "sarah." I'm not sure -it was shocking and I knew it was a stroke. She's had one.. Or a TIA. I got her into a chair and she refused to go to the car or to help in getting her to an ER. Fortunately my son and daughter were here. They helped me wait through an irrational stream of thoughts, as language returned. Years ago- and all of a sudden today- Mom recounted how she believed a guy, who was actually then my boss some 30 years back, someone she knew, took over her head and tortured her with threats and, well, from the time I was about 19 on she had this secret. Or I had it. A psychiatrist called it paranoid schizophrenia.
Mental illness..
It's tough to talk about. She had a severe time then, and over the years it's not far from the door.

So when she insists on decisions or control-it's tough. Today she'd look up and tell us what this guy in her head who she calls Mark, was saying right then. I was thinking about if he even understands his role in her head-if his going on to live his life he understood how she carried him as a burden, if he understood that or even thought of us. Certainly not caring enough to ever contact either of us. She was in an astrology group with him, and he was involved enough with her for me to say that his behavior then actually was a part of why she fixated on him-but...in her taking this on as an internal voice threatening her-that I don't understand. How can I?
And then she was angry with me because once again I have to say, "This isn't real, but it is real for you." Her mind broke after my father divorced her. But really I think he is responsible. He was cruel. He did things I cannot forget. And he wore her out.
Anyway today we watched slowly her pull things a bit more together. As we sat horrified and trying to get her up to a hospital. She was afraid. When she is afraid this shattering happens-it's the fault of this person in her head, she says. He paralyzes her regularly. So I learn this has been happening. And it takes loops and patterns I'm familiar hearing from years ago-and then under any stress out it comes, but my kids they are not so much used to this, maybe her odd inappropriate and even mean cackling laugh maybe, this no, -not to this degree. So I'm sure they felt sad. It tortures her. way back she refused meds and care and she didn't have ANY health coverage or anything like a "safety net" she had a hating, berating ex there to tell her what a piece of crap she was.
Mental illness is hard to look at. Harder still to talk about.
Way harder to know how to bring comfort.

After awhile my son got my husband from his ballgame-thought of how to do it and did it-he wasn't answering his phone. I thought he'd need to help me get her to an ER. But she would not go. His being here helped me without question for knowing that he could bring some strength to it-she called him Charlie-her brother's name.
I think she fears death. Irrational a lot more than I talk about. She went to her room-I went and cleaned it removing a lot of junk she had everywhere. I did do that and it was really awful. Why did I let it get that awful? Denial?  She had it so full of trash and junk but it occurred to me she couldn't lift or get the stuff out- if she wanted to- so I cleaned-de-junked. It's better. Leaving her sitting in her room is hard in the evening. Just my sitting in her room isn't so comforting to her-it's like watching a pot boil.
So I'm in the kitchen typing this thinking about how each of us on earth-this is maybe what we deal with. This, for me, is the legacy of violence, of poverty, of her marriage, of the abuse she suffered in her marriage and then...I don't know the why of mental illness. I just don't know.

I think we should talk about mental illness actually.
I feel like it might have helped me, long ago if I could have told people. Watching my kids I realized I first dealt with my Mom and taking care of her Mom dying-living with us when I was their age. I looked at them...they just had concern and worry and compassion. They looked like little kids. No wonder I didn't know what to do then.  I had no one to turn to then really. So mental illness isolates us. It's very true that people face these things in their parents-my gosh do we talk about how brave people are in aging, in facing death, dementia, strokes? It's something I see her having to take on, it is really something....

If I could I'd call people she knew, but most are dead. Or reach out to family-but my father poisoned that for me, and remains a rageful and hard person-afflicted himself. So...it's hard, not in a self pity way, just in a way of not knowing how I'll deal with the loss of my Mom. I've lived with Mom most all my life. And this is the  coming to the end of her days.
All I could see today was the junk, the meaninglessness in things, the loss of her capabilities...just how difficult this is.
Maybe tomorrow I'll see with clearer vision.

Thanks for listening.

So I drove to Santa Barbara today and thought about blogging about Roger Ebert dying,  referencing some essays he wrote that I liked. I also thought about blogging about listening to people talk about race too at some point. Lately I've heard somethings that are distressing (especially those opining how students like those I teach have parents that are at fault somehow). Thought about blogging on the art in the museum in SB I went to for a few minutes, or the bad dinner at Aldo's, or how my feelings got hurt at the Danish pastry shop. But in the end we came home after a couple hours, not gone long, and then found my mom on the floor of the laundry room holding her head. She was being watched by my son today, who didn't know she was trying to do wash. I found her in a heap on the floor.
So I forgot the pictures, even the one of Martin Luther King Jr. I saw today of ALL days-and prison ones that were very powerful evoking for me Soledad prison,  made by a Danny Lyon. I forgot a lot of thoughts in a few seconds of discovery,  as my lens once more narrowed. Right down to now.

See...my mom is in her 80's and she has lost a lot of weight in a month.
Given she weighed 105 pounds at MOST- I can only imagine what her size is now.  It was always important to her to be thin. I think she likes this loss on some level, which is insane. She has a mind that is now not so clear. Very unclear actually, she is mostly lost really. She caught something over a month ago, and developed a bad infection in her jaw, maybe in her head, spreading dangerously, and then we discovered she had very poor oxygen. It's a lot to tell. She hasn't allowed me previously to take her to the doctor, but we've gone several times in the month, except for a brief time after her stroke a few years ago in spring too she never went to doctors all her life. She respects them-but she also proves out that any medicine gives her very real and difficult side affects. No that's effects damn it. She has insisted on climbing chairs, cooking, carrying coffee all over the house ruining all the rugs in her last few years. Ruining them. She's also maintained her innocence in this- but I doubt she sees the stains as I must  anyway. I postponed getting the rugs changed til June. Now she is doing a new thing. Staring. Sitting and staring. It's really strange to see it. She just goes away mid action or sentence.
We found her a few days ago, she's mostly deaf, watching her tiny TV in her room turned up loud to the Spanish channel watching novellas. She took a year or two of Spanish 60 years ago, but I'd hardly call her a Spanish speaker, she pronounces tortilla with the L's and burritos are burr-eat-as or something that entertains guests but embarrasses me. However she's equal opportunity, matzoh is "matt(like a guy named matt)-zahs".
So the general consensus was she was hearing the program in English, despite it being sent out in Spanish. It's a tough thing to say for sure. She's just undergone an extreme change in a month which is shocking for me somehow. To be honest.
Finding her on the floor in the small space of this laundry room wasn't good, she was holding her head. I thought she'd had another stroke. I said that, sorry.

I made her a ham omelet after we righted her. Now I'm the one pushing the food. A true role reversal.

It's been a very hard month or so for me, I'm saying deeply worrisome, most especially difficult because on another coast my father is probably going through something too similar-I think his mind is clearer-and it's hard to see my parents this fragile, in pain, facing death. My mom could fall and at her size it'll be awful.
So-the narrowing of my frame I recognize.
I'm doing wash, cleaning,  thinking of how to wash up the junkyard that is her room, looking at all the boxes of newspaper clippings, thinking of what a life is. Hers is strangely about trying to stay in control.
And I guess mine is too much about advance grieving.

When I was young I took care of my mother to some extent, when she was in a terrible breakdown after her divorce -when she took on my grandmother for years who was dying with Alzheimers. Prior to anyone naming it, having support for it, it was a five year period that was very hard. So, in a way I'm returned by my children hitting their 20's to my twenties, and by my mother to this time in my twenties at a minimum wage of $3.50, when each day was a real loss of muscle, of ability, a kind of new challenge to bring to it some cheer or I don't know...12 mile walks to get to a supermarket and be harassed.
I feel the darkness of depression mostly.

But with something like a perspective.

I bought a ham for 8 dollars for Easter.
Mom had an omelet tonight with a bit of that inside. She says it is the best ham she ever ate. Her mouth, following an antibiotic was so sore she couldn't take it-and she never complains-I suspected thrush but didn't get the doctor to treat it, despite begging,  so I gave her acidophilus and yogurt. This ruined eating for yet another week for her at a crucial time. But months ago she gave up 65 years of smoking. She can't breathe. I think this in turn set off some kind of her body balance goes to h in a handcart thing. I think she tastes more now. Salt bothers her. She used to favor brining.
Everything I do -which kind of pores guilt on my wounds-is the best she ever had including my bothering to carry her tiny bit of raggedy wash over to her room. The best she's ever seen someone do that. I used a hanger too!

I know that pretty soon she may not know me.
It's kind of hard to explain but Mom and her mom had this thing about insisting they'd never go in care. Like a facility. Grandma Lucas had good reasons-she'd been in the places in St. Pete her home in Florida, and as a retired nurse she knew the level of care. So Mom made the promise and Mom relied on my keeping it. And again I find myself feeling frozen, incabable, struggling with both fear, fatigue and just struggling to do this. I can't look away and I can't look.

So...anyway I played a moment of hookie today just getting in the car to ride along as my daughter went to turn in something to UCSB. She's done a year early but getting the loan to give her a grace period is hell. Anyway when she was in the financial place I sat in the car listening to an NPR piece. On This American Life. A young filmmaker wanted to understand men, white men, fixated on Asian women. I forget the term she used. Rice King. She openly spoke about it. I've known men that were like this. And I was interested in hearing about her conclusions on their fixation-but that isn't really where the piece went. She talked about deciding to make a documentary and a few men were heard saying that they loved "the black hair" or whatever. (You see my father has this issue but I don't speak about it.) His is a whole subservient, greater IQ, meek/dominance thing. I don't know- he has some weird unearned admiration, but also a myth structure. It's a creepy thing to me, another form of forcing women to carry some extra burden. The filmmaker settled on talking about a 60 year old man who futility and sadly wrote many Asian women until, to the filmmakers shock, he called to say he was getting married. She got invited into that-and mediated this complicated arrival and adjustment of a woman in her 30's from China who eventually married him. It left me to think. Both about my father and someone that takes care of him, but about the strange racial construct in that mix. About what drove these women here from poverty in China.

I was thinking about that as we sort of got to the museum of art in Santa Barbara. For reasons that are complicated I have great anxiety about the museum. No one knows. We went a few times with my severe back trouble - a five year torture of excruciating daily pain- prior to surgery, when my ability to walk was almost gone, so when I go back it's some kind of stored memory. A PTSD I guess. If I had to name it I'd say somewhere I retain that day when I had to tell the entire family I could not walk to get out of there. Had to have help. Lost control.  I look at the statues with the blown off penises that greet you as you enter and think about my fearing losing eyesight or walking, mobility. Things related to nerve issues I have.
We looked at California landscapes. In that room I smelled my father-in-law's Aramis cologne on a guy. Since Vern is gone that sobers me. We looked at impressionist paintings I've written into poems and do  wonder if my poems are THAT bad, because I  like them.
I found myself looking at a set of photographs. By Daniel Lyon. Some were these amazing prison scenes. Some showed the days when racism was being confronted at lunchcounters. A picture of two fountains, do you know I remember two fountain days? I stayed a long time looking at a picture of Martin Luther King Jr. right before he preached after four little girls lost their lives to hatred and a bomb in their church. One picture showed the shattered stained glass in that humble church. I looked at the wind blowing through that picture a very long time ago. I looked into the past- into the faces of those who were very brave. He took pictures that were in the times a changin'. So that set of art took me a long time to fully integrate into my own working being. Because that is what I think led to some of my choices-so I went back awhile.
I thought about how my mother would like this show. But it would be hard for her to see it now.

After we left we ate at Aldo's. It wasn't good frankly.
I think the girl spit in my Arnold Palmer. I have food poisoning. She dropped my plate bringing it out and wiped it off with a dirty towel- but my dinner companions do not like if I have ANY feelings about these things-we must NEVER speak to the people we pay 30 bucks a plate to poison us.

So I said the dinner was great and I'm retching now.

That landed us at the weird Danish pastry place, where Jack once bought a ten pound apple streudal in some strange error in ordering. I got hurt feelings, and we got a box of stuff and drove home.

I was trying on the drive to sort out my thoughts...seeing many birds on the tops of trees including an owl...when the silence was broken by some discussion of Jack's hiring someone coming up which I didn't follow- as I then tried to talk to him about how I liked reading Roger Ebert. I thought of him as an essayist extraordinaire. I remembered one essay I thought a lot about on death. It mirrors the way my daughter talks to me about death.  You'll go read that link, yes? I can't argue against his view. He manages to try to argue it himself. For me the fear is in non existence. Which would render the all of this I suppose into a joke.
I just respect him, and to be honest I hadn't really thought of it quite that way, so it taught me something. Of course the beautiful writing-oh-it was somewhere to be today, sorting in my thoughts.

But then, as I said, I found Mom sprawled on the floor and I couldn't put anything together again from my Humpty Dumpty last few weeks. I can't debate educational policy, or talk about race, or think about where we go after death, or if anything matters. Mostly I made an omelet and listened to her talk about her book of Virginia mansions she's been looking for, and switched on my Edith Ann Lily Tomlin CD. Because Mom loved it, and she can't hear it- so I can laugh about the two thousand dollar ashtray from Pars Bar.

When no one was looking today I gave 100 bucks to an overweight homeless woman who needed a bath and a home. She'll probably know neither. When I went outside with hurt feelings I also was trying to catch her -so I wasn't caught by the eyes that are on me and not so approving of my white guilt. She reminded me of the dichotomy we allow in this world.
I think that maybe she could be any of us. Well she is us. But for luck and turns of circumstance.
She wasn't begging, she was just going down the street- but she was appreciative giving me a hug.

I don't even know why that got into this wandering piece.

I'm waiting on a load of wash to finish. The day has been one with many references, thoughts, ends, bits, pieces. As you see.
But I liked reading Ebert-saying that being kind was something to live by.

Yes, well,
I would like to see the Atlanta teaching scandal put on trial the notion that 100% of our children nation-wide will be proficient and advanced by next year.  2014, the year when everything is "fixed". Or is the fix in?
I'd like that specific notion to be tried.
I'd like to see a lawyer equal to the best we've ever seen in civil rights work-litigate- come forward- to suggest that sometimes when things are theater of the absurd, then the drama that results isn't so awfully surprising. Sad though it is. And disappointing. I think if we tried that falsehood we might have different types of names than just an Atlanta Super plus teachers to vilify. And this certainly has sprung forward an absurdest catalog of behavior on her part-from group cheer sessions celebrating the cheaters to a $100,000 chauffeuring around a city burning with educational nightmarish behavior.
Except my calling for that defense and trial might turn us to talk about the elevation of test based education-and for some will be heard as a defense of cheating-which I do not support in fact, over a broader wanting to hear the case on education based on test scores as king. Or it'll be heard as excuse making, (which I do support). Or heaven help us-just THINK of all the "extra help" the actions of these cheaters took from these poor kids. (and that I'd like to see recently sprung notion defended as a "truth")

Lately in the news about the Atlanta test cheating scandal I've been watching and paying attention to "erasing parties", group humiliations, teachers shunned for lower scores, big assemblies and cheering for those "getting results," and a long hard look at leadership that took on the last wave of education reform by accepting bonuses, embracing the inherent notions and saying if this is what they want we'll do it with glee, that said what couldn't possibly be done was their mission-with no excuses-and I wonder why couldn't it, that is what I think we should bring to trial. 

Now I guess when Arne Duncan or his ilk want to point to schools that DO achieve these "goals" in areas of poverty, they don't point to Atlanta anymore, they just sort of say...it can be done and when it's done by cheating we will lock you up. So.....look away at what we once touted.
I'd like to look at that. How they missed anything done on that scale.
How readily they assumed that these "wonderful" increases were examples of "what works."
What failure in oversight and responsibility do these leaders have in this?

Because, after all, they didn't tell ANY system how to go about achieving these impossible things that didn't really happen. NCLB was not a way to reform a system, or help an area in poverty. It was a measurement and a punishment scenario. The achievement gap remains. By the way.
They just encentivized and punished, sorted and privatized-standing there with a group of consultants and took the public system to the cleaners.
But I think fully understanding that -well that lags.
A good televised court case would help.

But something about Atlanta brings to mind what won't be debated.
Or put on public trial.

I heard a person on TV stating "it would just be easier to teach the kids the content" and I thought-if it would be easier to get the scores legitimately, why this elaborate cheating?
Can that person prove that assertion?
And I read a friend talking about how much he resents the poor quality instruction given to black kids schools in urban poverty-where he works in math education-and has a historical perspective. What he knows offsets those that claim that thousands are beating down the door to go teach in high crime, high poverty areas, he misses seeing those with incredible skill levels in the class next door. And now he sees the turnover that was killing in the past- of two year teachers- now a revolving door of all the teachers who aren't going to even gain the security of tenure or the assurance of a pension.

I go back to my days teaching in south Central LA where there were no materials, class-sizes were enormous, it was dangerous, rates of absences were high for instructors, turn- over impossible, poverty and crime were overwhelming factors-thinking of how the highstakes testing must have impacted that world. Further isolating it. Do we hear the voices from those schools speaking?

Perhaps the teachers and Super that are caught in this net might be assigned public service and asked to go give their time and effort to kids in poverty and be assigned to help them learn to read, do math, love science, art, technology. Say for years. After all they started out wanting to do that-over going into expensive jails. That seems fitting.

It might be nice to see ed reformers and consultants assigned to do the same.
Perhaps Arne might do a five year stint. He could clean up by writing a book about what he learned to compensate him for the loss of income later.

Punished by the crime-so to speak.