Peeking into the rock

This is something that happens to me sometimes. It didn't happen to me today but I read a story that made me cry and so I was thinking about things while I was at the pond with Zluta. And I thought about this thing that happens to me sometimes. Well, it's kind of a thing that happens, but it's also mostly a thing that doesn't happen, not really.

I don't want to say I have a post-traumatic stress disorder. I feel that it would be presumptous: that it would dilute the label, contribute towards making people distrust it when it is used for people with more disabling issues. But this thing that happens to me: it's kind of like that. But not really, because it almost sort of doesn't happen at all.

It could happen on any kind of day. A bright summer day, like that day--with the light fog in the morning and the insistent breeze off the bay in the evening, but wait? Do I remember what kind of day it was? I can remember the way the day was on one of the days after, when it happened to me, when it was even a Tuesday morning just like that day, and it happened: that was a high-up grey kind of day, the air still and gentle, warm enough for the children to play with water but not warm enough to strip them down to their diapers and underwear and give them juice pops in the play yard. Was that day like that too? It was August, so it could even have been hot, though I don't remember that.

But it doesn't have to be that kind of day, or even daytime at all. It could be a rainy winter day with the rain drops picked out of the air like tiny glass crystals, the doggy smell of wet asphalt everywhere, happy little floods dancing in the gutters. It could be late at night, the house silent but for ghosts and rodents and the proprietary dog pursuing her claims against them. ANy kind of time at all. I could be anywhere.

When it happens to me, I could be anywhere. I could be in my house, chopping kale and parsley on my daughter's cutting board. I could be walking my dog in the neighborhood, past the firehouse, or beyond the soccer field with girls in ponytails and boys in pink shoes, all leaping after brightly colored balls. Or in the grocery store parking lot, or driving to the piond, or like that time I remember, in the play yard at my old job.

What happens to me is almost nothing. It always seems like it will be nothing this time. That's how it starts: with me noticing that it is not happening.

That's not true. It starts with a firetruck, or an ambulance, or a siren, or a person in a uniform. Not juist any uniform: a firefighter's uniform, or an emergency medical technician's uniform. Anything from the first responder's kit, really. They don't have to be responding to anything. The firetruck or ambulance can be tooling around town or parked in a parking lot. The siren can be blocks away. The person in a uniform can be standing around, or buying groceries.

The first thing that happens, as I said, is I notice the presence of the firetruck, or ambulance, or siren, or firefighter or ambulance driver. I notice they are there and I notice that nothing is happening to me. And then I notice that nothing is still happening to me.And I think about how grateful I am to the firefighters who came on that day even though they couldn't save him and neither could my son though he was almost a doctor when his father died in his arms. And then I think some more about how this used to make something happen to me but it doesn't any more. And then I think about the thing that used to happen to me when I noticed the presence of one of these things. And then I remember what it felt like when that thing happened to me, and I congratulate myself for not feeling that thing, for not hjaving that thing happen to me an hymore. And then I rell myself that I must have gotten much better because I am not feeling that thing that I can so vividly remember feeling. And then I remember several occasions when I felt that way, and I vividly recall the sensation of feeling that way.

And then I'm not really crying because there's hardly any moisture coming out of my eyes, and I'm not sobbing because my body isn't really shaking and there's no sound coming out of my mouth, and I'm not really grimacing but there's a kind of little frown if you look closely and my eyes do close tight but they open right away so you can't really say anything is quite happening to me, but it feels like something is happening to me and I really, really, really wish that day had not happened.

But it's not really quite a thing that happens, still: it's more of an echo of a thing that used to happen, over a thing that happened, years ago now.

(I've been back almost a week, I have internet, but I am also jetlagged so I will only be gradually be catching up with reading everything you all wrote while I was having offline adventures, and also only gradually catching up on telling you about those adventures. Also, I have book news, but I will save that for later today).

I want to take note of, and respond to, a couple of trends I have noticed online the last week or so. Of course both of them have been around longer than that by a long shot, but now is when I want to talk about them.

The first one is this. A fellow, usually someone who makes their living from something publically geeky, will write about how he was doing something with his daughter and had a feminist insight. There will be some memorializing about how the activity in question resonates with his earliest and truest experiences as a boy and young man, how he dearly wishes to share this experience with his child, the degree to which he does, his deep love and admiration for his smart, strong, interesting daughter. There will be a crushing experience--no girl characters, someone saying something terrible to his daughter: the kinds of things girls experience in a gendered way (of course, I say pre-emptively, boys have crushing experiences, and even gendered crushing experiences, but it's not symmetrical, and that's the point). The father is appalled and furious that his daughter experienced this, and wants to let you know about this. Partly he wants to make a statement that he Gets It, partly he wants to speak to other men who might not get it and say "This is why I get it, and why you should to," and sometimes there's even a bit of "what is to be done," that is, a call for specific action or discussion.

The second one is a response. There are lots of different responses out there, many of which amount to "You lovely man! I am so glad you Get It now." But there's this other one that is "I am so tired of you men who only Get It when you have a personal stake in it. Where were you ten years ago before your daughter was born? All you're doing is posing to get praise. I don't buy it. You're self-absorbed, not feminist. I excoriate you."

Of course he's self-absorbed. He is a person who is writing about intimate personal and family experiences on the internet, frequently with adorable pictures of the daughter in question and/or his own smiling self. Seriously, that's not much of an accusation. And yes, of course he wants his readers to think he's brilliant and caring and forward-thinking. Again, not much of an accusation. But to say that his insight is worthless because it came on the heels of a personal experience is odd. Is it that his referencing his own family is to ignore the rest of the world of women and girls who suffer all these and more every day? Is it that some of us don't want fellows like him to stand over here with us?

I'm going to stop here for a second and wander down a side road in my mind. The very first man I heard day that any man with a daughter has to be a feminist was the fellow I married. He told people about looking at the world from this perspective, how he couldn't stand that people would limit his daughter's passage through the world. He was an imperfect feminist, too. He said things at times that he only later realized were awful. But I wouldn't say he suddenly became a feminist because of one of those experiences he talked about. He was developing into a feminist before I met him, and unlike many women I've known, wasn't reluctant to call himself one even around his most misogynist associates. I suspect that at least a large number of these men writing about their feminist insights with their daughters were like him, and the insight did not pop out of nowhere.

But that's a side trip. It's not the important thing. We're better off if the internet is chock full of conversion moments where men who Don't Get It become men who Get It and write impassioned personal pieces about it replete with cute photos and references to beloved cultural icons. We're better off if every self-absorbed man on the internet decides he's a feminist now because he has some shocking personal experience. These men vote: they spend money: they talk to other men: they even talk to men I can't stand to be in the same room with. No, you don't need to respect them more than the woman who has spent her life fighting the good fight at every turn and getting beat for it. But why spend your bile on them? We have actual enemies in this world, and they are better organized than to attack the person who wishes to give them support.

My thermostat says 66 degrees, which is traditionally really quite warm enough for me, but I'm here in two sweaters and fingerless gloves (and thank you, Emma, for the large stash of fingerless gloves you have made and given to me over the years! I have dry ones tonight because of that!)

My friend Bonnie's staying the night again.  She's wandering off to Asia next week, but today we walked to the wharf and back and watched the seals and sea gulls being adorable.  It's like I'm on vacation, because there are no jobs to apply for.  The last summer's baby gulls are pretty much grown, now, though they still have juenilve feathers and behavior.  The nice fellow used to call animals like that "Archies" after the Archie of the teen comics world. So these Archie seagulls are going up to their parents -- who are no bigger than they are, and making cute little baby-bird sounds and bobbing their heads in the general direction of the red spot on daddy's beak, and the mommy or daddy gull makes a parenting chuckle noise and then goes "what? No! You're old enough to get your own fish!" and flies off and the grown-up baby seagull goes "tweet! I am a baby bird! Don't leave me!" and follows.  This was going on all over the wharf.  I never noticed it before.

The seals, meanwhile, were all sacked out on the lower rungs of the pilings, of course, but there were a few that were barking and barking.  I told Truffle, "Look, they're just like you -- they sleep and they bark.  If they're not sleeping, they're barking.  If they're not barking, they're sleeping." She was underimpressed, but mildly curious.  She did eat something objectionable on the wharf and spend fifteen minutes after we got home trying to upchuck it, but I don't know what it was, I only became aware of it after it was too late.

My neighbor across the street begged us to try to get some of his figs because there are a lot of them and he is busy at work and doesn't have time to get them all, so Bonnie and I tried.  There is an art to picking figs with a pole harvester, expecially if the fig tree hasn't been properly started off in life by a little old Italian man with a ready pruining knife and the fig tree has grown as big as a mighty oak, which is what they do if you leave them alone.  The stem of the fig gets sturdier as the fig gets riper, which is just plain stupid, but you can't expect trees to go out of their way to be convenient. And of course the fig is very soft and vulnerable to the tines of the pole harvester, so if you're not in control of your technique you rip the little thing to shreds. Nevertheless we did succeed in collecting a few figs. 

I am not really nanoing.  I am writing.  But I have to take days off to digest what I am learning about the work of a soldier during battle of this kind, and I keep having to discard chunks of work that I messed up.  So it's more like normal writing, rather than intensive writing.

I went and spent a couple hours with the nice fellow's military history buff friends and learned a lot. They got what I was asking, too, and didn't insist on telling me history buff things.

One thing I keep asking myself over and over every time I learn something new about the way war was actually conducted on the ground is, why weren't there a lot more mass desertions?

Actually, I don't really want you to try to answer that question, okay?  Because there's a direction that discussion leads that I don't want to go to.  But if you have anything to offer me about latrines, trenches, the maintenance of weapons, supply trains, water supply, or whatall, I'm happy to read it.

I'm not, actually, writing a book that is about anti-war. It's about Yanek's experiences and evolution, how after fighting all through childhood to be a man that is respected and included, he succeeds in becoming something else, not quite human, but respectable and essential in his own right, in a new place he couldn't have imagined as a child. So war is in it, and of course war is horrible, and war is bigger than anything, but the story is bigger than the war, for Yanek.

on another front: I can sit cross-legged on the floor again.

and another thing: I have the loan modification papers, and unlike the unemployment website, they are written in normal language and laid out comprehensibly.  They're still intimidating.