Rest, Rosa

I was going to rant on about the breakdown of decency and values in this country, and had a considerable little diatribe going yesterday, which I didn’t finish. I intended to finish it this morning when I got into work, (in my spare moments, of course,) but this morning’s news made me think of something else.

Rosa Parks has died at age 92.

Rosa Parks was an icon in the civil rights movement, and she is one of my heroes. When I was four years old, Mrs. Parks boarded a Montgomery, Alabama bus on her way home from work. She sat in the “colored seats,” one row behind the white seats in the front of the bus. That day, the bus picked up rather more passengers than usual, and the bus driver asked the people sitting just behind the white section to stand up and yield their seats to the white folks. Mrs. Parks refused.

Mrs. Parks was a quiet, unassuming woman, a member of the NAACP. She had not been planted, nor was she told by anyone to defy the law—but defy it she did. It set off the firestorm of the civil rights movement in our country. Her subsequent arrest was the spark in the powder keg of segregation, which then exploded. Then it changed our laws.

I admired Mrs. Parks and what she did. She wasn’t special, just a decent, hard-working woman, weary from a day’s labor. She didn’t use name-calling, firebombs, guns, rhetoric or blame to make her point. She just sat in her seat and refused to be a second-class citizen anymore. This small and minor act was the only weapon she had. But it wasn’t just the act, (Rosa Parks was not the first woman to be arrested for refusing to yield her seat,) it was her basic decency that proved how heinous a philosophy was segregation. It is the basic decency of most people of color that makes all prejudice heinous, makes it so unacceptable. We cannot continue to think of skin color, national origin or ethnic association as making us different. Mrs. Parks made that clear, as obvious as it seems to us now. Yet it is still not as obvious in our actions, or our minds.

Recently I saw the film “Crash.” Racial prejudice and its consequences is the core plot element in this film. It shows that we are not always what we think we are, even when we think we have no prejudices, or try to do the decent, honorable thing. The film is well done, thought-provoking, and makes its point harshly, but with intelligence. It shows us that despite our new laws prohibiting segregation, our regulations about busing, banishment of “separate but equal” accommodations, and all the hard-won freedoms made for and by people of color, that we have still not evolved enough to overcome prejudicial thinking. It makes me sad, and it seems synchronistic that I saw the film the day before one of the linchpins of the civil rights movement died. But it’s even more important than that to me.

I remember my ninth birthday party. I was born in July, and my party was always an outdoor event, usually a picnic, to which I would invite everyone I knew—classmates, neighbors, relatives—to share in hot dogs and watermelon in our back yard. That year I invited my fifth grade classmates. All of them. Most of them showed up. Including the one black girl in our room.
Her name was Jewel. She was quiet, shy, pretty. Her parents were far better off economically than mine—our family had always skated right on the edge of outright poverty. She came from “up the hill,” and one of her parents was a businessman, the other a professional. They wore suits to work, and drove a new car. Jewel wasn’t a close friend, but she was a friend. I was glad to see her. She alighted from her parents’ car with a gift in hand—one of only two who brought me something. I greeted her and showed her the back yard, where everyone else was already tucking into picnic fare; but before I got to follow her back there, my mother pulled me aside.

“Don’t you think she would be better off with her own kind?” my mother asked me. I puzzled over this a moment—as far as I understood, Jewel was with her own kind—we were all fifth graders. I must have looked oddly at my mother, because she got flustered, embarrassed, and repeated the phrase—don’t you think that little girl should be with her own kind?

I remember the feeling I had then. Stunned, shocked, humiliated. I couldn’t look at Jewel for the entire party. I couldn’t talk to her. I had finally understood what prejudice was, and it was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen. My own mother had committed a crime—that of being a bigot—and I couldn’t talk to her anymore either. Of course, despite my shame, that resolution was merely temporary, though I had lost a key element of trust in an instant. Yet, this incident was never spoken of again between us.

Fast forward to 1993. My mother is ill, severely diabetic, and must go on dialysis. She has been resistant to her insulin for years, and it’s killing her, unless she gets the lifesaving procedure. She sets up her appointment at a local dialysis center, and arrives—late—and finds out that she can’t make dialysis fit into her schedule. She argues with the attendant at the center, and makes a scene. I know this has happened because I’ve been monitoring it all from my desk at work, via my uncle, who is trying to make my mother see that she’s causing her own problems by being inflexible. Nothing seems to work—but she gets her dialysis and goes angrily home. When I get home that evening, I call her and ask how it went.

My mother launches into a diatribe of her own: the attendant was not cooperative. She was rude. She wouldn’t let my mother have the appointments she wanted. She was deliberately trying to inconvenience her. And the reason? Because she was black.

I was transported once again, back to that birthday party, when bigotry came rushing at me like a ten-ton truck to run me over. Then, I was silent—the subject had been dropped. This time I wasn’t. “Mom,” I told her, voice shaking, “I know you think you’re the victim here, but I can honestly say that it probably didn’t matter one little bit what color that woman was. You were rude to her.”

The silence on the other end of the phone is a moment frozen in time for me. My mother’s bigotry was larger than she was. When she recovered her wits, we fought. We screamed at each other over the phone line; we said horrible things to each other. The upshot was that I told her I did not want her talking like this to my children, that I had not raised them with such ideas, then I told her I wouldn’t talk to her either, until she apologized for her bigoted statements.

That was the last time we spoke.

My mother died the following year. I did not know she had been sick. My family didn’t tell me until the day of her funeral; they thought I was being hard-headed, that I had thrown away my family for my principles. Perhaps I did. But there are some things I will not abide—and prejudice is on the top of that list. A family that promoted bigotry was not a family I wanted to belong to. My mother, and our relationship, was sacrificed for that belief.

Rosa Parks might have understood. There are just some lines you don’t cross, and some thoughts you can’t allow to be part of your life. I lost my mother; lost the chance to tell her one last time I loved her, (which I did, no matter how she felt,) lost the opportunity to show her that one could live without being bigoted. I was not a good example. I was hard-headed. But I stuck to my principles, and paid for them. It hurts, to this day.

But so does prejudice. It hurts us all. It hurts us more.

Thank you, Rosa Parks. Thank you for sacrificing your freedom so that the law could change. Thank you for being a decent person, standing up for your rights as a human being. Thank you for living a long time, and making us all aware, if nothing else, of what you did for us.

Rest in Peace at last.

Center: everywhere; Circumference: nowhere

I felt like creating something, so I’m building a miniature house with miniature furnishings made of balsa wood, fabric scraps and found objects. It began with a cardboard box turned on its side, it’s “walls” upholstered in burlap, with a wooden floor made from scrap wood from my basement. It has two windows, one with “glass” made of the plastic bubble from a package of screws. I have to find another package of the same dimensions now, to make the windows match.

The scent of hot glue permeates the atmosphere in my back room where bits and pieces from many junk drawers are messily left out on a card table; plastic craft bins and boxes are stacked on a shelf under the window. I put the internet radio station on, and go back there and waste hours at a time making my tiny upholstered armchair: gluing foam rubber to an L-shaped countertop support from Ikea, wrapping it in green silk, tufting the back with tiny little beads, finding the exactly-right-height “legs” from my collection of caps and beads.

It’s an obsessive hobby, exacting, absorbing work. I use small pliers, tweezers, toothpicks and straight pins to push and prod things into small spaces. I miter the corners of a balsa-wood picture frame around a Currier and Ives gift tag for a painting to hang on my little wall. I stick small silk flowers into clay to put into a petite terra-cotta flowerpot I found at the craft shop—a package of 6 for 79 cents—tie it around with a narrow red and green striped ribbon. My house has a Yule tree, yet undecorated. I will make tiny candy-canes out of wire and alternated red-and-white seed beads. I will hang garland made of silver and gold thread, use a plastic “jewel” in a star shape for the topper. There is a candle made of a spare bulb from a string of holiday lights—the little twinkly kind—sitting on a shelf above the small chair, and two “Indian vases” made of carved beads, and a miniscule wax pine tree “candle”. I found baskets that are no more than a quarter-inch across at the same craft shop where I found the little flowerpots. There will be a buffet table with a Yule feast, dishes and platters made of buttons and goblets made of clear push-pins with the points removed, turned upside-down. They look just like beer glasses. Food will be made as well: apples made of red beads, cheese made from a gum eraser, cut into chunks, grapes from the perfect round drops of hot glue that collect under the nozzle of my glue-gun in a small cluster, painted purple; maybe some sausage slices made from thinly sliced pencil erasers.

It is tempting to buy a whole lot of tiny little perfectly-reproduced miniatures, but there is something far more satisfying about making things yourself out of found objects. Soon, you find that you are looking at things in an entirely different way, and throwing out nothing. That scrap of sponge—it looks just like a swiss cheese, doesn’t it?—that origami paper would make great wallpaper—that pony bead only needs a tiny handle to become a coffee cup—that little cosmetic box could be a small dresser, or credenza. I paw through contents of toolboxes, and other places in the house—that basket by the telephone that collects everything I don’t know what else to do with, for instance—where I throw all those nagging miscellaneous objects. Windowsills which have been host to little found objects all year—stones, shells, tiny little bottles, interesting seed pods, jewelry bits—now get swept clean, and the objects brought to the back room and given new life as other, often surprising, things. All that unused drapery hardware makes good shelf brackets for wee shelves, or supports for furniture. Wooden pencils make columns, or door frames. Old placemats get cut up into pieces for shingles, or flooring. Knurled bolts make wonderful metal bowls, turned upside down and filled with colored beads. Bottle caps and jar lids make tabletops, tureens, soup pots. Paper clips in a row make a pretty little fence. Hairnets serve for lattice or trellis. white folder labels are fine as clapboard siding.

Once begun, a project like this overwhelms and overtakes your mind, and you find yourself expanding inward to a world smaller than yourself, but with infinite possibilities. You are god, goddess, creator, puppet master. You are builder, architect, designer, engineer. You are the center and the perimeter of your own universe. Your circumference is nowhere, your center is everywhere. The classic Giordano Bruno paradox come to life in your hands.

I will work this way until after Yule. Part of me wants to make these things as presents for others, but so much of me goes into their construction I find it hard to give them away later, and they perch around my house collecting dust. I remember sitting at the table for weeks in 1993, building a medieval Yule feast in a tiny wooden greenhouse, making a small fire-brazier, a tiny wire grill cover, flames from red fabric, an entire hutch and desk of scrap wood, complete with tiny knife and pencil; a plate of brownies was carved and cut from a boullion cube and glued to a button dish. It was an amazing piece when finished, and kept me from going insane at a time when my “real” life was too painful to actually live out. This year, there is no pain, no horror outside the miniature world I am creating; and my obligations always seem to be pressing on me, despite my obsession with my hobby. Yet, I can’t wait to get back to the spare room, to my glue gun, to my collected miscellany, my boxes of beads, sparklies, ribbons and scraps. I am soothed as the year ends, and caught in my own ever-expanding, ever-shrinking cosmos.

A Bookful of Dollars

I want to talk about writing. There are some things that have, in my great old age and wisdom, (chuckle) begun to irritate me beyond reason. One of them is the tendency of some popular writers to become very self-referential and egotistical.

I’m not suggesting that fame has done this to them; for all I know, they were egotistical prior to becoming famous. However, there is just something very annoying about the emergence of this self-absorption when you’ve gotten to like the style and substance of a particular writer. It jars the conscience, it grates on the senses. One particular writer who has begun to make me grit my teeth and cringe is Stephen King.

I started out as a fan, with the publication of Carrie, the first book published under his real name, and the first bestseller. I devoured each book as it came out after that one. I thought each one was great.

Between the publications of The Shining and The Dead Zone was one of King’s greatest and most amazing novels: The Stand. I read the original novel in 1978; it was about a “future” in the late 90’s, not really much different from the present, except that 3/4 of the population of the world would be eliminated by a ‘super flu’ virus, and the remainder of those left would have to duke it out in a major, final showdown of good and evil. Not only was the theme universal, the characters were well-delineated, superbly fleshed-out and downright unforgettable. The action was well-paced. The dialogue was realistic and believable. The book sparkled. But, (and I credit King himself for this particular metaphor) there was something that was like biting on tinfoil when I read it.

Okay, maybe I’m being picky. Maybe I’m just not entering into the spirit of the story. Maybe. Or maybe I just demand that my writers and those who edit their works give a serious consideration to the intelligence of their readers. Mr. King made a huge—huge—mistake in this book, upon which the plot rotates and depends, and which I could not overlook.

Mr. King made the whole plot turn on a chocolate thumbprint in a diary. Problem was, the person who left the thumbprint, was eating PayDay candy bars. As you and 99.9% of the universe knows, PayDay candy bars contain not one drop of chocolate. Now how did a mistake like this sneak past the editors? And why did the King actually write this blatant error? I don’t know. I can say without a doubt that it almost scuttled my enjoyment of this book when I came across this error. And what bothered me so much about this was that it was such an easy thing to fix—yet it went through three iterations before it was fixed, and when it was, it made me angry.

First came the paperback edition of the original book: in this edition, the PayDays were changed to Milky Ways. Well, I guess that’s one way to handle it, though the mistake was never acknowledged or annotated. I supposed I could live with the change, since the plot now made sense and operated correctly. But, then came the 1990 book—the “complete and uncut” edition. The story was “updated” to the present time--this updating would also include some things that did not exist in 1978 (felt-tip markers, computers)—and one of these was the Chocolate-covered PayDay candy bar. The original PayDay nut roll was now available with a chocolate coating, so, yes, all the Milky Ways were turned back into PayDays! It was an acknowledgement of the original mistake—and a slap to the readers of that original book, who had cringed at the original mistake. Think I’m being too sensitive? Maybe. Then again, maybe not.

There was something else wrong with this edition of The Stand that had nothing to do with the candy bar debacle. This edition was “expanded” to include all the dialogue and description that the original editor had excised. Yes, all that “extra” material was put back in. And all I could say about this once-sparkling piece of writing was: "YUCK!" The book was ruined!

There is a good reason for editors. They read your stuff objectively, and they cut the crap you write: the long, unnecessary dialogues, the overblown passages—all that stuff you don’t need. Just because you’re famous, does not mean you are perfect, and dammit—you don’t need to include all that extraneous mental debris! Sometimes you should just leave well enough alone, and give your readers some credit for being able to form mental pictures all on their own. Sometimes editors know what reads best. The Stand’s original editor was pretty good. Not much that had been removed actually needed to be left in.

Perhaps Mr. King thought that it was time we were “treated” to all the contents of his files, whether or not they were actually worth reading. I, for one, became angry that this bestselling author could do this (seemingly) only because he was a bestselling author! This was an opportunistic use of the Fame Card in my opinion.

But it did not stop there.

The next egotistical thing King did, however, was to bring out his novel The Green Mile in serial form. The Green Mile is a durn good story, sure. It’s well written, has good characterizations, and a plot that moves right along. So why did it need to be dragged out into a 6-part, (almost $3 apiece) pulp-serial paperback? I can’t think of any reason at all, unless King just wanted to see how far his readership would go, and how much money they would spend, in order to read his next bestselling book. In this case, he bet on the right horse—not only did readers buy, they also bought the NON-serialized book when it came out, AND the film of The Green Mile when it came out. All this said to me was that King could not lose, no matter how much ego he showed, and no matter how self-aggrandizing he got.

Okay, I got over it. I hated the serialization, and I only read parts 1 and 2 before giving up and waiting for the re-unified paperback (I didn’t have to wait very long—surprise surprise.) But that wasn’t the worst thing King did—the worst was Desperation and The Regulators. Gad—how much more arrogant can an author get? Not only had King used a pseudonym for his first three books (Richard Bachman--he even used a fake photo on the book jackets!) he also managed to weave the ”down side” of pseudonymous authorship into a novel (The Dark Half) as well as using and re-using the same characters in half a dozen or so other books and stories. When The Regulators and Desperation were simultaneously published in 1996, one was published as King’s novel, and the other—the same story told from a different character’s point of view—was published under his pseudonym, Richard Bachman! This time, I was incensed. Not only were King’s readers being courted for his next novel, but also for his altar ego’s! And the stories were NO DIFFERENT. Why sell just one book, when you can sell it twice and get away with it? Double the ego, double the profit!

This is where Mr. King and I parted company as author and fan. I didn’t find this “publishing dodge” amusing. I felt used and abused, over-manipulated, and that Mr. King did not really care about his readers at all. I have not bought a Stephen King novel since the publication of Desperation, and will not, though I have read some of them. None of them have even come close to the poignancy of ‘Salem’s Lot, the flawed but fascinating intricacy of The Stand, the icy-fingered terror of Cujo, or the writing excellence of Misery, Gerald’s Game, or Dolores Claiborne. In fact, if you put all of King’s works in one pile, these are the only ones I think that would stand out as being truly worthy pieces of writing. The rest are just ego on paper. The unfortunately mediocre output of a writer that didn’t have to be mediocre. And that, to me, is very sad.