Enid Bagnold and the Origins of National Velvet; How Close is Too Close For a Writer--Part Two.

Saturday, March 19, 2016

National Velvet, Enid Bagnold and the Butchers of Rottingdean--How Close Is Too Close When You're Writing From Life

Nobody grownup seems to read National Velvet. Take my word for it. This is not a children's book. It's a fairy tale, yes, but it's also a brilliant and deeply observed book about a very real family: that of Araminty and her husband, Mr. Brown (the parents call one another Mr. and Mrs. Brown even in moments of great tenderness) and their five children. The three older girls are, "Like golden greyhounds," Velvet, at fourteen, is described as "a sapling Dante," while their four-year-old son, Donald, carts around his "spit bottle," and worries about "Stinking ants." 

The family also includes their dogs--the nameless "black barking dog on a string," that nobody in the house hears anymore, and who occasionally lunging himself senseless; the three yard spaniels, thin and golden like the three older daughters, leaning against the "groaning" door, longing to get in; and Jacob, the fox terrier, growing stout in middle age, obsequious and fawning, and who trots from person to person at the table. "The Browns loved Jacob as they loved each other, deeply, from the back of the soul, with intolerance in daily life." 

And then there's Mi, the son of the only man who knows what Araminty is really made of, "embedded in fat, her keen, hooded eyes hardly lifting the rolls above them." For Araminty once swam the channel and Mi's father was the man who trained her to do so. 


Father is the butcher, with a shop and slaughterhouse (the latter sharing a wall with the house.) Mother does the books and cooks the remnants left over when the fancy meat is sold. 

And here's where we get into the "How close is too close?"

Enid Bagnold. 

According to Michael Thornton, the film and theatrical reviewer who was befriended by Bagnold when he was seven and she in her fifties,  National Velvet's publication in 1937, "created an uproar in Rottingdean. The village butchers, the Hilders, contended that they were cruelly caricatured as the Brown family in the novel. Their daughter Winnie and her three siblings had clearly served as models for the characters of the heroine, Velvet Brown, and her sisters. Everyone in Rottingdean knew that the family’s matriarch, Mrs Hilder, had been an exceptional swimmer in her day. She was incensed to find herself portrayed as Mrs Brown, who she saw as a bossy, over-large matron rather than the powerful woman Bagnold wrote. 

To add insult to injury, Enid did not even buy her meat from them, but got her joints at Sainsbury’s in Brighton. The Hollywood film nine years later, which elevated Elizabeth Taylor to stardom, made Enid’s success international and the Hilders even more resentful.

I adore the Browns, especially Araminty. She "cooked admirably, ran the accounts, watched the shop, looked after the till, spoke seldom, interfered hardly ever, sighed sometimes, (because it would have taken a war on her home soil, the birth of a colony, or a great cataclysm to have dug from her what she was born for,) moved about the house, brought up her four taut daughters under her heavy eye and thought about death occasionally with a kind of sardonic shrug. Ed(wina) Malvina and Meredith behaved themselves at the wink of one of her heavy eyes. Velvet would have laid down her stringy life for her." 

Enid Bagnold in WWI

I would, too. 

And yes, Mrs. Hilders hated the way she was presented. Should Enid Bagnold have changed the family, made them unrecognizable? The girls in the novel are Edwina, Malvolia and Meredith. In real life, the girls, born in 1897, 1899 and 1900, were (I believe) named Winnie, Minnie and Matilda.  Should Enid have turned these the three older daughters, "all alike, like golden greyhounds," into three boys, thus losing the dynamic of four girls in a row, not to mention, "their golden hair was sleek, their fine faces like antelopes, their shoulders still and steady, like Zulu women carrying water, and their bodies beneath the shoulders rippling when they moved." Personally, I'd be hard put to say she should have. 

Bagnold married Sir Roderick Jones, the head of Reuters, and a wealthy man. They had four children and a large household with several servants to manage, or try to manage. Mi Taylor is likely based on McHardy, a former jockey with a mysterious past, who taught the four youngsters to ride. Bagnold's daughter, now "Laurian, Countess of Harcourt," was the horse mad girl who inspired the novel and who also provided the line drawings of horses that illustrate the original book. “I was able to practise my riding so much because I had a governess and a lot of time.’’ And because she had McHardy. 

   

McHardy slept, by choice, in a loose box and, according to Bagnold, reinvented the Joneses as a “horsebox family”, so they toured gymkhanas countrywide. Bagnold once claimed that for the 10 years McHardy was with the family he was “more important than a governess: more important than a mother”. It was his racing background that informed the book’s narrative. (His character, Mi Taylor, was played by Mickey Rooney in the film, with no attempt at an accent. At least McHardy never seems to have objected to his character, in either novel or film. 


fouhttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/may/31/biography.theatre

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/apr/06/national-velvet-enid-bagnold-rereading

Reposting from obsolete blog. How Close Is Too Close In Writing. Part One.

 Welp, I can't get into an old blog, so I'm going to repost what I liked best: 

Thursday, March 10, 2016

How Close Is Too Close In Writing? Haven Kimmel

When novelist and poet, Haven Kimmel wrote her first memoir, A Girl Named Zippy, the granddaughters of her ex-third grade teacher, were not happy. Perhaps it was because she referred to their still-living grandmother as "the meanest woman in the history of Mooreland Elementary School.

At any rate, they sued. 

Kimmel, undaunted, collected depositions from 50 other former third-graders, who, it seems, agreed with the description. She faxed these to Doubleday, who sent them on to the granddaughters.

They dropped the suit. 

Good thing the crazy neighbor who wore the same dress 23 days in a row and "clacked her false teeth together like a castanet," had already died. No surviving relatives took offense. 

Presidents, Strokes, Wishful Thinking, and the movie "Dave."

With the U.S. President slurring words, calling origins "oranges," and looking more and more like someone who continues to have a series of small ischemia or mini-strokes, I felt profoundly sad. Clearly, there is no one--no Republican, no one in power--willing to state the truth about the clear deterioration of Donald Trump's physical and mental health. 

That led us to "Dave," a film where the president has a stroke and evil counselors replace him with a look-alike lightweight. 

But since this is a fairytale, that lightweight, played by Kevin Kline, grows in gravitas, gaining allies through sheer kindness, while reminding his staff that the president works for the people, and should care far more about their needs than his/her own. 

And yet, we weren't really able to escape into this charming film, written by David Ross and directed by Ivan Reitman, this Frank Capra vision of ethical people facing down villains, while inspiring others to regain their lost ethics. The shadow of our nation's current politics stretched over the fantasy movie.  If only. . .

Empty Nesting, Mallard-style

It's early autumn, the days growing shorter, the nights cooler.  School has started for everyone. I stopped my bike ride around the lake to watch this lonely female, brooding. Clearly, she has Empty Nest syndrome. 

After the verdict, Officer Geronimo Yanez.

I wrote this blog post a year ago. I'm not certain why I didn't post it. It's late, but I'm going to post it today.

Yesterday morning, I had to tackle a complex cat box problem involving a dog, a closed litter box, coats and scrubbing the front hall floor on my hands and knees. It haven't been able to watch the video yet, the video where Philando is shot within four seconds of the interaction beginning.I have the luxury of not watching it happen, of refusing to witness, of sweeping up kitty litter and wiping the floor. Diamond Reynolds doesn't. She must see it happening again and again. Her little girl doesn't. she must wake from nightmares of seeing that "pretty good guy who cared about us" get bullets in the heart, because somebody was terrified of his skin. 

I put it off as long as I could. I folded laundry and watched a sit com. I took the kids swimming. I made mashed potatoes from scratch. Finally, though, I sat down and watched the video Diamond Reynolds sits handcuffed in the back of the car, stunned, wailing, numb, horrified, while her little daughter tries to comfort her--and keep her calm, "so you won't get shotted, too." 

I made grilled cheese sandwiches.  I swept the kitchen floor. I pickled some watermelon rind--an experiment with a recipe from 1870. Then, I watched, very tiny on my phone, a small section of Diamond Reynolds being questioned by police--the part where they told her that her boyfriend, Philando Castile was dead, the part where she wailed, that hoarse, painful wail with all its overtones, the one you make when everything is lost, when you have nothing, when you feel once again a helpless child--like the helpless child her daughter was in the police car. I quickly hit the side button that switched my phone to darkness.  

In the afternoon, I heard the interview on NPR--the one where the juror explains how they reached their not-guilty decision. I was slicing apples for the kids, a steady chop, chop chop. "We took the emotion of out it," the juror said, before explaining that once they deadlocked, once that judge sent them back, they figured he wouldn't let them go before they reached an agreement. 

So they found the officer not guilty. They didn't want to be stuck in the deliberating room for any more days.

The juror said,  "Well, he seemed like a pretty honest guy."

"Wait," said the interviewer, startled. "You mean Philando Castile?"

"No." The white juror's flat Midwestern accent sounded ordinary and calm. "The officer."

He meant Jeronimo Yanez, the police officer with the puffy, young face, the one who changed his story from "I couldn't see it" (the gun) to "He was pulling it out," to "He had a c-grip." The officer who cried during his testimony, saying he feared for his life. The officer who, he testified, thought he had to shoot Philando because there was "second-hand smoke" in the car, and if Phil would smoke around a child, he was dangerous. 

But the juror's take from all that confusion, from watching the video of Yanez panic, tell Philando contradictory things and kill him within seven seconds of the mention of Phil's concealed carry, was that Yanez "seemed a pretty honest guy." 

My child came in and turned off the radio. I kept slicing apples, and sobbing.  I had the luxury of sobbing in the kitchen over apple slices. My child could come in and turn off the radio mid-interview. My kids didn't see their dad shot because of the color of his skin.  My husband doesn't have to worry, as the father of the adorable baby we met at a protest does, "Now that I have a baby, it's not safe for me to drive anymore. I can't afford to have a cop shoot me because of a broken tail light." We are white, and in this country, we are (mostly) safe.

A reporter that I much admire wrote today, "I can't take all this depressing news. I'm only looking at images of cute cats and adorable puppies." I can relate. I'm certain that during WWII, many in Poland, in France, in Germany turned their backs on the news and decided to look, instead, at cute cats and adorable puppies. Jews didn't have that luxury there. People of color don't have it here. Why should the rest of us?

We have to watch the dash cam. We have to turn the radio back on. And more--we have to leave our comfort zone, let the anger when we hear the phrase "All white people" roll off our backs. We have to remind ourselves there's abundant reasons for it. We have to stay in the room. We have to hit the protests, join the organizations, we have to make absolutely certain that every family, brown or white, has the luxury of driving their cars, slicing their apples, folding their laundry, without fearing that one phone call or one broken tail light or one bad interaction with a police officer will leave us--or someone we love--dead. 

Christian Martyrs?

About forteen years ago, a white, Middle-class woman told me that whites were on the run and Christians were terribly persecuted. We were both in the gym at a nice hotel in the major city of our state--I, visiting for a family celebration, she for a football game and to see her son off to the military.

"Christians in this country, we're all being persecuted," she said as we plodded away on the stair master.

I listened, my face carefully wide-eyed. "Wow. That's terrible. What was it like? You were refused a job because of your religion? Or forced out because you're Christian?"

"Oh, no," she said.

I tried again. "Then--somebody wouldn't rent you an apartment? Or sell you a house?"

"No, no no," she said.

I was pretty sure this wasn't the case, but. . ."Then, they called you names and threatened you?"

"No. Of course not," she said.

"Well then how have you been persecuted?"

She leaped on it, her face redder than ever, and not from the exercise. "It's these judges.. These activist judges. Telling us we can't say Merry Christmas, taking away prayer in school. It's terrible. It's a sin."

I took a deep breath so I could reply without audible sarcasm. "Oh. You mean they won't let you tell other people how *they* have to live?"

"Yes." She was so relieved. Finally somebody understood. "Yes. Absolutely. These activist judges are persecuting us."

Just like Saint Euphemia, (above) supposedly thrown to the lions for refusing to sacrifice at the altar of Ares, this woman is being forbidden to throw others to the lions. Persecution. Right?

Trump's Negotiating Tactics Per Prime Minister Trumball Phone Call

Now that someone has leaked the transcript of Trump's first phone conversation with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, I thought I'd let you hear the unredacted version--see above. 

“I’ve always heard a tax return was a sacred kind of thing,” Trump tells Jesse Watters

The Call To Worship!

Sinclair Lewis' Passing Novel--Kingsblood Royal

This is a photograph of George Bonga, a Minnesota fur trapper and one of the first African-Americans born in Minnesota. He was the grandson of two slaves brought to Mackinac by a British officer and freed there, and his mother was an Ojibwa woman.) 

In 1947, Sinclair Lewis published, a satirical novel that was nominally about George Bonga and much more directly about America's complicated relationship with race. The novel's hero is a very white man in a very white suburb doing research to prove that he's descended from royalty, who discovers, instead, that his ancestor was essentially George Bonga--which makes the hero of Kingsblood Royal, a man of color--at least according to the one-drop rule. 

The hero is shocked by this discovery, but as he starts telling people, his world falls apart, leading him to wonder what life is really like for those poor black folk who live so separately on the wrong side of town. 



The white press couldn't stand Lewis' novel. There's no way, they said that any such well-to do guy would have been so stupid as to claim his hidden heritage. The black press loved it and thought it was very astute. Paul Robeson's wife, Eslanda, said she appreciated Lewis' approach to material "from the white side," and--get this--said that she was working on a novel about somebody passing for white from the "other side of the medal." You may not know this--I did not know this--but Paul Robeson's wife was an author, civil rights worker and anthropologist. 

I wonder why most of us have never heard about Kingsblood Royal, or George Bonga or his father, Pierre or his Ojibwa mother? And why the heck have we never been taught about Paul Robeson's wife, who--by the way--co-wrote a book with Pearl Buck? I also want to know how to find that manuscript of Eslanda Cardozo Robeson's the one approaching this material from the other side of the medal.  Oh, how I would love to read that. 

Those Who Can Say, "Give Him A Chance."

Ida Fink's spare and powerful novel, The Journey, begins on a golden, gorgeous autumn morning, the day that typically, the author and her family would harvest apples from a tree that adjoins both properties.  

But on this morning, the father has left his girls in hiding, watching as their neighbors harvest all the apples. They are Jewish and their neighbors are not, and it's Poland in 1939, and the Nazis have just told every Jew in town to come to the town square to be shipped off to an "internment camp." So, the sisters, terrified, listen to the screams coming from the town square, while their neighbors move the ladder and pick bushels of apples from the tree.

I've been thinking about apple-picking as we enjoy these extraordinary, golden, unusually warm days of autumn and recover from the shock of the election. I keep thinking of those apples every time someone says to me, "I'm just going to trust it will be okay and enjoy this gorgeous day." Because those people, like the Ida Fink's neighbors, can do that. Not from any ill-will, not because they're evil, but because they can go on picking apples while others fear that they will be shot, or harassed or rounded up in the town square or shipped off to some unknown location, or go into hiding, their identities stripped from them as they scurry from place to place, terrified.

After all, I'm sure that on many days, during many raffles, (what the Germans called the roundup of Jews,) many decent people longed to hope for the best, to enjoy the beautiful weather, to pick those apples and try to believe that it would all be all right. Maybe it will be all right. As long you're not one of the targets and you're willing to pick apples while others are targeted.

The Allure of a Despot

The real fascination of a character like Henry VIII is that we all know him. We've all had a parent like him or a spouse or a boss. Someone who rules by terror, who likes to watch people hop, {who loves the freedom to grab women by the pussy} and who doesn't care whom he beheads.

The parallels reflect more than a liking for sumptuous decor and the habit of multiple wives. Like Henry VIII, Trump was raised with an abusive father who coupled rage, emotional neglect, and velvet gloves. Like Henry, Trump was the younger son, his older brother supposed to be the heir. As the darling of his father's empire, Henry VIII had a whipping boy, someone who was punished in his place whenever he misbehaved. Trump had a teacher who he punched in the face when he was only twelve--with no real consequences afterwards. 

Like Henry VII, Trump's father was a man so crooked it was probably hard for him to walk straight and he passed onto his son an empire where his word was law.  Roy Cohn was Trump's Cardinal Wolsey, a man behind the scenes who turned the scion of an empire into a unrepentantly immoral fighting bastard. With Cohn as his teacher, Trump, like Henry VIII, learned that it was perfectly acceptable to cheat the commoners who work for him, rage at them, cut their pay or stiff them completely--with everything based on a whim. 

I have always thought that watching the Tudors was a lot more fun than living among them must have been. And it wasn't just people at court whose heads rolled. Millions of commoners had their lives uprooted, destroyed or brutally ended simply because Henry wanted to divorce his wife and couldn't do it, and nobody--but nobody--could say no to the man. 

Now, with a Republican Congress and Senate willing to ignore all evidence of wrong-doing, and a Conservative Republican Supreme Court, Donald Trump is set to rule our Land. 

May God Save America. 

Wisdom of the Father's, transformed to include the Mothers.

In a time of great stress, we sometimes turn to older wisdom. So, I give you this, from a book of Jewish wisdom called the Pirkei Avot, (Words of the Fathers) modified slightly to make it words of the Mothers, too:

“In a place where no one is human, one should strive to be human.” – Pirkei Avot 2:5

And this: 

Rabbi Tarfon . . . used to say: It is not your responsibility to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.

(My apologies--I cannot find the artist to credit for this image.) 

John Steinbeck pegged it, back in 1952

John Steinbeck pegged it, back in, in East of Eden (1952)--discussing America's need for demagogues.

“It is argued that because they {Americans} believed thoroughly in a just, moral God they could put their faith there and let the smaller insecurities take care of themselves. 

But I think that because they trusted themselves and respected themselves as individuals, because they knew beyond doubt that they were valuable and potentially moral units -- because of this they could give God their own courage and dignity and then receive it back. Such things have disappeared perhaps because men do not trust themselves anymore, and when that happens there is nothing left except perhaps to find some strong sure man, even though he may be wrong, and to dangle from his coattails.”

Anybody notice that Cindy McCain was wearing a pantsuit when she voted? A white pantsuit, no less? Is this a secret signal about how she planned to vote? 

Perhaps she feared that her husband, too, would be trying to control her vote. . .

My Child Should Run for President

My oldest child should run for president--the kid knows the names of more foreign heads of state than one of our current candidates. My kid even knows the name of the guy currently bombing the crap out of the children of--what's the name of that joint in Syria again?--Help me out here, I'm having an Aleppo moment.
Johnson's VIP was finally able to haul up a name. But since he couldn't remember Merkle's first name (Angela, with a lovely hard g) Johnson could have been referring to silent film star Una, or to Ursula Merkle, the musical Bye Bye Birdie's hyperactive best friend of Kim, the teenaged second lead. 

On the other hand, Donald knows the name of at least one--Benyamin "Bibi" Netanyahu, though Donald thinks he's "not a happy camper." And he used to know the name of the Mexican president, because he met with the guy. Probably, though, knowing the Donald, he's forgotten the name Enrique Pena Nieto already, but we're all sure Donald could tell us all about some beautiful--truly amazing-- property he owns there. 

For those of you who, unlike two of our presidential candidates.  who would like to learn more about heads of state, here's a lovely article: 

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/09/ranked-admirable-world-leaders-that-gary-johnson-forgot/502208/

The Romance of Food Poisoning

So, I woke up in the middle of the night tortured by gut pains like Alien was trying to bust out. No position could improve the pain. I had to get up, and wait it out for a couple of hours--let's not get explicit here, but they were not fun. 
I ran a hot bath, hoping that would help me relax and survive the gut explosions, and it did for a bit, until I had to lurch out and throw up. (Let's get explicit here.) 
Not only my throat, but the insides of my nostrils burned from stomach acid and I was pretty sure this was food poisoning and not a stomach flu. I didn't want to wake the kids. I grabbed a chair so I could be more comfortable--if that's at all possible. I hate throwing up. (As if someone could love it?) I get all shaky, cold and hot at the same time. Maybe King Henry V felt like this while he lay dying of dysentery on the battle field he loved so well. I just wanted to lay my head on the cool, floor, in our house, perpetually covered with dog hair. (Gotta love Hank Cinq's haircut--I think it's coming back in style.) 

Finally, I staggered up the hall and woke my poor husband, who is recovering from a cold and needs his sleep.  Hubby stayed with me while I moaned and urped and released poison from various orifices. I said, "Tell me a story about when you were little." He started to trot out all the ones I know. "No, about school. Tell me a story about when you were little in school." 

He was leaning against the counter. He thought a minute and then told me, "When I was four, there was a boy, he was bigger than me. I remember that. And I kicked him in the stomach. I got in big trouble. I had to write the proverbial lines on the board." 

"Wow," I said. "You could write when you were four?" 

"Wait. My papa was already in the states," he said. "So I was five. No, six. He was in the West. Yes, I was six. I was scared about my Oncle Maurice. I remember my Tante Marcelle making faces behind his back so that I wouldn't be scared."

"You were scared of Oncle Maurice?" In the stories, he's a kind man who makes people do the right thing. 

"Well, Marcel was the easy-going one." (Yes, there's an aunt Marcelle and an Oncle Marcel--the names sound the same, and I think they were married to one another, which means even they must have spent their lives confused. But maybe not. Maybe Marcelle married Maurice, so confusion was limited.) 

"What did you have to write?" (I figured if you're writing something a hundred times, you'll remember.) 

"I don't know, 'Je ne jamais livrer un coup de pied à l'estomac de Didier.'" (literally--I will never deliver a hit of foot in the stomach of Didier.) At least that's what I think he said--my French felt as shaky as I was at the moment.

"Tell me another story," I said. "About school." I'm not sure why I was fixated on school, but I know I sounded like our little one who loves these kind of tales.

"Well, there was a boy--this was in the states--at my school who was big and an athlete--I wasn't an athlete by any stretch of the imagination--and he was rough and kind of mean but I could do a sideways futball kick. So, with kickball, he figured out that we would run up the court, me with the ball, everybody chasing after him, and I would shoot him the ball and he would score every time. So he would always pick me first. I was the first kid picked by the best athlete of the school."

I had never heard these stories. That's amazing.

"Another," I said, still sounding like our youngest. By this time, I was done throwing up, so I was just waiting for the rest to pass through me. Spouse took my chair and told me another, after mentioning how sexy I looked (!) 

"I ran for Treasurer in High School," he said. "I have no idea why. And my papa drew for me these posters--'Don't Fight, Switch, vote for--' and he put my name. There was some cigarette commercial that used the slogan, 'I'd rather fight than Switch.'"

"What did the drawing look like?"

"It was a guy with a black eye, like in the cigarette ads."

I had no idea his father could draw--another of many talents of this man I never met. I love to draw, though I rarely get time for it, and our little one is turning out to be a gifted artist, while our oldest, when he tries, can also draw very well.

I was, by this time, exhausted. (Bed times stories are designed to be relaxing. These had worked.) I was ready to go back to bed, but not certain it was safe. 

Hubby took a towel and laid it on the sheets, just in case. I was still in pain, so we could only hold hands. I fell back to sleep right away. 

I don't think of Food Poisoning as romantic, or tales from elementary and high school as courtship, or a wife in the throes of earping, (etc,) as sexy. And yet, the Night of the Food Poisoning, was romantic in its own crazy way, with Hubby wooing and winning my heart all over again.

Witness to Protest: Justice For Philando March Part I

On Sept. 6th, almost three weeks ago, I headed downtown for a protest march: “Justice For Philando.” 

I went because I received notification from AR14, which seems to me a wiser group than Black Lives Matter, and because three African-American adults whose actions I have admired were among those who went me invitations. I went despite my intense dislike of crowds, an innate wariness of herd behavior, and a learned fear of being on lists and being caught in large groups that comes from being part of a Holocaust survivor family. 

Our city is shaped like a large stone axe, surrounded on three sides by a giant bend in the Mississippi River. City Hall and the Ramsey County Courthouse are housed in a large, gorgeous Arts and Crafts building, which sits at the corner of one of the major bridges that cross the river, and directly in front from a main boulevard that fronts it. 

I was told via Facebook, that 700 people were going to attend. Nobody was outside when I got there a few minutes early. Naive, I went inside City Hall to ask the security guys manning the metal detectors if they knew where the protest was. (Protests are a part of our civil liberties, so I wasn't worried about mentioning this one.) 

They didn’t, but they did inform me that the protest couldn’t be inside, because they didn’t allow any signs in the building.

I walked around the building for a while, looking for people wearing the black they had requested.  Finally, I found some other youngish white people. We all walked to the front and waited. A few more people—black, white—dribbled into the crowd. Then, we saw a large crew walking across the bridge. They seemed cheerful, as if this were a picnic. Some of the younger ones were cavorting. That's the only word for it. A few wore shiny construction vests. 

I felt very much out of place. 

I’ve been looking for a group to join, someplace to go for Phil. I so want to be part of a community working for Philando. I was hoping this would be that place, and that community. I want to work for justice for him. I want to remember him. I want to have ways to make his life keep on living, although I know that’s not literally possible. 

Members of the crowd began to pass out signs. None of them said what I wanted to say. I should have brought my own sign--Philando was not a number--he was a good man. Or Phil cared about kids. Or His Mother Loved Him. Among the gathering crowd sat a young black man, dressed, despite the heat, in a black leather jacket. He was on the bench that edged a yard-sized planter, one arm on his knee, his head on that hand, and he was falling asleep. I knew he wasn't a part of the protest to come--no one spoke to him or even seemed to see him. He was one of the invisible, ones, the lost ones, the homeless, the mentally ill who haunt our streets, and he had to be either drunk, intoxicated, or completely exhausted to be able to fall asleep amid the crowd and the noise. As I watched, he twitched, his body slowly relaxing, muscle by muscle, leaning forward. I was afraid he was going to fall on his head on the concrete. I watched, waiting to leap for him if he started to fall. Finally, I woke him. I had to. 

He startled. I said, "Sorry, sorry. I didn't want you to fall and hit your head." 

He put his head back on his hand and started to fall asleep again. 

I said, "Where's your mother?" 

"Dead," he said. 

I asked, "Do you have somebody who can help you? Somebody who loves you?" And then wanted to kick myself. 

He said no. He was having a hard time getting his social security card, he said, and his legal i.d. He was hungry, he said. Did I have a snack. 

I usually do, but I didn't. Phil would probably have fed this guy, I thought. Philando fed people. That's what he did. The man asked if I could give him three dollars. I don't give money, but Phil was in my head. I gave him the only dollar I could find, loose in my backpack. He put his head on his hand and his eyes oozed shut. The dollar landed on the ground, next to a piece of paper. I picked them both up. It turned out to be his parole paperwork. 

Then, as the protest began to fire up, I went into the courthouse. I explained that I was worried about this guy. The guards called a Ramsey County Sheriff who said he could call St. Paul Police to do a welfare check, but, he said, they'd have to send a car and the officers would have to be in uniform and if they came out in the middle of a protest they'd have a riot. 

So, I went back out. The guy was sitting up, more alert, but still invisible to the crowd around him. The protest had spilled into the center of the street, to the narrow space between the yellow lines. The chant switched from "No Justice, No Peace," to "No Cops, No KKK." I had a huge disconnect. I had just gone to the police for help, for a black man. We need police, just not racist police who view anybody black as a terrifying monster or someone to dominate. 

I put my hand on the sleepy guy's shoulder. The paperwork had said his name was Lamont. (not his real name) I asked what I could do. 

"Can I stay with you tonight?" 

I said, "I have a special needs kid. That wouldn't work." 

He asked for twenty dollars for a room. I didn't have any money. The homeless shelter was three blocks away. And yet--I know people who've been in these shelters. They're crowded in a room with hundreds. It's noisy. They don't feel safe. They can't sleep. And this guy seemed much more alert. Maybe he was just exhausted. 

I dug into the open section of my backpack again, and out came twenty bucks that I didn't know I had. I handed it over and looked into his face. He looked back into my eyes. I said, "You matter. Your life matters. I'm not your mother but I'm a mother, and I know that you count. Just hold on. Get through this. You can make it. You can make a difference in the world." 

I might be deluding myself that he listened, who knows? It seemed to me that he heard it--heard a fellow human person, caring. He nodded, a couple of jerks of his head, and then he crossed through the protest and the crowd, and heading off, walking straight, not at all like someone drunk or on drugs. 

The Times We Lie

Yesterday, in the car, my youngest listed multiple times when she had lied about misbehavior. 

She had:

Scraped the fridge: "You know that little drawing on the side? I accidentally scratched the paint off with this paper clip and then I thought, I can make a drawing, so I kept on going." 

Drawn a head with legs and arms attached on the wall in the bathroom (when she was very little). 
Hid under a towel with a friend and a pen so they could extend the arms and legs of the drawing in the bathroom. 

Hidden under the bed with several children at a birthday party and drawn all over the wall down there with all of them. (More about this later.) 

Turned the fridge and freezer temperature so cold that the ice machine froze. (That one cost us 100 bucks on a service call--we thought the water main was broken) though fortunately, the repairman kindly also fixed something on both the dishwasher and the dryer for free.

I stayed completely mellow about these confessions, for several reasons. 

First: Oldest is the one who usually gets into trouble--though clearly Little One is as capable of doing Bad Things, but much better at getting away with it. And Oldest was in the car, listening to Little One addressing the balance. 

Second: Research Has Shown that all kids lie. Even ones who get beaten, punished or humiliated when they're caught in a lie. When children are punished for lying, that simply serves to drive lying underground. This may not mean as much when the lying is about who snuck the candy or drew on the wall, but it will mean a great deal when it's who is sneaking out of the house to run around with teenaged friends and possibly get pregnant/drunk/STD's/in an accident.  We have friends who severely punish their children any time they catch them in a lie. With very stern faces, they say to very young children, "We will always love you if you tell us the truth, but we will be very, very, very angry if we ever catch you lying." And, indeed, any child caught in a lie is severely punished. 

Their oldest middle child (they have several) is one of then best and most frequent liars I know, and is often involved in my own child's admitted lies (see above, friend under towel, one of friends under bed, etc.) 

Third: I lie, too. "I have a previous engagement," with quiet and a good book. "I'm sorry, I did not see that email," when I'm pissed at the organizer's request. "Thank you in advance for your prompt and thoughtful action," when I know that the action will be neither thoughtful nor prompt. "I love that haircut you just got," when I think it makes them look like a hamster, but know they have a big job interview tomorrow.   "I'm sure that he was completely responsible for the divorce," when I know the opposite will never be heard but I want my kids to still be allowed to play with their little friends. 

I even use bendy lies, implications, like, "I can understand how you would think you were responsible for your husband's adultery," and the subsequent child this friend is partly raising, when, in fact, I don't at all believe that she's responsible for his callous choices. 

And we're not even getting into times when we have to lie to the boss because the boss is a controlling disaster but we can't get fired; or the many, many times when our relatives lied for their very survival, during the Holocaust. 

Lying, to me, then, is a continuum, and a life-skill. Frankly, it's one I need to learn better. I was once booted from a writing critique group because I couldn't lie well enough. (The leader had pulled me aside and said, "She's not capable of learning to write any better. She'll never learn subtext or how to write dialogue. So when you make those notes, you just make her feel awful. You need to simply praise what she does.")

(Of course, the leader, too, had massive blind spots that needed tender-loving lies. I tried, but failed in Lying 101, so out I went.) 

At any rate, as I heard Little One's list, I simply laughed with the rest of the family. When Little One said, "I'm pretty good at lying," I replied, "Well, sometimes we do need to lie in life, but I hope that, from now on, you'll tell us when you do something wrong. Look at us--we're hardly angry." 

"But that's because it's a lot later," said Little One, who may have a point. 

Then, Little One asked if I had ever lied to my parents about things I'd done. 

"Well," I said instantly. "There was the time--I think I was ten--when my best friend and I rode our bicycles far beyond the boundary I had at the time. We knew we could get back in time, and we wanted to explore. 

"Unfortunately, my front tire went wobbly. It wouldn't turn, so I couldn't bike. We didn't have any tools. We were too scared to ask for help.  So we had to run my bike home, holding up the whole front half of the frame, because only the rear wheel turned. My best friend took turns with me, thank goodness. We made it in time. Barely. We were exhausted and our arms ached, but we never told." 

And then, oddly, I thought of something else that I never told, also when I was ten. I thought carefully and decided to tell it to the kids. "There's this other thing that happened when I was ten that I never told about," I said. "We lived near this big drainage ditch that was kind of like a small river with riparian woodland all around it." (Of course, being a mom, I had to explain riparian woodland before I could get back to the story.) "We used to play there all the time. It was called Gregson's Ditch. 

"And one time, when I was ten, these two girls, Kelly and Heidi, sisters, they told me they wanted to see my bra. I already had a bra. And they wanted to see it. And I said no. Kelly was nine and fragile, Heidi was eight and built like a horse. And when I said no, they wouldn't let me go. They kept yanking up my sweatshirt. I kept holding it down. I couldn't get away from them. Every time I managed to get Kelly's hands off my sweatshirt, I had to get Heidi to let go of my arms. I was crying."

"That was sexual assault," said my oldest, and I felt gratified that these days, kids know, that they are certain. We didn't know when I was little. In fact, without that announcement from the back seat, I'm not sure I would have realized it (with certainty) even today. 

"Yes," I said. "It was." Now, it turned out that Kelly and Heidi had also pulled down Melinda's pants in her garage and stuck pebbles up her butt, all of which makes me think that somebody--maybe Mr. Ettinger--was doing something he shouldn't have been doing to his two daughters. In fact, come to think of it, I remember overhearing the parents talking about this, but they didn't report us playing with Kelly and Heidi or even tell us to stay out of their house. How times have changed.

"Anyway. I don't know how long we were down there. Maybe an hour, maybe less. I know that it felt like it was forever. I know that I thought I would never get away. I know that when I finally managed to escape them both and take off--red-faced, huffing, sobbing--my sweatshirt was so completely stretched out of shape that it never recovered. And they probably did manage to see parts of my white cotton training bra, despite all my efforts. 

"But I never told." I said. I'm still not sure why I never told. I know I felt shamed. I felt besmirched. I felt stupid to have gone to the little paths at the side of Gregson's Ditch with only Kelly and Heidi, even though they had never bothered me before and I didn't yet know about what they'd done to Melinda in the garage. I felt there was something wrong with me that I needed a brassiere while Kelly and Heidi didn't. And I liked Kelly, though I did not like Heidi, who was often hostile and physically rough. In fact, I remember that I kept pleading with Kelly, reminding her of how awful her sister was, telling her I would play with her if she'd just get Heidi to let me go--it was Kelly masterminding this, or so I thought at the time. 

(Of course, part of the reason I never told might have been the way my own mother would usually say to me, if I mentioned any problem at school, including bullying that broke my collarbone, "But what are you doing to make them act that way?" But that's another story. 

At any rate, I thought it was all my fault, and my shame, which is why I never told. "Do you think that was right, or wise?" I asked. 

"No," said my little one. 

"So I'm telling you this story because I want you to always tell us if anything happens. No matter if you feel ashamed or you're afraid you might have done something to cause it. " 

"It's sexual assault," said my oldest. "Of course, we'd tell." 

But I, with my Gregson's Ditch experience, am still not so sure. The shame I felt was enormous. And the self-blame. "I will never, ever treat you that way. Because I know how it feels," I said. "That's not something you can ever lie about. Okay?" 

I got agreement, but of course, you never really know. Kids--all kids--lie.