A Once-Long Road Is Suddenly Shorter

Every year before my birthday, I take stock. I think about where I am and what I’d like to accomplish in the coming year. I’m surely not the only person who does this. It seems a pretty basic, obvious thing to do before your birthday.

Some years, I draw up long, elaborate lists of what the next year should look like for me. This has mostly been true as I enter new decades, I guess. Sometimes my lists are full of fancy. Somethings they are depressingly earthbound — such as the year when almost the whole list was related to dealing with various aspects of my health. That was a bad list, a sad list, the kind I hope not to need to repeat often or ever. There should really always be some whimsy, some sparkly fun on the list. If not … well, damn.

This year, something strange happened as I thought about making my list. I haven’t been young in a long time, but this year for the first time I really thought about being old, about the fact that I’m closing in on being truly old and I need to imagine what I want my aging to look like.

So I did.

And I realized there are things I want from my old age that I hadn’t realized I wanted, ways I want to be living that don’t follow any kind of path from how I’m living right now. And I’m not entirely sure how to do anything about that, but I am sure that I want to do something about it, that I can’t just keep bumbling along and expect anything to change on it’s own. So I sketched out some ideas, some plans for a course shift.

Not a course correction. I wouldn’t say I’ve been on anything like a wrong path — or, at least not entirely on a wrong path — but I do need to make some changes, and some of them need to be significant.

 

I work with a lot of people who are much younger than I am. A lot of 20- and 30-somethings. Young people who are very clear, very focused on what they want from their careers and where they want to be heading. They fascinate me. Truly. How do they know so much about themselves already? How can they already have a sense of what they want to be doing with their lives long term … to have enough of a sense that they’ve already done so much to move themselves along those paths?

Not that I’ve spent my life flitting around aimlessly, falling from one experience to the next … but I kind of have, too. It’s only by chance that I find myself with a career in education. I just about literally stumbled into my first teaching job and discovered I liked it and was pretty good at it, and so kept doing it. It wasn’t until I’d been teaching for nearly 20 years that it occurred to me that education was my career.

Really the only thing in my life that hasn’t happened by chance is writing. This all needs more thinking through. For now, back to my birthday and planning for Big Life Changes.

 

When I made my list this year, I made a list that looks out to when I’ll turn 60, to where I hope to be at that moment. I have a short-term list, too, but all the things on that list connect to where I want to be winding up when I turn 60. And I think I’ll be projecting out five and ten years from now on. Otherwise, how will I ever have the chance to be the old lady I now realize I want to be?

The sad part of all this is being fully aware that there is nothing new here, fully aware that people the world over plan for their futures every day, and that people have been planning for their futures forever, that the only thing interesting about what’s happened to me is the fact that I’ve lived 55 years without thinking far enough ahead in my life to make a sustainability plan.

I’ve got a lot of catching up to do … and a crazy-short runway.

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(I’m torn about whether this “counts” as an essay … I’ve fussed with it a lot, and cut out a long not-quite-getting-it section that tried to tease out why I don’t look at my life as a long-term proposition. Maybe that’s a separate essay, maybe it’ll just stay on the cutting room floor. This bit it what’s left, and I’m sticking with it.)

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In 2017, I took up Vanessa Mártir’s #52essays2017 challenge to write an essay a week. I didn’t complete 52 essays by year’s end, but I did write like crazy, more in 2017 than in 2015 and 2016 combined! I’ve decided to keep working on personal essays, keep at this #GriotGrind. If you’d care to join in, it’s never too late! You can find our group on FB: #52Essays Next Wave.

Close to Home

Last week I gave a workshop for young women in a close-to-home program. I thought I understood every part of what I just wrote, but it turned out that my understanding was way off the mark.

Because of the work I do, I’ve gotten used to the definition of “young adult” being 16 – 24 years old. That’s the age range used for the kinds of programs that are funded to support “out-of-school youth” and “disconnected youth” and “opportunity youth” … and whatever other names we choose to give young people whose circumstances have made the transition to adulthood more difficult. These are the young people I taught in my basic education and high school equivalency classes years ago. All of the students I wrote about in those days fell into this 16-24 category. The range is fairly well cemented in my head.

“Close to Home” is the name of a juvenile justice initiative that focuses on keeping young people close to their families and communities rather than sending them to detention facilities that are too far away for their families to visit them easily. I don’t know if these programs exist in other states – though I hope they do – but we’ve had them in New York since 2012. Before leaving my last job, I attended an info session/focus group discussion about close to home programs. One of the community organizations we worked with was about to open a residence in the neighborhood and wanted other providers to know about the residence, understand what the program would look like, and offer possibilities for partnership in providing services to the young people who would live in that home.

As it happens, the definition of “youth” in the Close to Home model is very different from the one in my head and at my office. In New York City, Close to Home has enabled the City to completely eliminate prison for kids under 16 by placing them in group residences near their home neighborhoods.

Right. Young people isn’t the same as young adults. Not by a long shot. I wasn’t at all prepared for such young girls. The girls in my group were 14 and 15, and that was definitely not who I was expecting to meet. The workshop I prepared was, luckily, adaptable enough, but adjusting my brain wasn’t so . You just don’t talk to 14 year olds the way you do to 24 years olds.

The bigger misconception for me was what it meant for these young people to be living at this Close to Home group residence. I kept being surprised by my surroundings. Surprised by the level of security, surprised by how monitored the young women’s time was. I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting, but clearly it wasn’t the same as what I was seeing.

I kept bumping up against how regulated the girls’ actions were. I’m sure this sounds silly because the definition of the program is that this program offers an alternative detention placement, doesn’t eliminate detention all together. The young people in these programs have greater or lesser degrees of freedom depending on the type of program they’ve been assigned to, but they are still serving out the time they’ve been given, they are still detained.

As I thought more about the cognitive dissonance I was experiencing, I realized that I’d been thinking of the group home as a halfway house, a middle step between incarceration and re-entry. In some ways, I suppose that is a function of the Close to Home group residence – the girls aren’t going to have to transition from a prison or from being cut off from their families – bu t there are constant reminders of the fact that the girls lives aren’t their own.

Realizing my halfway-house confusion highlighted that I have a lot to learn about this program. For example, what is the relationship between local police and these residences? When I arrived to give my workshop, there were police on-site, called because there was some disturbance with one of the young people. In the end, they took that young person away with them, which was incredibly disconcerting to me … and even more disconcerting once I fully understood the reality of the homes as a form of detention. If you are already detained, what does it mean to have the police called to further police you?

Certainly I think it’s better to have young people – and ones who are so young – detained near their families. The girls in my group all talked at one point or another about family visits that had happened since they’d been placed in the group home. That is better than their families having to miss work days to travel upstate or not be able to take that off time and wind up not visiting as a result. And the group home is better than local incarceration, too. The memory of my one visit to a prison tells me that. The horrifying vibe I got from the male guards at that facility makes me happy the too-young people I met – those children – clearly don’t belong in a prison environment.

So yes, better than regular incarceration … but still distressing. Doesn’t there always have to be a better option for children than jail? And yes, I’m asking that seriously, even as I watch this country imprison thousands of children, watch this country force infants and toddlers to represent themselves in court. And yes, I know all the reasons that its it’s easy to consign these children – these brown and Black children specifically – to prisons and detainment facilities. I know. I still have to ask the question. Have to.

Two hours. That was the entirety of my experience with that residence and those girls. It was enough to leave me with all this to puzzle over. I stay having so very much to learn. Sigh.

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In 2017, I took up Vanessa Mártir’s #52essays2017 challenge to write an essay a week. I didn’t complete 52 essays by year’s end, but I did write like crazy, more in 2017 than in 2015 and 2016 combined! I’ve decided to keep working on personal essays, keep at this #GriotGrind. If you’d care to join in, it’s never too late! You can find our group on FB: #52Essays Next Wave.

To be or not to be … a person who stops.

It’s Tuesday, Slice of Life day, and I posted this “slice” on FB earlier (CW for language):

Went out to pick up some lunch. My plan was to buy something then walk over to Poet’s House to eat and write and stare at the water. I turned the corner and saw an elderly Black man on the ground, half rolled up in a carpet. He didn’t respond when I tried to rouse him, and I couldn’t tell if he was breathing. I called 911. 911 wanted to send the police, but I kept asking for medical help. Finally she connected me to EMS at the fire department. While I was on with EMS, the man moved his leg, slightly. That dispatcher said she’d have a truck out as quickly as possible. A young woman asked if I was calling 911, and said she’d wait with me for the ambulance.

We waited and fairly quickly a fire truck arrived. We thanked them for coming so fast. All the pretty young men poured out and surrounded the man on the ground. They roused him and it turned out that he was drunk and most likely homeless, not sick or injured. One of the firemen teased me for calling 911. “Are you from here?” he asked. “You don’t seem like you’re from here.”

I thanked them again for coming quickly and said I was glad I’d been able to have them come and not the police. “They protect you, too, you know,” one of the firemen said. And I said yes, that was sometimes true but that there was no denying the good reason for my reluctance to call them. (I mean, seriously? Are we going to pretend that there’s no reason for Black folks to think twice about calling the cops? Are we?)

The young woman and I started to leave and an older woman came up and asked if we had called. She said she’d run home for her phone and was coming back to see if she should call.

Because 911 had been called, the firemen said, the man would have to move. This displeased him enormously. He started to get up and started cursing me. Please know that there are three of us now standing there: me, the older woman who is white, and the young woman who is white Latinx. The only one singled out for abuse is me.

He called me a stupid whore, called me an ugly cow, called me a dumb nigger bitch. I was already walking away, so I didn’t hear what else he had to say, though I could hear that he kept going. I’ve been called out of my name before, but this felt uglier. I didn’t turn back and look at him, mostly because I didn’t know how volatile he might be and didn’t want to inspire him to come after me … but also because I didn’t want to see the firemen, see them not doing anything to stop that, see them maybe even laughing at the thanks I got for doing what I thought was the right thing to do.

The older woman told me to forget about it. “The important thing is that you cared enough to stop and do something.” Is that the important thing? I want to think so, but I’m not so sure.

I bought my lunch then went back to my desk feeling deflated, conflicted, overly-sensitive, sad.

#sigh

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But here’s the thing. I posted this on FB because of course. And I got a lot of loving responses from my loving friends. Also of course. My friends are kind and beautiful people who don’t enjoy seeing me upset about things.

Yes, I was grateful for their kind responses because I really was feeling sad as I walked back to my office, couldn’t even magic up a fake smile for my favorite security guard. But mostly … I am a fraud.

Trust me that this isn’t La Impostora, this is for realz. I pass people on the street all the time, people who maybe need the help this man didn’t. Sometimes I call, but mostly I don’t. And there’s no logic to my decisions about when to call, about who really needs to interact with first responders or the healthcare system and who should be left in peace. Sometimes I call, but mostly I don’t.

And today, the whole time I was on the phone and then waiting for EMS, I was thinking uncharitable thoughts about the sea of people who just kept walking, who barely shifted their steps so as not to step on the man, who walked on the carpet as if they couldn’t see that a person was rolled up in it.

But I am those people. Just about every day of my life I am those people. How dare I act all holier than thou because this one time I decided to stop.

In truth, I’m not surprised by what happened today. I’ve seen this happen to other people, and I’ve had it happen to me. Maybe I was particularly hurt by this man simply because I wasn’t prepared. Because I’d been dreaming myself into the library at Poet’s House, already letting my mind wander, already choosing which of the four fountain pens in my bag I’d choose to write with.

And the man on the street makes sense to me. I can understand where he was coming from. How much abuse does he face on a daily basis? How difficult must it be for him to have one lousy interaction with strangers after another? And how frightening and disorienting must it be to wake up and see five large uniformed men standing over you and talking loudly into your face, touching you without your permission? Were that me, my first reaction might be to lash out, too. Sure, I would probably not lash out in the way he did, not with those precise words, but still.

None of that makes what happened today any less unpleasant. It makes me think about my own choices, however. I chose to stop today and see about that man. Why did I stop? Why don’t I stop every time? I usually try to see if the person is breathing, if there is a clear visible ailment or wound, if someone else is already stopping to see about them.

Which makes me think about that young Latinx woman. When I confirmed that I was on the phone with 911, she immediately said, “Well, I will wait with you.” I thought that was lovely. She didn’t need to do that, for him or for me. I appreciated having her there, especially when the firemen seemed to question why I would bother calling 911 for the man on the ground. (“You call about every person you see on the street? In this city?” one of the fire fighters asked me.)

So she was also a person who stops. I wonder if she always stops, or if she is like me and employs some random-ish set of criteria to determine whether she will stop.

*

Will I continue to be a person who stops? I will. Of course. Nothing that happened today makes me think I shouldn’t stop. Will today actually make me stop more? Maybe now I’ll see that my ridiculous calculus of when to stop is just that: ridiculous.

I don’t know if I’m a “good person” for stopping, for calling 911. Because what does that mean, really, anyway? I mean, sure, I’m okay enough (depending on the day) but that’s not the point of any of this. Stopping is the right thing to do … the right thing for me. Calling 911 isn’t always the right second move, but stopping and taking a moment to assess in more than a cursory way that still sounds right.

Assessing in more than a cursory way. That’s what I wanted the firemen to do. I said the man on the ground turned out to be drunk and maybe homeless, but I don’t know that. I only know that he was able to sit up, able to talk, able to get up with difficulty and start walking away (while cursing me). But the EMTs didn’t examine him at all, not even a quick once-over, and that’s what the situation seemed to warrant. Why was it enough for them to show up and rouse him but not actually tend to him? Granted, he was in no mood for accepting much of anything, but does that automatically mean he didn’t need anything?

So my title isn’t a real question at all. I know full well that I will continue to stop (we’ll have to wait and see if, as I said, I stop more than I have in the past). Here’s hoping today was the worst of the responses to my nosy-body, good-neighbor behavior.

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In 2017, I took up Vanessa Mártir’s #52essays2017 challenge to write an essay a week. I didn’t complete 52 essays by year’s end, but I did write like crazy, more in 2017 than in 2015 and 2016 combined! I’ve decided to keep working on personal essays, keep at this #GriotGrind. If you’d care to join in, it’s never too late! You can find our group on FB: #52Essays Next Wave.

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And yes, as I said up top: It’s Slice of Life Tuesday.
Click over to Two Writing Teachers to see what the other slicers have going on.

Take your olive branch and go.

As early as November 9, 2016, there were people saying folks who hadn’t voted from Donald Trump should calm down and give the man a chance before we set our hair on fire. So many think pieces telling us that we needed to understand Trump supporters better, that we had ignored these racist assholes people at our peril. Suddenly, all of us who had voted for sanity, American dignity, and a world persona not built on insults, bullying, and hate were being told we were responsible for the outcome of the election because we hadn’t spent enough time cozying up to people who had no trouble voting for a man whose agenda rested atop a mountain of virulent prejudices, ignorance, and lies.

As if.

This week, Roseanne Barr felt comfortable tweeting some racist hate, and a lot of people got very upset about it. There were people contorting themselves to excuse the tweet and people expressing shock and outrage. Both of these response piss me the fuck off.

As a general rule, the moment you flap your lips to defend racism, you’re waving your own “I’m a racist!” flag. There’s no defense for racism that isn’t based in racism. Punto. Anyone dismissing Barr’s tweet as a joke — up to and including Barr herself, of course — proclaimed themselves a racist. Racism is never a joke. It is never meant to be a joke. It is always meant to tear down, to demean, to dehumanize, to harm.

But I was just as angered by the shocked and outraged crowd, the people who were incapable of believing Barr could have said anything so awful, that she could really have meant what she said. First of all, shut up. Who, exactly, do you think believes you? Barr has been a raging fireball of crassly-expressed hate for a LONG time. Her tweet about Valerie Jarrett was fully in keeping with who she has shown herself to be over and over again. To say that you are shocked by that tweet says that you are either a) one of those non-Black people who has been comfortable not noticing or acknowledging anti-Black racism because it didn’t affect you directly and Black folks are so sensitive and need to stop seeing racism in every little thing, or b) one of those non-Black people who has been shocked and outraged every time … and believes that’s the extent of your necessary response, that claiming shock and outrage brands you as not-a-racist and so your work is done and you can go back to your regularly-scheduled programming.

The reboot of Roseanne’s show — a show I loved in its original run — was heralded as an olive branch, a way to reach out to those angry, hate-mongering, butt-hurt white folks who had voted for Trump … and a way to make those same people sympathetic to the rest of us. Putting the ugliness of voting for a man who is bent on destroying this country into the warm and lovable characters we all laughed along with decades ago was supposed to bring us together, bridge the growing divide that makes holiday dinners prickly.

And now Roseanne Barr has brought all that olive-branch-y beauty crashing down in a burning pile of rubble.

Damn racism. It’ll do that every time.

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I didn’t watch the reboot. People tell me it was funny, and I’m willing to believe that. Why wouldn’t it be funny … you know, if you could ignore the fact of Barr being a racist troll playing a racist troll. I wasn’t interested. (In truth, none of the recent reboots have interested me. The only one I’d buy popcorn for would be the return of Living Single. I’m ready for that, ABC. You’ve got room in your schedule … ijs)

But let’s be clear: the return of Roseanne was never going to bridge any divides. It wasn’t an olive branch, it was a ratings sponge, a money-maker for ABC. Full stop.

In an era of reboots, ABC saw a chance to cash in and did. Big time. They knew what they were getting with Roseanne Barr. They either didn’t care or decided to take a chance that she would be more interested in the warm glow of fan love than the harsh glare of criticism. But Roseanne Barr is a racist white woman, and lord knows, racist white women have a pretty solid track record for spewing hate, and the warm glow of fan love couldn’t hold that back.

And, as ABC knew what it was getting with Barr, Barr knew what she was doing with that tweet. She was banking not only on her celebrity and her history of getting away with shit, but on her white womanhood. Once the shock and outrage started, she could call up some white fragility, say she was only making a joke for Pete’s sake and wait for the storm clouds to clear.

While I can’t say I’m surprised that Barr felt safe — she’s gotten away with this in the past, so why wouldn’t she feel safe? — I also can’t quite believe her stupidity. After all, ABC’s president is a Black woman, and it should surely have been a given that Channing Dungey wasn’t going to laugh off that tweet. (Dungey might, however, have had a good laugh at the Sanofi US tweet after Barr blamed Ambien for her racism. I know I laughed loud and long. Sanofi’s tweet was world class, A-level shade, a firm “not today, Satan” clapback. (And I like to think she’d have been amused by my response: that I hoped Barr was fired in time to run over to Starbucks to get in on that anti-bias training.))

I don’t much care about Roseanne Barr. She’ll be fine, and she certainly neither needs nor wants my care or gives a single shit about what I think. I do have questions for her cast members, however. For Sara Gilbert and her “we’ve created a show that we believe in” nonsense. For John Goodman and his silence followed by his ridiculous “I don’t know nothing ’bout no Twitter,” craptasticness.

Gilbert’s tweet reminded me of Carl Reiner’s priceless tweet after the 2016 election. He told us so much with his:

I, a Jew, was willing to give Trump a chance til I heard his cheif [sic]of staff say he’d not allow his kids to go to a school if Jews attended.

As Myles E. Johnson said so brilliantly in response:

translation: I was willing to empower whiteness/white supremacy until I learned that I may not be considered white in the white imagination.

Reiner’s tweet really was priceless, the encapsulation of the many liberal white folks who felt the need to tell me and mine to shut up and give the agent of destruction a chance. These were the people who reconciled themselves to my annihilation because they assumed their whiteness would shield them. Reiner’s tweet was the 2016 version of the Martin Niemöller “First they came for” quote.

Gilbert’s tweet called attention to the behind the scenes people who were impacted by the cancellation. Maybe that was a way to show us her compassion, her broader world view, her concern for the “family” of the production team. Mostly what her tweet said to me was that the Blacks should just shake it off, sit down, shut up and let her keep getting paid reprising the only role she’s ever played.

As for John Goodman, his statement that he’d “rather say nothing than to cause more trouble”  is pretty bizarre. What does it mean? The way I see it, there are a two possibilities:

1. He’d rather say nothing than say something that would defend Barr and indicate that he’s a racist, too.
2. He’d rather say nothing than say something condemning Barr’s tweet and risk pissing off a woman who has been and could again in the future be a source of income for him.

Or maybe there’s a third option: He’s rather say nothing that double down and make a series of equally if not more racist “jokes” to show us that Barr’s tweet wasn’t that bad.

And then his strange, undefined-antecedent comment:

“I don’t know anything about it. I don’t read it.”

I’ll just say that I am on Twitter about once every 43 years, and I knew about this story within an hour or two of all this mess jumping off. Goodman didn’t want to get involved and thought pretending he didn’t know anything about what was happening would be the appropriate shield. The trouble with that — other than making him sound like both a liar and a fool — is that he’s been involved. There’s no way he couldn’t be involved. He agreed to be in this show, agreed to go back to work with this woman, and she has been exactly who she is for many years. His signing onto the reboot was his agreeing to look the other way. There’s no pretending that you’re outside the mess. You cosigned the mess.

And Laurie Metcalf? No idea what that story is. Maybe she, like Goodman, didn’t want to get involved and, unlike him, managed to actually keep quiet during all the drama. Apparently, however, she’s joining Gilbert and Goodman in the push to get paid for the Season 2 that will never be. Really. Asking ABC for that cash. But shouldn’t it be your homegirl who ponies up? She’s the one who cost you your paycheck.

*

The entire dumpster fire of this story. But really, the dumpster fire isn’t Roseanne or Gilbert, Goodman, and Metcalf. It’s all of us. It’s how comfortable Roseanne felt posting that dehumanizing tweet about Jarrett. It’s how quick folks were to jump up and shout their support for her first amendment rights barely a week after applauding the NFL’s decision to silence Black men’s freedom of expression. It’s the everyday-ness of anti-Black racism and the unsurprising surprise of non-Black folks (but primarily white folks) when they are called on their shit.

ABC canceled a show. I applaud the decision, but there is still all the work to be done, all the everything to be done. The needle on dismantling structural racism doesn’t move because one racist gets slapped down. The slap is satisfying, but nothing has changed.

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In 2017, I took up Vanessa Mártir’s #52essays2017 challenge to write an essay a week. I didn’t complete 52 essays by year’s end, but I did write like crazy, more in 2017 than in 2015 and 2016 combined! I’ve decided to keep working on personal essays, keep at this #GriotGrind. If you’d care to join in, it’s never too late! You can find our group on FB: #52Essays Next Wave.

Fat Talk: Fit-Modeling and Clothes-Shopping while Fat

My dear friend Lisa (who you can find at satsumabug.com) sent me a note about a shop looking for plus-sized fit models. I emailed back and forth with the shop and decided to take myself up there and try on their clothes.

It could be a fun thing to do, but mostly I was incredibly nervous. Did these women know anything about plus sizes? Did they know anything about being fat and what clothes shopping can be like for fat folks? Was their idea of “plus-sized” really not “plus” at all (I see all you, shops that have the audacity to call an 18 a 3X)? How would they address my body?

So many questions. So many things to worry about.

Clothes-shopping-while-fat can be fine. It can also be a nightmare. There are over-perky sales people who talk to you as if you’re painfully dim-witted as they try to tell you all the parts of your body you should be trying to hide, all the ways you shouldn’t show yourself in public. There are the sister-girl salespeople who think you need to be told you’re smoking hot every five seconds if you have any hope of feeling good about yourself. There are the clothes, abundant in sizes 14 to 20 … and then scarce, scarcer, scarcest the farther up the numbers you go. There are the clothes in your size that are always buried behind every other thing like undesirables that must be hidden.

There are the clothes-makers and their inability to understand body differences. There is a universal belief among manufacturers of clothes for us fatties: we all have the exact same shape. Depending on the company, the belief is that we are all shaped like Marilyn Monroe writ large, or we’re all shaped like fireplugs. Fireplugs win out most often.

Meanwhile, what is true is that none of us are shaped like fireplugs. And, even for those of us with hourglass figures, it’s not as simple as just sizing up from a thin hourglass. Also, we fat folk (hint: like all folk) come in more than two basic shapes. It is possible to be both tall and fat. It is possible to be fat and have a flat butt. It is possible to be fat and not need armholes that open to our waists. It is possible to be fat and have small breasts. It is, let me just say as plainly as I can, possible to be fat in MANY different ways. MANY. MANY.

And yet the clothes are made in basically two ways. I have no idea if non-fat people have this problem. It’s likely they do. It’s also likely, however, that it’s less pronounced because there are so many more places where non-fat people can find clothes in their size, so they have a better chance of finding things that will work for their bodies.

And then, of course, there are the prices. There is the obscenity of having to pay more – a lot more in some cases – for the same items non-fat people buy. Having to pay more for what are often poorly made clothes, for clothes that don’t fit us properly because they’re made for some version of a fat body that isn’t ours.

It’s a lot. Trust me that this is only the briefest description of what clothes shopping can be when your body doesn’t conform to society’s beauty standards.

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So I set off on my adventure and rode uptown. I walked into the shop and smiled at the beautiful young woman who smiled at and greeted me. And then at the young woman who came out from the back when she heard me say my name. They were both warm, and neither did a spit take at the sight of me, so I figured that might bode well for what the experience would be like. I took off my coat.

Young Woman #1 (YW1) was working with a customer, so she turned back to her. YW2 and I chatted for a moment: what size did I wear, where did I usually shop, do I have any favorite brands … And then she brought out the samples. One was green, the other red. To my great pleasure, she had me try on the red. Both were beautiful colors and patterns, but the red was just a little more stunning and fab, a little more yes-yes-a-thousand-times-yes than the green.

I slipped my arms in. I buttoned up. I turned to look in the full-wall mirror … and I loved it.

Oh, sure, there were little problems here and there. YW2 and I went through them in detail so she could understand how the pattern should be changed. We went through the flaws, but, even as I nit picked about one thing or another, all I could think was how much I loved the dress, how I could already see myself wearing it, how much I didn’t want to take it off and give it back.

We went over more details about the dress, and I kept loving everything about it. Finally we were done, and I slipped it off and handed it back to YW2.

This was definitely not a typical CSWF (clothes-shopping-while-fat) experience. I had talked easily and comfortably about my sizes and what parts of me are hardest to fit. I had let YW2 put her hands on me without tensing up or pulling away. YW2 had talked to me about the look and fit of the dress in a way that didn’t condescend or artificially inflate. No one – YW1, YW2, the other customer – behaved as if my looking good in the dress was shocking or anything other than entirely normal and expected.

That experience definitely ties for first place with the one other truly lovely CSWF experience I’ve had. Yes, that’s right: I am a middle-aged woman who’s been fat since early high school … and I’ve had exactly one great clothes-shopping experience before this fit-modelling moment. That is a true statement. That is how bad it can be out here in these sartorial streets for us fatties.

To be clear. This experience wasn’t great simply because I liked the dress and looked good in it, though that certainly helped. No. I find clothes I like and clothes that mostly fit me quite often. I’ve even had plenty of entirely wonderful clothing finds. (Do not get me started on the day I tried on my first Christian Siriano dress. Do NOT.) This experience was special because of how I was allowed to experience it, because of how I was treated, because of how I was seen and valued, because of how I was treated respectfully and not like someone’s dirty secret.

The experience was special because it was a reminder of how simple CSWF can be, of how easy it is to just treat people like people and provide quality service.

I’ve gotten good at CSWF. I can deflect unwanted sales help quickly and deftly. I am easily able to ask for whatever I need to make my shopping experience work well for me. I also do a fair amount of shopping online … for the convenience of having things I want show up at my door, and to spare myself CSWF foolishness.

While it’s true that designers of large-sized clothes need fat fit models so they can make their designs with actual women’s bodies in mind, they aren’t the only ones who would benefit from this service.

I want store staff to go through a training with a fat fit model, want them to have to work with that mock customer until they can get through a full sales process without fat-shaming, without saying one offensive or irksomely insincere, perky thing.

I would take on that fit-model job. Not because my skin is thick enough to handle the fat-phobic nonsense – although I think it is – but because I would enjoy getting to school people on all the ways they aren’t getting their pitch right.

“Let me stop you right there, Marny,” I can imagine myself saying. “You shouldn’t assume there is any part of my body that I want to hide. I’m fat, and however “slimming” or “camouflaging” you want to think this outfit is, everyone will see that I am fat. You need to talk to me about how well it fits, how comfortable and intelligently made it is, how good I look in it.”

“Hold up, Tiffany, it’s not at all helpful for you to bring me clothes that are a size too large. Wearing things that hand awkwardly off my body because they’re too big isn’t flattering, it’s annoying. You have clothes in sizes that fit me. Your job is to help me find them, not to try covering me in a tent.”

Of course, I am only one size and style of fat woman. I don’t want designers and stores to exchange one fat body idea for another. I want the idea of what is a fat body to diversify, to encompass as many types of bodies as we have. Yes, this sales training would need a whole team of willing fatties to really get the job done.

AS much as I love the idea, I’m pretty sure this program wouldn’t work, however, no matter how many fat shoppers were up for the challenge, no matter how many sales staff were trained. It would be about as successful as the single-day racial bias training Starbucks is gearing up for will be. Well-meaning, but one day of real talk can’t undo a lifetime of programming. Not about race and not about fatphobia.

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The almost-end of this story is that I took off the dress, YW1 and YW2 thanked me for helping them, and I left.

The real almost-end of this story is that I couldn’t stop thinking about the dress and emailed to suggest that I should be given said fabulous item, that it would be good for the store because I would get a lot of compliments and would talk up the shop every time that happened. It was a pretty brazen email. I don’t know who I was in that moment!

But it worked! I got a reply right away saying the dress was mine! As a friend said when I told her about it, “If you don’t ask, you don’t get.” Can’t deny the truth there.

So, the actual-end to this story came yesterday, when I wore this lovely dress out in the world. The weather didn’t much cooperate before now, and then I had a big work event on my schedule, so I saved the debut for that. And here I am at the end of the day (photo cropped so you don’t see the stacks of still-unpacked boxes that are the primary décor in my apartment!), a totally happy camper:

It’s as if I’m wearing a coral reef! And yes, it has pockets! The dress is from Zuri. I don’t think the plus sizes are out yet, but the smaller sizes are there for the having. Plus sizes — up to 3X — should be available late spring/early summer.

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One in a series of essays inspired by Roxane Gay’s, Hunger.
If you haven’t read my ground rules, please take a look before commenting. You can find all of the essays in this series under the Fat Talk tab. Thank you.

In 2017, I took up Vanessa Mártir’s #52essays2017 challenge to write an essay a week. I didn’t complete 52 essays by year’s end, but I did write like crazy, more in 2017 than in 2015 and 2016 combined! I’ve decided to keep working on personal essays, keep at this #GriotGrind. If you’d care to join in, it’s never too late! You can find our group on FB: #52Essays Next Wave.

Building Sanctuary

I have been following the progress of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice since the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) first announced plans to create it. America’s history with lynching is deep and ugly, rooted firmly and hidden from view, glossed over. We, as a country, turn our backs on this history … even as we nod and wink at the carnival spectacle of it.

I don’t know my family’s full history, have no idea if any one of my ancestors was lynched, but lynching is a power evil in my consciousness all the same. I learned about lynching when I was a child, was already aware of it by the time I made the mistake – at nine years old – of reading Uncle Tom’s Children. That collection of stories is a classic but  definitely not meant for fourth grade reading.

(Nine, of course, is years older than other children have had to learn about lynching. And they have learned through the experience of of dying because of it, of losing a family member to it, of being uprooted from their homes to flee it. I fully recognize the privilege in my own experience, in the fact that I didn’t grow up in a place where I needed, realistically, to worry about lynching. That didn’t eliminate the fear, but the fear never needed to be active, never needed to be daily. I am grateful for all of that.)

As a country, we act as though lynching wasn’t pervasive, wasn’t a tool used to punish, terrorize, and control communities of color. At the same time, we pretend not to see or understand the impact lynching had on communities and the ways that impact is still seen and felt today. And we pretend that we can’t see the way people use calling the police to “handle” Black people today as a proxy for rounding up a lynch mob.

In 2000, when James Allen’s photo exhibit, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America was touring, people expressed shock and horror at the images on display. That seemed, at best, pathetically disingenuous. Who did these people think they were kidding, acting as though they didn’t know about lynching, acting as though they hadn’t thought it was “that bad.” It continues to surprise me how surprised white people are when confronted with the facts of whiteness in this country.

The title of that exhibit and the book that followed referenced the painful truth that, even in death, lynching victims were mistreated – bodies mutilated or dressed, made up, and posed for photos. No sanctuary.

I thought about Allen’s work when I learned about EJI’s plans for the memorial. And part of what I thought – especially after I saw the artist’s rendering of the design last summer — was that finally there would be sanctuary. Finally, these murdered innocents would be held with dignity, with grace. Finally, they would be respected.

The design of the memorial is stunning and majestic. The concept of the double set of county markers is so bold and inspiring. I think about those duplicate markers, the ones that are meant to be taken away from the memorial and placed in the counties they document. The idea of having this way of bringing the monument home to the sites of the killings is so moving. But it will also be very telling. I will be surprised if more than a few of the more than 800 markers are claimed by their respective counties. Those few blank spaces at the memorial will tell a story, but the hundreds and hundreds of remaining markers will tell an even more significant one.

Of course, I want to be wrong. I want to be entirely wrong. I want each and every one of those localities to shock the mess out of me and collect their markers and put them on prominent display in the county seat. I want that more than I can say. It won’t actually mean we’ve turned a corner on race. There will still be decades and decades of work to do. But it will be meaningful all the same. I want that. But I’m not naïve enough to allow myself to expect it.

I was never able to see Allen’s photo exhibit. I waited in the block-long lines in the cold to get into the gallery on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Waited three different times. I wasn’t deterred by the cold but by the knowledge that I couldn’t bear the photos. I knew myself well enough to know that, but still tried to force myself into the gallery. Three times. It was an exhibit that needed to be witnessed – by every white and non-Black/non-native person of color, but also by me.

Every time was the same: I’d get within half a dozen people of the gallery entrance – only twelve people were able to be in the gallery at a time – and I’d pull myself out of the line and head back to work.

Several years later, I bought the book. I came on it by chance in a Brooklyn Barnes and Noble. There was just one copy. I didn’t want it. I knew I’d never be able to look at it. But I couldn’t leave it on the shelf, either. Couldn’t leave it to be picked over, to be ignored. It felt wrong to pay for it, wrong to have money change hands over it the way professional photos of lynchings were sold as souvenirs. But I bought it. To this day, I have barely handled it, have only turned a few of it’s pages.

This history is so painful inside of me.

The closer today’s date came, the more news articles appeared about the memorial. I avoided most of them, read part way through a few, chose other articles for erasure poem source text as I worked through my National Poetry Month writing challenge.

But here we are, today, and I have to say something, write something.

I don’t believe I will ever be able to visit the memorial. Just as I can’t look at the pictures Allen collected, my heart and head wouldn’t do well at the Montgomery site. I’m not ruling out a visit, but it seems highly unlikely.

I won’t rule out a visit because the power in that space is undeniable. The weight and pressure in that pavilion horrifies me and calls me, too. Maybe one day I’ll be strong enough to under that display.

For now, I am grateful for Bryan Stevenson, for the Equal Justice Initiative, for the design, realization, and opening of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. This is something every white person needs to see, every non-Black/non-native person of color needs to see, and however many Black folks choose to see. And, maybe one day, something for me to see.

The source text for today’s erasure poem is a Times editorial about the memorial.

Building Sanctuary
(An erasure of a Times editorial about the National Memorial for Peace and Justice.)

Before you know it,
Hundreds surrounding you,
watching.
Lynchings carried out with impunity.
more than 4,400 killings,
racial terror
lasting more than seven decades.
An accounting
of those lost to history.
Devastating,
unreadable and unreachable.
A growing pressure
to include the role of racism
in American history.
Anyone in this country
has inherited a narrative
of racial difference,
a slow accumulation of evidence
leading to an inevitable conclusion:
America’s “reign of silence”
around slavery, lynching,
racial subjugation.

Deliberativeness,
attention to detail —
only lynchings that could be verified
by two contemporaneous accounts.
Such a damning exhibit,
a kind of liberation,
a kind of redemption.

To face up
to America’s brutal, racist past
with open eyes,
to understand how it lives on today.

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It’s National Poetry Month! Every year, I choose a specific form and try to write a poem a day in that form. This year, I am trying erasure poems and I want to use news articles as my source texts. I’ve practiced a few times, and it’s already feeling difficult! We’ll see how it goes.

Here’s an edited version of the Wiki definition of this form:
Erasure Poetry: a form of found poetry created by erasing words from an existing text in prose or verse and framing the result on the page as a poem. Erasure is a way to give an existing piece of writing a new set of meanings, questions, or suggestions. It lessens the trace of authorship but requires purposeful decision making. What does one want done to the original text? Does a gesture celebrate, denigrate, subvert, or efface the source completely? One can erase intuitively by focusing on musical and thematic elements or systematically by following a specific process regardless of the outcome.
Also, Robert Lee Brewer at Writer’s Digest has some good points to add about ethics and plagiarism:
Quick note on ethics: There is a line to be drawn between erasure poems and plagiarism. If you’re not erasing more than 50% of the text, then I’d argue you’re not making enough critical decisions to create a new piece of art. Further, it’s always good form to credit the original source for your erasures.

Washington International School

In 2017, I took up Vanessa Mártir’s #52essays2017 challenge to write an essay a week. I didn’t complete 52 essays by year’s end, but I did write like crazy, more in 2017 than in 2015 and 2016 combined! I’ve decided to keep working on personal essays, keep at this #GriotGrind. If you’d care to join in, it’s never too late! You can find our group on FB: #52Essays Next Wave.

Yes, we have no ageism today.

I stopped at a bodega on my way home tonight. The man behind the counter asked me some silly question, and my answer let him know that women my age don’t get up to such nonsense. He looked stricken.

“Dear lady,” he said, “don’t say that. You are beautiful. Believe me.”*

???

Because you know, in my book, my being middle-aged does not in any way impact the fact of my beauty. I told him as much, said I was well aware that I’m beautiful, that I had simply been pointing out that I am also old.

Again, he had the stricken face, told me not to speak so harshly about myself.

“No,” I said. “This isn’t harsh. I embrace every minute of my age. I am totally fine with being exactly the age I am.”

He just stared at me. He couldn’t process my comfort with myself, so he gave me three bananas for free. Seriously. He insisted I take them.

This is all ridiculous, of course. Both his part in this conversation and mine. I’m sad for him that he equates age with loss of beauty. But it’s also true that a large part of my comfort with my age is the fact that I know I don’t actually look my age. If I were truly comfortable, I’d say goodbye to my henna and let my silver tresses glisten in the sun. I don’t. (I thought I’d do it when I turned 50. Now I’m telling myself I should wait until I’m 60. Yeah, we’ll see what happens.)

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* Also, no one can really use that “Believe me” anymore, can they? Now that Trump says it to punctuate every bit of bullshit he spews, it no longer has any meaning. I hear that and the first thing that comes to mind is: “Believe you? Are you kidding?”

(And also, I hope you see what I did there with my title and the free fruit …)

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