The New Rambler

I am still in Iowa; everything here is still unbelievably sad and horrifying. This is just an attempt to take my mind off all that for awhile.

My father died when I was five and a half, and thus I was effectively raised by a single mother, with a fair amount of help from my grandmother. My two oldest friends in the world were also the children of single parents.

My mother, and their mothers, got a lot of grief from people. People were generally not allowed to come play at any of our houses after school because there was not a Responsible Adult at home. In fifth grade, a girl had a party for the whole class. I went for a bit, but my asthma started to act up from the crowd and the English sheepdog, and so I went to the organizing mothers, thanked them for the party, and said I would be leaving now. I lived a few blocks away and it was, I think, not even dark out yet. They insisted on calling my mother, who was not home as she had, god forbid, gone grocery shopping. After a lot of hemming and hawing, during which I said they could either take me home to my inhaler or they could take me to the ER, they finally took me home — and the next day they called my mother to excoriate her and to tell her that I was having a “panic attack.”

There was an immense prejudice toward single mothers when I was young. It did not seem to matter how you became single — my father had died; one friend’s parents divorced; another friend’s had never really been together. I had the easiest time, but it was still not easy.

I bring all of this up because I was reading through the comments on Walt’s post, and I was reminded of how deeply judgmental people are about family structures. My father’s death was and remains the saddest thing that has ever happened to me, but I don’t think I am less of a person because of it, or that my family is somehow deficient because of my single mother and single grandmother. A lot of people do seem to think just that, however, and I imagine that many of these people are the same people who view gay marriage as such an abomination because it somehow undermines conventional family structure.

I am not a fan of Hillary Clinton, but the adage that it takes a village to raise a child is far older that she is. It suggests to me that our ancestors knew something that we did not: it takes a village, to me, is a recognition that no one’s family structure is perfect, that even two happily married people of opposite sexes may have deficiencies, and that we as a society should strive to help each other in looking after our children rather than tearing each other down for some real or imagined failing. There are people in this world who make bad parents, but there is, perhaps sadly, no one filter we can use to rule them out of the child-rearing process. Or perhaps the inability to filter isn’t sad — perhaps it is a reminder to us that we must always think; that we cannot and should not rely on any single factor or litmus test to make all our decisions for us — and that, I think, is a good thing.

I’m writing this from a Java House in Iowa City, the one over on the west side of town that’s now part of this mini mall that, when I was in high school, was a field of wildflowers. Come to think of it, the Java House did not exist when I was in high school. I remember going to the one downtown during my first winter break home from college and thinking how pretentious it was. Sometimes I still think that, but given the hours of my life that I have now spent idling away in fancy coffee shops, I should admit to being either pretentious or hypocritical myself. Or both.

When people say, “I just couldn’t keep it to myself,” they usually mean that they have good news (or even the Good News). Mine is not good news. I’ve been pondering a good deal lately about the nature of online communication and whether, when we post something either good or bad, we are doing so in order to be informative or in order to garner accolades or condolences. I haven’t come up with an answer, but I have realized that, for me, the online world and the regular world have bled into each other so much that I can’t always separate out what happens in my real life into distinct parcels that fit neatly into pre-printed grids. I was always fairly good at coloring inside the lines when I was a kid, and I used to hate it when I made mistakes. Some years later, it seems to me as though mistakes are pretty much the currency we trade in, if we’re honest.

Friday afternoon, my godson, Phelim Andrew Thurston, the son of my oldest friend in the world, died suddenly. He was not quite eight months old.

When I was last in Iowa City, my mother, our friend Alice, and I held a baptism for Phelim in my mom’s house. I never got to take a formal picture of us all, and there are more pictures of Phelim’s older brother, Imriel, in that set than of Phelim himself, who was at that time still quite tiny and hooked up to a monitor. He was born prematurely and spent several weeks in the neo-natal intensive care unit, and some months after that connected to a monitor. He was given a clean bill of health after that, though, and seemed to be thriving. You can see him flirting with his mom in this little video.

I got the news Friday afternoon when I got home from work. Before dawn on Saturday I was in my car and headed to Worland, WY, where I got on an eighteen-seat plane with three passengers headed to Denver by way of Laramie. I got into Chicago that afternoon and was practically apoplectic at seeing gas for $4.39 a gallon on the cab ride to my grandmother’s, where I spent the night as I was exhausted beyond measure. It turned out to be just as well, since I wouldn’t have been able to leave that day anyway.

I generally fly to Chicago because it’s almost always cheaper than flying to Iowa, and in this case there was the added bonus that I’d be able to use my mother’s car, which was at my grandmother’s because my mother had left it there when she took the train out to Boston, where she’s spending a month learning about street ministry. The difficulty lay in the location of the keys to my mother’s car, which, after numerous phone calls (including one to Triple A to get the car unlocked, because at one point we thought the key was in it), we finally learned was on my cousin’s dresser in his apartment, which was all very well except that he was in Peoria for the weekend along with the other people who might have had a key to his place, and we had to wait until six o’clock last night for them to return so that we could get the key so that I could drive to Iowa City, which is only about three and half hours away. I got in late last night, after the extreme disappointment of stopping at the Mobil Mart in Rock Falls for a doughnut only to find that not only do they not have Krsipy Kreme doughnuts any more, they also had no doughnuts of any sort at all. (And Firefox, apparently, accepts donut but not doughnut. Gar.)

I’ll be here for a week, at least. I am extremely grateful to my director, Frances, for telling me to go ahead and take off and we’d figure out my timesheet later, and to my coworkers, for covering everything in my absence.

And thank you to all of you. Those on Twitter got this news a few days ago; this is the first time I’ve been able to sit still for long enough to write the rest of it down. If you are a praying sort, please say a prayer for Caitrin, my friend, for baby Phelim, and for Imriel, Ileana, and Delaney, his older brother and half-sisters, and Sam, Phelim and Imriel’s father. And thank you all, again.

Facebook is really making me wonder if I need to reevaluate my entire high school experience.

I did not like high school. I spent as little time there as possible, but it was still far too much. If I had to do it over again, I’d drop out the day I turned sixteen, take some college classes, read a lot, and get a GED.

But then, you see, I joined Facebook. And then I started getting friend requests from people I knew in high school. A few are people I was at least friendly with, but there are plenty of others I can scarcely remember, and some I remember actively disliking me.

Of course, Facebook is in part about gathering “friends,” and some people are heavily invested in getting their numbers up, and that may account for part of it. And I have observed that people you know who haven’t seen you in a long time invariably treat you as a long-lost friend, regardless of how little they liked you back when.

A few weeks ago I got a message from a long-lost high school acquaintance in which said acquaintance mentioned that he’d always had a crush on me. I did not date in high school. I did not even come close. I certainly didn’t think anyone came even close to harboring an affection for me. But apparently I was wrong — and knowing that has made me start to wonder how many other impressions I had that were incorrect. And that in turn leads me to wonder if I had a whole other possible high school existence, a sort of parallel track that I never found a way to hop on. It’s almost enough to make me wish I could go back and do it again — but not quite enough. I think I’d still hate gym class, lockers, bells, the smell of the cafeteria, and my AP English teacher.